Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Fiction
vr 3.00
2008-02-16
"Shippo's Little Asymmetric Dragon" by Abraxas | 2005-12-14
Chapter Two
I, the writer – and you, the reader – pause at this interlude to digest the information. The images. Perhaps I went to far too soon and this new, unheard-of side to Shippo proves to be a great, unbearable trauma. Perhaps it is not. I cannot promise to be gentle. But now, just for now, if just to rationalize it, let me interject interpretations entirely and uniquely my own.
Armed with this aforementioned fact – that obscene revelation the group stumbled into – and with a little thought, is it not obvious what were the true, secret events that a well-hidden, teenage fox-demon was privy? The woman covered the man head to toe with tattoos and that could not have happened overnight – the operation must have transpired over many days, weeks. According to the authority of my new source, patterns must have been agreed-upon, scaled and etched into the flesh. Colors must have been prepared afresh anew each and every session. Inks must have been applied carefully, systematically, one hue at a time.
All the while there was Shippo – pubescent Shippo a larger in size human in proportion – astride the darkness sitting. Sitting and watching. Watching as the man stripped, as the woman grasped, prodded, the flesh the artwork coming alive through her fingers.
We know the fox was fascinated by the arts and we want to believe it was innocent. But if it was innocent, why were his friends in the dark? If it was innocent, why was he in the shadows observing like a voyeur? Because it was something about the process of the woman tattooing the man that planted the kernel of a weird and bizarre fetish, a drive whose deep and all-consuming ambition could not be revealed or suggested or hinted at in anyway to anyone. Because it was – clearly and undeniably – a schizophrenia of soaring highs and wallowing lows, a contradiction of sexual pleasures and carnal pains.
If it had not been so then it must have been so now – eventually Kagome and Sango weaned him off and expelled him out of their ‘girls-only’ circle. Whereas he had been treated and fawned-over like their surrogate little brother, he was banished as it could not be denied any longer that he was becoming a new and different creature. A man who could not be permitted to engage in their womanly-affairs no matter how they felt about him either way. Yet he was not completely a man and – after that incident – was not comfortable being around the men. He could not identify with Inuyasha and Miroku because he knew his fetish marked him someway, somehow, to be totally and radically different.
My latest source states that, within the dynamics of the group, Shippo sensed a kind of silent, ‘understood’ ostracism. That he did not either fault them or curse them for it. It fed into the fantasy. Already he attained an edge to survive alone in the world – now he needed an edge to survive intact through the torment necessary to fulfill the vision. The man he watched was stoic; he, too, wanted to be tough. One way or another he would have to be tough to keep from crying out in pain – and how better then to keep face if not aided by a ‘well of anger’?
At this juncture Houshi Miroku’s “Right Hand” becomes more significant than the Narakunomicon of the mad, crazed miko Higurashi. It makes sense, does it not, that even esoterically deviants identify with each other? Yes, I say deviant, for it must be evident that the monk realized exactly what it was that attracted the young fox into the tattoo parlor. Inuyasha would have never engaged in such overt sexual obsessions – those two shared very little in common – but in Shippo he convinced himself he found a ‘soul mate’ whose cotius lust could have matched the intensity of his own carnal desires.
I must drawback; I must refrain from reading too deeply into Miroku’s motives.
Nevertheless, it is from Miroku that scholars gather the evidence to prove that, for a long time, Shippo was withdrawn and lonesome and awkward. He gave the teenager space; he approached him only after a lot of time passed since the incident with the hut. But even after he established that ‘male bond’, he was taken aback by how reserved and quiet the youngster was.
At the same time was it not clear to the fox-demon that of all the members of the group only the monk would have understood? He could have opened up to him, but he kept back from him, why? Why did he not confess the inmost blackness of his depraved heart? Unless there was something fundamentally wrong about the nature of his feelings? And if Miroku was deemed to be incapable of understand it, what can be said about Shippo’s state of mind?
What fascinated Shippo? My clandestine source thought about it, agonized about it over and over. The nakedness of the man? The woman, touching and massaging the ripped, masculine body? The thought of a woman’s hands tattooing a man’s genitals – might he, could he imagine himself to be in that position? Indeed, my unheard-of informer emphatically proclaims that the demonic artist craved to be touched like that, feeling that amalgam of secret, masculine pleasures and scorching, permanent pains needled into his flesh by the skill of the tattooist. Suddenly, almost overnight, within that studio his love for art and his embryonic, sexual desire merged into an orgy of pain and pleasure.
All of this was happening during a time of great, psychological strain. It must have been a difficult, lonely time. It was his adolescence and his body was changing, growing into the mold and form of a man. (Already by his late, teenage-years he was as tall and built as Sesshoumaru.) A man tormented by what he felt to be the weakness that allowed the group to find him that damned, dreadful day and to be more or less superficially aware of his voyeurism. Had he just been caught masturbating, it would not have been as deep or as probing a revelation.
END OF CHAPTER
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