#bindingvows

The compulsion starts small, as it always had.

A hangnail. A cyst. A scab halfway healed. Millia. Ingrowns. Any slight variation in the texture of your skin, any patch or spot. Your fingers find imperfections before your mind realizes what the body's motor system is doing, worrying at them, picking away absent mindedly until they bleed and then some. Pinching, squeezing, plucking, digging, until you left bloody wounds. The evidence existed all over your body, often in unsavory, unseen places.

Kenjaku learns this quickly, unfortunately.

"Feeling restless again?"

Their voice drifts across the room from where they lounge against a pile of cushions, one eye cracked open to watch you claw at your scalp, fingers skipping from sore to sore as you pick them one by one. Feeling like a scolded pet, your hand withdraws from the canopy of your hair and is shoved beneath your sleeve.

They hum, the sound carrying all the smug amusement of a lazy cat watching a bird they're confident they can catch, if they so wished.

"It's a very human habit to wear the evidence of your anxiety."

You hate when they say such obvious things in that condescending manner.

Sometime later, you find yourself staring at the line of stitches that marred their forehead. Not anything new, by any means. You'd seen them before. Everyone had. It's fairly difficult to miss when someone looks like they'd underwent some form of crude neurosurgery.

But noticing them from afar and seeing them up close, in detail, are two very different things.

The black thread is uneven in places; Some loops sit tighter than others. One knot protrudes slightly from the skin. The sutures don't sit perfectly aligned, with some skewed at more severe angles than others. The snarky part of your inner voice wants to scoff. You'd think a being who has done this to themselves for centuries would be more precise with the needle, especially someone as meticulous and critical as Kenjaku.

Your eyes keep returning to them. You're only made aware of how your pointer fingernail is flicking against the cuticle of your thumb when you process a light sting of pain.

"Curious about something?"

You avert your eyes the second those of their vessel meet yours. Though, few minutes pass, and you're staring again.

That seam is offensive. Human skin should not look like that, should not pull around thread like that. You were no surgeon, but the very placement of the scar was nonsensical, though you know well enough that sorcerery was not limited to what was considered normal or natural.

As if you had any authority to determine what qualified as normal. Your gaze remained fixed on the seam, on the dark thread disappearing beneath taut flesh, and the urge returned with renewed force. Whatever standard you were measuring yourself against, the desire to peel that scar apart and see what lay beneath certainly wasn't it.

Kenjaku notices your prying eyes yet again, offering a sharpening crinkle of interest at your odd curiosity.

"It's considered rude to stare at other's differences. It's also considered polite to ask when you want something."

Mortification swallows you, with an aftertaste of annoyance for their hypocrisy.

"You wouldn't be the first to have questions,"

The grin plastered on the face of their vessel stretches, dimpling their cheeks. Despite this not being their own original body, something about the nature of this expression felt uniquely their own.

Long fingers raise to meet their forehead, tapping lazily against the side of the face they wear.

"You've been looking at them for quite a while."

You want to pull on those sutures. The urge lives somewhere between disgusting fascination and that unexplainable, light pressure that gathers in your groin when digging your nails into a festering wound you made. The dull pain you cause is part of the addiction.

The thread sits wrong, and your fingers ache with the need to fix it, and if not to fix it, then destroy it. Kenjaku watches this realization dawn across your face. Then, to your horror, they laugh.

"How fascinating."

The ancient sorcerer tilts their head back slightly, taunting you as the threads catch light. Deliberately.

"Go on, then."

Your stomach drops.

"What?"

"You've been thinking about it so hard, I can nearly hear your thoughts, and I wouldn't want to discourage such natural wonderment."

Before you can stammer out a half convincing response, your body had already moved to seat yourself beside them, eyes glued to their stitches and doing all they can to avoid that smug, half lidded stare. You don't know where to begin; you've never picked at another like you do your own body. You could possibly harm them, or do something beyond what they were willing to put up with. These sentiments whirl about inside your skull as your teeth tear at the lining of your cheeks in thought.

As if sensing your hesitation, Kenjaku shifts their vessel to be more easily accessible to you, even going so far as to force your weight to sit upon their lap. This draws an involuntary gasp from you that you immediately regret, knowing it only strokes their ego more.

Though you can't deny the added leverage gives you both the visibility and access you need. The threads are inches away, and the imperfections are far more pronounced like this. The fiber isn't a smooth black line as it appears from a distance. Individual strands have begun to fray in places, tiny hairs lifting from the cord where months of movement and skin oils have worn at them. Some portions sit buried so deeply they nearly vanish beneath the flesh. Others have worked their way upward, exposing a few extra millimeters as though the body were attempting to reject them. Where the threads disappear into the skin, there's often dry, crusty flaking, especially so where the skin is pulled tightest. The scabbing isn't much different than how hair emerges from a follicle. The entry points are tiny, and it becomes difficult to imagine pushing a needle through your own forehead over and over again when the logistics really sink in.

"Do they ever get infected?" The question lands with more breath than intended."

"Occasionally, though seldom."

Their shoulders rise in a lazy shrug.

"A bit of inflammation. Some pus if I'm especially lazy. Nothing particularly notable."

You visibly recoil. Kenjaku laughs.

"What? Did you imagine near immortality exempted me from basic wound care? I can't use reverse cursed technique on it due to the Binding Vow,"

They trail off, though you lose the words as you brush a thumb over the threads, ever so gently tracing each raise, feeling the fiber strands contrast with the skin, categorizing what feels right and what doesn't. The main scar line itself feels as it looks; glossy, smooth to the touch. Only the very edges are more jagged. It doesn't seem to have been reopened recently, so the likelihood of Kenjaku allowing you to pry it open is low. Your attention is more vexed with the stitching, anyway. Several questions come to mind, but you aren't guaranteed to get anything more than a Cheshire cat smile and a cryptic response anyway.

You find one of those flakes of skin, especially scabbed over one of the entry holes, trapping the thread in the mess of it. Your nail scrapes the edge, desperate to find a lift, with you leaning closer as you search. Once you find one, the process of extraction begins.

Instinctively, you pull your hand back.

Kenjaku catches your wrist before you can retreat very far. Firm, though not immediately painful. Only enough pressure to return your shaking hand to where it had been.

"Satisfy your itch."

Follwing a roll of your eyes, you begin again, right where you had left off. Again, you find the textured lift of the scab, and perform a sawing motion with your nail as the tool, though you wish so badly that you had a pair of tweezers. There's no bleeding or leakage until you're nearly halfway under the scab, and your stomach turns. The edge finally gives; the sensation travels straight up your arm. The rest goes quickly, leaving the flake loosely clinging to the thread grown through it. You pluck at the thread like a guitar string just to do it.

"This is disgustingly unhygienic."

Kenjaku chuckles at that, brows raising as their knowing, lidded eyes lift to find yours. You hadn't noticed yet how their hips just barely shift beneath you as you groom their vessel like a monkey.

"The body is remarkably adaptable," They muse. "With enough time, it will attempt to heal through almost anything,"

Those eyes track your fingers as you free the scab from its anchor and lift it closer to your gaze for inspection, before you're glued to the wound left in your wake. It's just raw enough to reveal an oily, damp pink sheen of meat. Relief washes over you immediately, though it doesn't last. You want to press the pad of your fingers against it, to squeeze at it and see what emerges.

Embarrassing.

It's the same gross satisfaction that accompanies every scab, every loose piece of skin, every wound you've ever promised yourself not to pick again, only to cave in the midst of the thought.

"Including bad habits."

Their attention had long since drifted away from your hands, away from the inspection of the seam itself. That wasn't the object of their interest in this situation; you, and your behavior, were.

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