✧ Stigma — Chapter XIII: The Lustre That Was Lost ✧

(Oscar Wilde–style Aesthetic & Philosophical Translation)

His wounded foot throbbed with a pain so intimate it felt almost like a confession. When at last he reached his modest dwelling, the neighbourhood lay in a silence so complete it seemed to have been woven deliberately to receive his despair. The door of his twenty‑year‑old apartment yielded with a weary creak, as though even it had grown tired of witnessing his return.

If only he could reach the bed—his final sanctuary. But his body betrayed him, folding at the threshold like a marionette whose strings had been severed. The bandages upon his feet, once white, were now stained with the melancholy colours of blood and dust; they resembled the remnants of a purity long since abandoned.

And in his mind, Sakurako’s song unfurled again— “Scarlet blossoms bloom in vain, embracing fruitless love.” The refrain coiled around him with the elegance of a serpent that knew precisely where to strike.

A sob rose, fragile and unwilling. Yes—he was that blossom, blooming in the inferno of his own making. He had not lit the lamps; darkness was kinder, for it concealed the ruin of his face and spared him the cruelty of reflection. He feared anything that glittered, for beauty had always known how to wound him.

Memory, that most treacherous of companions, returned. Eiji’s smile beneath the streetlamps. The nights of singing until his throat felt flayed. The first coin offered by a listener moved to tears— and Eiji’s radiant joy, bright enough to shame the dawn. “You see? You can do it!” Those words had once been his salvation.

Now they were the blade.

The light he had once basked in now carved mercilessly into his heart. It was gone—irretrievably gone. He had lost Eiji, the one who had become the axis upon which his life turned.

He tried to deny it, but truth has a way of branding itself upon the soul. “Do not think. Do not feel.” Yet the fire within him paid no heed.

He longed to touch Eiji’s pale skin, to hold him with a violence born not of cruelty but of desperate devotion. He wished to see that immaculate face undone, to claim a moment of ruin that belonged to him alone. If Eiji were to destroy him, he would accept it gladly; there are deaths more exquisite than lives lived without love.

But he could not bear to see Eiji broken. That was why he fled.

He reached for the telephone—silence. Rejection. “Impossible… Eiji, you wouldn’t…” Despair propelled him into the night, tears drawn sideways by the wind as he rode his bicycle like a man pursued by his own heart.

Dawn approached. The roof of Eiji’s apartment emerged from the paling darkness. A figure stood ahead—Eiji, or the ghost of him. Something was wrong: the posture hollow, the clothing black instead of white, the familiar bag absent. He resembled Eiji too closely, and yet not at all.

Masa drew nearer, compelled by dread.

He did not know that beyond this moment, a deeper hell awaited him— one fashioned precisely for the heart that dared to love.

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