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korienee

Jun 27

silkscream

use me

ੈ✩ aki hayakawa x reader

ੈ✩ wc: 10k

ੈ✩ synopsis: aki finds himself in a predicament when you aren't yourself after a mission.

ੈ✩ tags: 18+ MINORS DNI, enemies to lovers, workplace relationships, sex pollen, dubcon for that reason, smut, hate sex, fingering, face fucking, dom!aki and brat!reader, degradation, biting, choking, drunk sex, impact play

ੈ✩ a/n: happy belated thanksgiving yall

It was your fault – it always was. If you hadn’t directly defied Aki’s orders, maybe you’d be conscious enough for him to take you back to headquarters. Enough to stumble back home at least, instead of sprawled out on Aki’s lap in the backseat of a cab. The look he’d given the driver was apologetic, gentle enough to assure that no, sir, I’m not bringing home an inebriated girl to have my way with her. Work happy hour got a little too crazy.

Of course, that was a lie.

Your impulse control was terrible. It didn’t help that your temper was worse than Power’s – at least when it came to dealing with Aki, who hated that you got under his skin in a completely different way. Only one year his junior, you had kept to yourself when you had joined Public Safety. It was only a matter of time for him to find out you were an insolent bitch whenever he tried to exert his authority.

It was supposed to be a sting operation. Take down some yakuza members who had liaisons with certain devils. Easy work for you and Aki.

Despite the mission brief, the two of you had met an entirely different beast. In the back rooms of some dingy bar, the Devil had throbbed and moaned through its leaking pores, its body an amalgamation of every victim that was its prey. The gangly limbs of naked women were encapsulated in a transparent yet muddy flesh.

Before Aki could so much as whip his katana across the dripping flesh, you extended your daggers quicker than he could blink. You were fast. He hated admitting that. A contract with the Snake devil matched your personality, he always thought — you and your venomous tongue.

A quick slash triggered the Devil’s aggression even more, and out came the fumes. You had dropped to the floor with a thud by the time Aki could make sense of his surroundings, his throat burning from holding his breath. He carried you out of the building as quickly as he could.

Now, here you are, sprawled on his couch, chest rising and falling with deep sleep. Aki is relieved for that, at least – the slaying of the Devil was exhausting on his own with you being passed out.

Fuck, he needs a drink.

He opens the liquor cabinet to pour himself a glass of Suntory, cringing at the burn of it sliding down his throat. He glances at the couch to check on you and widens his eyes when he sees that you’re awake. Sitting up, eyes darkened with an emotion he’s never seen in you before.

“Welcome back,” he mutters gruffly.

You say nothing. You only stare back at him, pupils dilated to the max. Transfixed. You’d never looked at him like that before unless you were several beers in, and even then, he ignored the fact. You say his name in a way that makes his insides heat, his heart blanching in the deep pool of your pupils staring back at him. There’s a frisson of wariness that slices through him as he blinks.

“You need water? Hungry? You were out for a while,” Aki offers politely. His fingers strain against his whiskey glass.

You shake your head, still staring at him. You blink slowly. His heart stutters.

You close your eyes, shaking your head again. You scratch the back of your neck, cross your arms in a defensive stance as if you’re trying to fold into yourself.

Your mouth is bone dry and tastes like carpet glue. You want to spit, but Aki’s fuzzy rug looks expensive, so instead you glare at a spot near your feet until your vision stops shimmering. Every cell in your body aches, raw nerve endings sparking against the inside of your skin. Your hands flicker, restless, like you could wring the world’s neck if you tried hard enough.

Aki watches you from his kitchen, shoulders set in a way that’s meant to project calm, but his grip on the whiskey glass is so rigid you expect it to shatter. You think about how long it would take for those fragments to embed under his skin, how much pressure to split the veins on his hand. The thought makes you smile, your lips splitting before you can reel yourself in.

Fuck. The Devil’s not done with you.

You can tell by the way every face and voice in your head smears together, blurring into a chorus. Everything feels raw, open to the air—like you've been skinned. You try to sit still, screw your eyes shut in focus. You try to remember your training, but the memory of the operation keeps looping; flashing back to the Devil’s whine, the glisten of its jelly skin, the gloom-thick stench of lust marbling the air. The need to bite something — someone — buzzes under your tongue.

Aki still hasn’t moved. You can almost see the thoughts grinding gears behind his eyes, all those rational synapses clattering: She’s still high as balls, he’s thinking, need to keep her calm, need to keep her from stabbing me in the chest.

He watches as you hunch forward, elbows to knees, hands knit tight under your chin. Your breath is uneven. The horror of the Devil’s lair should’ve rattled you, but there’s no trembling this time, not even a trace of the shakes you got after most jobs.

Instead, your energy spikes sharp, restless — a low whine in your bones, a hunger that makes your teeth clench. Something is still inside you, and not in the spectral, symbolic sense. The Devil’s residue is in your blood.

Aki sets the glass down. You were always a little unpredictable after missions, but not like this. Not so… untethered. He crouches in front of the couch, careful not to crowd.

“You okay?” he whispers. You open your eyes. Pupils blown wide, almost animal.

Smells hit you: aftershave, briny sweat, whiskey, a bitter-laced edge beneath it all. The air is saturated with him. It makes your head spin, suffocating and sweet. You pick at your sleeve, unpicking a loose thread, then press a fist to your mouth to bite it off, but your teeth won’t cooperate. You want to bite something, but not fabric.

“I’m hungry,” you say, forcing the words past the pressure in your throat, the softness of your tongue. Your voice doesn’t sound like yours. Aki nods, missing what you mean entirely.

“I can heat up some leftovers. And there’s frozen gyoza in the freezer — lemme —” He starts to stand, but you grab him by the wrist. Hard. A strange sensation buzzes in your fingertips.

His warmth floods your palm, so much more solid than you expect. Bones and sinew under skin, somehow both fragile and immovable. You can feel his pulse, not in his wrist but inside your own chest. Aki tries to pull free, politely at first, and then with a controlled twist. You don’t budge.

“I’m hungry,” you repeat, aware that your voice comes out odd, almost childish, stringy with saliva. You want to gnaw him down to the marrow.

Realization passes over his stormy blue eyes. He gives you a look, neutral as possible, like a pane of glass over fear.

“Huh. You’re still under the Devil’s influence,” he says, voice low. “It’ll pass. Just — just hold still for a second.”

He reaches again for his whiskey, but this time you yank him all the way down to couch-level. The bottle tips, and you barely notice. His face hovers a few inches from yours, raven-black hair falling out of its neat tie. The urge to laugh, or bite, boils up your throat. You don’t know which will come out first.

He tries to keep his breathing even, but the scent of him fills your lungs, as deep as the Devil’s maw. It’s a miracle he hasn’t cuffed you already, called for backup, or tranquilized you on the spot. Self-control: the virtue he worships. You ache to see if you can break it.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Aki says, maybe to himself, maybe to you. “You need to just ride it out, okay?”

From this close, he can see the faded mark of a cut that ridges underneath your bottom lip — a nick you’d gotten in a fist fight weeks ago. He remembers the blood, the way you swiped at him with your sleeve and laughed at him for caring. Even then, your face was full of drunken ecstasy, eventually softened with the dullness of cheap bar drinks. There’s nothing soft in your face now — only hunger, deep as a pit.

“No,” you gasp. “I need— I need to get it out.”

The room’s heat prickles your skin, sweat gathering at your collarbone and pooling in the dip of your thighs. Your body feels like it’s stitched together by an invisible string pulled too taut. Muscles at war with your nerves.

Aki’s face, blushing against porcelain skin, radiates a morbid magnetism that you can only attribute to wanting to see a car crash. Your hands shake with the possibility of your touch being destructive, every cell under your skin scraping desperately to the surface in a seething crawl.

Your vision whites out a bit as you feel heat fogging the inside of your skull — a smothering, hormonal blanket. Aki pulls away ands spoons some leftover rice into a bowl as you watch him, the careful movement of his forearms, his Adam’s Apple bobbing as he regards you with the wary cadence of someone handling a wild animal. It takes everything in you not to reach for him, to unspool all the tightness in your skin to lick the salt off his sweat.

You’re fucking burning. The stench of the Devil still permeating through your pores, turning itself into something utterly terrible. You can hear your pulse in your ears, static thickening everything. Somewhere across the apartment, the microwave beeps. Aki sets the bowl in front of you and keeps his hand on the rim, steadying it. His other hand hovers level with your face, palm out, halting.

His face in the lamp-lit apartment is tired, blue-shadowed beneath the cheekbones, but his gaze pins you. He’s fighting the habit of walking away, leaving you alone to self-destruct. That’s new. He’s always been a dick about personal boundaries — his and everyone else’s — but right now, for once, he’s not treating you like a bomb. He’s treating you like a person in the middle of coming apart.

You reach out and take the bowl, but your hands don’t quite work. The rice tastes like nothing. Cigarette ash and wet chalk. You feel Aki’s stare on you, and when you look up, he doesn’t flinch or look away.

You want to lie down and float until the next morning, maybe for a week, but Aki hovers with that draining, careful patience that’s almost sympathy. He sits, hands loose, knees apart, breathing through his nose. You can taste the air. Salt. Sweat. Cherry trees blooming in the spring.

He’s waiting for you to come back to yourself. That’s what he does, the professional: waits things out, nurses the process, ignores the mess until it stops being inconvenient. Except you’re not sure if it will, not this time.

You want to tell him: There’s something wrong inside you, and if you can’t get it out, you’ll ruin the room. The staccato itch in your gums, the ache in your bones — if it was possible to peel yourself open right here, you’d claw your ribcage empty.

You eat spoonfuls of rice, bites of gyoza. The meat still feels frozen and the rice feels stale.

“Think I lost my appetite,” you mutter.

Aki glances at you, but you can tell from your peripheral vision that a glare is pulsating underneath his stoic face.

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously,” you bark back. Aki scowls the way he always does, venom spreading on a tongue that he refuses to use because he knows better. He knows you’re incapacitated in a completely unprecedented way, so he doesn’t snap back at you. Just this once.

He mumbles something under his breath and puts away the dishes carelessly as he swigs more whiskey. When he sits down next to you, your pulse jumps at a depth that makes your chest hurt. As if your heart is trying to dive itself down into the deep end of the pool.

“I’ve never seen shit like that, you know,” he murmurs, trying to make conversation. An attempt at casual. “That Devil. I don’t even know if a Sex Trafficking Devil could even be real — not that it’s not a human fear, but it’s too specific.”

“There’s a fear for everything,” you mumble.

You think about how much your heart is lurching, how the cells underneath your skin are thrumming. Yearning for contact.

Lust is what is plaguing you, ultimately. It clouds you too much for you to say it out loud. Instead, you pounce on the person who cares enough to feed you.

The forward momentum knocks the air out of both of you — a dusty cough from your own lungs, a grunt rumbling somewhere beneath his ribs. You pin his shoulder under the cut of your jaw and clamber across his lap, knees punching into the sad couch cushions. There’s a sour, animal joy in the way he tries to block you, hands rigid and hovering at the jagged notches of your hips. The heat under your skin spikes. Every neuron in you is tuned to the need for friction. He’s solid, all sinew and stubbornness. The world teeters on the edge of dizzy white noise.

“Stop it,” he snaps, more bark than bite, but you can taste the fear in it — righteous, responsible. Professional. You ride the tremor of his voice, intoxicated by the pushback, how he refuses to meet your stare even as you press your fever into him. The hardness of his thigh is a dare. You aren’t sure whose heart is hammering harder.

“Make me,” you bite out. Your tongue is numb, every word dragging velvet behind the teeth. You hear him swallow, feel the reverberation of a grunt against your chest. He manages to wedge a forearm between your bodies, not enough to push you away but enough to set a boundary and define the line.

“Don’t,” he says, voice ragged. “This isn't you right now.”

He says it like an apology. Like he’s sorry to remind you of yourself. Meanwhile, you want to crack his name open on your teeth. His cologne — firewood and amber — floods you, making the bitter strand of want under your tongue tingle again. You press your mouth to the hollow above his collarbone, his pulse vibrating against your lips.

Aki says your name, voice tight, and only then do you realize your rough grip on him, fingers fisted in his shirt hard enough to rip. You stammer out an apology, but it feels like your senses are flooded with an offending gas. Sweet aroma, the taste of his sweat.

“Please,” you gasp, the sensation in your throat hideous and radioactive. Your jaw grinds as you rock into him, climbing onto his body into a straddle. “Aki-kun—”

Shame flashes bright in your throat at the high-pitched plea that falls out of your mouth. It’s not like you. Aki knows that, especially, because his blue eyes are bright and wide with shock, cock stirring at the implication of it. You want to open him at the seams, so you’re clawing at his collar, fiddling with buttons with childlike frustration.

“Stop,” Aki scolds. The calmness in his voice is infuriating. He has you by the upper arms now, fingers pinning into muscle.

“No— just let me—”

“No,” he says firmly. “You need to wait it out.”

It goes against everything in your pulse, your state of mind. Bruises you in a pulsating pain. You want skin and weight and teeth and he won’t fucking give it to you. You press your pelvis against his, the ache in your thighs forcing you to press harder, to find a calm within the blizzard inside your bones.

“Just — fuck, please,” you slur into his shoulder, tongue failing. “Need you. Need you to make it better.”

Aki breathes heavily, closing his eyes in a useless attempt at containment. He doesn’t open his eyes as you rock harder into his lap, the wet heat of you stirring his cock in ways he wants to curse God for. You can feel the slightest bit of friction when he’s half-hard, and it makes you laugh, snarling as you dig your fingers deeper into the muscle of his arms.

“No,” he mutters, trying to wrangle your wrists into submission, but you’re able to break free with the whip of your hands. You can feel tears stinging from the corner of your eyes, threatening to spill over. The heat underneath your skin feels unbearable now — you don’t even want to rip him open more. Your urges are reduced to a tiny animal’s, feral and chaotic and frustrating in its repression.

You press your forehead to the knot of his tie, fingers trembling at the steady column of his neck, and say, “Help me.”

Your voice is terribly weak. The gnawing inside you is starting to hurt in a way that feels irreversible. He feels like the only way to drown the ache out, and you’re too frenzied to examine the reason why. You beg in wet gasps, drowning in suffocating heat.

He freezes at your plea. It’s broken, almost pathetic, coming out of your mouth, which doesn’t suit you. It doesn’t sound like your voice. He strokes your cheek like you’re something wild and half-tamed.

“It’s the Devil’s effects," he murmurs, trying to soothe you, "It’s not real. You’ll feel normal tomorrow.”

“It hurts,” you whimper, clutching the front of his shirt. A sob bubbles up raw and ugly in your throat, not even from the excruciating illusory hot flashes from the Devil’s effects, but for the sole fact that Aki refuses to touch you back.

You needed it, needed him. Did he hate you so much to refuse you relief?

The synapses in your brain flash. It’s all too loud in your head. When you look at him, something changes — if he won’t help, you’ll have to take it for yourself, won’t you?

You kiss him.

It's not a gentle brush. Your lips press against his in a collision that leaves his teeth rattling. You grab at his face, palms flat against his cheekbones as if you could climb into his head and startle him into coherence by force. Aki tenses, a hot silver of shock lighting through his body before he jerks his head away, electrified and breathing through his teeth.

“What the fuck —” Aki spits out, his voice strangled. A string of spit snaps between you, embarrassment flashing nuclear inside the both of you.

A dark flush bleeds lightly under the pale skin of his cheeks, settling into his neck that reminds you of sweet prey ready for teeth. You expect him to push you off, grab one of his weapons, summon Kon for the sake of restraining you. Spit in your face and call you worthless. Instead, he only stares at you.

You should retreat. You want to crawl into yourself — the mortification of kissing him breaking through the Devil’s haze to remind you of the reality of your relationship. The humiliation of it all sobers you, makes you square your shoulders, even if the gnawing ache in your chest is about to crawl out into a new beast.

The self-loathing throbs in your throat, shame blanketing your body and turning it frozen. Your brain frenzies beyond the Devil’s heat — fuck, I should apologize, or I could kiss him again and make him want me, or I could run away and find someone else to fuck, or maybe I should kill myself—

Your train of thought is interrupted by Aki yanking you forward by a fistful of hair. His mouth crashes into yours, heat funneling into the narrow point of contact where lips feel like carnations. His tongue slashes into your mouth, furious and unpracticed, hurried as if he's the one affected by the spores of lust instead.

Aki bites you like a warning and you let the pain bloom on your mouth, salty copper bleeding on your tongue. His fingers bunch at the roots of your hair, pulling slightly through the strands. His roughness might make you laugh if you could breathe at all, but you’re too engrossed in the taste of whiskey and blood and the sharpness of his teeth. At least a year’s worth of unvoiced feelings melting into unfettered lust.

You push him hard until his back hits the back of the couch. Your mouth descends onto his jugular, then the side of his neck, chasing his pulse. You bite him hard and he groans, feeling the draw of blood.

“Ow! Crazy bitch,” he mutters, pupils midnight against the moon-paleness of his face. “I should fucking sedate you.”

“You don’t want to,” you slur, teeth bared and taunting. “You like me crazy. You love how much I want to fuck you right now because it’s what you want when you’re sober. Without a fucking Devil.”

You crash your lips to Aki’s again — desperate and rough, teeth catching, defenses breaking like shattered porcelain. Saliva, spit, the resinous taste of his cologne. You claw at him, breaking the buttons of his shirt like you want crawl inside his sternum to feel how he ticks.

He groans as you bite the hard line of his jaw. He fists your hair as you find the skin above his ribs, his own hands going to your hips the way a man might try to cage a rabid thing.

Aki pulls away from you to see you beyond the ruination that his hands will extend. It’s why he blocks out the Future Devil during times like these — he could see your death if he wanted to, the way you’d come undone from his actions with a sob. Anything that could make his cock throb.

“Aki,” you whimper. “Please.”

Your whines raise in pitch as you rut against him. It’s only then, out of his feral haze, that Aki realizes how fucking hard he is. He groans as he feels you through the wetness of your panties, which drips through the thin linen of your trousers.

“Fuck,” he groans, grabbing your wrists, “Wait— wait. Just—”

“I can’t,” you rasp. “It hurts. Hurts so much. Need you—”

He gasps when you pull him onto the carpet, kneeling as your nimble fingers tug down the zipper of his trousers. He was aroused from the moment you kissed him, he realizes. Aki can only resort to calming you down with calloused fingers combing through your hair.

“Shhh, shh— just wait—”

But you can’t wait. Neither can he — not when you’re in between his legs, kneeling with your mouth watering. It doesn’t even feel fair at this point to let you suck his dick — aren’t you the one who needs relief?

Aki takes your hand and pulls you upward, coaxing you into straddling his lap again. You don’t protest, merely kissing his neck with feverish eagerness as you lift yourself enough to tug your trousers off. He groans, every kiss feeling like a branding, like liquid gold burning molten upon his ordinary flesh. Was he affected by the Devil too?

You take a reprieve from kissing to nuzzle into his neck. Of course, this is what makes him freeze — the tenderness.

He had gotten used to your chaos, shed his reservations along with your humility when the fever truly hit you because in the back of his mind, it would always be tongue and teeth with you.

The thought of fucking you would flicker in his brain at the rarest moments. When it did, it was always rough, you attempting to dominate him to prove a point, him putting you in your place just because he could with sheer strength.

He hadn’t prepared for softness.

“Aki-kun,” you sob. “I can’t—”

The pit of his stomach deepens at the sound of your voice.

“It’s okay,” he mutters uselessly, petting your hair.

“No,” you whimper. “F-Feel like I’m gonna die if you don't —”

He realizes, acutely, at this moment, that his dream was never a passing fantasy at all. It was what he wanted most, buried under layers and layers of professionalism, of uncaring faux-placidity that called to logic.

You are nestled at the crook of his neck, tears falling onto him, whimpering out of sheer desperation. Admittedly, this was another passing daydream of his. You being cute. Pathetic. Malleable.

“Please, Aki-kun,” you whisper into his neck. “I want you. It feels terrible.”

He hitches his breath before lowering his hand to the apex of your thighs, gathering your slit upwards to lubricate your throbbing clit. You gasp at the intrusion, your cunt pulsating automatically at the prospect of finally getting filled.

His touch is all knuckles and heat as his hands fumble past the shoddy elastic of your underwear. The wetness startles him, his hand trembling a little as he touches you, like he’s bracing himself for a shock that doubles back through his bones. Maybe he is.

You buck against his fingers, ungraceful, grinding against him like he’s merely an object — a handle or hinge or switch to be thrown. The ragged drag of his fingers against your clit sparks the air inside your head, blowing out every rational thought in your mind and reducing it to the need to come, god, just fucking come, and then maybe you’d stop shaking.

He kisses you again. Catches your mouth and sucks on your tongue as if to wring out the poison from you himself. It’s difficult to breathe. You don’t care much. You want him to suffocate you at the root, lips bruised and sloppy. Fist-fight intimacy, skin to skin in collision. You bite his bottom lip and the guttural noise from his mouth has you careening.

His fingers are long, knuckle-deep inside your pussy until he hits the spot inside you that feels like bruised fruit. The delicious pressure of it makes you whine against his mouth, breathless, eyes rolling back into your skull at the pleasure.

You claw at each other until your shirt is completely unbuttoned. Nails snagging at skin, not knowing or caring if red trails are left behind. Aki’s fingers curl inside, blunt force fucking you open while his thumb rolls around your clit. His other hand seizes a fistful of your hair to control the angle of your mouth, teasing your eagerness by pulling his own mouth further away from you.

You gasp at the slight pain in your scalp, only soothed by the peak growing inside you.

“That’s it,” he sighs. “That’s a good girl. Just listen to me and I’ll take care of you, alright?”

You whimper in response, looking submissive for the first time in your life. He feels fucking insane as he overstimulates you, watches the tears flow from your eyes.

Aki cants your hips forward, the knuckles of his hand rough and merciless in the way they work you open, and your soggy cunt pulses around his fingers with such frantic need that your vision flickers with motes of black. His teeth scrapes your jaw, biting deep at the bone and bruising your resolve to fight back. You’re broken apart for him, humiliating in its helpless immediacy, and the aftershock leaves every muscle in your legs fluttering at the edges.

“Aki—”

“Shut up,” he grits. “Shut up and fucking come on my fingers.”

The room fades away until it’s just you and him and the ache. Your orgasm hits like a tidal wave, the dusty warmth of whiskey radiating from his neck mixing with the sweetest aroma that you would only be able to describe as otherworldly. It had to be the Devil’s doing. You’re coming on his fingers alone and everything feels like daisies.

He groans as he watches you come. As your body relaxes from your high, you feel the precise shape of his cock underneath you. You wriggle against him, hard enough to grind your clit against the head of his cock. He grunts like he’s been punched, making you want to rub harder, to coax him through the threshold of his pants.

He pulls his hand free with a noise, then smears your wetness along the hungry seam of your mouth. The taste of yourself is sharp and musky and obscene, and you lick his fingers despite it, kitten-like. He grunts and pushes his fingers onto your tongue. You can feel the violence of his dislike for you sizzling under the surface, even as he thumbs your lips and pulls them open for a real kiss.

You let him have you. There is nothing left to do. The Devil’s heat left you helpless, skin flayed into strips, but his touch is the salve now, the only way to cool the fever thrumming through your bones. He sits back, spreading his knees, the tent in his pants lurid and obvious. You want to laugh in his face, tease him about it, but your voice is broken. All you can manage is a hungry gasp of his name, soft and desperate through the tears you’d almost forgotten were pooling in your eyes.

You paw at his crotch frantically. With a groan, he yanks your hands away and you make the most pathetic noise.

“I need—”

“Calm down,” he commands sternly. “I won’t fuck you if you’re not patient.”

“I feel like I’m dying —”

He grabs your face roughly, squeezing your cheeks with his long fingers. “Go into my bedroom and wait for me there. Make sure all your clothes are off and fucking behave.”

He watches your face sour like a child’s and his lips almost quirk up at how it’s a reprieve from whatever beast is inside you at the moment. His eyes glance at your pert ass, the soaked lace of your underwear taunting him as you walk to the bedroom.

Aki swears under his breath and drinks another gulpful of whiskey. Takes his gun out of his holster and morbidly contemplates how worse this can get. Whatever (unfortunately common) dream this was of his, the image of you nearly naked in his apartment, it had manifested into a nasty curse. He’d have to live with the fever of it.

Anticipation sparks up your arms and across your shoulders as you enter his bedroom. You’ve never once slept in his bed, never crossed this particular threshold except to rifle his room for evidence of pssible embarrassing secrets. There isn’t much: the linen is stark, the books beside the low bed are dog-eared as hell, the closet so empty you can count every hanger. The only things out of place are your own, scattered in a pathetic trail: panties, blouse, blazer. All a little torn. All smelling like the inside of his jacket now.

You want to stuff your mouth with the pillow and scream through it. Instead, you flop onto your back, blood humming in hot, angry pulses. You’re so wet you half expect a slick mark to stain the sheets when you sit up again.

You hear Aki’s footsteps before you see him, deliberate and mean. There’s nothing of his usual stiffness when he enters; his shirt is already unbuttoned, sleeves rolling back to the torque of his forearms. Black hair down, tie discarded. It’s obscene how self-contained he is while you twitch on the mattress like a deboned fish. The assessment in his eyes is flat, clinical.

He flashes you a stern look and you lay back down on your elbows, scowling like a rejected dog. He almost wants to laugh. He sighs instead.

“I should fuck your mouth with the way you’ve been acting,” he grunts. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

You pretend your mouth doesn’t water. He can see the flash in your eyes, the tantalizing glint displaying what’s probably going on in your head right now. Better not poke the bear if he’s supposed to tame it.

The thought of it makes your mouth salt over, thick and selfish. He should fuck your mouth. For the sin of biting him, for the humiliation of lust collapsing your body so quickly, for the crime of wanting, more deeply than air, the specifically horrid, beautiful taste of Aki.

He stands at the edge of the bed, gaze raking you up and down, and the lines at his mouth are deeper than you’ve ever seen them. He’s so still, even the breath in his nose is almost silent. Disgust, amusement, hunger — you can’t tell which occupies more of his face. He doesn’t smell like soap, just that flat chemical of his body, maybe some lingering pepper of cordite and ash under his fingernails. He’d touched his gun five minutes ago. You can smell it.

With the first step forward, Aki’s whole body resolves into force. This isn’t the Aki from the office, or out in the field, or the bored, ceremonial Aki who covers his mouth when he yawns. It’s something else: a heat with nowhere to go except toward you. He grabs you by the hair at the root, hard enough for your scalp to sting a bit. You feel giddy.

“You’re going to behave,” he says flatly.

“If you don’t get in me now, I’m going to kill you.” You glare. He tugs harder.

“You’ll have to try harder,” Aki says, a sneer curling at the edge of his mouth. His grip at your scalp is calculated, the flex of his arm telegraphing how little it would take to break your neck, if you were anyone else.

He doesn’t move, not until your glare softens and your body slackens, sopping-wet and almost cowardly in the sheets.

Then, a single motion: he yanks you upright, plants you on your knees, bends your head back until you’re looking up at the cloudy lampshade and his knuckles are digging into your hairline. Your eyes cross with the pressure, and you suck in a breath. There — already, just like that, all the fury is sluiced through your nerve endings and replaced with that keening hunger.

You want to bite his hand. Instead, you flatten your tongue out, panting open-mouthed at his wrist.

He holds the back of your head, other hand wrestling the mess of briefs and pants lower on his hips. Then he’s hard and right there and he presses the crown of his cock to your lips, cool and clinical, a doctor measuring your reflexes. Your voice is gone, burned up in all the other screaming, so you show him: mouth wide, tongue wet and shameless on the tip, fucking delighted when he twitches against your taste buds.

Aki hisses — a cuss exhaled to the ceiling — and shoves past your teeth in one go. Your eyes water, and the hand tangled in your hair tightens.

Your mouth feels fucking amazing. Your lips suck into what feels like an incredibly tight ring.

“Careful with your teeth,” he groans, tapping your face unkindly. “Told you to fucking behave.”

You moan, taking him down to the shaft as you choke on his cock. He gasps when he hits the back of your throat and hears you gag. He makes the terrible mistake of looking down to see you choking on him and his stomach stirs with overwhelming lust. Any longer and he feels like he’ll blow his load.

This is not going to help her, he thinks briefly. She needs to cum.

He exhales as he pulls on your hair, your mouth whining as you chase the head of his cock. It’s almost precious how much you want him. Maybe it would be if you weren’t ravenous.

“Hey,” he warns. “Relax.”

He manhandles you onto your back and you nearly drool, blown-out eyes wide as saucers. You already look fucked out, wet eyelashes sticking together.

He circles your clit and you make a wounded noise that gets swallowed by his mouth. Aki has never cared much for kissing — it was always easier to bite and lick, fuck whoever wanted him hard and fast so he could send them away quicker. A dirty, rough fuck that ended clean, nothing to be developed afterward.

Unfortunately, kissing you feels like a drug.

Aki loves the plushness of your lips, wet moans spilling in between spit. His fingers are deft at your clit, grind and rhythm offset just enough to keep you guessing, desperate, never able to draw a proper breath. He reigns you in by the nape of the neck, hand planted at your jaw to catch the noises you make.

You want his fucking cock inside you. Nothing short of that will satisfy the hollowed-out ache. You push against his thick length with shameless impatience, nails catching on the line of his hip. Your legs fall apart and your heat stains his skin, enough that he shudders. For a moment the only sound is breath, the wet drag of his shaft on your cunt.

He lines up at the entrance, splits you open in a lazy push. The slow threat of being filled in one measured movement — Aki is determined to make you feel every last inch. It’s a violence, the way he feeds himself inside you, but your whole body sings for it, nerve endings shrieking in relief as you pulse around him.

His chin tucks at your ear as he pushes deep, hands pinning your wrists above your head. His cock is so thick inside you that you can barely breathe, but you drag your body against his desperately as if you could manage to get him any deeper.

“Aki,” you whimper. “Aki-kun—”

“I know,” he mumbles. “I know. That’s it. Just take it.”

“Faster,” you gasp, squirming against him. Your heel knocks against the small of his back. “More—”

“I’m the one in control, you brat,” he hisses. “Be good so you’ll feel better.”

“Keep being mean,” you grin, your disposition nearly hypnagogic. “Makes me wet.”

He shuts you up with two fingers shoved in your mouth. You can feel his pulse in them, each shiver a counterpoint to the brutal invasion of his cock inching deeper between your legs. Aki fucks you with precision, like he wants to prove a point about what you’re capable of taking.

Your jaw aches from the stretch, but the ache between your legs burns hotter; you clench around him and revel in the frustration that creeps into his face, hair falling over his sweat-damp brow. You want to kick him in the chest and split your knuckles on his ribs, but what you do is slither your tongue along his fingers and bite.

He hisses, lets go of your wrists with a long snap, and then you are everywhere at once — your nails clawing at his shoulders, your thighs binding him in place, your teeth grazing skin when you pull his hand away from your lips and clamp down, savoring the copper taste of blood. He lands a smack against your cheek hard enough to light up your vision. You don’t flinch. You giggle.

“You like it filthy,” you laugh, high and uneven. “What would your little office rats say, seeing you fuck me like a animal?”

He grinds your clit with his thumb, no mercy, and your words melt into a gummy moan. The devil-spawned need in your gut is a siren song, and he’s matching the rhythm of it, hips slamming you open, cock hitting deep enough to make your bones shake.

After a minute you’re lightheaded, your nails embedded in his arms. He leans close, flattening you to the bed, his hand at your jaw so your face opens to his mouth — or to a slap, you don’t care which — and you’re trapped in the best kind of panic. Every time his hips hitch forward, you feel the collision of your thighs together. His cocks grind ups against the patch inside you that’s so raw it doesn’t feel pleasure, just bright light and sound. You float in it. You want it to drown you.

He pistons harder and slammins that spot so fiercely your teeth buzz. You arch your back, delirious, moaning at a fever pitch. Aki looms over you, his black hair swinging forward in wild streaks, the shadow of his cheekbones stark and mean. Sweat drips down the hard line of his neck onto your chest, each drop a scald that makes you keen.

“Is this what you wanted?” he hisses into your ear. “Needed it this dirty? You’re a fucking mess. Look at you—”

You whimper, wanting to answer but all that comes out are wet, slurred noises. He snakes his hand down, pinching your clit between two knuckles hard enough to make you sob.

“Speak.”

“Yes, yes, fuck, yes, Aki, just—” You swallow, tasting salt-iron from your own bitten tongue.

You lose the thread of the next few seconds — everything is a swirling, seething pulse of wet friction, the push and burn as Aki rams you open, his grip implacable at your hip. The ache in you subsides and is replaced with delicious pleasure. Despite the ache being soothed, the hunger seems to grow.

You want to say: You are in control. You want to prove it by making a mess of him, make him come before you do, draw his resolve out and snap it between your thighs. But every time your body tries to obey that ambition, he pins you firmer. Hands flattening you, forearm heavy across your collarbones. He angles your pelvis, the length of him pushing deeper than you knew was possible. You gasp, and your next moan is a shiver right at the line of pain. Cleansing, almost sacred.

“Holy fuck,” he moans. “You’re fucking dripping all over me.”

“Oh god,” you gasp, your orgasm blinding.

“That’s it,” he rambles. “Ride it out, baby. Cum on my cock. I’ll fuck it out of you.”

If you didn’t already know what the end felt like, you’d think you were dying. It’s the kind of climax that steals voice and thought and snaps a white-hot fuse along your spine. It detonates against the scarred insides of your skull.

Your nails dig into Aki’s arms so deep you feel tendon slide, and there’s a bleak little joy in knowing you’ll both see the marks for days. Every muscle in your thighs and belly knots and holds you rigid around him, every nerve a wire pulled so tight it threatens to bust. Your body convulses, seesawing against the length of him, pussy squeezing in desperate waves.

Aki is whimpering, something you didn’t think possible. He’s glassy with sweat and shaking as he fucks through your aftershocks. His hands digg into your hips like he could anchor himself to you and survive the flood. He slows down slightly.

You come back to yourself with a mouth full of his palm — he’s covered your sobbing, bitten-wet mouth with his huge, shaking hand to quiet the next insane sound. His cock is still throbbing inside you; you feel every pulse ringing in your lower stomach.

“Shh. It’s okay. Stop crying.”

You’re not crying, you want to spit at him. Instead, you suck his index finger into your mouth, drag your tongue from knuckle to tip, and stare him down with wild, ruined eyes. Defiant even in devastation.

He leaves the hand over your mouth, just until your spasms subside, until the arch in your back collapses and your legs fall open, boneless and twitching. Then he pulls away, a string of saliva glistening between your tongue and the rough pad of his thumb. He’s breathing like he’s just run a mile. You reach u -- grasp his wrist, keep his hand just above your face, ready to bite or beg again if it comes down to it.

“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down,” you choke out around the edges of his skin, your voice shredded and hoarse. “If you stop now, I’ll never forgive you—”

He slides his hand down, palm cradling your cheek with unwarranted gentleness.

"Tell me how it feels,” he snaps. “I’m not stopping.”

You want to throttle him; you want to praise him. You’re trembling, not with fear, but with the sense that if he pulled out now, the rest of you would follow—your tongue, your heart, your spinal cord, all in one long red string.

“Keep going or I’ll—”

He bucks against you, rough and animal, just the way you like. Your orgasm has made you so loose and slick it’s an invitation: come apart again, this is what you’re for.

“Shit. Good girl,” he pants, and you hate him for it.

You buck hard, knock his jaw with your head, and he’s so surprised at the pushback that for a second you can flip the balance. You straddle him in one twist, slamming down, and his cock splits you open so hard your vision goes white for a second. He tries to choke you just to regain control, but you wrench out of his grasp.

Every fiber of muscle in your body spasms at the stretch of this new angle. You gasp.

Unconsciously, you clench around him, and Aki swears under his breath, violent and soft, gripping your ass hard enough to leave fingerprints. You set the pace, frenzied and clumsy at first —then more confident, riding the sluggish roll of his hips until something inside you starts to melt. He feels impossibly thick, every controlled pulse of his body grazing the spot that’d make you lose your balance and brains in a single blow. You brace yourself with a palm against his sternum and dig your nails in, using it for leverage as you grind downward.

Aki exhales hard. You feel the tremor in his thighs as he tries to keep up. You stare down at him, shaking. His face is a snarl, but behind it his mouth trembles with restraint. His hands clutch your hipbones, fingers scoring red into your skin, and you get the hint — rock faster or lose the upper hand. So you do.

You grind down until the only thing left of you is sensation — a hot, wrung-out rag, sore and fevered, nothing but a mouth to open and a cunt to fuck.

He knows it; he feels it in the way your body seizes, the way your voice devours itself: Aki, Aki, Aki, please, more, more, you’re killing me, I love it, I’ll do anything, anything, anything you want.

He lets you ride him until you’re undone. Then, at the flashpoint just before you break again, he grabs your hair at the nape and yanks you down to kiss him. It’s all teeth: he bites your lip so hard the copper of blood is clear against his tongue. It’s a gasp, a lurch, and suddenly he’s on top again, turning you over onto your stomach and pushing a hand against your shoulder blades.

He thrusts so deep inside you it’s unreal, It almost hurts, the pleasure so sharp you see nothing but afterimage and dye-bloomed shadow. You know it’s meant to be a punishment, but you only feel pure bliss. You can feel your peak building again, empty-headed, mouthing obscenities into his sheets as your body flails and shakes.

“Gonna come?” he growls, striking the plushness of your ass with a slap. “What happened to that attitude, huh? Now you’re fucked out and taking it like a good little slut.”

You can’t answer — your jaw’s slack, and every muscle in your body is twitching with white-hot need. You grip the mattress so hard your knuckles turn bone-white; the sound you make isn’t even a real word, just a raw, kinetic groan torn wide open by his hand beating a fresh red bloom across your skin of your ass.

“That’s what I thought,” he sneers. The satisfaction is real, but there’s a ragged edge to him, too. Like it costs him something to hold you down, to fuck you so furiously, to let this side of himself win.

He birds his hand in your hair, bunching the strands at the base of your skull, and yanks your head up so your back arches obscenely, so he can see your face in profile.

“Look at you,” he spits, grinning feral, “all cock-drunk. How’re you gonna go back to work after this, huh?”

Your eyes flutter; in the blur, you crane your neck to see his face, red and splattered with sweat, pupils so wide it’s almost demonic. You try to snarl at him but your mouth’s as raw as the rest of you. You can only gasp his name.

“Please, I’m so close,” you gasp. “Don’t stop—”

You’re whimpering, knees shaking in the sheets, each thrust landing like a hammer blow in the base of your skull. The world has collapsed to two points — the slice of Aki’s grip in your hair and the brutal, friction-ripped seam of pleasure where he splits you open. With every slam and slap, your body tenses tighter, until the only thing left is a coil of pressure along your spine, ready to snap.

He wrenches you up by the roots so your back arches more, chin thrown high, and you hear in your own ears an inhuman wail, a scream too raw for language. Your cunt clamps down, milking his cock in wild pulses. You spasm through your climax, tears streaming down your face as every muscle in you goes rigid and then shudders apart.

Aki is cursing you — he’s lost his own cadence, the measured rhythm giving way to ragged, uneven pounding, like he’s desperate for release but determined to gut every last tremor from your body first.

His voice is close to your ear, filthy, insistent, babbling curse after curse with your name laced through it—fucking take it, you brat, you wanted this, didn’t you, always such a greedy bitch, can’t get enough, gonna make you so fucking sore—and you know, with bright certainty, that you’ll never want anything else again.

You crumple forward as your orgasm rocks through you, half-sobbing, face mashed into the damp sheets. Aki keeps rutting into you, slower but impossibly deep, letting you wring out the last dying electric arcs of the orgasm. Your legs are numb, shaking uncontrollably, but for some reason, your mind is completely blank.

Aki just keeps hitting that deep, devastating place over and over, groaning filth in your ear—"Yeah, that’s it, make a mess. Wanna feel you milk me dry — fuck, you’re tight — you want my cum that bad?”

You nod, or try to, but your neck won’t cooperate. You only whimper and sob. He pushes you down, burying your face into the pillow, and the suffocation makes your last spasms of need clench down tight.

He fucks you through the comedown, doesn’t even slow or coddle. He just holds you under the crux of the shoulder, rutting, cock twitching so hard you can feel every jolt as he loses control. You can’t beg anymore, can’t even think. You want him to fill you so bad your stomach hurts. When he shoves in, bottoming all the way out, the heat inside you is electric.

You sag in the sheets, face mashed sideways, Aki’s teeth pressing into the tendon of your neck. His free hand claws at your thigh, jerking you back onto him. The second he cums, it floods you so intimately. Sugar boiled down into syrup.

He collapses forward, grunting, weight pinning you to the mattress. His tongue flat against the back of your ear. All salt and exhaustion. You can’t move, can’t think, don’t really want to. You lose track of how long you lay there. Maybe you black out.

Aki appears in the edge of your vision, outline blunted by exhaustion. You expect him to light a cigarette, maybe nudge you off the bed with the tip of his shoe, but instead he throws his shirt over your hips and crouches low.

You feel your wakefulness go in and out. When you open your eyes, he’s holding a wet hand towel, steaming faintly, probably microwaved. He kneels beside you, eyes slitted with an anger that’s less about you and more about the failure of his own professionalism.

“You with me?” he asks, voice stripped of all the venom it had from before. He checks your pupils, the tender press of his thumb to your cheekbone almost apologetic.

It would be comforting, if you weren’t sure that he’s mentally reviewing all the ways he let shit get this bad.

You don’t respond. You can only blink dumbly back at him. He frowns.

“Hey,” he says softly, tapping your cheek. “Say something. You alive, baby?”

The endearment knocks the air out of you, hangs heavy in the back of your head, somewhere beyond the whirring static noise.

He just called me baby. He is not joking. Aki is too tired to ever really joke.

“Uh huh,” you mumble, voice hoarse, as if it’s your job to apologize for the entire preceding event.You haven’t cried more than twice in your adult life, but you know if you open your mouth again, tears will fall out. That’s another thing you can’t tolerate: crying.

Maybe Aki wants you to. Maybe you want you to.

All you can do is hide your face and bite down on the sound trying to rip itself free from your chest. There was a point, hours before, where you would have given anything for the soft, deep velvet of his voice in your ear. Now, his hand at your temple feels like something soft wrapped in barbed wire.

“Nngh,” you gargle, trying to roll away, but your body’s at heavy odds with you. Your arms don’t want to listen. Your legs aren’t attached. You feel like a crash-landed ship.

Aki sighs and hauls you upright. He sits on the edge of the bed with your limp shell in his lap, legs bent at grotesque angles. You try to protest, but your forehead thumps against his collarbone, and it’s the first time in memory you’ve ever felt so fragile.

“Don’t move. Let me take care of it.” His hands are pointed and mean as ever as he wipes your thighs, the sticky mess of lust and shame and need, but there’s a tenderness to it.

“I feel weird,” you mumble, suddenly feeling as if you’re hungover.

“You are weird,” he scoffs. “And you fuck like a coked-up pixie.”

The smile you find for him is a strange, not-quite-human thing.

“You loved it,” you rasp, just to needle him. “Blew a huge load, didn’t you, Captain?”

If this embarrasses him, he hides it well: only the hard swallow at his throat, the brief flicker of his tongue at a split in his lip. He swipes the cloth between your legs, utilitarian, but with odd care. Enough to make you squirm at the memory of how thoroughly he carved you open.

You expect a reprieve, the post-coital flicker of contempt he’s built up over years of policing his emotions. But he only looks at you, long enough you wonder if you’ve actually died. He cups your chin in two hands and tilts your face up.

He almost looks like he’ll kiss you.

Instead, he looks at the bruises on your body, the shape of sex taking formation in blotted colors. He clears his throat, shame tinting his face.

“Sorry,” he says, and his voice is steady now, softer than even the echo of your own pulse. That gets you: Aki Hayakawa, apologizing to you after years and years of your careless mouth and his mean precision. His thumbs brush the hothouse of your cheekbones. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to—”

“Liar,” you snort, and the effort of it sends a shiver from your shoulders all the way to your toes.

He shakes his head, eyes sharp and silver under the salt-smudge of sweat. “No. I’m not lying. But you’re impossible to handle. I should’ve just tied you up.”

You bat your eyelashes, or you try, but it’s more of a series of uncoordinated blinks. “Next time.”

Aki’s breath hitches, the faintest spark behind the exhausted mask.

“Don’t say shit like that,” he mutters, avoiding your eyes. You think it’s hilarious considering the filth that came out of his mouth earlier. “Makes me think you’re still not you.”

“I was always me,” you scoff.

“No,” he grimaces. “You acted like you were fucking possessed.”

“I was still in there, though.”

His eyes soften, almost, but the steely facade he usually puts on wins over. “Yeah. Guess you were.”

There’s a minute where neither of you say anything, but it’s not the loaded simmer it once would have been. There is no longer rage between you.

You’re sitting in his lap, both naked, both trembling, and neither of you seem equipped to handle something so frail as aftercare. Still, he wraps his arms around you, brings your chin to his shoulder in a way that means comfort even if it’s never been offered before.

The next morning, you regain consciousness, the world recalibrating itself around the fact that you can barely move. For a moment, you’re convinced you’re still back on that Devil sting mission, trussed up by yakuza as leverage. Then you realize: this is Aki’s bedroom, haloed early sun strobing through the curtains, the smell of his sweat and your own sex clotted thick in the air.

Your body is folded into a knot of blankets — no, not blankets, his jacket, the sharp-wool lining scratching your cheek. You can’t feel your hands. You try to move them, and only then do you see why: Aki has bound your wrists in the sleeves of his own button-up, coiled so snug the pulse at your wrist stutters.

The little creep, you think. You never expected he’d have such a sense of humor.

He’s beside you, lying on his back, the profile of his face sharp and battered in the predawn light. The inside of his forearm is smudged with marks — yours, probably. For once, he isn’t pretending to be asleep or already up grinding coffee beans at the first hint of morning. He’s there, a real person, shell-shocked and vulnerable. He blinks at you.

“Hey,” you murmur.

He looks over at you, his expression not moving. “Hey.”

“Care to explain why you tied me up?”

“You’re still a liability,” he says flatly

“Right. Because the most recent collection of UNIQLO is going to restrain me.”

He considers this, meets your eyes, and snorts.

“Couldn’t be too careful.” Then, quieter, “You kept trying to touch me. Even in your sleep.”

You try, for his sake, to look abashed, though beneath the thump of your headache, there’s the pulse of something that almost feels like pride.

“In a pervy way?” You raise a brow.

“Not at first. You kept grabbing my wrist.” He holds it up, and you see the angry pink trenches from your nails. “And then you stole my phone and texted Makima at four in the morning.”

“About what?”

“…You told her you loved me. Also said I had a giant cock and made you see god.” The flush at the shell of his ear is the only proof it’s not a total lie.

You close your eyes and let the humiliation wash through you. “So, what did she say?”

Aki scratches the scar near his eyebrow, sheepish. “She said to keep you hydrated, and recommended two paracetamol every six hours.”

You let out a genuine laugh this time. His lips quiver at the effort of holding back a smile. You make a child’s show of straining against the makeshift bonds. The effort spikes needles up both your arms, but that only makes the reward — Aki’s hand touching your forehead, the gentle brush of his thumb at your eyelid — feel like a contact high.

“Still you in there?” he asks, barely voiced.

“Still me.”

There’s a charge in the air as you lie there tangled in the aftershock, blankets twisting the two of you together in a makeshift shroud. You count out breaths, running a tally of damage: thighs burning, wrists tender, lips bruised. When you move, Aki’s arm slides over your midsection, pulling you closer with proprietary gentleness. You never knew such a thing existed between the two of you. The heat in his palm spreads under your ribs, far softer than his cut-glass voice has ever allowed.

“For the record,” he says, slowly. “I’m glad I was your victim and not someone else.”

You want to say something pithy, call him a simp, a weak-ass bitch, but nothing makes it past the tickle in your throat and the way your cheek is pressed to the back of his hand. It’s so easy to close your eyes and float, just for a second. Even the pressure at your wrists doesn’t bother you. If anything, it’s the only thing binding you to the world.

“For the record, you’re better than my last three victims combined.”

He snorts, half laughter, half bitter disbelief, and for a second the space between your bodies is a live wire.

“Sorry I made you do that,” you say, eyes tight against the morning glare.

“You didn’t make me do anything.”

“You sure?” you laugh, just a puff of breath between your teeth. “I could try harder next time.”

He lets the suggestion hang. You wonder if you mean it as a threat or a promise. He shifts his weight, rolling so that your wrists are pressed to his ribcage, snug, and leaves a palm splayed on your lower back. The weight of it keeps you from drifting off.

You try to catalog the feeling in your chest — a spasm eating up all the leftover shame. It feels like biting into a perfect, stolen persimmon. Terrible, too-sweet, impossible to stop. It’s not romance, exactly. No one would call it that. But it’s… something.

“We both have the day off, by the way,” he murmurs.

“You’re saying I can do whatever I want today?” you ask, tilting your chin in a challenge.

“Absolutely not,” he snorts.

“You’re basically asking for it.”

“You’re not going to seduce me this time,” he replies, his voice almost wary.

“So you’ll just make coffee and pretend you don’t want to rail me into unconsciousness,” you suggest, with what you hope is a steady voice.

He sighs. You catch, in the brief twist of his lips, that he’s considering the offer on its full spectrum.

You muster the strength for another wild strike: “Maybe I do want to seduce you. Did that ever occur to you, Aki?”

You hope the invective lands like a brick, but instead he just looks at you long and hard. There’s an unspeakable flash of interest and amusement, a flicker of weird kinship that makes your insides squirm.

“Later,” Aki promises, surprising you. “First, you need food and three liters of water.”

Instead of hauling you out of bed, however, he keeps you corralled against his chest in the starchy tangle of sheets and ruined uniforms, warm and lazy. You can sense his heartbeat in the wall of muscle pinning you, each pulse steady as a clock, as if his body requires you to re-time yourself to its cadence.

Aki’s thumb, as if by accident, strokes the hollow at your chin. He's not big on physical comfort — prefers to bark orders and slam doors and keep the world at a safe radius, but in the bleached honesty of morning, he can't resist the compulsion to check that you're real. That you're not just a fever dream or a devil hallucination. You realize he’s watching your eyes for signs of relapse; there's a tension in his brow that shows he’s still being cautious.

You swallow thickly. “It’s still me.”

He stares at you another second, reluctant to yield. Then nods, once, and releases your hands from the neat knot of his sleeves.

You press your ear against the metronome of his pulse, close your eyes, memorize the way the shape of your face fits against the hollow beneath his collarbone. Somewhere below the blanket, his knee presses against your thigh, bracing you in place. In that weird, bitter-light morning, you think he could die like this, both of you wound up together like blown fuses. Perhaps it would be an okay way to end.

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