Demons drifted through Yomi's corridors like ghouls, some servants and some soldiers, some dignitaries, and others commoners visiting the dead and dried-up heartland of their country. They possessed an equal sense of being picked up and mislaid here by some capricious God, fantastic beasts uprooted from legends and stories and confined to the daily grind of urban demon life. There was nervousness in their faces, which seemed to be formed of metal and glass, like the skyscrapers they inhabited. It was an inevitable side-effect, Kurama supposed, despite their horns and fangs, ridges and gills, scales and feathers, their tribal tattoos and the trinkets woven into greasy hanks of hair.
Kurama found the palatial inner rooms of Yomi's fortress dismal. Dismal, and familiar, since Kurama had taught Yomi all the things used to make his fortress impenetrable. Bandits had neither easy entries nor obvious goods to purloin; Kurama had seen flaws, but they would be hard to exploit. He had filed the information away anyway, tucked it inside for an emergency situation. He wished he could use them now, but he was biding his time; for now, he was trapped.
Besides the formal teahouse and gardens in the center of Yomi's city, nothing grew to warm the soul here. Even inside there, the plants chosen were gauche frippery, nothing lovingly tended, nothing beautifully untamed to delight the senses, or pleasant, substantial and wildly alive. It was all clipped, guided, reined in too firmly from unwanted growth. Kurama found it unbearably depressing, even worse for the fact that it was intended as charming.
The sky remained its murky black, the artificial glow of the buildings and the lightning bolts constantly singeing the air both more affecting than the brief hints of sun. This city was like the wreck of Yomi's heart, the iron decorated in places with frightening apertures that jutted like the gargoyles of human cathedrals, scenes of bloodlust and battle carved into the walls of ceremonial hallways, the only type of ornamentation Kurama had seen yet. These buildings were Yomi's church, a temple to himself and his greed, inviting all those who lived within to genuflect to his ambition.
Kurama could not relax, any more than he could succumb. He sat on the edge of a king-sized bed, feeling the alien cloth of the synthetic sheets as he petted them to calm himself down. His hair was wet, clinging to his too-pale face and neck in curls after the long soak he'd indulged in, trying unsuccessfully to remedy his woeful loss of calm. Long lashes lowered, head turned down, he gnawed his lips into a falsely seductive pout, sitting with nothing but a towel draped about his hips. Yomi had been explicit: this was what was expected of him. Kurama sucked his teeth bitterly, wondering how things could have strayed so far from his control.
He gripped the sheets hard when the expected knock on the door cut through the stifling quiet. Kurama's nerves were frayed, his muscles uncomfortably tight, but he was aware who lingered on the other side of the entryway to the atrium of the rooms he had been provided. Kurama knew better than to make his esteemed visitor wait. Getting up, his lips gnawed again between teeth straight and small as a dentist's dream, Kurama strode to the double doors and opened them calmly. They menaced each other, Kurama in cool rage, Yomi with a face full of his petty victory.
Kurama moved to the side, gesturing Yomi into his chambers. When the goat was in, the doors were shut, Kurama taking a moment to lock them. He let his forehead rest surreptitiously on the cold metal, trying in vain to mask his heartbeat.
"Kurama," Yomi said, his voice a taunt, "you seem agitated. Is something the matter?"
Kurama said nothing, willing himself to keep iron control on the glib responses his mind was forming, on his muscles, on his emotions, on his heart, on anything and everything that could give him away. He allowed Yomi's hands to clench onto his upper arms and rip him away from the door, worried at the violence of the motion, knowing he would bleed tonight, suffer for a thousand festering years of betrayal and hate.
"Let me go." Kurama quelled his voice carefully. "I am willingly succumbing to this, there is no need to treat me so."
Yomi snickered, an odd laugh for the triumphant lord, and then marched Kurama to the bed with his grips still in place, Kurama's palms rising in defense. When Kurama's thighs hit the soft mattress, Yomi pressed suddenly, his face twisting with anger, as it had when he'd killed the one-time assassin. Kurama didn't see the look, but allowed his waist to bend and his face to be crushed into the blankets. The damp towel was stripped from him and tossed away.
"Yomi, please." Kurama tried to keep hold of his quiet dignity. "This is little better than a rape."
"Do not talk to me of rape, old friend. Did you know? Slave catchers took me as I tried to become used to the loss of my light. What I will show you while you reside here will be infinitely kinder than that."
There was a hesitation. "I am sorry," Kurama breathed.
"Indeed you will be," Yomi agreed, and Kurama listened to him draw back and free himself from his clothes, shocked at the brusqueness of it all. The fox glared at the blankets, anger and sorrow tightening his face. He was determined to see nothing of Yomi when the goat forced himself on him. "Hold yourself open for me, Kurama."
Kurama was confused for a second by what he meant, and then scowled into the mattress once he'd realized. Slowly, burrowing his face into the soothing blankets, he complied: his hands held a cheek of his ass in each palm, spreading them apart, revealing to Yomi the sensitive inner valley. A sorry turn-about, Kurama acknowledged. There was nothing he could do, and perhaps Yomi could be persuaded to gentle himself, if the right impetus was found.
He knew not to ask for lubricant, but his breathing still hitched when he felt what was unmistakably the bulging head of Yomi's cock smear pre-cum over his skin, running up and down, and then nudge against his hole insistently. It already sweltered, pulsing with the rhythm of Yomi's blood, Yomi masturbating himself to stay erect. Kurama considered asking for leniency, to see if he might be allowed preparation, citing the size and inexperience of his human body, but he didn't want to be mocked, couldn't bear to open himself up to slander, and so relaxed himself and bit the sheets in an attempt to stifle what he was afraid would turn into a scream.
He shuddered at the foreign sensation of the rounded head edging inside of him. Yomi chose a time when he was breathing out, unprepared, to grab Kurama's hips and jolt forward, using the powerfully splayed position of his boots and the force of his weight to impale Kurama smoothly, basking in the sharp, strangled cry that he'd dragged from Kurama's throat. For a second, Kurama stuttered out what little air was left in his lungs with a whoosh, and found that he couldn't breathe, the pain too intense. It was horrible, more reminiscent of being stabbed than Youko's dim memories of fucking.
Yomi ground himself into Kurama with languorous rolls of his hips, moaning as his balls slapped and rubbed against Kurama's perineum. Wanting to increase the vindictive sensation of pleasure, loving the hushed whimpers his harsh movements were dragging from the kitsune's throat, Yomi grunted and rested his hands, and with them all his prodigious weight, on Kurama's shoulders.
"Your breathing is so elevated, Kurama—your heart rate's up, your muscles are tensing into a vice. Tell me, are you in pain?"
The smooth amusement in Yomi's voice, changed to a growl by his satisfaction with the situation and the gratification he received from it, was too much for Kurama's pride to handle. "It hurts, Yomi. Do not mock me for this. You are being cruel, and you know it. It's a sign of low class to taunt someone for their weakness."
"You admit to weakness, then?" Yomi was gloating, Kurama's barbs for once not hitting their mark. "I told you, I emulate you in all ways, old friend. My cruelty is no greater than your own."
"I was never a rapist, Yomi."
Yomi's face twisted. "No. But you were pitiless. The virginities you stole, the hearts you broke, were as legendary as your banditry. Besides," he grunted, levering Kurama into a stark arch by a hold in his hair, "I was under the impression that you had succumbed willingly to this, Kurama. Put your hands back."
After a moment of enraged hesitation, Kurama replaced his palms, which had released his ass and drifted up towards his painful scalp. He was furious, livid, far from the merely angry. He shook with it, even as he spread himself, the dry cock rasping painfully within him with a fierce inside pressure, his fingertips brushing the shaft slightly, causing him to recoil. It made Yomi laugh. The king used the bed as a flat surface, a hand splayed on either side of Kurama, and began to drive his hips into his new advisor's, setting a blistering pace. He smiled while listening to whimpers drag out into agonized moans that Kurama was struggling to hide.
Kurama and Yomi could both feel the blood from the internal tears Yomi was slowly facilitating begin to congeal, sticking as Yomi's cock pulled in and out in a rapid, teasing pace. Blood was always an inadequate lube—it coagulated, making the experience that much harder. Kurama was wondering whether Yomi was purposefully denying him pleasure, whether his nights would dissolve from now on into weary pain, when Yomi moved, changing the angle of the cock inside him.
The body of Youko Kurama could have taken it easily. The body of Shuuichi Kurama, small untried thing, used only to touching the sweet spot with its own inadequate fingers, nigh collapsed, shuddering, at the shock of it. Kurama's walls rippled, causing Yomi to thrust back into it directly, making Kurama clench at his own ass, whining. When Yomi stopped thrusting, Kurama nudged back into him lewdly, trying to draw more of that absolute pleasure in. Youko's body had been numbed to sensation for millennia—in Shuuichi, the purity of it was an interesting new experience. Kurama was sorry that he hadn't done this before, with someone worthy.
"Kurama, you're reacting like a virgin given her first taste of release." Yomi's voice was shocked.
"This body is young." The conversation brought the pain back. "It is only recently that Shuuichi has yearned for flesh, and humans mate for life—I didn't desire a fling, I desired a lover. Instead," he spat, "I will have to be content with a rapist."
Yomi's brow creased, anger beginning to break the surface once more. "Oh, Kurama. You do try my patience. But if I am a rapist, then here: let's see what your body says to my rape."
He ripped away Kurama's hands by the wrists, leaving five clawed marks of bright red on each side of his ass from his own nails, darker even then the handprints Kurama had given himself as he squeezed, trying to hold back the former pain. Yomi pulled Kurama up, changing the angle so he could penetrate deeper, even as he jammed into the heavenly bunch of nerves inside Kurama's passage. After a few experimental thrusts, he found the right movement to scrape his cockhead over it, again and again and again, until Kurama's shaft was aching and engorged, his skin radiating heat, his heart pounding.
Kurama couldn't stop himself from crying out, having been adequately prepared for the reaping of pain, but not having spared a thought to the dangers of pleasure. He was ashamed of every noise that escaped, and tried to swallow back what he could. He was loose now, and reeking of musk, but he was frightened of the loss of control, embarrassed at how he ached for more—humiliated. Truly a sad state for the quicksilver thief of the Makai, Yomi thought.