The morning after the night before

By Seth

Note: this is slightly AU. Also, the characters are aged up. This may bother some people, but frankly, I am far more bothered by two fourteen year old kids having sex than readers can ever be by what I do to the characters I write about.

Shaman King belongs to Hiroyuki Takei, not to me. No profit was or is made from this story.

'The morning sun is entirely too bright. Perhaps I should have the spirit of Fire extinguish it.'

These were the first thoughts to penetrate the befuddled mind of Asakura Hao, who was currently using a pillow to shield his face from the brilliant light of the sun. It took him less than a minute to conclude that he had probably had too much to drink last night, and less than a second to decide that he would not ever drink with his brother and assorted hangers-on again, not even if the Emperor himself sent the invitation.

The story was simple enough, as always in such cases. After the end of the shaman fight, many of the participants had found that they needed some kind of job to sustain them from then on. But it was hard to get a job these days, and there were not many companies who would hire people who would occasionally talk to themselves. It looked like a large portion of Japan's shamans would remain unemployed for a long time to come.

And of course it had been Kyoyama Anna who had come up with the winning idea; to set up an onsen which employed only shamans, whether active or retired, and catered to both humans and spirits. She harassed her fiancé into joining her in this harebrained scheme, gathered some more help and before anyone had realised, Funbari onsen had become a fact. Last night had been the opening night, and it had been well-attended. The first ten guests were promised V.I.P. treatment, and as it seemed amusing to Hao to see his brother being bossed around by his soon-to-be wife, he had booked himself and Opacho rooms for the first night.

However, he had reckoned without his brother's amazing ability to pull everyone he met along in his wake. Before he knew what was happening, Hao had been roped into joining Yoh and his friends for a drink after the last guest had retired for the night. Which would have been bad enough in normal circumstances, but when alcohol got involved, things turned quite nasty at an alarming pace. Someone had shoved a cup of sake into Hao's hand, and as he did not wish to appear squeamish he had downed it in one gulp. And it was soon after that that he discovered that he could not hold his alcohol.

As he lay there with his head under his pillow, Hao tried to recall what had happened after the sake, but to his great discomfort he found that he could not remember anything past the second cup. No matter how he wrecked his already tortured brain, he could simply not remember. All of the previous night was blank. This odd forgetfulness upset him considerably. Hao decided it might be a good idea to get up and investigate. Perhaps Yoh could shed some light on what exactly had happened to him last night.

With this thought in mind he forced himself to take action. First he peeled the pillow away from his face, wincing slightly as the bright sunlight assaulted his eyes. It felt like holes were being drilled in his skull, but Hao persisted, and after a minute or two of agony the light slowly became bearable. He turned his head carefully, not wishing to trigger another one of those killer headaches, and surveyed the room around him. But the sight that met his tired eyes did nothing to ease his worry. On the contrary, it only served to strengthen the sense of foreboding that had haunted him from the moment he opened his eyes.

The room was an absolute mess. His clothes were strewn all over the tatami floor, and his underwear was, inexplicably, dangling from the ceiling lamp at a jaunty angle. There were no less than three sake bottles next to his futon, two of which were completely empty. With growing dread, Hao counted no less than five sake cups, stacked neatly next to the bottles. There had been people in his room last night. If they had seen it in this state... He groaned inwardly. Down went his reputation.

There was a knock on the door, and Hao whipped his head around to face it. He instantly regretted this action, because it made him very dizzy and more than slightly nauseous. He clutched his head in his hands and took a few deep breaths. As soon as he trusted himself to open his mouth again, he spoke. "What is it?" he asked, noting as he did so that his voice definitely had a very croaky quality to it.

"I came to see if you were okay," a soft voice said from the other side of the door, and Hao recognised it instantly as his brother's. "After last night... I was worried about you."

With a growing sense of dread, Hao considered his brother's words. They sounded ominous, and when Yoh said something ominous it never boded well for the recipient of the message. For a moment, Hao seriously considered fleeing the scene right there and then. But that would be cowardly, and Asakura Hao was anything but a coward. "You'd better come in," he said, shifting on his futon to face the door. "Hold on for a moment."

He got up and reached out to retrieve his boxers from the lamp. But as his fingertips touched the soft red fabric, a sharp stabbing pain shot through his lower back and caused him to collapse back on the futon with a groan of pain. Momentarily blinded, he heard rather than saw the door open, and he heard Yoh's hurried footsteps across the tatami floor. "Are you okay?" he asked, his voice filled with sincere concern that made Hao recoil in horror.

"I'm perfectly fine," he lied, bringing one hand to his head as his vision slowly came back to him and his brother's face swam into focus. "Might I point out to you that I am also completely naked, and that you rudely intruded on the privacy of a customer?" He cocked his head. "I should file a complaint."

Yoh smiled. "Good to see that you haven't lost your sense of sarcasm," he said, sitting down on his knees by Hao's side and setting down the tray he'd been carrying. "Might I then point out to you that your naked body is nothing I have not seen before, and that family does not exactly count as a full customer?"

"Bite me," was Hao's most sophisticated response. Now that his sight had returned, he noticed that Yoh's eyes were travelling down Hao's body. As casually as he could, Hao grabbed his cast-off blanket and threw it over his legs, effectively shielding his lower body from view. "It is rude to stare, you know."

Yoh's eyes snapped back up to Hao's face in an instant, and his cheeks flushed ever so slightly. "Sorry," he said. "You look kind of awful, though. I think anyone would stare."

Hao glanced down at his own body and actually felt the blood draining from his face. There were angry red welts all along what he could see of his hips and stomach, hinting at more where they disappeared below the blanket. Hao looked back up at Yoh, who was watching him with some concern. "What in the name of all that is holy happened here?" he asked.

Yoh's expression was impossible to read. He stayed quiet for a moment, as if he were debating with himself. "You mean you don't remember?" he asked, his eyes fixed on Hao's own.

Hao averted his gaze. "Obviously I do not," he said, "otherwise I would not have asked. Now, if you are attached to your limbs and feel like you wish to remain in one piece, I suggest you start talking within the next minute. My patience is very thin this morning, and you do not wish to find out what happens when it wears out."

Yoh rolled his eyes. "Empty threats," he said simply. "You will need more than that to scare me, Hao." But when he saw his brother's murderous look, he added "It was nothing, really. Nothing out of the ordinary, I mean." He considered this for a moment. "Well, perhaps it was slightly out of the ordinary, but really, there are no ordinary people at this place, so it isn't a big deal anyway."

Hao closed his eyes and sighed. "Just tell me what happened already," he said. He was now more than wary of the answer, but if he was going to take whatever had happened in stride he needed to know what had happened.

Yoh averted his eyes, even though Hao was not looking at him. "You cannot remember it at all?" he asked incredulously. "All those things you said... and did," he added as his eyes found the angry red welts on Hao's skin again. "Completely gone from your memory?"

"That is what I said." Hao was positively dreading Yoh's explanation by now. He knew it would be bad, he just knew it. Perhaps he had slipped in the bath during some embarrassing drunk episode, or perhaps he had gotten into a fight. Even the possibility of a fight with a band of rogue cats had cropped up in his mind when Yoh opened his mouth again, and spoke the words that would make the cats seem like an honourable way out. His words sealed Hao's doom in such an irrefutable way that a neon sign with accompanying music could not have competed with it in matters of clarity.

"We had sex last night."

Hao's face went completely blank when he received this information. When he remained silent for a long time, Yoh nervously got to his feet and started gathering Hao's clothes from around the room, not daring to look into his brother's vacant eyes, afraid of what anger or reproach he would find there. He had managed to retrieve and fold all of Hao's clothes, including the impressively placed boxers, and still his brother had not said anything.

"You don't have to worry," he said, placing the folded clothes next to the futon and kneeling down again himself. "No one else knows. Well, not everyone knows. You were sort of loud, so there may be some people down the hall who figured out what was going on, but most of the guests have slept soundly last night. I asked them about it myself."

When Hao did not move or speak, Yoh went on, his voice soft and gentle. "We didn't realise you took your alcohol so badly," he said. "It was fine before the second bottle, but when you started rambling it was far too late to stop you drinking. So we brought you along upstairs and sat up here with you." He hesitated, glanced at Hao's face, then continued in that same soft voice. "You... you got very vocal, especially when we tried to put you to bed. So we sat up with you for a while, feeding you water instead of sake. It just didn't help much, but at least it didn't get any worse."

Still Hao said nothing. He listened to his brother's words numbly, a leaden weight settling in his stomach with every new piece of information he was given.

"After a while," Yoh said, now looking down at his hands which were playing with the hem of Hao's poncho, "you decided that you wanted to hug me. And kiss me. And..." he had the decency to blush at this juncture. "...well, it went quite a bit further than kissing," he said.

It was at this point that Hao finally interrupted him. "And you did nothing to stop me?" he said, anger flaring in every syllable even though his voice was still deadly quiet. "You did not tell me that was a bad idea, to make such advances towards my own brother, a man, in the company of others?"

"I was slightly inebriated myself," Yoh said. "I tried to hold you off, but you were very persistent." His voice grew ever smaller as he spoke, until the last word was almost inaudible. "...sorry."

"I assure you that I didn't either," Hao snapped, his face now alight with fury. "I cannot believe this. I fucked my own brother. This is without a doubt the lowest point in my entire career." He dropped his face into his hands. "Gods, and to think that you let me. What were you even thinking?"

Yoh tilted his head to the side, giving Hao a politely puzzled look. "What do you mean, I let you fuck me?" he asked, his voice still annoyingly calm, although his eyes were twinkling ever so slightly. "You didn't fuck me at all, you know." He paused. "To put it bluntly: you undressed me, and proceeded to fuck yourself with me as a tool."

Hao felt the ground disappear from under him in one whirlwind of understanding. That pain in his back which had tormented him when he tried to stand should have told him immediately, but blind belief in his own superiority had led to his denial of a blatantly obvious fact. He, the great Asakura Hao, had not only had sex with his brother...

He had been submissive.

A/N: This is a rewrite of a story I started in 2011. I've been asked by several people to continue this. However, the way I wrote these characters back then bothered me greatly, so I decided to rewrite the story so far before I continued it. Hopefully it will still be enjoyable.