Disclaimer: I don't own Sengoku Basara or its characters.
A/N: Sixth in the Loved/Beloved series. You know where to find Loved!
Prompt: Hours
Premise: Either Yukimura or Masamune is married; what are the consequences?
The pleasure that is pain, is also a fire in his veins. He calls it Masamune.
That word, the name of that emotion – it is a mix of many, a name with no home.
It brings him sensations each night, each stolen dawn; the sensations are not emotion, but a tutelage.
He learns to love, love in more ways than one, love in more ways than a man. There is no one more responsible for this state of affairs than Masamune – his rival and equal – with his arsenal of pleasure and adoration.
He, he himself, has neither offered nor volunteered anything.
In retrospect, it was heartbreaking.
Today, it is a part of every thought he has. It is a part of society and of life itself – the better you were at it, the better people thought of you. But today, he has no need to be better. Today, he recognises the urgency and want in Masamune's eyes, and takes it for his own without question.
This much, these few hours, Yukimura can squander upon Masamune.
This much, he knows he must, because it is the last time, the only real time they have left till tomorrow comes.
Tomorrow, Yukimura is getting married.
"Please don't."
The words are simple – they are an echo of the pleas he has made himself, but in quite a different context. When these forbidden words passed his lips, Yukimura was bound to the bed, spread-eagled and erect and throbbing with need. He had not seen any shame in begging for attention, for affection then.
So why, he wonders, do these words now seem to him like the brand of a hot iron best left to drown?
Yukimura is not marrying for love. Indeed, he can muster up some semblance of desire for the woman he takes to his bed every night, but the voice he hears, the face he sees and the clenching tightness he feels are not hers.
Those have always belonged to the man called Date Masamune.
Yukimura thinks it is not seemly to think of his lover when he is bedding his wife. He closes his eyes, kisses Masamune once on the lips, and then achieves orgasm with frightening precision.
When he cries out in release, the face he can see is female; it is his wife.
Masamune...what does he see?
It is something that often bothers Yukimura. When he looks at his family – pudgy little sons and daughters, a pleasantly curved woman tending to them and shooting him shy smiles at intervals, he wonders what Masamune sees.
H e can never know, but what he imagines is no less accurate – or so he believes. Masamune would hate them. Masamune was fiercely possessive, Yukimura knew that. The nights when Masamune came to his door, his windows and his roof, stealthy and beggarly, were frequent. Yet, Yukimura had not shied away from his duty – he owed the Takeda line a suitable heir and he had got it.
Masamune?
Yukimura did not know anymore.
Masamune, he wonders, briefly, distractedly. Where...what are you doing, Masamune?
Yukimura rejects the yearning in the question and retains only the lack of true response.
I shall try again, he vows, and neglects to appoint a specific time and place.
When the news reaches Yukimura, it is a wee bit too late. He manages to get gifts for his growing brood of children, but not quite for his wife.
Blue silk yukata, is what he wants to buy for her. Blue silk, a blue eye, blue electricity crackling against his fire, are what he sees, and thusly forgets that he even has a woman waiting for him at home.
All he can be bothered to think about, for these valued moments, is Masamune.
Masamune who had loved him.
Masamune who had taught him pleasure,
Masamune who had swallowed him.
Masamune who was him.
Masamune, who had killed himself at last, because he could not have him.
And all Yukimura knows, all he feels, is relief.
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