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Sex is not something Komugi has spent a great deal of time wondering about. Honestly, she has never really considered it as an option. Who, after all, would want something like her?

Evidently, Meruem does.

'Komugi,' he says, his voice neither hard or soft, framing her name as a statement rather than a question. 'I wish to touch you.'

And despite the lack of the inquisitive lilt most people would mark the end of such a statement with, Komugi finds herself reaching out for his face, smiling softly as his cheek tilts into her palm instead. She feels a rumble beneath the muscle, one so quiet that perhaps only another blind person could feel it. Not quite a purr, but more of an expectant hum, as though he already believes that she will never say 'no.' It's not quite true though and they both know it.

'Meruem,' she says. 'You actually waited.'

By that she means he waited until the sun fell from the sky, waited for what the other people call darkness to rise up and touch the land. Komugi can feel it is night because of the way it makes his skin cool to the touch, the faintest trace of his heartbeat feeling like the only warm part of him left. She can feel the careful, stubborn thump of it beating along the ridge of her palm, echoing inside the flicker of veins in her wrist as he slides her hand up, pressing just that little bit harder.

'Human social customs are not all strange,' he observes, tentatively picking at the sleeve of her dress, as though urging it to come off by willpower alone. 'I can understand why a lover would not wish the sunlight to illustrate the form of their beloved to another. I suppose, in some fashion, the night provides an illusion of privacy.'

'Nobody will ever come out here,' Komugi reminds him, blushing as a memory escapes into a head, one involving a chorus of passionate cries as she slid the gungi tiles across a makeshift board of hardened mud, knowing that her parents were christening the conception of her newest sibling just across the room. 'And s-sex isn't something people just do at night, either.'

'I am aware.' There is a strange rhythm to his voice, one that almost gives birth to a chuckle. And Komugi almost flails away from his touch
at the thought that he finds her amusing.

'I-I am sorry if my body does not please you,' she murmurs.

He scoffs. 'I have not even seen it yet: not in its entirety. And what makes you believe I would find the result anything but pleasing? Do you think me so shallow?'

'N-no! I would never inst-inute-'

He cuts her off, insistently pulling at the sleeve of dress, in the way perhaps an impatient child would. 'Komugi...you mean to make me wait longer?'

She sighs, feeling him stiffen as she opens her eyes. 'I reserve this for gungi only, as you know,' she informs him, as crisply she can manage with the nerves holding the rest of her body hostage. 'But that is partly because of my love for it. And I never really believed I could discover something to rival it until I met you, Meruem.'

It is strange to say it aloud. Usually she reserves such admissions for the board, flirting with risky manoeuvres only he will grasp the significance of. Perhaps this will simply be another. And with that thought, she attempts to yank her dress over her head within one solid movement.

But there is a painful yank on her scalp and she freezes, arms crossed over her head as the dress bunches up around her face. The material almost chokes her, its thin creases and bunched-up rolls pushing up against her mouth as she sniffles pathetically, feeling only a little distraught that she is rubbing mucus into the inside lining of her dress. The rest of her just feels overwhelmingly embarrassed. She grunts and gives another fruitless yank. And then wishes firmly for the ground to somehow swallow her up.

'Meruem-sama!' she wails, forgetting in her distress, about how he will no doubt flinch at the added suffix. 'I'm so sorry, but I'm stuck!'

He does not laugh. But he, very firmly, steps over and dips his hands into the mess she has made of herself. Within a few seconds he wriggles the dress collar free of her grasping white strands, carefully pressing her rebellious hair down against her scalp.

'So embarrassing,' she sighs once she is free.

'Is that so wrong?' Meruem asks. 'I am the only one to see, after all.'

'Ah.' Komugi wrinkles her nose up with distress. 'In some ways it becomes more embarrassing because you are the one to see...'

'Ridiculous,' mutters Meruem, but he waits nevertheless, for the blush to vanish from her face before he leans over to play with her hair.

And Komugi knows that to him she is not simply a tile on the gungi board to be played, but somehow, now, she feels as though this is the closest she has ever been to becoming one. It is in the way he starts to touch her, half-stroke and half-glide, at first tentative as though unsure she won't break. She has heard this in the way he plays, she thinks. Some caution telling him to place his tiles down like a series of stepping stones for his mind to follow, a careful, delicate undertaking that results in a series of soft thumps. But then of course, later, come the more confident moves, when he is sure he has landed on a winning strategy. Then his pieces clank down with ferocity, with a more assured tap. And so it is now, his movements against her skin becoming more self-assured, particularly in the places where she snorts out laugher or starts wriggling with a protest about how she is 'not sure that that is decent, Meruem!'

'I am a king no longer, Komugi,' he says sternly, 'but do not think you can tell me what does or does not feel pleasurable. Your reactions speak for you. I see no shame to be gained in refusing me.'

She pushes more firmly on his wandering hand and he freezes instantly.

'Unless of course,' he ventures cautiously, 'you are in pain?'

She shakes her head furiously, mouth gaping as she desperately searches for words.

'Good,' he says, sounding entirely too pleased, and continues to lick at the swell of her thigh. He is not being particularly aggressive about the movement though, and for that Komugi is grateful. His tongue is a curious thing though, with the way it dips and slides down to her shin before circulating back up to her thigh. Here he pauses, before giving her skin a delicate nibble.

Komugi giggles. 'Stop Meruem! It's like you're going to eat me!'

His teeth vanish from her thigh at once. Komugi waits there, feeling slightly foolish at the way her leg dangles in the air with only Meruem's hand to support it.

'Eat you? Don't say something so foolhardy.'

Komugi frowns. Meruem's voice does not waver, not exactly. But there is a tremor lying there beneath the words, some undercurrent of emotion she has no real name for. It reminds her, strangely enough, of the way she had felt before his servant, Pouf, had left. Like something dark and savage is waiting for her.

'Perhaps we should stop.'

Komugi frowns, digging her elbows firmly into the ground at the resigned disappointment she hears in his tone. Then, mustering as much of her strength as she can (it's a pitiable amount, she knows), she forces herself up off the ground, launching her hands onto his chest with a wobble. She waits there warily for a second, but Meruem freezes beneath her hands, his only movement being to curl his fingers a little tighter round the leg that he still, stubbornly, supports off the ground.

'Komugi?'

'No,' she states firmly. 'I do want this. Even if perhaps, you should bestow this honour on someone more suited-'

'Do not insult me,' he cuts in, anger evident, 'or do you think my judgement so impaired that I am incapable of making the best choice for myself?'

Her mouth drops open a little at this.

He chuckles darkly in response.

But determined now, Komugi taps at his neck firmly. Then, as he bends down obligingly, still with the mocking laughter pouring out from his lips, Komugi shoves herself forwards, her mouth smashing into his. She winces slightly at the painful thump of her skull meeting his face, unsurprised when he does not so much as flinch. Still, she pushes forward, shoving her tongue inside to tangle with his own, feeling pleased when his chuckle dies a stifled death, his chest shaking slightly with the force of holding it down.

Komugi holds no illusion of winning this battle. Indeed, Meruem has already placed her leg back down on the floor (though perhaps there is victory enough in that, she thinks) to bring his now free hand up to her neck, pushing her hair aside with a gentle force, as though he were doing nothing more than briskly drawing a curtain aside. Now it's his turn to push forward slightly as, gradually, Komugi feels herself melting down onto the floor beneath him, her legs pushed aside as his chest hunkers down inside them. He acts as a solid weight that keeps her trapped and a little nervous.

Komugi lets his tongue swirl against her teeth, offering a soft joust with her own. She will let everything else unfold, but all in its own time and, quite hopefully, before she loses her own mind. Because Meruem begins to push his tongue back in, determined to find his own rhythm. And at the sudden swell of pleasure she experiences, her breath loosens from her lungs. And so it is that Komugi, once again, is lost.

Months pass and Komugi half believes herself to be in heaven. They play gungi everywhere, from inside the cool stone walls of their home to the sunlit grass of the outside world, their backs pressed against the shadows that swirl out of the bamboo forest at their sides. Sometimes, Meruem gathers her close and takes her to the mud-licked stones of the river, his hands dipping out to catch the leaping flash of trout as they writhe through the bubbling waters beside them. Or at least, that what Komugi assumes happens; there is always the quick whirl of an occasional splash as they play and a series of thumps as a fish flaps to their side and breathes its last.

One day she sits up and frowns. 'Forgive me for disturbing your thoughts, but isn't it cruel to let them flop like that?'

She feels him visibly still across the board from her, his mind drifting from his current predication of being boxed in at all sides from her aggressive tactic.

'No wonder your plays have been so assertive today,' he observes. 'This has been bothering you for a while.'

She loves him a little for stating this as a fact instead of as a question. No one else has ever bothered to know her well enough to tell.

She squirms in embarrassment. 'I have never dragged out my victory against you Meruem. I just thought, well, it would make me...pleased, to know you do not do the same to this creature.'

'Very well,' he says simply.

The next second there is a familiar splash followed by a singular thump. Komugi listens carefully but there is no muted sense of rattling taking place in the pebbles beside them, no wrestling thump as a fish writhes its way over ground it cannot simply stroke through with its fins. After a while, she looks up, beaming.

And from then on, true to his word, there is only a single thump, whenever a new fish finds itself beached on the shore beside them.