Did he appear because I fell asleep thinking of him?
If only I'd known I was dreaming,
I'd never have wakened.
-Ono no Komachi
There's an old "curse" about the nakōdo in her village.
Although they are born with natural gifts for pairing two soulmates for life, a nakōdo is discouraged from ever marrying, as many matchmakers have become widows just after choosing the one they love.
A superstition that most people took with a grain of rice these days.
Yet even before being literally dragged from her apprenticeship as a nakōdo in the Hidden Stone, and forced back into the shinobi life,the bee mistress had decided long ago that she would never marry.
In the early bloom of her naive genin days, she had witnessed first-hand in the Leaf how destructive loving someone could be to the people she cared about.
Perhaps, becoming a nakōdo was her way of making amends for the mistakes of her shinobi past...knowing that marriage within her dying clan was highly valued in building alliances, and those practicing the sacred gifts of matchmaking were too important to lose in romantic distractions of their own.
At least, that was how she rested her case with the clan elders.
And how very tragic it was that everyone was too busy training for a war to ever bother with a little research.
Who would have thought that accidently finding that scroll on The Sacred Art of Bamboo-Cutting in the Stone Library would inadvertently give her exactly the intel she needed to send her shinobi suitors sulking back to their compounds?
Intel that allowed her to trade in her ninjutsu training for the charms of superstitions as her weapons, bending the clan elders to her side and not her father's erratic political agenda.
And so, whether there was really any weight to the matchmaker's curse was not a question that greatly concerned her.
As long as becoming a nakōdo stopped her gung-ho father from bargaining her off in some ambitious clan alliance to the descendants of the sagely Senju Clan, or some hotshot of the steel-wielding Nopaki Clan.
And with some quick-thinking and a handy library card, an arranged marriage between an outside clan had been surprisingly easy to dodge.
Dreams, however, were a little more complicated for her to avoid.
Dreams haunted by him...conjured by her tormented memories...which had never felt so real as this...
"Hold still," his voice was darkly monochromic, quietly commanding her to resist resisting with something of an 'or else' kind of warning hidden in its savory huskiness. "The more you fight me, the harder this will get for you."
Was that contempt?
It was always contempt.
But her head was spinning too much to fire back the gift of her own contempt for him this time. Her mind oddly spacey and colorful in some genjutsu-like fix.
Like waking up in a field of honeysuckle the morning-after yet another jamboree bender, though without all the jam, and tragically, no honey wine.
Which could only mean she'd been stung by some powerful bee's venom. Which lucky for him, was the only reason she was too euphorically tipsy to punch him.
Let alone, protest.
Had she been captured by a powerful bee sage of her clan then?
How could he not already know that his perfectly well-behaved little object of ridicule couldn't even lift a finger to stop him, surrendered to the mercy of whatever he damn well wanted to do with her?
Though she had to admit, it was kind of nice waking up as the one unsuspectedly captured, rather than doing all the capturing herself.
And lucky for her, this one was a dominus.
Making quite a little bee out of her in the way he dragged what felt like honeysuckle across every trembling inch of her intensely tingling skin. Tracing the flowerhead from her smoky white hair, down to the button of her blushing nose, across her slightly parted lips, slowly down the arc of her neck, and then lingeringly between the pearl curves of her comely breasts...where it stopped...in a silence where only her heartbeat skipped on.
A strange, quietly dominating little force the unsuspecting honeysuckle plant had become. Leaving the honeybee to wait for it to decide what part of her the flower would claim next.
Its delicate petals teasing her into goosebumps as it lightly brushed across the tiny bead of her nipple erect under her kusari gusoku.
By accident or intention, she couldn't guess.
She couldn't think much of anything anymore.
Her mind going numbly blank.
Consumed by nothing but a jealous desire for her efflorescent liege.
And at that moment, she couldn't tell who was hungrier for more of this; she or her flower master.
Her jaw clenched but her tormenter bit back.
Leaving light little bites dangerously close to her inner thigh, the flowerhead remained unsatisfied until it possessed every bit of her body as its playground.
No...this couldn't just be the work of an innocent flower.
The little tickling hairs she'd mistaken for pollen pistils were too lewd to not belong to something uglier. A menacing wave of millions of tiny legs tasting her honey-glazed skin, holding back just at the edge of eating her alive.
That unmistakable prickly tickle-nibbleof...bugs?
Had she not become privy to the sweetooth of a beautiful flower dom then?
Instead, had she unexpectedly become the prey of a bee?
Or was that giving her predator too much credit?
She still couldn't tell which of them was getting a headier fix off feeding on her; she or this hungry minibeast?
"With my insects, I'm giving you my chakra," he told her. "Why? The Beekeeper's antidote is not without side effects, which means this'll only hurt you more if you don't take my insects. My chakra will help numb your pain, which means you will sleep more comfortably tonight, if you don't fight me."
But wha...what are you?
Tenshi or kishin?
What else but something of the supernatural could have this arresting power over her?
How could anything human feel this good?
The aphrodisiac rush of his chakra entwining with hers, dissolving her senses and rendering her powerless to think about anything else but the way his elemental vigor filled her up.
Anything with the power to make her so high for being taken like this had to be the doing of a "what", not just any mortal "who".
And surrendering to his chakra crushing into her, as if he was hellbent on taking her nakōdo oath next too, she began building this fantasy of him in her mind.
Raven black hair. A masked face veiling his true identity. The muscles underneath his trench coat as hard as raw beeswax.
Her blood surged.
The more you fight me, he'd said.
Ah, yes...they all wanted a good girl, didn't they?
He hoped she would be an obedient little lovebug for him, but she wasn't ever any good at being prey. Even to a master bee sage.
And unable to stand for how impotently needy he made her feel now, her vengeful fingernails grabbed hold of the closest thing within her reach.
A jacket?
It certainly didn't belong to her, and it lingered with a fresh scent of petrichor.
A scent not honeyed like any ordinary bee sage.
Nor obnoxious like the men in the Hidden Stone, because stone men were always so obnoxiously machismo with their obnoxiously chiseled faces and obnoxiously overpowering colognes.
But his scent was like that earthy smell of wet dirt right after the rain falls, with little hints of oakmoss and cedar hidden in a masculine undertone.
She'd never forget the way he smelt. Raw, primal, unfiltered nature.
Or the gentle restraint in which his chakra took her, pulsing into her veins until her body throbbed back to life with unspoken urges that she'd long suppressed. Knowing he could take her with so much more power, if he wanted to.
Did that make him scarier...or hot?
Everything that was him becoming an obsession she couldn't get enough of, no matter how many others after him she'd use for her own pleasure, trying to get the same hit.
But knowing that nothing like him would ever get her again this same way, she was unwilling to wake up from it. Dreading having to open her eyes and find out some punishing, forbidden reason why her newly found fixation couldn't actually exist in her real world.
Whoever he was, he had to be hers.
So, whatever the penalty, she surrendered shamelessly to it.
Ready to be anything he wanted to make out of her, as long as she didn't wake up.
As long as he didn't stop.
But what if he didn't?
Where could this fantasy go, if he decided he wasn't done with her yet?
Could it really get any better than what he was already giving her?
And just when she felt like it was too much and that she'd explode with such intense pleasure of it, he withdrew.
Pulling his chakra out of her, and denying her the nirvana he'd only just given her a taste of.
Making her toes curl maddeningly for the build-up that dragged her so close to the edge.
And just as he'd sabotaged her the first time by unraveling her crumbling resistance against him, his chakra quietly slipped away from her again without so much as a by her leave.
Don't stop...Because if you do, I'll have no choice but to take you myself.
But even as she swore this in her head, her lips remained still and silent in coma.
Unable to say those words, or do anything to make him stay.
Was this really a bee sage's genjutsu after all then?
Had he really made her mind and body so defenseless against him, that she was unable to fight back and reclaim the fix he'd tricked her into pining after?
And as her body burned with a jealous frustration, too manic to contain in unconsciousness, she slowly came to.
Her lashes fluttering open to find herself snuggled inside of something like a cocoon hammock with a long gray jacket keeping her warm. Her eyes glowing like golden candlelight against the swirling gray fog and her starlight hair.
A troop of kikaichū scurried away from her, having successfully transferred enough of her captor's chakra to numb her pain.
All around her were the music of bugs; crickets, grasshoppers, katydids, and bees. All of them drawn to the campfire gently crackling next to her.
'I'm supposed to be dead...why am I not dead?'
Turning over her bandaged hand, the kunai injury in her palm had stopped bleeding, and judging by the tiny bug bites near the wound, the poison was gone too.
"But who..."
"I wouldn't start moving yet, if I were you."
Like a moth caught in a bug zapper, she froze.
Her honey eyes wide as ryō coins, as the realization gradually hit her.
Oh my Sod Worm...Don't tell me that's...
And then all she heard were the tiny bones popping in her stiff sore neck, as she turned her ghost white head to finally look her target-turned-captor in his eyes.
Or rather...his sunglasses.
Those unmistakable sunglasses. That upturned black collar underneath his gray coat. That stubbornly unreadable face. That tumbleweed hair.
That dream!
Now more a buggy nightmare.
Because if her own poison didn't kill her in the end, coming face to face with Shino Aburame alive and well in front of her was like throwing salt on a garden snail.
And away she sizzled in the salt of her failure, as her lusty "bee sage" Shino Aburame continued.
"My insects seem to like you," he informed the jaw-dropped bee mistress. "Why, you ask? Parasitic beetles like these are more carnivorous than even a bedbug when it comes to a blood meal. However, you slept soundly without a single deadly bite."
'Bugs?' She thought, whiter with terror. 'You mean I just got honey-potted by an insect?'
"Even after giving you my chakra," Shino went on. "You don't have enough of it to fight me a second time. So there's no point in trying to escape."
But the stunned bee mistress was still stuck on the part when he...
'As in B.U.G?' She couldn't wrap her head around it. 'He didn't even touch me once?...He did all those things to me...with just his bugs?!'
"So, until you recover," Shino informed her. "You're mine to detain."
'But what does this actually mean?' She wondered, still going a little haywire over the buggish complexities of it all, which seemed to rattle her more than how Shino Aburame managed to capture her in the first place. 'Do I have a thing for bugs now? Am I an entomosexual?...What monster has he turned me into!'
But there was no use crying over spilled honeydew.
Because more important than almost losing her v-card to a beetle, she had failed her mission.
The odious Shino Aburame was still alive.
And his odious remark about bedbugs hadn't been a compliment.
It was a warning.
And it'd be her mistake to fall asleep and let her guard down with him again.
Even so...
'If that's what he can do with just his bugs...then...'
Inch by inch, her eyes dropped below Shino's ninja pack...right down to his huge...swinging...
..pockets...
...big fat bulging pockets with his hands stuffed inside...
Bees' Nest...those were some big pockets.
And rightfully so, if he was to shelter all those damn bugs.
Dozens and dozens of insects crawling around freely from under his sleeves and the inside of his turnt-up collar. Tumbling over each other like little psychos in a race to do their bug lord's bidding.
A nail-biting foreshadow of what was to come for her if she didn't do exactly what she was supposed to for him.
Her blood simmered.
Her skin feeling like a colony of angry ants.
How much more could she take of this humiliating subjection in one night?
'But he's so...'bug-ish'...Even if he is an Aburame, how could this dorky, pathetic little beetle kisser be the one I was sent to kill? '
"Therefore, you have no other option now, but to answer my questions," Shino finished laying down his dicktation. "Who are you? Who sent you to kill me?"
The bee mistress stubbornly kept her silence.
Her golden eyes defiantly mocking him under sweeping dark lashes that forced Shino's heart to skip, each time she slowly blinked.
Wasn't he cute?
His face as delicate as lotus petals as he stared hard back at her through those menacing glasses.
Never before had she wanted to crush such a beautiful flower.
No matter how good your bugs feel...I'm still going to drag your freakishly beetleful corpse back to my village.