Work Text:
His is not the first dead body you’ve seen.
The glassy eyes, neck bent at an unnatural angle, even the blood pooling beneath the gash on the back of his head, you hadn’t bothered to check for a sluggish, thready pulse. The fact that he hadn’t so much as twitched in the twenty minutes you’ve sat staring at him further solidifies your assessment.
Deader than dead.
On your living room floor. Because you shoved him.
Mid-thirties with slicked back hair and a cheap looking designer suit, everything about him from the thick gold chain around his neck to the equally tacky watch on his wrist screamed wanna-be gangster, dime a dozen ‘round here. Thugs with their first taste of money and power thinking they rule the damn world when in reality they’re a step above the gutters, on a fast track to ending up face down in a dumpster with the next asshole in line sweeping in to take their place before their body’s even cold.
From your few brief and extremely unpleasant interactions with this particular asshole, you doubt anyone’s gonna miss him too much.
Unfortunately for you, that isn’t the saving grace it should be.
Your fingers drum anxiously against your thigh, your gaze flickering from the dead body on your floor to the message typed up on your phone, ready to send.
I need your help, it’s an emergency. Please.
The last part was added somewhat begrudgingly. Deleted. Typed again. Calling him would be easier and would probably get him here faster, but despite the looming inevitability of it, the thought of actually speaking to him makes you want to shrivel up inside. If your back wasn’t against the wall–
But it is.
There’s no point stomping your feet and bemoaning your lack of a choice. You have choices and none of them are any good. With this one, maybe you’ll make it out of this mess in one piece.
Send.
You exhale in a gust and exactly none of the tension holding your body captive eases.
The text is a hail Mary at best, one that hinges on too many variables. You haven’t laid eyes on the man for three years – for all you know he’s holed up in prison. Besotted with one of the sultry singers from Gojo’s classier joints or some idiot heiress. Dead. Alive and too entrenched in the festering rot of your leaving to bother lifting a finger to help.
You’d like to think that even if he still bore a grudge, Yuuta wouldn’t abandon you if you begged, but any faith you have in the man you knew is wishful thinking at best. Three years is an aching chasm between you.
The clock ticks. Your leg bounces.
Should you try Gojo if Yuuta doesn’t answer? Would it be worth the pound of flesh he’d delight in watching you carve for him?
Tears sting at your eyes and furiously you blink them back.
The corner of your coffee table shines with blood, more of it seeping into the fibres of the blush flatweave rug you’d salvaged at a flea market years ago – one of the few pieces of home you’d brought with you when you ran.
Your phone vibrates and you snap to attention, holding your breath. Beneath your message, a tiny red heart appears, and then–
Where?
The relief that hits you feels like a gut punch. You fold in on yourself, forehead resting on your arms, and shudder out another breath. Texting back your address takes a minute because your hand won’t stop shaking and the stupid thing keeps autocorrecting the wrong words, but eventually you manage.
This time, the reply comes through in seconds.
Be there soon x
—
The quiet knock at the door shatters your already fragile nerves.
Much like with the shaking text message, it takes a moment or two for your muscles to move how you will them, unfolding and rising to your feet.
The dead body lies between you and the door, you give it a wide berth, skirting around the walls to reach the doorway. Peering through the peephole, you’re relieved to see the familiar face of your ex-boyfriend smiling back at you.
Relieved and a little unnerved, if you’re being totally honest.
Yuuta smiles with boyish innocence, a sweet natured soul incapable of causing harm. The sort of guy who walks old ladies across the street and helps lost, crying kids find their parents. He smiles and you’re twenty years old again, thinking your roommate was so full of shit, because there was no way this guy with puppy-dog eyes who blushed and stammered through introducing himself could possibly run in the same circles as her girlfriend Maki did.
You can’t even call it an act. Yuuta was kind and gentle and sweet when he came home to you with blood flecked over his shirt, the acrid bite of gunpowder still clinging to the fingers he’d trace over your lips.
But it could flip like a switch. Never around you, not if he could help it. You’d be out, settled in Yuuta’s lap at one of their clubs or restaurants when Gojo would come calling. Your sweet boyfriend would extricate you with a kiss, promise not to be too long, and nine times out of ten, his driver would end up taking you back to the penthouse, playing dumb to your requests he drive you home instead.
Just once, you decided to follow.
Yuuta knocks again, calling out your name, and you – clutching the door handle – you hesitate. Your hand refuses to move.
The door isn’t locked. The dead asshole on your rug hadn’t seemed all that concerned with security when he’d shouldered his way into your apartment, kicking it shut behind him. You’re the one who begged Yuuta to come, but the sight of him on your doorstep sends you back to that night, and the startling absence of humanity in your sweet, kind, gentle boyfriend as he sliced another guy’s hand off with a fucking katana.
You invited him, and now he’s here.
To help.
Lesser evils, you remind yourself. Yuuta never laid a finger on you you didn’t want. Against your better instincts, perhaps, you crack the door. “Hi.”
A pathetically inadequate greeting considering the circumstances, but Yuuta breaks into a relieved laugh, pushing the door wider to swallow you up in a near crushing embrace. “Hi, baby.”
While you don’t return the hug, you can’t exactly rebuff him either. You end up in an awkward middle ground – nestled stiffly against his chest with your hands curled into loose fists, hanging by your side. Yuuta doesn’t care. You get the sense that your tiny apartment could spontaneously combust, dead body included, and it wouldn’t drag him away from this.
“You should’ve called me sooner,” he mumbles into your hair, making your stomach flip uncomfortably.
It would’ve been easier if he’d come to you cold, you think. Ridden to the rescue begrudgingly, because he thought he owed it to you – one last favour to put the flaming disaster of your relationship to bed. You could’ve swallowed snide jibes and frustration far easier than the intimacy he’s trying to inspire with the hugs and the pet names.
“I… need your help.”
Finally, Yuuta draws back. Hands on your hips, thumbs working smooth circles into the sliver of bare skin between your skirt and the bottom of your top. Gunmetal eyes appraise you, narrowing at the tear in the neckline of your shirt, the bruise blooming on your cheek. For the first time since stepping foot in your apartment, Yuuta sees you.
The tension inside the room ratchets, violence crackling in the air.
“Yuuta–”
“Who is he?” Yuuta’s voice is level, but there’s no mistaking the lethal edge behind his dead-eyed expression.
“One of Naoya’s underlings. I don’t know his name,” you admit in a small voice. Delivering threats and roughing up women didn’t usually require a formal introduction. “There’s probably an ID in his wallet if you’re up for frisking a dead guy.”
Yuuta doesn’t laugh. “And why the hell would one of Zen’in’s cockroaches be at your apartment in the first place?’
Yuuta hadn’t laughed, but there’s no holding back the strained, bitter chuckle that escapes you.
“I didn’t run to him if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not stupid; Naoya’s the last person I’d ever get into bed with.” Second last, actually. “It started with mum after she got sick. Dad couldn’t keep a job, he was drinking a lot, gambling too, I think. It got worse after she died. When I went back I thought I could help him, but–” but he wasn’t interested in seeing his tainted daughter, much less accepting your help. Ironic, considering that he was the one who ended up entangled with Naoya. “I didn’t know he owed the Zen’ins. Not until that asshole,” your chin juts towards the dead guy, “showed up at his funeral a couple of months back to tell me I needed to settle his debts.” You shrug, “I ran a few days later, came here. I didn’t think they’d follow me back to Tokyo.” A small part of you hoped that hiding within Gojo’s territory would’ve afforded you some level of protection from Naoya and his thugs.
And maybe that might’ve been the case, had you not picked a run-down dump at the very edges of it.
Yuuta’s quiet for a beat. “I heard about your dad. DUI, right?”
It takes a few seconds for the words to sink in, and your stomach sinks with it. It’s funny how you don’t realise you’re clinging to the last vestiges of hope ‘til they slip clean from your grasp entirely and you’re in freefall. You’re tired, so damn tired of this. All the fear and the paranoia, the running and hiding, scraping by through the skin of your fucking teeth and for what? What was the point of it all when you never truly walked away? When you’ve ended up right back where you started, only this time you knew better, and it’s entirely your own fault.
“You’ve been keeping tabs,” you surmise, closing your eyes.
The warm palm that cups your jaw has you flinching, but Yuuta is nothing but gentle when his lips brush your cheek. “C’mon, we should go. I’ll get someone to take care of this, you don’t have to worry about a thing, okay? I’ve got you.”
He takes your hand then, lacing his fingers with your own. You pause long enough to snatch up your purse and then he’s leading you from the apartment, the quiet thud of the door closing behind you echoing in your head.
The gleaming black SUV waiting out front looks shockingly out of place in this neighbourhood, as does the suited driver who smoothly exits the vehicle to open the door for you both to slide in. Yuuta’s the one to pull your seatbelt across your chest and buckle you in, a safety precaution he doesn’t bother with for himself. The moment he’s settled, though, he reaches across the seat to steal your hand once more. You let him.
The engine purrs to life beneath you, the rhythmic clicking of the indicator filling the empty space between you as the driver wordlessly pulls out onto the road. “Where are we going?” you ask.
If it’s the club, or any of Gojo’s businesses for that matter, you think you’ll burst into actual tears. There’s nothing left inside of you to deal with Yuuta’s boss, or the uncomfortable, knowing looks from Maki and the others. All you really want right now is a long, hot shower with a comfortable bed to crawl into after.
“Home,” he promises.
The words should bring some modicum of relief, but they don’t. You can’t feel much of anything right now, weighed down by exhaustion, grief. While Yuuta flicks out his phone and begins to type a one-handed message, you allow your head to fall against the window, closing your eyes as the streetlights spin past you in a blur.
Home.
—
Laid out on Yuuta’s bed, a silk camisole and short set, baby blue and edged in lace greet you when you emerge from the ensuite bathroom at his new apartment.
The clothes you’d come in with are long gone, unceremoniously shoved into a trash bag for Yuuta to get rid of while you showered off the night’s events. When he’d said he’d find you something to sleep in, you were expecting an oversized tee, maybe, not lace covered sleepwear.
Mindlessly you slip them on, exhaustion quashing the noise in your head, and drag yourself back to the living room where Yuuta waits, splayed on the couch, thumbing through his phone.
Unlike you, he’s still dressed in the suit he showed up in, although he’s shed the jacket and his shirt’s now unbuttoned to his sternum, allowing a glimpse of the sprawling traditional japanese tattoos inked across his chest. The knot in the pit stomach tightens when he glances up at your arrival and his jaw goes slack.
Yuuta never used to frighten you, but there’s a dark, fervid gleam in his eyes as he drinks you and the teensy little pyjamas down that makes you feel hunted.
You’d run if you could. If you thought it might actually save you from this.
“Feel better?” he rasps.
Soundlessly, you nod.
He swallows. Licks his lips and clears his throat. “Good. Do you uh, want a drink?”
What you want more than anything is to crawl into bed and sleep for a week. For this to be a nightmare you can shrug off in the morning. To wake up twenty years old again, before you ever heard the name Zen’in Maki roll off your roommate’s tongue.
In the absence of that, alcohol will suffice.
“Yeah, sure.”
Sitting yourself gingerly on the edge of the couch, you watch as he first fixes a whiskey for himself and then retrieves a new bottle of sake to pour a glass for you.
“Thanks.”
Sake should be sipped, but as Yuuta settles onto the couch – not in the seat he’d previously vacated, but with his thigh pressing up against yours, his arm stretched over the back of the couch behind you – you knock it back in two mouthfuls, shuddering at the warm burn of alcohol sliding down your throat.
“Easy, baby,” he says, taking the glass from your fingers and setting it down on the coffee table. “You just need to relax a bit, huh? You won’t sleep when you’re all wound up like this, let me take care of you.”
Like a pretty little doll, you’re shifted and easily repositioned on his lap, your back to his chest, knees hooked over his own spread thighs. “I missed you. Every day, I missed you.” He draws back a few locks of your towel dried hair to lay a kiss, petal-soft, on your thrumming pulse. “I’m glad you called me tonight.” He chuckles sheepishly, buries his grin by hiding it in the crook of your neck, “Thought I was dreaming at first, seeing your message. Felt like a dream anyway.”
Your breath shutters at the heavy palm that cups your breast and gives a slow, considering squeeze, the other trailing tortuously down the silk front of your camisole to your shorts.
Another kiss, this time on the curve of your jaw.
Your participation in this act isn’t required, merely your silent acquiescence. You don’t have to do anything.
Tomorrow when the dust is settled and the body in your living room gone, you’ll set about putting some boundaries – distance – in place. Helping you isn’t an act of benevolence no matter how sweetly Yuuta sighs, fingers dipping beneath the waistband of your tiny, silk shorts. Sex is a given, the rest; cohabitation, enduring the whims of his boss, sinking any further into the rot of that lifestyle (your hands are bloodied enough), doesn’t have to be.
There needs to be separation, somehow. You cannot give him everything.
But it’s a problem for tomorrow, when the edges of your nerves are not quite so raw. For now, the noise in your head eddies, the tempest raging beneath your skin tuned out.
Why fight against the inevitable?
Yuuta’s touch doesn’t hurt.
Your head lolls back on his broad shoulder, a shift of your hips more easily allowing his hand access to the warmth of your pussy. Though you aren’t wet – how could you be? – it hardly matters. Yuuta’s in familiar territory. No one’s spent the hours learning every inch of you the way Yuuta has. No one ever held that zealotry.
And he forgets none of it.
The slow heat he draws out, working his fingers over your sex, quickly remedies the situation. He always pays good attention to your clit, and when his middle finger slides into you, the walls of your pussy grip and shudder while he groans at the sensation. The slick sound it makes when he draws back has you cringing, but if he hears it, feels it, he gives no indication.
There’s no hiding your little gasp when his ring finger joins, crooking up inside of you, all the while the heel of his palm grinds against your throbbing clit. You buck. Bite down on your bottom lip. He tweaks at your nipple, pebbled into a bud, and you jerk in his grasp.
Through his pants, his hardening cock twitches insistently against the cleft of your ass, reminding you, in case you’d at all forgotten, exactly where this is heading.
His mouth is on your neck again, teeth flirting with the idea of sinking into soft, delicate skin, marking you as his, offering yet another taste of you. His thumb strokes your thigh.
“Take them off– good girl,” Yuuta pants as you lift your hips obediently, his fingers still notched inside you, and tug at the silk shorts, letting them slide down your legs and fall gracelessly to the floor.
Slick dribbles down his fingers from your cunt. The way Yuuta moans your name and curses at the sight of it would be enough for shame to swallow you whole, if not for the liquid surge of heat that floods through you when those wickedly clever fingers of his find your g-spot.
“Yuuta!” you cry out–
–and whatever self control he’s left shatters into a thousand pieces.
You hear the hiss of his zipper and another curse – all the warning you’re given before he’s manhandling you once more, this time to turn you around on his lap. Twin flushes of colour burn high on his cheekbones, a glassy, feverish look in his eyes as familiar to you as it is foreign. As terrifying as it is visceral.
Your stomach swoops.
There’s a moment, a brief space in time you’re afforded to collect yourself, before his hips jerk upwards at the same time wet fingers sink into the plush of your middle and drag you down. Your breath’s robbed of you, knocked clean from your lungs at the sudden fullness within, his cock stretching you open and filling you deep.
“Fuck!” you gasp, your nails clawing at his back.
With your knees now settled onto the couch on either side of him, riding him would be easy if that’s what he wanted. He doesn’t. You could be a ragdoll, soft and pliable in his grip for the way he sets about bouncing you on his cock, only you’re meeting each punch of his hips with a roll of your own, chasing the delicious heat sparking from the friction against your clit. A hand splayed over your asscheek squeezes and urges you on. Yuuta leans forward to capture your lips in a sloppy, demanding kiss.
The sex is messy, jagged edges and discordance. Tenderness swiftly devolves into desperation.
You’re stretched around him, panting and sweaty, clinging to the fabric of his shirt, and it isn’t enough. There’s an edge of pain that creeps in, his treatment just a little too rough as he fights to fuck you deeper, to carve himself a place within you you can’t overwrite.
Your thighs shake. Yuuta’s grip flexes at the mere hint of rejection. Come morning you’ll be an artwork of mottled fingerprints, but you won’t shy away from him here.
The savage, needy noises that spill from him between kisses, the lewd squelching of his cock rabbiting into you from below, they feed the hot puddle of shame burning in your belly. And yet through the bite of his cock dragging through you, the roiling beneath your skin, hot pleasure snakes through your veins, undeniable. Inescapable.
You can’t remember the last release brought about by another person. Some drunken hookup, probably, a faceless one night stand that slipped from your mind the moment you crept out the door. You ache for this as much as you dread it.
He knows it, too.
“I need you,” Yuuta’s ragged plea becomes a chant. “I need you, I need you, fuck, I–”
Hips surging, the maddening angle of his length driving into you, and the silken heat of your own cunt fluttering and squeezing around every intrusion, it drives you both to a frantic crescendo. Pleasure spools in your gut, a sweet agony that winds tighter and tighter.
Your back arches, toes curling against his thighs. A soundless cry tears its way free as your orgasm crashes over you, blind pleasure rippling through you like the waves of an aftershock. You clamp down on Yuuta’s cock and his whole body shudders in turn, collapsing against your heaving chest as hot spurts of cum flood your quivering, aching pussy.
When Yuuta falls back to the cushions of the couch, he drags you with him. Beads of sweat slide down his tattooed chest, disappearing beneath his shirt he hadn’t bothered to shed. Yuuta doesn’t care about his disheveled state, much less your own, settling you back into his chest, cock still stuffed inside of you, to press a lingering kiss to your temple. “Feel better?”
“Yeah,” you lie. And then, after a beat, “Thank you for showing up tonight.”
Slow knuckles trail up and down the length of your spine as Yuuta leans forward to retrieve his forgotten glass of whiskey. “For you, I’ll always come running.”
—
Yuuta’s in the shower when you wake late in the morning.
He mentioned last night – or early today, you suppose – something about getting you clothes for the day. You can see a bundle of fabric waiting for you at the foot of the bed, what looks like a dress and some underwear, but you’re in no rush to rise and play dress up.
Not until the shower’s free at least. Your thighs are still tacky with his cum.
Besides, whatever plans Yuuta has for the day, first stop on your list is going back to your apartment. Even that thought sits unpleasantly; the desire nonexistent to return to the home you were assaulted in, to walk over the blank space on the floor where your favourite rug used to lie and remember the blood that spilled there.
You can’t stay here, though. You know that much.
Reaching blindly for the nightstand, you fumble for the phone Yuuta plugged in to charge last night. There’s no messages or missed calls, which is hardly surprising. The friendships were fleeting when you bounced from place to place and god knows your extended family won’t speak to you anymore.
There’s a news alert in your stack of useless app notifications and you almost, out of habit, swipe it away without a second thought, until your eye catches the headline.
Fourteen dead, three hospitalised in Tokyo apartment blaze.
Every drop of your blood turns to ice.
There’s probably hundreds of thousands of apartment blocks within the city. Millions, even. Your hand trembles as you click on the link to the article. The seconds that pass waiting for the story to load crawl, compounded by the off-kilter thudding of your heart.
It can’t be.
He wouldn’t, he–
The video at the top of the page begins to play; firefighters dousing the burnt out, smoldering husk of a building with huge hoses amidst flashing blue and red lights of emergency vehicles.
The same building you drove away from last night, after Yuuta promised he’d take care of things.
You watch in open mouthed horror as the video switches to the inside of a newsroom, the grim faced anchor speaking soundlessly as pictures of the victims flash on the screen. Hot tears spring to your eyes as you take them in, one after another, each new victim another knife twisting in your chest. When a photo of a mother and her two young boys appears, you clamp a hand over your mouth to muffle a choked sob.
Hot tears stream down your face, your whole body shaking like a leaf. You want to throw up. The sound of your heart pounding fills your ears, deafening you to all else.
And then–
You. An old picture; you in your graduation gown, beaming behind a gorgeous bouquet of peonies. Happy and carefree in a way you haven’t been for years.
A victim, burned up in the fire with all the others. Dead.
The phone drops from limp fingers at the same time the bathroom door cracks and Yuuta’s voice floats out.
“Baby, you up yet?”