Chapter Text
“The luxury of a wood pile,” Taigen said with a contented sigh as he easily tossed more fuel into the house's small cooking hearth. “Things you don't realize you would miss on the road.”
Mizu lifted the lid of the salt cellar and pinched some coarse salt between her fingertips. “Enjoy it while you can.”
Taigen poked around the old farmer's food cache. He had indeed been struggling, there were only a few roots, a handful of vegetables. “And how long is that?” Taigen said absently, examining some fungi. Snowcap?
Mizu didn't respond right away. He glanced at her expression; she almost seemed surprised at herself in this conversation. She wiped her hand clean.
“You did buy this place.” He set down the potential poison. “Not bribe, not borrow, but buy—”
“I know,” she said, stopping him with a short exhale. “I just…” Mizu trickled off again, like her words were water. Taigen imagined her trying to catch them between her fingers, her thoughts slipping through.
“I need to learn how to be slow again,” she finally said.
Taigen considered this. So much of his life—their lives—were devoted to becoming the swiftest, the fastest to run away. From their village, from fire. He nodded.
“We should sleep. Start slow tomorrow.”
She offered him a small smile. She had been doing that lately, in lieu of a grunt or a cold stare.
“Okay.”
Taigen weighed the options, his desires, and chose to lay down first to sleep. So that most Mizu could have options as well—to lay apart from him, or beside him. He faced the wall, away from the door, telling himself it was to make her choice more comfortable.
He listened to her steps, counting them out of habit, and then held his breath as he felt the heat of her at his back.
His heart was pounding, to be sure—but he also found it natural to relax and be still in the moment. Like they had done this act of sharing a restful place a thousand times before, perhaps in another life.
Taigen felt her forehead touch between his shoulder blades. A soft, careful exhale on his back, as if she feared her breathing could ever disturb him.
His want to roll to his other side and pull her to his chest was almost alarming. He hadn't known such innocuous urges could be as visceral as the split second decision to kill.
For now, he closed his eyes and allowed the warmth of shelter and Mizu lull him.
Tomorrow.
They combed the house more thoroughly the next morning, finding paper and a brush.
“We need a map of the land,” Mizu told him at high noon. A good use of their day. Productive, peaceful. Taigen nodded.
They took the horse, a large black beast, with Taigen at the reins and Mizu at his back again. Her arms circled his waist, and he could feel her cheek at slower paces, resting on that same spot between his shoulders.
He squeezed her knee when they came to a stop. She marked on the paper a fruit tree, a berry bush, a clear creek, before wrapping her arms around him again to tell him to move on, chirps and petals surrounding them in equal measure.
They had chosen the good side of the mountain to settle on, Taigen decided. Come winter they might lose some daylight as the sun set below the horizon of the taller peaks around them, but he could tell that they would benefit from the valleys in between during the warm months.
Tomorrows.
“The clouds,” Taigen said eventually, breaking through the birdsong.
Mizu's cheek lifted from his back. “What about them? Storm coming?”
“No, they just look nice.” He gestured vaguely upward. “Like the clouds in paintings, except in the sky.”
She snorted a laugh, though it wasn't derisive. “Poetic.”
“Mhmm.”
Mizu turned down the horse as soon as they returned to their farm; Taigen was glad for it, since he didn't know how. He watched her hands to learn.
“He deserves rest.” She stroked down the horse’s strong black neck. “He has been the only beast of burden on this farm for too long.”
The horse looked fine to Taigen. He almost shrugged, before he caught himself and gave her an agreeable nod instead. She smiled at him again, before turning back to the horse. She admires him, Taigen mused to himself.
“He needs a name,” she murmured.
“Go ahead.”
Mizu patted its shining neck again. “I don't know him yet.”
Taigen didn't realize this was a barrier to assigning a name to a work horse. But he knew and trusted Mizu.
“Okay. Later, then. After you get to know him.”
He watched her careful work in silence for another minute, before Mizu seemed to become aware of the quiet. She glanced over her shoulder at him, her brow already raised in question.
“You're perfect,” he told her.
Her blush was instant, reaching the roots of her hair. He grinned.
“Hungry?” Taigen said, instead of love.
“If you are,” Mizu answered, as if she understood anyway.
Mizu was the first to retire that night.
Taigen knelt to lie down at her back. He settled a palm on her arm, and she inhaled. It wasn't a sharp breath; it was blurred around the edges the way his own thoughts felt when they turned to Mizu.
His hand drifted to her elbow, and then he slipped his arm loosely around her middle.
Mizu shifted back toward him with a squirm of her hips. A smile spread over Taigen’s whole face, and he touched his open mouth to her shoulder so she could feel it too.
His arm tightened around her as she made a small sound in her throat, their bodies flush now, only separated by their thin kimonos. He pushed his hips into her ass, his stiffening cock sliding between the cheeks, and it felt as good as he imagined it would.
Mizu whimpered. Yes.
She arched her back, angling her ass as they rolled their hips together, fluid like their fighting—and just as breathless and pleasurable, Taigen thought in a haze. His hand drifted down her taut abdomen, its rippling muscles, until he cupped his hand firmly between her legs.
“What—”
“Keep going,” he hissed. Her hips grinding into his palm as he pressed down, constant pressure, allowing her to set her own rhythm. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist bone, her breathing growing ragged. He touched his lips to her temple, her cheek, down her jaw to seal his lips on her neck and suck.
Taigen broke away cursing when she cried out, bearing down on his hand as she shook with her release. “There you go,” he muttered, his cock throbbing at the sound of her fractured moans, the sight of her helplessly open mouth. He shifted his fingers to seek out where she was the most sensitive, wanting to feel her body twitching in his arms, overstimulated in the best way.
“Fuck,” she choked out, her nails scratching at his wrist. “What—ah—” Mizu broke off with another gasp, and Taigen bared his teeth in satisfaction that he had found it.
“There you go,” he repeated, watching her convulse through another wave of pleasure.
She turned around to face him, her lips parted as she caught her breath. “Taigen.”
He brushed her hair from her eyes. “You're just perfect,” he murmured.
Her skin was flushed, lovely. She caught his hand, pressing it to her pinked cheek. “Why do you keep saying that?”
Taigen shrugged a shoulder. “Why does anyone point out when it rains? It's still worth noting, even if we can all see it.”
He was somewhat disappointed when she released his hand, though that was quickly remedied as she reached down between them to grasp at his cock through the thin layer of cotton. He exhaled sharply, rolling his hips into her hand, watching her face as she squeezed her fingers around the bulge almost experimentally. Mizu seemed frustrated, and she caught his eye.
“I don't know how to touch a man like this,” she confessed in a whisper.
“I like what you're doing right now,” he assured her honestly.
“I have been with a man, but we didn't—it wasn't like this, how we're touching each other even with sleeping garments on—” Mizu broke off, pressing her lips together, a gesture of embarrassment. Taigen found it incredibly endearing. He liked catching her off guard, keeping her on her toes, the way she did him.
He was surprised again when her hands reached to untie the front of his kimono.
His fingers closed gently around her wrists. “Are you sure?”
A tiny frown ceased her forehead. You're overthinking it, Mizu, Taigen sorely wanted to tease her. He decided to be kind. “I just mean we don't have to tonight. There's always tomorrow.”
Mizu raised a brow, deliberately tugging at a tie. “But you might kill me tomorrow.”
“You might kill me now,” Taigen muttered distractedly as she opened the front of his kimono by spreading her hands beneath it, over his waist, and then she was pulling at his hips with an urgency that he could only associate with Mizu. He growled, circling an arm around her to roll on top of her, pressing her back into the bed. Her eyes were bright and hazy all at once as she looked up at him, and then she lifted herself to meet him—
“Oh!” Her breath was punched from her as Taigen pinned her back down, his palm over her breastbone, his fingers kissing her pulse in her neck. He grinned, grinding against her center as he gathered her wrists in his other hand, and she allowed him to pin them above her head. Her mouth was still open, a corner of her lips upturned. She arched her back, a plea in her throat; he obliged her, tearing at her kimono with his other hand.
Mizu tilted her hips to line up with his, her thighs locking around his waist, and Taigen groaned as the head of his cock caught at her entrance; he nearly slipped inside, she was so wet from her orgasm, and clearly so eager. She squirmed under his gaze as he stared down at her mouth, the flush tip of her nose, and then her eyes, begging blue.
Her hands started to lift—Taigen locked them back down with a growl and guided himself inside her in the same breath.
His forehead fell to her shoulder as they moaned in unison. He squeezed her wrists, caught her fingers, gripped her waist as he pulled back and thrusted—
“Fucking perfect,” Taigen gritted out as she gave him another rasping moan. “You feel perfect.”
“So do you,” Mizu managed to whisper near his ear. He lifted his head. It seemed to be a conscious effort to keep her eyes open and alert as he fucked into her deeper.
“All of it,” she demanded of him.
“Fuck.” He let go of her hands to push at the back of her thigh until her knee met her chest, Mizu nodded mindlessly as he sank in to the hilt. Wet and warm and perfect. He was breathing like he had sprinted over a mountain to get here, to get to her, and perhaps he had. He dipped his head down to lick into her pretty mouth, and they both groaned at the change in angle of his cock pressing inside her.
“More,” she hissed, surging up to meet him. Her teeth scraped his jaw, her breath hot. “Fuck, I need more—”
Taigen drove into her as hard as he dared with his next thrust, but Mizu seemed to sense his weakness. Her hands dug into his hair, and she pulled at his scalp to guide his ear to her mouth.
“You can't hurt me,” she breathed.
“You're already hurt,” Taigen panted, holding his weight above her.
Her fingers curled into his hair. “You can't hurt me, Taigen.”
Something carnal shifted inside him—that thing that they shared, fire that flowed like water—and he grunted, hooking his arm around her knee to lift her ankle to her shoulder, folding her in two as he bottomed out inside her.
Taigen shook out his hair that was sticking to his forehead from perspiration. “Is this what you wanted?” he said with a snarl, snapping his hips.
She could only moan in response, and for a split second he feared that it was in pain, like when they sparred—but the line of her neck as her head rolled back, her slack mouth, made him fuck her harder.
Because Mizu looked like she was lost—but lost in him, and how he filled her—
Taigen groaned, his abdomen tightening. “Mizu, I'm going to—”
She clutched him to her, her grip telling—and he emptied himself inside her with a low moan. She whimpered his name as his cock pulsed, her hand fluttering to his neck when her cunt clenched around him. “Oh, I—I—”
She sounded dazed. He was breathless, spent—but still stubborn to Mizu's needs, was he not? He grunted in exertion as he began pounding into her again.
She shattered around him with a wail.
“Mizu," he said, his voice strangled in awe. "Mizu."
Taigen moved his arm from where he had locked her leg in place, tucking her face into his neck as she came back down from her high. He stroked her hair as they caught their breath together; her mouth was sticky and hot against his already sticky skin, but it was sweet as well. He lifted his head to kiss her hair. He gazed down at her, feeling the same sense of wonder that he felt so briefly as a boy as he stared at the stars beyond their tiny fishing village.
“Mizu,” he said again, because he wanted to.
Her fingertips touched his face.
“Are you real?” Mizu whispered.
Taigen recalled her asking this question once before. He had requested that she throw him back in the dungeon soon after, followed by a quiet, but emphatic Hate you. He stifled a chuckle at the memory.
Her lip stuck out in doubt as he laughed, and Taigen smoothed it with his thumb, before planting a kiss there, hot-lipped and soft.
“As long as you want me to be.”