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Every gift Noritoshi had ever received was an heirloom. More bluntly, a hand-me down, given the state of the house of Kamo at large: fine at a distance and ragged up close, bred for blood sorcery until the blood had thinned, dwindled, dripped into the shape of the last boy, the adopted heir. They were a dying clan, land rich and money poor, and so most of his landmark ages had been celebrated with something found from deep within the main house itself, disgorged and presented as new, as his. Just like blood. A closed circuit.
This is what he felt like when presented to Choso. Secondhand goods.
It had taken some doing, some excruciating conversations with Utahime sensei and delicate texting with Yuji, but the curse had agreed to visit his–their–home compound.
Noritoshi watched him pause at the gate, pale face awash in newly forming and unpracticed emotions: pain, rage, grief, fear, rage again. It was grey and cold, their weather, his mother might say.
“Nephew,” Choso said, still gazing at the house. Likely the same as a hundred years before.
Noritoshi tried to see what Choso was seeing and gave up. The house existed to him as his own memories layered over each other until they were nothing, just impressions laced with dread. The cold lacquered chairs in the visitor’s room, stubbing his foot on the magnificent clock that no longer wound. The warped glass door he’d put his hand through as a child. Blood everywhere, scolding and screaming. A slice on his arm that healed jagged and now was just a white thread.
Here he was in the family crest, resigned, docile. Choso overflowed with new feelings and his urgency, his radiating power, was somehow shameful in comparison, the greedy way he clutched at was should be his. In his bound hair and fresh white feet, Noritoshi felt more seven than seventeen.
“Uncle,” he said, and Choso had snapped to attention. He was easy to read. He wanted in.
His namesake had been shunned and sentenced to death, but once word spread that his experiments had borne fruit, specifically 550 psi laser-precision piercing blood-wielding fruit, the Kamo family had put aside their distaste and ripped open the binding seals on his lab journals. When he thought about the clan meeting that led to this decision, Noritoshi would have liked to have believed there had been some hesitation, some tearful refusal by an emotional cousin, but he knew better. After a century sunken in the living death of disgrace, the only way out was brute force. A powerful heir that would save them from eating more shit at the hands of lesser houses; unconventional, suspicious, but too strong to be ignored.
The notes were clear; he was told it would work. The girl had carried nine to term before succumbing to madness and taking her own life; this was an acceptable time frame. And the gestational magic that sprang into existence during coupling was contagious, insistent, uncaring of biology. It would make what it needed, not to worry. Hearing this, Noritoshi broke into the old servant's quarters to get at the notes, carefully turning the yellowing paper with a handkerchief. Kenjaku had tried on several men, including a youngish traveling medicine hawker from up the coast. "Uncooperative but successful," and then a detailed recounting of the vivisection of the man and the fetus. In the same dry tone: neighbor boy, thought to be in Spain. Pelvis distended but functioning, strange attachment to child.
Foolish of me, Noritoshi said to himself, a day later. He had retired to meditate in the small garden at the back of the house, smoothing out his pulse. What was the point of being able to regulate your body if you couldn't smother abject horror for political gain.
Tradition, when faced with the perversion of it, fell short. Choso was served tea and did not drink it. Here they were in the room where they took visitors, where just a year ago they had tried to tempt some Zen’in offshoot with their blind-looking adoptee and his rare magic. Had him do a round of archery in the garden out back, bullseye after bullseye in the wet heat. They had left and never called. Mai told him he was better off, that part of the family was riddled with gambling debt.
“Ugly, too,” she’d sniffed, and he'd laughed. It was the last chance for a normal marriage but at the time it seemed like he could manage, maybe find a girl the old fashioned way. Marry a cousin, like the clan head before him.
In a way, that's what had happened, and how the heads presented it to Choso.
“No,” Choso said. He was radiating a simmering killing intent that made Noritoshi sigh. He should have been the one to explain it; but here they were, fumbling the sell.
“The council has changed,” his mother said, ignoring them both. “And you’re half human. There’s no law against that.”
“I won’t rape your son,” Choso said.
“That’s not–”
“I want it,” Noritoshi said, before she could say something worse.
He physically felt Choso turn his full attention on him. He was not subtle. Choso filled the compound with nerves and sweat, power rich like rotting blood, sweet like dying flowers. It must be nice to be so much.
“Me?” Confusion, twisting his face.
“You won’t be forcing me,” Noritoshi said.
“Why do you close your eyes?” Choso asked, after a long pause. He’d apparently listened to his heartbeat, what little one there was, and was looking for more obvious signs.
“It’s a restriction,” Noritoshi said, surprised. “It augments my power.”
Choso’s eyes bore through his eyelids.
“We should train together. You could be stronger.”
“Well, yes,” Noritoshi said.
“Do you find me appealing? For childbearing?”
“Yes.”
Choso seemed more confused.
“And in exchange, I will receive all my bound siblings?”
“It's a guarantee of the contract,” his mother said. “We swear it.”
He'd had a physical family for what Noritoshi had calculated as four and a half weeks, and then spent the next month getting blood in his mouth over the remainder, a boy who didn't recognize him and had told him no when he'd tried more than kissing, “what curses do." This also from Mai, via Todou.
“That family and more, if there is more than one child,” his mother said. Noritoshi felt his stomach turn over.
“Nephew,” Choso said. A man of fresh, tormented faces. “Do you truly want this?”
It was done then. His mother gestured for the contract to be brought in.
“Of course,” Noritoshi said. “I admire you, uncle.”
After dinner, which Choso did not attend, every single member of the existent family and the few ancient staff who had raised him vacated the premises. The cook left the washing up for the new girl who would come in the morning. His mother left him the keys to the house. No one said anything.
Choso returned from wherever he'd been lurking. Maybe the graveyard. Noritoshi was waiting, as it seemed he always was, in some doorway or another. They entered together, Choso too close to him and startling the lamp almost out of his hand.
“You're a rare beauty to give to me,” Choso said, once Noritoshi had lit the old-fashioned kerosene heater.
It was his parents' bedroom, stripped and cleansed. A discreet silver dish with a vial of what on closer inspection turned out to be valium. My wedding night, Noritoshi thought, grimly.
He hadn’t known what to tell the others. Nothing, in the end; Mai would understand, as would Utahime sensei. The same deadened obedience he carried behind his eyes was present in them. Mai had to be intact for her marriage contract to retain the 3% interest and so she endured a pelvic exam every break, bored in her terry cloth robe in the clan clinic, texting him through it.
Choso was standing at the edge of the room, still as a rock.
Noritoshi considered asking if Choso remembered the carvings over the doors in this wing and then decided that was unkind.
“They'd give you anything for a blood wielding heir,” Noritoshi responded. “Things much more valuable than me.”
“Family is the most precious thing of all,” Choso said.
“I frankly fail to see how you, of all people, still believe that,” Noritoshi said. The contract had been signed, so he felt no need to be polite; but that was fear talking, and he had been raised better. He forced himself to breathe.
“It's all I have,” Choso said. “My brothers.”
He did not blink. His body didn't move either, the slight signs of respiration void from his form. No heartbeat, just endless, whirling blood.
“I am not your brother,” Noritoshi said.
“I know,” Choso said. “Your blood is weak.”
It stung. Half an hour ago Noritoshi had been struggling through something pickled and wet at dinner fighting down visions of being split in half and sobbing and now here he was, prickling at what was hereditarily his lot: second place.
“But you are my bride,” Choso said.
“Yes, it appears so,” Noritoshi said. The sarcasm slid right over Choso.
“You are very fair,” Choso said. “Is your hair bound to signify you are the eldest?”
Noritoshi did his hair every morning in the dark. He’d perfected it to under five minutes, but sometimes enjoyed the dramatics of it, the oil and comb and blessed bindings.
“That I’m the heir. It’s traditional. Was it the same for you?”
“I don’t know,” Choso said. “I have some memories, but they are…unclear. I know some things, but I think those are my mother’s. I did this because it felt correct.”
“I can do it for you, from now on,” Noritoshi said.
“You don’t have to be sweet,” Choso said, sharp. “You have me already.”
Noritoshi was taken aback.
“I didn’t mean–”
“I know I am an aberration,” Choso said.
“I don’t see you like that,” Noritoshi lied. Years of etiquette training, but he was finding it hard to reaffirm the humanity of the person who was supposed to defile him. The moment dragged on.
"We should enact the contract before it turns on us," Choso said.
“Here, then,” Noritoshi replied, bereft of charm. He slipped out of his hakui and immediately felt his nipples peak. Always cold, the Kamo clan, blue tipped fingers and a baffling pulse. He knew compared to Itadori he was nothing. Yuji had the beauty of a virgin and a natural disaster rolled into one, strong and bulky, ripe muscle and kind freshness that would succor any wife. Til death kind of affection written on his whole milk bones. Noritoshi was thin as paper and paler, hips points and stomach a drum. Muscle but a desperate kind. The only thing handsome about him was his bound hair and his eyes, if you got past the blood. Maybe his legs, long like a girl's.
“Come,” he said. Choso did not move. The pulse of him, the red webbed aura of his blood that Noritoshi could see, was quickening.
“Pretty,” Choso said. His mark throbbed, once.
“Men don't like to hear that,” Noritoshi said, savagely yanking at the ties of his hakama. He realized too late it would leave him in his tabi and nothing else, but to stop to remove them would be too unseemly. He stripped off the black fabric and tossed it aside. He wore nothing underneath.
“I said come,” Noritoshi said, shivering at the chill in the room. Choso ran a hand over his own stomach, stared at the apex of Noritoshi’s legs. It was now, then, that he would have to commit to this, to start to remove himself from the flesh and blood of him and let it happen. It struck him there was no lube or anything at their disposal; he had some idea of how it would work and the fact his clan had not wanted to concern themselves with the details of it beyond smothering pain after the fact would have been enraging, if he had that luxury. Instead he focused on his blood, and on thoughts of his mother, dead and blissfully unaware of this happening to her only child.
“You mean to put a baby in me?” Choso asked.
Noritoshi coughed.
“What?”
“How else?” Choso asked. He swallowed, scoffed, “You're too slight to carry a child. You’ll have to mount me.”
“I… “ How to explain what he had been told, the act he had raged over, had ripped open the training field in Kyoto in a senseless fury that they'd do to him what they'd done to her. Make him some poor bitch whelping more blood sorcerers, kept kenneled and wet. And yet now it seemed Choso had assumed he’d be the one impregnated. And most strange, hysterical, almost, he seemed to be-if his rubbery expression of want, his quickened breath, was any indication-into it.
“A curse begets a child with any human,” Noritoshi said. “We–I thought I would–”
The machinery of Choso's body began to move, to spark.
“No,” Choso said, firmly. “I agreed because it would be in me.”
“Oh,” Noritoshi said, for lack of anything else.
"I want to feel what it's like," Choso said. "For humans. To make something like that. And I have found comingling with blood I recognize to be pleasurable."
"I see."
Visions of Choso in some faceless curse orgy flashed before him.
“Are you displeased?”
“No, no,” Noritoshi said, quickly. “Quite…the opposite.”
“Let’s begin, then,” Choso said, and began unwrapping his strange clothing. Noritoshi cleared his throat and tried to focus.
His body looked like it had been carved, or whittled out of some unyielding material. Articulate wrists, fine ankles, but the rest shockingly solid. He took his hair down, piece by piece, and then walked over and hesitated.
“Go ahead,” Noritshi said, and Choso tugged the wrapping off his hair.
Then he pulled off his pants.
“I’m well prepared for you, see,” Choso said, spreading his big legs. Noritoshi wasn’t sure what he was looking at, exactly; he was a virgin, but not a prude, regardless of what Todo might assert loudly whenever they passed giggling girls on the street–and yet what Choso was showing him, face blushed near-purple, was not exactly–
“Do you like it?”
“I–yes,” Noritoshi said. It moved on its own, but then again, so did his, twitching now. He’d gotten hard suddenly, like he always did. He felt very young again.
He cleared his throat.
“I think we should kiss,” he said.
In the midst of it, Choso cried, big furious tears that mixed with the blood dripping down his face and into his open mouth. One wanted to be kind to him. There was something in his open face and miserable past that Noritoshi wanted to clutch to himself and consume. He had opened both eyes just to get a better look at him.
“I didn’t know,” Choso said, rough, shaking, unashamed, “That it felt like this.”
He was holding his own legs up, taking it.
“Fuck,” Noritoshi said, hair sticking to his neck and mouth. He wasn’t going to last. He had tucked his hands into the crease where Choso’s legs met his waist, feverish with sweat, and was trying to get leverage to cram his dick into him as deep as possible. Everything he did, Choso seemed to like. Even if it was fast and uneven, Noritoshi pretending he knew how it went.
"You have to fill me up with it," Choso panted, like Noritoshi had any other choice. Noritoshi made an unattractive, whimpering noise and came.
“It takes more than one time,” Choso said, moments later. They both had finished, Choso after Noritoshi had rubbed three fingers against where he pulsed and dripped Noritoshi’s cum. When something wrapped around his wrist to hold him there while Choso shook, he imagined it inside him and felt giddy, half-fear half-arousal.
“You know this for certain?”
“Are you opposed?” Choso asked, lifting himself on his elbow.
“...No,” Noritoshi said, and laughed. Everything was possible in these hazy moments. He felt lighter than he had his entire life in the Kamo stable, a stay of execution now tracing his ribs with one big, hot hand.
Choso sweated like a human. Noritoshi should go get them water, but instead he draped a leg over Choso’s side and thought about locking the family out of the compound, forever. The smell was different than he had imagined or experienced when he did it himself, and the feeling was indescribable.
“A few more times like that and it’ll take,” Choso said, confident for what reason Noritoshi couldn’t imagine. Drained and fuzzy-brained, Noritoshi thought of Choso full of his child and an odd shiver passed over him.
“You feel it,” Choso said, smug. “I’m right.”
“You know as much as I do,” Noritoshi said.
"I know more," Choso said.
It was likely true. Of the known world inside the compound, the spoke of clan and expectation around which his world turned, Noritoshi was an expert. But now the bare feet bumping against his on sweaty sheets were new, were part of something black-hole strange.
"Show me how to do your hair," he said, meaning it. "I'll show you mine."
"You're married. It should be different," Choso said. "More complex."
"I'll show you," Noritoshi insisted. Choso smiled, rolled him over. Strange attachment, Noritoshi thought, and let that be buried in his husband.