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“See? I knew you could do it.”
The cold stone of the well presses against Nene’s back as neatly pleated black slacks emerge to bracket her on either side. A hand (big and strong and masculine, a man’s hand) grabs her by the shoulder. Another swallows her face, tenderly cradles her cheek, and tilts her chin up, up, up.
Amane smiles widely down at her, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. No, his eyes are dark and unreadable. He doesn’t even spare a glance at Aoi — or Akane, or Teru, or Mitsuba — or Kou — all of them unmoving and stained red, bleeding out into the water and dripping down the stairs and on her hands —
“There’s a good girl,” he says, warm and syrupy and focused entirely on her.
Grown-up Hanako is… He’s cold. He’s not any warmer than the well. Nene shudders and tries to choke back a sob. Yugi Amane might have lived a little longer in this world, but he’s still dead, and now so are all her other friends.
And soon she will be too. There’s no escaping; the weight of his dark eyes and cold grin pins her in place. Her phone buzzes again, faint and futile and forgotten somewhere in the bloodied waters. Surely he’s going to choke her with those horrifying tentacles again, or tear her apart, or break her neck, or maybe just toss her down the well, or…
Nene couldn’t move even if she wanted to. She can hardly breathe, frozen in place and staring helplessly as he….
As he pulls her closer, nestling her further between his legs and his long limbs curling around her. He’s even humming something. It’s uncomfortably comfortable. Those big fingers of his stroke her absently, petting her cheek and playing with her hair.
“Yeah,” he mutters to himself, a stray thought slipping out beneath his breath. “A sacrifice.”
His grip on her tightens, making Nene cry out “N-No —!” and try to shove herself away, but those big hands don’t hurt her. He only tugs her up out of the water and deposits her unceremoniously into his lap.
She stiffens.
“Oh, don’t look so scared,” Amane says kindly, wrapping an arm around her waist. He leans down, drapes himself broad and unfamiliar across her back, rests his chin upon her shoulder. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to just below his elbows. It’s handsome in a mature, practical way — revealing nothing more than wrists and forearms, which shouldn’t be scandalous but is, a little bit, when Hanako’s bare arms are usually hidden beneath the long sleeves of his gakuran and now they’re holding her close against him, veins and sinew made more prominent with age. “You should be happy! After all, you were a very big help to me today, Yashiro Nene.”
"I — I don’t think I wanted to help you with this.”
“That’s alright,” Amane says. He even sounds like he means it. His cheek presses up against the side of her face, coarse and scratchy with a hint of the five-o’clock shadow he’d never get a chance to grow in her world. “In fact…” he continues, so quietly that if his lips weren’t so close to Nene’s ear she probably never would have heard it, “the best sacrifices are the ones you don’t want to make.”
“O-oh,” she says faintly. “I, um. I don’t think I really understand…?”
“That’s alright too. This house doesn’t care about what you want or what you understand.”
“W…what does it care about…?”
“Food,” Amane says, as if it’s simple. “It’s not picky. It’ll eat anything that stumbles too close: frogs, birds, idiot kids. Science teachers… Everything. Priestesses. Oracles. Sacrificial brides… girls with their whole lives ahead of them.”
She dares to steal a glance at him from the corner of her eye.
His eyes are cold and flat when she meets them. She jerks her gaze away quickly, almost guiltily. Her heart hammers in her throat. Can he — or whatever it is that’s crawled inside Hanako, ate him all up and hollowed him out — feel how hard she’s shaking?
If he can, he doesn’t let it stop him.
“I feed the house and in return the house feeds me,” he continues. “But you really did do a good job! Five souls at once should be enough to sate it for a little while, so it’s not hungry at the moment. But I am.”
Eep.
“Um,” she says, squirming nervously. “W-well, if —” if he let me go, if I got away from him, Nene thinks, and if I ran, then maybe I could still fix this somehow, if I turned back time again — “if you wanted, I could make you s-something to eat! Um… I could, if you have a kitchen, make… you… donuts…?”
His arm around her waist tightens.
“That’s sweet, but I don’t eat donuts.”
“What d-do you eat, then?” Nene asks. She’s scared of the answer, but she might be even more scared of not knowing. And she kind of suspects… She remembers what was left of Sumire.
“Girls with fat ankles.” Amane’s eyes crinkle as he grins at her, wide and easygoing, but… if this were Hanako’s face, his amber eyes would sparkle with a familiar teasing light. These eyes stay dark. That light never reaches them. Scary. “Girls with too little sense for their own good. Girls with their whole lives ahead of them.”
His hand slips beneath her skirt, casually traces its way up her leg. Nene freezes.
“Hana — I mean, Amane — wait, stop it, please don’t —!” she squeaks.
He ignores her.
His hand is so big, big enough to curl easily around her thigh. His knuckles are all prominent and boney, same as always, and his fingers are long and sturdy, and his nails kept short and squared off. He never ended up growing into them, really. They’re still Hanako’s same familiar hands, and still Hanako’s same familiar fingers as they dig into her leg, as his thumb massages little circles over her black tights. His fingers creep higher and higher up the soft inside of her thigh.
Nene presses her legs stubbornly together before his touch can crawl up to the crease where her thigh meets her hip. His hand might still be wrapped around her thigh — and much too high for comfort, but — but — maybe she wouldn’t mind if Hanako wanted to feel her up, but this isn’t really Hanako! She doesn’t want some strange grown-up version of Hanako to touch her like this, no matter how handsome, hollowed out and replaced with something evil, who didn’t listen when she said don’t, who said he wants to eat her — !
“Are you scared?” Amane asks, interrupting her hyperventilating train of thought. He almost sounds kind, like he would pretend to care if she were. “It’s okay. There’s no need to be scared. It’ll feel good soon enough.”
“I’m not scared!” she denies, shaking her head. Whatever Nene feels right now is much worse than just scared. “I’m not, but I... I want you to let me go.”
He falls silent for a moment.
And then he laughs, hard enough to shake her in his lap, harsh and cruel and tinged with something awfully sad. “I already told you,” he manages to get out in between mean peals of laughter, “that what we want doesn’t matter to this house. Come on. Be a good girl and play along.”
Nene shakes her head again and shuts her eyes. She doesn’t want to look at him — Hanako’s face made strange with sharp angles and unfriendly eyes — and she doesn’t want to look behind him in case those disgusting slimy tentacles with hundreds of eyes are looking back at her and she doesn’t want to look away from him because the only other place left to look, in front of her, is… everyone. They’re still there. They haven’t moved.
And though Nene is trying very hard not to cry, she can feel her chin quivering and her lips twisting in a way that makes her feel like she’s already almost lost that battle.
“Oh? Are you going to cry now, too…?” Amane asks. “Please don’t look so sad. You want to feel good, don’t you?”
She sniffles wetly. “I thought… I thought what I want doesn’t matter.”
“That’s right,” he confirms cheerfully, giving her thigh a sharp squeeze. “But giving in will make it easier. Now come on.”
When she still refuses to loosen up for him — doesn’t unclench her thighs from where she’s got them primly locked together on his lap — he sighs. Nene cracks her eyes open to give him a suspicious, watery glare.
Something cold brushes against her ankles: those tentacles.
She squeaks and struggles in vain to kick them off. They’re weirdly muscular and oozing as they twine around her and Nene wishes she’d never opened her eyes to look; she hates how they stare back up at her. They wrap further up her calves to curl too tight around her thighs, caressing and squeezing her soft plush flesh before they wrench her legs wide open across his lap.
“Stop — let me go — !”
“Mmm. Nope.”
The tentacles hold her firmly in place while Amane smiles that same affable smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. … and his hand continues its slow journey between her thighs.
Nene flinches when his fingers ghost between her legs, a barely-there brush of friction through her tights and panties. It’s the kind of teasing touch that makes something in her chest ache suddenly. Her eyes burn with tears. She feels like she wants to be sick: a pit at the bottom of her stomach. Hanako’s a rotten tease, so it makes sense that this version of Amane would be too. But Hanako wouldn’t tease her meanly, at least not like this, and for all his dirty jokes he’d never actually touch her if she didn’t want him to… would he?
Amane strokes her again. Just two fingers over her tights and her panties, light and glancing, running over the split between her legs to trace the folds beneath. If he stopped now, it could still be like nothing even happened. It’s only been over her clothes so far, so — it’s almost like he hasn’t even touched her yet, technically.
He hums again where his chin rests on her shoulder, and presses his knuckles firmly against her. He’s not interested in trailing lightly up the length of her folds — not anymore. Now he strokes her slowly and deliberately through the fabric, circling against her clit. It feels… Nene’s face feels hot. A low, thick sob claws its way from her throat. He’s right that it doesn’t feel bad, exactly, but it’s overwhelming. Strange. It feels very different from when, sometimes, at night beneath her covers, she slips her own hand between her legs and grinds against the heel of her palm. Not often, but — it’s normal for a young girl just beginning to blossom into womanhood to have those kinds of needs, so just — sometimes! When the mood strikes!
Amane presses a little harder, his fingers sliding lower between her folds to circle her core — her core, that she thinks, her heart pounding in her throat, that’s starting to feel hot and slick against his cold fingers. He dips a knuckle against her entrance, through her tights and panties, pushing as far as he can go with the layers of fabric still separating them.
And then he tears through the thin fabric of her tights easily, like they’re nothing, while Nene squirms and squeaks. He runs his hand soothingly along the soft skin of her thighs, his fingers and the tentacles both caressing her, digging into her plush flesh and leaving little red marks on her skin, single-minded and unstoppable no matter how much she protests.
Nene tries to kick again when he pulls her panties (embarrassingly wet) to the side. First times are supposed to be special, for love, after a perfect wedding or at least after a sufficiently romantic and glamorous date, and this is not how she ever imagined her first time with Hanako — Amane — would go. The tentacles coiled around her legs tighten, keeping her locked in place.
Nene sniffles. Her lips quiver pink and piteously. “Please — please don’t.”
He ignores her.
His fingers are cold and impossibly thick as he pets her clit, gliding slowly up and down between her folds, soft and sweet and puffy, her entrance glistening with wetness. She’s slick, even if she’s scared, even if she doesn’t want to be, even if this is more like a nightmare than any dream she’s ever had. So slick, actually, that his fingers are starting to make loud, embarrassing sounds as he strokes at her. Her face flushes.
And — eep — maybe she’s imagining it, but Nene thinks she feels something hard pressing against her rear end.
He rubs slow, patient circles at her entrance, circling the rim of her hole over and over again, never quite pressing in. Like a tease. Like this is nothing more than a game. It’s not a very nice game. It makes her breath catch in her chest, conflicted, even as between her thighs grows slicker and slicker, as each brush of his fingertips against her core sets her nerves alight and waiting for more — her heart fluttering against her ribcage, trapped and nervous and scared — thinking over and over: this is it, then, he’s going to stop teasing and do it, he’s really going to do it and put it inside me —
A single one of those thick, long fingers of his eases inside, pressing only to the second knuckle. She chokes on a sob: Yashiro Nene, officially a maiden deflowered.
“There,” he says, sounding so kind, sounding so pleased with himself that for a second she really, truly hates him. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”
He looks at her, still and expectant. Waiting… for her to respond?
(When she does grind against the heel of her palm, beneath her covers — well, she’d tried slipping her own slender finger inside once or twice, but the angle was all wrong, and while it didn’t feel bad, it mostly just felt strange. It definitely didn’t feel good enough to make it worth getting in the habit of it.
This is an intrusion, and an unwanted one, but it feels…different, when it’s someone else’s finger and she’s dripping wet, burning hot and tight and so, so sensitive around him.)
She shakes her head with a sniffle. No, it didn’t hurt.
Amane’s arm is hard and unyielding as it pins her close to his chest. He crooks his finger inside of her, stroking her soft inner walls, and rubbing his thumb against her clit, a jolt crashing through her spine and through her legs.
The stretch and the burn of him slipping a second finger in. She can’t imagine how he manages it; it feels too tight to fit.
She tries to jerk away as best she can — accomplishing little else besides growing uncomfortably more aware of just how open those awful tentacles have her spread upon his lap and accidentally driving herself deeper upon his fingers with a gasp.
“Wow,” Amane says, like he’s trying to stifle a laugh, the smug jerk, “I told you it would feel good, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t — that’s not —” she protests, frustrated, shoving at his arm. “I wasn’t trying to do that —!”
He cuts her off with another thrust of his fingers, rocking them further into her, so thick and so full she can only cry out and squirm again, clenching around him as he stretches her open. As he pets her from the inside out.
“Sure, sure,” he teases.
She gives up — sags against him — lets her head fall forward despondently. Her hair cascades around her in an ashy blonde curtain, and Nene steadfastly ignores the red soaking the ends, drying in sticky patches, because if she thinks about it she’ll definitely cry and maybe throw up. She’s definitely going to fix this. Somehow. She… she has to.
She wants her friends back; she wants her Hanako back.
She shudders as his fingers fuck deeper into her, wet obscene noises echoing against the stone walls. The tentacles squeeze her legs and caress her thighs — and more of them come to curl around her chest, too, groping her over her uniform and bra, running lightly down her sides, squeezing at her soft tits and rubbing against her nipples. His dark and unfriendly eyes burn as he watches her face: intensely creepy. It’s not fair.
It’s not fair and it doesn’t feel real but she can’t do anything to stop it, can’t do anything to prevent it, as sensation crashes over her like a tidal wave. It almost feels like drowning: her heart beats against her rib cage like it’s going to explode and her lungs empty of air and her eyes burn and her legs shake. Nene bites her lip to stop a sound from squeaking out of her. It feels a thousand times more intense than any orgasm she’s coaxed out of herself in her bed at home. It feels awful.
“Perfect. There we go,” he soothes her. “Feels good, right? Easy? Just like killing those friends of yours: once you give in, it’s easy.”
If it weren’t for his arm like an iron bar around her, she’d probably have collapsed with a sob, all limp and wilting. He rocks her for a moment, gently, a slow and steady back-and-forth sway as he hums beneath his breath as if to comfort her, with his arm around her waist and his chin resting on her shoulder.
It’s hard to trust anything he says; it’s hard to tell what comes from whatever still remains of Yugi Amane and what comes from the curse of the red house. He wants to eat her. To sacrifice her? He wants… to not hurt her? To make her feel good…? Nene shakes her head and feels a sob break from her throat: nothing about this makes any sense.
He hauls her up off his lap and into his arms in one easy movement as he stands from his seat on the edge of the well; Hanako holds her all the time, whenever she needs rescuing and often when she doesn’t, around her shoulders or beneath her arms or sometimes even sweeping her entirely off her feet, but Hanako doesn’t make her feel small like this. He doesn’t unsteady her — not usually on purpose, at least. Amane’s hands settle beneath her thighs as he perches her precariously in his arms, where she has to decide what’s safer: to lean into him, all unfriendly eyes and fake smiles, or to lean away and risk falling into the bloody water below. For now, at least, she’ll take her chances with him.
The water ripples with each step he takes. She watches wide-eyed and horrified as those same awful tentacles emerge from the well and begin dragging her friends (limp and lifeless because of her) towards the well’s open mouth. Into the well. He doesn’t even acknowledge it. He doesn’t blink or even break his stride. He just… steps over Mitsuba without a care, then Kou, as he carries her back up those stairs. Back out through that ominous black door.
It shuts behind them with an terrible sense of finality.
It’s creepily silent; the air seems stale. The rest of the house still looks its unnatural tidy self, untouched by time or rot.
Except… Nene stares down the hall, at the blank stretch of wall where the front door used to be.
Even before — even the first time she’d wandered across the threshold of this cursed red house — when it had refused to let her leave with the little Tsukasa, when it had tried to drag her deep beneath its foundation and trap her forever in its belly, the door had still been there for her to try to open.
Not anymore.
Amane nuzzles against the side of her throat and presses a kiss to her cheek, prickly with stubble, smelling of old blood and stale well-water and a hint of unfamiliar cologne.
“There, there. It’s okay. Don’t look so sad. You did great! You’ll feel better soon enough.”
“I,” she hiccups sadly, “I really don’t think I will.”
“You will,” Amane says, low and ominous. She trembles in his arms as that horrible yawning void swallows up his face — Hanako’s face, perfect and strange in its grown up glory. The curse looms over her, hollow. Empty. Hungry. “You will. You’ll stay here. It’s been so lonely. Stay here? Stay with me? Stay long enough and you will.”