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Another hunt between them.
It should have been stranger than it was.
That was the thing about men who had seen what they had seen. The threshold for strangeness moved. You made your accommodations with the world as it actually was rather than as it had been explained to you, and you kept moving. As their little party made its way through the mountain and down towards the coast, the dregs of winter had earnestly melted into spring, and with it, an uneasy kind of heat had awakened between him and Ogata.
Saichi Sugimoto was not a complicated man. He has always known this about himself, had even been at peace with it. Complicated men tended to make everyone around them miserable, himself included—Ogata being the current exhibit. But uncomplicated didn't mean shallow. It meant he felt things cleanly and without much ceremony.
He felt now: suspicion, familiarity, anticipation. The particular baffled tenderness he'd developed against his better judgment, for lost things. The one that had reawakened upon Asirpa's entrance into his life. The sympathy of one stray to another. And underneath it, older and simpler, the hunger Ogata had named without permission.
They'd been walking for maybe a quarter of an hour, a little more, when Ogata stopped and looked back over his shoulder. Not at Sugimoto. Past him, toward the treeline, like he was checking angles, measuring every step down to the centimetre. The thing he always did, that habitual calculation, which never ceased for a moment. Then his gaze settled on Sugimoto with that flat, evaluating expression, but there was a flash of something in those eyes, the same deadly focus staring down the sights.
"You're doing something," Sugimoto said. "I don't know what it is yet."
"So are you."
"I know what I'm doing."
"Do you?"
Sugimoto's jaw tightened. "I want something. It's simple. There's nothing—" wrong was the word he stopped on, because it wasn't the right word, and he was honest enough to know it—"complicated about it."
"You want to be useful," Ogata said. Not unkindly, which was somehow worse than if he'd made it a weapon. "You want someone to need you. Not just the man with the bayonet."
Sugimoto said nothing for a long moment.
"You have no right."
Something crossed Ogata's face that might, on another man, have been the beginning of a smile. "I guess we'll have to see."
He turned and kept walking deeper into the woods, and Sugimoto—
Sugimoto followed.
Again.
The trees here swallowed sound. It was the same as last time, that particular quality of stillness that made you aware of your own breathing, your own footfalls. Ogata moved through it as if he belonged to it, that economy of motion that never changed regardless of circumstance. Sugimoto was louder. He'd always been louder. It had never bothered him before. They were far enough now that Shiraishi's voice was gone, that the smoke had thinned to nothing. Far enough that no one would come looking. Far enough that—
The thought slid home like the weight of a bolt.
Oh.
He's going to fuck me.
It wasn't a question. The realization, as it arrived, wasn't exactly a surprise. It was more like a fact presenting itself for inspection, the way you might notice storm clouds gathering on the horizon and understand what they meant without needing to be told. And he didn't need Asirpa to read these signs.
Sugimoto stopped walking.
Ogata stopped too, a few paces ahead, and looked back. Waiting.
"Here?" Sugimoto asked, and heard in his own voice something he hadn't intended—not nervousness, exactly, but an edge of uncertainty that annoyed him.
"Does it matter?"
It shouldn't. That was the thing. It shouldn't matter where or how or any of the logistics of it, because this wasn't—it wasn't about romance or tenderness or any of the soft machinery people wrapped around the act to make it mean something it didn't. This was practical. This was two men with a hunger neither of them wanted to name, making use of what was available.
Except.
Except Sugimoto had done this before—in the army, in the brutal shorthand economy of warmth for warmth—and it had never felt like this. Like he was walking into something with his eyes open and still couldn't see the shape of it. Like Ogata knew something Sugimoto didn't, and was waiting to see how long it would take him to figure it out.
"You're thinking too much," Ogata scoffed.
"I'm pretty sure you said I was an idiot who couldn't find a thought if it caught him and bit him on the ass," Sugimoto huffed.
"Idiots don't need to think. Besides, that was before."
"Before what?"
Ogata didn't answer. He just looked at him with those dark, unreadable eyes, and Sugimoto felt it again—that sense of being hunted. Not in the way enemies hunted each other, though that was there too. Something else. Something that lived in the space between the times Ogata watched him across the fire and the times Sugimoto caught himself watching back.
He thought about Mister Kikuta. About the smell of tobacco, sweat on the futon, the frayed tatami. His own eager gluttony. Grateful for any scraps, high on the steady stream of two square meals a day and a pillow where he could lie his head and a strong body welcoming him in its wordless embrace, and a name he could never shake. The wanton warmth of it had warped something inside him, had poured him from that bed to the barracks in less than a handful of days, and he'd never quite figured out what to do with that mistake since.
Was that what this was? Just—an old habit, well-worn and familiar, dressed up in the same uniform?
Or was it something worse?
Sugimoto looked at Ogata—really looked, the way he usually didn't let himself—and tried to parse what he saw. The scars along his jaw, faint as whisker-marks in certain lights. Fresh enough that he could still see the individual puckers where the stitches had pinched the skin shut. Scars Sugimoto had put there, that day outside Otaru when he'd nearly killed him. Should have killed him, probably, except Asirpa had begged him not to and Sugimoto had never been able to say no to her (not even then).
Ogata had fallen into the river and survived. Had clawed his way back. Had rejoined the hunt with a new alliance and those new scars on his face and that same flat expression, like nearly dying was just another piece of data to catalogue and file away.
And now here they were.
"I'm doing you a favour," Sugimoto heard himself say.
Ogata's eyebrow twitched. Almost imperceptible. "Is that what you're calling it?"
"You've got—" Sugimoto gestured vaguely, frustrated with himself for not having the words. "Hangups. About this kind of thing. I can tell."
"Can you."
"So I figure, if I—" He stopped. Started again. "It's easier this way. For you."
The silence that followed was so complete that Sugimoto could hear his own pulse in his ears, like the moments before one crested the ridge of a trench in a raid.
Then Ogata said, very quietly, "How considerate."
Something in his tone made Sugimoto's spine straighten. Not quite mockery. Not quite a threat. Something in between he couldn't name, that made him aware—suddenly, viscerally—that he'd just walked into the trap and the jaws were closing.
"Turn around," Ogata said.
And it wasn't a request.
Sugimoto should have said no. Should have laughed it off, made a joke, or some insult of it, walked back to camp and pretended this had never happened. He was good at that—at pretending things away until they stopped mattering.
But his body was already moving, already turning, and the truth of it was that he didn't want to say no. There was no explaining the want. No way to walk away. The hunger was there, simple and clean, and Sugimoto had never been good at denying himself something he wanted just because it was probably a bad idea.
He heard Ogata move behind him—quiet, deliberate—heard the rustle of fabric, the soft thump of something heavy hitting the ground. His cloak, probably. Then he put his hands on his hips, gloved and certain, turning him toward a fallen log.
"Here," Ogata said. "Brace yourself."
Sugimoto put his hands on the log. The bark was rough under his palms, cold and slightly damp. Real. Solid. He could feel his own heartbeat now, hard and fast, could feel the anticipation coiling in his gut like something with teeth.
This he understood. This he could do. The mechanics of it, the physicality, the simple transaction of bodies. He was good at this. Had always been good at using himself, at making his body useful in whatever way was needed.
Behind him, Ogata was quiet. Too quiet.
Sugimoto looked back over his shoulder and caught the expression on Ogata's face—there and gone in an instant, but unmistakable. The smug look of a man who had just gotten exactly what he wanted and was surprised to find it tasted like victory.
"What?" Sugimoto asked.
Ogata's hands tightened on his hips, bruising. "Nothing," he said. And then, almost as an afterthought: "Keep the cap on."
The request landed strange. Specific in a way that made Sugimoto's instincts prickle—the same instincts that made his hair raise on end, that had kept him alive through war and cannon fire, dozens of ambushes, and more than his fair share of fights. Like Ogata needed the cap there for a reason that had nothing to do with Sugimoto, and everything and nothing to do with the army they'd both left behind.
But there was no asking, no time to reply, not when Ogata's hands were already working his belt open, and the question dissolved into the simpler fact of what was about to happen.
The same taste. Like his mother's monkfish stew—craved and despised in equal measure, the thing you couldn't stop eating even as it turned your stomach. What is insanity but repeating the same action and expecting different results?
Ogata understood action. This he could control.
Sugimoto was already braced against the log, hands grasping bark, that ridiculous cap still on his head despite everything. The wrong colour coat with the right kind of boots. Excellent. The angle was right. The frame was right. Ogata could work with this.
He worked Sugimoto open with the same quick precision he brought to everything—the greasy slide of gun oil on his fingers, the give and clench of muscle, the small involuntary sounds Sugimoto tried and failed to muffle. It was always fascinating, this part. How even someone as loud and unsubtle as Sugimoto would try to quiet himself when it mattered, as if silence could preserve some dignity the act itself had already stripped away.
"Relax," Ogata said, not because he particularly cared about Sugimoto's comfort, but because tension made this harder and he wanted it to be easy. Wanted the fiction to hold.
Sugimoto huffed something that might have been a laugh. "Easy for you to say."
"Is it difficult for you?" The slide of it had been easy, and even easier, aided by the grease that was almost too indulgent. He should have used spit. Would next time. Waste was its own kind of failure.
"Shut up," the dog growled underneath him.
Ogata felt something twitch in his face, not quite a smile. He added a third finger and felt Sugimoto's whole body go taut, heard the sharp intake of breath.
"There," Ogata murmured, more to himself than his target. Found it. The spot that made Sugimoto's knees buckle slightly and his grip on the log turn white-knuckled.
"Damn—" Sugimoto's voice came out strangled. "Just get on with it."
Ogata withdrew his hand. Lined himself up.
The first push in was always the same—resistance, then give, then heat. Sugimoto made a sound low in his throat, something caught between pain and relief, and Ogata—
Ogata closed his eyes.
Better. This was better. Without looking, he could shape it into what he needed. Could imagine that the body under his hands was leaner, less scarred, untested by war. Could pretend the harsh breathing was something else, someone else. The cap helped. The angle helped. If he didn't look too closely, if he kept his eyes shut and focused on the sensation—
Yuusaku-dono.
The name he wouldn't speak. His brother. His legitimate, loved, pure little brother who had followed him to war with stars in his eyes and trust in his heart. Who had died with Ogata's bullet in him and never known, never suspected—
"Move," Sugimoto grunted. "What are you waiting for?"
Ogata's eyes snapped open.
Right. The Immortal. Another kind of wraith. Not Yuusaku. Never Yuusaku.
But the cap was still there. The frame was still right.
He could work with this.
Ogata pulled back and thrust in again, establishing rhythm. Deep and controlled, each movement calculated for maximum effect. He watched Sugimoto's shoulders tense, watched his head drop forward, the cap's brim casting that same shadow. Watched the way he was trying to stay upright, trying to maintain some semblance of control even as his body betrayed him with every push.
"I—damn it—" Sugimoto's voice was rough now, wavering. "I guess I wasn't the only one who was pent up."
Ogata didn't answer. He adjusted his angle slightly, hit that spot again, and was rewarded with a full-body shudder.
"There?" Ogata asked. Clinical. Detached.
"Fuck—yes—there—"
Good. This he could do. This he could control. If he made Sugimoto feel this, made him fall apart, made him need it—then what did that prove? That the pure could be corrupted? That even the legitimate sons born of love weren't so different from bastards like him when you stripped away the pretense?
That Yuusaku might have—
No. Don't think it. Just act.
Ogata gripped Sugimoto's hips harder, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, and increased his pace. The rhythm turned punishing, now deliberate, each thrust calculated to overwhelm. Sugimoto was making sounds now, couldn't help it—broken gasps and bitten off curses that echoed in the quiet of the woods.
"Wait—I'm—crap, I can't—"
Sugimoto's legs were shaking. Ogata could feel it, could feel the moment when braced became unsteady, when Sugimoto's weight started shifting wrong. His hands slipped on the bark.
"I've got you," Ogata heard himself say. The kind of thing a good older brother might say. The kind of thing the brat would have—should have eaten up readily.
And he did. One arm wrapped around Sugimoto's chest, holding him up, holding him together, while he continued the relentless rhythm with his hips. Sugimoto sagged into it, into him, all that strength suddenly dependent on Ogata's grip to stay upright.
Perfect. This was—
Sugimoto made a sound Ogata had never heard from him before. Desperate. Overwhelmed. Not the sound a man makes when he's stabbed, closer to the sound he makes when you withdraw the blade. Sugimoto's whole body went rigid, trembling, and then—
"Oh fuck—fuck—I'm—"
He came. Untouched. Just from this, just from being fucked, his cock spurting uselessly against the log while his body clenched and spasmed around Ogata.
Ogata froze.
That wasn't—that shouldn't—
It was revolting. It was fascinating. It was wrong somehow, this easy surrender, this complete loss of control. If Sugimoto—a man who wore love on his face like a uniform, a man who prostrated himself for love—could be reduced to this, then what did that say about purity? About the things his father had valued in Yuusaku and withheld from him?
Nothing good.
Nothing that could be examined in the gasping wounded aftershocks of the body beneath him.
"Fucking hell." Sugimoto panted. "Give me a—I need to breathe—"
But his body was still clenching, still oversensitive, and Ogata was still hard inside him, still chasing something he couldn't name.
"I'm not done," Ogata told him, and punctuated it with a roll of his hips.
He thrust again, and Sugimoto made a noise that was half-laugh, half-protest.
"Yeah, I—ah—I fucking noticed—" Another thrust, deeper, and Sugimoto's hands scrambled for purchase on the log. "Fuck, that's—too much— I just came, you bastard—"
"Then you should have waited."
"Oh, sure, let me just—oh—let me just ask my dick to—to have some damn patience—"
Despite himself, despite everything, something almost like amusement flickered through Ogata. Sugimoto couldn't help it. Even now, fucked open and oversensitive and completely at Ogata's mercy, he had to bite. He was a creature of habit, a dog that liked to snarl or growl, even when it begged to be stroked, some semblance of control.
It was almost endearing.
It was infuriating.
"Shut up," Ogata said.
"Make me."
Wrong thing to say.
Ogata pulled out—ignored Sugimoto's startled grunt—and pushed him down onto his knees. Sugimoto went, legs too shaky to resist, and looked up at him with those dark eyes, confused and still flushed, cap askew but still on.
"Open your mouth," Ogata said.
Understanding flickered across Sugimoto's face. Then something else—not quite resignation, not quite eagerness. Just acceptance. He opened his mouth.
Ogata pushed in.
Different angle now. Different context. But the cap was still there, and if he looked down at just the right slant, if he ignored the scars and the too broad shoulders and focused on the submission of it—
This is what you would have done. If I'd asked. If I'd needed. You would have said yes because you loved me.
The thought was poison. The thought was everything.
Ogata gripped Sugimoto's hair and fucked his mouth with the same ruthless precision he'd used before. Sugimoto took it—eyes watering, throat working, hands braced on Ogata's thighs but not pushing away. Taking it because that's what he did. Taking it because he was useful, because his body was useful, because this was the only language he knew how to speak.
"Good," Ogata heard himself murmur. "That's—good—"
Sugimoto's eyes flickered up at him—dark, present, knowing—and the fantasy cracked.
Not Yuusaku. Would never be Yuusaku. Just Sugimoto, with his scars and his stupid cap and his idiotic willingness to let Ogata use him like this over and over, because he thought—what? That it would bring them closer? That it would make Ogata more tolerable? That it meant something more than mutual self-destruction?
Ogata came with that thought, bitter and inevitable, spilling across Sugimoto's face because he couldn't help it, because that's where the cruelty led.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Ogata pulled back, tucked himself back into his fundoshi, hands as steady as if he'd taken a shot.
Sugimoto wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—smeared it really, made it worse—and looked up at Ogata with that expression. The one he got after a fight. Pleased with himself. A little feral.
Then he reached up, fisted Ogata's jacket, and pulled him down.
The kiss landed messy and wrong. Sugimoto's face was still wet, semen between their mouths, and his lips swollen from use. He kissed like he fought: direct, unsubtle, taking what he wanted without asking if it was offered. When his tongue pushed in brutish and demanding, Ogata tasted himself, tasted the whole degrading scene replayed in reverse, and froze.
This was worse than the sex.
During the sex, he could maintain it—the cap, the angle, the sounds muffled into something shapeless. He could keep the fiction running if he didn't look too closely, if he focused on the frame and not the picture. But a kiss required faces. Required looking. Required Sugimoto's scarred cheek under his hand, the faintest rasp of stubble, the stupid pleased hum in the back of his throat like this was good, like Ogata had given him something worth having.
Yuusaku had never kissed anyone. Yuusaku wouldn't have tasted like this—salt and bitterness and grease and something Ogata could detect but hardly name, something alive and present and unbearably real. Yuusaku wouldn't have grabbed him like this, possessive and careless. Yuusaku wouldn't have looked at him after, eyes dark and knowing under the brim of that damned cap, and grinned.
And for a moment—just a moment—Ogata kissed back. Closed his eyes and tried to make it work. As if he might still fool his senses, as he tried frantically to reshape Sugimoto's mouth into something younger, softer, more untested. Tried to imagine this was the right flavour of absolution.
It didn't work.
Sugimoto's kiss was too much—too present, too demanding, too alive. He kissed like he was trying to crawl into Ogata's mouth and drag something out, and Ogata couldn't—
He pulled back.
Not violently. There was nothing explosive about it. Just stillness. The absence of motion. Inert, the way a gun's mechanism stops when you remove the bolt.
Sugimoto blinked up at him, still holding his uniform jacket. "What?"
"Nothing." Ogata's voice came out flat. Controlled. Level. He extracted himself from Sugimoto's iron grip with the same measured efficiency he used for everything, adjusting his buttons. Evidence tidied. Composure reassembled.
Sugimoto watched him for a moment, then huffed something that must have been a laugh. "You're the one who just fucked me over a log and came on my face, but that's where you draw the line?"
"I didn't draw anything," he said, pushing his hair back.
"Could've fooled me." Sugimoto pushed himself up—legs still shaky, Ogata noted with distant satisfaction—and wiped his face more thoroughly this time with the inside of his sleeve. "You know, for someone who doesn't give a shit about anything, you sure have a lot of rules."
He didn't understand. Of course, he didn't understand. Sugimoto thought this was about propriety, about some arbitrary line between acceptable degradation and unacceptable intimacy. He thought Ogata was being fastidious, maybe even prudish in some backwards way.
He didn't understand that the kiss had worked. For the first time since this started, Ogata couldn't maintain the shape of the thing he was trying to hold. The ghost had flickered and failed, and all that was left was Sugimoto—scarred and real and looking at him like he'd won something.
"No rules," Ogata replied. He retrieved his rifle from where he'd propped it against a tree, checked it with automatic precision. "Just facts."
"Yeah? What facts are those?"
That you're not him. That you'll never be him. That I'm trying to fuck my way into understanding something that has no answer and you're stupid enough to let me.
"That we should get back," Ogata said instead. "Before Shiraishi starts looking."
Sugimoto snorted, adjusting his cap—that habitual tug, ears poking out beneath, and Ogata looked away. "Shiraishi won't look. You said that last time."
"And I was right."
"Pick something else to be right about, asshole. You're always right. It's unbearable."
There was no heat in it. If anything, Sugimoto sounded almost fond, which was worse than anger would have been. Anger Ogata understood. Anger had clean edges, clean trajectories. This (whatever this was) had no shape he could map.
He started walking. Sugimoto followed, because he always followed, because that was the trap and the joke and the thing neither of them would say aloud.
Behind him, Ogata heard Sugimoto spit into the underbrush, heard the crunch of his boots in the leaf litter. Heard him mutter something under his breath, more noise, the half-curse half-laughter that seemed to follow him everywhere.
The same taste.
His mother's monkfish stew.
Love isn't what makes you hungry. It's what feeds you, even when you don't have the stomach to swallow it.
Ogata's jaw clicked when he opened his mouth to say something—anything—and closed it again. The scars along his face ached in the cold. Sugimoto had put them there. Had nearly killed him. And here Ogata was, letting him close again, trading one kind of violence for another, and expecting different results.
What is insanity but repeating the same action and expecting different results?
Like a finger on a trigger.
He'd do it again.
He already knew he'd do it again.