Work Text:
There are stories told in the lowlands, where the roots whisper to the barley, and the roads are forged into the earth by weary feet and incessant time alike. Where heat lightning pricks across the atmosphere, birthing myth amongst pressurized destruction.
They speak of a kitsune that has long since fallen from favor.
Not the clever trickster of hearthside tales, nor the pale, golden gleaming guardian that blesses rice and rain.
This is something wiser. A nine-tailed creature of glut, loitering too long in places too human, until reverence soured into rot.
A corrupted thing. A yokai that wears the mask of a god.
It is said that the fox resides in the heart of the forest. And that the forest around its settlement evolves.
Paths constrict like arteries, trees grow into parapets, rivers pulse with wet rage, just to shrivel up dry and depleted when their purpose is served. Travelers who enter with ambition find themselves wandering. Most do not return.
The men who vanish are not spoken of.
The children who fall ill are.
They take fever without cause, burning through nights with glassy eyes and trembling limbs, coughing up vital ichor, mumbling words in a tongue none are versed in, frightening their mothers more than any malaise.
Some say it is the fox feeding on ripened souls.
Others say it is an omen, a punishment. That certain things are not to be approached, much less understood.
There are quieter warnings. Spoken only when the fire sputters and the darkness slips around ankles.
It does not hunt.
It listens.
When someone is foolish enough to speak their name, the forest remembers.
It need not touch flesh to devour.
It only needs to speak.
For the sound of one’s name through that bloodied maw thieves time. Some say days; others warn of years. Lifelines eroded with syllables.
The more you fear, the more it takes.
Until the only thing left to bear your name is a headstone.
And sometimes, though fewer will admit, there are sightings.
Not of a fox.
A figure walks the length of the forest at dusk, when the light decays and sepulchral shadows bend strangely. A woman, so it appears, with her long, midnight-satin hair playing in the air regardless of any wind. Her robes drag soundlessly behind her, though the ground is uneven. She leaves no trace of herself behind.
She does not look at those who claim to have seen her.
But when the moon is swollen and the snow mirrors the pearly glow, they say you can see it.
The kitsune’s eyes. The color of enlightened amethyst drowned in stardust. Deep and brilliant.
When you see them—
Your window of chance has already eclipsed.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
Satoru hears all of this before he even spies the forest.
Not in one telling. Never so precise.
It comes to him fractured, passed between hands like worn coin, each thumb pressing its own terror into the cut of it.
It gets worse when they realize he is not asking to be entertained.
“Do not go,” an innkeeper pleads.
Satoru sweeps past, a scarred hand lax on the hilt of his katana. “Keep my room vacant. I’ll return before the full moon.”
“You won’t,” someone else argues, face stricken green with fear.
Satoru smiles.
“Then let this be farewell.”
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
He reaches the threshold of the forest before the sun has properly risen over the mountain.
The sky is empty and pallid, sunlight reflecting from below, altitude unforgiving on the horizon. Mist sojourns across the topsoil, disordered around his quiet steps. There is a cleave between the wispy moisture and the disarrayed forest floor. No grand entrance. No stone engraved warning. Trees. An unsightly amount of them.
They watch as he approaches.
Satoru keeps a hand affixed around his blade, thumb nudging the tsuba, ridged design of the guard stamping into his skin. He steps forward, chin refusing to bow.
The grove does not accept him. It confiscates.
The outside world expires.
When Satoru glances back at where he entered from, there is only thicket, like he’s been walking for hours instead of a measly few paces.
He lures a sliver of his katana free, exorbitant metal of unsightly appetite, and continues walking.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
It is impossible, later, to track how long he has been moving.
Time stretches abnormally beneath the canopy. Light comes and goes without meaning, the sun reduced to fractured glimmers that never settle long enough to mark a passing hour. Paths narrow, then vanish entirely. Landmarks repeat.
He has learned, quickly, that direction is a suggestion at best.
He has also learned—
That he is not alone.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
The laughter appears first.
Soft, giddy, childlike.
Two origins, woven into one melody.
It echoes beyond reach, drifting between bark and shrub like a forgotten dream. The first time he heard it, Satoru followed, crashing amongst the thicket and hacking through scraggly vines.
The second time, he made no sound, stalking the treeline, counting each vibration.
Now he does not follow at all.
And so the test advances.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
He has seen them. When they allow him to.
A flash of movement between branches. Two tails where there should be none. Small bodies slipping just out of sight the moment he focuses too hard. Twin paws.
Children, from the meager size and the bounding energy they exude.
Foxes.
He does not follow them, either. For he knows what it means when they let themselves be seen.
It means that he was close.
It means he is not anymore.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
Satoru finally takes rest at the sight of a stream; the light dapples thin and gray with the illusion of morning.
He lowers himself to the bank with a discrete grunt, motion heavier than he intends. The substrate is damp beneath him, knees sinking into the mud as he cants himself forward. His hands part the running water, cool and crystalline, reflecting the green velarium above. He takes a much-needed drink, hands cupped with more attempt than water, wetting near everything but his gullet.
His stomach churns at the onslaught, empty and displeased with the offering.
He has not eaten in some time now.
His supplies ran out sooner than expected, having prepared ample nutrients for multiple days. When his pack carried crumbs in place of utility, he tore the seams from the fabric like the sinew from a hare, shredding it into swaths of cloth.
Used as marcation.
That is, if he ever saw one.
His stomach fluctuates again, crying out in the dead abyss.
Satoru drags a dirty hand through his hair, pushing it back from his face.
He’s seen plenty of game skittering through the underbrush.
Hunting would be simple. Efficient. His sword would be resheathed before the prey would fall lifeless to the ground.
He decides against it.
Better to starve than risk offending something that already puppets the warped forest around him. Better to remain a guest, however unwelcome, than an entrée.
Satoru laughs humorously at the thought, hauling himself upright.
If he ever finds the host, he is already their anticipated meal.
He’s half-turned to the water, sandals squelching in the mud, when he sees it.
A flicker of movement. Auburn fur. Deliberate energy.
Across the opposite bank.
“There you are,” Satoru croons, voice chaffed, unused. He smiles despite himself, just a crooked pull of his lips.
The little fox tumbles from the shadows without care, rolling languidly through the grass where the damp earth has softened. Her fur is neutral gold, copperized and sunbleached despite the darkness in the forest. She stands proudly against the backwash of muted greens and greys.
Unbothered. Unafraid.
Watching him while pretending not to be.
She always reveals herself first.
Satoru drops into a crouch again, closer to the slosh of the stream. He doesn’t dare cross it. She’ll flee. And Satoru would be even further off course.
“Where’s your little friend?” he calls, tilting his head as though addressing a child instead of a mischievous little critter that has led him in circles for days.
She continues to shimmy herself around, thumping onto her back, ears twitching, forearms stretching like an arrow.
He follows the point.
The other fox sits behind him, removed. Tucked within the hollow of a fallen log, small frame folded neatly into the crevice. She’s better suited for espionage, with her burnt chocolate fur and calculated patience. She lets him know she’s watching. Always.
Satoru knows now too that it is not stoicism but timidity that keeps her in the periphery.
“Mm. Shoulda known.”
Ahead of him. Behind him.
Never where he needs them to be.
The lighter one rises, shaking twigs and muck from her fur. She stretches with a yawn, takes a single step forward, and stops.
Satoru’s brows pull.
This is new.
They do not stop for him. They vanish. They mislead. They laugh and scatter and leave him grasping at absence.
They’ve never waited.
The darker one stays put. Her pupils rivet into narrow slits, studying the incursion in his hand.
Satoru looks down.
His katana. His fingers are still curled around the hilt, thumb transferring the insignia on the tsuba, metal half-bared from the lacquered casing. Reflex. A comfort he has not discharged since stepping into this enigma of a woodland.
“…Ah.”
He holds it tighter, measuring reactions.
The lighter fox shifts her weight, pulling back.
The final test.
Satoru’s jaw tightens. He loosens his grip.
The fox in front of him yips, spinning on her heels, tail wagging.
When he glances back, the dark-furred fox is gone.
Satoru frowns, scanning the clearing.
A bush rustles.
Satoru sees her beneath it. Flattened to the earth, foliage blanketing her spine, swallowed entirely by shadow.
Closer now.
Satoru forces a puff of air, fringe above his eyes blown askew. Unpleasant recognition swirls in his gut.
He hates that he’s even considering it, digits flexing over the guard, jaw working up tension in his gums.
“Tch.”
The weapon is extracted, trained movements that fail to even crease the fabric of his tunic, the purposeful sound of an owl’s flight, silent and deadly.
The steel starves.
Satoru observes the disappearance through the refracted surface, little foxes evanescing even faster than he can draw his blade.
Impressive.
He does not smile.
The blade hums faintly in his grasp, unsated.
For a moment, Satoru watches the water instead of the forest, conjuring furry reflections in nomadic glass, letting their memory of movement dissolve in the current.
His face buckles.
Annoyance.
Not at them, but at himself.
He did not come here to consort with foxes.
Well—
Not the lesser kind.
His hand still hasn’t lowered the blade. Satoru clicks his tongue.
“Right,” he mutters, voice gone flat.
Test failed.
He stands there a moment longer than necessary, katana still drawn, cutting a clean, foreign line through the quiet of the clearing.
His stomach, the damned thing, grumbles again.
Surrender.
Just for now. Before his organs cannibalize.
He sheathes the katana, deftly unfastening it from his belt. Stalking backward, he sets the sword in the same concave log the second fox had resided in moments before.
His fingers trail along the edge of it as he pulls back, expecting it to vanish when he ceases possession.
It stays.
Satoru does not.
They are both positioned on the opposite riverbank. The lighter one stands at the water’s edge, tail swaying in slow, coaxing arcs. The darker one sits at her posterior, partially shadowed per usual, but not hidden. Not this time.
They are waiting.
Satoru knows this is his last opportunity.
He steps into the stream, water climbing his ankles like morphless chains, mud shifting dangerously beneath his sandals. When he scales the opposite bank, it feels as though he’s crossed something of status. Something he cannot revoke. Something that already stains him.
Satoru forges onward, guided by couriers who, for once, do not disappear.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
The twin foxes are light on their feet. Quicker than expected, almost too fast for Satoru to track.
They aren’t bound to the world in the same vein as he is. They pass underbrush that gnaws at Satoru’s feet. Slip between trunks, over roots, through brambles that should prickle and slow—none of it deters them.
Edges of the forest leak around their bodies, obscured, vague.
They don’t belong here.
Good. Something Satoru can trust, now naked without the drapery of steel at his waist.
His hand flicks beneath his haori, thumb confirming the weight stashed behind his back.
A dagger. Compact. Inconspicuous. Wielded for mitigation in case risk adapts.
It’s dirtier this way.
But it’ll have to do.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
It isn’t a straight path.
They weave, double back, and slip from sight.
When they slink elsewhere, they draw his attention with a sharp, lilting chirp. He pivots left. Then right. Then somewhere behind him entirely.
They never leave for long. Every time he adjusts, they are there. Closer. Further. Flanking him. Creeping at his heels.
Leading or misleading, Satoru cannot tell which.
And soon enough, he’s thrust into what he feared.
He loses them entirely, foliage dense and choking, thick, muggy air doused in wrongness. No laughter. No movement. No paws.
Then, a warble.
Satoru whips around.
The world breaks open.
The forest gives way all at once, unnaturally so. Like a curtain has been pulled aside.
Set impossibly within the confines of a place that refuses axiom, stands a shrine. Ancient. Pristine. Unblemished by erosion that banquets the proximate wood.
Torii gates rise in succession, vermilion bathed in winding ivy, green-leafed hands extended to the sky in praise. Their pillars stand straight despite the years, lacquer unbroken where it should have long since peeled.
Within, a courtyard chiseled clean from the wilderness. Stone worn smooth, untarnished by moss that should have webbed itself between each crack.
A higher inlay of stone amounts to a border, enclosing the dregs of water that spills in a wide cascade from a jagged cliff, striking the basin below with a thunder that is engulfed before it can truly echo.
And further still, beyond the innermost gate, is the temple, lavish and poised.
Satoru’s body fails to react, stupefied. He absorbs with bated breath.
“Hah…”
It leaves him with a quiet impulse.
So it does exist.
When he breaches the first torii, his presence is announced.
Bells. Ringing from nowhere. No woven rope or shrine maidens orchestrating the sound, no true source.
Just the resonant chime of a malignant welcome.
Satoru stills, eyes searching for his objective. When he finds nothing, he casts a glance over his shoulder.
Equivalency.
The foxes are gone.
The bells follow in their attendance, dying the moment he crosses the inner sanctum, no echoing reverberance to salute the sound.
Silence, infringed by the pad of his stride.
The courtyard whispers but does not resist him.
His hand curls uselessly at his side, grasping at emptiness.
The waterfall roars louder, violently flogging at stone, dispersed in vapor that agglutinates amongst the turbulence.
Satoru thinks his eyes have forsaken him.
A figure, at the far edge of the basin, blooms like an oasis. Sieved, dispersed, wavering in and out of actualization. Each blink warps the falsity, smeared by mist and piety.
Sight, here, has proven itself unreliable.
He lets the image stabilize.
Robes spill in a decadent disarray, silk slipping low across one shoulder, clinging only to a delicate waist, abandoning form there on out. Bronze skin glows in the permitted morning light; lustrous hair flows congruent to the falls pouring before them.
And fanned out across the stone—
Satoru’s breath catches.
Tails. Nine of them. Resting in quiet sprawl, their movement slow, languid, as though each one exists with its own resolve.
A hand slips to the dagger at his belt.
It should not look like this.
Nine tails, and none of them bear the splendor he was taught to expect. A kitsune like this, void of purity and stripped from divinity, is corrupted.
Cursed.
Satoru’s jaw flexes at the thought, the memory ignited from behind his eyes.
His fingers dawdle on the blade, impervious instruction burned into muscle that understands how to carry out delegation but not why it must.
He curses internally.
Hesitation had cost him once before. He would not afford it again.
Except that’s all he’s spending in this dreaded forest.
The kitsune stands as a statue, unmoving, back turned. A second glance reveals the sprout of fox ears atop their dark hair, swiveled back, focusing on Satoru without disturbing posture.
Then, it speaks. The cadence of viscous honey spurting from the lips of a water lily.
“Tell me—if a man walks willingly into something that unravels him,” they begin, voice soft and contemplative, the thought having begun long before Satoru arrived, “does the fault line lie with the thing that devours…”
There is a pause.
“Or the man who wished to be undone?”
Satoru’s throat is thick with heat he refuses to discern. The blade advances, slipped from the annex of secrecy, adorned in his ruinous palm, unraised.
“Depends,” he answers steadily, “on whether or not it can consume the man.”
A quiet hum from the fox. “How interesting. You turn to challenge when presented with ambiguity.” Amusement colors their tone.
A strong profile emerges through the drifting mist.
Purple eyes, deep and beautiful. Intelligent to the degree of intrusion.
Satoru recalls the migrant doctrine the town lives and dies by. The apparition conceived under a starless sky. The woman with long, black hair and haunted eyes.
Here.
His stomach lurches. This isn’t—
“You were led here.”
Satoru swallows; twin foxes scurry around his memory. “I found my way.”
“Did you?”
The kitsune turns fully. Graceful. Terrible.
Beautiful.
He’s beautiful.
And Satoru is wholeheartedly unprepared.
“You carry intent like a wound,” he conveys, stepping down from the raised edifice around the waterfall, bare feet inaudible against wet stone. His purple eyes flirt down the line of Satoru’s arm, the limp dagger in his hand. “Poorly concealed. Poorly tended.”
Satoru does not release the blade. “Concealed or not, my intent will not wound my own flesh.”
The kitsune’s eyes linger, ignited with interest.
“Mm.” His tails perk up, a cryptic tapestry of sentient fibers. “Such conviction.”
A step closer, fabric ripples, slipping over stone and skin alike.
“And yet,” he murmurs, voice rich, “your hand trembles.”
“That is not fear,” Satoru rasps, tempering his vulnerability.
“No?” The kitsune’s eyes dilate. “Then what shall we call it?”
Another step. The mist swirls, following the progression, ebbing between breaths.
“Anticipation?”
Satoru’s teeth grind.
The kitsune’s eyes graze his face, sinking lower, tracing the column of his throat, the captured air inside his ribs.
“Indulge me once more,” he whispers. “If the words of men are to be taken as truth, how soon would the sow of ignorance reap ruin?”
“You speak like you already know the ending.”
The kitsune saunters closer, peering up at him through thick lashes. “I know many endings.” His eye teeth flash. “I am interested in which one you have come to pursue.”
Satoru doesn’t have an answer for him. None for himself either. The dagger suddenly feels futile.
The kitsune’s eyes drop to it again.
“Will you use it?”
Satoru stays frozen.
The kitsune closes the final bridge of distance between them, hair wisping across Satoru’s chest, ticklish if not for the covert plate of armor dressed beneath his tunic. The top of his head barely scales Satoru’s chin.
Cool fingers enclose his wrist. The dagger yields against better judgment.
“There it is,” he murmurs softly, a pleased breath heating the side of Satoru’s neck. His hand slides higher, feeling the limb fall slack. “Intent is such a fragile thing when rooted in suspicion.”
His other hand lifts. Finds Satoru’s jaw. Tilting him down.
Their noses kiss.
“For example,” he whispers, words containing a vast desert of intimacy, barren, sweltering, evaporating any splash of affection. “You have yet to answer me.”
Satoru’s lungs seize as those eyes hold his.
“What is it you seek?”
There are a dozen answers. None of them are honest.
“You.” His tongue darts over his dry lips, feigning for a taste of the mystic. “I’ve come for you.”
For the first time, the kitsune smiles. His eyes scrunch into closed crescents. “Careful.”
His thumb presses into the line of Satoru’s jaw, nurturing one of the many uneven scars hacked into his flesh.
“Men that speak like that lose more than they obtain.”
Satoru’s breathing is volatile. “I have nothing more to lose in this life.”
Delight cleaves obliquely at the symmetry of the kitsune’s face, teeth bared, pupils bursting against violet irises.
A second hand plants between his pecs, fingers tapping purposefully at the defense plastered there.
“Nothing to lose…” he repeats softly. “How sweet, he knows my rules, so now he wants to play.” His fingers work beneath the hem of his tunic, swiping across Satoru’s clavicle. “Naive boy.”
Satoru’s hand traps the kitsune’s wrist before it can travel further beneath the fabric. “I am not a boy,” he asserts, face flattened into cold discontent. “I know your price.”
For a moment, they hold like that. Pulse to pulse.
“And yet you stop me.”
Satoru’s grip tightens. “I said I have nothing to lose. That doesn’t mean I won’t give it freely.”
“You are in no place to make demands, my dear.” His wrist turns in Satoru’s hold, feeling the thrum of hunger escaping from his veins. “I’ll humor you just this once.”
An invitation. The very cusp of something he will never get back.
The dagger slips from his fingers, clattering against stone, ringing empty through the shrine.
Neither flinch at the sound.
“I said I wanted you,” Satoru says bluntly. “Your name. Give me your name and you shall have mine.”
The kitsune stills, consideration, not surprise.
“My name?”
A breath of kind mockery follows, laughter that rumbles. His fox ears twitch.
His hand drops from Satoru’s jaw to his throat, claws bejeweling his skin. “Trying to bargain with a god. That does not bode well for you.”
Satoru scoffs. “You are no god.”
His fingers dig into Satoru’s pulse, just enough to feel it falter. “And you are a fool.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Well, then,” the kitsune sighs, clawed finger scratching at Satoru’s jaw. “Suguru. You can call me Suguru.”
Both of their chests heave, intermingled breaths tasted.
“Your turn. Give me your name.”
Satoru dares to sneak contact, welding to the divot of Suguru’s small waist, obscured fabric bulging around his hand.
“How much will you take, Suguru?” he asks instead, the back of his neck prickling.
Suguru’s smile is feral, lips sneered in mischievous delight, eyes razor-sharp and gleeful. He molds to Satoru’s anterior, clasped hands imprisoned between their chests. He presses his mouth to the joint of Satoru’s jaw, just beside his earlobe.
“All of it.”
The waterfall is silent. The air is stagnant. Everything waits.
Satoru weaves his arm around Suguru’s waist, drawing him impossibly closer, eyes crimping shut.
He considers something.
Why?
The variegation is endless, a blistering garden of hesitancy, one he’s scorched time and time again, but the weeds are too obstinate.
He has felt death before.
Not as a looming specter, nor a stitch to be sewn into his own perishing soul.
Death has always been measured, administered by his own hand with a numbness once praised. For a long time, his blade never stuttered. A line of distance drawn, followed through with action.
Now, that steadiness has atrophied. And that must be corrected. Punishment, contradictory to the way lesser men understand it. Impossible fruition: sanctioned task placed into his palm.
A metaphorical rope. Apparatus for atonement or a noose for his throat. Its use is of his discretion.
Satoru has been hanging for a long time. He is ready to be laid to rest.
His lashes lift, pale gaze cutting through the closeness between them.
“Satoru.” His voice does not break, despite the resigned destruction in his bones. “Satoru Gojo.”
It is no longer his.
He feels the smile against his skin.
“Satoru,” he purrs, sucking on each syllable.
A whip to his spine, splintered. A clean strike, fleeting as soon as it hits, imagination tingling in his ribs.
Satoru sucks in a sharp breath.
The pain does not linger where it struck. It unravels.
Suguru hums again, pleased. “Satoru.”
Another lash, lighter this time.
Perhaps he’s already adjusting.
His hand breaks free from Satoru’s grasp, skipping up to cradle his face, both thumbs grazing the high points of his cheekbones with deceptive tenderness. He draws him down, foreheads meeting. Satoru shivers.
“You give so easily, my dear,” Suguru murmurs. Their lips touch, not a kiss, simply breathing against one another. “I wonder if that has always been your failing… or is this all for me, Satoru?”
The name rolls from him like liquor. Addictive, deleterious.
Satoru feels it this time. The hollow lack that follows the whip. Vitality siphoned from his heart, gone before he could claim it. A footprint pressed into wet sand, saltwater swarming the depletion.
His hands harass the silk obi at Suguru’s waist, gripping painfully. His brow twitches.
“You can feel it,” Suguru croons, arms looping around Satoru’s nape, hiking himself to the tips of his toes. “Tell me how it feels.”
Satoru shakes his head, panting.
Suguru’s cheek rests against his collarbone, locks of dark willow slip down his back, his fox ears smack against his chin.
“Such a beautiful name. It would be a shame not to savor it. Don’t you agree, Satoru?”
Another theft.
Suguru is glowing with it.
Satoru is already thinning. Still, he leans into it. But there is nothing to lean against.
Suguru pulls back abruptly.
Satoru panics, hands following, yanking at malleable silk, evaporating to mist when he catches it.
“S–Suguru—”
A laugh ghosts between them.
“Aht, you’ll spoil your appetite.”
His presence is fuzzing again, lapsing from reality.
“You came here with purpose,” Suguru continues softly, eyes vibrant, body slowly washing into nothingness. “Yet you squander it so quickly.”
Satoru steadies himself, hands fisted at his sides. “You’re the one indulging.”
“Am I?”
The mist thickens, encroaching.
“Then let us see,” he says, voice lilting, almost playful and gracefully cruel, “if you can find your way back to me once the forest remembers what it is made to do.”
Satoru stumbles forward. “Wait—Suguru—”
“Goodbye, Satoru.”
A masochistic parting gift.
And then the world ruptures.
Stone crumpling beneath his feet, debris erased by mist and blackened water, the air around him rips into a lacuna, the textured terrain rendered to liquified oblivion.
Satoru is falling—
—and very suddenly he isn’t.
Impact.
Oxygen is expelled from his lungs as he strikes the hardened earth, shoulder first, gravel perforating the fabric of his haori, right through his underlayers, and biting along skin. Reality returns all at once, sound, substance, consequence, a mountain saddling his spine. None of the translucent reprieve the shrine imparted.
He lies there, unable, or rather unwilling, to move.
It hurts.
Satoru draws a choked breath, fingernails clawing at the dirt.
“Shit.”
The forest looms behind him, silent, impenetrable. As if it never opened its clutch to such inferiority.
Satoru rolls onto his back, staring up at a sky that feels offensively ordinary. His hand presses to his sternum, holding what’s there. Mourning what is not.
“Suguru…” he rasps.
He pushes to his feet. Leaving what remains of himself inside the kitsune’s empty halls of mythology.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
Before Satoru even reaches the seedy little inn, the entire townlet bespeaks the vagrant corpse. An aposematic white halo of heralded death.
When he shoulders open the rickety wooden door, people already wait, horror petrified on their pallor faces.
The innkeeper drops the ceramic plate in her hands, shattering to the floor. “You—” Her voice falters, painful and cracking. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Satoru shrugs off the threshold dust, stepping inside as though nothing had transpired. Every eye in the lobby tracks his footing. “Is my room still available?”
A man rises to his feet; the chair he occupied topples over. “You went in,” he stammers, condemning hand pointing in Satoru’s direction. “We saw you go in.”
“And?” Satoru replies flatly, eyebrow twitching.
“You’ve been gone a fortnight.”
His tongue prods the inside of his cheek. “Have I?”
The gallery of flesh-framed morbidity paints stale.
“You didn’t…” the innkeeper whispers, wringing her shriveled hands together. “You didn’t give it your name, did you?”
Every breath holds tight.
Satoru’s gaze drifts.
Not to her. To nothing. To the empty weight at his hip and the cavern in his chest.
To the memory of regal amethyst eyes and a voice that kissed his name with utmost devotion.
“…No,” he says quietly, turning away from them.
It’s no lie.
The name no longer belongs to him.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
The inner sanctum of the shrine is thick with refined occupation. Air warm and sweet from smoke, incense leaking knowledge into the immutable dominion.
Satoru stills at the apex of the stairs, just before the mouth of the temple. He casts a glance back.
The foxes are already skipping away, a flurry of vibrancy. He watches them phase into the spilled mist of the falls. Gone from sight.
The emptiness at his hip demands substance; his hope of reuniting with the forgotten sword purges. A wish made on a delustory star.
Satoru supposes there is little such use for the blade now. Unless he seeks a catalyst for his fate. Blood drank from a golden goblet of theology tastes sweeter than that spilled by mortal steel, where it clots the soil, iron gone stagnant with insignificance. Only Suguru could spindle death into virtue.
He enters, footsteps lighter than he’s used to. The wooden floorbeams groan beneath his weight, muffled by parapets and papered walls; the distant hail of water striking the earth rumbles softly in his ears.
The temple corridors spread wide and dim, lantern light seeping along polished beams. Silk banners sail between rafters, pliable to a wind only appercipient to their lustrous tendrils. Every room he passes appears inhabited only moments prior, tea left steeping atop low tables, scrolls half-unfurled, incense smoldering in shallow ceramic bowls.
Yet there are no signs of life.
Satoru does not stop searching, nor does he call out Suguru’s name. The savor of his renown is no good without company.
A turn down another corridor reveals an open courtyard webbed in pale morning mist. Another opens into a chamber overtaken by flowers smiling through cracks in stone, petals fat with impossible color despite the absence of sunlight. Somewhere deeper within the shrine, furin chimes chant dulcet hymns.
The temple is endless, or perhaps deliberately rearranged around what is not intended to enter. Satoru understands that the structure is alive in the same manner as the forest.
Everything here bows to the same sharp-eyed entity.
He navigates deeper into the sanctum, narcotic smoke thickening with each step, stinging his eyes and filling his lungs.
A room opens before him, a hollowed atrium at the core of the temple’s devout circulation. Quartz rises at its center in a broad dais; gauzy, translucent fabric smothers the smooth stone, dripping to the floor in a heap. Candles gutter low in their dishes, illuminating gold leaf and old prayer markings carved into the surrounding walls.
And there, cradled atop the effulgent altar, lounges Suguru.
He lies with his back arched against the stone, eyes closed, awake despite the display. One arm extends above his head, resting in the inky river of his opulent hair, outstretched and curling around his ears. The other hand hangs loose off the platform, elegant fingers balancing a long-necked kiseru pipe. The stem rests against his knuckles like an extension of them, smoke pulsing ribbons from the glowing ember at its end.
His kimono folds open carelessly. Cream fabric pooling around the appealing spread of his bronze legs—knees bent, thighs bulging, decadent exposure among candlelight, barely preserving modesty. His tails bosom beneath him, some slinking up the wedge of his legs.
Satoru pauses at the threshold.
Suguru’s eyes remain closed, although his fox ears atop his head swivel in acknowledgment. The pipe-burdened hand rises unhurriedly, brought to his mouth and inhaled. Hazy gray halos puff from his lips.
“Satoru.”
The sound of his name tempts through the chamber, leather coiling around skin.
A small ache answers instantly beneath Satoru’s ribs.
Suguru smiles around the mouthpiece, rolling fluidly to his side, head resting on his still outstretching arm, hip swollen against the narrow divot of his waist. More of his kimono falls free, unveiling regal collarbones and pert, fawn-colored nipples.
“Long time no see.”
Only then do his eyes open. Amethyst glimmers through smoke, seductive and superior in knowledge. They slide over Satoru without urgency, taking him apart piece by piece with leisurely appreciation. Satoru feels biopsied down to the marrow.
Two of Suguru’s tails convulse behind him.
“You returned far sooner than I anticipated, dear,” he murmurs, licking his teeth. “Should I be honored, or concerned for your lack of self-preservation?”
Satoru’s knuckles clench. “You told me to find you again.”
“And you obeyed,” Suguru hums. “How dangerous.” He presses his right leg against the altar, spread over its contralateral limb. The movement parts his robes further, teeth flashing where he bites the pipe. His hand skis the near aggressive altitudes of his body, caressing the canyon between his propped hip and waist.
Satoru feels something stir in his body, lower than where Suguru’s abstract typically purloins.
His blood flows south.
Suguru’s eyes droop, predatory and beautiful. “I am in a mood today.”
“When are you not?” Satoru replies, voice lazy.
Suguru chuckles lightly, removing the pipe from his lips. “I concede to that.” He melts, twisting onto his back once more, pipe forgotten. Both hands travel up and down the length of his body, thumb flicking the hardened bud of his nipple.
“Tell me again what it is you came here for.”
“You,” Satoru answers simply, moving closer, erection twitching at the sight. “I came for you, Suguru.”
A moan, airy, and not at all honest. “You amuse me.”
“How so?”
Suguru’s fingers work apart the knot in his kimono, body bare underneath. His thighs are clenched too tightly to properly view what gem he hides between.
“You are pure.”
It is not a question. Of course not. A being all-powerful and all-knowing such as this beauty need not question anything that falls into the palm of his outstretched hand.
Satoru’s mouth purses in disdain, suddenly unable to watch the kitsune without burning red, virginal shyness summoned. “Why is that amusing?” he snaps.
Suguru’s lashes lift slowly, considering him like one might admire a ceremonial blade still pristine from disuse. “You are embarrassed,” he realizes aloud, smile deepening.
Satoru’s expression hardens. “There is nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“No?” Suguru’s ankles cross together. “A man grown, armored in reputation and discipline alike, yet untouched.” His eyes drift pointedly down Satoru’s body. “I admit I am surprised.”
“I’ve had better things to do than waste my coin in brothels,” Satoru scoffs.
At that, Suguru laughs properly. “You think that is what I mean?” He stretches out, casual and cat-like. “I do not speak of rutting behind paper shoji with trembling girls taught how to sit pretty and praise mediocrity.” His eyes glint. “You came to a creature that feeds upon devotion itself. Did you think I would not notice the way your body starves?”
Heat creeps viciously up Satoru’s neck.
Annoying.
Because the fox is right.
Suguru sighs theatrically, rolling his head against the stone. “And you are terribly unfortunate.” His manicured fingers trace down his thorax. “I am not gentle. I do not soothe nerves or coddle uncertainty. I am a greedy lover, Satoru. Everything that is mine serves me.”
Satoru’s stomach tightens.
“I like attention,” Suguru continues, voice honeyed smooth. “Touch. Worship. I want hands on me before they think to touch themselves. I want mouths that know better than to speak before they’ve learned how to use their tongues properly between my legs.”
Satoru salivates at the mention of what he’s hiding there between his thighs, eyes half-lidded and hungry.
Suguru isn’t even looking at him any longer.
“You should leave before you mistake infatuation with preparedness.”
Satoru sees the curve of his cheekbone, face turned away as he tries to hide his smile.
Stupid, conniving little minx. Provoking him on purpose, instigating hesitation, waiting for retreat. For the embarrassed flush to swallow him whole and send him stumbling back through the grove like every other fool who wandered into this shrine with an appetite for suicidal revelation.
Satoru’s pride bristles at that comparison. “Keep smiling like that,” he says darkly, erasing the distance in a few eager strides. “I’ll give you something worthwhile to gloat about.”
Suguru’s smirk is ferocious, quirking a brow. He lifts a dainty ankle, pressing the sole of his foot against the tented fabric over Satoru’s erection. “Ah. I see where you keep that big ego of yours.”
Satoru captures him by the ankle before another word can be spun into silken mockery. The kitsune huffs a soft sound of surprise as he’s dragged against the smooth stone, closer to Satoru’s towering form. His tails flick angrily.
“Impatient.”
“You talk too much.”
“Pity,” Suguru pouts dramatically. “I do adore the sound of my own vo—”
The rest is yanked from his lips in a fractured gasp.
Satoru moves without warning, broad hands locking around Suguru’s thighs and wrenching them apart against the stone dais.
And, Gods, the sight has Satoru groaning.
Blushed folds fluttering open in invitation, already wet with arousal, proof that his teasing has not been one-sided. A patch of dark hair tufts from his lower navel, delicious against honey skin pulsing with heat. A pussy, lovely and glimmering and so terribly enticing.
Suguru spreads beneath him like a desecrated deity, entirely too beautiful for this realm. His kimono creases, abandoned beneath his strong body, curves rippling with dense muscle.
Satoru forgets how to breathe.
“Have you bitten off more than you can chew, Satoru?” the kitsune taunts in a purr, arching himself obscenely. “Poor thing.”
Satoru flattens his forearm along his midriff, immobilizing him further. “Shut up.”
“Mm.” Suguru’s tail, one of them, curls around his bicep. “There’s that temper again. Tch.”
Satoru descends before the fox can continue tormenting him.
Hot breath ghosts against the sensitive flesh of his hip, relishing in the shiver Suguru gives him. Satoru’s nose traces illegible patterns along the bone; his mouth, clumsy and inept, offers more spit than kiss. He moves on instinct instead of confidence, wide palms gripping the back of Suguru’s thighs, shoulders forcing them further apart while his tongue drags experimentally at the seam of his cunt.
“Oh…”
Satoru glances up through pale lashes, expression sharp despite the flush crawling over his face. “Suguru,” he calls, kissing the dripping entrance briefly, “tell me.”
“Hmm?”
He presses his mouth closer, sucking whatever part of him he finds first.
“Tell me how to please you.”
The sound Suguru makes is wrecked, fingers burying themselves in white strands, claws scraping against scalp. “Gods, you ask so sweetly for—”
Satoru’s tongue dives inside of him before the taunt can finish forming.
Suguru jolts. “Yes—fuck, yes!”
He learns quickly.
He hums against the slick folds of Suguru’s worked-open cunt, drinking up every surge of enjoyment and bitten-back moan with frightening focus, knuckles white, folding Suguru’s body in half, and growling each time he tries to clamp his thighs together. He’s messy about it, jaw hinged wide enough to ache, tongue plowing sloppily into the channel of wetness. Suguru’s back curls off the stone, hands scrambling along the vast horizon of Satoru’s shoulders.
“Satoru!”
His voice strikes like a lash to exposed nerves. Pain blazes up his spine, but his body cannot distinguish the theft anymore. Not with Suguru gushing into his mouth, shuddering and moaning his name like prayer.
Satoru moans into him, rutting into the cold surface of the platform he kneels at.
The vibration tears a cry from Suguru’s throat. “Hnng, yes,” he pants, chest heaving. “Keep going—ah, Satoru—Satoru!”
Satoru’s trousers are wet with precum. He ignores it. He wants to hear Suguru make that sound again.
Suguru’s clawed hand cards through his hair, skimming down the strong ridge of his nose, smearing through his folds. He taps lightly at his clit.
“Here,” he croons breathlessly, leaning over to watch the point of connection. “Put your tongue to work here, darling. I want your fingers inside—ah, hng.” His sentence dissolves in syrupy bliss, whining when Satoru complies, licking ravenously at his clit. “Good boy, Satoru.”
The hurt inflicts action; two calloused fingers sink down to the knuckles, his cunt clenches around the obtrusion.
He works up a rhythm, following the wordless clues Suguru’s perspirated body forfeits. His composure deteriorates rapidly after that. Thighs trembling violently where they’ve been repositioned around Satoru’s bobbing head, fingers defiling his white hair. His tails are no longer enlightened appendages of his prophecy, thrashing wildly beneath his squirming body, tangled in his robes and hair as pleasure overtakes him in brutal waves.
“Satoru,” he whines, needier than he’s ever sounded.
The siphon steals more for it. Satoru’s vision blackens for half a second. His wrist is beginning to cramp; his cock is about to burst. He does not stop.
After a handful more keens of his name, does Suguru notice, breath catching behind his teeth. “Greedy thing.”
He fucks another finger into his swollen pussy.
Suguru convulses. Orgasm ravages through him so intensely he recoils, folding in on himself while simultaneously dragging Satoru closer to the heat. Loud, broken moans spill endlessly from his mouth. The shrine is doused with them, wet and shameless and echoing against ancient stone.
Still, Satoru does not stop, licking and sucking at his twitching clit, sweet relief stinging into moist torture.
Suguru’s body jerks helplessly beneath him. “Satoru—hah—wait—”
Another lash of stolen vitality. Satoru groans at the sting, dizzy from it now, hips grinding unconsciously against the platform. The pain is changing. Or perhaps he is.
Suguru writhes, humping himself against the cleft of Satoru’s nose, licked down to raw sensation. “Satoru—ah!”
The pain blooms hotter this time, sending overwhelming stimulants straight to his weeping cock. His orgasm blindsides him, coming in his pants and grinding against the unvarnished stone. Satoru shudders through it, biting into the soft fat of Suguru’s upper thigh, fingers still pistoning inside. He’s so drunk off lust that the affliction is confused for affection. His suffering decoys want, starving for anything and everything Suguru chooses to take.
“More,” Suguru pleads, ears flattened against his head. “Again—”
Maybe Satoru isn’t the only thing starving.
He brings Suguru to another potent orgasm. Then another. Until the kitsune is screaming out moans and smacking his fist weakly against Satoru’s shoulder. He writhes beautifully in his excess, dark skin slick with sweat and blushed pink, chest spasming as though each inhale must be stolen back from drowning. His tails swish against the altar, trembling with waning pleasure.
“Satoru…” he whines again.
Satoru finally slows, lips easing from Suguru’s twitching clit, overworked and angry. He pulls his fingers out gradually, careful not to jostle his already shivering body. Wetness glistens on his hand as he pulls away, down his wrist, sticky along his jaw and mouth. Suguru’s thighs are even worse, caked thick with sweat and moisture, glistening in the candlelight. He makes no attempt to close them, clearly relishing in the feeling of being put on display.
Satoru feels his dick perk back to life at the sight.
“Fuck…” he rasps, tongue running along the back of his teeth. “How’s that for a debut performance?”
Suguru’s eyes have nearly rolled into the back of his skull, saliva pooling in his mouth as he heaves. “You—” he gasps, wetting his lips. “You lack refinement; your technique is sloppy,” his legs raise, knees drawn up to his chest, doing little to hide the obscenity Satoru made between his thighs, “though I suppose enthusiasm has its charms.”
Satoru scoffs, hand drifting to his crotch to palm over his erection. He grimaces at the state of his trousers. “Bullshit.”
“Have I struck a nerve?”
“Nah,” he grins ferally. “But I have.”
Satoru grinds his thumb across the puffy folds presented to him, bulging from the cinch of his legs. His thumbnail scrapes harshly on Suguru’s clit, irritating stimulation that causes Suguru to yelp and scramble away.
Satoru doesn’t let him recover. His grip is already there, confining him to more pleasure instead of allowing relief to be confused for control. Suguru makes a broken sound, pelvis bucking against the pressure, up, down, up, down, unable to properly resist the fiery touch, nerves white-hot and singing beneath his flesh.
“Hah—ngh—stop—” Suguru tries, but it tears apart when Satoru rolls the little bud in his fingertips with little care for dexterity. It makes no difference; Suguru’s too far gone, saliva dripping down his chin, tails thwacking around his arched form, eyes screwed shut as each reaction is embezzled from his deteriorated composure.
Satoru clicks his tongue. “C’mon, don’t get all shy now.” Three of his fingers plunge back inside, sinking right down to the final knuckles, squelching wet and warm. He curls them up, wiggling around, seeking the spongy sweetness nestled inside. When he slides past it, Suguru whines high in his throat, mouth dropping open and head thunking back against the altar. His pussy clenches so tight Satoru’s circulation is threatened. “You gonna take my cock this good? Huh, Suguru?”
“Sa—Satoru! Hnngg—I—please—!”
Satoru groans, jaw tightening from the pain flaring in his stomach. He’s still fully clothed, fabric clinging uncomfortably to the planes of his abdomen and cinching at the joints. His dick weeps where it’s confined, oozing more ambition, groin darkened and tented.
“What? Don’t tell me I’ve fucked you brain dead already?” He spits lewdly onto Suguru’s already drenched hole, flexing wide around the digits pumping inside. “Dumb slut. Guess that means I can enjoy myself now.”
Unannounced, he slips his fingers from the tight channel, taking with him a stringy web of slick stretched from the part of his folds. Suguru hiccups a whine; his hole gapes around emptiness. The sudden concession of intensity tips his brain off its axis, pretty eyes brimming with unshed tears.
Looking at him, Satoru feels his heart clench for an entirely new reason. He hadn’t expected this.
He knows Suguru is beautiful. Hell, a blind man could wax poetic about the myth basking before him; his voice like ambrosia, supple flesh bathed in the sleek river of his dark hair, so divine he transcends devastation.
But like this, plucked from the renown of his Delphic throne, trembling from Satoru’s tongue alone, Suguru looks like his. Satoru wants him to be. A fatal wish.
Good thing Satoru’s a condemned man.
Suguru swallows thickly, lashes sticking together from moisture. His cunt flexes helplessly around nothing, still trying to hold onto Satoru’s abandonment. He looks confused by the absence, fox ears flattened slightly as if his nerves are still waiting for the next wave to strike. “Satoru…”
Satoru exhales through his nose, expelling the throb. He drags his slick-stained hand down Suguru’s thigh, strong muscles jumping in his palm. “Look at you,” he murmurs, voice rough. “You gonna let me use that pretty mouth now? Or do you still have proverbs to recite for me?”
Suguru gives a faint glare that loses cohesion halfway to completion. It only makes him look prettier.
Satoru is so hard it’s suffocating.
“Get up.”
Suguru barely moves. His head cants sideways, huffing petulantly.
Satoru heaves himself up, towering over the other man. His head spins, dizzy from the sponge of blood and lust throbbing at his groin. “Get up,” he orders again.
A faint noise from Suguru. Annoyance, that is if he possessed the coordination for it at this time.
Satoru’s too impatient—and more importantly, aroused—to wait. His fist knots into dark hair at the crown of Suguru’s head, tugging at him. Suguru hisses, skittering off his back, following the prickling tension. Satoru releases him for all of two seconds before entangling his fingers into the roots at the base of his skull, gathering the heavy rope of it around his hand before really hauling him upright. Suguru gasps sharply, those gorgeous tears boiling over. His knees buckle as he’s dragged up and off the altar, pliant hands gripping Satoru for balance.
“There you go,” Satoru praises darkly. He sits on the edge of the dais with a grunt, legs spreading. Then he manhandles Suguru down between them, fist still locked in his hair.
Suguru lands on his hands and knees with a thunk, a fissure forms along his browline. Satoru presses it smooth with a calloused thumb.
For a moment, they both sit there, staring. Suguru blinks dazedly, breathing heavily against Satoru’s groin, tear-tracked cheeks pink, lips swollen from all the sounds Satoru has pulled from them.
Satoru swipes idly at his eye, blood roaring in his ears. He reaches for the ties at his waist, jittery, apparent in his struggle, shoving at fabric just enough to free his cock. It springs awake, hot and heady, slapping against Satoru’s stomach, causing him to hiss through his gritted teeth.
Suguru’s eyes swelter with lust, drifting down the massive length of it, captivated by the pulse of the many prominent veins. His throat bobs. “…Compensating for something?”
Satoru barks a laugh. “That mouth’s getting brave again.”
“It never stopped.” Suguru tilts his head, cheek squished to Satoru’s thigh, peering up at him. “Larger than I expected, dear.” His lashes flutter sweetly. “Does all the blood leave your brain when you get hard?”
Satoru grips his jaw at once, forcing his lips into a pucker. “Careful,” he warns, grin sharp. “You’re in a very disrespectable position right now.”
Suguru hums around the pressure, entirely unbothered. “Do you plan to do something about it, Satoru?”
Satoru’s vision flashes red, subconsciously intrigued with the idea of striking the pretty thing right across the face, watching the pain bloom beneath the rain of salty tears.
He doesn’t want to damage the goods.
Maybe next time.
Satoru leans forward, fingers coaxing Suguru’s jaw apart. “Yeah. Gonna put that mouth of yours to use. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, whore? Open.”
Suguru obeys, glossy lips parted, pink tongue lolling out. Satoru groans at the sight.
All for him.
The thought alone has his cock shuddering.
“What a good slut,” he croons, voice eroded beyond recognition. “My good slut, hm?”
Suguru’s eyes narrow, annoyed and aroused in equal measure. He drops a kiss to the shaft before pulling back once more. He can’t go far; Satoru ensures so, knuckles white, callouses branded in Suguru’s generous extent of hair.
“Stay put.”
“I dare not dream otherwise.”
Satoru’s jaw clenches. He jerks himself once, too dry to be pleasurable, smearing precum from the reddened tip. He paints a pearly glaze across Suguru’s plush lips. “You keep provoking me like that and I’m gonna forget how pretty you are.”
The fox shivers. Opening up, his tongue sticks out again, cupping the head of Satoru’s dick like a moist pillow. “Empty threats. If you truly intended to punish me, you’d have done it by now.” His tongue swivels the slit with an excessive moan. “Aren’t you going to fuck my face, Satoru?”
The agony detonates in his core, stripping a gasp from his throat and a demanding throb through his groin.
“Oh, you stupid fucking fox.”
He thrusts forward abruptly, pushing the thick weight past Suguru’s lips in one rough glide. Suguru gags around the intrusion, throat convulsing, hands flying to Satoru’s knees. A garbled sound punches from his chest, fresh tears spill down his cheeks.
He’s not going to last.
Satoru groans so deeply he sounds possessed. “Fuck,” he breaths, one hand braced on the edge of the altar while the other snags harder in Suguru’s hair. He forces Suguru deeper, inch by inch, until his nose is flush to the pale trail of hair traveling Satoru’s navel. “That shuts you right up. Not much of an attitude now.”
Suguru glares up at him, eyes glassy and furious.
Satoru sends him a smirk. “Watch those fuckin’ teeth, sweetheart.” He drags him back slowly, cock sliding girthily over his tongue, leaving only the tip inside. Saliva glistens along the shaft, stretching and snapping between them. “Thought you’d have been better at this. Cockslut.”
Suguru speaks around the head of him. “I was s—”
Satoru shoves him back down, hard. Suguru sputters but doesn’t choke this time around, prepared for the forceful assault. He moans unabashedly, swallowing Satoru with ease.
“What’s wrong?” Satoru chides, degradingly jolting him from side to side by the hair. “Cock got your tongue?” He laughs madly at that.
Suguru’s claws dig into the meat of his thighs, breathing shallowly through his nose.
“That’s better. Much prettier when you’re full, Suguru.”
He starts using him properly after that. Guiding the pace solely through the grip on Suguru’s hair, pulling him down the length and holding him at the hilt all while driving his pelvis up into the heat. The wet sounds are utterly filthy, jumbled vibrations and slick suctioning echoes.
Suguru tries to keep up with it. That’s what undoes Satoru the most.
Even now, even trembling from overstimulation, cunt still oozing over the floorboards, throat raw from crying, Suguru still tries to please him. Hollowing his cheeks. Relaxing his jaw wider each time Satoru pushes deep enough to make his eyes roll. Slurping at the underside of the shaft with his tongue.
“Tastes good?” Satoru asks, watching spit bubble from the corner of his mouth, dribbling down his chin. “You seem to be enjoying yourself more than me.”
Suguru pulls back, rasping, “And if I am?”
Satoru orders him back down with a grunt, extending his legs for leverage to buck his hips forward, nudging past the tight clasp of his throat. “How many poor souls have you sucked dry through their cocks, hmm? Probably thousands.” He laughs mockingly, savoring the fleeting resistance. “I can imagine you at one of those brothels. Blowin’ anybody and everybody that walks through the damn doors. Fuck, your just pussy drooling for attention. D’ya let ’em use you, Suguru?”
Suguru makes a strained sound that might’ve been an insult.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Satoru mutters, almost conversational amidst the dishevelment in his tone. “What say you let me have a turn? Let me fuck that pretty little pussy with my big cock? You’d like that, wouldn’t ’ya?”
Suguru surges up for air, unlatching with a pop. The hefty mass of Satoru’s dick smacks him in the face, leaving a pearlescent streak of milky fluid across his cheekbone and sweaty bangs. He drinks a much-needed breath, then giggles, voice scraped raw from moaning and choking and every other indignity Satoru has fucked out of him.
“You,” Suguru rasps, pumping a loose hand around Satoru’s length, kissing what he can of the girth, “are perhaps the most perverse virgin I’ve ever encountered.”
“Perhaps?” Satoru echoes, running his fingernails gently over Suguru’s scalp. “Do I get a reward?”
“I think you’ve already capitalized your opportunity, dear.”
“But—”
Satoru halts him with movement. With visible effort, he lifts himself on trembling legs, using Satoru’s knees as leverage. His kimono, what’s survived of it, falls from his limbs, crashing around his ankles. For a moment he sways where he stands, battling for breath, tails slinking around his waist.
He wields the marque of beauty that men go to war for.
Suguru mounts the stone elevation, straddling Satoru’s thighs with his own, sitting atop Satoru’s spread lap. A moan emerges from both of them when Satoru’s cock brushes the heated center of him. He’s utterly soaked, no friction to keep him in place, slotting easily between his rosy lips. Suguru moans louder, rolling his hips languidly, the tip grazing against his needy clit.
Satoru takes hold of his dainty waist, bruising the slick skin as he forces Suguru to settle. The kitsune huffs, wrist flicking the sweat-adhered hair from his collarbone. With the same hand, he positions his palm to Satoru’s pectoral, coaxing him flat against the altar. He’s rearranged as well; the constricting belt around his waist orders him to follow suit.
“Is this my reward?” Satoru asks charismatically, waggling his eyebrows. “The ride of my life?”
Suguru’s claw taps at his sternum, right above the frantic hammering beneath bone. “It is not your anything. Have you forgotten?”
“Forgotten what?”
He wiggles his ass against Satoru’s thighs, leaning himself back, hands fondling the gentle swell of his chest. “Where my pleasure falls in comparison to yours.”
“Please,” Satoru scoffs, thumbs petting the jut of his hipbones. “You were just slobbering over yourself for a taste of my cock. Now, sit yourself down on it before—”
“Before what, Satoru?” the kitsune purrs, head tips back as he rocks along the hardened length between his folds. “Before you make me?”
The pain liquefies Satoru’s insides, melting him from the inside out. Salt cloys the back of his pallet, perspiration diffusing his perception. Satoru doesn’t realize he’s closed his eyes until candlelight floods his vision once more, until Suguru’s smiling teeth widen before his face, until—
Heat envelops him all at once, impossibly wet, impossibly welcoming.
So fucking tight.
Suguru’s mouth drops open around an airy keen as he sheathes him inside the eager clutch of his cunt seamlessly. Satoru is hilted in one fluid motion, so wet there’s no place for him to pause to catch his bearings. Strangled inside those constricting, velvety walls.
“Fuck,” Satoru grits out, skull knocking sharply against the stone. His nails barb into Suguru’s tan skin, holding him steady as he gives a tentative thrust, weak in his current position. “Fuck, yeah. You—mm—you’re so tight, shit. My dick’s gonna snap off, hah… Gotta relax, Suguru, c’mon. Be good for me and relax, pretty thing.”
Suguru shudders, fatigued already by the massive radius he’s tensed around. His core muscles are strained, thighs burning as he bears down, trying his best to inhale a sense of relaxation. His head falls, chin tucked to his chest, watching their consummation. “O–oh…”
The shrine falls strangely quiet around them.
They acclimate together, breathing rapidly for such little spend. Satoru snakes his hands around Suguru’s lithe waist, squeezing a palmful of that perky ass. He forces himself to stay still, although everything in him is screaming to disobey.
He wants Suguru to cave first.
“Hng,” Suguru whines, reaching back to plant his hands on Satoru’s thighs. “I don’t…” He pauses, choking on his own tongue. “I don’t often allow this.”
Satoru grunts out a questioning sound, too dazed from the crushing heat wrapped around his cock.
“Allow myself to be had.”
Something fierce and ugly and deeply satisfied blooms low in Satoru’s stomach. His hands soften without permission, stroking the divot of Suguru’s back, thumbs folding over the crease of his thighs.
“Lucky me.”
Suguru counters with a raise of his hips, sliding almost all the way off Satoru’s dick before taking him down to the base again. The glide is lethargic after everything Satoru has done to him, relishing in the aid of gravity, hips meeting with a damp clap that echoes through the room. Each rise leaves Satoru aching from the loss; each descent steals the breath from his lungs all over again.
Suguru chases the momentum, thighs shaking from excursion, moving himself as he sees fit. His tempo is less so formed than it is discovered, indulging in visceral pleasures, chasing the motions that make him feel best.
“Just like that,” Satoru praises, pressing on the taut skin of his tummy. “Keep going.”
Suguru complies with a drawn-out moan, riding Satoru with renewed fervor. His head lolls to one shoulder, baring his pulse, neck painted with sweat and damp tendrils. Satoru is hypnotized by his decadency, the breadth of his hips, the way his abdomen ripples as he drinks in lust-tainted air, the pendulum of his hair behind him. Higher yet, Satoru marvels at the nakedness of his expression. Heavenly stoicism extinct by hedonism, baser instincts taking the reins of grandeur. Siren eyes blown wide, brows scrunched, chin dripping with an abundance of bodily fluids: drool, tears, sweat, and the watered-down daub of precum.
He’s filthy.
Satoru can’t afford to miss a second of it. His hands roam impulsively, laying an illusory claim, meaningless the moment their candle of affairs is inevitably snuffed out. If Satoru burns himself badly enough, the smolder of it will remain long after the smoke dies in his lungs.
His hands slide up along Suguru’s body, climbing the slick sides of him. Satoru swears he feels Suguru’s ribs tremble. Sweat gleams amber in the candlelight, every inch of him warm and living and devastatingly real atop Satoru’s lap.
One of Suguru’s tails coils absently along Satoru’s forearm. Curious: Satoru snags his fingers into the thick fur and gives a trial of a tug.
Suguru startles. A sharp whimper sparks brokenly, body bucking hysterically, slipping himself right off Satoru’s throbbing cock. It plaps pathetically against Satoru’s abs, angry from the loss of Suguru’s delicious embrace. They both hiss out. A trickle of wetness spurs from Suguru’s fluttering hole, dripping onto the fabric of Satoru’s pants.
Sensitive.
Satoru stares up at him, a disbelieving, lopsided smile pulling across his face.
Suguru’s chest rises and falls rapidly, lashes fluttering as another involuntary twitch ripples through his tails. His expression flashes briefly with something almost embarrassed before dissolving back into hazy pleasure.
Interesting.
“That feel good?” Satoru grins out, unable to stop stroking along the disturbed fur.
Suguru shoots him a blistered glare, ruined by the way his lips wobble around a moan. “Don’t touch that,” he breathes weakly. The tail writhes harder in Satoru’s grasp but doesn’t move away.
Satoru laughs under his breath. His cock throbs against Suguru’s inner thigh, flushed dark and leaking steadily. He wraps a hand around the base, hissing at the relief of pressure. He gives it a few loose pumps, then grinds through the messy seam of Suguru’s cunt, gathering slick. He’s distracted by the feel of his shaft cradled by pink, heated folds.
He slaps the peak of Suguru’s clit with his tip. The kitsune yelps, partially thrown off balance. His hands shoot out, finding purchase on the wide span of Satoru’s chest, faces brought closer together.
“Sit down, sweetheart.”
Suguru does, spreading his legs wider as he realigns the two of them, blanketing himself on Satoru’s big chest. Satoru’s cock head angles to his entrance, swallowed greedily, bottoming out at once.
“Mm—fuck,” Suguru moans, forehead dropping to Satoru’s shoulder, hands splayed on his navel. He’s full to the brim, pussy spasming around the sheer size of him. “Oh, Gods… It’s—it’s so big.”
“You like it,” Satoru whispers into his hair, groping the fat swell of his ass. “Greedy pussy, taking me so well.” His palm claps against his ass, more surprising than painful. “C’mon, get back to work.”
“Ah—yes, ngh—yes, yes.”
Suguru begins to move again, but his stamina is hollowed out, too tired and trembling to ride him effectively. He settles for aborted little grinds along the chisel of Satoru’s cock, swiveling his hips back and forth, side to side. His clit bumps along Satoru’s navel, sending a full-bodied quiver through his skeleton, eyes rolling white. His simple movements lose even more coherence after that.
Satoru attempts to guide him by the waist into lifting up, but he whines so pitifully he forfeits. An open-mouth kiss is placed on his collarbone as thanks; Satoru moans unabashedly from it.
“How’s it feel, Suguru?”
Suguru can only nod.
Satoru guides him through it for a while longer, palms anchoring against his waist while Suguru rocks himself stupid on his cock. His arms wrap around Satoru’s neck, hiding his face in his throat as his energy dwindles. His cunt flutters with every exhausted breath, too needy to be on top any longer.
Satoru’s repose curdles into hunger all over again. His hands tighten. “I’ve got you.”
Suguru barely manages a retort before Satoru flips them. The world lurches violently. Suguru lands on his back against the altar with a flustered sound, tails crinkled beneath him, pussy empty and clenching. Satoru fills him again, driving back inside in one ruthless thrust, pelvis hitting him with crushing force. The kitsune wails.
There he is.
Satoru cages him beneath his body, bending one of Suguru’s thighs up and over his shoulder, holding the other flat to stone. He pistons into him hard enough to flicker the incense, dick carving all the right spots, dragging hot and heavy against Suguru’s vice-like walls. He’s quick to build up a pace that hurdles them right over the edge, uncaring of how rough he’s being.
Sweat flicks from white strands to Suguru’s face. The sounds are obscene; skin slapping against skin, slick suction, the helpless, strung-out cries Suguru can no longer bite back no matter how hard he tries.
Beneath it all, Satoru discerns that he’s making noise too. Deep growls and inarticulate rumbles, verging on feral. Every thrust has him snarling, visceral and loud, ricocheting through the already wild cacophony of their adultery. He’s never heard himself like this before. Never so unhinged, never this undone.
Never so hungry.
And Suguru takes him beautifully.
The stone along his spine is unforgiving; Satoru swears he feels the impact reverberating back through his bones when he plows into him, strength unbridled. Maybe he’d stop and think about curbing his excitement if Suguru wasn’t fucking himself on each of Satoru’s thrusts, arching and writing and begging him, “Please, Satoru, right there, right there—don’t stop!”
His body yields around Satoru like he was created for this exact purpose, foot flailing over Satoru’s shoulder, slick pouring endlessly from his cunt. Every thrust forces more of it free, coating Satoru’s pelvis, dripping down the curve of Suguru’s ass, smeared across the altar in translucent streaks. Satoru watches the glaze of it around his dick when he pulls out, even more of it glooping down their skin and Satoru’s tarnished pants, still stubbornly clinging on for the ride.
“So fucking wet,” Satoru hears himself rasp.
“Sa—ah—” The fox keens, head thrashing. “I’m—”
“Beautiful,” Satoru croons gruffly. “Y–you’re beautiful, Suguru. Prettiest fuckin’ thing I’ve ever seen. Gods, I’m close.” His palm presses to Suguru’s taut stomach, depressing the skin enough to feel his cock impaling him. “Can I? Suguru, can I come inside? Please. Please, I wanna fill you up.”
Suguru’s nails scribble blood-red scratches down his back. “Yes! Satoru, yes, inside!”
Pain thrives, an acute sting that chars the lining of Satoru’s throat. It’s a necessary evil, a temptress of seduction. Pain gives way to pleasure, engulfing his cognition.
The world narrows, halved into what is Suguru and what fails to be so. Nothing else survives.
Satoru drags Suguru higher against him, forcing his thigh further over his shoulder so he can reach deeper still. The new angle punches a scream from Suguru’s chest. There. Satoru hits it again and again without mercy.
“Sa—Satoru—ah—hahh—!”
Climax cresendos fast.
Suguru crashes first, orgasm downright destructive, screaming loud enough to shame the heavens. Constricting around Satoru’s cock with pressurized pulses, clamping so tight Satoru is forced to halt his movements. His body moves erratically, neck snapping from shoulder to shoulder, back bent, muscles calcified.
Satoru chases after him. A few more sloppy thrusts and he’s gone, spilling inside Suguru’s squeezing walls. He feels every spurt of come, cock throbbing as his orgasm washes over his brain. He’s delirious with it, groaning like some rabid animal, rutting up against Suguru as the pleasure ebbs and flows.
For a fleeting, impossible moment, he feels sanctified.
“You—mmh, came so much,” Suguru pants into the crook of his arm, thrown over his face, fingers twitching over his hair.
Satoru huffs out something of a laugh, hanging his head. “…Ah. Yeah.”
The post-orgasmic haze barely has time to settle before it’s gone again. It evaporates into the weight of Suguru in his arms.
He hikes himself up as he pulls out, watching the clenched objection of Suguru’s hole as he retreats, dick smeared in semen and stickiness. A bead of sweat rolls from his brow, stinging his eye. He ignores it, too preoccupied in the smear of white around the base of his dick as he drags another inch loose. Suguru gives a little moan, shuddering tighter around the remaining length still inside. His neck cranes, eyes trained on Satoru’s cock, the part of his folds around its girth.
He slips from Suguru’s hole, leaving him gaping around emptiness. The kitsune makes no attempt to close his legs, cunt flexing, recovering from Satoru’s rough treatment. A heavy glob of come spurts from his lips, down to his ass, before beading onto the dais. Suguru shivers at the feeling, biting his lip around another moan. After the initial wave, more floods free, white viscosity a stark contrast against his honey tan skin.
“Fuck…” Satoru pants, palm sliding up the inside of Suguru’s damp thigh.
Neither speaks while they catch their breaths.
Suguru blinks up at the ceiling, struggling to gather himself back into one coherent shape.
Satoru watches him. There’s a bruise to his chest. He moves before the wound can metastasize.
He crawls upward over Suguru’s body, sluggish. Broad hands settle beside Suguru’s head, barely holding himself upright. Their chests flatten together.
Suguru’s eyes half-lid lazily. “Insatiable.”
Satoru kisses him.
He’s not particularly good at it, worming his tongue inside Suguru’s shock-slackened mouth, lapping at his teeth and tongue with the same sloppy excitement he had used between his legs.
Suguru’s hand shoots to his chest, pushing flimsily, then falling limp with exhaustion.
Satoru feels it: his cessation of performance. He draws back only slightly, noses huddled, savoring the taste of him.
Suguru’s eyes are fuzzy with uncertainty. “Sa—” His teeth snag on his bottom lip, skin white where he bites, cutting himself off.
Satoru drops into another kiss, languid and warm, capturing his conjecture. When he pulls back, Suguru’s lips are still parted.
The shrine returns around them in slow increments. Sputtering candles, sweet smoke wafting through corridors, a distant birdsong through the cracked shoji. Their breathing gradually regulates.
Suguru’s fingers drift mindlessly against the nape of Satoru’s neck, pinky trailing the upper cartilage of his ear.
His gaze wanders over Suguru’s face once more, greedier somehow in the aftermath than during the act itself. The damp shine of his lashes. The flushed bridge of his nose. The inflammation of his bitten lips.
He stays hovering for longer than he should. Very carefully, he shifts himself beside the kitsune, lying on his side on the altar, admiring Suguru’s profile from there.
Their legs web together. One of Suguru’s tails runs across Satoru’s stomach, ticklish warmth.
Suguru doesn’t move away from it. If anything, he wiggles closer.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
Satoru returns the next day. And the next day, and the day after. So on and so forth.
The ritual is archived in his bones with humiliating ease. Ink he cannot see, yet it rules him all the same.
He rises before dawn, dressing in the waxy blue haze before sunlight properly crests the mountains. His armor is abandoned. Decorative plates of protection shed, left within the inn room until only his base layers remain, easier for traversing the woodland, easier for Suguru’s hands to push aside.
The patrons stop warning him. Stop objecting. After the first week, they stop meeting his eyes entirely.
Satoru returns beneath the grim silver of the moon, slipping through the rear window of his rented room to avoid the hush that follows him through the inn proper. He collapses onto the moth-eaten futon, still aching with phantom lashes beneath his skin, chest hollowed pleasantly raw, prior orgasm still buzzing, body exhausted in ways battle never managed.
Then morning comes. And he goes back. To the forest, which gradually stops resisting him. To Suguru, who greets him with growing compassion each passing day. As do the twinned companions.
The foxes wait for him openly now. Huddled together at the outskirts of the forest. The golden one yips and sprawls onto her back in the dirt the moment she spots him approaching through the mist. Her sister, a warm-toned shadow, brushes against the back of his ankles while they walk, no longer vanishing when he notices her.
Sometimes Satoru catches them sleeping together in shafts of sunlight near the shrine steps. Other times, they are perched atop the torii gates like smug little guardians, tails flicking. Once he caught them splashing around in the shallow water by the falls, chasing one another and tripping over their own feet.
Satoru remembers watching them with poorly concealed amusement, seated along the shrine engawa with his sleeves pushed to his elbows. It wasn’t their childlike whimsy that fixated him.
They cast no reflection.
Rather, the water’s surface was like a transparent mirror, warping the incorrect orbit in its possession.
Two little girls raced across the waves.
One with golden-straw colored hair, the other with deep chocolate locks, both sheared just below their chins. Small yukata sleeves fluttering. Twin irises dazzling. Bare feet striking clear water where paws should have been.
He blinked, and the image was gone, sunken by the swirling current.
He told himself it was just another one of the shrine’s aberrations. A trick of the light. A fissure between realms.
Stranger yet, Suguru never acknowledges them. Even when they circle him as he saunters through the courtyard. Or when they curl up in the loose fabric of his robes as he lounges in the gardens. The kitsune doesn’t even bat an eye when one chews at the end of his sash.
Again, he tells himself he’s reading too far into things. It seems daft to inquire Suguru about it. Especially with the nature of their relations. Though, he posits, that too is something beautifully factitious the forest deceives him with.
Every encounter transpires with voracious lust. He arrives at the shrine wild with anticipation, cock half-hard, and clothes askew from the route. His haori tumbling to his feet before greetings are properly exchanged; Suguru spreading languid beneath him, or rolling his hips sensually in Satoru’s lap, or, when the kitsune is feeling particularly generous, dropping to his knees and swallowing Satoru to the hilt.
The fox reads him easily, catabolizing that expertise into action. Exploitation, really.
He knows where to mouth at his throat to make Satoru lose his rhythm. Masters the particular cadence of degradation purred like praise. Calculates how long he can deny him before desperation overrides pride, before Satoru grabs a fistfull of that long hair and slams him into the closest wall, fucking him with rabid intensity.
And Satoru learns him just as fast.
The quiver in his thighs just before he comes. The constriction of charcoal tails when pleasure multiplies too fast. The fucked-out version of himself Satoru reduces him to, how to mold him into something akin to pliancy.
And the expression he wears afterward, seduction steeped out of him, finally tepid and satiated. Heavy-lidded and distant, like he woke from a dream only to discover himself lost outside of it.
Satoru finds himself entranced after the act has ended, lingering for a moment longer than acceptable.
Watching Suguru reclined boneless across rumpled sheets. Hair unbound. Bite marks flourish on sun-kissed skin. Sometimes he’ll instruct Satoru to open a window for him before he leaves; he likes feeling the breeze when he sleeps. Sometimes he orders in a raspy voice for Satoru to refold his stripped kimono, complaining about the savagery performed on the fine textile. Sometimes he catches Satoru by the wrist as he pulls his trousers back on, cheeks pink, eyes downcast.
Satoru slinks down with him, listening while he speaks in that velvet lilt about subjects he cares little about.
Because increasingly, it is not the shrine speaking that keeps him there.
It is Suguru.
And slowly, like the unnoticeable passage of clouds across the atmosphere, his name stops appearing on the lips he spends his afternoons ravaging.
Satoru only notices when the word is initiated in the throes of fluster. If he has Suguru on his hands and knees before him, wailing into a spit-soggy pillow, or when he’s folded in on himself, laughing at whatever crude joke Satoru had whispered into his ear.
Suguru bites it back each time. Stealing it before it can steal. Before another lashing can be driven from Satoru’s lifespan.
Now entire visits pass without hearing it once.
In turn, Suguru bestows him with new phrases of accord.
Darling. Dear. Insolent man.
And, quite possibly, worst of all—
“S-slow down, love…”
The plea crumbles into delirious rapture. Satoru’s rhythm falters for only a moment before he’s fucking into him harder, the harsh jut of his hipbones bruising Suguru’s own, sending him further across the floor. He doesn’t go far; Satoru seizes him by the wrists in one massive hand, pinned above his head as he drives forward again.
“What’s the matter, Suguru?” he taunts, breath ragged, grin feral. “Thought you wanted me to use you, huh?”
Suguru glares at him through watery eyes, saliva and tears streaking across his flushed face. Sweat glistens down the elegant slope of his throat, glazing the copious amounts of love bites Satoru has suckled into his skin over the course of their heated meetings. There’s an especially nasty bruise spattered crimson just below his ear, the newest addition to his carnal canvas.
“I do,” he whines, voice breaking when Satoru angles his cock against his sweet spot, spent pussy quivering. “Just—hahh, ngh—slower. Slower, it’s too much—hurts!”
Satoru has already worked him apart too many times to count tonight. Reverence executed cruelly. Idolizing his every curve, mapping kisses from his forehead to his stomach, right down to his toes. By the time he sank inside, Suguru was already delirious and sopping wet, squirting out orgasm after orgasm.
He tightens his hand around Suguru’s wrists, a quick squeeze, before releasing them in favor of his neck. His grip is punishing, crushing his windpipe, leaving little room for breath. Satoru coos when he panics, body jerking erratically, both hands shooting up to grab at his arm.
He doesn’t push Satoru away.
Satoru smirks, forcing more of his weight down, bowing over him, foreheads pressed together.
“Beg,” he orders, pulling out just to ram into him with increased aggression, relishing in the slick squelch of his cunt. “Beg me for mercy.” Satoru spits into his slack mouth, hand enclosing around his windpipe further, loving the way he chokes.
Suguru wails, sputtering and coughing, claws entrenching blood from Satoru’s veins as he clutches around him.
“P–plea–please—” Suguru struggles in a gasp, tears flooding, dripping into his ears and hairline. “Love—love, please—!”
Satoru goes feral at the sound of it.
Something molten rips through his heart. His grip lessens enough for Suguru to drag a desperate breath into his lungs, chest hitching under the broad cage of Satoru’s body. More tears cling to his lashes in crystalline beads, fox ears flattened against the sweat-soaked spill of black hair. He looks wrecked. Completely wrecked.
And he’s begging him. Begging Satoru.
The white-haired man is intoxicated with it.
Satoru exhales shakily through his teeth, forehead dropping to Suguru’s shoulder for half a heartbeat, laughter splintered and breathless. “Fuck… Listen to yourself.”
Suguru growls weakly, heels knocking into the small of Satoru’s back. “You told me to beg,” he whispers hoarsely, voice shredding raw. “So I am.”
That alone nearly finishes him.
Satoru releases Suguru’s throat entirely, only to seize his jaw instead, thumb forcing between swollen lips. Suguru opens instinctively, sucking at the digit with a weak moan that sends another pulse of heat through Satoru’s abdomen.
“There you go,” Satoru praises darkly. “Keep talking, pretty thing. Tell me how you feel. How I’m making you feel.”
His thrusts lose their brutality but not their depth, deliberate in their puncture, tempting broken little sounds from Suguru’s throat each time their hips meet. The wet smack of skin against skin echoes obscenely in the empty chamber, mixed with the hushed rustle of wind-blown leaves through the open window, warm glow of candlefire clashing with the argent moon-blush freckling across the floor where they lie.
Suguru squirms beneath him, overstimulated and helpless, cunt fluttering around Satoru with every drag of his cock. “Good. So–so good. Too deep,” he gasps, though his legs tighten immediately after, heels hooking behind Satoru’s back to pull him closer. “Feel you in my stomach. Gods—love—please—”
Satoru moans openly now, unable to contain it. Suguru destroys him.
He presses their mouths together, teeth clattering, swallowing every cry Suguru pours into him. The kitsune kisses back desperately, sharp teeth and needy whimpers, clawing against Satoru’s shoulders like he cannot decide if he wants to cling or escape.
“You love this,” Satoru rasps against his lips. “Being pinned down. Being used. Being mine.”
Suguru shudders. “Yes.”
The honesty makes Satoru’s head spin.
He drives into him again, slower still, grinding deep enough to make Suguru arch clear off the floor with a ragged sob. His tails writhe against the wood in frantic agitation, head shaking.
“There,” Satoru murmurs, drunk off of him. His thumb twists between the crush of their bodies, petting over his abused clit. “That’s it. One more, Suguru. Give me one more.”
Suguru’s face splinters beautifully. “Ah—no—can’t!” Suguru reaches for him blindly, palms sliding up his neck, fingers trembling as they cradle his face with startling tenderness amidst all the ruin. Another wave of tears, he breaks further. “Please,” he whispers instead, barely audible. “Please, love—”
Satoru kisses him with everything he has left to offer.
The climax crashes through Suguru first, devastating in its force. His entire body locks beneath Satoru’s, mouth falling open in a silent cry before sound finally tears free. His cunt clenches impossibly tight around Satoru, milking him through wave after wave while tears streak hot across flushed cheeks.
Satoru follows with a groan so deep it sounds wounded.
He buries himself fully inside, arms wrapping around Suguru as the force of it knocks the breath from both of them. For a long moment neither moves; the only sound in the chamber is their ragged breathing and the soft crackle of dying incense. Satoru slumps his weight against him, listening to the turbulent thump of his heartbeat, cheek squished against Suguru’s sternum, eyes closed. Suguru grunts a weak sound of complaint, shifting, but threads his fingers through Satoru’s damp hair all the same.
Their skin sticks together uncomfortably. Come froths around their point of connection, Satoru still stubbornly inside.
A waft of chilly air capers around them. Satoru shivers, absorbing most of the chill, ensuring Suguru stays warm beneath him.
“You are crushing me.”
“And yet you endure.”
“A trial. Truly.”
His tails wind around their bodies, drifting over Satoru’s back, making him shiver in an entirely new meaning. Satoru hums low in his throat, lips puckering an idle kiss to Suguru’s chest.
The incense has nearly burned out. Beyond the open shoji, summer cicadas drone through the darkened forest.
After a while, Suguru cranes his neck enough to press a kiss to the crown of Satoru’s hair. Satoru smiles into his skin. The fox seems to realize what he’s done a heartbeat too late, cheeks ruddy, ear twitching.
Satoru props his chin up, watching him with wistful eyes. His lopsided grin is stricken with longing.
“Don’t make that face,” Suguru huffs.
Satoru’s grin blossoms. “What face?”
“That one.” His hand drags across Satoru’s cheek, pinching him lightly with his knuckles. “Have I told you, you bear a striking resemblance to that of a frog?”
Satoru’s grin slides from his face; a vexed pout curls his lips. “I do not.”
Suguru laughs vividly, finger tapping playfully at Satoru’s nose. “But you do, darling.”
“Suguruuu…” he whines dramatically, blue eyes the size of the moon.
“See? There it is again. Positively amphibious.”
Satoru bites the tip of Suguru’s finger in retaliation, earning another dazzling laugh that ricochets off Satoru’s pleasure-swollen heart.
His laughter fades, but his touch remains, fingers delicate as he maps out Satoru’s face, thumb stroking once below his eye before settling against his jaw. They watch each other unabashedly. A groove hatches between Suguru’s brows.
Satoru questions it with a wordless look.
“…Stay,” the fox says at last, voice so quiet Satoru would mistake it for breathing if he wasn’t so close.
Suguru averts his eyes immediately after speaking, long lashes floating over his solemn expression. “Tonight,” he amends, voice lighter, attempting nonchalance and failing utterly. “Stay tonight.”
Somewhere deep in Satoru’s soul, fate gives way to devotion. He surrenders himself willingly.
He leans in before he can think too hard about it, kissing Suguru with methodical care. The hunger is satiated; deviance ran dry. He kisses him for the sole purpose of kissing him. Tasting warmth and the lingering breaths traded lazily between parted mouths. Their noses brush, hands fondling, lips smacking again and again.
Satoru chases every kiss Suguru tries to retreat from until the kitsune gives up pretending he wishes to pull away at all.
“I’ll stay if you’ll have me,” he murmurs against Suguru’s lips. “Unless you intend to cast me into the pond with the rest of the frogs.”
Suguru’s elbows lock around his neck, smile wet with intermingled spit. “If you croak in my ear all night, I might.”
For the first time in a very long while, neither of them sleeps alone.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
Satoru wonders if you can corrupt the perverted. If there is something sickening about innocence in the eyes of Eros.
At first, Satoru only saw Suguru sprawled across altars and silk bedding, nude and wanting, tails coiling around his waist and parted legs while ecstasy spilled from his lips like sugared poison.
The longer Satoru stays, the less often Suguru is confined to silk and divinity.
Half-submerged in the hot springs behind the cliffed waterfall, dark hair gathered in a messy top-knot, droplets adhering to his lashes.
Bent over wooden railing feeding scraps of fruit or various seeds to little woodland creatures that should fear the predator.
Kneeling against the bark of ancient trees, luminous foxfire dancing around stumps of decaying wood.
The debauchery wanes after that.
Not cleanly. Never for long enough to become stale.
Suguru still drags Satoru into dark rooms by the sash of his haori when the mood strikes. Still smiles avidly when Satoru enters the temple flushed from the heat.
The hunger prevails, but on days where they have fattened themselves on the feast, they bask in the afterglow together.
They’ll slip into the spring to cleanse themselves of sweat and sticky come, giggling together when Satoru smacks a hand on the supple swell of Suguru’s ass, a thunderous clap ringing through the open air. Afterwards, he’ll comb out the impossible length of the fox’s hair, lathering rosemary-infused oils into the ends.
At night, Suguru pillows his thighs beneath Satoru’s head while he drifts in and out of sleep, stroking a palm down the unclad stretch of his back, careful not to irritate the scratches he had clawed into his skin.
Certain mornings, he’ll dress the grumpy kitsune, swathing him in his lavish kimonos.
“You are wrinkling it,” Suguru will complain, nose scrunching with exasperation as Satoru wraps him in layers of silk with little care for elegance.
“You can haunt me about your wardrobe later.”
“I haunt you now.”
“Yes, yes, you are utterly terrifying, my little fox.”
Other days they’ll argue aimlessly for hours on end. About philosophy and the morality of human nature. About the rules of shogi after Satoru cheats for the umpteenth time in a row.
Suguru speaks in riddles just to watch Satoru scramble to keep up, until he grows tired of the psychological warfare and grabs the dark-haired man by the waist, spinning him in the air while he squeals to be released.
Suguru laughs every single time.
The hours spent together stop feeling like borrowed convenience and more like companionship. And Satoru, fool that he is, begins to mistake it for permanence.
There is more of Suguru now than there ever used to be. Not merely his body, though Satoru still drinks from that well with calamitous sanctity. But in the assimilation of habit. The placement of his sighs. The twitch of his ears or the flick of one of his tails when Satoru is being too loud during the temple’s quiet hours. How he steals all the blankets despite running warmer than any living thing ought to. The shape of his smile pressed against Satoru’s lips.
Satoru takes this knowledge greedily. The more he is given, the more violently he craves what remains withheld.
His name.
The omission begins to bruise him more than its existence ever did.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
“How much?”
“Hm?”
Satoru burrows closer into Suguru’s back, forearm numb beneath the fox’s weight, curled around him in the darkness of the night. The futon rustles as he draws the other man tighter to his chest.
Monsoon season is upon them, plunging the world in a rainy dilemma. Harsh wind flays leaves from branches, clouds laden and dark, bleeding humid misery. Waxen mud pollutes the ground, knee-deep and churning from the relentless storms.
Suguru had informed him three nights ago, with tremendous fuss, that if he attempted to return to the village proper, he would slip and crack his idiotic skull open on a rock.
Satoru laughed. Suguru had not.
So he stayed. Seldom now does he depart from the fox’s side. He takes no qualms with the development.
Suguru looks especially divine bathed in moonlight.
“How much have you taken from me?” Satoru asks quietly.
Suguru’s body goes still as a cadaver, cold and lifeless. His hand, idly tracing shapes against Satoru’s wrist, falls away at once.
“Suguru?”
The fox turns his face further into the pillow instead of answering, fringe slipping over his eyes. His ears flatten low into his hair. Defensively repressing himself.
Satoru regrets his phrasing. He tilts his jaw to Suguru’s shoulder blade. “I am not angry.”
Suguru makes a disapproving sound low in his throat.
Outside, thunder shakes the mountains. Suguru flinches, Satoru cradles him tighter.
“I am simply curious.”
A wet inhale. “You should be,” he whispers. “You should be angry.”
Satoru hoists upward on one elbow, nosing gently against Suguru’s temple. “I could never be angry with you, love.”
That earns him a sob, sincerity too heavy for him to hold.
Satoru’s heart breaks at the sound.
“Please.” A kiss over his closed eyes, salt and sorrow coating his lips. “My love, please don’t cry.”
Silence stretches.
Rain beats against the temple roof, sending running rivers spraying down the eaves.
Satoru thinks he might not speak at all.
The kitsune’s hand digs into the bedding.
“…Thirty-six years.”
Satoru blinks.
“Huh.”
Suguru lets out a brittle laugh at that, shoulders curling inward. “What a profoundly human response.” He scoffs; more tears fall soundlessly. “Fool.”
Thirty-six years.
He feels… hollow. Utterly indifferent about it.
Knowing that his so-called destiny will feed Suguru for a myriad of calendars—ensuring him to be warm and comfortable within these empty halls when the snow is greedy for a seat at his altar—brings him immense solace.
His regret is pyred. But Suguru absorbs the ash, venerating his sacrifice. He mourns something set free.
Slowly, Satoru lowers again, kissing the sensitive skin below his earlobe. The fox shivers.
“Say it again.”
Suguru goes rigid.
“Say my name again.”
“No.”
Sharp and immediate. He twists to pull away, but Satoru only follows, brushing the corner of his mouth.
“I miss it,” he admits quietly.
The confession surprises even him.
Suguru shakes his head vehemently, rubbing at his wet eyes with the back of his hand.
“I miss you saying it. Please, Suguru.”
“You are asking me to hurt you.”
Satoru hovers over his face. And, Gods—
He’s magnificent.
Crying moondrip, eyes red around his lashes, wounded in anguish that canonizes his mythos.
Suguru has been denying himself something too. Hurting. Yearning.
He is more human than Satoru gave him credit for.
Satoru brushes his thumb gently beneath one of his tears. In a sick gesticulation of sadism—the mortal man’s thesis—he takes from Suguru for once.
“You already have.”
Suguru crumbles, tears pouring harder than the heavens above. His fist smacks feebly against Satoru’s chest, defeated.
“You speak so easily of your demise,” he heaves, tone congested.
“With you? It’s ecstasy.”
Another wave of tears. Suguru looks angry with it. “Your poetry is repugnant.”
Satoru expects him to pull away again. To retreat into silk and riddles and that terrible, graceful distance he masquerades so well.
Instead, he surrenders. Exhaustive against his chest, head tucked beneath Satoru’s chin, nine tails curling sluggishly around Satoru’s legs.
Satoru counts every knocking heartbeat against his ribs until their rhythms sync into one.
After a while, very softly, almost too soft to hear beneath the rain—
“Do not ask me again.”
Satoru closes his eyes. “As you wish.” His mouth finds Suguru’s hair.
And when sleep finally takes them, Satoru’s dreams morph from the forecasted prospect of Suguru devouring him to the fierce chivalry of keeping him safe in his arms.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
Satoru keeps his promise. He does not ask Suguru to say his name again.
The want remains anyway, nagging at him like a missing tooth; his tongue cannot help but search the cavity of it.
But another curiosity expands.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
The storm season swells the shrine with vegetation. Gardens overgrown and fragrant from weeks of rainfall, moss conquering stones and bark. Pink constellations of petals collect in the ponds.
Suguru spends the morning kneeling in the dirt, sleeves tied back, forearms dusted in soil, while he trims away drowned roots from the flower beds. Satoru sits sprawled behind him, legs crossed, chin propped on his hand, in the comfort of the wooden vestibule.
“Quit staring,” Suguru says without turning.
“That is like shunning Icarus from the sun,” Satoru censures. “Why would you deprive me of such rapture?”
Suguru hums, clipping away another stem. “If Icarus never learns the virtue of sunlight, his skin withers and pales. He will never burn.”
Satoru now knows how to score in his game of quixotism. “But does he live?”
Suguru’s chin turns, mouth already parted around the response. Satoru interjects before he can speak. “For the sake of metaphor, dear.”
Suguru huffs. “No. He fails to live because he fails to die surrounded by the flames of his ambition. Icarus sought the sun not for death, but for warmth.”
“I am an Icarus to your flame.”
Suguru laughs, tails rising into a fanned motion. “What have I said about your poetry?”
Satoru grins lazily. “You insult me but listen regardless.”
“Like one listens to a cicada screaming itself to death outside the window.”
“Sooo… fondly?”
Suguru flicks a clump of damp moss at him. It bounces by his ankle. Satoru laughs, unbothered by the attack. Somewhere deeper in the forest, a rangale of deer startle at the sound, trampling and calling out through the mist-veiled trees.
Suguru returns to his work, careful fingers loosening tangled roots and murmuring encouragement to lackluster flora.
Satoru never stops watching him. The sweep of dark hair sliding over one shoulder, the refined posture of his spine, the life he exudes.
Satoru wonders if Suguru was ever Icarus, too.
If there had once been a version of him that wanted too much. Reached too far. Burned too brightly.
Perhaps he never fell at all. Perhaps he ascended instead.
Satoru squints upward, toward the blur of daylight filtering through the canopy. The sun sits impossibly high above the earth. Alone in the stratosphere.
His gaze drifts back to the shrine weaving around them: vast corridors, time-blemished wood, the damp chorus of silence.
It occurs to him then that divinity might simply be another word for isolation.
“Do you ever get lonely here?” Satoru asks vacantly.
“What an insipid question.”
“That sounds like a yes.”
“It sounds like I am choosing not to engage in your melodrama before midday.”
Satoru hums, unconvinced.
Suguru snips another root with increased force, ears flicking. His face stays concealed. “I am a centuries-old entity secluded within a cursed forest. Isolation is rather integral to the aesthetic.”
“You avoided the question again.”
“And you asked me a question you already know the answer to.”
“Are you still lonely?”
Suguru glances over his shoulder, expression illegible. “Does the thought trouble you?”
Satoru smiles, but it feels fragile. “A little.”
Suguru looks away just as quickly. After a long moment, he exhales slowly and sets aside the pruning shears and rises from the flower bed. Damp soil stains the knees of his robes.
Satoru tracks him casually with his eyes, expecting another philosophical deflection.
Instead, Suguru crosses the engawa and lowers himself beside him. His head comes to rest lightly on Satoru’s shoulder.
Satoru brings him closer by the waist. The kitsune allows it, fitting against him perfectly. His gaze stays fixed ahead, watching the gardens sway with the breeze. “Why?”
The answer feels strangely too difficult to admit. It will sound too intimate once spoken aloud. He cannot help but rest his cheek on Suguru’s head. “I suppose I do not like imagining this place without me in it anymore.” He laughs softly through his nose. “Which is arrogant, admittedly.”
Suguru shakes his head immediately, palm flattening over Satoru’s heart. “No—”
Satoru continues before he can lose the nerve for it. “When I am gone… you will still be here.”
A tremor passes between their bodies.
“And you will be lonely again.”
“I have survived solitude.”
“Of course,” Satoru says. “But that does not mean you enjoyed it.”
Suguru inhales shakily, nosing the line of Satoru’s throat. They sit in silence for an unknown passage of time, breeze brushing through their hair, leaves rustling in the backdrop of greenery.
“I was not made for companionship,” Suguru speaks at last. “Creatures such as myself are worshipped from a distance. Feared, desired… blamed. Never loved correctly.”
Satoru opens his mouth.
Suguru presses two slightly dirty fingers against his lips before he can speak. “Darling, you do not get to interrupt my tragedy with tenderness. It ruins the atmosphere.”
Satoru takes him by the wrist, bringing the back of his hand to his lips, kissing the mud-free skin there. “Apologies, love.”
Suguru scoffs, pulling free with a half-hearted grumble. “Vile.”
“You adore me.”
“Debatable.”
His mood sobers quickly.
“Truth be told.” He looks down at his lap, hair shielding his face. “I was lonely.”
The breeze alters around them, petals and leaves skittering around the engawa.
“And loneliness,” Suguru murmurs, almost to himself, “breeds selfish things in all of us eventually.” His fingers curl loosely in Satoru’s sleeve. “That is why I was punished.”
Satoru watches him carefully. “Punished?” he repeats.
A long pause.
“I created something I should not have been capable of.”
Satoru’s brows knit. “What?”
Suguru meets his gaze, sorrow etched around his eyes.
“Life.”
The word trips his blood. Satoru goes still.
Suguru turns his face away again, staring toward the mist curling across the gardens. “I took pieces of myself and offered them to the world in exchange for what it would not give me willingly.”
His voice grows distant. Ancient in memory and grief.
“The first time, I used earth.”
His claws puncture Satoru’s sleeve.
“Rich soil from the bed of the mountains. Roots older than empires. Moss fed by foxfire.” A smile ghosts his lips. “She was shy from the very beginning. She used to step on the backs of my feet while following me through the shrine because she thought if she stayed close enough, nothing could reach her.” He shakes his head. “Mimiko.”
Satoru’s chest tightens.
“The second time…” Suguru exhales shakily. “I took from the sea. Foam from the crashing waves. Shells carried inland by storms. Pearls treasured beneath the tide.” His lashes flutter. “She came to me screaming. Truly screaming. Red-faced and furious. I feared she would split the heavens above with her voice.” His eyes well up with new tears. “Nanako.”
Satoru’s blood rushes in his ears.
Golden fur. Dark paws. Childlike laughter.
The girls in the pond’s reflection—
“They were mine.”
His stomach drops. “Suguru,” he says breathlessly.
The kitsune continues as if he hadn’t heard him at all.
“I knew it was forbidden.” His hand presses over his eyes. “Life cannot be stolen from the world without consequence. So the world corrected itself.” A bitter laugh. “As it always does.”
“Suguru—”
“They were taken from me. Returned to what once was.” His voice is shredded with emotion. “To the earth and sea.”
Satoru’s heart is hammering a lesion against his ribs.
“They were all I had. My daughters,” Suguru says quietly.
And suddenly, Satoru understands.
This shrine is not a sacred sanctuary. It is a mausoleum.
A monument caging the ashes of a man ignorant enough to love something far more than the heavens permitted.
Icarus had not fallen.
He had reached the sun and been condemned to burn there forever.
The empty halls, the extra cutlery placed out, the way Suguru lingers beside the waterfall at dusk with that awful look in his eyes, beholding the place where water meets earth, waiting for something that never arrives.
The little foxes. Planets orbiting the brilliance of his star. Always following him, always here. They never left his side.
“Suguru,” Satoru repeats urgently.
The kitsune must misinterpret the pallor on Satoru’s face for horrified grief, turning away with a brittle laugh. “You needn’t look so stricken, darling. It happened long before your grandfather’s grandfather first drew breath.”
“No.” Satoru pushes upright. “No—no, you don’t understand.”
Confusion disrupts the facade of Suguru’s eulogy, brows drawing together. “What are you—?”
Satoru grabs him by the wrist.
“They’re here.”
Suguru blinks. “Who?”
“The foxes!” Satoru’s grin splits across his face, eyes crinkled by the force of it. “Gods, Suguru, the foxes—”
His mind moves faster than reason can decipher.
He thinks of the little tails darting through the shrine. The paws that never left footprints. The love that persevered.
They were never aberrations.
One of Suguru’s eyebrows arch. “You are acting mad in the head.”
“Probably.”
He feels dizzy from excitement.
He can fix this.
Suguru will never have to be lonely again.
He hauls the kitsune to his feet, laughing when he stumbles right into Satoru’s chest.
“Come with me.”
“Huh—?”
“They’re here, Suguru,” he repeats, foreheads bumping together. “I have seen them.”
Suguru shakes his head lightly, staring at him with a particular shade of doubt that Satoru can only assume is shock.
He refuses to think of it as anything less than hope.
Satoru is already pulling Suguru down the engawa steps and into the gardens, rainwater splashing beneath their feet as flower petals scatter around them in violent pink bursts.
“Hurry!”
He doesn’t see the way Suguru’s heart ruptures into his expression.
Suguru trips on the hem of his robes more than once, saved only by Satoru’s firm grip and unbreakable determination.
Satoru scans the treeline like a maniac, searching between the sweeping curtains of wisteria branches and rain-heavy hydrangeas, dissecting dappled shadows for dirty paws and little snouts.
“Mimiko!” Satoru shouts into the shrine grounds. “Nanako!”
Suguru’s pulse has gone wild in Satoru’s grasp. “What exactly do you believe yourself to be doing?”
“I told you,” Satoru laughs breathlessly. “I detest the idea of you alone.”
Suguru makes a strangled noise.
Satoru heeds it little mind, dragging him deeper into the vegetation. They run past the rain-flooded pond, fringed by moss and river stones. Their reflections glide across the liquid sky.
Satoru sees them across the water, curled together among the roots of the great willow. Nanako’s fur gleams damp from the dewy grass. Mimiko drapes atop her, grooming the top of her head, nipping her ears when she tries to wiggle loose.
“There!” Satoru shouts. He slows at one, chest shaking from exhilaration. Suguru collides into him, sending them both skittering in the mud.
Both foxes startle half a foot into the air, fur spiking up, pupils wide. They calm quickly when they see Suguru, peering over the massive bulk of Satoru’s frame. Nanako’s tail wags, mouth open in a delighted yip. Mimiko slinks closer, ears twitching.
Satoru smiles so hard it hurts. “They’re always here, Suguru.”
Suguru says nothing. His eyes frantically search the clearing. Left. Right. Left again. Flicking above to view the drooping willow branches. Nothing.
Satoru’s smile weakens. He tilts the kitsune by the jaw, fingers ever so careful. “They’re under the willow, love.”
Suguru’s breath hitches.
“They’re excited to see you.”
Nanako darts forward at that, distracted by her own shadow, spinning around excitedly. Mimiko’s tail gives one hesitant wag. She whines.
Only Satoru sees it.
“They’ve been bringing me to you all this time,” he continues quickly, pinky tracing the stretched lobe of Suguru’s ear. “I wouldn’t have found you without them.” He chuckles under his breath. “Had me leave my katana behind to rust in the forest.”
Suguru’s eyes search faster now. His mouth curls. “If this is some kind of sick game—”
“No, I swear it’s truth, Suguru.”
The fox shakes his head.
“Love,” Satoru whispers, trying to soothe him, “I swear it on my life.”
“Describe them.” Suguru’s eyes are vandalized fury, smeared with wet misery. “Describe them to me.” His lip wobbles. “Please.”
Mimiko lets out the softest cry Satoru has ever heard.
His throat burns.
“Of course. The light-colored one, like bronze, Nanako, she—she’s bigger than her sister, not by a lot, but she’s got the confidence to prove it. Her fur’s all messy from the rain and dirt. She keeps tripping over herself because she’s too excited.”
Memories Satoru is not permitted to access dance in Suguru’s irises.
“And Mimiko,” Satoru’s voice falters. “She’s quiet. Her fur’s darker, better for her to hide with. She’s whining, won’t stop staring at you. Too shy to come any closer. I don’t think she likes me very much. Not compared to you. No one compares to you.”
Suguru tears away from his touch, dropping to his knees in the dirt, a desolate curtsey stripped of the refined persona he wields.
“Suguru—”
“Where are they?” he demands.
Rainwater splashes beneath scrambling hands as he claws through grass and crumpled petals and tangled roots, optimism too dire to survive unscathed.
Nanako stills, caught between longing and futility. Mimiko darts forward, rushing after his hands.
“Where, Satoru?!” he wails, tails smacking angrily. “Where are they?”
A knife of heat impales him, wrathful and ravenous, carving Satoru aslant from the jugular to the femur.
Oxygen vanishes.
The world blackens.
Suguru’s voice invades his senses, torn raw and hazardous in an entirely new realm.
Love.
Love will be the end of him.
The shrine spins sickeningly around him.
He drops hard into the mud beside Suguru, one hand flying to his ribs as though he might physically hold himself together. Agony floods beneath his skin, white-hot and catastrophic, every vein flayed open by the sound of his name in Suguru’s mouth.
Blood surges thick against the back of his throat. He swallows it.
Suguru doesn’t even realize what he’s done, body rocking with the force of his sobs.
“Here,” Satoru chokes out instead, sweat already beading against his temples. His fingers find Suguru’s wrists, trembling violently beneath his touch. “They’re here, love.”
Another crack against his skin. It is unimportant.
Nanako presses frantically against Suguru’s thighs, tiny body shaking, and Mimiko has climbed into his lap, burying her face against the fabric of his muddy robes.
“It’s alright, love.” Satoru’s voice frays thinner. “Everything will be alright. We’ll—we’ll figure it out. All of us.”
“Why?” Suguru heaves. “Why—why are they here? Why can’t I hold them? Please, please, please—”
“They love you too much to leave you.”
The sound that leaves Suguru’s mouth is traumatic. His body caves inward as a sob rips through him, shoulders shaking, hair pooling in the muck. Tears spill harder than any storm cloud.
“Mimiko,” he gasps brokenly. “Nanako—I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
Suguru cannot feel either of them, but somehow, he folds around them perfectly. Divinity is fool’s gold to devotion. Isolation does not erase; it preserves pain.
And Suguru is gutted by it.
Satoru watches it happen through swimming vision, chest aching with something crueler than the curse eating the life from his soul.
There is a certain form of kindness provided by ignorance. A gentleness that tilts the jaw and kisses over blind eyes, steering sensibility away from savagery. Like sleep to the freezing, welcomed release.
Suguru’s prior mourning was quieter than this, watching him shatter around the shape of vacancy. If he could, Satoru would surrender every remaining year if it meant Suguru’s daughters would return to him.
Satoru buries the thought inside of his pain. If Suguru had failed to bargain with the heavens, Satoru has a snowball’s chance in hell.
So, he gathers the fox carefully in his arms. No elegance remains in Suguru’s destruction. He clutches at Satoru’s clothes with both hands, sobbing into the curve of his throat hard enough to shake them both, tails dragging limply through the ground as Satoru lifts him bridal style from the mud.
The little foxes follow. Satoru watches them through his periphery, weaving anxiously around his ankles the entire walk back to the shrine.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
By the time they enter the temple, Suguru has cried himself voiceless. Satoru tracks muddy footprints through the corridors, holding Suguru tight even as he limps from the lingering pain.
He slides the shoji closed with his foot, entering their room, futons still unrolled from their lazy morning spent between the sheets.
Suguru’s fists remain tangled in the front of Satoru’s robe, unrelenting to be released.
“It’s alright,” Satoru murmurs, though he is unsure of who he is trying to assure. “I have you.”
He lowers Suguru onto the futon. Suguru collapses into wet silk and warm blankets, hair plastered against his face. His breathing catches every few seconds, inhaling the woes of his memories.
Satoru peels away his stained clothing. Suguru does not protest.
Usually there is wit included in the ritual. Sharp remarks. Teasing bites against Satoru’s forearms whenever he undresses him too slowly for his preference.
That too is a ghost of the past.
Wet fabric gathers in Suguru’s lap. Mud streaks Suguru’s skin in watercolor smears. Grass clings to the curve of his hip. A knot has woven into the ends of his long hair.
Satoru’s heart seizes so violently he mistakes it for another theft.
“My love,” he whispers, swiping the wetness from under his eye.
Suguru’s face crumples anew.
Satoru keeps his hands moving. Dries him with a fuzzy cloth, dresses him in fresh robes the color of frosted sapphires, combs out the tangles and stray leaves in his hair. All the while, Suguru cries into the pillows. He is quiet now. Somehow, that is worse.
Satoru tries to kiss away every tear before they can fall. “I’m sorry, Suguru.”
A copper taste floods his mouth. He turns his head quickly, swallows. The effort sends a sharp ache through his ribs. When he lifts the back of his hand to his lips, crimson smears across his knuckles.
He wipes it away before Suguru can see.
The quiet blankets the room, a press of humidity to the back of the throat. Sleep arrives in golden mercy; Satoru holds on long enough to ensure Suguru’s mourning cannot eulogize his dreams.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
Time ceases to behave after that. It transfers through the shrine in uneven portions, gathering thick in the corners like dust and old pollen, then slipping away from this realm in an idealistic seizure of cogency. Satoru begins to lose the ability to tell one hour from another except by accident: the change of light during the embryonic conception of a new day, when the sun spills rivulets across the ground, or the way evening arrives as an omission.
Suguru does not participate in it consistently anymore.
That is the only predictability.
He is here, at Satoru’s side, undeniably embodied—warm skin, steady breath, the weight of someone still technically alive. But the rest of him comes and goes in tides that Satoru cannot track. At times he responds to touch with his usual clarity, lacing his fingers between Satoru’s or tucking his socked feet under Satoru’s calves when they lounge across from one another. At other instances, he stares through Satoru with closed doors for eyes, his recognition a key ingested by magnificent sorrow.
Satoru has begun to think of it as misalignment. Suguru has not left the world so much as the world has stopped agreeing with him.
And Satoru can no longer tell whether this is healing or fading or simply an anonymous language of grief that Suguru is translating inside his citadel of lonely enlightenment.
He begins to enact change. Openings where there was prior oblivion. Regressing reality into simple arrangements he can reconcile with instead of argue against. Things that can be touched, ordered, repeated. Tears still arrive occasionally, catching him unaware in the middle of mundane tasks, but the relentless devastation that had consumed the shrine for weeks has receded.
Entryways stay open, parted only by a handspan, inviting passage for tiny guests. Suguru leaves them that way even when evening chills the floors. Even when rain drifts inside and stains the wood. Extra cushions are placed at low tables. Meals are set upon the engawa. Another plate beside the garden path. One beneath the willow.
Offerings.
Not to gods.
To daughters.
Satoru watches him do it daily. Watches Suguru lower himself to the floor with aching deliberation and arrange meals for children he cannot see.
His throat burns every single time.
The futons sting him worse.
He discovers them one evening after returning from gathering water. Two small sleeping mats laid neatly beside his and Suguru’s. Tiny blankets folded, pillows fluffed meticulously.
Satoru can only stare motionless in the doorway.
Nanako has already reclaimed hers, rolling across it dramatically, belly up, tongue out. Mimiko occupies the other with considerably more dignity, kneading the corner before looping herself into a perfect circle.
Suguru adjusts the corners of each bed, smoothing out wrinkles from fabric that nothing has disturbed.
His expression is calm. Focused.
Hopeful.
Satoru doesn’t have the heart to mention it.
Because the futons go unused. Every night, when Suguru tucks under his blankets, Nanako is already crawling atop his chest, Mimiko following, snuggling in the fold of his knees.
Satoru does not tell him. The truth would not comfort him. It would only create a new helix of despair.
So he watches. And sometimes, in the quiet hours after midnight, with Nanako snoring softly atop Suguru's ribs and Mimiko tucked beneath his chin, Satoru finds himself wondering if grief and faith are the same thing.
Both ask a person to keep setting the table.
Just in case someone comes home.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
The world, infuriatingly, refuses to stop.
So they move. Partly because there aren’t many alternative options, largely due to the impression movement has on progress.
Suguru mends.
Or at least he performs a convincing imitation.
Pity. For an assumed omniscient fox spirit, he should know better than to think his masquerade of serenity still fools Satoru’s inference.
The unsettling part is that Satoru is no longer convinced the performance is intended for him. There are moments, watching the fox move through the shrine with measured calm, when he suspects Suguru has become his own audience.
As though he has constructed some careful explanation for his suffering and now rehearses it until it resembles truth.
Worse.
Suguru is not resigning his grief.
No, he’s answering it.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
“Dearest.”
“Mm?”
Satoru is somewhere between waking and dreaming.
The afternoon sun pools warmly across the garden stones. Cicadas drone lazily in the distance. Mimiko chases after Nanako in the tall grass, the latter distracted by a butterfly, both of them going flying when Mimiko crashes into her. Suguru's weight rests comfortably against him, head pillowed atop Satoru's bare stomach, one arm draped loosely across his waist.
For the first time in days, neither of them appears actively haunted.
“May I ask you something?”
Satoru snorts. “You just did.”
A sigh puffs against his skin. He continues before Suguru can rebut. “If you, my love, are opening with permission?” He finally cracks an eye open. Sunlight absorbs into dark hair. The corner of Suguru’s mouth twitches. Satoru points accusingly. “It’s going to be catastrophic.”
“That seems unfair.”
“It is remarkably fair.”
Suguru hides his laugh against Satoru’s navel.
Satoru leans back, victorious. His eyes slip shut again. “Every disastrous conversation in recorded history has started exactly like that.”
“I doubt that, dear.”
“Nope. Ancient law.”
“Ancient law?” Suguru repeats incredulously.
“Mhm.”
“Written where?”
“In the sacred texts.”
“Authored by whom?”
“Me.”
Suguru shifts slightly. His cheek presses more firmly against Satoru's stomach.
The movement should be comforting. Instead, a strange tension curls beneath Satoru's ribs. Because Suguru is smiling. He has not done that in… well… Satoru has lost count of how long.
“Please?”
The world startles him more than it should.
Suguru speaks many things. Some of them are polite. But ‘please’ is generally reserved for circumstances involving fewer articles of clothing and glassy eyes writhing in pleasure.
An alarm bell rings in his mind. His eyes peel open again in suspicion. “Suguru, what—?”
“Do you trust me?”
The question lands like a fallen tree. Satoru feels pinned beneath it. He’s rendered mute from it, blinking down at Suguru listlessly.
Suguru’s expression morphs with something quietly astute that makes him wish he had stayed asleep.
“Do you trust me?” he asks again, kissing along the pale trim of hair feathering from Satoru’s navel.
“More than anyone.”
The admission leaves him before he can temper it, before he can disguise it beneath humor or deflection or any of the countless evasions that have carried him through the worst moments of his life. Truth is a reflex of love.
Suguru grows motionless atop him.
The afternoon advances. Cicadas drone their endless summer liturgy from somewhere beyond the shrine grounds. A breeze stirs the tall grass at the edge of the garden. Farther away, Nanako barrels headfirst into a flowering shrub. Mimiko disappears right after her, whether out of concern or irritation is impossible to determine.
Morbid certainty surfaces in Suguru’s eyes. Slowly, he peels off Satoru’s form, kneeling beside him, and cups his face. His thumbs brush the familiar planes of his cheeks, tracing them with an unbearable tenderness.
“Good,” he murmurs ominously.
Before Satoru can ask why, Suguru leans forward. Satoru meets him halfway. The kiss is patient. Suguru kisses him like he’s praying. Like he’s the last devotee residing in this desolate temple. Like any aspect of himself is inferior to Satoru’s being.
Satoru kisses back just as reverently, if not more. Suguru’s mouth opens on a quiet moan when Satoru’s hand fists into his dark hair, the other coaxing him by the waist to straddle Satoru’s lap. They rearrange without splitting, tongues entangled. The fox’s plump thighs constrict him, tails drowsy where they sprawl around their ankles. The afternoon heat bathes them. Somewhere beyond the courtyard, the girls continue their game.
The world narrows to the waning distance between their lips. Their actions never break cleanly enough for the kiss to be counted anew. When they finally part, Suguru remains close, their breaths mingling as they recover oxygen.
His forehead rests against Satoru’s, his eyes closed. For a moment, he looks terribly young.
Suguru sighs, kissing over Satoru’s eyes.
“I love you.”
It takes Satoru an embarrassingly long amount of time to register it, staring blankly at the sharp-eyed angel seated atop his lap.
Suguru loves him.
The confession does not arrive with revelation. It settles into place with the gravity of a star returning to a constellation. Love has existed between them for months now. Perhaps longer. Satoru cannot identify the exact moment it began because it feels less like something discovered than something remembered.
Of course Suguru loves him.
His throat bobs with heat. “I love you,” he admits roughly, grabbing the kitsune’s waist tight enough to bruise. “Suguru, I love you so much, Gods. I—”
Suguru shushes him with a kiss. Pulling back, he presses his lips to the corner of Satoru’s mouth. Crooning, “I know, darling. You do not need to tell me.”
“I disagree,” Satoru huffs.
The kitsune laughs.
Satoru shifts back, intending to complain properly, already preparing a lengthy argument regarding the importance of hearing such things aloud.
Instead, the words die in his throat.
Because Suguru is smiling. Again, that certainty of his. It sticks to his teeth and glazes his pupils.
It is the face of someone long since fallen. The acceptance that hits when land reveals itself.
It is the end.
“S–Suguru?”
Amethyst eyes memorize him. Every line. Every scar. Every detail.
Then the kitsune leans in one final time, kissing Satoru’s forehead, speaking there.
“Forgive me.”
The breath leaves Satoru, dismissed by cold fear.
“I intend,” the fox whispers, voice trembling, “to return to you what was never mine to keep.”
And before Satoru can ask what that means—
Before he can move—
Before instinct can catch up to disaster—
Suguru reaches into the sleeve of his kimono.
Silver flashes.
A dagger.
For one bewildered second, Satoru doesn’t understand what he’s looking at. Then, realization lacerates.
His dagger. The one he had smuggled here all those moons ago, aimed for the legend he swore to slay.
Satoru’s stomach drops. No. No—
He reaches out.
Too late. Far too late.
The blade flies through the air, butchery steered by Suguru’s clinical palm. The line of it arcs backward. Toward the nine-branched tails gathered behind him.
They’re severed in one clean cut.
Suguru is screaming before they even touch the ground.
Satoru has heard him in pain before. Furious. Grieving. Has heard him sob until his voice failed him beneath the willow.
Nothing resembles this.
The cry rips from Suguru’s chest, pulverizing the lining of his lungs, spit and agony spraying from his lips. A flock of sparrows explodes from a low-hanging branch.
Blood erupts across the engawa. Scarlet splatters the adjoining grass. The dagger, Suguru’s hand, Satoru’s legs—doused red.
Nine amputated tails crash against the floorboards. The sound rolls outward through the forest, trees recoiling, mossy footprints dispersing, bugs silencing.
Satoru swears he feels the heavens spasm.
“SUGURU!”
The kitsune folds forward, dagger clattering from numb fingers. Blood pours from the small of his back, ichor of enlightenment. Gold glistens through the crimson density. Threads of light, fragments of memories. Sooth unraveling from flesh.
Satoru cradles him to his hammering chest, tucking Suguru’s head beneath his chin. Suguru buckles, muscles locking around nothing before falling slack. Another wail bouts from his lips. Then another, again and again. Each smaller than the last.
“Suguru—Suguru, no—no!”
Panic obliterates clarity.
His hands press desperately against the wound, peeling back saturated fabric. It accomplishes nothing. Hot blood slips through his fingers.
“What did you do?” Satoru screams, choking around the hysteria. “Suguru, fuck! No—”
The answer lies scattered around him.
Nine quivering, impossible masses. Nine lifetimes. Nine hundred years of archived knowledge. They cover half the engawa.
And they are moving. Not dying; transcending.
Black fur peels apart into veins of light, coiling around itself. The air fills with a thousand voices, images congealing through the glare.
Backdropped snowfall. A chanted prayer. Crying. A blood-smeared battlefield.
Mimiko’s laughter. Nanako’s first steps.
Satoru’s own toothy grin. His blue eyes radiant, creased at the corners by the curvature of his cheek.
Every soul Suguru has ever carried. Every memory he refused to forget. Every fragment of existence scattered across time.
Relinquished all at once.
Suguru sucks in a gravely breath against Satoru’s throat, teeth grazing his jugular.
He’s smiling.
If the blood loss doesn’t kill him, Satoru thinks dimly, then he might do it himself.
“You absolute fucking idiot,” he spits.
“Sa—”
“Don’t,” Satoru growls. “I don’t want to listen to your suicide sermon.”
“I didn’t—”
“Shut up!” Satoru hardly recognizes his own voice. “What did you think was going to happen? Suguru?” His hands shake violently where they press against the open wound. Blood gushes endlessly. “Did you hit your head? Is that it? Did a millennium of arrogance finally rot inside your thick skull?”
Suguru makes a small, laughing noise against his pulse.
It sends Satoru into cardiac arrest.
“Don’t you dare laugh at me right now.” His voice rises an octave. “You’re bleeding to death!”
The kitsune merely folds closer. His arms, weak and trembling, wrap around Satoru’s middle. Seeking comfort. Seeking him.
“Satoru.”
A wave of tears cascades down Satoru’s face. “Suguru,” he chokes out. A plea disguised as reprimand.
Suguru buries his face deeper into the curve of Satoru's neck. “Satoru, my love...”
Satoru barely hears it. Or perhaps he refuses to.
Because hearing it would require acknowledging the frightening softness in Suguru's voice. Would require acknowledging the possibility that this was intentional. That Suguru knew exactly what he was doing.
“Don’t,” he snaps again. “Don’t start talking like that. I can’t—you—Suguru, please.”
Another laugh against his skin. “Thought you trusted me, dear?”
“That wasn’t permission! You—you manipulative fox,” he hisses, anger clouding all of his senses. “You don’t get to decide things for the both of us! Are you listening to me?” Satoru scoffs. “No, of course not. You only hear what you want to hear. You self-serving bastard!”
The accusation is limp. It hurts. The intention. The certainty that Suguru knew exactly what Satoru would have said.
So he removed the opportunity of choice.
Suguru’s hands fumble at the front of his robes, snaking into the fabric. His palm presses over Satoru’s heart.
“Satoru,” he calls once more. “Satoru, can’t you feel it, love?”
And just as Satoru is about to hiss out ‘Feel what?’ he does feel it.
Rather, he doesn’t.
There is nothing. No missed heartbeat. No poison alloyed in the syllables. No theft.
Just his name. Spoken fondly.
Free.
Suguru feels it too. Trembling fingers tighten weakly in the fabric of Satoru's robes. He sobs wetly. “Satoru! Satoru, Satoru—” His shoulders shake. “My Satoru!” He presses his face deeper into Satoru’s neck, tears soaking through the collar of his robes. “My Satoru,” he weeps again. “Gods, I can say it.”
The sheer happiness he exudes glues to the back of Satoru’s lungs.
For weeks, Suguru has spoken around it. Utilizing every possible substitute. Anything to avoid the destruction hidden inside the vowels.
And now. Now he says it with reckless abandon.
“Satoru.” A kiss to his jaw. “Satoru, it’s yours,” he whispers. “All of it. Every year I stole. It’s all yours, love. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—Satoru—”
Satoru’s vision blurs.
He loves him. Truly. Profoundly. With every terrified corner of his love-swollen heart.
“You are never allowed to do this again.”
“I suspect,” he nods at the evaporating chaos around them, “it would be rather difficult to repeat, Satoru.”
“Shut up.”
“Yes, dear.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Mm. An understandable reaction.”
“Suguru,” he chides, nudging the tip of his nose to the fox’s ear. “…Say it again.”
Suguru arches up as much as his sapped energy will allow, speaking into Satoru’s mouth.
“Satoru,” he purrs. “Kiss me.”
He does.
Their lips lock. Satoru cups Suguru’s face with a trembling, blood-slick hand, thumb brushing across the sharp line of his cheekbone. Suguru leans into it immediately, chasing the touch like a starving thing. He kisses the fox softly. Suguru kisses him back.
Alive.
Satoru’s body aches.
His hand slides into Suguru's hair. Suguru hums against his mouth, exhausted and content in equal measure, as though severing nine tails and dismantling centuries of accumulated divinity has somehow improved his afternoon.
Idiot.
His idiot.
Satoru is already preparing an entire lecture. Several, actually. A lifetime’s worth.
“…Mama?”
The hesitant sound shatters the moment. Suguru freezes beneath his hand. He pushes forcefully off Satoru’s chest, eyes bulging, scanning the gardens.
There, at the edge of the engawa, stands two girls. Barefoot. Knees powdered with dirt. Hair glowing with halos of backlit sunlight.
The one who spoke stands slightly ahead of the other. Auburn hair and wide brown eyes.
Nanako.
She looks small. Gone is her bravado as her gaze darts between Suguru and Satoru and the blood staining the floorboards.
Behind her stands Mimiko, rigid. Her hands fidget at her sides. She hiccups around a squall of tears.
For once, she is the first to move, darting forward the instant her eyes meet Suguru’s.
“Mama!”
Suguru makes a harrowing sound, tearing out of Satoru’s hold, toppling forward on his hands and knees. “Mimiko!”
She collides into him. Suguru catches her, both falling in a heap of tears and limbs. Mimiko throws both of her arms around his neck, wailing into the hollow of his throat. Suguru wraps himself around her, one arm extending for the rapidly approaching Nanako. The second girl buries her face in the length of his dark hair, wetting it with her cries.
“Nanako,” he chokes. “My babies. Oh, my babies.” Suguru’s hands roam. Carding through hair. Thumbing over small noses. Flattening over spines. Weaving between delicate fingers. Peppering wet kisses everywhere he can reach.
Needing proof.
“You’re just as perfect as the day I lost you,” he sniffles, kissing the side of Nanako’s head while dragging Mimiko tighter against his chin.
Nanako cries harder. “Mama, we—” Hiccup. “—We thought you forgot us!”
“Never,” Suguru says. “Never was there a second where I forgot you two.”
Suguru gathers them closer, despite the agony that must still be lancing through his body. Blood continues to drip from the ruined remains of his severed tails, staining the sleeves wrapped around his daughters.
“Not one second,” he repeats, voice raw. “I remembered every birthday. Every bedtime story. Every argument you started with me.” He nips Nanako’s cheek playfully, spurring a laugh from the girl. He dips down to kiss Mimiko’s forehead. “Every flower you brought me, Mimiko. I remembered all of it.”
Mimiko snivels something illegible against Suguru’s collarbone.
“What is it, baby?” he croons.
She pulls back just enough to look at him. Her eyes immediately drop to the blood soaking through his robes. To the place where the tails had been.
Her mouth trembles. “Did it hurt?” The question is so small.
Suguru's face crumples. Satoru’s chest seizes at the sight of it.
Mimiko’s voice slips softer. “‘Cause of us, Mama?”
“No, sweetheart.” He presses a kiss between her brows. His arms tighten around both girls. “Never because of you.”
“Mama,” Nanako presses.
“Yes, honey?”
A feral grin breaks across her ruddy face. “You kissed ’Toru.”
Suguru blinks.
Inches away, Satoru laughs, unrepentant. “Nanako,” he scolds teasingly, “I think I preferred you better as a fox.”
Mimiko giggles at that. Nanako’s face screws up, tongue sticking out in Satoru’s direction. “Liar!”
Satoru, ever the instigator, prods back, “You’re a liar.”
“No, you’re the liar,” Nanako squeals, stomping her foot on the floor.
Suguru laughs. It slips free before he can stop it, bright and unguarded and so achingly familiar that Satoru feels his chest cave inward around it. Everyone stares.
Suguru’s smile stutters under the attention. “What?”
A tri-unanimous “Nothing” answers him in kind.
Suguru’s eyes meet Satoru’s. The moment sobers.
The courtyard still glows with dissipating strands of light. Fragments of time continue to unravel above the grass like drifting fireflies. Blood stains the engawa. The air smells of iron and summer and miracles.
Nanako settles into Suguru's lap. Mimiko curls against his side. And without thinking, without invitation, Satoru shifts closer too.
Suguru welcomes him. Their hands enclose; Satoru’s head rests on Suguru’s shoulder, melting when the kitsune kisses his temple.
Two mischievous giggles resound. Satoru wrinkles his nose, sticking his tongue out at the two adorable troublemakers. Mimiko wedges between their bodies, sprawled across both Satoru’s and Suguru’s laps. Satoru wraps an arm around her little shoulders.
He squeezes Suguru’s waist.
No years vanish. No curse awakens. Nothing is stolen.
Suguru’s breath catches, a fresh wave of tears slipping from his lashes.
For the first time in centuries, Suguru is no longer alone.
The fox who had spent lifetimes gathering things finally discovers there is nothing left to collect.
Only people to remain beside.
And beneath a sky vast enough to contain gods, grief, and every incarnation of love, Suguru allows himself the impossible.
He loves.
-ˋˏ ༻⛩️༺ ˎˊ-
Stories, like roots, are slow to change.
People still speak of the forest that moves as it wishes. Of roads that vanish. Of rivers that confuse more than lead. Grandmothers still warn children not to wander after sunset.
Though time has eroded some of the details.
They remember the fox, but disputes often arise three drinks in at the local tavern. Drunken farmers arguing whether or not it was a monster at all.
The children prefer another version.
One where a fox spirit dwells in the heart of the forest with two impish daughters who laugh too loudly and steal offerings left at roadside shrines.
A folktale.
The sort told beneath summer stars.
There is another figure in these stories as well.
Not a god. Maybe not human either.
A bright-eyed wanderer who appeared one day and never left.
Some claim he was a mighty warrior. A samurai who slayed countless men. Others insist he was a celestial being.
Everyone agrees he was hopelessly in love.
They say the forest has grown gentler since they came together. Kinder. As though something ancient finally laid down a burden it was never meant to carry alone.
Of course, they are only stories.
But on quiet evenings, when the wind slips through the trees and the sunlight catches just right, there are those who swear they spy four silhouettes through the thicket.
And if you listen closely, if you are very, very fortunate, you might hear the kitsune whisper his lover’s name.