Chapter 1: The Audio That Hit Too Close
The dorm room was dark, the only light a pale blue smear from Yuji’s phone screen casting sharp shadows across his face. The silence was total, pressed tight against his eardrums, before he hit play.
Then her voice filled his skull.
“You’re being so quiet tonight, little brother. Did you have a bad dream?” The voice from the audio was a low, honeyed murmur, laced with a knowing smile he could practically see. It slipped into his ears, warm and intimate, and his body reacted before his mind could censor it. A slow, hot coil of tension wound itself tight in his gut.
Yuji let out a shaky breath, his head falling back against the pillow. He stared at the cracks in the ceiling plaster.
“You can tell me,” the voice coaxed, a gentle whisper now, closer, as if her lips were right there against the shell of his ear. “You can always tell me anything. Come here.”
His hand, which had been lying flat on his stomach, drifted downward. The fabric of his sleep pants was already strained. He pressed his palm against the hard line of himself, a soft groan escaping his lips. It was a sound of pure, frustrated want.
Guilt followed, immediate and acid-sharp. It curdled the heat in his veins for a second. He shouldn’t be doing this. Not to this. Not imagining…
But the audio rolled on, relentless.
“Mm? What’s this?” The performer’s tone shifted to playful, feigned surprise. “You’re all worked up. Is this because of me? You got hard thinking about your big sister comforting you?”
“Fuck,” Yuji whispered into the dark, his hips pushing up into his own touch. The guilt was still there, a greasy knot in his chest, but it was being drowned out by the pounding of his blood. He fumbled with the drawstring of his pants, shoving them down just enough to free his cock. The cool air of the room hit his heated skin, and he hissed, wrapping his fingers around himself.
The voice was his anchor and his damnation.
“It’s okay,” it soothed, layered now with a dirty, promising edge. “I know what you need. Let big sister take care of it. Let me make you feel good.”
In the dark, with his eyes squeezed shut, the voice transformed. It wasn't the anonymous performer anymore. The cadence smoothed out, the playful lilt deepening into something more familiar, more calm, more painfully real. It became Choso’s voice. Choso, who’d made him steaming bowls of rice when he was sick. Choso, who’d quietly tucked extra spending money into his bag before he left for college. Choso, whose rare, wide smile felt like a victory.
Now, in this twisted theatre of his mind, it was her. Her voice saying those things.
His hand began to move, a slow, tight stroke from root to tip. Pre-cum beaded at the slit, slicking his path. The friction was good, but it was the voice that did it—the specific, illicit fantasy it unlocked—that made his breath catch in ragged gasps.
“You’re so hard for me,” not-her-voice murmured. “Throbbing. Is it aching? Poor thing.”
“Yeah,” he grunted, the word torn from him. His rhythm increased, his fist a tight, desperate vessel. The sheets tangled around his thighs. He was lost in it now, the guilt a distant echo. Every synapse fired toward the image her words painted: a dim room, not this one, her concerned face leaning close, then shifting, changing, understanding dawning not in shock but in a dark, shared hunger. Her hand, not his own, touching him there. Her mouth—
“Come for me,” the voice commanded, soft but undeniable. “Come for your big sister. Let me hear you.”
It was the final trigger. A violent shiver racked his frame. His back arched clear off the bed as his orgasm ripped through him, hot and pulsing, stripes of white painting his abdomen and chest in the dark. A choked, strangled sound was all he could manage, his sister’s name a silent, shameful shape on his lips.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of his own desperate breathing and the wet, sticky proof cooling on his skin.
The crash was instantaneous.
The audio had ended. The physical thrum faded, leaving a hollow, sick emptiness in its wake. He yanked the headphones off as if they were on fire, letting them clatter to the floor. Disgust, thick and nauseating, washed over him. He stared at the mess on his stomach, feeling like he’d just defiled something sacred.
“What is wrong with you?” he muttered to the ceiling, his voice raw.
He forced himself up, limbs heavy with shame, and trudged to the small sink in the corner of his room. He avoided his own eyes in the mirror as he wiped himself clean with a cold, wet cloth. The ritual was familiar. The self-loathing was too.
Slumping back onto his disheveled bed, he grabbed his phone. The screen lit up, still open to the forum where bloodymess posted. Her icon was a simple, abstract drop of crimson. He’d listened to every file she’d ever uploaded. Dozens of them. Each one a different variation on the same beautiful, terrible theme.
He needed to disconnect, to chase the real world. He opened a messaging app, his thumb hovering over Choso’s name. He typed out, “Hey, how’s work?” then deleted it. Too forced. He settled for a stupid meme about cats, something normal, something a good little brother would send.
Her reply came a few minutes later, just a laughing emoji. A little bubble of normalcy. It made him feel worse.
Scrolling mindlessly, trying to distract his brain, he navigated back to the forum. He’d never checked bloodymess’s profile. It felt like an intrusion, a step further into the obsession. But tonight, sated and sickened, a numb curiosity took hold.
He tapped the username.
The profile was sparse. A join date two years ago. A list of audio titles. No personal details. But at the bottom, there was a link. A single, discreet line of text: “For customs and commissions, click here.”
It was a link to a private, paid platform for content creators. Without thinking, driven by a compulsion he couldn't name, Yuji tapped it.
The page loaded. It was a professional, minimalist site. And there, front and center, was a profile picture.
It was small. Blurry. Clearly cropped from a larger, casual photo.
But it showed a woman’s smiling mouth, her chin, and the elegant line of her neck. And resting just in the hollow of her throat, on a thin silver chain, was a pendant.
A very specific, familiar pendant. A tiny, stylised tectonic plate. Geologic. Uncommon.
Yuji’s blood turned to ice. His heart, which had just been pounding from exertion, now seized in his chest with a new, pure terror.
He knew that pendant. He’d bought it for her. For Choso. For her last birthday.
The phone tumbled from his nerveless fingers, hitting the floor with a crack. The dark room felt like it was spinning. The voice from the audio, her voice, echoed in the new, screaming silence of his mind.
It was her.
bloodymess was Choso.