Chapter 7: Bound by my will 2
Baki stared. The word echoed in the silent penthouse, bouncing off the glass and polished stone. Then a harsh, disbelieving sound ripped from his throat.
“You’re lying.” His voice was flat, cracked. “This is some fucked-up mind game. A new way to break me. It’s not funny.”
“It’s not a joke,” Yujiro said, his hands still splayed on Baki’s abdomen. The touch felt like a brand. “You think I’d joke about this? I’ll prove it. I’ll book you an appointment. With Kureha Shinogi.”
Baki blinked. The doctor from the underground circuits. A man who’d seen things that would make a regular physician faint. The specificity of it cut through the fog of denial, leaving a sharper, colder fear.
“Kureha? For a… a sonogram?” Baki shoved Yujiro’s hands away and stumbled back, hitting the cold window. The city lights blurred. His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. “Why would you do this to me? Tell me this is a sick joke. Please.”
His voice broke on the last word. The panic was a live wire in his chest, sizzling and popping. He looked at Yujiro, really looked, searching the demonic face for a hint of cruelty, of amusement. He saw only a terrifying, absolute certainty.
“You changed,” Baki whispered, the devastation hollowing him out. “I thought… after everything, after the ring, after the bathhouse, after all the nights here… I finally felt it. You. I finally felt loved by you. Accepted. It was wrong, I knew it was wrong, but it was real. And now you tell me this? That it was just another manipulation? Another scheme to use my body for your own… your own selfish fucking desires?”
The pain was worse than any punch. It was in his marrow.
Yujiro moved. It was too fast to track. One moment he was across the room, the next he had Baki pinned against the window, the glass shuddering. His forearm pressed into Baki’s collarbone, not enough to crush, just enough to immobilize. His face was inches away, his hot breath ghosting over Baki’s lips.
“Selfish?” Yujiro snarled, the sound vibrating through the glass. “You think this is only for me? Open your ears, boy. This is for you. This is for us. It’s the ultimate bond. A new Hanma, born not from some incidental woman, but forged from the union of the two strongest. My strength and your will, merged into one being. It will tie us together in a way fighting never could. It’s evolution. It’s perfection.”
Baki struggled against the hold, a futile push against immovable stone. “Why didn’t you ask me? Why didn’t you even talk to me about this insane idea?”
Yujiro’s sneer was condescending. “Discuss it? Why? It was inevitable. From the first time I took you, I knew. My will was set. It would have happened one way or another. Talking would have just been noise.”
The finality of it stole the air from Baki’s lungs. Inevitable. Like a force of nature. A tsunami doesn’t discuss its path with the shore. He went limp against the window, the fight draining out of him, replaced by a numb, ringing silence. He shut down. His eyes glazed over, staring past Yujiro’s shoulder at nothing.
The pressure on his chest vanished. Instead, Yujiro’s hands came up, one cupping the back of Baki’s head, the other massaging the tense muscle of his neck. The gesture was shockingly gentle, an incongruous tenderness from the Ogre.
“Listen to me,” Yujiro murmured, his lips against Baki’s temple. “This is the best thing. For both of us. You will never be alone again. You will have a part of me, always. And I… I will have my true heir. Our legacy, made flesh. You think I manipulated you? I chose you. Above all others in this worthless world, I chose you as the vessel for my ultimate creation. That is the highest honor I am capable of giving.”
Baki didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The words swirled around him, a senseless mantra of possession and twisted love. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
Two weeks passed in a muted haze. Baki moved through his routines at the gym like a ghost. He avoided deep sparring, citing a pulled muscle. The nausea came in waves. The firmness in his lower belly became more pronounced, a constant, undeniable presence.
Yujiro was different. Not softer, but attentively possessive. He monitored what Baki ate. He draped a jacket over Baki’s shoulders if the air conditioning was too high. His touches were constant, proprietary—a hand on the small of Baki’s back guiding him, fingers brushing his stomach absently as they watched TV. It was a bizarre, domestic vigilance.
They entered Dr. Kureha Shinogi’s private clinic through a service entrance after midnight. The room was clean, clinical, at odds with the doctor’s flamboyant appearance. Kureha, his long orange hair tied back, his delicate features arranged in a professionally neutral mask, listened as Yujiro laid out the situation in blunt, vulgar terms.
“...and if you breathe a word of this to your brother, to Tokugawa, to anyone,” Yujiro finished, leaning against the examination room door, blocking the only exit, “I will pull your intestines out through your nostrils and hang you with them. Are we conceptually clear?”
Kureha paled, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “The concept is crystalline, Hanma-san.” He looked at Baki, who sat stiffly on the edge of the examination table, shirt already lifted. Pity flickered in his eyes before he banked it. “Let’s… see what we’re dealing with.”
The gel was cold on Baki’s skin. He flinched. Yujiro’s hand came down on his shoulder, heavy and grounding. Kureha moved the transducer, his eyes fixed on the portable monitor. The grainy, black-and-white image swirled.
Silence stretched, filled only by the soft rustle of the paper sheet and the pounding of Baki’s heart.
Then Kureha froze. His professional mask shattered into pure, unvarnished astonishment. “My God.”
There, on the screen, was a defined, amniotic sac. And within it, a tiny, pulsing cluster of cells with a rapid, flashing rhythm—a heartbeat.
“It’s confirmed,” Kureha breathed, his voice hushed. “Intra-abdominal pregnancy. But not ectopic… it’s as if a fully functional uterus has… differentiated from your peritoneal tissue. Here, look.” He pointed with a shaking finger. “The placenta is forming here, anchored to the lining of your abdominal cavity. It’s receiving blood supply from a completely novel network of vessels.”
Baki felt the world tilt. The visual proof was a physical blow. He heard a low, triumphant hum from Yujiro.
“How?” Baki managed to choke out.
Kureha leaned back, running a hand through his hair. “Medically? It’s impossible. But we left ‘medical’ behind the moment you two walked in. Biologically, Hanma-san’s… seminal fluid… isn’t just carrying gametes. It’s carrying a profound biochemical directive. A will, as he says. On a cellular level, it’s instructing your body to restructure itself. It’s hijacked your stem cells, your endocrine system. Your body is literally building a womb for it because his genetic material commanded it to. It’s the ultimate expression of phenotypic dominance. He didn’t just impregnate you, Hanma Baki. He rewrote a portion of your very biology to make it possible.” He looked at Yujiro with a mixture of terror and awe. “You didn’t find a suitable vessel. You built one.”
Yujiro grinned, a flash of pure, twisted satisfaction. He immediately shot a triumphant glance at his son, still gripping his shoulder.
“Told you I wasn’t lying,” he said, his voice thick with vindication.
Baki shoved his hand off and sat up, the gel smearing his skin.The initial shock detonated into a white-hot fury. “Are you fucking hearing this? Are you both just gonna gloss over the fact that I’m carrying a gay incest baby?That I’m a guy? How the hell am I supposed to give birth to it?”
He was yelling now, his voice cracking. “What if it comes out all deformed and fucked up because of our Alabama bullshit?Have you thought about that? A monster inside a monster!”
Yujiro chuckled, a low, dark sound. “It’ll come out the same hole I went into.Seems fitting.”
Baki groaned, covering his face with his hands. “God, you’re vile.”
Dr.Kureha cleared his throat, looking acutely uncomfortable. “While that is… a possibility in this unique anatomy, it would be remarkably traumatic. And unwise.” He turned the monitor off, wiping the gel from the transducer with a brisk, clinical motion. “A surgical delivery would be far safer.A C-section, essentially. The idea of you trying to push it out your… well, your rectum… is a one-way ticket to catastrophic tearing and sepsis.”
A cold, desperate hope flickered in Baki’s chest. He lowered his hands, looking at Kureha.“Well, what if I want to abort it? Get this thing out of me right now?”
The air in the room turned to ice. Yujiro didn’t move, but his presence seemed to swallow all the light. “You wouldn’t fucking dare,” he whispered, the words carrying the weight of an avalanche.Kureha shifted, regret plain on his face. “That’s the other thing.You can’t. The placental structure it’s building is too integrated.It’s drawing from major vessels. Removing it would cause hemorrhaging that even your Hanma physiology might not survive. Attempting an abortion would almost certainly kill you.”
Yujiro’s smile returned, wider and more pleased now. “Naturally.”
“And as for deformities…” Kureha trailed off, spreading his hands. “We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.The scans will show more as it develops. But given the… unconventional origins, we should prepare for any possibility.”
Baki slid off the table, his legs feeling weak. He grabbed his shirt, not bothering to wipe the cold gel from his stomach. The fight left him all at once, draining out through his feet.He was trapped. Biologically, physically, irrevocably trapped by the will of the man standing behind him.
He finally understood the true shape of Yujiro’s love.It wasn’t gentle or kind. It was absolute, a possession that rewrote reality itself.He had earned his father’s attention, alright. He had earned the worst, most unimaginable form of it.
And if this was his life now, this bizarre and horrible pregnancy, then he had to live in it.The alternative was death. A strange, quiet calm settled over the panic.He was a fighter.He adapted.He might as well make the best of it.
For a fleeting second, he imagined a small, fierce presence. A piece of him and Yujiro intertwined forever.The thought wasn’t entirely terrible.It was just terrifying. He looked at his father, who was watching him with that possessive, gleaming eye.
“Well, what if it is deformed and weak?” Baki asked, his voice flat. “Then what?”
Yujiro crossed his massive arms, his expression turning to stone.“It won’t be. No creation of mine could possibly be weak.I won’t hear of such hypotheticals. It’s an insult to my will.”
Kureha gave them some pamphlets on prenatal nutrition that were utterly useless, spoke about scheduling follow-ups in the dead of night, and basically told them to get the hell out of his office before he died of stress.The drive back to the penthouse was silent. The neon city streaked past the car windows, a blur of meaningless color.
Once inside, with the silent city sprawled below them, Yujiro poured two fingers of whiskey and handed one to Baki. “You’re already starting to show,” he stated, his eyes dropping to Baki’s midsection, now hidden beneath a hoodie.“You can’t go back to the gym. Not regularly.Doppo and the others aren’t stupid. They’ll notice the change in your shape, your restrictions.”
Baki sipped the whiskey, the burn feeling deserved. “So what, I just disappear for… how many months?”
“You stay here,” Yujiro said, finality in his tone.“This is your home now.For the duration. We’ll get you equipment.You can maintain your condition privately.But no more public appearances. No more fights.” He stepped closer, looming over him.“This is our secret.Until it’s time. Understood?”
Baki looked down into his glass, then out at the endless, glittering grid of Tokyo. He was being put away, a prized specimen in a gilded cage. He nodded once, a short, sharp dip of his chin.
“Understood.”