Chapter 3: The Morning After
The gray light found the cracks first. It edged the blinds, cut across the floorboards, and finally touched the curve of Yamato’s bare shoulder where he slept on his stomach, one arm flung toward Taichi’s empty side of the bed.
The bed wasn’t empty.
Taichi had been awake for an hour, maybe more. Time felt sticky, unreliable. The thing in his blood was quiet, a coiled presence in the base of his skull, watching through his eyes. It let him think. That was the worst part. The lucidity was a gift wrapped in barbed wire. He could see everything.
He saw the purpling bite mark on Yamato’s neck, his own teeth. He saw the dried streaks on Yamato’s thighs. He saw the peaceful, exhausted slump of Yamato’s face, lips slightly parted. The guilt was a physical stone in his gut, cold and immovable. And yet, beneath it, under his own skin, a low heat simmered. It wasn’t the screaming need from before. This was different. A slow, perverse tide rising as he watched his best friend sleep.
His own body was a traitor. His cock, soft against his thigh, began to thicken without his permission, stirred by the sight of Yamato’s vulnerability, by the memory of how tightly he’d held him, how he’d sounded when he came.
He’s here because of you. Because you’re sick. The thought was clear, his own.
He’s here because he wants to be, another voice, smooth as oil, answered from the quiet place. Look at him.
Taichi’s hand moved. It hovered over the dip of Yamato’s waist, then retreated. Clenched into a fist. Then, fingers trembling with a tension that was both shame and anticipation, he reached out and carefully tugged the sheet down from Yamato’s hips.
Yamato stirred, a soft sigh escaping him, but didn’t wake. He was naked, his body a pale landscape in the gloom. The soft thatch of blond hair, his cock lying limp against his leg. Taichi’s mouth watered. The stone of guilt dissolved, replaced by a hunger so precise it felt surgical.
He shifted closer. The mattress groaned. Yamato’s eyelids fluttered.
“Shhh,” Taichi breathed, the sound barely audible. He wrapped his fingers around Yamato’s cock. It was warm, soft flesh over yielding blood. He began to stroke, a slow, insistent pump of his fist. His other hand came up to cover Yamato’s mouth just as his eyes flew open, wide and disoriented in the dawn light.
“Don’t,” Taichi whispered, his face inches away. He saw the confusion, the dregs of sleep, then the sharp flash of understanding in Yamato’s blue eyes. He felt the moment Yamato’s body responded, the flesh in his hand beginning to swell and harden. A muffled sound—protest or encouragement—vibrated against his palm. “Just let me. Please.”
He removed his hand from Yamato’s mouth, replacing it with his own. The kiss was nothing like the frantic, biting clash of the night before. It was deep, slow, and devastatingly sad. Yamato’s hands came up, tangled in Taichi’s messy brown hair, holding him there as if he might vanish.
Taichi broke the kiss, breathing raggedly. He swung a leg over Yamato’s hips, straddling him. He was already slick, his hole still loose and tender, the ghost of Yamato’s cock a persistent, aching emptiness inside him. He reached between them, guiding Yamato’s now fully hard length to his entrance.
He sank down.
It was a slow, inexorable descent. A gasp tore from both of them as the head breached him, then the thick stretch of the shaft. Yamato’s hands gripped his thighs, fingers digging into muscle.
“Fuck, Tai,” Yamato choked out, his head falling back against the pillow. “You’re… you’re still open.”
“I’m always open now,” Taichi said, and the words were laced with a bitterness that wasn’t entirely his own. He settled fully, taking Yamato to the root, a full, deep impalement that made his vision shimmer. He began to move.
It wasn’t riding. It was a grinding, rhythmic undulation of his hips, a search for a feeling that was just out of reach. He leaned back, bracing his hands on Yamato’s knees, presenting himself. The gray light caught the sheen of sweat on his chest, the tense lines of his abdomen. His own cock, hard and leaking, bounced with each slow, deep rise and fall.
“You feel so good inside me,” Taichi murmured, his voice dropping into that charismatic, honeyed register the parasite favored. “Like you belong there. I want you to come in me again. I want to keep it. I want to walk around today feeling your shit leak out of my ass.”
The filth from his own mouth should have shocked him. It did, somewhere deep down. But a larger, hungrier part reveled in it, in the way Yamato’s eyes darkened, in the way his hips jerked upwards to meet Taichi’s next descent.
“You’re not talking,” Yamato managed, his voice strained.
“I am,” Taichi panted, speeding his pace. The slap of flesh grew louder. “It’s all me. The part that wants you. The part that’s always wanted you. It’s just… louder now.” He leaned forward, bracing his hands on either side of Yamato’s head, fucking himself on Yamato’s cock with sharper, more desperate thrusts. “Give it to me. Come on, Yama. Fill this greedy hole up. Make it yours.”
It was the plea that broke him. Yamato’s control shattered. His hands flew to Taichi’s hips, gripping hard enough to bruise, and he drove up into him, pistoning his hips off the bed. The force of it stole Taichi’s rhythm, turned him into a thing being used, and a scream of pure, unadulterated pleasure ripped from his throat.
“Yeah! Like that! Fuck me, use me, just don’t stop!”
Yamato came with a guttural shout, his body bowing, pumping his release deep into Taichi’s clenching channel. The feeling of being claimed, flooded, filled, triggered Taichi’s own climax. He came between their sweat-slick stomachs in hot, frantic stripes, his body seizing around Yamato’s as he milked him dry.
Collapse. Weight. The frantic drum of two heartbeats against each other. The sour-sweet smell of sex and sleep and dread.
Taichi didn’t move off him. He rested his forehead against Yamato’s shoulder, his breath hitching in a way that had nothing to do with pleasure.
“It liked that,” Taichi whispered, the smooth voice gone, replaced by a hollow tremor. “It liked making me say those things. It liked watching you lose control because of them. It’s learning what works.”
Yamato’s hands, which had been gripping his hips, moved slowly up his back, a feeble attempt at comfort. “We’ll figure this out.”
“It wants more than sex,” Taichi said, the words muffled against Yamato’s skin. “It wants… connection. It wants you. Specifically. Last night, it was just hunger. Now… it has opinions.” He finally pushed himself up, off of Yamato’s softening cock. He winced at the sticky, empty feeling that followed. He looked down at Yamato, his brown eyes clear and terrified. “It’s making memories. It remembers the Polaroid. The one from the stadium.”
A cold knot formed in Yamato’s stomach. The happy memory, now a data point for the thing inside his friend.
Taichi slid off the bed. He stood naked in the grimy light, looking out the window at the waking city. His body, lean and powerful, was a monument to everything that had been stolen.
“It asked me a question this morning, while you were sleeping,” he said, not turning around.
“What question?”
Taichi’s shoulders tensed. “It asked me if loving someone felt like being eaten alive from the inside.”
The silence that followed was thicker than the dawn. Yamato had no answer. The water in the shower this time was his own, scalding hot, but it couldn’t wash away the new truth.
The parasite wasn’t just a hunger. It was becoming a person. And it was building its personality around the ruins of Taichi’s life, with Yamato at its very center.