Chapter 4: Lick
The dojo mats still smelled of them.
It was a week later, and Baki couldn't shake it. The scent of sex and sweat had seeped into the resin, a permanent ghost in the space that had once been purely for violence. It distracted him. He’d find himself mid-spar, his mind flashing to the searing pain-pleasure of being pinned there, and Yujiro’s fist would crack against his jaw, snapping his head back.
“You’re dead,” Yujiro would grunt, not even winded. “A hundred times over. Your focus is shit.”
He was right. Baki felt unmoored. The brutal coupling on the mats hadn’t sated anything; it had opened a hungry, howling pit in him. He wanted the fight and the aftermath. He wanted the pain that wasn’t punishment, but possession. It made him reckless.
It happened during a routine conditioning drill. Yujiro had rigged a new apparatus: a series of suspended, multi-angled steel beams, each weighted to swing back with tremendous force if not perfectly controlled. The objective was to move through the maze without being hit. It was about fluidity, perception, soft deflection.
Baki charged it like a bull.
He was angry—at his own distraction, at the confusing warmth in Yujiro’s eyes that appeared only in the private darkness and vanished by dawn, at the desperate need that dogged his every step. He ducked the first beam, weaved past the second. The third came from his blind side, a thick, swinging I-beam of brushed steel. Instead of sliding past its momentum, he tried to stop it.
His palms slammed against the cold metal. The force was monstrous, transferring up his bones with a sickening jolt. He gritted his teeth, muscles cording in his neck, feet skidding on the mat. For a second, he held it. A surge of triumph went through him. He could control it. He could control this.
“Idiot,” Yujiro’s voice cut through his focus, a flat, bored tone from the sidelines.
The insult was the spark. Baki, in a surge of defiant pride, didn’t let go. He tried to shove the beam back along its arc. It was physics at its most unforgiving. The beam, meeting unequal resistance, torqued wildly. A jagged bolt head sheared off with a ping.
The beam’s swing altered. Instead of a clean push-back, it twisted sideways.
Baki saw it too late. The ragged, sharp edge of the sheared bolt, now a spinning lance of steel, caught him across the lower right side of his ribs as the weight tore from his grip.
There was no dramatic sound. Just a wet, tearing whisper, like fabric ripping, but deeper. Then the fire bloomed.
He stumbled back, tripping over his own feet, and crashed to the mat. The breath left him in a shocked gasp. He looked down.
His tank top was split open. Beneath it, a deep, glistening furrow ran from just below his pec down to his hip bone. It wasn’t a clean cut; it was a savage tear, the skin and muscle peeled back, revealing the shocking, bloody gleam of subcutaneous fat and the ominous, darker red of muscle tissue. Blood wasn’t just welling up; it was pouring, a swift, hot stream that immediately began to soak the fabric of his pants and pool on the pale mat.
The pain arrived a heartbeat later, a crescendo of white, blinding agony that locked his voice in his throat. He could only stare, breath hitching in shallow, useless pants.
Yujiro was there. He hadn’t moved with speed, but with inevitability, like a landslide. He stood over Baki, looking down at the wound, his expression unreadable. No concern. No anger. Just assessment.
“Stupid,” he said again, the word clinical. “Trying to overpower a pendulum. Basic error.” He knelt, his knees cracking. The pool of blood spread, nearing his sweats.
Baki trembled, going into shock. The world began to tunnel, the edges of his vision greying. He needed a hospital. Stitches. Surgery.
Yujiro’s hand, vast and warm, pressed against Baki’s sternum, pinning him flat to the mat. “Don’t you pass out.” The command brooked no argument. “Look at it. Look at what your pride just bought you.”
Helpless, Baki looked. The wound gaped, pulsating with each frantic beat of his heart. He was going to bleed out here, on the dojo floor, and his father was giving him a lecture.
Then Yujiro did something that stopped Baki’s heart more effectively than the blood loss.
He bent his head.
He didn’t reach for a towel, for antiseptic, for a phone. He lowered his face to the vicious tear in Baki’s side.
And he licked it.
The touch wasn’t a kiss. It was broad, firm, and thorough. The flat of his tongue, hot and rough as a cat’s, dragged the entire length of the wound from bottom to top in one long, slow, deliberate stroke.
Baki jerked, a silent scream caught in his chest. The sensation was beyond comprehension. The searing pain of the open laceration was suddenly mixed with a shocking, intimate wetness, a primal, animal contact that bypassed all logic. He felt the texture of Yujiro’s tongue—the rasp of it against raw tissue, the pressure as it cleaned away the welling blood.
The coppery tang of his own blood filled the air, mixed with Yujiro’s scent.
Yujiro pulled back slightly, his mouth stained crimson. He spat a mouthful of blood onto the mat beside them, a casual, brutal gesture. He examined the wound again. The long lick had cleared the immediate flood, revealing the damage in stark, terrible detail. Without a word, he bent again.
This time, his work was more precise. His tongue probed the edges of the torn skin, licking away fresh blood as it seeped. He worked with a focused, disturbing intensity, his head moving in small, efficient motions. He was cleaning it. Not with alcohol or water. With his own mouth.
Baki lay paralyzed, stunned into absolute silence. The agony was still a towering inferno in his side, but layered over it was a breathtaking, horrifying intimacy that made his brain short-circuit. This was care. But it was the care of a wild thing, a predator tending to its own. It was possession written in the most primal script possible.
Yujiro finished, sitting back on his heels. The wound, while still grievously deep and open, was clean of debris and free of the obscuring flow of blood. The bleeding had slowed, shocked into coagulation by the bizarre treatment.
“The saliva has enzymes,” Yujiro said, his voice utterly matter-of-fact, as if commenting on the weather. He wiped the back of his hand across his bloody mouth. “Slows infection. Stimulates healing. Better than any shit you’d get at a clinic.” He looked at Baki’s ashen face, at the wide, shell-shocked eyes. “You’ll need stitches. But you won’t die.”
He stood up, leaving Baki lying in the cooling pool of his own blood. “Get up. Walk it off. Then we’ll seal it.”
Baki couldn’t move. His body was a lump of lead, his mind screaming. Yujiro had just… licked his gaping wound. Tasted his flesh and blood. And it hadn’t been an act of violence. It had been an act of… preservation.
“Why?” The word scraped out of Baki’s throat, weak and ragged.
Yujiro paused at the doorway, glancing back. The red smudge on his lips was the most vivid thing in the room. He looked like a beast after a feast. His eyes held that familiar, terrifying absence of anything soft. And yet.
“Because it’s mine,” he said, the answer simple, absolute, and devastating. “I decide what happens to it. Not an infection. Not your stupidity. Me.”
He left.
Baki lay on the mat, the ghost of his father’s tongue burning on his torn flesh more fiercely than the injury itself. The pain was a tangible thing. But the stunned, vertiginous feeling in his chest—that was全新的 territory. He had been claimed, down to the marrow. Not just with sex, or words, or violence.
But with a lick. A gross, animal, profoundly caring act that belonged to no world Baki understood. He shuddered, a full-body spasm that tore a gasp from him. Slowly, gripping his side, he began the agonizing process of rising. To walk it off. To present himself for stitching.
To belong, utterly, to the thing that had just tasted his blood to keep him alive.
Baki made it to the doorway of the dojo, each step a fiery knife twist in his side, before his legs buckled. The grey at the edges of his vision swarmed inward, thick and fuzzy. He swayed, catching himself on the doorframe, his breathing shallow whistles.
A shadow blocked the sterile hallway light. Yujiro was back, a small, worn metal box in one hand. He looked at Baki clinging to the wood, his face pale and beaded with cold sweat. No sigh. No remark.
He just hooked an arm around Baki’s chest, careful to avoid the mangled right side, and lifted him clear off the floor. Baki’s head lolled against his father’s shoulder, the world tilting. He was carried not with tenderness, but with the efficient, unyielding certainty of a soldier retrieving vital equipment. The metal box, a field surgical kit, bumped against Baki’s thigh with each stride.
Yujiro took him not to the sterile med-bay in the estate’s east wing, but to Baki’s own room. He laid him on the bed, the dark sheets cool. "Shirt. Off," Yujiro said, his voice leaving no room for Baki’s trembling fingers. When Baki fumbled, Yujiro simply gripped the ruined tank top and tore it the rest of the way, peeling the blood-soaked fabric from his skin with a soft, tearing sound.
The wound wept fresh blood at the disturbance. Yujiro opened the metal box. It was orderly: gauze, a bottle of clear liquid, a curved needle, black silk thread. He worked without speaking, soaking gauze in the liquid—alcohol, the sharp scent cutting through the blood—and dabbed at the edges. Baki jerked, a hiss escaping his teeth.
"Hold still," Yujiro murmured, not looking at his face, his entire focus on the torn flesh. His other hand came down, palm flat and heavy on Baki’s left shoulder, pinning him to the mattress. It wasn't a gentle restraint. It was absolute immobilization.
He threaded the needle. His hands, which could punch through concrete, were preternaturally steady. The first pinch of the needle piercing skin was a bright, shocking sting. Baki gasped. Yujiro didn’t pause. He began to suture with a swift, brutal rhythm: pierce, pull, tie. Each tug of the thread drew the separated meat of Baki’s side back together, a tight, stitching ache that mapped the wound’s path with fiery precision.
"You don't get to be careless with this," Yujiro said, his voice low, conversational, as he worked. "Not with this body." Pierce, pull, tie. "It's not just yours anymore. You understand that?" He glanced up, his eyes locking onto Baki’s. The intensity there was new. It wasn't lust, or battle-frenzy. It was a cold, glaring ownership. "I put time into this. I marked it. That makes it my concern."
Baki could only stare, mesmerized by the dichotomy: the vicious, intimate pain of the needle, and the terrifying depth of that statement. Yujiro’s thumb smoothed over a completed stitch, checking its tension, a gesture oddly meticulous.
He finished the last suture, knotted it with a firm yank that made Baki see stars, and clipped the thread. The line of black stitches marched across Baki’s side, a stark, neat railroad of repair. Yujiro wiped the area once more with clean, alcohol-soaked gauze, then taped a sterile pad over it. His hands lingered, pressing the bandage flat, feeling the heat of the trauma beneath.
Then he sat back on the edge of the bed. He didn't leave. He looked at Baki, sweat-damp and breathing raggedly on the sheets, and something in his posture shifted. The arrogance softened into something more rigid, more watchful. "You don't move from this bed unless it's to piss. And I'll carry you for that."
"I can walk," Baki mumbled, the defiance automatic but weak.
Yujiro’s hand shot out, not to strike, but to cage Baki’s uninjured wrist against the mattress. His grip was iron. "You can't. You will heal. Perfectly. No scar to impair function, no weakness in the tissue." He leaned in closer, his presence filling the room. "Because I said so. Anyone else comes near you—a doctor, a nurse, one of your idiot friends—I break their hands. You eat what I bring you. You sleep when I tell you."
This was beyond training, beyond domination. This was a possessive custodianship, absolute and smothering. The man who had once thrown him through walls was now dictating his rest, his nutrition, his very mobility, with the fervor of a dragon guarding a single, specific jewel.
Baki swallowed. "For how long?"
"Until it's mine again," Yujiro said, as if it were obvious. He finally released Baki’s wrist, his fingers brushing almost unconsciously over the pulse point there. "Whole. And strong." He stood, looking down at his work, at Baki laid out before him. "Now sleep."
He didn't leave the room. He dragged a heavy chair from the corner and placed it right beside the bed. He sat in it, a sentinel in the dim light, his eyes not leaving Baki’s face. The message was clear: he was staying. He would be watching. Overprotection wasn't a gesture; it was a lockdown. And in the thick, pained silence, Baki felt a new, bewildering layer snap into place around the chaotic bond they shared—a cage of terrifying, absolute care.