Chapter 14: Fear
The ride home was silent. The whoosh-whoosh of the twin heartbeats seemed to have transplanted itself into Baki’s skull, a maddening metronome counting down to a crisis he couldn’t name. He stared out the passenger window, unseeing, his hand splayed protectively over his lower abdomen. The slight curve there felt like a lie now, a modest hill hiding a coming avalanche.
Yujiro drove, his earlier elation simmering into a watchful concentration. He kept glancing at Baki’s profile, at the rigid line of his jaw. The joy was still there, a bright, burning coal in his chest, but he saw the shadow it cast on his son.
“Baki.”
No response.
“Talk to me.”
“What is there to say?” Baki’s voice was flat, hollow. “Two. It’s not a complication. It’s a catastrophe.”
“It’s a victory.” Yujiro’s tone held no room for argument, but it wasn’t harsh.
“For you.” Baki finally turned his head, his eyes dark pits of exhaustion and dread. “My body is the battlefield. Not yours. You don’t have to carry them. You don’t have to push them out. You just get to… marvel at the result.” He looked away again, his throat working. “It already feels like there’s no room. I can’t breathe right. How am I supposed to house two? How am I supposed to survive it?”
The car pulled into the underground garage of their building. The engine cut, leaving a thick, smothering quiet. Yujiro unbuckled his seatbelt and turned fully toward Baki, his large frame dominating the space.
“Listen to me.” He waited until Baki reluctantly met his gaze. “You are the strongest thing I have ever known. Not because of your muscles. Because of this.” He reached over and tapped a single, firm finger against Baki’s temple. “Your will is forged fucking steel. You survived the mountain. You survived me at my worst. This?” His hand slid down, covering Baki’s on his stomach. “This is just the next fight. And you don’t fight it alone.”
Baki’s breath hitched. The warmth of Yujiro’s hand seeped through his shirt. The simple, solid weight of it was an anchor.
“It’s too much,” Baki whispered, the admission frayed.
“It’s not. You have nothing to worry about. I am here. Every second. I will carry what I can. I will break anything that threatens you. Anything.” Yujiro’s voice dropped, becoming low, intense, a vow etched in stone. “Those two heartbeats are ours. A testament to us. To our line. And you, you incredible creature, are their vessel. There is no one else on this earth who could do this. So you will. And you will be magnificent.”
He leaned closer, his forehead nearly touching Baki’s. “Everything is going to be alright. Do you hear me? Everything.”
Baki closed his eyes. He wanted to believe the promise. He wanted to drown in the certainty of that voice. The fear was still there, cold and leaden in his gut, but Yujiro’s words were a hearth against the chill. He gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.
“Good.” Yujiro pulled back, got out, and came around to open Baki’s door. He didn’t carry him this time, but his hand was firm on Baki’s elbow as they walked to the elevator, a steadying presence.
Inside the apartment, the silence felt different. Charged. The reality of the two heartbeats hung between them, a shared, colossal truth. Baki moved to the couch but didn’t sit. He stood in the middle of the room, feeling unmoored, his skin too tight.
Yujiro watched him for a moment, then walked over. He stopped just in front of him, his gaze tracking over Baki’s face, down his neck, to the subtle new swell of his belly.
“I want to feel them,” Yujiro said, his voice rough.
“You saw them.”
“Not like that.” He placed his hands on Baki’s hips, pulling him closer. “I want to feel where they are. Deep inside you.”
Understanding dawned, hot and immediate. A thick, needy flush spread up Baki’s neck. The fear and the awe twisted together, morphing into a sharp, wanting ache. He didn’t protest as Yujiro’s hands moved to the hem of his shirt, pulling it up and over his head. The cool air kissed his skin, raising goosebumps. Yujiro’s eyes darkened as he looked at him—the old scars, the fading bruises, the new, gentle prominence that changed everything.
Yujiro bent his head and licked a stripe from Baki’s navel up to his sternum, a possessor tasting his territory. “On the bed. Get on top.”
The command brooked no refusal, but it wasn’t cruel. It was wanting. Needing. Baki let himself be guided to the bedroom. Yujiro sat back on the bed, shedding his own clothes with efficient, powerful movements. He leaned back on his elbows, a king on a rumpled throne, his cock already thick and heavy against his stomach. “Come here. Ride me. I want you in control. I want to watch you take me where they are.”
Baki’s hands trembled slightly as he pushed his sweats and briefs down. He climbed onto the bed, straddling Yujiro’s thighs. The intimacy was overwhelming, more so now with the new life—lives—between them. He reached down, guiding Yujiro’s cock, the head pressing against his entrance. He was already slick, his body responding to the blatant hunger in Yujiro’s gaze.
He sank down.
It was a slow, burning descent, an exquisite stretch that made him gasp. Yujiro’s hands flew to his hips, not to force, but to steady, his fingers digging into the flesh. Baki took him all, until his ass rested on Yujiro’s thighs, he was fully speared, achingly full.
“Fuck,” Yujiro breathed, his head tilting back, cords standing out in his neck. “Just like that. Now move.”
Baki began to rock, a tentative rise and fall. Pleasure, sharp and bright, cut through the constant low-grade anxiety. He braced his hands on Yujiro’s massive chest, finding a rhythm. Each time he sank back down, it was deeper, more claiming.
“Yes,” Yujiro growled, his hips thrusting up to meet him. “That’s it. Take it. Take all of me.” His eyes were locked on where their bodies joined, then drifted up to Baki’s stomach. “I can feel it. I can feel how deep you are. Right to the root of you.”
His words were filthy, raw, stripping away every pretense.
“You feel so fucking different,” Yujiro moaned, his hands sliding around to grip Baki’s ass, pulling him down harder onto each thrust. “Tighter. Hotter. Like your body’s remade itself around my cock. God, yes.”
Baki cried out, his rhythm faltering as a particularly deep angle sent a shockwave through his core. He was full in a way he’d never been, Yujiro’s length seemingly reaching into a new, secret chamber of his body.
“That’s where they are, isn’t it?” Yujiro snarled, his voice guttural with effort and awe. He pistoned his hips up, driving himself relentlessly deeper. “Right there. I’m hitting the wall of them. I can feel it. I can feel our children, Baki.”
The obscenity of it—the raw, biological truth—shattered Baki’s last defenses. A sob mixed with a moan tore from his throat.
“Say it,” Yujiro demanded, slamming up into him. “Tell me you feel me touching them.”
“I feel it!” Baki screamed, his back arching. “I feel you! You’re everywhere!”
“I am,” Yujiro grunted, his movements becoming frenzied, a brutal, pounding rhythm. “I’m in your guts. I’m in your womb. I’m so deep in you I can feel those two little hearts beating around my goddamn dick!” The vulgar poetry of it sent them both over the edge. Yujiro’s roar filled the room as he came, a hot, pulsing flood that seemed to reach Baki’s very soul. The intense, internal heat triggered Baki’s own climax, his release striping Yujiro’s stomach as he clenched around him, milking every last drop.
He collapsed forward, spent, his face burying in Yujiro’s neck. They were both slick with sweat, breathing in ragged, shattered unison. Yujiro’s arms came around him, holding him close, one broad hand splayed possessively over the small of Baki’s back.
Gradually, their breathing slowed. Yujiro’s hand drifted around, settling with infinite gentleness on Baki’s lower belly. He held it there, his thumb making slow circles.
Inside, sated and sensitive, Baki felt it. Not a flutter. A distinct, double-tap. Tap-tap. Then, a moment later, from a slightly different point, another. Tap-tap.
Yujiro felt it too. His hand stilled. He froze, every ounce of his preternatural awareness focused on the palm of his hand. A tremor went through him.
Baki held his breath.
Another set of taps. One. Two. Separate. Alive.
A ragged, broken sound escaped Yujiro. It wasn’t a laugh. It wasn’t a sob. It was something purer, more primitive. Acknowledgment. Awe. His big hand curled, cradling the curve, as if he could hold them both right through Baki’s skin.
He didn’t speak. He just held them—Baki, and the two new lives within—in the circle of his arms, in the quiet dark of the room. The fear wasn’t gone. But for now, it was outmatched.
But for now, it was outmatched.
Time, however, was a relentless opponent. It refused to be outmatched. The weeks piled on, each one adding density, pressure, and a profound, grinding misery. The gentle curve Yujiro had cradled that night swelled into a hard, distended dome that looked alien grafted onto Baki’s fighter’s frame. By the ninth month, he was a prisoner in a body that had become a torture chamber.
The two lives inside him had run out of room. They pushed. They shoved. A heel would jab the arch of his diaphragm, stealing his breath until he saw stars. A head would grind against his bladder with the weight of a stone, sending him hobbling to the bathroom for the twentieth time in an hour. The relentless internal pressure felt like he was being scrambled from the inside out, his organs compressed into useless pulp.
“I can’t,” he gasped one afternoon, stranded on the couch like a beached vessel. He was drenched in a sweat that had nothing to do with heat. “Yujiro. I can’t do this anymore. Make it stop. Just for a minute. Please.”
His pride was ash. He begged constantly, not for an end, but for a moment’s reprieve. He begged for Yujiro’s presence, for the anchor of his hand, for the low rumble of his voice to drown out the screaming of his own nerves.
Yujiro rarely left his side. He saw the agony etching itself deeper into Baki’s face every day. He saw the way Baki’s hands would tremble, not from weakness, but from a pain so constant it had become a vibration in his bones. The Ogre felt a helpless rage, a fury with no enemy to fight.
“You’re burning up,” Yujiro muttered, kneeling by the couch and pressing the back of his hand to Baki’s damp forehead. Baki flinched at the touch, his skin hypersensitive, every nerve ending raw.
“Everything hurts. Everything is… too much.” Baki’s eyes were glassy, fixed on the ceiling. “It feels like I’m going to split open. And not in the way you think. Like a overripe fruit. Just… burst.”
Yujiro’s jaw tightened. He had tried back rubs, cold cloths, whispered assurances that sounded hollow even to him. The medical directives were clear: wait. Nature would take its course. But watching Baki fracture in slow motion was an unacceptable course.
A dark, desperate idea surfaced. A physical distraction. A crude reset for the nervous system.
Without a word, Yujiro moved. He carefully pushed the loose sweats Baki lived in down over his hips. Baki didn’t protest. He just watched with exhausted, hopeless eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Something,” Yujiro said, his voice rough.
Baki’s cock lay soft against his thigh, ignored and untouched for months. Yujiro bent his head. He didn’t kiss. He took him into his mouth, all at once, with a wet, sloppy heat that was more claim than comfort.
Baki jerked, a shocked sound catching in his throat. “Yujiro—fuck—”
Yujiro worked him with a single-minded, messy intensity. His technique was all aggressive pressure and deep, sucking pulls, his tongue flat and heavy. Spit dripped down, coating Baki’s balls, making a slick, obscene sound in the quiet room. It was crude, almost clinical in its purpose, but the sensation was a lightning strike in Baki’s paralyzed body.
A low moan tore from Baki’s chest, torn between pain and a shocking, unwelcome spike of pleasure. His hands fisted in the couch cushions. “Don’t stop,” he choked out. “Oh god, just don’t stop.”
It was too much and not enough. The pleasure was a bright, sharp line cutting through the pervasive ache, but it couldn’t obliterate it. He felt too full, too stretched, too everything. Yujiro felt him tense, not with building climax, but with a fresh wave of overwhelmed distress.
Yujiro pulled off with a wet pop, his lips slick. He looked up, his gaze scanning Baki’s tortured face. He saw it wasn’t working. Not like this.
“Turn over,” Yujiro said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I can’t, my stomach—”
“On your side. Facing the back of the couch. Now.”
It was the command that moved him. Baki grunted, whimpering as he maneuvered his colossal weight onto his left side, curling slightly around the mound of his belly. Yujiro moved behind him, a wall of heat. He spooned close, his own clothes rustling as he freed his cock, already hard from the taste and the desperation of the moment.
He reached over Baki’s hip, his hand slippery from spit, and took hold of himself. He nudged the head against Baki’s entrance. It gave way easily, too easily, his body slack and open from the internal burden it carried.
“Is this…?” Baki whispered, fear threading his voice.
“Just feel,” Yujiro murmured into the sweat-damp hair at his temple. He pushed in, a slow, inexorable glide. There was no tightness, just a profound, yielding fullness. Yujiro buried himself to the hilt with a shuddering groan, his hips flush against Baki’s ass. He was impossibly deep, his cock sheathed in a hot, velvety channel that felt remodeled, monumental.
“Oh Christ,” Baki breathed. The intrusion was colossal, but it was different. It was a focused, external pressure that momentarily eclipsed the chaotic internal one. It gave his screaming nerves a single point of reference, a master pain to distract from the chorus.
“Tell me,” Yujiro growled, beginning to move in slow, grinding rolls of his hips. His arm wrapped around Baki’s chest, hand splaying over his pounding heart. “Tell me what you feel.”
“I feel you,” Baki gasped. The words tumbled out, raw and unfiltered. “All of you. You’re in my guts. You’re so deep you’re fucking my spine.” Each hard, deep drive pushed a broken sound from his lips. “It’s too much. It’s too good. Don’t you dare stop.”
Yujiro’s pace increased, his thrusts becoming harder, sharper. The couch creaked in protest. He fucked him with a brutal, driving rhythm, each snap of his hips a deliberate assault on Baki’s awareness. He was marking him, claiming him, trying to fuck the agony right out of him.
“That’s it,” Yujiro snarled, his breath hot on Baki’s neck. “Take it. This is the only thing that’s real. My cock in you. My weight on you. Everything else is noise.” He pistoned into him, the slap of skin filling the room. “You’re mine. This pain is mine. Those children are mine. And I am right here, Baki. I am not going anywhere.”
The vulgar promise, the sheer physical dominance of it, shattered something. Baki’s climax ripped through him without a hand ever touching his cock, a violent, full-body convulsion that felt like an exorcism. He screamed, a raw, torn sound, as his cunt clamped down in frantic, milking pulses.
Yujiro followed, burying himself as deep as he could go with a final, jagged roar, his release flooding into that deepest, most occupied part of Baki with a heat that seemed to echo through his very bones.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing. The pain was still there, a vast, oceanic presence. But it had receded, banked like a fire, by the overwhelming, cleansing force of the act. Baki felt hollowed out, pacified.
Yujiro stayed inside him, softening, his arm still a vise around Baki’s chest. He nuzzled into the junction of his neck and shoulder, his breathing gradually slowing.
Then, a sudden, hard kick landed against Yujiro’s lower abdomen, where he was pressed so close. Then another. A violent, double protest from within.
Yujiro went very still. He let out a slow, shuddering breath, his lips curling against Baki’s skin in something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“They’re strong,” he murmured, his voice thick with something like reverence. He held Baki tighter, as if he could absorb the next blow for him. The silence that followed was dense, waiting. The reprieve was temporary, and they both knew the storm was still coming.
The reprieve was temporary, and they both knew the storm was still coming. It arrived three weeks later in the sterile consultation room of a private surgical hospital. Baki sat doubled over in the chair, every breath a shallow sip of air stolen around the twin weights crushing his lungs.
“It’s too soon,” he managed through gritted teeth.
“It’s not.” Kureha’s voice was blunt, final. She pointed at the latest sonogram images on the light board. “See that? Placental degradation. They’re running out of resources in there. Their size, combined with the unique… anatomical stresses… means your body is beginning to cannibalize itself to support them. You go into natural labor now, in your condition, it will be a massacre.”
Yujiro stood like a statue by the window, his back to the room. His shoulders were a tense line. “The other way,” he said, his voice low. “The cut.”
“A Cesarean,” Kureha confirmed. “We go in, get them out quickly.Controlled environment. Far less traumatic for him, and for them. We schedule it for five days from now, at thirty-eight weeks. We get him admitted tomorrow for prep, monitoring, steroids for their lungs. It’s the only sane option.”
Baki felt a dizzying rush of something like hope. An end, with a scalpel’s precision. No tearing. No prolonged, animal agony. “Yes,” he whispered, the word thick with relief. “Do that. Cut them out.”
Yujiro finally turned. His eyes met Baki’s, seeing the desperate agreement there. He gave a single, curt nod. “You’ll be in the room,” he stated to Kureha, an order, not a question.“Obviously. But no theatrics. No Ogre dramatics. You follow my staff’s instructions or you wait in the hall.”
He didn’t argue.
The hospital room was a pale, quiet box. Baki was adrift in the mechanical bed, monitors beeping the twin heartbeats that now sounded erratic, frantic even to his untrained ear. He’d been poked, scanned, and prepped for two days. The surgical birth was set for dawn.
Yujiro hadn’t left. He occupied a chair that looked comically small under him, reading the same page of a motorcycle magazine for an hour. The silence was a live wire.
“Stop looming,” Baki murmured, his eyes closed. “You’re making the room feel smaller.”
“The room is small.”
“You’re making it worse.”
A nurse came in for a final set of vitals. She smiled tightly at Yujiro, her professionalism edged with palpable fear. “Just a few more hours, Mr. Hanma. Try to get some rest.”
When she left, Yujiro stood and walked to the bedside. He looked down at Baki, at the monstrous, taut swell of him under the thin hospital sheet. He placed his hand on it, not to feel for movement, but just to rest it there. “Tomorrow,” he said softly.
“Tomorrow,” Baki echoed, clinging to the word like a raft.Night deepened. The hospital sounds softened to distant echoes. Baki swam in a shallow, drug-assisted doze, the promise of a clean incision his only comfort. Then, at 2:17 AM, his entire world ruptured.
A pain unlike anything—worse than the rock, worse than any broken bone—sheared through his core. It wasn’t a contraction. It was an internal detonation. He arched off the bed with a strangled scream that ripped his throat raw.
“YUJIRO!”
Yujiro was awake and at his side before the scream finished echoing. “The drugs. I’ll get the—”
“NO!” Baki’s hands clawed at his own hips, his face a rictus of pure terror. “Something’s wrong! It’s—it’s tearing me open! From the inside out!”
He was thrashing, trying to curl around a pain that was everywhere. Yujiro’s mind, trained for a thousand battlefields, processed and discarded scenarios with cold speed. He grabbed the waistband of Baki’s hospital pants and yanked them down.
He froze.
Baki’s body was stretched, distorted. The entrance Yujiro had fucked just weeks before, which had felt slack and accepting, was now a gaping, dilated maw. It was a shocking, wet aperture, stretched to an unnatural, impossible diameter, a dark and terrible opening that seemed to pulse with a life of its own.
“Oh, fuck.”
Yujiro’s voice was flat, disbelieving. He’d seen horrors. He’d created them. This was different. This was biology revolting, a visceral wrongness that bypassed his combat intellect and struck directly at the gut. He turned and bellowed into the hallway, a roar that shook the door in its frame. “KUREHA! NOW!”
She came at a run, shrugging into a gown. One look at the bed, at Baki’s ravished state, and her face blanched of all color. “Christ almighty,” she breathed. She moved quickly, fingers probing with a clinical urgency that did nothing to hide her shock. “They’re coming.Now. The cervix is gone. It’s fully effaced. They’re in the birth canal.”
“But the surgery—” Yujiro started, his mind refusing to catch up.
“Is impossible,” Kureha snapped, already pulling on gloves. “His body is expelling them. Right now. This is the only way out. Baki!” She gripped his chin, forcing his wild eyes to hers. “Listen! You have to push. Do you hear me? You have to push them out!”
A fresh, seismic wave of pressure obliterated Baki’s ability to respond with anything but another, higher scream. It felt like his pelvis was being cleaved in two by a dull axe. The sensation of profound, internal ripping was not a metaphor. He could feel it, a shredding, tearing separation deep within his viscera.
“PUSH!” Kureha commanded.
He tried. The effort was a Herculean feat against a pain that demanded complete surrender. He bore down, his scream turning into a guttural, animal groan. The room swam with the smell of sweat and copper. Blood stained the sheets in a swift, dark bloom.
Yujiro watched, paralyzed for a second. He saw the gaping stretch of him, the grotesque spectacle of blood and fluid. A primal revulsion twisted his face. His son was giving birth. Through there. The reality of it was a physical blow.
Baki’s screams reached a crescendo, then fractured into ragged, wet sobs. “I can’t… it’s too much… they’re breaking me…”
“They are not,” Kureha snarled, her hands positioned. “I can see the first crown.Again! Now!”
With a final, soul-tearing shove, Baki felt something give way, a massive, sliding pressure. Then it stopped, halfway. The pain condensed into a white-hot ring of fire, a feeling of being split irrevocably on a physical spike. The sheer systemic shock was too profound. His eyes rolled back. The world dissolved into static, then nothing.
“Baki!” Yujiro’s hand slapped his cheek, hard. “Wake up! Don’t you fucking quit on me!”
Kureha didn’t wait. With a fierce, careful pull, she guided the rest of the tiny body out into the cold air. A sudden, furious cry pierced the room—not a weak wail, but a sharp, indignant yell. She cleared the airway with swift efficiency.
“A girl!” Kureha announced, her voice cracking with relief.
She placed the tiny, bloody, writhing thing into Yujiro’s waiting hands. He looked down.His breath vanished.
She was shockingly small, yet vibrantly, terrifyingly alive. A wild mane of wet, crimson hair plastered to her scalp. Her piercing eyes, a blue-grey already sharp with focus, scanned the blinding lights with clear annoyance. Her cry was one of pure, aggravated spirit. As he watched, her scrunched face relaxed into something else. She grinned, a gummy, fierce expression, and a single, needle-sharp tooth—a tiny, perfect fang—poked from her upper gum.
“A girl…?” Yujiro’s voice was a whisper of pure awe. A tremor ran through his arms. A female Hanma. The image of him, condensed into this furious, vital little spark. “I never thought…”
“Put her down and HELP ME!” Kureha’s scream shattered his reverence. “He’s still out and the second one is coming! Now!”
Yujiro’s head snapped up. The scene rushed back in: the blood, the gore, Baki’s unconscious, ruined body, that terrifying, stretched portal. Revulsion twisted his gut again, but it was overridden by a sharper command. He laid his daughter in the warmer with a surprising tenderness, then returned to the head of the bed.
“Baki.” He gripped his son’s hand, his voice dropping to a low, urgent chant beside his ear. “Come back. Right now. You’re almost there. Almost done. Come on. Finish it.”
Kureha was massaging Baki’s lower abdomen, her face grim. “Come ON, kid. One more.”
A ragged gasp. Baki’s eyelids fluttered. Consciousness returned, and with it, the full, screaming reality of the pain. He screamed again, a hoarse, broken sound.
“That’s it,” Yujiro soothed, his thumb stroking Baki’s knuckles. “One more. Just one.For me. Push.”
Gathering the last dregs of a will that had survived hell itself, Baki pushed. It was a weak, trembling effort, but it was enough. Kureha guided the second infant free.
The room went quiet.
This one was still. Small and slick and silent. Kureha worked with frantic, silent speed, suctioning, rubbing the tiny back. A tense, eternal second passed. Then a foot kicked. A tiny, shuddering breath was taken, followed by a weak, whispered cough. Not a cry. Just a fragile sign of life.
“A boy,” Kureha said, her own voice trembling with exhaustion. “He’s alive.”
She placed him in the second warmer. He lay quiet, his eyes closed, breathing in shallow, peaceful little puffs, utterly unlike his sister’s vibrant fury.
Baki lay utterly spent, a void where a person had been. He was aware only of a vast, numb hollowness, and of Yujiro’s hand, a solid, warming point of contact in a world gone cold and distant. The storm had passed. It had left behind two small, breathing miracles, and a landscape of wreckage.