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He can't really remember when this thing they have became so routine. The devious thrill of having coiled this man around his little finger - murderer, rebel, manslayer - and it had felt like a risk, at first, as though Bansai would push back; no man's dog, he, calm demeanour be damned.
He hadn't pushed. Takasugi should've hated it. The one relationship (a grand term, that) to have defined his life thus far had been one constructed around an infinite push-pull, a terminal brinkmanship that could only ever end in mutually assured destruction. in the interim - the pause between then and some indeterminate future now, in which scores would be permanently settled - he'd imagined that any such diversions would be of similar character. violence supplanting nascent affection. the territorial pissing of feral beasts.
Bansai adores him. A sentiment sufficiently alien to Takasugi that it takes gargantuan cognitive effort to even piece the words together. The first time they'd fucked - after weeks of silent goading, of intense eye contact, of daring Bansai to try him and hoping he'd snatch the bait - he'd lain back on the futon, watching Bansai undress, and he'd imagined those long, callused fingers fisted in his hair, wrenching the fine bones of his wrists.
(broad shoulders, plush tits, the wide plain of his back corded with muscle, and it had not escaped Takasugi's bitter attention that the body provoking such shameless salivation should bear such resemblance to Gintoki)
But Bansai adores him, and it'd taken Takasugi far less time than he'd care to admit to adjust to his generous attention, the sheer devotion of his touch. In rare moments, when introspection creeps in unbidden through the cracks in his carefully constructed carapace, it occurs to him in brief that he does not deserve anything close to this.
Here and now - Bansai's mouth hot against his throat, the pressure of teeth, of tongue, not sharp enough, not hard enough - head swimming with hashish, a certain melancholy slips in, borne on the smoke streaming hazy from the bowl of his kiseru.
He ignores it. Rolls his hips hard, making Bansai pause in his attention; a sound low in his throat, stuttering on the exhale. He's quiet when they fuck. Takasugi had found it vaguely insulting at first, until he'd learned how to wring small sounds out of him, delighted in each one, as though it were a kind of victory. He'd never grown out of childish competitiveness; that Bansai is pliant to each and every demand Takasugi makes of him simply necessitates novel ideas of competition.
Takasugi hooks a leg around Bansai's back, digs a sharp ankle into the hollow of his spine; coaxing him deeper, denying him egress, so he has no choice but to fuck him with short, hard little thrusts, like he's a desperate teenager. He winds his fingers into the hair at Bansai's nape, forcing his head back; leans up to meet his mouth, open on a half-gasp, the straining tendons in his neck taut and tempting. He slides his tongue into Bansai's mouth, inelegant, rough. An involuntary whine slips out as Bansai responds with eager hips, the sharp jolt of his cock against his insides sending dizzying pleasure shooting up Takasugi's spine.
Shinsuke, Bansai sighs.
(This too a competition, a dare. Or it had been, once. Before the honeyed sound of it had made a home in Takasugi's ears. Raw, unappended. Like silk on his poet's tongue. It's disastrous, how much he likes the sound of it. He should tell Bansai to stop, probably.)
Shinsuke. Breathed against his mouth, like half a prayer, and it makes Takasugi shiver, makes him suck the syllables off his tongue, swallow them hard. Pulling Bansai's lower lip between his teeth, catching flesh between his canines, hard enough to make him hiss, and still he keeps going, as though his sole purpose on this earth is to give Takasugi everything he wants.
It's too much. Too sweet. All at once he feels a thick and cloying revulsion, not at the man fucking him like it's his religious duty to do so, but at himself. Takasugi Shinsuke does not deserve sweetness, shouldn't want it. Shouldn't take it, the way he does, writhing like a whore at the sound of his own name, a permission he never ought to have given, should retract with sharp immediacy.
He slides his hand from Bansai's hair. Gropes blindly off to the side of the futon. Matchbook, ashtray. Piled clothing, discarded in haste. His fingers close around the cool silk of a shamisen string, put aside without complaint when Takasugi had, on a capricious whim, decided he would rather Bansai pluck his strings.
Bansai.
Mm?
He grabs Bansai's wrist, pulls his hand from where it's clasped around his waist. Regretting immediately the loss of warmth, the familiar solidity of his palm. He presses the string into Bansai's curled fingers. Feels the rapid percussion of his pulse beneath the heat of his skin.
Choke me. With this.
Bansai stops dead. Takasugi huffs in annoyance, frustrated at the cessation of the pleasurable rhythm he'd built up. The insistent heat and pressure of his stilled cock deep inside him, doing absolutely fucking nothing. Why choose now of all moments to deny a perfectly reasonable request?
(he knows why. had bet, in some miserable little part of his fucked-up head, that Bansai would flinch. Had hoped he would. Used as he is to Takasugi's strange demands - fucking Takasugi hard enough to hurt, arms pinned tight in the small of his back; letting Takasugi bite bloody crescents into the meat of his chest, his neck, visible to all who care to observe him in his day-to-day, because it thrills him, to claim some small ownership, and Bansai gives and receives pain with breathless obedience, as though he takes more pleasure from pleasing Takasugi than he does from fucking him)
Bansai, Takasugi says, through gritted teeth. Is there a problem?
No, I…
Choke me. Do it. Closing Bansai's fingers tight around the string. Bansai's eyes flit to the exposed curve of Takasugi's throat, sun-starved and naked. Takasugi feels his cock throb inside him.
Takasugi tilts his head back, performative, gazing up at Bansai through one heavy-lidded eye; lifts Bansai's hesitant hand to the hollow of his clavicle. He doesn't even really know why he's doing this. There's no sport in forcing Bansai. No pleasure in pushing him. There had been, in the beginning. Feeling out where his boundaries lay; encroaching with sweet venom on every last one, until Bansai had lifted hands in far-too-easy surrender. Watching with terrible patience for the moments in which his composed veneer would crack, just a little, and insinuating himself inside.
(He'd quickly understood that he could achieve similar results just by letting Bansai adore him. That the look of devastating arousal in those amber eyes was its own reward; the total undoing of his stoicism achieved just by sitting on his cock, by letting him touch freely, letting him kiss and taste and worship. By letting him call him Shinsuke, over and over, increasingly fervent, until he too had developed a taste for it. Until the sound of his name in Bansai's low voice reliably made his cock twitch.
How vile of him, to want it so.)
He won't lower himself to begging. But his body clenches in desperation, pushing up against Bansai; his skin crawls with the need of it, the desire to hurt, to gasp for air, until he sees stars, until his nails draw blood. To crest the hill of neardeath, taste the other side for a few fleeting seconds and come back different.
A purification rite. To burn away all this sweetness. To set him back to zero.
(if Bansai is in love with him, Takasugi can only blame himself for allowing it)
He guides Bansai's fingers. Lifts his head, so that he can slip the string behind his neck; watching Bansai following his movements with wide, uncertain eyes, flushed skin dusky and damp with sweat. His hair clings to his face, his neck. He's beautiful. That much is easy to admit. Hesitant hands moving with slow fluidity. A shamisen string and Takasugi's long, pale throat. Two things he knows his way intimately around.
He's still hard.
Shinsuke, Bansai says. Are you sure?
Takasugi won't lower himself to begging, but he's about to explode with frustration. He grinds his cock up against Bansai's stomach, biting back a petulant whine. He refuses to fucking beg, but if he doesn't pull that string taut in the next few seconds…if he doesn't do what Takasugi has asked him to do, more than once now…
Do it, he insists, hating the needy edge to his voice. Unable to stop it bleeding through. Fingers tight around Bansai's wrists, white-knuckled. And then, because he's still hesitating: please.
And that's the magic word, because Bansai simply cannot refuse an honest request. The string tightens around Takasugi's throat with maddeningly slow pressure; compressing the artery, so that his head fills with white noise, like cold water streaming through a crack in his skull. The breath catches in his chest, his lungs straining with it. Scorching his ribs from the inside. Takasugi's legs lock around Bansai's waist, as tightly as he can manage, with consciousness bleeding from him like an open wound; fucking himself on Bansai's cock, stroking himself clumsy and erratic, aware only of the competing sensations exploding through his body all at once. Heat and friction and fullness, brighter than he's ever felt them before, and the blissful silence of his mind, unable to formulate a coherent thought in among it all. Grey, seeping in at the edges. A strangled sound emerges from his airless throat. It sounds like someone else, in another room; as though Takasugi Shinsuke has momentarily ceased to occupy this wretched body.
Bansai's free hand gently cups the back of Takasugi's head. Tilts it back, threading fingers light through his hair. Distantly, he feels Bansai's mouth press against his, swallowing the choked little sounds, the airless gasps, as though he's really dying, and maybe that wouldn't be so bad, maybe it would be okay, to die like this. Maybe it's the best death a man like him could possibly hope for.
His back arches, spasms. Coming harder than he's ever come in his life, his entire body wracked with it. A silent cry trapped in among the maelstrom of his burning lungs, and the last thing he's aware of, before his entire body goes limp, is the sound of his name gasped reverently against the shell of his ear, as though on some distant shore, a very long way from here.
#
He comes back to himself in small increments. Breathing air that tastes of stale tobacco, cloying hashish. It burns his raw throat, scours his lungs. Taking a vague inventory of his still-distant body. His thighs burn pleasantly, as though with effort. Slow pulse of his heartbeat in his ears, a sharp sting somewhere in the vicinity of his neck. Bansai's arms around him, fingers tracing the curve of his spine. Kissing his sweaty forehead. He knows he's supposed to hate some part of this, but he can't really remember why.