Disclaimer: I do not own Kyou Kara Maou or any of its characters.

Beta-ed by: G

Warnings: Language, references to minors having knowledge of sex (however, all instances of sex within take place between consenting individuals who are sixteen or older), sexual activity, heterosexual sex, homosexual sex, masturbation, novel spoilers, mixing of novel, manga and anime canon for my own benefit, blatant infidelity (I know, QQ), most likely some OOCness, violence, joking references to mpreg, maybe some voyeurism, probably a few others that I can't think of off of the top of my head.

Pairings(s): Yuuri/Hashimoto, various references to others (which may or may not actually occur), including Yuuri/Gisela, Elizabeth/Wolfram, and Yuuri/Lady Flynn, Yuuri/Elizabeth, Murata/many-girls-off-screen, Gwendal/Anissina, Yuuri/Sara, probably some Yuuri/OMC, and finally culminating in Yuuri/Wolfram.

Setting: Varies. Yuuri goes from sixteen to somewhere in his twenties throughout the progression of the story. So mid-series to long after the series ends.

Rating: M

A/N: Sorry for not working on all the other things I've left hanging, but all my WIP fics are so emotionally exhausting or just disappointing to me when I look back over them. So I wanted to break out and do something a tiny bit different and have a little fun with Yuuri (while still getting he and Wolfram together against all odds, since that seems to be the running theme).

That being said, I've not read the novels in the original Japanese, nor have I done a very thorough reading of some of the English translations various fans have so kindly provided to fandom, so I apologize if Hashimoto is OOC. Also, I'd apologize for Yuuri kind of being an asshole, but I'm really not sorry at all. I feel bad for the way Yuuri gets treated by fandom, so while his actions and behavior in this fic might not be entirely mature or ideal, I do hope the unfairness of his situation with Wolfram comes across a bit better here, because being engaged to someone you don't want to marry and having everyone else around you go along with it is neither easy nor fair for any of the parties involved.

The Happy Life

by Mikage

Part One

By the time Yuuri had been king for an entire year, he'd come to accept certain things about himself that he supposed couldn't really be contested, though he'd tried many times to prove otherwise—namely, the fact that he was a bit… slow.

There were other words he could use to describe it. "Dim" was, perhaps, more polite, and certainly Gwendal's choice of phrasing, though Yuuri couldn't help but notice how easily his Chief Advisor could make such a small, seemingly harmless word sound like an insult when he was feeling especially cantankerous.

Yozak liked to joke that he was "uneducated," which seemed to suit the spy just fine, as it was a condition many people accused him of as well, being that he was both half-human and low-born and thus was expected to act like a barbarian (a stereotype that Yozak's bulky looks seemed to corroborate). Yuuri, of course, knew Yozak to be neither a barbarian nor uneducated, and though his friend and trusted spy may often attempt to promote the stereotype so as to encourage others to underestimate him (it certainly made Yozak's job easier when the people he was observing couldn't bother to see the muscle-brained, ginger-haired peasant as any sort of a threat) he was entirely capable of demonstrating public niceties and eating with the proper fork.

Or spork, as the case may be.

Additionally, despite how disastrously unconvincing Yozak may look in a dress—how anyone could buy those disguises of his was beyond Yuuri—he could still pull off proper etiquette becoming of a lady which, Yuuri was both pleased and dismayed to admit (depending on the circumstance), he could never quite grasp himself.

Gunter liked to blame his lack of appropriate knowledge and experience on the fact that he'd been brought up on Earth. His tutor seemed to think that had Yuuri been raised in the Great Demon Kingdom, strictly under his tutelage (and Yuuri cringed to think of spending that long listening to Gunter's rambling lectures) he would have been able to master all aspects of society and governing in fifteen years. While Yuuri agreed that that might have been the case concerning customs and etiquette and social norms, he refused to believe that any amount of time was enough for him to learn all of the Great Demon Kingdom's four-thousand-year history—political or otherwise.

The fact that he was expected to learn the history and basic governmental practices of other countries on top of that only served to encourage his disbelief. Wolfram was over eighty years old, and even he didn't know everything. Once, Yuuri had managed to completely stump him by asking him about King Tobias of the Burgundian kingdom.

Yuuri viewed this as a great accomplishment.

What Wolfram hadn't known but discovered later (because he apparently couldn't be satisfied with being without a clue and had endeavored to look it up) was that neither King Tobias nor the Kingdom of Burgundia were real. Yuuri had made them up, though he thought the situation still served to prove his point, as Wolfram had assumed they very much existed.

His fiancé also preferred the term "uneducated," often following it up with words like "vulgar" and "uncouth" and occasionally "vile" when he was feeling especially offended by Yuuri's dimwittedness. Other times, when Wolfram was feeling more childish and petty and throwing one of his notorious tantrums—usually in regards to the fact that Yuuri had dared to spare a glance at some random girl, or perhaps wasn't giving their engagement the attention Wolfram clearly felt it deserved—he chose to refer to him as "stupid," which tended to cause Yuuri a fair amount of distress, seeing as he didn't believe he was as stupid as Wolfram liked to pretend he was.

So what if he was a horrible dancer? So what if he didn't know who King Anathasios the Third was? Or where the Kingdom of Ulyciana was? So what if he would rather spend his time rolling around in the dirt hitting and chasing after baseballs than locked in his office with his nose stuck in a boring book?

He didn't think that made him stupid. It just meant he had other things in which he preferred to expend his energy.

Sometimes Conrad would say he was a "free spirit."

Yuuri liked this phrase much better.

But there were instances—and he truly hated to admit it—where Yuuri realized that some of the ways in which his friends and advisers chose to describe him were perhaps more accurate than he would like them to be. He was, in fact, quite slow in some areas of his life.

The most important of these was sex.

There was no way for Yuuri to deny that he was, by no choice of his own, a late bloomer.

He'd been rather small for most of his life. When he was very young, people had often mistaken him for a girl—though he was positive that this was only because his mother had insisted on dressing him like girl, a tragedy he also liked to blame for the fact that he was also, occasionally, slightly self-conscious. He'd been notably scrawny even in high school, despite hours and hours of baseball practice and sword training. Once, he'd tried ingesting more protein in the hopes that it would help to increase his muscle mass, and had seriously considered lifting weights, though he was often so busy, and his trips to and from worlds were, at that point, so sporadic, that he hadn't ever managed to follow a decent schedule, and his attempts either dwindled until he stopped trying, or else they failed miserably.

He would often find himself staring at tall and well-toned men with a fair bit of envy. He outright denied that this staring was in any way gay, as he was merely appreciating how aesthetically pleasing their bodies looked, not salivating over their biceps and stellar abs and entertaining fantasies of a sexual nature. He didn't feel hot and bothered, he felt jealous. If he had any fantasies at all, it was only because he liked to envision himself looking like them. He wanted a well-defined chest and noticeable biceps and, damn it, he wanted a six-pack.

Yet it seemed nothing he did as a teenager ever worked.

He was only ever cheered by the knowledge that Wolfram and Murata were just as scrawny as he was, and between the three of them Yuuri liked to think that he was the most masculine, though he would never say this out loud for fear of incurring Wolfram's wrath.

How his fiancé could still manage to look so frightening in the sort of long, frilly pink nightgown Yuuri imagined to be popular with little old ladies was completely beyond Yuuri's ability to comprehend.

However, it was not merely Yuuri's physical development that seemed stunted, but also his interest in any and all forms of sex.

With an older brother who spent a majority of his spare time locked in a dark room playing dating Sims games, and with a mother who, as soon as he hit puberty, thought it was appropriate to discuss love and sex and relationships with him at random intervals—despite how embarrassed or tight-lipped he grew when either topic was brought up—one would think he could have rivaled the likes of Johnny Depp and lost his virginity at the tender age of thirteen.

Sadly—although Yuuri rather liked to think that the fact that he hadn't should be celebrated—this was not the case.

It wasn't that he didn't know about sex. In fact, he knew quite a bit more than most people expected. It was all really rather basic, he thought. Both participating parties were aroused, usually through kissing and touching, though sometimes by means of such things as toys and porn. Then the penis went into the vagina. Or the anus. Or the mouth. Or it was stimulated by the hand. Or more toys. There was movement and friction and then there was cum, and if done unprotected with a girl in the vagina, that cum meant that it was likely that there could be, some nine months down the road, a baby. Condoms and other methods of contraception were, of course, used to prevent this, along with other unwanted conditions such as STDs.

Yuuri also knew that condoms came in a variety of forms. There were flavored condoms, ribbed condoms, extra-large condoms, and, for the truly adventurous (or just down-right weird) glow-in-the dark condoms. (Yuuri had to admit that while he thought these ones were highly unnecessary, he also thought they must be strangely cool. Who wouldn't want their dick to glow like a light-saber if given the chance?)

He wasn't a stranger to masturbation either. When one happened to walk into their older brother's room at the age of eleven and catch him toying with his dick, it was going to require a few explanations. After that, curiosity was bound to take hold—if not then, then a few years down the road. For Yuuri, this curiosity kept itself scarce until the age of fourteen, at which point he began to masturbate either whenever he felt the need or whenever it seemed convenient—and with the way his life turned upside-down a year later, it was hardly ever convenient.

Even still, he couldn't say he was especially interested in sex. Kids at school talked about it, his brother obviously did it—and if he wasn't doing it with a real girl, he was at least jerking off to the computer image of a fake one while thinking about a real girl—and the guys on his sandlot baseball team often cracked jokes and took their time checking out some of the girls who'd come by the lot to watch, or else discussed, in vivid detail, the activities in which they engaged with their respective girlfriends. If Yuuri took part in any of these conversations, it was only to laugh at the jokes and offer his congratulations—which was, of course, the appropriately manly thing to do.

Later, at home or back in the Great Demon Kingdom, Yuuri would think to himself how odd it was that most guys thought of sex as frequently as he thought about baseball, and that most guys viewed their sexual exploits as some sort of an achievement while he thought the homerun he'd hit in the bottom of the seventh inning was the greatest achievement of them all. In fact, in some ways the things they talked about were kind of gross—though it wasn't the act of sex itself that disturbed him so much as the fact that some of the guys seemed to have so little respect for their partners.

One would think that if they enjoyed it so much, they'd treat the other people involved in it better than they did.

In any case, Yuuri was only truly concerned by his lack of experience when Murata revealed to him that he had finally—after careful consideration and the selection of the perfect companion—lost his virginity. Murata who, like him, was scrawny, and who, unlike him, was a complete nerd (Yuuri insisted that enjoying historical dramas and occasionally referencing things from various sci-fi and/or fantasy books and films only made him slightly nerdy, as opposed to Murata who made excellent grades and chose to wear glasses when Yuuri knew he owned contact lenses) had had sex with not one, but two of the shrine maidens at the Great One's temple.

Two.

At the same time.

"And the first one did this?" he asked, unable to quell his sense of morbid curiosity.

"Uh huh," Murata said, his glasses flashing in the sunlight.

"And the other one did that?" Yuuri wondered, making vague hand-motions to reference which part of the event in question he was currently inquiring about.

"Yup!" Murata chirped, grinning a very self-satisfied grin.

Yuuri suddenly felt exceptionally inadequate, as if his masculinity had just taken a very harsh blow.

At that point, he was sixteen years old. He was still rather blasé when it came to thinking about sex, but after that conversation he was determined, no matter what the cost, to acquire an interest.

Before that, the only thing that had ever truly dismayed Yuuri when it came to matters of attraction was that he'd never once had a girlfriend.

Oh, sure, girls liked him well enough. He was always polite to them—and everyone else, for that matter—for fear of earning his parents' disappointment, and because he honestly thought it was the decent thing to do to treat a lady like a lady.

Unless she didn't want to be treated like a lady, in which case he had no idea what to do except treat her like "one of the guys," which typically had him feeling and therefore acting quite awkward, as "the guys" usually held discussions that were, as Wolfram would no doubt describe them, "offensively vulgar" and "altogether inappropriate."

The problem was that while girls tended to like him when it came to being friends, they didn't like like him in the way one would expect a girlfriend to like their boyfriend.

All except one girl...

Although Yuuri had been so dense he hadn't even noticed until Murata had set them up.

Hashimoto Asami was one of his former junior high classmates, and an avid fan of tennis, which suited Yuuri just fine, as he'd attempted to talk to girls who had no interest in sports before and it had been embarrassingly difficult. They never quite understood his passion.

But Hashimoto understood as well as indulged him in his habit of endlessly talking about baseball, and would occasionally counter by expounding upon her affinity for tennis. She was pretty enough and polite and kind, and much easier to talk to than most girls, and if she wasn't as beautiful or as incredibly seductive as some of the women he'd met in the Great Demon Kingdom, it wasn't anything he thought of as a bad thing. In fact, he thought it was a good thing, because it meant their encounters tended to go much more smoothly.

Not only that, but she got bonus points for not asking too many questions. If he turned up looking inexplicably sad (and he had quite often during the beginning of their relationship, as Conrad had only just turned traitor), or if he happened to unintentionally let something weird slip, she would express her concern but never pushed it too far, or else she'd laugh his little oddities off and sometimes even find them strangely cute.

Which was more than a good thing. It was a very, very good thing. Yuuri had to wonder if she'd run off screaming if she ever found out he'd been flushed down a toilet into an alternate world where he was the king of the demon race, and where he had also acquired a very pretty but undeniably male fiancé.

But since she never asked, he didn't have to tell her, which meant she didn't have to know and he'd never have to find out what her reaction may or may not have been.

Suddenly, Yuuri thought he was getting somewhere.

He got a bit further some time later, after they had been casually dating for a while and most things in the other world had settled down enough for him to feel less guilty about taking the time to enjoy himself while he was at home.

It was Murata's idea to invite her and a friend over to Yuuri's house one evening when both of his parents and his older brother were conveniently (blessedly) not around. It was also Murata's idea for he and the friend to leave early (and Yuuri had no doubt what he and said friend intended to do, given that Murata had become something of a playboy since losing the Big V), leaving Yuuri and Hashimoto alone together in an otherwise empty house.

Yuuri, his thoughts still on Murata and Murata's nefarious (and probably slightly perverted) plans, meant to ask "Wanna watch a movie?" but instead it came out as "Wanna go up to my room?"

For a moment, Hashimoto looked completely bewildered, and Yuuri was on the verge of apologizing and making excuses for the slip when she shrugged and said, "Sure."

And just like that, they ended up in his room.

After he'd taken the time to tell her about each of his baseball posters and a few of the signed balls his dad had brought home from the United States, they finally—and with some encouragement from Hashimoto when it seemed he'd be distracted again—sat upon his bed.

Then there was kissing, and lots of it. Yuuri didn't mind kissing so much. It was actually sort of pleasant, in a way. He didn't even mind when the normal kissing turned into the kind with lots of tongue, even if it was sort of weird and slightly messier. He liked the little tingles it sent zipping through his body, and when Hashimoto made a few quiet noises that clearly indicated she was enjoying it, Yuuri was very pleased that his body began to react as it should have, though he was also a bit embarrassed by the thought of Hashimoto noticing the tent in his pants.

She did notice, of course. Their hands weren't exactly remaining still. At first, he was afraid she might be offended—weren't some girls offended by things like that?—but Hashimoto didn't seem to mind at all. Instead, she eagerly unzipped his pants and pushed both pants and boxers down his hips to free his erection, and then, without further ado, she wrapped her hand around it and began steadily stroking.

Yuuri immediately realized that having someone else jerk him off instead of jerking himself off was not only different, but somehow better. If he was still embarrassed, he could hardly think to act on it. He was much too distracted by how good Hashimoto's hand felt around his dick to worry about such unimportant things as embarrassment, and anyway she wasn't embarrassed, so why should he be?

Pretty soon he figured he should probably do something to reciprocate, because even though she seemed to like the way he was mouthing at her breasts around the constrains of her bra, he thought his efforts to pleasure her were rather poor in comparison when one considered what she was doing for him. So he took a page out of her book and shoved a hand up her skirt, touching her through her panties before he decided they just got in the way, at which point he slipped his hand under those, too.

It was strange and wet, but he didn't dislike it. It was actually sort of hot, especially when she made more of those noises.

They continued on like that until Yuuri came. It was, he hated to admit, embarrassingly short, but true to form, Hashimoto didn't seem to mind, though that might have had something to do with the fact that once Yuuri recovered, he put all of his attention into what his hand was doing in her panties.

After Hashimoto had been satisfied, too, they laid half-sprawled across his narrow bed. They didn't cuddle, but simply lay beside one another, staring at the ceiling and regaining their breath. The only other sound was the ticking of the clock, and the occasional noise from traffic outside.

Eventually, Hashimoto turned to him, her cheeks still slightly pink. "We should do this again sometime," she said, quite matter-of-factly.

Yuuri—surprised, but by no means against the idea—simply shrugged and, miming her agreement earlier, said, "Sure."

He came to realize many things during the exploration of his sexuality with Hashimoto.

Firstly, he discovered that he was actually quite good at lying to Wolfram's face.

"There's something different," his fiancé observed one day in his office.

Yuuri sat behind his desk, riffling through a stack of papers in an attempt to find a certain document he'd seen earlier but must have misplaced between then and now. Wolfram stood in front of his desk with his arms crossed, staring at Yuuri down his prim, upturned nose. They were alone. Conrad had drills to attend to with the soldiers, Gunter was busy preparing for some banquet or another, and Gwendal had left some fifteen minutes ago upon hearing that Anissina was looking for him.

Yuuri was sure his Chief Adviser intended to hide.

"Huh?" he asked, setting the first stack of papers aside (messily) to look through the second.

"Are you even listening to me?" Wolfram asked. Yuuri didn't look up to see his face, but he could tell by the tone of his voice that Wolfram was frowning. He'd become quite good at predicting Wolfram's facial expressions by the sound of his voice.

Not that it was that difficult, as Wolfram never tried very hard to hide the foulness of his moods.

"Yeah, sure," Yuuri said.

Wolfram huffed. Out of the corner of his eye, Yuuri saw his hands uncross to prop themselves on his narrow hips.

"I said there's something different," he repeated.

"About what?" Yuuri absently asked.

"About you."

Yuuri let the second stack of papers fall back onto his desk when they yielded no better results than the first, deciding to give up for now as he leaned back in his chair to finally bring his attention to the other person in the room.

Wolfram had adopted one of his "I'm pissed off at you and definitely want you to know it" poses, which really weren't much different from his "I'm pissed off at you and don't want you to know it but I have a hard time hiding it anyway" poses. Frown in place, hands on his hips, green eyes blazing, he looked ready to launch into one of his tantrums.

Not in the mood for an earful of his fiancé's displeasure, Yuuri pretended as if he had no idea what he was talking about—which, when he thought about it, was mostly true. There were so many things that set Wolfram off, it was easy to lose track of them all.

"What do you mean?" he asked, for lack of anything better to say.

"I mean that there's something different about you," Wolfram said.

Yuuri simply stared at him. "Yeah. You kinda just said that."

Throwing his hands up in exasperation—which Yuuri thought was completely undeserved—Wolfram scoffed and began pacing back and forth in front of his desk.

"You're just... not the same. You're calmer, not as distracted. You're actually doing your work and not complaining about it."

"I thought that's what everyone wanted," Yuuri said, moderately confused by the observation and Wolfram's response to it. Shouldn't he be happy about his new work ethic?

"Yes, but it isn't you!" Wolfram insisted.

"O-Okay…"

"It's not like you to be so responsible."

"Hey!" Yuuri countered. "I'm plenty responsible!"

"And you're not as…" Wolfram trailed off, apparently unable to find the appropriate word. He made a few strange gestures with his hands that Yuuri took to mean "spastic" and "off-the-wall."

He had to admit, his usual energetic behavior hadn't been as overpowering in recent weeks.

It helped that he'd recently acquired such a new and exciting method to expend his energy.

What Wolfram was currently unaware of—and would never know as long as he lived, if Yuuri had anything to say about it—was that Yuuri was having all manner of sex with a very lovely young woman, not right under his nose (as it, of course, did not happen within the borders of the Great Demon Kingdom, or even anywhere in this world), but definitely behind his back. Yuuri found he rather enjoyed it. There were quite a few benefits, not least of which was indescribable pleasure. There was also the fact that his concentration had remarkably improved.

If Yuuri had known sex could lead to such a relief in stress and tension, he might have thought to try it sooner.

Well, provided he'd had a willing partner.

Who wasn't Wolfram.

At first, he'd wondered if he should feel any sort of guilt over the fact that he was, in essence, cheating on his fiancé, but after much soul searching and an hour's worth of internal conflict (he did have other things to worry about, after all; he couldn't spend all of his time on just the one thing), Yuuri had decided that just because he was engaged to Wolfram in the Great Demon Kingdom didn't mean he couldn't have a girlfriend on Earth. He'd also decided that Wolfram didn't have to know, and what he didn't know wasn't going to hurt him at all.

Besides, he wasn't gay.

He was pretty sure the fact that he was now having regular sex with a girl proved that well enough.

And anyway, how many times had he told Wolfram he liked girls? How many times had he told Wolfram that the engagement was an accident? How often had he offered to revoke it? What more did he have to do to prove to Wolfram that he didn't want to get married?

If he didn't do anything more to try and break the engagement except continue to protest or outright ignore it when Wolfram brought it up, and if he ever felt a tiny bit guilty upon returning to the Demon Kingdom after getting his dick sucked by his girlfriend only to see the "I'm very happy to see you but I'm not going to admit it" look on Wolfram's face, it was only because Wolfram was his friend and he didn't really want to hurt him.

He just wanted to be able to check out girls—an occasionally get laid by them—in peace.

Therefore, even though Wolfram was suspicious, and even though his fiancé seemed as if he intended to figure out what the hell was wrong with him, Yuuri was able to keep a straight face and pretend as if he hadn't had his dick shoved up warm, wet female parts just the day before.

Another point for sex, as he could now thank his new found focus for his improved ability to lie his ass off.

"I just thought it might be a good idea for me to start taking things more seriously," he said with a shrug. "I don't have much longer until I finish school. After that, I'll be spending most of my time here, won't I? So I should get used to the idea before then."

He knew almost right away that he'd said the right thing. Wolfram stopped pacing to stare at him. First, he scrutinized him, perhaps looking for any sign that he wasn't telling the truth. When that proved fruitless, his mouth fell open and he gaped in shock. And, finally, when he realized that Yuuri could possibly be telling the truth (he sort of was; he would be spending more time in the Great Demon Kingdom once he graduated), Wolfram's face broke out into one of his rare "I really like you but I'm not going to say it" smiles, which he only ever showed when Yuuri had done something to make him so happy he couldn't contain himself.

And which made Yuuri feel like a colossal jackass, come to think of it.

"Then we can start planning the wedding soon," Wolfram decided, all air of suspicion gone.

Yuuri tried to smile. He thought he managed it. At least his mouth twitched up on one side, and if there was a sudden odd tick in his brow, it was only because he'd spent the last few hours trying to read teeny, tiny demon print.

And because he really wanted to say that under no uncertain terms would they be planning a wedding.

Ever.

But he couldn't, because then he'd just have his ass handed to him.

Or his balls ripped off and shoved down his throat.

"Right," he said instead. He glanced over the messy piles of papers on his desk. Inevitably, he pushed them aside and stood to his feet. "Well, I'm going to see if Conrad wants to play baseball."

And that was the end of it.

The second thing Yuuri realized was that when he said he liked girls, he meant it.

Really, really meant it.

It wasn't something he said because he was afraid of being gay (he wasn't afraid; he just wasn't gay), and it wasn't something he said because he thought that's what everyone expected, or because he thought that's what it meant to be "normal." After taking a journey down a toilet bowl, into a spiraling vortex that dumped him into an alternate world that seemed a bit like early modern Europe, and after becoming a king in this alternate world and learning magic and accidentally getting engaged to an irascible young man who just couldn't understand the meaning of "not interested," he'd stopped trying to think of his life as "normal."

He still thought he was average—or "common" as Wolfram would say—but definitely nowhere close to what most normal people would consider appropriately "normal."

But he liked girls.

Sleeping with Hashimoto meant he began to notice girls a lot more than he used to. Occasionally he'd find his eyes straying to one pretty female or another when he was out somewhere with Murata, and when a group of them came by the sandlot during a game he could appreciate their presence the same as his teammates did—though never so much that it distracted him from what he was doing, because baseball was still baseball and he liked it just as much as he liked seeing Hashimoto with her mouth between his thighs.

He told himself he didn't develop a "type" so much as a list of things he liked about girls that he could find attractive in any combination. He liked nice, modest girls, but he liked when they were confident, too—which was probably the most attractive thing about Hashimoto. It was true what they said: confidence was sexy. He didn't care so much about what they wore, though skirts were much more convenient than pants. He just didn't like them when they were too short. He had an imagination and he liked to use it, and the chance was lost with clothes that were too revealing.

Bust size was somewhat of an important factor to him. Large boobs were nice and all, but he'd had his face shoved into Lady Celi's a few too many times that he no longer found it appealing, especially since Lady Celi was his fiancé's mom, and he could honestly say that having his face planted in his fiancé's mom's bosom—whether or not he ever planned to marry Wolfram—was not the sort of experience he thought he could enjoy, even if she was a hot older woman who looked barely over thirty. Now when he saw a large busted woman in a crowd, he invariably thought of Lady Celi.

It was an immediate turn off.

He much preferred the opposite—boobs he could cup his whole hand around.

"Anything else is a waste," he said to Murata one day.

His friend simply looked at him in amusement.

Yuuri was sure Murata was thinking he had no idea what he was talking about, but then Murata had never experienced the horror of Lady Celi's bosom.

Then again, Murata would probably like it.

He did his best not to look too closely at girls when he was in the Great Demon Kingdom, especially when Wolfram was around. His fiancé had the annoying talent of being able to follow the path of his eyes even in a room full of people. He didn't know how Wolfram did it—if it was some sort of sixth sense or if he was really that obvious about it—but Yuuri didn't look forward to the outbursts that would result from his staring, or the potential threat to his manhood (which was suddenly much more valuable to him now that it was being used for more than a piss and the occasional self-provided hand job). He kept his eyes firmly planted on other things in Wolfram's presence, like the table cloth or the napkin in his lap, which he used to hide his erection whenever he caught sight of a pretty girl out of the corner of his eye during a banquet.

When Wolfram was gone—on patrol or visiting his uncle or whatever else he did when he wasn't being a pain in Yuuri's ass—Yuuri took the chance to examine the many beautiful women who resided in his castle.

He kept his eyes far, far away from Lady Celi. Anissina, too. Sure, he supposed she was pretty, but she had the ability to strike fear into the hearts of men when she got a particular gleam in her eye. He heard Gwendal and Gunter commiserating over this quite often—though now that Yuuri understood the joys of sex, he was pretty sure Anissina would lay off Gwendal if he just dragged her into his room and let her ride him until there was no tomorrow.

Not that Yuuri liked thinking about his Chief Adviser having sex. It was sort of like thinking of his dad having sex, which was really the same as thinking of his mom having sex considering his mom and his dad had sex with each other.

And that was just gross.

Gisela, however, was fair game. Sure, it was kind of scary the way she could switch from sweet and supportive to authoritative and dominating in a matter of seconds, but once he looked passed that little inkling of fear he could see enough to find her attractive. She had a pretty face, of course, but mostly he liked her thighs. He rather liked the way a good portion of her weight was distributed to her lower half, making her curvier on the bottom than the top (though the size of her rack wasn't half bad either; not too big, but not too small).

Once, Yuuri caught himself imagining what it would be like to have those thighs around his waist while he fucked her against a hard stone wall. He almost felt bad for thinking it, considering he was in the middle of a lesson with Gunter at the time, and he didn't think his tutor would like the thought that Yuuri was fantasizing about his adopted daughter during a lecture about King what's-his-face the Fifth, but he couldn't really help it when he happened to glance out with window to see her drilling the soldiers with a ferocity that put Conrad—the greatest swordsman in the kingdom—to shame.

"Gisela's hot," he decided during another one of his conversations with Murata.

His friend smirked at him, as he did many times during these talks of theirs, but Yuuri could tell it was because he agreed with him this time.

"You should see if she's interested," Murata suggested.

"Nah," Yuuri said. "She's kinda scary, too."

"You think half the women in the kingdom are scary."

"That's because they could all slit my throat before I even realized it."

Murata made a "Mmm" noise, and drifted off into a fantasy Yuuri was sure he was better off not asking about.

Try as he might, after the fiasco that had occurred between them before, Yuuri could never quite rekindle his attraction toward Elizabeth. At least, not completely. She was incredibly pretty and actually very nice when she wasn't throwing a fit of possessive jealousy, but he couldn't look at her anymore without remembering that she and Wolfram used to be engaged, and then his mind would somehow bring up an image of Elizabeth and Wolfram making out.

That seemed inherently wrong somehow.

Probably because they were practically the same person in two different bodies.

"Have you ever kissed Elizabeth?" he asked one night when they were getting ready for bed.

Wolfram gave him one of his "what the fuck are you smoking?" looks.

"No," he said without a trace of hesitation (Yuuri was sure, then, that it was the truth). Wolfram paused a moment after that, staring suspiciously, and then asked, "Why?" with the sort of expression on his face that made it appear as if he were wondering if Yuuri had been jealous of the thought.

He hadn't been. He simply thought the idea was weird and wanted to make absolutely sure nothing of the sort had ever taken place.

"Just wondering," he said.

Then he rolled over and turned out the light, falling asleep to dreams of Hashimoto and Gisela pleasuring him at the same time (with Wolfram and Elizabeth looking on in abhorrent disgust).

Yuuri's third realization came in regards to condoms.

Glow-in-the-dark ones really were kind of cool.

He tried them out one evening at Hashimoto's house, when her parents were away visiting one of her relatives. She sat against the pillows on her bed, laughing at him as he waved his latex covered dick around in the dark.

He made light saber noises as he did so.

It seemed a shame not to.

Graduation, however, was quick to arrive. It seemed he was eighteen before he even realized it, and his last days as a carefree youth marked the end of Yuuri's relationship with Hashimoto.

"It's been fun," she said on the evening of their last night together.

"Yeah," Yuuri replied.

They were at her house again, side by side in her bed, naked and slick with sweat and cum.

"We can try to keep in touch," she offered. "Maybe if we're both in town at the same time…"

Yuuri could tell she wasn't saying it because she was hopeful, or because she expected to have any lingering attachments to him. They liked one another well enough, but Yuuri knew he wasn't in love with her, just as he knew she wasn't in love with him. He didn't feel bad about these facts at all. It made things easier, really. He was sure they'd both be able to move on relatively quickly, even if they missed the convenience their relationship had provided them both.

"Sure," he said anyway, just to be polite (and because he really wouldn't mind it if circumstances allowed, though somehow he doubted they ever would).

"You're a good guy, Shibuya," Hashimoto told him. She turned her head to look at him with a smile, her hand lightly touching the back of his.

Yuuri gave a start, staring back at her with some surprise.

And a strange, nagging sense of guilt.

Sometimes, he wondered if he really was such a good guy.

But he didn't say anything about it. They fucked once more, and then it was done. Hashimoto went off to college, and Yuuri, his duties and responsibilities beckoning him home, "went abroad" and returned to life in the Great Demon Kingdom.

For a while, things returned to how they'd been before Hashimoto. Yuuri did his paperwork, he sat in his lessons with Gunter—with the occasional fantasy to ease his boredom—he attended parties and held meetings with his allies, and played baseball with Conrad to take the edge of. The only difference between before and after was that now he thought about sex much more frequently—perhaps not as frequently as other boys his age, as a fair bit of his mind continued to be occupied with baseball, but still more often than during the pre-Hashimoto period of his life.

He simply wasn't having sex.

He considered it occasionally, but even though there were plenty of beautiful women around—and even though he still liked to imagine what it would be like to tumble into one of the infirmary beds with Gisela—he found he wasn't interested enough in any of them to make the opportunity worth Wolfram's wrath.

He wondered if he might be missing Hashimoto after all.

When he decided he wasn't, he began to wonder if there was something wrong with him instead.

He couldn't be losing the drive already. Not naturally, at least. He was only eighteen!

In any case, he never had much of an opportunity to even try to develop an interest in anyone else. When he wasn't doing paperwork and schmoozing at parties, he was doing his best to avoid a topic he'd spent much of his time on Earth trying to escape from.

Marriage.

With Wolfram.

His fiancé plowed right into the planning almost as soon as Yuuri returned from his last night with Hashimoto. It was sort of scary to leave a girl he'd liked enough to give his virginity to but had no inclination to marry, only to come back to a guy he never would have considered giving his virginity to and also had no inclination to marry, but who desperately seemed to want to marry him.

Often, Yuuri considered the unfairness of the world.

He thought it would have been easier if Wolfram was a girl. He'd have made a very pretty one. He was pretty enough as it was. He looked almost exactly like his mother, except his hips were narrower and his chest was notably flatter—and when he imagined Wolfram with Lady Celi's breasts, Yuuri decided that his mind was a sick, sick place to be and forced all thoughts of Wolfram as a girl out of his head.

No, no. He was much better off as a boy.

Instead of encouraging it, Yuuri reacted to Wolfram planning the wedding in the exact same manner he'd reacted to Wolfram insisting upon the engagement.

He argued. He denied it. He reminded him that it was an accident.

And when Wolfram insisted upon it anyway, Yuuri shut his mouth and simply pretended it wasn't happening.

"At least you'll get to have sex again," Murata said. He sounded cheerful, as if he delighted in Yuuri's misery.

He probably did.

"Except for the fact that I don't want to have sex with Wolfram," Yuuri replied with a grimace.

"You'll have to, once you're married," Murata told him.

"Who says?"

"Custom," Murata answered. He voiced the revelation rather matter-of-factly, with a bit too much amusement for Yuuri's liking. "You'll have to publicly consummate it, you know. With von Voltaire and von Christ there. With all of the Aristocrats there, actually, so both of von Bielefeld's uncles, too."

Yuuri stared.

He stared for a very, very long time.

Then his face paled and he swallowed a lump that had lodged itself halfway down his throat.

"What?" he asked, his voice an octave higher than usual.

"Oh," Murata said with a sly grin. "No one told you?"

"No!"

And if Wolfram had mentioned it—though Yuuri was pretty sure he hadn't—he'd completely ignored him.

"Well, now you know!" Murata said. He sounded far, far too cheerful. With a broad grin and gleaming glasses, he clapped Yuuri on the shoulder before strolling off, whistling to himself as he went.

Yuuri stared after him.

If he thought he could drown himself in his private bath without unintentionally opening a vortex to Earth, he might have tried it.

"Have you ever had sex?" Yuuri asked one night while he and his fiancé were in bed.

He stared very determinedly at his hands, which he clasped in his lap. He and Wolfram sat side-by-side, propped up against the bed's many pillows with three feet of space between them (Yuuri was tempted to try for more). Wolfram was absorbed in a book and hardly seemed to notice that Yuuri was even speaking (which Yuuri thought was unfair considering Wolfram expected his undivided attention every time he opened his mouth). He didn't even answer until he'd flipped the page and finished the chapter.

"What?" he replied, unconcerned.

Yuuri took a moment to wonder whether or not this was a conversation he even wanted to have.

Now that he'd asked the question, though, he felt a spark of curiosity.

"Have you ever had sex?" he repeated.

Wolfram definitely heard him this time. When Yuuri chanced a glance at him out of the corner of his eye, he saw that his fiancé had tensed up, his shoulders stiff and his back very straight. Color suffused Wolfram's normally very pale face, starting in his cheeks and traveling out to the tips of his ears, before extending down his neck. The portion of his chest not covered by his nightgown became blotchy.

Either the answer was "no" and that embarrassed Wolfram, or Wolfram had a very interesting story to tell.

For some reason, Yuuri hoped the answer was "no."

He told himself it was because he didn't want the mental images that would no doubt come from hearing any interesting stories. It couldn't be anything more than that, because he didn't give a shit what Wolfram did otherwise. His fiancé probably expected him to care, but the truth was that Yuuri wouldn't be fazed if Wolfram was bending over for or fucking half the castle so long as he didn't have to either see it or hear about it.

Fiancé or not, if Wolfram wanted to be a lecherous manwhore like Murata, Yuuri didn't think it was any of his business to stop him.

After all, Yuuri'd just spent the last year and a half vigorously fucking his girlfriend on Earth. It would be rather hypocritical of him to disallow Wolfram from doing the same.

"What are you talking about?" Wolfram asked. He kept his gaze glued on the book, though Yuuri could tell he wasn't reading it anymore. His eyes weren't moving at all.

"Have you ever had sex?" Yuuri asked a third time. He allowed himself to sound a bit exasperated. He didn't usually have to repeat himself this much. Wolfram typically hung on his every word. Either that, or he talked over him so much Yuuri hardly ever had the chance to speak.

Slowly—very, very slowly—Wolfram turned his head to look at him. Yuuri considered looking away (it was sort of an uncomfortable topic of conversation, and even though he was trying his best not to, the more the thought about it, the more he started getting disturbing images in his head), but he rather liked seeing Wolfram so obviously embarrassed. It was a good look for him, if only because it meant Yuuri was, for once, not that one feeling awkward and out of place.

"Why would you even ask that?" Wolfram said.

Yuuri suspected his fiancé was trying to avoid answering the question. He almost let him, because what Yuuri said next to try and weasel it out of him made him grimace and cringe to think that such a thing was actually coming from his mouth.

"Because we're going to have to have sex once we're married."

Wolfram stared at him for about as long as Yuuri had stared at Murata.

The silence was not altogether uncomfortable, though it could have been very easily (if it was for Yuuri, it was only because his statement had further cemented the horrifying images currently coalescing in his mind). Despite the fact that Yuuri didn't even want to consider what he'd just said, he was beginning to wonder if this was in fact that perfect way to get Wolfram to stop planning the wedding—make him so uncomfortable that he, like Yuuri, could hardly even bear to think of the expectations that would follow.

Because for all the bravado he showed when Gunter complained about him sleeping in Yuuri's room, and for all the times he'd snuck into Yuuri's bed wearing that ridiculous pink nightgown (or less), Wolfram now looked as if he wasn't any more inclined to think about having sex with Yuuri than Yuuri was to think about having sex with him.

"You remember the custom, right?" Yuuri prodded. He did his best not to grin. He didn't want it to seem as if he were enjoying this, even though he sort of really was. "You know… the thing about public consummation…?"

If it were possible, Wolfram's face turned an even darker shade of red. "Y-Yes…" he stuttered a response.

"You're okay with it?"

Wolfram's mouth opened and closed quite a few times before he managed to say anything. "I… I didn't… I didn't exactly consider it…"

"Oh," Yuuri said, trying to seem surprised. "Well, okay. I just wanted to know if you'd ever done it before. You know…" He paused dramatically before finishing, "… sex."

If Yuuri didn't know any better, he would have thought Wolfram looked slightly terrified.

Or perhaps it was mortification. For once, he couldn't really tell.

Whatever the case, he definitely saw Wolfram flinch.

"N-No…" his fiancé stuttered. His voice sounded very quiet and very small.

Yuuri didn't know if Wolfram was embarrassed or if it was something else, but he was beginning to realize why Murata found his discomfort so very amusing. He could barely keep his composure and stop himself from laughing at the utterly aghast look on Wolfram's face.

"Really?" he wondered, purposefully curious. "Never?"

"N-No…"

"Not once?"

"I said no!" Wolfram shouted. He tore his eyes away and stubbornly returned to his book, though he had no further success in reading it.

"Jeez," Yuuri said, stifling a chuckle behind a cough, which he covered by clearing his throat. "I thought you would have by now. I mean, you're what? Eighty-four now? Eighty-five?"

"Age has no bearing on sexual experience," Wolfram stubbornly insisted.

"Well, no. But, I mean, you're pretty, so there's bound to be plenty of people who'd want you. Another soldier… or maybe Elizabeth…"

Again, Yuuri thought how wrong that mental image was.

He was quite happy when Wolfram seemed to agree, if the paling of his face and the light tinge of green to his skin was any indication.

"I don't understand why you're even asking me about this," Wolfram said.

"Because you're planning our wedding, which means one day soon we'll be getting married, which means we'll have to consummate it and have sex, right?" Yuuri countered. The amount of pleasure he felt in having Wolfram off his guard was hard to describe. It was something like a mental hard on.

And it made the mental images relatively easy to ignore.

Wolfram said nothing.

"Come on," Yuuri wheedled. "You can't tell me you've never thought about it."

"You can't tell me you have," Wolfram argued.

"Of course I have," Yuuri lied. "What's so bad about us having sex?"

Wolfram clamped his mouth shut. He seemed to be trying to hold something back, but then Wolfram was never capable of holding anything back, and eventually he blurted out, "It's messy."

"So?"

"And uncomfortable."

"How would you know if you've never done it?"

"I can imagine."

"Imagining and doing are kind of different, Wolf."

"Well, it's embarrassing then."

"But you and I have been naked in the bath before."

"Yes, but… not like that."

"You mean like when we're horny?" Yuuri supplied. He didn't bother to hide his grin anymore, even if it meant Wolfram would know he was teasing him.

Wolfram, for his part, raised his book as if to shield his face, which steadily grew red again. "Must you be so vulgar?"

"How's it vulgar if it's natural?"

"Your crude language makes it vulgar."

"How am I being crude?"

"You're using inappropriate words."

"What? Horny?"

"Yuuri…" Wolfram said his name like a warning.

"What? That's too vulgar for you? That's not even the worst of it. There's 'dick' and 'cock' and 'cum' and 'fuck.'"

He could hardly believe he was even saying half of these things, but the sight of Wolfram growing more and more uncomfortable only served to further stimulate his mental hard on. If this kept up, he thought his brain might cum.

"Yuuri…" Wolfram said again.

"Come on, your mom has sex all the time."

That was the wrong thing to say. Wolfram suddenly slammed his book shut and threw it at him. It hit Yuuri squarely on the side of his head before flopping onto the mattress with a soft thud and a rustle of crumpling pages. As Yuuri rubbed the sudden soreness from his head, his fiancé threw himself out of the bed and stalked across the room.

"I am not my mother!" he shouted.

He went into the washroom and slammed the door.

Yuuri stared, half confused, and half trying to stifle a raucous round of laughter.

He should have expected Wolfram to eventually corner him and seek his revenge, but Yuuri had been too pleased with his success to think much about it, as Wolfram didn't mention the wedding again for an entire week. He should have known better. He'd left Wolfram a very clear opening. Wolfram wasn't one to miss things like that, no matter how embarrassed he may have been when the questioning had been directed toward him. Once he'd had a few days to collect himself, Wolfram retaliated.

Yuuri, his confidence soaring, didn't even see it coming.

"Have you?"

They were in his office again. Yuuri sat behind his desk, hunched over as he carefully read through a steady stream of documents, page after page of warrants and petitions and legal nonsense that he could barely makes heads or tails of. Wolfram stood in front of him, so close his bony hips almost pressed against the edge of the desk, standing as tall as his slight stature would allow and staring imperiously down his nose, making Yuuri feel a bit as if he were on trial.

He probably was. He didn't know where Conrad or Gwendal or Gunter were, but the pointed gleam in Wolfram's eye made him suddenly miss their presence.

"Have I what?" he asked.

He went over the day's events in his head to make sure there hadn't been anything he was supposed to have done that he'd forgotten, but nothing came to mind. This was the first time he'd seen Wolfram since that morning when he'd left his fiancé snoring away in bed to go jogging with Conrad. Hours later, Wolfram had simply barged in his office to stand there, content to stare him down while Yuuri dutifully ignored him and tried to focus on his paperwork.

It was growing increasingly more difficult to do so, he realized. He could feel the buildup of stress and tension, and for the first time since the last time they'd seen one another, Yuuri thought he might miss Hashimoto.

It was as if Wolfram could read his thoughts.

"Have you," he began again, slowly grounding the question out through clenched teeth, "had sex?"

Yuuri's mouth fell open as he looked up at the infuriatingly pretty young man lording over him, feeling suitably lost for words.

His first instinct was to lie. He'd gotten rather good at lying. He should be able to do it now. But then he realized he'd already taken too long to say something. Not only that, but he'd questioned Wolfram with way too much ease and knowledge on the subject to be believably ignorant. Wolfram seemed to be thinking the exact same thing. He was starting to develop that all-knowing gleam in his eyes like he already knew the answer, and Yuuri felt well and truly fucked.

"Uhhh," he started, hastening for words that wouldn't come. He settled for widening his eyes and trying to smile innocently. "Y-yeah…?"

Wolfram's face went red. This time Yuuri knew it wasn't from embarrassment.

"What?" his fiancé seethed. His voice sounded dark and dangerous and Yuuri hands instinctively went to his lap to shield the family jewels.

"I… y-yeah… I mean… um… well… y-yeah…"

"You've had sex," Wolfram said. He wasn't asking anymore.

Yuuri released a nervous chuckle and nodded his head in agreement.

"And with whom have you had sex?"

Wolfram was trying to keep his voice low and even. Yuuri gulped in response. He knew this was far more dangerous than Wolfram immediately exploding, because it meant he was allowing his anger to twist around in a fiery pit and build into an inferno.

"Umm…" Yuuri tried to sound confident (he was the king, after all; he should be able to handle his own fiancé), but it was really very hard when Wolfram looked ready to murder him. "My… my girlfriend…?"

"What girlfriend?"

"Uhh… the, uhhh… the one I had on Earth?"

"'Had'?" Wolfram jumped on the word, lifting his well-groomed brows. He seemed to settle somewhat. "This was before, then?"

"Uhh… before what?"

"Before we were engaged."

For a long moment, Yuuri struggled for something to say. He wanted to lie again, and a vigorous "yes" nearly leapt from the tip of his tongue, but he didn't feel confident enough to execute the ruse. He finally decided that honesty was the best policy in this situation. He didn't trust Wolfram not to ask Murata, and he didn't trust Murata not to tell the truth (purely for the entertainment value the resulting explosion would provide).

"Umm…" he began haltingly, "… n-no…"

"No?" Wolfram repeated. His eyes grew very narrow, his thin brows lowering back down, furrowing as his frown deepened. For once, Yuuri thought he could see a striking resemblance between his fiancé and Gwendal.

It was even more frightening than Wolfram's usual petulant glowers.

"N-No," Yuuri said again, swallowing down the nervous clog in his throat.

"When was it then?"

"It was… umm… well, we started… umm, dating… around the time that… er… I mean… back when all that… stuff… was going on with Conrad… and… yeah…"

Wolfram grew very still and very silent. The only sign of movement was his harsh breathing, his shoulders and chest lifting and expanding with increasing speed. In the brief calm before the inevitable storm, Yuuri could hear each ragged breath. Wolfram's nostrils flared. Yuuri watched Wolfram's face grow very white, even his lips, which pressed tight together in Wolfram's struggle to contain himself as he processed this revelation. He stood straight, his arms hanging by his sides. He seemed so shocked he wasn't even able to curl his shaking hands into fists.

Yuuri almost inched from his seat and made for the door. The faster he got out of there, the better. Unfortunately, his body didn't appear to be listening to the red alert his brain was giving. He remained rooted in his chair, staring up at Wolfram with a look that was half sheepish, half terrified.

Finally, Wolfram reacted. He pressed his shaking hands against the top of the desk, palms flat against the wood. Then he leaned very far over, placing his furiously pale face directly in front of Yuuri's, staring him straight in the eye. Yuuri kept his hands in his lap and gulped again, unable to look away.

In his nervous anxiety, he suddenly wondered if Wolfram could breathe fire. His breath was very hot on Yuuri's face.

"You…" Wolfram hissed, his voice unusually low, so much so that he barely sounded like himself anymore—cold while the rest of him steamed. "You are an adulterous swine."

Then he pushed himself away from the desk, turned on his heel, and walked stiffly toward the door. He left after nearly ripping it from its hinges, and slammed it closed with a force the rattled the windows behind Yuuri's desk.

Yuuri sat motionless and quiet, his eyes wide and trained on the spot where his fiancé had just been.

In retrospect, he probably should have left Wolfram alone after that. Even at his angriest, once Wolfram had a sufficient amount of time to settle himself down, he could usually be coerced into having a mostly calm, somewhat mature conversation. It was simply a matter of allowing his rage to burn out before tackling the issue like the dignified young adults they were supposed to be.

Unfortunately, Yuuri had rarely ever been dignified, nor were he and Wolfram as adult as they probably should have been by the ages of eighteen and eighty-five.

This left them with "young," and as all young people were, both Yuuri and Wolfram had the habit of being very impulsive and very stupid.

After a few minutes of staring after Wolfram in the uncomfortable silence of his office, Yuuri managed to stand from his chair and head out the door. In his defense, he thought confronting the issue immediately was the right thing to do. Sadly, the right thing wasn't always the best thing, nor did it always end pleasantly.

He caught up with Wolfram as his fiancé was stalking down the open hallway that surrounded one of the castle's inner courtyards. Yuuri had no idea where he was headed, though Wolfram seemed to have some destination in mind. He walked with purpose and ignored the smattering of people who'd come out to enjoy the scenery and pleasant weather.

Somewhere inside, Yuuri was sure it was a bad idea to have witnesses, but after Wolfram had ignored him calling his name three times, he couldn't find much of a reason to care.

"Wolfram!" he shouted after him again, picking up speed to stop him by grabbing onto one of his arms.

Wolfram turned and swiftly ripped himself away, glaring at Yuuri with so much anger it almost looked like hate. "What?" he snarled.

"Just… just wait a second," Yuuri tried. He dropped his hand back down when it was clear that Wolfram didn't want to be touched. He didn't think he had to restrain him anyway. His fiancé hadn't moved to run off again. "I… I'm sorry."

"You're sorry?" Wolfram scoffed. "And why are you sorry? Are you sorry you did it or sorry that I found out?"

"Sorry that… that you found out…"

As much as he would have liked to in order to save his own skin, Yuuri found that he couldn't lie in this situation. It seemed wrong to. He supposed it had been wrong of him to go behind Wolfram's back in the first place, but lying about it seemed worse than hiding it, even if they were, in effect, the same thing.

But he wasn't sorry that he'd done it. He wondered if he should be. He wondered if it made him a bad person to admit it, but it was true. He'd liked Hashimoto. He'd liked hanging out with her, he'd liked dating her, he'd liked kissing her, and he'd liked having sex with her. He'd liked being able to get away from the hectic, stressful life he had in the Great Demon Kingdom. He'd liked being able to do what he wanted with someone he enjoyed spending time with. He'd liked being young and being himself and having someone like him for it.

And he'd liked having sex. He'd liked having sex with a girl like Hashimoto. He'd liked escaping from Wolfram and the engagement. He'd liked being able to forget about it for a while. He'd liked experiencing things the way he thought he should—not because it was what people expected, not because it was what Wolfram said was right, but because it was what he wanted. He'd wanted to do it, pure and simple, and he hadn't cared that he'd cheated on Wolfram in the process.

He didn't care now. He cared that Wolfram was angry. He cared that Wolfram was upset. He cared that it might ruin their friendship, but he didn't care that he'd cheated. He only cared about the consequences, not the offense itself.

He couldn't tell by the look on Wolfram's face how his fiancé was handling the answer. Yuuri thought he saw his eyes spark again. In hindsight, it could very well have been a flash of tears held stubbornly at bay.

"You unfaithful prick!" Wolfram shouted. His hands lifted to Yuuri's chest and roughly pushed him back.

Yuuri stumbled a few steps but quickly regained his balance. His reaction was a confused conglomerate of feelings—shocked that Wolfram had uttered such a vulgar curse so loudly (he heard a few passers-by gasp in response), offended that Wolfram would actually push him, and frustrated that he was being berated for this in the first place.

"How dare you?" Wolfram continued, pushing at Yuuri with each emphasized word. "How dare you do this to me?"

"I haven't done anything to you!" Yuuri countered. His indignation and his frustrations over the engagement were beginning to rise, almost without warning.

"I'm your fiancé!" Wolfram bellowed over him. "Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"I told you!" Yuuri insisted. When it looked as if Wolfram was going to push at him again, Yuuri grabbed at his shoulders and shoved him back. "I told you it was an accident!"

"Need I remind you that you proposed to me?"

"What part of 'it was an accident' don't you understand?" Yuuri shot back. "I didn't slap you because I wanted to marry you! I slapped you because were a spoiled, selfish brat and a racist bitch!"

The harsh criticism gave Wolfram pause. He seemed to stumble and flinch back. The look on his face flickered briefly from enraged to stricken, before he was able to pull his anger back into place.

"You never retracted it," Wolfram tried. His voice shook. He knew as well as Yuuri did how weak the argument was, given all the times Yuuri had offered to do so.

"You never let me!"

Yuuri hadn't expected to start shouting. He'd expected a debate, but he'd thought the true heat of it would only come from one side. When he'd first gone after Wolfram, he hadn't expected his own frustrations would slip through. At some point in the last three years he'd spent fending Wolfram off, a crack must have formed in the wall he'd built up around all the negative feelings he had for his friend. For much of the previous two years, he'd been able to see Wolfram as the strong, honorable young man he'd matured into, but today, in this moment, he could only see the insufferable brat he'd slapped over dinner.

He'd had enough, finally. He was tired of the accusations, tired of being forced into something he hadn't agreed to, and tired of his life being controlled for him. He wanted out. He wanted it over with. He wanted the freedom to be able to live his life without the overbearing oppression of a fiancé who couldn't (or wouldn't) understand.

"I'm not the one planning the wedding, Wolfram! I'm not the one with delusions in my head! You are so blind you don't even realize that I don't want this! I don't want to be engaged to you! I don't want to marry you! I slapped you because I couldn't stand you! You're the one who suddenly decided it meant something, not me! I wanted to take it back! I kept telling you and everyone else, but you wouldn't even listen to me! What do I have to do to get it through your head?"

"You cheated on me…" Wolfram said. His voice was quiet, but he sounded no less angry. "You slept with someone-"

"I slept with someone because I felt like it! It doesn't have anything to do with you!"

"It has everything to do with me!"

"No, it doesn't! I would have slept with her even if we hadn't been engaged, Wolfram! I didn't do it thinking, 'Oh, hey, let's do this to piss Wolfram off.' I thought, 'Oh, hey, I've never had sex before. I like Hashimoto and she likes me, so why don't I do it with her and see what it's like?' I did it because I wanted to have sex with her, not because I wanted to spite you!"

"You should have thought about how it would make me feel!"

"I didn't think about you, Wolfram!" Yuuri shouted. "I didn't think about you at all, not until it was over, and then I decided I didn't care because you weren't there and I'm sick and tired of you trying to live my life for me!"

"That isn't what I'm doing!"

"It is what you're doing! When in the last three years have I been able to do anything without you harping at me for it?"

"This is completely different!"

"No, it isn't, Wolfram! It all comes down to the same thing! You think you can get your way if you just push hard enough! You think if you just ignore me and keep planning the wedding when I say I don't want to get married then maybe one day I'll magically change my mind!"

"That isn't-"

"Don't deny it," Yuuri said. "You know it's true. You know I don't want to marry you, but your pride won't let you admit it!"

"It doesn't have anything to do with my pride!"

"Of course it does!"

"No!" Wolfram cried. He looked as furious as ever, but Yuuri thought he could see something else beneath it, something just as strong but even more painful. "I want to marry you because I love you!"

For a moment, Yuuri stood and stared. Wolfram's chest was heaving, his eyes were bright, and his face was flushed from screaming. There wasn't anything about his stance or his behavior that suggested he was lying, yet Yuuri found that he was unable to grasp the idea of Wolfram being in love with him. Perhaps it was because they were both so angry that love seemed like such a faraway thing. Perhaps it was because he didn't particularly want Wolfram to be in love with him. It seemed odd and completely out of place, and the fact that he'd never even considered it before made Wolfram's proclamation all the more surprising.

Or perhaps he didn't want to believe it because it made him feel worse about rejecting him, and he was tired of having to worry about Wolfram's feelings on top of his own.

"That's so much crap, Wolfram," he said. It didn't come out sounding as confident as he'd wanted it to.

"You selfish bastard!" Wolfram swore. "What right do you have to tell me how I feel?"

"What right do you have to tell me who I can and can't have sex with?"

Wolfram's hand swung out before Yuuri's even realized it. One minute it was hanging down the length of his fiancé's body, and the next it was colliding with the side of Yuuri's face in a stinging slap. His head jerked to the left, his eyes wide first with shock, then with indignation.

Through his anger, in the moments before he retaliated, Yuuri had the sense to realize that it hadn't been the proper cheek to constitute a proposal. Wolfram hadn't struck him out of the desire he had to marry him. He'd struck him because Yuuri didn't share it.

His instincts screamed to strike back. That old impulse he'd always had to fight against oppression and unfairness rose up to rear its ugly head. He had a split second to decide whether he wanted to mimic the slap or respond in a different manner before catering to the anger and the irritation that spurred him on. Then his hand flung out, and his closed fist slammed into the side of his fiancé's face.

Wolfram gave a loud cry and stumbled, nearly collapsing against the stone bannister that separated the courtyard from the open walkway. He grabbed it to steady himself and looked at Yuuri as if he'd never quite seen him before. His eyes were impossibly wide and glistened wetly. His mouth fell open in shock. For a few seconds he actually looked vulnerable, young and small and so hurt, but he covered it quickly, slamming the furious glare back onto his face.

Before Yuuri could even think to apologize, before he could even begin to feel anything but a keen sense of satisfaction, Wolfram launched himself at him.

Then it was an all-out brawl.

It could have ended in so many different ways. Wolfram, being the better swordsman, could have easily disarmed him if they'd had the sense to make a proper duel of it. Yuuri, on the other hand, had the stronger magic (by an outstanding degree), and could have extinguished Wolfram's fire with his water in a matter of seconds.

But without using such methods, they were more or less evenly matched. Wolfram had never had much training in hand-to-hand combat, and Yuuri had cared too much about baseball to be distracted by the martial arts. He might have a slight advantage in height and weight seeing as he'd aged three years since their first duel while Wolfram had barely grown at all, but Wolfram had the advantage of wild passion, and it made him vicious.

Yuuri restricted himself to punches, grabs, jabs, kicks, and rough shoving. Wolfram's manner was much the same, except that he scratched and bit when it seemed appropriate to do so. It was neither the neatest nor the most skilled of fights. Had either of them been able to think through their respective pain and rage, they might have had a bit more success in effectively pummeling each other.

It ended as quickly as it began. They'd taken a tumble together, sprawled out on the stone floor. Yuuri was seconds away from bearing his weight against Wolfram and forcing him down to deliver another sound punch to the face when he felt a pair of hands grab him from behind and hastily rip him away. Wolfram, sensing an opening, seemed ready to climb to his feet and throw him himself back into it, but he too was restrained, both of his arms jerked back and held in place by his much taller, much stronger older brother.

"You bastard!" Wolfram shrieked. At first, it was unclear whether he was talking to Yuuri or Gwendal, who struggled to hold him back. "You bastard! You lying, cheating bastard! How dare you do this to me? How dare you?"

It didn't sound as if he were able to articulate much else. Yuuri couldn't think of anything to say in response. He didn't fight the restraining hands, or even so much as argue when Conrad began pulling him away. Instead, he simply glared at Wolfram, at his disheveled hair and his torn uniform and his bruised and bloodied face.

And for just a moment, so quickly he hardly even registered the feeling, he hated his fiancé. He hated everything about him—from his hair and his eyes to his voice and his clothes and the stupid poof of lace he always wore at his throat.

Most of all, he hated that Wolfram could still look so beautiful when he was beaten and angry and forcing back tears.

"Screw you," Yuuri said, much too calmly for the situation, but he couldn't muster up the strength to make it sound worse.

He jerked away from Conrad and turned to march from the scene, ignoring the whispering of the maids, the startled looks he received from the soldiers, and Wolfram's voice screaming curses after him.

He didn't care to hear anymore.

He'd done enough.

He ended up in the castle gardens, by a fountain and the flowerbed that housed Lady Celi's many breeds of flora. Conrad followed him. Out of the corner of his eye, Yuuri could see Murata trailing along as well. He ignored them even when Conrad tried to express some of the concern he wore openly on his face. As soon as he stood by the edge of the fountain, Yuuri leaned over it to dunk his head inside.

The water was cool and peaceful around his aching head. He would have stayed under longer had it not been necessary to breathe.

Only when his lungs began to burn from lack of air did Yuuri resurface, supporting himself against the fountain ledge as he gasped and panted for breath. Conrad placed a steadying hand on his shoulder, but Yuuri shrugged it off and sunk down to his knees. He squeezed his eyes shut against the traitorous sting that suddenly overtook them. He didn't understand—when he was so tired and so angry and so desperate for it to be over—why it should hurt so much when it finally seemed that it was.

He supposed it was because he hadn't truly wanted it to end. No, he didn't want to marry Wolfram. He'd barely even wanted to be engaged to him, and had only shut up about it for so long because it'd seemed like the easiest thing to do. He realized now that he'd begun to think the same way Wolfram had—if he'd just ignored it long enough, if he'd just pretended not to hear what Wolfram was saying, maybe Wolfram would somehow change his mind and realize that this just wasn't meant to be.

But he hadn't wanted it to affect their friendship. He liked Wolfram, he trusted Wolfram, he needed Wolfram's guidance and companionship as much as he needed Conrad and Gwendal and Gunter and Murata. He liked that they could have fun together when they weren't being encumbered by the awkwardness and the stress that had encroached upon them due to the engagement. He liked that they had memories together, that they'd worked and grown and played together, that they'd built somewhat of a family together with Greta.

Yuuri liked the person being friends with Wolfram had encouraged him to become, just as he liked the person Wolfram had become in being friends with him.

But it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough for Wolfram that Yuuri just wanted to be friends, and it wasn't enough for Yuuri that Wolfram couldn't be satisfied with the way things were. They were two completely different people who wanted two completely different things. Wolfram wanted marriage, for whatever reason (Yuuri still wanted to say that it was mostly due to pride, even though there was a voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Wolfram that told him it was due to love), and Yuuri wanted the time and the space to grow and figure out what he wanted.

Because he realized now that he didn't have a clue. He had ideals. He had things he thought he would like, and things that he definitely did, but none of it seemed especially concrete. He couldn't imagine what the future would be. He didn't even know what sort of future he wanted outside of peace and prosperity for his people.

"Yuuri…" Conrad said his name instead of his title, proof enough of how concerned he was. Yuuri supposed he had every right to be. It wasn't every day that Conrad came across his king and his little brother attempting to beat each other's lights out.

Yuuri shook his head, crouched down by the fountain ledge with his forehead pressed to the edge of it, his hands tightly gripping the stone. Water dripped down his face from his soaking hair, dampening the shoulders of his jacket, but Yuuri ignored it. He didn't care. It was a good cover for whatever tears managed to slip free.

"Yuuri, what happened?" Conrad asked. His voice was soft and kind, but firm, too. It was as much as he would push the subject, though his tone still seemed to expect an answer.

"Wolfram and I got into a fight," Yuri said through an aching throat and a voice thick with emotion.

Conrad stood patiently by. "About…?" he encouraged.

Yuuri shook his head again, not because he didn't want to answer, but because it seemed like such a stupid thing to begin with. "He didn't like that I'd slept with a girl, and I didn't like that he kept pushing me about the engagement when I don't even want to get married."

If Conrad was in any way disappointed by what he was hearing about the two people in the world Yuuri suspected he cared most for, none of it was evident in the way he spoke. "You don't want to get married…" he observed. It sounded almost as if he felt guilty for it, not realizing how opposed Yuuri had truly been to it until now.

Yuuri wondered if his godfather would have done anything about it had he been aware that things had gotten to this point, but he decided it didn't matter now that it had already happened.

"No," Yuuri said. "I don't want to get married, and I'm tired of hearing about it and worrying about it and trying not to hurt Wolfram's feelings when I just… I just want to be me and like what I like and do what I want and not feel as if I'm disappointing everyone."

"No one's disappointed in you, Yuuri."

"Wolfram is."

"Wolfram…" Conrad trailed off in the middle of trying to think of something to say. Yuuri knew it was because he couldn't deny the argument. "Wolfram will come to understand, in time."

"Yeah, right," Yuuri said, sarcastic and disbelieving. "He's pissed."

"Once he's calmed down, he'll be able to think things through more logically."

"It doesn't matter," Yuuri insisted. He pushed himself up from the ground enough to turn and sit on the fountain ledge, lowering his head into his hands. "Nothing's going to change. He'll still be upset that I don't want to marry him, and I can't do anything to fix that."

"No, you can't," Conrad agreed.

"So then what the hell am I supposed to do?"

He waited, in silence disrupted only by the falling of the water in the fountain, for his godfather to provide an answer. When minutes passed without the comforting, supportive sound of Conrad's voice, Yuuri realized that there wasn't one.

So that was it then. He and Wolfram were through.

In some ways it was a relief. He could do what he wanted now. He could look at girls all he wanted and not have to worry about Wolfram's reaction. He could have a girlfriend on Earth or in the Great Demon Kingdom without Wolfram or the engagement getting in the way. He could sleep with whoever he wanted, whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted, and not have to worry about Wolfram's anger when he found out. He didn't have to worry about a wedding being planned without any input from him. He didn't have to worry about being married to someone he didn't want to spend the rest of his life with in that manner. He didn't have to worry about consummating the marriage with someone he had no desire to have sex with.

But none of those thoughts made him feel any better. Losing Wolfram and everything they'd had between them seemed too big of a price to pay.

One weight lifted from his shoulders, even as the heavy weight of loss settled somewhere deep in his chest.

The silence continued for a long time. Eventually, Yuuri was able to force away the burning in his eyes, and rubbed at his face to clear it of any lingering water or tears. He looked up at Conrad—and Murata, who'd said nothing, but who stood by watching curiously—and tried to force a smile that wobbled with pain and sadness.

"I'll be okay," he said. He was sure he would be, at some point, even if it didn't feel as if he would right now. "I just…"

"You both need time," Conrad supplied.

Yuuri nodded, hunched over with his hands dangling uselessly between his legs. "Yeah, I guess."

They sat again in silence. None of them knew what else there was to say. Finally, Yuuri took as much of a steadying breath as he could manage and forced himself up onto his feet. He ached all over and knew he must look horrible. He'd yet to assess how much damage Wolfram had done, but as neither of them had seen fit to hold anything back, he assumed he had quite a few scratches and bruises. Wolfram had looked bad when Yuuri'd left him; he couldn't look much better.

He glanced from Conrad and Murata to the water in the fountain, quickly considering his options before coming to a decision. "I'm gonna go to Earth for a little while," he said.

Conrad continued to frown in concern but didn't argue. "Alright…"

Yuuri felt a bit guilty for trying to escape again. He thought he should have found Wolfram and tried to apologize, but he wasn't sure how long it would take before he was actually able to face him. Wolfram probably wouldn't want to talk to him anyway, and Yuuri knew he couldn't just sit there waiting for one of them to get over it enough to start a conversation. He needed to get away to think, to let the hurt run its course so that he could accept whatever he and Wolfram would be to one another now.

He nodded again as if to agree with himself that this was the appropriate course of action, and lifted one of his feet onto the fountain ledge to prepare to make the jump between worlds.

A hand on his shoulder stopped him. Yuuri paused and turned back to face Murata. There was concern in his friend's dark eyes, behind the glasses that threatened to catch and reflect the light of the setting sun, but he had a grin on his face, too. Yuuri, far too familiar with Murata's antics by now, knew what was coming before Murata even said it.

"Shut up," he warned him.

"You don't even know what I was going to say," Murata replied. They both knew that wasn't true, and Murata's grin widened in amusement.

"Yes, I do, and it isn't funny," Yuuri said.

Murata snorted and patted him on the shoulder. Then he said it anyway. "You need to get laid, Shibuya."

Yuuri showed him an offended frown and shoved him away. He turned to the fountain without him, jumping into the water before Murata could decide to join him.

Out of the corner of his eye, just as the vortex opened as he descended into the water, Yuuri caught sight of Lady Celi's bed of flowers. Normally his attention was reserved for the blue flowers Lady Celi had bred to represent his godfather, but this time he noticed the yellow ones that looked, to Yuuri, something like a cross between an iris and a daffodil, and the others, just as yellow, but larger and stretching toward the sun.

The image stayed with him even as he disappeared and the garden was no longer in view, and he thought how sad his fiancé's flowers looked, drooping in the shadow of his own.

As the vortex swirled around him and carried him away, Yuuri remembered Hashimoto taking his hand and telling him that he was a good guy.

With the memories of Wolfram's stricken and bloodied face still fresh in his mind, Yuuri didn't think he was such a good guy anymore, nor did he know if he'd ever even been one in the first place.

TBC…