A/N: Believe it or not, I've been at work on this off-and-on for a couple of months! Here goes the second of three installations of this project, the chapter "Virulence."

Reiterating my description of this little project from the debut chapter: "I got the idea from something we discussed in my Philosophy of Technology class, about how a virus actually alters the structure of a person's DNA—as does the vaccine given to prevent the virus, altering said DNA in anticipation of the bigger hit, providing a resistance. I decided to apply that here as a metaphor."

And I must say, I'm happy with the feedback I've gotten thus far, for just the first chapter! So now that we're refreshed, the setting of "Virulence" is the Three Kings Saga, in Gandhara. That little information should be all the explanation needed for what comes to follow.

Let it proliferate!

vir·us: the causative agent of an infection disease

vir·u·lence: the quality or state of being virulent: as a : the relative severity and malignancy of a disease b : the relative capacity of a pathogen to overcome body defenses

Definitions courtesy of Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary.

Disclaimer: Yu Yu Hakusho is the creation of Yoshihiro Togashi and belongs to him and his business affiliates. Ideas expressed in this story are my own and I make no monetary profit from them whatsoever.

Virus
02: Virulence
7 August 2010

Gandhara was humid.

Or, that was the reason Kurama gave for how much he was sweating.

Yomi smirked. "I'd accept that as a valid excuse, if we were outside."

Red brows knitted ever-so-slightly. What Yomi had lost in reckless perniciousness, he'd gained in a manner more elegant: microscopic, irritating observation. Kurama felt as though he were sitting on a sample slide, suffocated between the two panes of glass.

That he was all but officially labeled a hostage of Gandhara, that he was personally blackmailed to politically aid Yomi, that his parasite-ridden brother and his oblivious parents were the collateral that Yomi said would be seized should the king of Gandhara be crossed—all of this, Kurama could deal with. He could understand it, he could control it through appeasement, and manipulate it through his own deals, under Yomi's radar but not against the Goat's mandates. He could make order of it, and so he could tolerate it.

It was the day-to-day, the apolitical and the personal, which ate at him, which sometimes made him question what demons were more dangerous: those prowling Yomi's capital; those lurking beyond the borders, threatening to invade;—or the one inside himself?

His basest personal habits had become an irritant to his employer and jailer. The most basic and obvious one made itself known before Kurama passed his first twenty-four hours, his first full human day, as Yomi's new advisor. This was a matter of sustenance: the majority of Gandharan fare was inedible to the demon with the human digestive tract. Yomi's cooks took offense when they saw Kurama pick through his tentative meals for any sign that it might contain a fellow denizen of Ningenkai; they took greater offense when, once assured he was not about to become a cannibal, Kurama would send the dish back, saying it was undercooked, expressing concerns of contamination and food poisoning. Grumbles were heard, the bold questioning the sense of Lord Yomi listening to a hardly-demon that dined on burnt food.

Unbeknownst to his visitor, Yomi thought to supplement said visitor's diet with a steroid to stave off the effects of malnutrition. Kurama grew wise to his attempts with uncomfortable velocity, and he fasted for a week in retaliation. After this botched experiment, Gandhara's new advisor refused to consume anything other than Makai plant matter, the toxicity of which he was able to eradicate, or at least dilute, with his abilities, and vitamin supplements he brought with him from Ningenkai. That anything fluid that he took was probably, and in some cases certainly laced, was a matter distressing enough to make Kurama test his endurance against dehydration.

His "host" was not amused, and when one afternoon Kurama began, in the middle of an air-conditioned conference room, to break out in a sweat, a heated argument followed. When Kurama's attempt to blame the humidity outside was dismissed, he told Yomi with an air of finality that there were certain vapors in the Makai air that his body was not yet used to. He refused even the tamest of over-the-counter-grade Makai medicinals.

He rose from his chair, and his knees buckled; his legs gave out under him. When Yomi's hands steadied him, they grew wet with the perspiration that had seeped through his clothes.

"I won't take anything!" Kurama snarled, after Yomi had taken him to the nearest bedroom—the demon king's, withholding from him the meager security of his "own" space and furnishings—, taken off his wet clothes (ignoring his protestations, verbal and physical, while doing so), and offered him something clear and fluid in a glass. "I don't appreciate you secretly poisoning me; I won't aid you in doing so directly."

"I don't appreciate you deliberately damaging yourself to spite me," Yomi replied. He wore upon his face a sour expression, as if he'd bitten into a piece of unripe fruit.

"Damage to me is tolerable, then, so long as you are the one inflicting it?" The heat of Kurama's body did battle with the cool of yet another air-conditioned room; the cool won, rapidly chilling the saltwater covering his body. He clenched his teeth and curled up chest-to-knees, rocking. "Take me to my room, at least," he told Yomi. "My coat's there."

Yomi had the audacity to smirk a little, and draped his own over Kurama's naked, shivering, nonetheless still-sweating frame. It was warm on Kurama, and smelled of birch tar, a pungency akin to barbecue sauce, the demon king's own personal scent.

Then the corners of Yomi's mouth turned down; his forehead creased and furrowed pensively. "You seemed to breathe the air fine when you arrived," he told Kurama dubiously.

"I was not made to live in it on a daily basis then," Kurama retorted.

"You've developed an affliction, then." Something of Yomi's smirk returned, self-satisfied and rueful. "I ought to incapacitate you."

Kurama's flesh tensed. "No, Yomi," he said, defiant and pleading. Paranoid, he foresaw more blatant experiments, tweaking and tormenting his physiognomy, lurching beyond diet as medium to things involving vials and needles inserted into him directly. In frustration he bit his lip so hard that his eyes teared up. "It's not my lungs or my stomach. It's not this body."

It was something in this body, his body. Since the box had opened on him at the Dark Tournament, since he had like Jekyll taken the heterogenizing potion in the bottle, that thing had crept around inside him, hissing in his gases, swimming in his fluids, seeping into the lonely fibers that woven together made up his organs muscles and bones, contaminating him like a biohazard spill. Except unlike a typical contamination this one was sentient, ready to flare up spread out and take over, whenever he let his guard down. It happened whenever he lost his focus, let his mind relax however temporarily. At night he would crawl out of sleep drowsily, too hot and wet and air-thirsty, body tortured by a bawdy ballet performed by hands too ghostly and large to be his human own.

It happened whenever he lost control, lost mind-over-matter, and matter, made corrupt by that thing which seeped into its fibers and usurped his movements, rose up to betray him. Mind was displaced by emotion, so he had discovered during the recent Sensui fiasco, by whatever primal primacy, however temporary: rage, desperation, lust. The appointment of priority to pathos, then, was his more palpable self's undoing.

And here he was now, appealing to Yomi with tears in his eyes. Pathetic.

Yomi's brows arched up above where his eyes had ceased to exist a thousand years before. Above those darkened, emptied, obscured caverns, it was a gesture of enlightenment; and once the mouth rejoined the brows in upward motion, it profaned itself: a gesture of a smug sense of understanding.

"It's not that body," Yomi agreed with him. "You possess a demonic soul in a demonic setting. That human body is the only incompatibility now."

Kurama shuddered. A demonic soul in a demonic setting, and a human body possessing and possessed by a demonic spirit, sinking its metaphysical claws, tightening its psychological grip, trying to turn him, to turn him back…

He shuddered—Started—

Against his forehead, Yomi's lips.

Lips, possessing the least and thinnest of skin on the body; consequently, among its most sensitive areas. Yet in this scenario it seemed as though the sensations were inverted, retrosenses: Yomi stone-still, meditatively so; and he quivering, all those lonely fibers dancing, rubbing up against each other, plummeting his body into a state of equilibrial anarchy.

On either side, Yomi's hands pressed him, quelling some of the shaking and holding him up. Kurama might have protested, but for the very fervent and very founded fear that his knees might betray him and send him floundering to Yomi's feet. Hands over feet, any day.

Yomi pulled away. "You're feverish," he stated the obvious. Kurama shuddered—not the fever this time: Yomi delivered a second pressing of the lips, superfluous and (he suspected) not entirely clinical. As though reading Kurama's previous thoughts, Yomi continued, "It could be a matter of equilibrium," adding vaguely, "Nature that is not even second nature to you anymore…"

Nature?

"'Nature'," Kurama repeated, taking care to enunciate it as statement, not question. "Weather, or?"

There was that self-satisfied, rueful smile again. "Homeostasis," Yomi said. "You're confronting an element that you lost, that you've forgotten what to do with. So you suffer."

Homeostasis…

—Indignation. Kurama took one cautious, experimental step backward. Physically; mentally his limbs, head, and every fiber between them reeled and splayed every which way. "I haven't forgotten anything," he told Yomi, told himself, whichever self. His legs trembled.

The Goat tilted his head thoughtfully. His lips looked more pronounced, as though some of Kurama's flush had transferred to him via the temperature-testing.

Or was that a notion existent solely in his own mind, an entity that was of late most potent in recalling his former self, playing tricks on his current self, psyching out his psyche.

Lips parted: "Perhaps you wish you had."

Curt, candid—correct? Kurama shook his head, more out of uncertainty than negation, knowing that Yomi would know, that his sharpened senses would, had notified him of Kurama's shaky own. Afraid that anything he'd say might come out traitorous, Kurama kept his mouth shut.

His silence passed classified, if not as consent, then as nonprotest; and so on either side of him Yomi's hold tightened, and Kurama took haphazard steps backward, not out of experimentation but out of direction not his own, but of Yomi, Yomi his Second who did not die, who never followed directions but directed him now, him now the Second, Yomi and him, back from the dead, Yomi who chose not and Kurama who chose again and again, and again, again soon, if he, could he?

Kurama, who presently chose not to choose.

And so Yomi directed him, directed him toward bed.

Sickbed, thought Kurama, and something stirred up, something that quivered, not as he had been, with the world threatening to implode—

Enough.

Kurama pushed Yomi's hands away, fell backwards, bounced once, and landed on his back, the skirts of his borrowed coat flapping open on either side of him. Horizontal Kurama, hot and wet inside this vertical tower, cool and dry, his body's current climate much more in sync with the Gandharan storms outside, though it was precisely his body, in opposition to environment and essence, that was out of sync, as pointed out by the demon who currently towered over him, vertical Yomi.

Except,

One part, spurred on by his nakedness, endeavoring up, up, and away from the rest of him, vertical.

And one part, spurred on by his nakedness, straining against cloth confines, away from Yomi, horizontal, reaching out toward him to say Hello.

Kurama saw, and despite himself (whichever self) smiled, a contortion of the face that began with a vague germ of self-deprecation, that quickly metastasized into something much lewder.

In a voice not unlike his own, he informed the warlord: "I'm no third-rate ghost."

Said warlord smirked, the ruefulness evaporated somewhere into Gandhara's humid atmosphere.

"Welcome, Yoko."

Convergence or divergence, the creature on the bed teetered precociously on pure, unadorned and undiluted verge as surely as it teetered on an imperfect and shifting balance between body—fresh body, virtually untouched, no contact since the Dark Tournament—and the spirit, resuscitated, gasping, kicking and fighting—throwing himself at one demon (the one time, predicating a great deal of restraint, a lot of saving face) and fighting off another; and riding the waves between the two, the seasick mind, fighting that sentiment, fear and desire; Shuichi wanted to run, poor child, never had any say—but Yoko, roused and aroused over a year, wanted to play.

Yoko wanted to play.

Grunt from Yomi as he sprung, seized a piece of apparel and one, two, three, robes pants shirt, undid the whole ensemble; made the best of dull fingernails, dug into firm flesh, dragged them along until he found, grasped the bone that protruded from the flesh—

Oomph! from the demon king as his old comrade, now incapacitated, incarcerated, instigated a one-human bedroom revolt, and toppled him. Human flesh now ruled in the very gut of the land of human-eaters.

Under him Yomi's flesh heaved up and down; behind him Yomi's flesh stood straight up. Deep, diaphragmatic breaths under him, rapid beating blood flow behind him, and in him, the increasingly violent stirrings of the basest of impulses—No, basest dictated the purging of all embellishments—pulse, pure and simple, ushering, rushing those stirrings to the peripheries of his body and back to his core, sent out again renewed, refreshed, ready to revenge itself, if not upon internal then upon external catalysts.

And Yomi, still the fool, grinned up at the human mask, the delicate face adorning the swell of demonic fury gathered just behind it, channeling and funneling itself into a single, unadulterated form: lust.

The mask cracked. Kurama's lips curled, much in the same manner as Yomi's, but with a different effect: a snarl rather than a grin. Deep within him, something set to simmer long ago had now simmered too long, and hit the boiling point. Kurama leaned over Yomi, eyes glazed as though the heat he felt had actually produced steam, staring at the twin ruins in the other's face, ruined so long ago that even Kurama's puzzle-solver gaze could not detect evidence o scarring, but could envision still the look once there, once produced, amber eyes glowing with the fever that overcomes one coping with the presence of something foreign.

Taking deep breaths, taking in air riddled with the Makai vapors that just earlier he'd meant to scapegoat, letting it in, out, permeating him, touching every quivering, confused cell that made up this hybridized body, he reached up first one shaky limb, then the other, and rested, gripped, pushed each hand on an upward-protruding knee. He would make these new eyes remember that fevered look where now no eyes glared.

Muscles aside from his own flexed, coiled, tightened as he eased back just a moment, and then lurched forward with a snarl, voracious, his spirit boiling over, into the demon, the other demon.

—The passive demon.

—The unaffected demon.

As though the mask had broken off of his countenance, only to in turn suture whole again over Yomi's. He clenched his jaw, and lurched forward again, aggression infused with something desperate, that in his nude self's newfound nakedness he was sure Yomi could smell as strongly as the sweat dripping off his human form.

Despair.

Lurched, collapsed, pounded, Kurama's temples pounded with the same blood that gushed, rushed to his face, his very red face, that he hid between very red hair and the skin that covered the flesh that covered the bone that covered the organ, the still, demonic organ, the passive, unaffected organ—

Vibrations, upward, Yomi's vibrations against Kurama's vibrations, vibrations in his chest and his head, vibrations coming up beneath Yomi's sternum, armor of the organ that directed the blood to other organs—such as the other organ, come up, stayed up, unaffected—vibrations that weaved together as so many aural fibers that produced the muscle sound: a lean muscle that flexed: a growl, growling—

Yelping, as Kurama was displaced, and replaced face-first on the demon king's mattress. He snatched his face out of the sheets, barely catching his breath before a pair of hands sized his hips and pushed them up, making him lose his balance on his elbows and fall face-first into the sheets again.

"Yo—" he gasped, scrambling to keep his balance while Yomi maneuvered him, positioned his legs so that they propped up his pelvis, spread his legs, flung up his coattails—

"Yomi!" he cried out in dread: Shuichi had made no impact on the king of Gandhara, but he knew better than to expect the reciprocal. He tensed up, first in anticipation.

Then, in startlement, ironically because Yomi's hold on him, though maintained, softened. Fingers that dug into the soft skin that covered the tender flesh that covered the bones that Yomi could oh so easily break, relaxed, and ghosted along the prickling skin, the quivering flesh, and disappeared altogether.

—And reappeared as one, open-palmed, cupped so slightly, hurtlingly reuniting with his skin, aloud, a sharp Smack!

"Ah!" Kurama narrated the afterburn, the permeation through stunned skin into stung flesh.

Again: Smack!

"Ah!" Kurama echoed, elbows giving this time.

Smack!

"Augh!" the sheets muffled his refrain. Having gone down as far as he could in the one direction, the next Smack! served to bring him up in the other, the target of Yomi's blows involuntarily rendering itself all the more vulnerable to attack, with each attack, and with each attack, fracturing, the definition halving the target area sharpening as each attack rendered upward and outward, Kurama's legs spreading as his ass rose, his cries continuously muffled in the bedding.

Ceasefire. Kurama lifted, tilted his chin at an angle where his face was now not so entirely submerged in bedding. He shifted, or tried to: somehow the hem of the coat, Yomi's coat, had become lodged in one place under a knee, in another twisted round an elbow; and the sweating, the incriminating act that had slid him into this sticky situation to begin with, had become as an adhesive to those closer parts of the coat, causing the coat to appropriately coat him almost like a second, awkward skin; and consequently he had become tied up in the coat, imprisoned in Yomi's coat, braced in a pose that compromised any current action, and the nature of future action, if he remained as he was now. He tried to wriggle free, but due to current constriction the only parts of his body capable of actual movement were those of dubious help, his legs and that juncture where the backs of them met and became a cohabitate part, and any movement of these only rendered him further upward and outward.

He wasn't even cold anymore, traitorous body that had prompted the cloth confines!

Reluctantly he implored: "Yomi—A-Ah!"

The hand had returned, not bombarding the posterior exterior, but had delved into the interior, or rather the foyer, paused its knocking against the entryway to the true interior. "Is it cold?" the owner of the hand asked.

No, it wasn't cold, nothing was cold anymore, and if it had been cold it was for the briefest second, and Kurama had reacted less to the scant temperature extreme than to the texture, thick and gelatinous.

"What is that?" he demanded. He still did not trust the demon, especially in this circumstance, and wouldn't put it past his wannabe physician to take advantage of his personal fluctuations, to attempt alternative treatments where oral avenues had denied them before.

He went rigid—a finger had slid in. "Yomi!" he snarled, bucking—which hindered himself more than it did the demon behind him, as he lost his brace and slid to one side, or rather everything above his waist did, as Yomi grasped his hips and held them steady. "I won't take anything, Yomi!" he insisted frantically, kicking at the Goat with one leg, foot striking an impassive knee cap.

Now the other demon went rigid for a moment, and then exhaled audibly, breath intoning that same mixture of self-satisfaction and ruefulness.

"Backdoor assaults like that are more in keeping with your old repertoire, Kurama," Yomi informed him, matter-of-factly, not accusatively, not bitterly. The hands released his hips, his legs, and moved to his waist. Despite himself he let out another little gasp as Yomi gripped and flipped him, so that he lay now flat on his back, freed from the confines of coat and covers, able without hindrance to breathe, to move, to see, to see Yomi kneeling over him, that organ standing over him, persisting no doubt from stubbornness as surely as his own persisted from—he didn't want to admit it—excitement. Yomi's glistened head to base, and after a moment Kurama realized why the gelatinous substance, thick and slick.

Either side of his waist constricted as Yomi tightened his grip; he felt heat, not coming out of him, but mixing with and pooling close to his body and Yomi leaned in close.

"If I wanted to be a villain," the demon said, voice spoken softly, but textured harshly, "I could easily pin you down and force whatever substance I wanted, for whatever purpose I wanted, down your fragile human throat—or up alternate routes, anything, for whatever reason."

Kurama's fragile human throat began to vibrate with a firm, if faint, sound akin to a growl, or a weak whine, that might have communicated defense as easily as distress. His hands balled, then uncurled as claws, and shifted along the bedding, inward towards Yomi and himself. The Goat made no move to subdue them.

"Keep that in mind," he told Kurama, and bore down closer on the body beneath him.

A grimace on Kurama's behalf accommodated the jaws that came in collision with his own, the teeth that bit at his lips and the tongue that seemingly couldn't wait to greet his. Meanwhile a larger, denser pelvis ground against his, a slick prepped instrument rubbed against a slick prepped point of incision, one, two, three…

Recoil! Kurama jerked his face away from Yomi's, features convulsing, as from the shoulders down his limbs and torso did much the same. His mouth at first appeared to cave in, and then materialized again and split open in loud, ragged gasps, which finally sharpened into a more elegant, articulate "AH!"

Above his twitching form Yomi's had frozen, except the lips, which whispered something half-growl, half-curse. Except the hips, which after a moment ventured forward, by a mere fraction—

"It hurts!" Kurama managed hoarsely. He threw himself backward, as though trying to sink into the mattress, to escape and hide. "Ah-AH—!"

"Shh!" As he retreated, so had Yomi. The demon knelt, still over him but now with several inches allotted between them, sightless eyes half-concealed by brows knotted severely in consternation, in—perhaps—concern. "Shh…."

Kurama said nothing, and instead focused on his breathing, which he steadied from harsh gasps to deep exhalations, growing quieter with each rise and fall of his sternum, each expansion and contraction of his ribs. He was too hot, from sickness, from activity, from embarrassment, and after a few experimental spasmsfreed himself from the coat, and lied on top of it, not wanting to move further.

Until he saw Yomi rise from the foot of the bed, in search of the clothes that Kurama had stripped from him.

"Wait!" he gasped, straining his body until at last one leg, foot extended and brushed against Yomi's thigh, closest still to the bed. Intently he stared in the dark at the demon that towered over him, and raising his leg ever so slightly, ever so slightly nudged at higher anatomy—

And cried out, as his foot was snatched, and his entire body slid forward, down the bed, following it.

"You're asking for it," Yomi rumbled, one hand caressing the fine bone structure of the top of Kurama's foot, while firmly the other gripped the sole. Kurama said nothing as Yomi's hands began to wander, forefinger and thumb of one pinching either side of his ankle, while the other slid along his calf, his knee, his thigh. "So soft," the demon king stated, in what might have been appreciation, or a taunt.

Which elaborated on itself quickly as he added: "Milk-fed. I stopped because I thought that if I continued much further, you'd start crying for your human mother."

Hot-flash, which spread over Kurama's body in angry prickles. He kicked out his foot again, and using Yomi as both target and brace lunged his body upwards, as Yomi in turn sprung onto the bed, down toward him. The two wrestled for a couple of minutes, Kurama snarling, striking out whichever limb was free against whichever part of Yomi's body was most closely available; while Yomi with the exception of the odd grunt was quiet, enduring Kurama's strikes, all the while working and securing a grip around the smaller body's shoulders, hips, and finally seizing and pinning the struggling form back against the bed once more.

"Remember your place, Kurama," Yomi breathed into his ear.

He tensed, growled, but all the while listed and evaluated the connotations that command carried with it. He was Kurama—not Yoko, or at least hardly, or if so only occasionally, otherwise he was simply Kurama—the humanized demon, returned from foreign lands in a foreign body, and feeling foreign surrounded both by his Gandharan setting and his own frailer, increasingly fickler flesh, subordinate to Yomi, who remained, who remained a demon, who remained true to their old dreams, who despite Kurama's manipulations remained in power over him right now, politically as well as right now, crouched literally over him, him who was pinned in human—human?—flesh between the bed and the monarch of the land of the world all of which reminded him that currently in this position in this form in this condition in this moment he was the lesser power.

Yomi, if so inclined, could flay him open right now and eat him, human fillet, and the best Kurama could hope for in this sickly state would be to give the demon food poisoning.

He relaxed a little: Yomi had no intention of devouring him, if only in that manner. He relaxed a little, because if he was tense throughout it'd make the experience all the more uncomfortable. He relaxed a little, thinking, abstractly, that perhaps by taking in the demon, the other demon's essence if one would call it that, it might awaken or augment his dormant own, trying so hard of late to unfurl and flare up.

He had gone limp, with one exception, spurred on perhaps by the blood rushing throughout his body, or by the anger that had prompted the rush, or by the hormones roused by said anger—or was it vice-versa?—or by the excitement prompted by the possibility promised within his own mind, or by, perhaps, a stubbornness akin to that of the demonic force that, prompted by his slack in resistance, once again came crushing down against him.

"How do you want it?" Yomi whispered into his ear, tongue bathing the lobe.

Kurama shuddered and went bright red. On his stomach it was hard to breathe; on his back the angle was more painful…

"On your back," he replied resolutely.

He felt more than saw lips part, teeth bare in amusement. The other head eased away from his, the other body from his, as the demon king abdicated, and Kurama took his place on top without force this time.

Kneeling in a neutral position, he appraised the body laid out beneath him, and debating a moment over in which direction to proceed, straddled Yomi's hips, facing away from that eyeless but disturbingly perceptive face, wrapping one hand around the base of Yomi's shaft, bracing the other against a protruding hipbone as he lifted himself, crouched forward, took the tip in…

—And promptly lost it.

He let out an irritated sound, searched, found it, tried again. Barely wedged the head in, sank perhaps an inch—tensed, forced himself to relax (what a contradiction!—and yet it felt like that had become his own regular state of personal being), eased up with the intent of easing back down.

Lost, again.

"Fuck!" Kurama found some of his earlier assertiveness, aggression, and indicated this not only in the new harshness of language but also in another furtive search and seizure, another attempt, that ended in another cry, first of pain, then frustration as the process was again cut short. Behind him Yomi exhaled low moans when he handled the shaft, fingered the head; and when it resisted, again and again, rumblings, first the echoes of those which vibrated earlier, and then superseding their predecessors, expressions of impatience, warnings to Kurama to hurry up and recover both their selves, lest his difficulties rouse Yomi out of repose, which only aggravated that already aggravated Kurama's persisting frustrations.

"Ah!" cried Kurama, not in surprise or pain as previously, but in indignation as Yomi, finally too impatient, sprang up and backward simultaneously, robbing Kurama of his seat as well as equilibrium. He gasped as again he found himself bored down upon from behind, down into the covers and the mattress, and floundered on his elbows in an effort to keep his face from being planted into that smothering mess again. Up went his hips—down went his face—except this time he was almost immediately wrenched back up out of the sheets again, a hand fisted in his hair at the nape of his neck saving him from the suppression of air. Or trying to keep him still, as Yomi positioned and attempted entry again.

Failed, compromised: Kurama's head was pushed back down, though with Yomi's grip focused where it was, Kurama's face was tilted to one side and thus free; his legs were pushed open and the most intimate space shared between them, his ass, and his own genitals was immediately filled by Yomi's, shoved in and then rubbed violently back and forth, sending Kurama up and down a certain span of mattress while Yomi thrusted into this makeshiftspace, thrusted into the space and into Kurama's balls, coming out beneath them, holding up, rubbing against his penis, thus causing his movements to vary with subtle undulations of his hips, thus varying his grunts at being pushed and shoved with little moans at being stimulated such: "Ah, ah, ah, ah…."

"Ah, ah—ah—AH—OHH…!"

Wet stuff dripping onto the front, down the interior of his thighs, some of it his, as well as coating the bottom of his genitals and sticking in the space between his buttocks, Yomi's work. He panted, then collapsed face-first into the bed.

Yomi strategically fell and stretched out to one side of him. When a hand brushed along his ribs he shuddered, drew up both arms toward his face so that Yomi could not read the expression on his face—an absurd precaution, and he knew it—and so that Yomi could not so easily decipher the noises he made, muffled as they were by a complicated pretzel of human flesh and bone.

Human flesh and bone, that would not, could not conform to a demon's desires.

Sudden lightness to the side of him; on the other side, a hand placed, not brushed, on his shoulder:

"Do you know how they pasteurize milk?"

Kurama took a breath, lifted his face, blotched and tearstained, out of his armed fortress, and stared quizzically at Yomi. "They pasteurize it to prevent sickness—"

"Some humans pasteurize it to kill germs," Yomi interrupted. "I know that; but that is why, not how. Do you know how they do it?" Kurama blinked, still too put off by the impromptu question to answer. "They homogenize it. They boil it, and all the components come together. How is your temperature?"

Beginning to absorb Yomi's meaning, Kurama slowly sat up, and then more slowly eased off the side of the bed and stood. His balance wasn't solid, but his knees at least were steady.

"I can walk," he told Yomi. "I can walk back to my room. Give me my clothes."

Yomi let out something related to a snort. "Your clothes were soaked. Wear this." In the dark he walked to a chest, opened it, pulled out and handed Kurama a light robe. The coat Kurama had been wearing, Yomi's coat, lay contorted on the bed, wet with both their sweat and come. "I will stand in the hall while you walk back to your bed. I will hear if you stumble, and if you fall I will incapacitate you until this bout passes. You will go to bed and sleep this off, and starting tomorrow you will begin to eat and drink in accordance with the demands placed by that body of yours."

Kurama took the robe without protest. The plan: "I won't be fattened up by steroids in my food," he told Yomi, reciprocating the demon king's firmness. "I won't be driven bipolar by any hormones, either."

The sound Yomi made this time was without argument a pure snort. Too late, it meant, and promptly interpreting it Kurama glowered at him. Aloud the Goat said: "I won't add anything, if you don't deprive anything."

"Agreed," Kurama replied tersely, and putting on the robe began to walk, refusing to look back at Yomi, who true to his word followed Kurama into the hall and stood there while the virulent hybrid walked the length to his bedroom. Not once did he stumble.

Once arrived he opened his window—enough of cold rooms making him feel all the more fevered!—and threw himself onto the bed, and lying there stared discontented into space for several moments.

And then he parted his robe, slid his hand downward.

Gandhara was humid, and Kurama was still hot.

End "Virulence"

A/N: Wherefore shall the virus spread? I'm not entirely sure yet, because I need to relocate what little notes I took for chapter three. It shall be the most speculative of the project, since I positioned it where I have littlewhere else to go time-wise but post-series. I hope this experiment continues to be enjoyable, next time's when the philosophy shall grow more prevalent!