Warnings: AU, Yaoi/Slash, slice-of-life, cousin-cest, drama, angst-lite

Pairing: Shiro/Ichi

Chapter Rating: M

Disclaimer: Owned by Kubo Tite, et al.

Summary: There is something seriously fucked up with the Kurosaki family's Y-chromosome. That's the only explanation for why the two of them do this.

A/N: Be forewarned—this is a peculiar child of a peculiar brain. Whether the reader may find anything worthy of approbation, the author cannot say—except that zie hopes the reader will show enough human respect and dignity to refrain from sacrificing zir upon the alter of the reader's indignation. Thank you most kindly for your time and for, if you may be so inclined, a memento of your visit in the form of a review. The author is, as always, the humble and pitiable servant of your entertainment.

::Simplicity Itself::

~Track One~

A sticky, warm rill of blood bubbles from his left nostril. The split in his lower lip and the bruises purpling his face throb in time with his slowly quieting heart. It still feels like he got his lungs punched out. Absently he licks at the torn, reddened skin stretched tight over his knuckles and watches as his cousin rolls over onto his side and spits out a few strings of watery red onto the scarred, yellow linoleum floor.

"Fuck, you don't hold back, do ya?" his cousin cackles, fisting away the moisture clinging to his mouth.

"I could say the same," Ichigo says, and winces as the words pull at the cut in his lip. Droplets of sweat drip down the saturated spikes of his orange hair and soak into his fight-stained gray t-shirt. The stink of their violent exertions fills his nose and drowns the odor of his own seeping blood. Slowly, laboriously, his lungs learn how to function properly again. He hasn't been worked over this good since his middle school days; by the time he'd graduated from high school, most guys went down with a single uppercut to the chin.

If Shiro gets up, Ichigo doesn't think he has it in him to put him back on the ground. Damn, but the bleach-head's got some serious stamina in him.

Enervated muscles tense as the white-haired man levers himself up on his elbows and directs a toothy, blood-stained grin at him. His cousin's amber eyes spark with mad humor; a loose, liquid laugh pours out of his stretched, pale throat.

"I missed your fists, aibou. God, no one can hit like you. No one can take it like you."

Sweat cooling on his flushed skin, Ichigo shivers as his cousin's gleeful tone washes over him. He closes his brown eyes and lets his head loll back against the wall—the wall that is the only thing keeping him sitting somewhat upright at the moment.

Cloth rustles and sticky palms squeak upon the kitchen floor. Ichigo cracks an eye open to see Shiro dragging himself closer. Shit. The guy doesn't know when to quit—neither does Ichigo, come to think of it. Both of them are bastards who hate to lose. There is something seriously fucked up with the Kurosaki family's Y-chromosome, he thinks.

A hard hand closes over his ankle, calluses scraping over the delicate skin covering the bony knob, a thumb pressing deeply into his Achilles tendon. Shiro uses Ichigo's unresisting leg like a living rope to haul himself up the orange-haired man's body. Ichigo considers giving him a good cuff across the face, but can't find the energy reserves to do anything but glare tiredly. The other man's raspy breaths fill the silence of the abused kitchen as he takes a moment to rest, hot, sweaty cheek pressed against the jumping muscles of Ichigo's jean-clad thigh.

"You're a persistent bastard, you know that?" Ichigo says around a sudden yawn. Sharp teeth anchor into the thick denim and pull a sharp hiss from him as they dig into the flesh below. Shiro releases his mouthful, mutters something less than complementary and grabs hold of Ichigo's shirt to drag himself further up.

Heated pants sift through the damp hair tickling Ichigo's neck as his cousin's pointy chin digs into the fleshy curve between shoulder and neck. Ichigo wrinkles his nose and turns his face away from the exertion-stink rising from head of white hair butting against him: sweat, violence, and Shiro.

He shifts minutely and finds the strength to pinch his cousin's side. There's nothing pleasant about having a hot, sweaty body plastered against you when you're also hot, sweaty and aching from several dozen snake-fast punches.

"You reek," the white-haired man slurs, pushing his nose into the sensitive swathe of skin behind Ichigo's slowly reddening ear. A lightening swift sweep of a tongue has Ichigo twisting the bit of skin trapped between his thumb and forefinger. Shiro grunts lowly. "Salty, too."

"Like you're any better."

"Mm-hm."

"Get off."

"Can't move."

"Tch."

A shudder plays through his slack body as his cousin's warm, sticky hands slide up the back of his shirt and begin lightly rubbing at his slick skin. He swallows down the taste of salt-iron on his tongue in a sudden rush of saliva. With their pelvises this snug together, Ichigo can quite clearly feel why his cousin is so disinterested in moving. The small, liquid pulse that drives into his nuts makes him sick.

Yeah, Kurosaki men are fucked in the head.

~Track Two~

"Ice."

"Do it to me gently, aibou."

"Ice," Ichigo repeats and jams the sandwich bag full of crushed ice against his cousin's black eye. The white-haired man spits out a curse and then giggles as he grabs hold of the bag before it can drop.

"You make a shitty nurse," Shiro says, leaning back against the tatty green couch shoved into the space the serves as both the living room and dining room of Ichigo's small apartment.

Ichigo grunts a response and flops down next to him. Cold condensation drips down his fingers as he holds his own bag of ice against his face. He should start investing in icepacks again, it looks like. With how unpredictable his cousin's taste in violence tends to be…

He's gonna be sore for weeks. Just like old times.

Because only his cousin would substitute a punch to the face for a normal greeting.

"Ten years."

"Mm-hm, ten long years," his cousin agrees and scoots over to drop his head onto Ichigo's bony shoulder. The orange-haired man lets his own tilt to the side and lightly knocks their skulls together.

"You're still an asshole."

Nuzzling into Ichigo's neck, Shiro issues a liquid chuckle. "And you're the one who agreed to let this asshole be your roomie."

"I owe uncle Zan."

Eyes closed, Ichigo doesn't flinch when strong teeth gently close upon the side of his neck; Shiro has always liked to put his mouth on things and put things in his mouth—very orally fixated.

A yawn pulls out of the back of his throat and drags tears into his dark lashes. Damn, but he's beat—literally, too. Everything aches and throbs, and just generally hurts like a bitch. He could just sleep here with Shiro's familiar heat and weight settled against his side, with those familiar teeth pressing deeper into his skin, with the smell of sweat and blood in his nose.

Just like when they were kids and fighting in the backyard until they both collapsed from mutual exhaustion; and it didn't matter if it was sunny or snowing or raining. Idiots and Kurosaki men don't catch colds, apparently. At least, they don't catch colds when they're being idiots.

"Ya know, I had to be so fucking good for ten years. God, it would have rotted your teeth out, I was so sweet—otherwise, the crusty old bastard wouldn't have given up my birth certificate. Fucking safe deposit boxes," his cousin says with a frustrated growl, teeth still set into Ichigo's neck. "High school, university, had to do all that shit like a good li'l boy before I could come back to Japan."

A hot, wet tongue slithers out and laves at the pain-throb indents blooming upon Ichigo's neck.

"Wanna know a secret, aibou? My old man didn't move us overseas just because of his job. Our dads were afraid I'd do something really, really dirty to you. Watcha think about that?"

Ichigo remains silent even as his heart rate ramps up. Unease releases cold, clammy eggs into the pit of his stomach. He swallows down the taste of old iron and turns his nose into his cousin's violence-pungent hair. Cold water drips down the side of his injured face from the bag. Maybe he can pretend to be asleep already?

Pale, black-nailed fingers slide over the coarse material of his jeans to tease along the seam running up the inside of his thigh.

"Ne, aibou, can I? Can I do something dirty? I really have been a good boy."

~Track Three~

Rain beats restless fingers against the bedroom window. With honeyed lassitude, Ichigo pulls himself through the clinging veils of somnolence into the waking world. Muscles ache and burn; bruises throb dully.

Ah, so last night wasn't a nostalgically masochistic dream…

The heated weight pinning down his pelvis and sternum is quite, quite real.

The raw skin across his knuckles splits anew as he fists the futon bedding cushioning his back.

Blinking through the sleep gumming his lashes together, the orange-haired man stares up at the look of deranged concentration pinching his cousin's sharp features. Amber eyes blaze through a screen of frost-pale lashes and catch his gaze. A slow, creeping smile cuts open Shiro's face.

His cousin has found a happy home fitted tightly between Ichigo's thighs—so tightly pressed together are they that Ichigo can quite clearly feel the length and width of his cousin's penis alongside his own and the rounds of his testicles through the barrier of cotton boxers. Neither one of them is hard—yet.

"You adjusted me, didn't you?" Ichigo says, a sour film of morning breath upon his tongue. Ichigo likes to tuck himself down to the right when wearing boxers; this morning his dick is across his stomach and kept in place by Shiro's firm, whipcord body. Somebody else has had a hand on it since he went to sleep.

A singular, twisting sensation settles low in his belly at the thought of his white-haired cousin preying upon him while he slept without dreams—all the things he could have done when Ichigo succumbed to exhaustion, but didn't. Another twist, a tight, liquid coil of something, and the muscles in Ichigo's thighs and ass clench violently.

And Shiro knows.

The white-haired man's grin deepens, revealing a hint of polished enamel and a flick of a blue-raspberry flavored tongue. Shiro leans down until their noses almost touch and then deliberately, slowly tilts his head. Ichigo's heart kicks his ribs and his lungs seize. His fingers and toes flex stiffly.

Shiro smells strongly of Ichigo's spearmint toothpaste and lemongrass soap, but under that, and all the more beguiling for its subtle presence, is the sharp odor of pine sap and the musk of some secretive, nocturnal animal. So familiar, so known.

And so close.

Close enough that if Ichigo licks his lips, he'll be able to taste the damp trace of a tongue upon his cousin's mouth. Close enough to share one humid breath. Close enough to do something they've never actually done before.

"We're not kids anymore," the brown-eyed man says, fully aware of the freighted implication sliding damp palms across the words, barely moving his mouth lest that second to final transgression be made. He squeezes his eyes closed against the tingling rush of old memories.

No, they're not kids. They're not in the middle of wrestling in the backyard; wrestling because they're too evenly matched with fists; wrestling because Ichigo has managed to put Shiro on the ground but couldn't jump back in time to avoid being dragged down with his cousin; wrestling until the friction starts to make them feel strange, shivery and weirdly anticipatory—until they're not wrestling but moving together in a way that has Ichigo panicking because there's something seriously wrong with his penis, because it feels like something's gonna come out of it and the only thing that's ever come out of it before is yellow piss.

Still kids, later, when Shiro finally manages to find a way to pin Ichigo down until all those slick, shuddery sensations twine together tighter and tighter and tighter and then snap—and Ichigo finds his shorts sticky and wet and smelling of something wholly unlike urine: earthy, pungent and animal.

Kids when they start using hands, when Shiro uses his mouth, his tongue, when his mouth and tongue start wandering to places that are dirty and wrong and stop don't stop.

Kids. Kids. Kids.

Then Ichigo is alone, Shiro gone overseas.

And even to this day, he comes hardest when he masturbates with a piece of blue-raspberry candy, Shiro's favorite, in his mouth—even though the two of them have never kissed.

"You're losing focus, aibou," Shiro says with a quicksilver chuckle, drawing his warm lips over the soft plane of Ichigo's cheek. Then he shifts—just a minute flex of his hips, but it sets the blood in Ichigo's veins on fire.

It's horrifying and dizzyingly delicious to feel the silky foreskin pulling back as his cock—as Shiro's cock—hardens between their bellies, to feel cloudy beads of precome slicking the head and dampening his boxers. He sucks in a short gasp of a breath and can't help the small movements of his pelvis as his cousin presses down with deliberate intent.

Teeth catch in the lobe of his left ear and hot breath washes over it. Liquid heat gathers and coils in the pit of his stomach and then floods his balls. He can't help but surge up, fingers leaving the bedding to score angry welts down along the shower-damp furrow of his cousin's spine. Then he drags them lower, beneath the elastic waist of boxers, to dig into the meat of Shiro's tight ass.

A pleased grunt leaves his cousin's mouth. The teeth release their prize and wet tongue dips into the whorls of Ichigo's ear.

"You're so much better when you follow your instincts."

"Shut up."

Torn between the impulse to close his legs and trap his cousin there and the need to spread them wider, to open up for more wicked friction, Ichigo rocks up and nearly comes undone from the decadent sensation that rushes through him with the motion. God. Can't stop, though. It's too much. Not enough. Everything and nothing.

Not kids anymore.

And what if—

What if it's just skin against slippery skin as they grind and thrust and grunt? What if a thrust, a twist of narrow hips, slides Shiro down? Slides him in?

Oh god.

Goddamn.

Inside.

Inside.

Liquid butterflies flood his abdomen; Ichigo hauls his cousin's hips into a brutal rhythm, friction burning his sloppy, soaking dick. Shiro's harsh exhalations scald his ear, his own desperately, sharply push past his lips. Their sweat, their mutual stink, fills his nose. Hot, slick, moving. Together. Together after ten years.

So close. Shit. So close.

Not.

Kids.

Anymore.

Ice water floods his veins as an unfamiliar ringtone cracks open the moment to spill it, messy and rank, into reality. Ichigo's eyes pop open. They both freeze, chests heaving with short breaths, dicks sticky with precome and so, so hard.

Guilt and disgust hit him like a lead slug to the stomach. He jerks his hands out of his cousin's boxers.

"Fuck," Shiro curses with a twisted half-smile and fumbles for the interruption off to the side of the mussed futon. Panting, dazed and twitching, Ichigo struggles to find his equilibrium. Every small, involuntary movement of his wanting, flushed body sends delicate, electric thrills into his belly and balls.

His cousin flips open a slim white cell phone and grins like a wolf going for the jugular as he reads the number off the glowing display.

"My ex-fiancée," he announces with a manic chortle.

Wha—

What?

Chapter End

A/N: this tiny slice-o'-life miniseries is for nmhotel21's fic request over on this author's LiveJournal. Zie threw out a free-for-all fic request opportunity towards the beginning of the new year and has been slowly, very slowly, working zir way through them. Did zie mention slowly? /sweatdrop/

Each track was, originally, posted as a separate chapter over on zir LJ, but zie does not like uploading anything less than 1000 words on ff . net . Thus, this fic will be updated here when zie writes enough tracks whose total combined word count equals or exceeds one-thousand.

Thank you to all of you who have made it this far, and especially to any of you who decide to take a moment to leave a review. Reviews are the inspiration that lights this author's imagination.

And if you didn't have the image in your head of Shiro and Ichigo humping each other in the backyard as kids… well, there you go. You're welcome. /grin/