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“Feel good?” Yasuo murmurs, kneading his hands into the soft flesh on Ahri’s back. Her body pulsates warmth through her skin and she is nice to admire, nice to touch. He longs to let his hands wander as they might please—but he would not allow himself to taint her is such a way.
“Yes,” she breathes softly, leaning into the touch. She reaches up to rest one clawed hand atop his own as he works away. “Thank you.”
He doesn’t respond—just keeps massaging her slowly, easing the tension out of her muscles one by one. She lets out a little contented sigh, and something curls in his stomach. Sometimes he wishes it had been his destiny to serve her, to pleasure her. He keeps at it.
Once, when he was but ten summers old, Yasuo had found a wounded bird hidden beneath the steps to the temple’s back entrance as he played. Beak agape and breath shallow, it was barely alive; he’d taken it back home, tried to heal it, only for his fumbling fingers to snap the delicate bones of its right wing clean in two. Yone had scoffed at the sight upon returning from his duties, and broken its neck in a rare show of mercy.
“Yasuo,” he’d said, cleaning his hands in the river after burying the animal by the forest, “you haven’t a gentle bone in your body.”
(Nine years pass, and Yasuo tears twin gashes across Yone’s pristine face just before running a blade through his chest. Later, as he scrapes blood out from beneath his fingernails, he figures he had probably been right.)
Ahri squeezes his hand just so, her own quiet way of saying that’s enough. She reaches for her belongings and pulls her comb out; handing it to him with a look over her shoulder, she asks, “Mind getting my hair, too?”
He nods in lieu of responding and takes it from her, shifting on his knees so as to get comfortable. He takes a section of her hair, tangled from days of travel with little rest, and, after a momentary inspection, decides to remove the knots with his hands instead. They are both quiet as he works, smoothing out the knots fully with the comb after slowly undoing them with his fingers. A bit of oil would make his job easier, but they’ve none—so he works slowly, taking care not to pull at the thick strands as he goes along. Ahri is so still beneath him that, for a moment, he believes she’s fallen asleep; the thought is quickly vanquished, however, when she quietly shuffles, adjusting herself.
Yone had never let Yasuo touch his hair. Sleek, shiny, dark as ink, healthy and strong. He’d made it a point to maintain it well; his beard, too, had been cropped close and even, and always clean. For him, external appearance had always served as a window to the interior—a fact that even Yasuo had been able to discern since an early age. Perhaps that was why, as time went on, Yasuo had stopped taking care of himself as much as he should have.
He is so lost in thought he almost doesn’t notice when Ahri speaks.
“You’re so tender,” she says, and sounds so relaxed that he can tell her eyes are closed, even with her turned away.
He feels his face color, and his hands slip despite himself. He coughs, embarrassed, as he gets back to work. Mumbles, “I’m really not.”
He can almost sense her smile. “I’m sure that’s what you’d like to think.”
He says nothing in reply. Just works out another tangle.
(He hadn’t known how to hold Yone as he’d died; the embrace had been clumsy, awkward, stiff. Yone’s breath had come out in ragged pants as blood leaked past his lips; when he’d coughed, choking, red had sprayed all over the skin on Yasuo’s chest. His work had been sloppy, this time, cuts lacking the lethal precision they had been trained to have; still, even then, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to deal the final blow.
Soft was the only thing Yone called him that nobody else ever had. There was a reason for that. His eyes didn’t glaze over for a long, long while.)
Only for you, he doesn’t say, and passes a hand through her hair once more, stroking it gently. Sections it to braid.