Uruha awoke to the sensation of a light brushing of tongues against his cheek. His eyes slowly opened to see the face of Kai. My Kai, he thought, before slowly reaching out to touch his hair. His fingers brushed through silky smooth hair before eventually hitting on one of Kai’s hair snakes.
“Love, you know I do love to be woken up by one of your kisses, but I think that there was an unspoken provision that those kisses had to come from your mouth.”
Kai’s eyes slowly opened, revealing slit pupils and lovely golden irises.
“Uru, I remember no such provision.”
Uruha begun to shift from where he was trapped in Kai’s coils.
“Kai, I think that I need to be released from your trap, much as I hate to say this.”
Kai yawned. “Can’t we just stay here for a little while?”
“Well, as much as I’d love to do that, we do have a very important event taking place today.”
Kai lurched upright abruptly. “God, Uru, I almost forgot, the wedding’s today right, and..”
Uruha glanced up at the ceiling, and worked at extricating himself from Kai’s coils. “Yes. the ritual.”
Kai begun to move off the bed, working to shift aside the veritable menagerie of blankets that had been piled there during the cold night. “Are you going to be okay with this?”
“Yes.” Uruha was sitting on the edge of the bed, seemingly in a trance.
“Are you sure you don’t want me coming along?”
“Rules are rules.”
“You do realize I’ll love you no matter what speci-”
Uruha turned around to look at Kai. “I know, love. I just want this marriage of ours to be respected by the Council. I don’t want to age and wither while you stay young, and I don’t really want all your parent’s hard work setting this up to go to waste. ”
Kai slithered over to Uruha’s side, brushing some hair out of his face. “I know that. I just don’t want to feel like you’re being forced into this.”
Uruha sighed, and caught Kai’s hand as it tried to make another pass through his hair. “Come on. We have a lot to prepare for, you know.”
Kai rolled his eyes and moved away, his large tail bumping the side of the bed as he moved towards the bathroom.
As Uruha sat in the small dark room, with lamia attendants rubbing some sort of liquid into every crevice of his body, fairy powder mixed with something foul-smelling, allegedly to make sure the nagah mana stuck to his body and mixed properly with his human mana, though he supposed they might just be stalling to get the last bits set up properly, he recalled the day he first met Kai.
It had been a bitterly cold night. Rainy too, the kind of rain that hurts when it hits and feels like it’s freezing to your skin. He had been walking alongside a lonely country road, praying to every god he knew for a car to drive by that would take hitchhikers. Something, anything. Finally, he was almost ready to give up, for his clothes were soaked to the skin and his shoes were starting to fall apart and get his socks wet. He thought he might just lie down on the side of the road and just take a nap. Just freeze into a block of ice , only to be seen by the few travelers who for some fucking reason decided to drive through a windy road in the middle of fucking nowhere. Uruha had just finished entertaining this thought before he tripped over a tree root and sent both limbs and his backpack flying. After pausing for a moment to let out a string of curses at the scraped up state of his hands and the now very visible tear in his jeans, he bent over to pick up his backpack. When he looked up, he saw that he was seemingly in the middle of a forest that stretched in all directions, with no lonely winding road or fucking cold rain in sight. Fuck. He decided that he must have been marching solidly in one direction, too solidly to tell when he was no longer following the road and had instead wandered off.
“You okay?”
Uruha nearly jumped out of his skin. His eyes darted wildly in an attempt to find where the voice came from, but he only saw forest.
“Where are you?” His voice shook.
“Look up.” Uruha glanced towards the sky and almost fell over.
On the branch above him, some sort of human-snake hybrid was lounging,. His long red-brown tail was coiled around the thick branch, and Uruha could have sworn that there were snakes moving in his hair.
“See me now?” He grinned, and Uruha could almost think that it was cute if it wasn’t for the pair of long, sharp looking fangs pointing out.
“Don’t eat me!” Uruha was only able to blurt out this statement before he fell over on his back. The snake monster was uncoiling from the branch and was starting to make its way down the tree. Uruha begun to silently pray, pray that this was all a horrible dream and that he would wake up nice and cozy in his bed, with nary a snake monster or weird forest or parents that would scream and throw picture frames in sight.
“Hey, I’m not going to eat you.”
“Wait, what?” Uruha looked up at the snake monster with distrust from his position on the forest floor.
The snake monster tilted his head. “No, really. I’m not going to eat you. I just want to help you find your way out.”
Uruha rolled his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Humans can’t usually find their way into here. You aren’t supposed to be here. I have to lead you out.”
“I was just going to leave here, so I would appreciate the help if you could lead me out.”
The snake monster extended his hand to Uruha.
“By the way, what’s your name?” Uruha pulled himself up, not taking the snake monster’s hand.
The snake monster looked weirdly disappointed. “Kai. And you are?”
“Uruha.”
Uruha and Kai had been walking, or rather one of them had been walking and the other had been slithering, rustling everything as he went.
“So, where do you live?”
Uruha stopped suddenly after that question. “Um, well, actually I don’t have anywhere to go in particular.”
Kai stopped and turned around, fixing Uruha in his gaze. “What do you mean you don’t have anywhere to go?”
“I just- my parents kicked me out. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Kai looked at Uruha with some expression that he couldn’t read. “Your parents threw you out? Why?”
Uruha glanced aside, his heart starting to pound in his chest. “I’m gay. They caught me fooling around with some dude, god I can’t even remember his name, told me I had to get out or they’d-” He cut off. Why was he telling this to a complete stranger?
Kai’s face flashed with a number of incomprehensible emotions. His hair snakes begun to dart around wildly. “Stay with me, then.”
“What?”
Kai smiled again, his fangs flashing in the recently arrived sunlight. “I said, you can stay with me.”
“I thought that humans weren’t allowed to live wherever this place is?”
“You can live in my closet. My parents won’t suspect a thing. I’ll find you chips or sushi or whatever it is that humans eat.”
Uruha considered his options. He could either continue to walk alongside the road until he reached some major city and then.. to be honest he hadn’t really figured that part out yet. Or, he supposed, he could go along with Kai to live in the woods somewhere with his snake family and hopefully not get eaten.
“What the hell. I’m in.”
Uruha had just awakened from his reminiscencing when one of the lamia poked her head out the door.
“Sir, could you come in please, the ritual is about to begin.”