#hostageshipping

   The Westermarck Effect, as Reiji understood it, was a theory to explain the incest taboo across various cultures. It was the idea that non-blood related peers treated familially since childhood were later sexually unattractive to an individual because they were too close. Too connected. They became biologically undesirable through this comfort and commonality. This was something else. This was instantaneous attraction to a previously unknown individual with a high probability of being a familial relation and finding that more the allure than anything else about them. A true in red blood relation, if at least in half measures through an already tempestuous patrilineal heritage.

   Yes, what Reiji was experiencing, was most certainly not the Westermarck Effect but rather its perverse inverse, if he had to analyse his feelings. His attractions. His arousal. He had never met this Kurosaki Shun before tonight, after dusk fell, they scarcely knew each other, but Reiji already felt an uncharacteristic amour for the XYZ decadent and he thinks it's because of his face. Reiji felt as though he had seen it before. Perhaps in a mirror and in the reflection of his own. Just in the edges, the peripheries, in the sharpness of his eyes and his hair. It was all uncannily similar to his own, if he had a little bit of paranoid artistic licence. 

   But maybe he was just overcomplicating things as he was prone to do, brought upon by stress of what he knew and what Shun most certainly did not know.

   Reiji couldn’t be certain yet if this unusual flush of arousal was because of some thrill of crossing bloodlines or simply because he felt untethered in Shun’s company since they had aligned goals. They both frothed at the mouth to enact their plans and violence, to uncover the truths and how they had been wronged. More importantly, they both loathed his father, Akaba Leo and what could be more sibling-like than that? 

   Besides, Reiji already had one half sibling, what was another?

   What was another across yet another dimension, another timeline? A dimensional counterpart, as it were.

   It was all, unfortunately, within the realm of possibility. Mentally, Reiji pondered the images of pudgy faced, eight-year old orphans from the Fusion Dimension: Serena and Yuri. Serena whose face was that of what Reiji had found in photo albums that had survived the rift of whatever had happened to cause his father to abscond to the Fusion Dimension so he could bring about his glorious ideals that did not involve his present son and his new hot bitch of a wife. Photos of an elder sister previously unknown; photos of a younger sister apparently belonging to Shun and then, of course, the girl from You Show, she was involved too, with those eyes, those cheekbones. They all shared a striking, impossible likeness. 

   Thus, Reiji could not yet so readily dismiss the possibility that he and Shun were linked more than just seeking his father’s head and of course the preferred fashion choice of wearing something red around the neck, a scarf, a bandanna, and if he got lucky, maybe a hickey, too.

   It was best to explore all possibilities, Reiji decided. There were too many unknowns, too many variables. He was just one boy in the helm of a grown man’s position, as a company CEO and as patriarch in his own mangled family. His Father left too much concealed and unknown but Reiji was forever practical at heart. Pragmatic, too. So, he had to know with all unfettered certainty whether he was seeing patterns where there were none or if the family tree would extend again with another branch, another sibling.

   Shun, meanwhile, didn’t need to know why. He didn’t even have to know that it had happened at all. That Reiji requires something so personal of his body such as his DNA. So Reiji didn’t even bother to give him a pretence as to why they needed records of his blood and his saliva, too, for good measure. He would have protested either way, if he knew the actuality or if he was told a lie. It was all too much a bother as he was too full of rawness and fight for Reiji. So it was to be done in secrecy and violation. 

   But for some reason, it gave Reiji a very sick thrill to imagine being forthright with Shun. When he was wide awake and frayed at the edge, a stressed bird in a new, unknown concrete jungle. To tell him exactly why Reiji required his DNA, he wanted to know if it matched his own and Reiji felt more than a throb in his heart when he imagined Shun lashing out. To have Shun claw at Reiji and his face, drawing blood with a feral gleam in his eyes, that sent a shiver down Reiji’s spine but it was not meant to be.

   He was violated in the end. Lied too, pacified. His samples taken in the night, spirited away when he was quietened down with the first good bed that he had slept in for months. Reiji took it silently and with relish. The needle gleaming in the moonlight that came in through the blinds. Shun laid on his bed, curled up in a foetal position, he was so vulnerable and Reiji gently rolled up his sleeves.

   Shun seemed so armoured in just a flimsy jacket. Plated and hard, like he was made of iron like the Raidraptor monsters that he called upon during a duel, during a battle. But just like real birds and their fragile, hollow bones, in actuality, he could be quite so brittle and Reiji pierced the skin all too easily. With a delicate, medical motion, he drew back the plunger on the syringe as he took a sample of blood from him. 

   Reiji’s mouth watered. There was a temptation to take more. To be of the utmost carefulness but he only had the one syringe on him. He supposed he could force open Shun’s mouth and take a sample of saliva but Reiji knew that would cross a line because if Shun’s mouth was open. Well, it would simply be begging for Reiji’s tongue to go inside it, swabbing down his teeth and gums but the sample would dilute and Reiji would get exactly what he wanted unscientifically. So he resisted. Refrained. And he held up his syringe that was now heavied with Shun’s blood to the shaft of moonlight that came in through the window guarded by heavy blinds.

   He admired how the blood looked so deep and maroon in the low light. Oh, it looked so beautiful and it was all his now inside that glass vial. He couldn’t wait to have it sent out to the labs and be made top priority. And so, he vanished himself from Shun’s room that he had been so graciously given by Reiji and Shun would never know. He likely wouldn’t even feel the prick in his shoulder by morning, he was too tender with other, older wounds to notice something so small as a needle, surely.

   Once the sample was delivered to the laboratories, Reiji waited in a fever pitch that would scare Reira for those results. His expression admittedly fearsome as he let his mind run calculation and simulation after calculation and simulation. The romantic would realise this was all just pining, of course, as Reiji merely imagined all the possible, delectable scenarios of what could be revealed by that sample of blood. His bias towards this instaneous attraction to possible incest playing a larger role than he ought to let it in the various possibilities that he explored in his mind.

   Unfortunately, for Reiji, what was revealed was not quite so theatrical. Shun was AB and Reiji was the universal donor of O. They couldn’t be more unalike on such a chemical level. They barely had any commonality at all in how their genetic data was strung across the highs and lows of the lines of how the machine had extrapolated their DNA.

   Though, just because he and Shun shared no blood, Reiji did wonder if it would be a different story if he had some of Ruri’s DNA but he knew not to explore that either. He had what he wanted. His curiosity was placated, even if the reality was so much duller than how he had fantasised under the duress of this strange attraction. 

   Attraction which yes, did diminish with the phantasms revealed to be so unexcited but it was still there. If slightly. Logically, Reiji should be relieved but instead, he just felt tired. Trite. He sighed, he hummed, he reframed his thinking and his amour. He had to move on but he would not yet dismiss it as an entire waste of time.

    It would be good to know Shun’s blood type, at the very least, as Shun appeared prone to getting himself in trouble. He was all recklessness and leaping before looking, letting his blood boil at the slightest provocation and acting out as soon as the impulse sparked. No doubt he would need field medicine and Reiji hoped to God that he would be the one who would be Shun’s bloodsack, all smeared with cleaning alcohol on his skin and stuck with needles, shared and then they would truly be made kin. Warm, red blood shared between them in this atrocious war of card games and genetics spliced across various worlds ruled by the method of summoning fictitious monsters.