The Night Calls

Title: The Night Calls
Author: fangirl_lizzie
Rating: Hmmmm, hard R/soft NC-17?
Fandom: The Last Samurai
Pairing: Nathan Algren/Nobutada
Disclaimer: Not mine, don’t sue. All you’ll get is a collection of my trashy fanfic and a well-thumbed copy of LotR anyway.
Notes: This will make absolutely no sense unless you’ve seen the film; in case you’ve seen the film and forgotten, Nobutada is Katsumoto (the Samurai)’s son. Written whilst on Percocet (make of that what you will) and unbeta’d, so I gladly claim all mistakes as my own.
Summary: Plotless Algren/Nobutada, at night, in Nobutada’s village.

***

The night comes, the night calls, and Nathan lies awake. He doesn’t close his eyes; there are things he sees behind closed eyes, doors to which he dare not put a name, and he cannot close his eyes. He resents this cowardice and all that it entails, heart and mind overflowing with a bitterness that he once called duty. He can’t close his eyes.

A million miles and a lifetime ago, when the night called, he’d crawl inside the nearest convenient bottle. That’s no longer an option, so he tells himself he’ll stay awake. It doesn’t help that he’s lying under different stars tonight, with newer scars, and there’s a smell in the air that reminds him that he’s far from home. He’s heartsick and homesick for places that were never really home.

The dark crowds him, claws at him until he suffocates, his back against the wall, panic rising in him hotly like the burn of ice. He thinks he might be sick. He hopes he might pass out. He doesn’t. And even though he’s still awake, even though he’s left it all behind, his memories come. His mind screams with it.

He wants to say he didn’t mean it, but he did – every last moment that’s etched, blue-inked on his brain was deliberate if not calculated. He wants to say that he protested, and he did, but what he said never did much matter. His voice was not the loudest, nor his words spoken with the most conviction. He thinks that’s why he blames himself, why he hates himself, because if only he’d said *no*, if only he’d had the strength to walk away… there’d be no old death behind his eyes. If only.

Then, in the midst of his anguish, the door slips open - just a whisper in the darkness as someone slips inside. He stares; he can make out the form, can almost see; he knows that face. Nobutada. The realisation startles him.

They, neither of them, say a word. Nathan gazes up with a frown that creases his brow, forgetting himself and his customary wallowing in that moment as he searches Nobutada’sdfgoe for some small sign of why he’s there. There’s no glint of a knife, no shining sword, no gun in his hand, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t come to kill him. He hopes he has. He wishes for it, longs for it, the death he’s deserved for so many long years. But death does not come.

Instead, Nobutada drops his robe.

There’s a whisper of cloth against skin as it falls away, comes down to a pool at his feet and leaves him bare. Nathan’s breath catches and his frown deepens. Wrong – it’s all wrong. There was supposed to be a knife gleaming in the moonlight, a flash as a hand struck out and buried cold steel deep down in his heart. He was supposed to feel the cool air leech the heat from his blood as it spilled thick and hot over his chest. This is… not what he expected.

Nobutada turns and kneels and closes the door then, shutting them in, closeting them there together in the small room. It’s like he’s put a stopper in the light, too, because all at once the moonlight spilling from the window seems so bright, so wondrous, lustrous midnight-pale, the glow of a hundred silver fireflies in the air. It illuminates the smooth line of Nobutada’s back as he kneels there, his hands still lingering on the door as if caught between decisions, his long hair swept forward over one shoulder. Nathan’s hungry eyes sweep over him, down that line, rigid as the blade of a katana, down to the cleft of his ass. Something in his belly tightens.

He’s slim and lean, all flat, graceful planes and long limbs as if drawn rather than created, penstrokes, brushstrokes, given life. His chest, so like all of his skin, is smooth, and rises with his shallow breath. Then there between his legs and nestled in a bed of short, dark curls is his hard sex. Nathan has to swallow, hard, against the knot that’s forming in his throat from looking; however, this cannot stem his own desire, unexpected, pulsing there between his legs.

Then the boy, the young man, turns; he crawls forward on the matted floor, his hair falling forward to graze over the mats. He moves like a predator with Nathan his prey, like a young mountain tiger whose true strength lies yet hidden, until he’s right by Nathan, right up close, and Nathan’s pressed himself against the wall. His hands reach out, brush at the shorter, lighter hair that touches Nathan’s collar, before they dip further down; soft, cool fingers press lightly along his collarbone, shifting cloth aside, baring his chest in the moonlight. Soon his robe lies open. Nobutada’s eyes are on him, and he almost feels ashamed.

Limbs arranged haphazardly, propped against the wall, robe flung open, eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep or whiskey, Nathan feels himself so very poor and spent when in comparison. He’s bruised and damaged to the core if only they would see it. Nobutada’s fingers trace his jaw, brushing over his unkempt beard. His hands move, play over Nathan’s worn, battle-scarred chest, fingertips caressing the raised pink scars, the pale skin, his pebble-hard nipples. Then he moved again, insinuates himself against him, presses in tightly with his knees astride Nathan’s thighs. There’s a brush of lips against his cheek, his forehead, hands cupping his face like they’re afraid he’ll break. Nobutada’s such a paradox.

He reaches between them, hand skirting over Nathan’s belly to circle the base of his cock. He quivers like a bowstring plucked, pulled taut inside by his master’s art. He’s circumcised but that was never an issue before now, with Nobutada’s fingers playing, exploring his unsheathed sex for a moment before his moves his torturing hand and holds it out.

“Give me your hand, Algren-san,” he says. Nathan finds he cannot but comply, and in a second his wrist’s in Nobutada’s grasp, tight but not quite painful. He lifts Nathan’s hand with both of his and his tongue darts out, flickering over the pad of his index finger before taking it inside his mouth, sucking, nipping, his tongue swirling, and their gazes never part.

He lets the finger go with a wet pop, but doesn’t relinquish his grasp on his wrist; if anything it tightens a fraction, almost tight enough now to bruise, as he takes Nathan’s hand away from his mouth and guides it back past his hip. He folds the rest of Nathan’s fingers down into his palm and he shifts slightly, settling his legs a little further apart. He brings the finger to his entrance, breathes in deeply, then pushes it inside.

He gasps, his eyes drifting closed. Nathan’s surprised; he didn’t expect this, the movement, the fact that Nobutada came to him already greased and ready. Their cocks are caught between them, rubbing, the friction so teasing. The shame he feels at his arousal’s almost mortifying.

He’s too young. Nathan wants to tell him to stop, that he’s old enough to be his father or his father’s enemy, but even if he knew the words he doesn’t think he’d undend. nd. The village – Nobutada’s village – is like another time, another world, where the beautiful boy with the long dark hair is a warrior and a taker of lives. Nathan wonders if they even understand the years as he does. Forty – what does that mean? He feels so old, aged right through his flesh and bones, next to the dark and vital light of Nobutada.

But then something in his gives. He’s too old for self-pity. He’s been staring at himself ghost-pale in the bottom of a whiskey glass for far too long.

He moves his finger, crooks it, presses it in deeper, and Nobutada lets go of his wrist. He leans down heavily against the wall as Nathan teases him, plays with the spot inside him that makes him push back against that finger and whimper meekly for more. Nathan obliges, pressing in a second finger, making Nobutada mewl. He rocks them in and out just slightly, again and again, until he feels a hand back at his wrist, pulling him out.

“More,” he says, and pushes against Nathan’s shoulders, pressing him down from where he’s resting against the wall and further onto the floor. Nathan lets him do this. In that moment, Nathan would let him do anything. He has hair as soft as silk and eyes like ink, a sinuous body; he’s beautiful in his androgyny though Nathan doesn’t think of him as womanly at all, just ambiguous, intriguing. He’s every wisp of beauty in the world brought together in one form.

Nobutada loves with the same strange intensity that he does everything else in life; he presses down against him, against the head of his cock, pressing tightly around him with a low moan and a rake of short nails down his chest. Nathan’s eyes threaten to roll with the heat of it, the heat of *him*, and he grasps roughly at his hips, fingers digging down. It isn’t his first time - he’s known a couple of men, soldiers, back in the States - but this is light-years away from anything he’s known before. Nobutada’s long fingers in his hair, his beautiful, bare body… He’s spiralling out of control before he knows it, arching, bucking, moaning. The sounds that Nobutada makes just spur him on. Muscles tighten around him as Nobutada jerks his own cock roughly. He tingles. He comes, Nobutada following just seconds later.

For one still moment they lie together, skin bright with a moonlit sheen of sweat as they catch their breath. Their gazes meet and Nobutada reaches out to him; Nathan catches his wrist as his fingertips begin to trace the line of an old scar.

“I must be so ugly to you,” Nathan says, only somewhat naively considering the situation. “Hideous.”

Nobutada’s bowed lips curve still further. “Just different,” he says. “Just different.”

And then he moves, a sliver of moon-pale skin and ink black hair as he pulls on and ties shut his robe. Nathan lies still and watches as he smiles, then turns and leaves. It seems the room darkens just a little as the door closes in his wake.

So now he’s alone again, lying there, spent. He pulls his robe around himself, looks up out of the window into the still air and the low moon. He’s tired now. He wants to sleep.

He’ll sleep and dream tonight, those same dreams that flood his mind and leave him with a trembling that it seems will take a lifetime to subside. But tonight he thinks, for the first time in years longer than his memory, that dark though his dreams may be, he’ll wake with hope.

And when the night calls, he’ll answer.

***
End
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