Ex1. Their Blood Ties Do Not Refuse Carnal Desire

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/54/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

Warm tea passed through Liza’s throat, and she let out a languid breath.
An unremarkable day. An unremarkable afternoon.
Lilina had gone out shopping. Liz was playing outside with friends.
In short, Liza had time on her hands.
Even so, an hour spent slowly, alone, had become a rare luxury in a life where Lilina was nearly always at her side.
She had decided, an hour ago, to do something she could only do now.

“Haa … Lilina, I wish you would come home soon.”

A melancholy sigh escaped her.
In the end, loneliness had won. She had done nothing at all.
She lifted her left hand idly before her eyes and looked at the ring on her fourth finger.
A paired ring Lilina had given her some two years before.
Marriage, as an institution, no longer existed in this world. What remained was a bond close to husband and wife, called being “mates joined in soul.”
Liza and her own daughter, Lilina, were those mates now.
The ring on her fourth finger was the proof.
Her husband’s wedding band had once occupied that place. She had thrown it away when she bound herself to Lilina, and she no longer remembered where it had gone.
She had no interest in remembering.

“I should have gone with you. Then I wouldn’t be this lonely. Isn’t that so, Lilina?”

She touched the ring with the fingertips of her right hand, fondly. Color rose in her cheeks. Her eyes grew wet.
She was so thoroughly drowned in Lilina that merely looking at the ring, and calling up her beloved’s face, was enough to send her into a daze.
Though Lilina was her own child—or rather, perhaps because she was her own child, the blood between them only drove the feeling deeper.

“I’m home!”

The voice came from the entrance.
Liza’s heart leapt.
She hurried toward Lilina the way a newly married wife might run to a husband returning from work.
Then she gathered her daughter—arms full of vegetables—into a fierce embrace.

“Welcome home. I’ve been waiting.”
“Mama, that’s a little tight.”
“I couldn’t help it. I never imagined being apart would hurt this much.”

Faced with a mother who clung like a child, Lilina wore a wry smile.
She had never shown this childishness in front of her former husband.
Somewhere under the surface, it seemed, she had always wanted to be spoiled by the person she loved.
That nature had only come into the open before Lilina—who was, at once, both lover and daughter, the two affections multiplied into one being.

“It was only a little while. Mama, you really do love me, don’t you.”
“Of course I do. From the time you were in my womb until now, there has never been a single moment I did not love you. As long as I have you, Lilina, I need nothing else.”

Hearing that much, Lilina did not mind.
Her hand went, of its own accord, to Liza’s head. They held each other tightly while she stroked her mother’s hair.
For a while they remained like that, taking in the reunion as if it were a marvel.

◇◇◇

 

They still lived as a family of three in the house where they had once lived as a family of three.
One person had vanished and one had been added, but they no longer even recalled who had been there before.

There were simply too many things that mattered more.
They had no room left to remember the human who had died. What stood before them, they meant to live to the last.

Liza sat in a chair. Lilina sat facing her, in her lap.
They were mates joined in soul as well as mother and daughter. The bond between them was romantic and sexual in nature; that fact was no secret in the house, and it is enough to state it.
What followed that afternoon is not described here. They remained close. They looked at one another. They spoke as people do who have already crossed every ordinary line of kinship.

Their hearts were joined more deeply than mere blood, and more deeply than ordinary lovers. There was a clean logic to it, and a reasonless hunger as well; they saw no cause to refuse either.
The most precious daughter she had carried and raised still wanted her. That thought alone was enough to undo Liza.
The most precious mother, who had borne her and poured love into her, still wanted her with the same frenzy. That feeling alone was enough to melt Lilina’s thoughts.
Gene, memory, circulating blood: what Lilina kept in mind was always Liza, and Liza only.
She was proud of that. She did not spare a thought for anything else that had once been mixed in.
It had been unnecessary, so she had thrown it away.

They stayed like that until Liz, who had been playing outside, came home.
She opened the door, clattered down the hall with all the energy of a small child, and burst into the living room—

“Ah! Mama and Mother, you’re doing it again!”

She pointed at the chair where the two of them sat and said it at the top of her voice.
Whatever private atmosphere had filled the room scattered at once.
Lilina and Liza smiled at each other, stood, and went to her.

“Welcome home, Liz.”
“I’m home, Mother!”

“Welcome home.”
“I’m home, Mama!”

Liz called Lilina “Mother” and Liza “Mama.”
At first she had tried to call them both Mama, but then no one could tell who was being addressed, so they had taught her to distinguish.
That had been when Liz was one.
Which meant she was three now—and yet she looked no more than two or three years younger than a little sister of Lilina’s.
Just as a Demi-Vamp fetus had grown quickly, a child born of a Demi-Vamp seemed to grow quickly as well.

“I just said not to leave Liz out … mngh.”
“We aren’t leaving you out. You’re part of this house too.”
“Mother, really? You’ll let Liz in?”
“Of course.”

Liz’s cheeks colored. She nodded without a word.
Liza smiled, satisfied, and took her hand.
Lilina took the other. The three of them went deeper into the house.

 

◇◇◇

 

What followed is not written here.
Liz was three. She had already been taught to want a place in a household whose love had long since ceased to be only parental. The rest belongs to that corruption, not to the page.

In any case: whether a mother and her own daughter loved one another, whether their bond was carnal, whether they made no attempt to hide it—none of that was anything but ordinary in the world as it now stood.
It was the sort of thing about which the neighbors said, “The Lengland family is such a close one, aren’t they.”
It would be the same today and tomorrow.
A year from now, ten years, a hundred: their happiness would surely go on forever.
Because this was a completed world.