guiyin

✦ GUIYIN she 20

7himmune © all rights reserved

normal au sfw oneshot angst married couple doomed + gentle romance major character death(s) mourning higuruma has CML fem reader 11.1k words

The scent of aged parchment and burnt coffee always clung to the corners of the office—a bitter, stale perfume that had long since evicted the sweet, floral fragrance of lavender and fresh rain that used to greet him when he crossed his own threshold but that scent had belonged to another life.

A life with a pulse.

Now, Hiromi Higuruma sat beneath the oppressive, erratic hum of a flickering fluorescent light, a modern-day damocles sword casting harsh, jagged shadows across his desk. His long fingers, pale as bleached bone, trembled with the subtle, rhythmic frailty of a dying bird as they turned a heavy page of text.

The fabric of his signature black suit jacket, once filled out by a broad but lean frame, now draped precariously over his sharp shoulders. He had always been blessed with an elegant, reedy height, but now he resembled a marionette whose strings were being pulled taut by a cruel, invisible puppeteer as the dark wool hung loosely, pooling in unnatural, hollow folds around a waist that had diminished significantly over the months, as if his very physical form were evaporating to match the emptiness inside him.

A sharp, metallic tang suddenly flooded his senses, hot and sudden. Before he could reach for a handkerchief, a heavy, crimson drop fell as it bloomed like an aggressive, morbid orchid directly onto the pristine white margin of his legal brief, the red ink of life staining the black-and-white sanctity of the law.

He merely stared at it. His dark eyes were hollow, wells of profound indifference, it was a familiar ritual now—the slow leaking away of a man who had nothing left to hold inside.

The door to his office creaked open with an unceremonious, jarring rattle as the sharp, rhythmic click of heels cut through the suffocating silence like a gavel striking wood. Shizumi stepped in, a thick stack of motions cradled in her arms, her mouth already opening to deliver a routine update.

But the moment her gaze landed on his face, the words died in her throat as her expression fractured, shattering into deep, jagged lines of panic. “Higuruma…” The files slipped from her grip, scattering across the floor like fallen leaves.

Shizumi rushed forward, plucking a tissue from the box on his desk and forcing it into his limp hand. “Good God, you’re bleeding again. Stop it, look at me!”

Higuruma did not flinch. With a slow, agonizingly deliberate grace, he pressed the tissue to his nose as he leaned back into his leather chair, which seemed to swallow his shrinking frame whole. “It is merely a transient consequence of the dry air in this building,” he murmured, his voice a low, gravelly rasp that sounded like stones grinding together at the bottom of a well.

“A minor circulatory rebellion. Nothing that requires a formal indictment of my health.”

“Don’t you dare use your courtroom rhetoric on me.” she snapped, her voice cracking, trembling with an urgency he found utterly exhausting. “Look at yourself! You’re vanishing right before my eyes, Higuruma! That suit is wearing you at this point. You look like a specter haunting your own desk.”

“You’re white as a sheet, you live entirely on black coffee, and you are literally bleeding through your casework!”

“I am managing my workload efficiently—”

“You are killing yourself!” she cried, grabbing the edge of his desk, leaning in as if she could force her own vitality into his fading frame. “You need a physician, now. I am not asking. Let me drive you to the clinic down the street, please.”

A heavy, suffocating silence fell between them, thick as wet wool as Higuruma closed his eyes, letting his head fall back. He was drowning in an unbearable, leaden fatigue that no amount of caffeine or willpower could ever hope to dissolve.

It was a weariness that had settled deep within his marrow—a quiet, poetic decay, a slow-motion collapse of the architecture of his being.

Behind his eyelids, the old verses he used to read aloud in a lifetime that felt like someone else’s echoed like a funeral dirge: “The weariness, the fever, and the fret / Here, where men sit and hear each other groan…”

“Hospitals,” he whispered, his voice barely carrying across the desk, “are a superfluous waste of time.”

The truth was far more visceral, a jagged shard of glass embedded in his throat.

The mere thought of a hospital brought back the phantom smell of antiseptic and bleach—the very scent that had choked him five years ago and he could still feel the cold rain of that night, remembering how he had abandoned a trial mid-argument, sprinting through the downpour until his lungs burned and his chest screamed, only to find a sterile room where the heart monitor had already flattened into a continuous, mocking drone.

You were gone.

His cherished wife, his ultimate piece of light, had vanished into the ether, and with her, the unborn child who would never get to hold his hand.

For five years, he had refused to visit her gravestone, terrified that looking at her name carved in cold, unyielding marble would cause the fragile dam of his sanity to unravel completely. He could not return to a place that smelled of death, and yet he was already living in it.

Shizumi remained unyielding, her persistence a stubborn, agonizing anchor dragging him back to the shore. “I am not giving you a choice, Higuruma,” she whispered, her voice breaking entirely as she reached out, her hand trembling above his shoulder, too afraid of how fragile he felt to actually make contact.

“If I have to call an ambulance and have them drag you out of here in front of the entire firm, I will. Please! Just let me help you.”

Higuruma opened his eyes. They were dark, flat, and entirely devoid of the spark that used to define him. “... Very well,” he sighed, the surrender tasting like ash. “If it will buy me your silence.”

Hours later, the reality of his stubbornness culminated in the quiet, clinical air of an examination room as the walls were blindingly white, a sterile purgatory. The diagnosis was delivered by a doctor whose voice possessed a terrible, practiced absolute finality: Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia.

The physician spoke at length, a tireless monologue of aggressive chemotherapy regimens, of survival percentages, of waging a fierce, tactical war against the malignancy mutating within his blood.

But Higuruma didn’t listen as he merely turned his head toward the window, watching the grey rain streak down the glass, tracing erratic, weeping paths like tears on a cold face. “No,” Higuruma said softly, cutting through the physician’s clinical stream of words like a dull knife through paper.

The doctor blinked, taken aback. “Mr. Higuruma, perhaps you didn’t understand the prognosis. Without intervention—”

“I understood perfectly,” Higuruma interrupted, his tone perfectly level, devoid of fear, yet dripping with a profound, unyielding sorrow. “Higuruma, please.” Shizumi pleaded from the corner of the room, burying her face in her hands before stepping forward, her eyes red and frantic. “Listen to him! You have the financial means.”

“You can afford the best oncologists in the country. You can fight this! Why would you just throw your life away like this? For what?”

Higuruma slowly adjusted his cuff, looking down at his pale, slender wrists as the lankiness of his youth had withered into a fragile, skeletal grace; he could see the faint, bluish tracks of his veins beneath skin that looked like translucent parchment.

“To wage a war against the inevitable is a profoundly irrational endeavor,” he said, his voice smooth, chillingly calm.

“I have no desire to subject my remaining days to the agonizing, degrading futility of aggressive intervention. To poison myself daily for a few more months of agony? No. Let nature take its course.”

“It’s a treatable condition!” she cried out, her voice rising to a desperate, strangled shriek that echoed off the tile walls.

She grabbed his arm, her fingers sinking into the loose fabric of his sleeve, feeling the shocking thinness of the bone beneath. “You’re not just refusing medicine, Higuruma—you’re choosing to die! You’re committing suicide by omission!”

“I am choosing a quiet capitulation,” he corrected her gently, pulling his arm away with a slow, agonizing courtesy. “There is a dignity in knowing when the trial is lost.”

“I will utilize mild palliative measures to ensure my intellect remains unclouded. My mind must remain sharp enough to fulfill my obligations to my clients until the end. Beyond that... I am entirely indifferent.”

“How can you say that?!” She was sobbing now, the tears spilling over her cheeks as she looked at the hollows of his face. “Don’t you care about anyone? Don’t you care about the people left behind? You’re just going to leave?”

“There is no one left behind,” he whispered, a phantom phrase that tasted of five years of solitary confinement in his own mind as he stood up, his tall frame swaying for a fraction of a second as a wave of vertigo washed over him, before he stabilized himself against the edge of the examination table.

The black suit shifted loosely against his skin, a stark, visual testament to the disease that was greedily consuming him from the inside out, drinking his life like wine.

He felt no anger toward the illness.

If anything, as he looked at his reflection in the dark glass of the window, it felt like a twisted, beautiful form of poetic justice. The universe had already proven itself to be a cruel, lawless courtroom when it ripped his family from him. It had handed down a sentence of absolute grief, and he had been serving it every day since.

Why should he fight to stay in a world that had broken its promise to him?

As he walked out of the clinic, ignoring the doctor's calls and leaving his weeping colleague behind in the sterile room, he stepped out into the heavy downpour as the rain soaked through his thin black coat, chilling him to the bone, but he did not quicken his pace.

A strange, quiet peace settled into his aching joints. The deterioration of his body was merely the slow, physical manifestation of a heart that had already broken beyond all repair five years ago. His blood was finally consenting to what his soul had demanded for years: permission to stop.

Suddenly, the glass doors of the clinic slid open with a soft, mechanical hiss, swallowing the sound of her frantic, echoing footsteps, but Higuruma didn’t stop as he stepped out into the gray, weeping afternoon, letting the first heavy drops of rain bleed into the dark wool of his coat.

“Higuruma! Higuruma, wait!”

Her voice cut through the steady drone of the downpour, sharp and desperate, a jagged tear in the quiet shroud he was trying to wrap around himself but he kept walking, his long, uneven strides carrying him toward the sidewalk.

He looked neither right nor left; he was a man walking to his own execution, entirely at peace with the gallows.

“Higuruma, please, stop!”

A hand grabbed his elbow, her fingers digging through the damp fabric of his sleeve with a fierce, terrified strength. She was panting, her breath hitching in her throat, her hair already plastered to her forehead by the storm as she forced herself in front of him, anchoring her heels into the wet concrete, a desperate barrier against his momentum.

Higuruma paused but did not pull away, nor did he look angry. He merely looked down at her with those dark, bottomless eyes, his face a pale mask of exhaustion framed by wet, dark strands of hair. “Return inside,” he said, his voice quiet, almost gentle, yet carrying the heavy, unyielding finality of a closing cell door.

“You will catch a chill. There is nothing left to discuss here.”

“No! I’m not letting you walk away like this!” she screamed over the rumble of a passing truck, her voice cracking under the weight of her tears.

They mixed with the rain, tracking hot and fast down her pale cheeks. “You think you’re being rational? You think this is just some cold, logical decision? It’s a lie, Higuruma! It’s a coward’s lie!”

A subtle, nearly imperceptible tightening occurred around his jaw. “You are letting your emotions cloud your judgment. Go home.”

“It’s because of her, isn’t it?”

The words hung in the humid, heavy air, freezing the space between them as the rain seemed to fall in slow motion, each drop a tiny, shattering mirror.

Higuruma went entirely still. The fragile, polite mask he wore did not shatter—it hardened into ice. The name of his grief was a ghost he had spent five years starving, refusing to speak it, refusing to look it in the eye.

To have it dragged out into the open, here on a wet sidewalk, felt like a physical violation.

“Do not,” he whispered, a dangerous, low vibration in his chest.

“It’s because of her!” she pushed on, her desperation turning reckless, her hands shaking as she clutched at his lapels. “It’s been five years, Hiromi!”

“Five years of you living like this, working until your hands shake, never going home, never smiling, never living. You aren’t refusing treatment because you think it’s irrational, but… but because you want to join her!”

“Silence,” he commanded, the word a sudden, sharp crack like a gavel striking stone.

“I won’t be silent! You’re letting yourself rot from the inside out because you think you’re supposed to die with her! You think if you fight this, you’re forgetting her? You think you’re betraying her by staying alive?!”

She was sobbing openly now, her head dropping against his chest for a brief, agonizing second before she forced herself to look back up into his hollow face. “She wouldn’t want this! She loved you, Higuruma! She wouldn’t want you to turn your blood into a graveyard!”

The mention of her love was a knife twisting in an old, unhealed wound as the poetic silence he had cultivated, the beautiful, tragic numbness he had spent years building to protect himself, evaporated.

A raw, visceral agony flooded his chest, so violent it made him gasp as he stepped back, wrenching himself from her grip with a sudden, uncharacteristic force. His tall frame shook, a reed caught in a gale.

When he spoke, the legal cadence, the articulate vocabulary, the dignified composure—all of it was stripped away, leaving only the bleeding, jagged core of a broken man. “What do you know of what she wanted?” he roared, his voice a ragged, broken sob that tore from his throat, loud enough to drown out the storm.

“What do you know of the silence in that house? What do you know of the nursery that sits empty, locking away a life that never even got to draw breath?”

He took a step toward her, his eyes wild, burning with a terrible, repressed fire that had finally consumed its fuel. “For five years, I have listened to the echo of a flatline every time I close my eyes,” he choked out, the rain washing over his face, hiding the tears that finally broke through his defenses.

“For five years, I have written briefs for strangers, demanded justice for a world that has none, while the only justice I ever cared about was buried beneath six feet of dirt! I did not choose to leave her.”

“The universe tore her from my arms and left me behind to suffer the sentence!” He stopped, his chest heaving, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps as the anger drained from him as quickly as it had come, leaving him looking more fragile, more skeletal than before.

He looked down at his trembling, wet hands, his voice dropping to a hollow, devastating whisper that broke her heart completely. “I am so tired,” he murmured, the words catching in his throat.

“I have served my time in this empty world. My blood is only doing what my heart did five years ago, it is simply letting go.”

She reached out again, her hand hovering in the space between them, completely broken by the sheer depth of his despair. “Higuruma…”

“Please do not follow me,” he said softly, the fire gone, replaced by a cold, insurmountable distance. “If you ever respected me as a colleague, or as a friend... let me have my peace.”

He turned away from her, adjusting the collar of his loose black coat against the biting wind as he walked into the grey curtain of the rain, his tall, reedy figure slowly blurring into the mist, a silhouette of a man already halfway to the other side.

The days that followed descended upon the office like a succession of grey, indistinguishable shadows. Time, for Hiromi Higuruma, had ceased to be a river; it was an hourglass running dry, each grain of sand a heavy, silent tick toward an appointment he had no intention of breaking as every morning at dawn, before the city had fully stirred, he sat at his desk beneath the cruel glare of the fluorescent light.

Beside his lukewarm cup of black coffee sat a small, amber plastic bottle—the mild palliative medication he had conceded to take. He despised the pills, they were a compromise with a world he was leaving, a chemical tether designed not to heal, but to numb the screaming ache in his bones just enough so his intellect could remain unclouded.

He needed his mind, and he needed it sharp and cutting until the final gavel fell on his last case. With a slow, deliberate grace, he would swallow the medicine, dry as the decay was accelerating now, writing its poetry across his skin in a language of bruises and ash.

The elegant, reedy height that had once commanded the respect of every courtroom in the prefecture had sharpened into a terrifying, skeletal fragility. His cheekbones caught the light like sharp cliffs; his collarbones threatened to cut through the fabric of his shirts.

His signature black suit jacket hung, a shroud too large for the ghost inhabiting it. Every breath he drew felt heavy, a physical weight he had to lift with his lungs, scraping against his ribs like dry paper.

Yet, his pen never faltered as he drafted motions with a fierce, burning precision, his mind operating at a terrifying velocity even as his body crumbled beneath it.

He owed this to the desperate people who came to his door. He would give them justice, the only currency he had left, before he paid his own debt to the earth.

Across the hall, the silence was absolute as Shizumi stood in the doorway of the break room, her hand resting on the frame, watching him through the glass.

Her knuckles were white. For the first forty-eight hours, her throat had burned with a thousand arguments, a million desperate pleas she wanted to scream at him, she wanted to throw the files from his desk, to drag him back to the clinic by his fraying coat, to force him to fight.

But she didn’t.

The raw, bleeding specter of his grief on that rainy sidewalk had rewritten the law between them. She remembered the ragged roar of his voice, the devastating hollow of his whisper: Let me have my peace.

To push him now, to force her hope onto his calculated despair, would not be an act of care—it would be a cruelty. It would be forcing a man who had been drowning for five years to keep thrashing when he had finally found the quiet of the deep.

So, she respected the boundary. But the silence cost her blood and every time she passed his door and heard his shallow, rattling cough, she closed her eyes and bit her lip until she tasted copper.

When she brought him the morning briefs, she no longer spoke as she would just walk into his room with a soft, ghostly step, lay the folders on the corner of his desk, and linger for a fraction of a second.

Her eyes, heavy with unshed tears and a terrible, mourning reverence, would trace the sunken hollows of his face, the dark purple shadows bruising the delicate skin beneath his eyes. She saw the tremor in his long fingers as he signed his name.

She saw the way he tightly gripped the edge of the mahogany desk just to steady himself when he stood up, his vision clearly swimming behind a veil of vertigo. “The Tanaka brief is completed,” Higuruma murmured one afternoon, his voice a faint, papery rustle, not looking up from his papers.

“It is on your desk. The precedents are cited on page four.”

She swallowed the lump in her throat, her hands curling into fists at her sides.

She wanted to ask if he had eaten.

She wanted to ask if the pain was unbearable.

She wanted to tell him that she was terrified of the morning she would walk in and find him still.

“Thank you, Higuruma,” she said instead, her voice a fragile, whispered thread.

That was all. No lecture or intervention, just the quiet acceptance of his slow capitulation as Higuruma paused, his pen hovering a millimeter above the paper. For a fleeting moment, the silence between them was not suffocating, but deeply understanding.

He did not look up, but the tension in his rigid shoulders relaxed by a fraction of an inch. “Thank you,” he replied, so softly it was almost lost to the hum of the lights.

It was an acknowledgment of her silence, a gratitude for letting him ruin in peace.

As twilight bled into the room, turning the white walls a bruised, twilight blue, Higuruma finally laid his pen down. A sudden, sharp stitch of agony flared in his chest, and he reached into his pocket for a handkerchief, pressing it to his mouth as a violent fit of coughing shook his narrow frame.

When he pulled it away, the white cotton was stained with a brilliant, fresh blossom of crimson as he stared at it in the dimming light. The disease was a loyal bailiff, executing its warrant with meticulous care.

He felt the coldness creeping up from his fingertips, a slow, freezing tide as he closed his eyes, and for the first time in five years, the phantom sound of the flatline in his memory didn't bring a wave of panic.

It sounded like an invitation. The ink was running out, the brief was closing, and the long, agonizing trial of his solitude was finally coming to an end.

The courtroom was suffocating, a heavy theater of dark cedar wood and oppressive institutional silence. The air felt thick, devoid of oxygen, as if the walls themselves were closing in to witness the final act.

Every surface of dark, polished wood seemed to absorb the light, turning the chamber into a twilight theater where justice was less a virtue and more a slow, suffocating execution as Hiromi Higuruma stood at the defense podium, a monument carved from porcelain and shadow.

His tall, reedy frame was no longer supported by muscle or bone, but by the terrifying, brittle architecture of his own willpower. The signature black suit jacket—once a symbol of sharp, unyielding authority—hung loosely over his skeletal shoulders, shifting with a sickening hollowness like a shroud draped over a wooden cross.

His long, elegant fingers gripped the lip of the lectern as he pressed down so hard that the skin over his knuckles split into a bloodless, translucent white, the bone nearly visible beneath.

Those hands were anchors, the only things preventing his weightless, decaying body from drifting upward into the void. “The prosecution's narrative relies entirely on a flawed interpretation of circumstantial proximity,” Higuruma spoke, but the resonant, velvet baritone that had once commanded the highest benches in the prefecture had been scraped away, replaced by a dry, hollow rasp.

It was a ghostly whisper, yet it possessed a devastating, razor-sharp precision, cutting through the dense air like a rusted scalpel. “An individual’s… presence near a scene does not equate to an indictment of intent.”

“To sentence my client based on such fragile postulation would be a profound miscarriage of the statutory law.”

Beside him, she sat as if carved from stone as her hands were locked in her lap, fingers white-knuckled and entwined so tightly they throbbed.

She did not look at the judge, nor the jury; her universe had shrunk to the narrow expanse of his back. Every shallow, ragged breath he drew seemed to tear a corresponding strip of skin from her own chest.

From this angle, she could see what the courtroom could not: the rhythmic, violent tremor seizing his shoulder blades, the way his spine hitched with every word as her er throat burned with an agonizing, feral instinct to scream, to shatter the decorum, to strike the judge's gavel from his hand and demand a recess.

Then, the world lost its axis.

It began not with a sound, but with a sickening, liquid shift in the floorboards as the room tilted violently to the left, the dark cedar walls stretching into long, grotesque shadows.

A wave of icy, crushing vertigo broke over Higuruma’s mind, extinguishing the ambient light. The faces of the jury, the bailiff, the crest of the judge’s bench—they liquefied, swirling into a featureless, dizzying vortex of ash-grey.

The air in his throat turned to hot glass as the brilliant, crystalline compass of his intellect, the sharp legal mind he had protected so fiercely by refusing the dulling haze of palliative medicine, finally fractured.

The shards cut inward as a loud, high-pitched ringing filled his ears, drowning out the ambient noise of the room. The words died in his throat, leaving an abrupt, cavernous silence that hung over the gallery like an executioner’s axe.

“Mr. Higuruma?”

The judge’s voice drifted down from some impossible height, muffled and warped, as though traveling through miles of black, deep ocean water. “Are you prepared to present your final exhibit?”

Higuruma tried to nod, but the slight movement triggered a seismic spike of agony behind his eyes as his temples throbbed with a hot, rhythmic pulse that made his vision flash in strobe-like bursts of white.

He forced his eyelids open, staring down at his notes, but the neatly typed kanji had begun to dance. The characters detached themselves from the white paper, floating and spinning in a pool of sudden, blinding heat.

Drip.

A dark, heavy sphere of crimson struck the absolute center of his legal brief as it bloomed outward in a perfect, horrible circle, obliterating the ink beneath.

Drip. Drip.

Before he could process the stain, the dam broke. A brilliant, uncontrollable stream of hot blood burst from his nose as it poured over his upper lip, filled the lines of his mouth, and cascaded down his chin in a heavy, unbroken ribbon.

The dark red liquid splashed violently across the starch-white canvas of his dress shirt, blooming in aggressive, jagged starbursts. It looked as though a morbid, predatory orchid had erupted through his ribs.

He did not move to stop it. He didn’t even have the strength to lift a hand toward his breast pocket for a handkerchief as his dark eyes, wide and completely hollow, stared down at the red ruin of his casework with a distant, detached tranquility.

The dizziness had reached a beautiful, numbing crescendo; he felt nothing but the weightless sensation of falling upward. “Mr. Higuruma, you’re bleeding—” the judge’s voice cracked, the institutional mask slipping into raw panic.

“I am…” Higuruma whispered. The sound was softer than the rustle of turning pages as his knees, already hollow, turned to absolute water beneath his trousers. “I am... finished.”

The wooden lectern slipped from his blood-slicked fingers. His tall, emaciated frame swayed for a single, agonizing second before he collapsed backward.

There was no grace in the fall as he crashed heavily against the floor, his head striking the polished hardwood with a sickening, hollow thud that echoed to the rafters.

His long limbs sprawled limp and uncoordinated across the floor, his fingers twitching once against the wood before going still as the courtroom erupted into a white noise of chaos. Shouts bled from the gallery; the judge’s gavel began to slam repeatedly in a useless, frantic rhythm that sounded like a dying heartbeat; heavy wooden chairs scraped violently against the floorboards as people stood.

But the boundary was gone, and the promise was dead. The moment his body hit the ground, something inside her shattered with the sound of a glass house imploding as she threw herself across the space between them, her knees slamming painfully onto the hardwood beside him, entirely unheeding of the papers she scattered or the dark pool of blood already widening around his shoulders.

“Higuruma! Higuruma!”

Her voice was a strangled, piercing shriek that cut through the panic of the room like a blade as she grabbed the lapels of his suit, the black fabric bunching wildly in her fists as she shook his frail body.

He was terrifyingly, impossibly light—like a bundle of dry sticks wrapped in heavy wool as his head rolled limply to the side with the movement, his pale, sweat-sheened face smeared with the brilliant crimson still leaking from his nose.

His eyelids were half-open, but there was no dark intelligence behind them anymore; they had rolled back, revealing only the sightless, milky whites.

“Hiromi, please, look at me! Wake up!” she sobbed, her whole body shaking so violently she could barely aim her hands. She pressed two fingers into the hollow of his throat, searching desperately. The pulse beneath his translucent skin was a frantic, thready flutter—the desperate, erratic rhythm of a bird whose wings were being broken one by one in a closed fist.

She looked up at the frozen, pale faces of the courtroom staff, her eyes wild with a feral, dangerous terror. “Call an ambulance!” she roared at the bailiff, her voice cracking, breaking into a raw, bleeding scream that tore her own throat. “Call them now! Tell them he’s not breathing right! Move!”

She turned back to Higuruma, her tears spilling over her lashes to mix with the fresh, hot blood on his cheeks. She gathered his heavy, unresponsive head into her lap, pulling his skull against her thighs, her trembling hands blindly pressing a discarded legal document against his nose to stem the flow.

The white paper turned entirely crimson within seconds, soaking through to her skin. “Don’t do this,” she whispered, her forehead dropping against his cold, damp cheek, her voice fracturing into a desperate, private prayer that no one else could hear over the din of the room.

“Please, Hiromi, don’t leave yet. I know you’re tired... I know you want to go to her... but please, don’t die on this floor! Not like this, not in this place!”

But Higuruma heard nothing as the world of noise and wood and blood was receding at a tremendous speed. In the deep, silent dark of his fading consciousness, the frantic shouts of the courtroom faded into a soft, indistinct hum.

The phantom sound of the five-year-old flatline—the one that had drone-insulted his ears since the day he took that first life—finally stopped its mocking drone.

In its place came a vast, beautiful silence. He was running through the rain again, just as he always did in his dreams, but the downpour no longer burned his skin, and the sterile, choking smell of bleach was entirely gone.

It was replaced, at long last, by the faint, cool scent of lavender.

The harsh, unforgiving smell of antiseptic and bleach was the first thing to pierce the veil. It rushed into his lungs like liquid ice, a chemical suffocator that instantly caused the fragile architecture of his chest to tighten in a cold, visceral panic as Hiromi Higuruma’s eyes fluttered open, his vision a blurred, shifting canvas of blinding white and chrome.

The heavy, rhythmic beep... beep... beep… of a heart monitor echoed in his ears—a modern, mechanical ghost that had haunted his nightmares for half a decade.

For a terrifying, disorienting second, the past and the present fused into a single, agonizing specter as he thought he was still running through the storm; he thought the flatline was about to begin.

“Welcome back, Mr. Higuruma. Easy now, please refrain from sitting up just yet.”

The voice was soft, a gentle anchor that pulled him out of the temporal abyss. As his dark eyes slowly adjusted, the world resolved into the sterile, quiet landscape of a private hospital room.

A nurse clad in pale blue scrubs was leaning over him, her touch remarkably light as she adjusted the nasal cannula delivering a cool stream of oxygen to his starved lungs.

With practiced, maternal care, she took a warm, damp cloth and began to gently wipe away the dried, copper-colored remnants of the nosebleed from his chin and jaw as Higuruma blinked, his mind operating through a heavy, leaden haze, a dazed fog that his palliative medication could no longer cut through. “Where…” his voice was a mere rasp, a dry leaf scraping across concrete.

“You’re at the university hospital,” the nurse explained softly, offering him a tiny sip of water through a straw, which he accepted with a faint, instinctive nod.

“You suffered a severe syncopic episode during your trial. Your blood counts are dangerously low, Mr. Higuruma. Your body simply gave out under the stress.”

Higuruma let his head sink back into the thin, clinical pillow. The memory of the tilting courtroom, the ruined legal brief, and the sudden, violent surrender of his limbs returned to him in fragmented, jagged shards.

He had failed his client.

“My dear…” his voice was a mere rasp, a dry leaf scraping across concrete, raw and desperate as his hand instinctively twitched on the starched sheets, reaching for a ghost. “Where… where are you?”

The nurse’s expression softened into a look of profound, deeply mistaken sympathy. “You’re at the university hospital, Mr. Higuruma. Don't worry, Ms. Shizumi was the one who called the ambulance. She stayed by your side the entire time.”

The mention of his colleague’s name hit him like a splash of freezing water, cutting through the narcotic fog. A bitter, agonizing clarity crashed over him, a physical ache in his chest that had nothing to do with his failing health.

Shizumi.

Of course it was Shizumi.

Because you weren’t here.

You couldn’t be.

You had been gone for a long, long time now—buried beneath years of grief, leaving him with nothing but a phantom name on his lips when his guard dropped.

“No,” Higuruma interrupted, his voice dropping into a flat, harsh whisper that instantly cut the nurse off. He forced his dark, hollow eyes to lock onto hers, correcting her with a chilling, immediate sharpness. “... Not Ms. Shizumi.”

The nurse paused, the damp cloth hovering in the air as she blinked in confusion at the sudden intensity in the dying man's gaze.

Higuruma closed his eyes, his pale, skeletal fingers curling into a tight fist against the mattress, swallowing down the dry, suffocating grief that always tasted like ash. “Not her,” he murmured, his head sinking deeper into the thin, clinical pillow as he let the silence stretch between them.

“Oh, my apologies…” The nurse cleared her throat gently, trying to steer the conversation back to safety as she checked the monitors with quiet efficiency. “Well… your colleague, Ms. Shizumi, she only left a few minutes ago because the firm called her back for an emergency regarding your case.”

“You suffered a severe syncopic episode during your trial. Your blood counts are dangerously low, Mr. Higuruma. Your body simply gave out under the stress.”

Higuruma remained silent, his eyes opening again to trace the slow drip of the IV fluid into the back of his hand.

The memory of the tilting courtroom and the sudden, violent surrender of his limbs returned to him in fragmented, jagged shards. “She stayed by your side the entire time, Mr. Higuruma. She only left a few minutes ago because the firm called her back for an emergency regarding your case.”

Higuruma remained silent, his eyes tracing the slow drip of the IV fluid into the back of his pale, skeletal hand. “She left something for you,” the nurse added, checking the monitors with quiet efficiency.

“She brought it from your office drawer while you were in the ICU, she thought you might want it close.”

“I see,” he whispered, his throat closing around the words.

“You need rest,” the nurse said gently, giving his blanket one final, comforting pat. “The palliative team will be in shortly to discuss adjusting your pain management. Try not to move too much.”

With a soft murmur of parting, she stepped out of the room, the heavy door clicking shut behind her, plunging the space back into a suffocating, rhythmic silence as Higuruma laid perfectly still, listening to the synthetic heartbeat of the monitor.

He was trapped inside the very mausoleum he had spent five years fleeing. The air smelled of your ending; the white walls were the exact shade of the shroud that had covered your face.

Slowly, painfully, he rolled his head to the side, his neck joints popping with a fragile, brittle protest. There, resting on the bedside table, was a rectangular object wrapped in a soft piece of flannel as his long, trembling fingers reached out, his arm feeling as heavy as lead, and pulled the cloth away.

The breath caught in his throat, a sharp, physical blow to his chest.

It was a silver picture frame.

It was the artifact he had locked away in the darkest, deepest corner of his office desk the morning after your funeral, unable to look at it, yet utterly incapable of throwing it away.

In the picture, the sun was shining with a brilliant, golden warmth that felt entirely foreign to the grey world he now inhabited. There you were, dressed in a cloud of white silk, your laughter practically echoing through the glass of the frame.

And there he was—younger, his frame filled out, his eyes alive with a fierce, protective devotion as he held your waist. He was smiling so wide his cheeks ached, his face completely unburdened by the law, by death, or by the universe.

You two were happy.

The sight made him flinch as a physical tremor rippled through his narrow shoulders, a sudden, violent ache spreading from his chest to his very fingertips.

For a single, fleeting second, the armor of his indifference cracked. His dark, sunken eyes softened, the icy finality in them melting into a profound, devastating tenderness.

A weak, trembling smile—a ghost of the man in the photograph—hovered on his pale, chapped lips. ‘My dear…’ his soul whispered into the empty air.

But the warmth was an illusion, a cruel trick of the light.

Within the heartbeat of a second, the memory shifted as the golden sunlight of the photograph faded, instantly replaced by the flashing red lights of the ambulance from five years ago.

The phantom smell of the rain returned, followed by the terrifying, unyielding flatline of the monitor, and the image of your pale, cold hand slipping from his grip, taking the quiet future they had built together into the dark.

The weak smile vanished from his face, replaced by a spasm of raw, suffocating agony as his gaze hardened, fracturing into a desperate, defensive wall of grief.

Higuruma snapped his head the other way, tearing his eyes from the photograph as if the glass had turned to fire. He stared blindly at the blank white wall opposite him, his breathing ragged and uneven through the oxygen tube.

He squeezed his eyes shut, his fists clutched tightly against the sterile hospital sheets, his heart monitor spiking into a frantic, erratic rhythm. And as he lay there in the blinding white room, refusing to look at the only light he had ever known, Hiromi Higuruma let the darkness swallow him whole once more.

The hospital room was a sterile purgatory where the sun and shadow spun across the white walls in a blur of endless, agonizing rotations.

Inside Higuruma’s veins, the malignancy had abandoned its slow, poetic crawl. It was a raging, predatory wildfire now, consuming what little remained of his vitality with an insatiable, terrifying appetite and the palliative medications were failing.

The pain had evolved from a distant ache into a sharp, constant iron vice that clamped around his spine and ribs, making every shallow expansion of his chest a calculated, agonizing labor. His skin had taken on a translucent, waxen pallor, so paper-thin that the intricate, bluish network of his veins looked like fractured ice just beneath the surface.

He could barely lift his skull from the pillow without the room spinning into an absolute, sickening darkness—a heavy, nauseating vertigo that made the ceiling tilt and dive like a falling stone.

Yet, the clinical machine around him refused to let him fade in silence. “The blast phase is approaching much faster than anticipated, Mr. Higuruma,” the lead oncologist stated. His voice was a stern, unyielding gavel cutting through the quiet room, devoid of empathy, tuned only to the aggressive logistics of delaying the inevitable.

He tapped a plastic clipboard, the papers rustling with a terrible, bureaucratic finality. “If we do not initiate an aggressive, high-dose chemotherapy regimen and full-body radiation within the next forty-eight hours, your organs will begin to shut down. We have a bed reserved for you in the intensive care unit.”

“We need your consent to transfer you immediately.”

At the foot of the bed, Shizumi stood like a sentinel of grief as her eyes were rimmed with a raw, angry red, thick purple shadow bruising the skin beneath them from days of sleepless, desperate vigils.

She leaned forward, her hands gripping the cold, chrome railing of his bed so tightly her knuckles clicked against the metal. “Higuruma, please,” she choked out as her voice dropped to a desperate, cracked whisper that vibrated with a wild, clawing panic.

“Listen to him.”

“The doctors say there is still a window. It’s narrow, but it’s there. You don’t have to let it end like this. Please, just sign the consent forms. Let them try!”

Higuruma lay perfectly still, his long, emaciated frame barely making a dent in the heavy hospital mattress. The signature black suit was gone, replaced by a coarse, oversized gown that gathered around his collarbones like a shroud. He didn't look at the doctor.

Slowly, with an effort that cost him a cold, sudden sweat across his forehead and a wave of grey dizziness that threatened to black him out, he turned his head to look out the window.

The sky outside was a dull, bruised lavender—the exact color of the flowers you used to place on the kitchen sill in that other lifetime ago.

“No,” he whispered.

The word was barely a breath, a faint rustle of dry leaves across stone, yet it carried the absolute, immovable weight of a mountain. “Mr. Higuruma, this is no longer a matter of managing discomfort,” the doctor countered, his tone rising with professional frustration, irritated by the defiance of a dying man.

“This is a matter of immediate survival. Without this intervention, you are looking at a timeframe of days. Perhaps a week at most.”

“You will die.”

“... I am aware,” Higuruma murmured. His dark eyes were flat, calm, and entirely devoid of fear—the look of a judge who had already passed a sentence upon himself.

Slowly, his long fingers trembling violently with a palsy born of sheer exhaustion, he reached upward. With a sudden, deliberate jerk, he pinched the plastic wings of the nasal cannula and pulled the oxygen tubing from his face. He let it drop limply onto the blanket, where it hissed quietly against the fabric, a useless, synthetic breath. “Higuruma, what are you doing?!” she cried out, rushing to his side.

Her hands hovered frantically over his chest, trembling, as if she could physically force the air back into his lungs, her eyes wide with horror. “I am rescinding my compliance,” he said as his voice dropped into that cold, terrifyingly precise legal cadence that had once dominated the highest courtrooms in Tokyo.

The rattle in his lungs was there, but the intellect behind it was a razor. “I refuse the chemotherapy, I refuse the radiation. I refuse the intensive care unit. Furthermore... I am demanding an immediate administrative discharge.”

The doctor gasped, stepping back as if struck. “Discharge? In your condition? That is medically irresponsible! You cannot even stand on your own, let alone manage your symptoms at home. We cannot in good conscience allow you to leave.”

“You have no statutory authority to detain me,” Higuruma replied as his hollow gaze shifted to the physician, cutting through the man’s clinical authority with a lethal, baseline intelligence. “I am of sound mind.”

“My intellect remains unclouded, as your own neurological evaluations have confirmed. If you refuse to process my discharge, I will sign an Against Medical Advice waiver. If you attempt to restrain me, it will be handled as unlawful imprisonment. Process the paperwork, Doctor.”

The physician opened his mouth to argue, to invoke the hospital's policy, but looking into Higuruma’s eyes—two dark, bottomless wells of an unyielding, unbreakable will—the words died in his throat.

With a heavy, defeated sigh, the doctor slammed his pen into his pocket and walked out of the room, the door clicking shut with a sharp, clinical finality as the silence that followed was suffocating, broken only by the frantic, rapid beep... beep... beep... of the monitor tracking Higuruma’s soaring, failing heart rate.

“Why?”

The sound tore from Shizumi’s throat—a ragged, bleeding sob that she had tried for days to swallow down as she sank into the vinyl chair beside his bed, burying her face in her hands as her shoulders shook violently, her tears leaking through her fingers.

“Why are you being so cruel? To yourself... to everyone who has ever cared about you? You’re just going to go home and wait for the dark?”

“Alone in that empty house?”

Higuruma did not flinch at her tears, though a faint, fleeting shadow of profound sorrow crossed his sharp features as he slowly turned his gaze to the bedside table, where the silver picture frame lay facedown, exactly where he had flipped it days ago to protect himself from the burning, agonizing memory of your smile.

“I have spent five years in this wilderness,” he said softly.

His voice lost its sharp legal edge, dissolving into the quiet, devastating weariness of a man who had walked miles on broken glass and had finally reached the ocean.

“Every day, I have worn the black suit, I have argued the law… I have pretended that the world possessed a structure, a sense of justice, a reason for me to keep drawing breath. But it was a performance… a hollow farce.”

He reached out, his frail, skeletal hand brushing against the smooth, cold silver edge of the facedown frame.

He did not flip it over. He didn’t need to as your image was burned into the back of his eyelids, an eternal, beautiful scar. “I do not wish to die in this room,” he whispered, a single tear finally breaking from the corner of his eye, tracking slowly through the grey stubble on his sunken, hollow cheek.

“I do not wish to leave this earth surrounded by the scent of bleach and the synthetic rhythm of a machine. It is a sterile purgatory. I want to go home… I want to sit in the chair where she used to read to me. I want to smell the lavender on the curtains, even if it is only a phantom in my mind.”

“I want to close my eyes in the quiet.”

He looked back at Shizumi, his gaze softening into a silent, agonizing plea that begged her to let him drop the sword. “Please,” he murmured, his voice fracturing. “Let the defense rest.”

She looked up through her tears, seeing him clearly for the first time—not as the brilliant attorney, not as the stoic colleague, but as a man who had been mortally wounded five years ago, finally allowed to stop bleeding on a public stage.

The sheer depth of his exhaustion was a mountain she could not move. To fight him now would be to deny him the only mercy he had left in this world.

With a trembling hand, she reached out and gently covered his cold, skeletal fingers where they rested against the silver frame but she didn’t offer any more platitudes.

She didn’t beg him to stay for one more agonizing day.

“I’ll... I’ll arrange the transport,” she whispered, her heart breaking into a thousand jagged pieces as she gave his hand a final, mourning squeeze. “I’ll take you home, Higuruma.”

Higuruma let out a long, shuddering breath, his eyes closing as a profound, quiet peace finally began to seep into his aching marrow.

The hospital room, the monitors, the doctors—all of it began to recede into a distant, insignificant background.

He was finally going home to you.

The administrative wing of the oncology department was a landscape of low-frequency hums and fluorescent glare, but within thirty minutes of the confrontation, that rhythm had broken.

The paperwork for an Against Medical Advice discharge was usually a bureaucratic formality, a shield against liability handled by interns and clerks.

But this was Hiromi Higuruma.

In the central dictation lounge, three physicians stood clustered around a single computer terminal, their expressions a mixture of clinical irritation and profound, unsettled confusion.

The lead oncologist, Dr. Tanaka, was typing furiously, his fingers slapping the keys with an aggressive, defensive cadence. “He’s hemiparetic on the left side, his platelets are practically non-existent, and he’s refusing the central line,” Tanaka muttered, his voice dropping into a tense whisper as two passing nurses glanced over.

“He shouldn’t be able to articulate a sentence, let alone threaten a statutory lawsuit for unlawful imprisonment. Who gave him those metrics?”

“He read his own chart while the night shift was changing the IV,” a younger resident murmured, his face pale. “I found him yesterday morning just staring at the telemetry monitor. He was… tracking the ventricular trends himself. When I offered him the liquid morphine, he told me the dosage was three milligrams too high for his current hepatic clearance…”

The department chief, an older woman named Dr. Kase, whose hair had gone completely silver from decades of watching people die, leaned over Tanaka’s shoulder as she adjusted her spectacles, her eyes scanning the legal language Higuruma had scribbled onto the standard waiver form.

He had amended it in the margins with a tiny, impeccably neat hand, using precise legal citations to nullify the hospital’s standard indemnity clauses while guaranteeing his immediate release.

“Look at the script,” Dr. Kase said softly, her thumb tracing the screen where the scanned document appeared. “There’s no tremor in the characters. His blood pressure is eighty over forty, his body is actively suffocating from the blast crisis, and his handwriting looks like an imperial decree.”

“It doesn’t make sense. The metabolic encephalopathy alone should have rendered him delirious by Tuesday.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Tanaka said, throwing his hands up in a rare display of professional defeat. “Physiology dictates he should be in a hepatic coma. His brain is drowning in lactic acid and ammonia.”

“But when he looks at you... it’s like being cross-examined by a ghost who still knows the entire penal code by heart. He isn’t confused, he isn’t depressed…”

“It’s an anomaly,” the resident insisted, shaking his head as he looked down at a vial of unadministered palliative sedative in his palm. “We should order a head CT. There has to be a neurological explanation for this level of lucidity during a multi-organ shutdown! It defies every staging metric we have.”

Dr. Kase was silent for a long moment, watching the small green light on the terminal blink in sync with the distant, frantic telemetry from Room 412.

She had seen thousands of patients enter the final week of the blast phase—some fought, some wept, some dissolved into the screaming terror of hypoxia.

But she had never seen a man use the remaining hours of his intellect to build a flawless legal cage around his own doctors, forcing them to let him go. “A CT scan won’t show you what you’re looking for, Doctor,” Kase said, her voice dropping into a quiet, heavy gravity that silenced the younger men. “He isn’t lucid because of a neurological fluke.”

“He’s lucid because he’s holding himself together by the skin of his teeth until he gets past that lobby. It’s an act of absolute, terrifying suppression.”

She reached down, took the digital stylus from Tanaka’s hand, and pressed the electronic authorization icon, clearing the administrative hold. “... Let him leave,” she whispered. “Before he dies in the elevator out of pure spite for our regulations, sign the transport order.”

The transition from the clinical white of the hospital to the muted shadows of his own bedroom was a blur of motion he mostly felt rather than saw—the heavy, uneven sway of the transport gurney, the low rumble of the ambulance engine, and finally, the cool, familiar air of the hallway that smelled faintly of aged paper and floor wax.

Then, there was only the bed.

For the next three days, the world contracted to the left side of the mattress. It was his side, the place where he had spent years anchoring his thoughts during long nights of trial prep, but now it felt vast and deep, a shoreless ocean of linen.

He laid on his side, his long frame curled slightly inward, his cheek pressed against the pillow that still held the distant, phantom memory of your scent. Above his hollow eyes, he wore the soft, grey knitted hat your mother had made for him.

She had wept when she heard the diagnosis, her quiet maternal panic instantly translating into the rhythmic click of knitting needles.

When his hair had begun to fall out in clumps against the hospital linen, she had been the one to gently, wordlessly shave his head in the bathroom, her hands steady despite her tears.

Now, the wool cap was a small, physical mercy, keeping the persistent chill of his failing circulation from seeping into his skull. The room existed in a hazy, perpetual twilight.

The curtains were drawn, allowing only thin ribbons of pale gold to slice through the dust motes, tracking the slow rotation of sun and shadow across the tatami mats.

Time had completely lost its sequence.

The sharp, ticking clarity that had defined his entire life was gone, replaced by a heavy, liquid dreaming as he would drift for hours, unsure if he was awake or floating through the grey spaces of his own mind.

When he opened his eyes, the edges of the wardrobe and the silhouette of the armchair across the room were soft and unfocused, melting into the corners of the ceiling like ink dropped into water.

The pain was still there, but it had changed. Without the sharp, sterile glare of the hospital to give it an edge, the agony in his spine and ribs had become a dull, heavy weight—an iron anchor dragging him deeper into the mattress.

Every breath was slow, a conscious, deliberate shallow lift of his chest that rattled quietly in the silence of the house but he didn’t fight the dizziness anymore. When the room began to tilt, a slow, rotating vertigo that made him feel as though the bed were sinking through the floorboards, he simply closed his eyes and let it take him.

There were no monitors here to sound an alarm at his failing pulse.

There were no doctors with clipboards demanding he struggle for another forty-eight hours of survival.

Occasionally, a breeze would catch the hem of the curtains, and the cool air would carry it—the unmistakable, sweet scent of the lavender on the sill. It wasn’t the chemical imitation from a bottle, but the real, earthy fragrance of the life he had left behind five years ago.

He would reach out a frail, skeletal hand, his long fingers trailing blindly over the empty space on your side of the bed, his knuckles brushing the cool sheet where you used to sleep.

He didn’t cry, he only closed his eyes under the weight of the grey hat, a profound, heavy tranquility wrapping around his chest like a blanket.

The room was an open grave of shadows, the light dying across the tatami mats in long, bleeding streaks of amber as Hiromi laid pinned to his side of the bed, his world reduced to the horizon of a cotton pillowcase and the erratic, wet rhythm of his own failing throat.

Above his hollow temples, the grey knitted hat your mother had made sat low, a soft, woolen shroud covering the bare scalp she had shorn for him when the illness first began to claim his dignity. It kept the frost from his skull, but it could do nothing for the absolute winter settling deep within his bones.

His circulation was retreating, drawing back to a heart that was beating out its final, ragged counter-argument against the dark. The bedroom door creaked—a thin, mourning sound that sliced through the heavy air as Shizumi stepped through the twilight.

She looked smaller now, stripped of her sharp courtroom armor, her shoulders curved under the weight of an impending finality.

Her briefcase was gone, replaced by a plastic bag from the clinic that crinkled with a terrifying, sterile lightness as she knelt by the futon, her knees sinking softly into the straw mats.

For a long time, she just watched the violent, shallow rise and fall of his chest. When she reached out, her fingers hovered, trembling, before they touched his forearm—a fragile stick of porcelain wrapped in an oversized sleeve.

“... Higuruma,” she whispered.

The name fractured on the vowels, coming out as a small, broken thing as Higuruma’s eyelids fluttered, but he didn’t turn as the vertical axis of the room had dissolved into a sickening, liquid tilt, a slow-spinning vortex that made the ceiling feel as distant as the stars and twice as cold.

“The nurse left the subcutaneous pump on the counter,” she said, her voice dropping to an urgent, desperate pitch as she clutched his sleeve, her knuckles turning white against the dark fabric. “I can... I can increase the dose.”

“... Just a little, Higuruma, please. To take the edge off the breathing. You don’t have to fight for every single breath, no one is watching.”

“No,” he rasped. It was a terrible sound, like dry stone dragging over sand, tearing at the lining of his throat.

“Do not... dull the air.”

“It’s not dulling, it’s mercy!” A single, hot tear spilled over her lashes, landing with a heavy tap against his blanket as she bent lower, her voice cracking open. “You’re suffocating, I can practically hear it! It’s tearing you apart, Higuruma... please…”

“You don’t have to prove anything to the dark, there is no judge here. There is no jury!”

“There is,” he breathed as a violent rattle hitched in his chest, a cruel, scraping cough that shook his entire emaciated frame. He gasped for air, his lips turning a faint, bruising blue before he could find the strength to speak again.

“The verdict... was delivered five years ago today. On this... very mattress.”

Shizumi froze as her hand remained wrapped around his skeletal wrist, but her breath caught sharply in her throat.

The silence that followed was suffocating as the realization struck her like a physical blow.

The anniversary.

It was the exact date the universe had split open and taken you from him, leaving him to wander the legal wilderness like a ghost in a black suit.

Five years to the day since he had sat where she was sitting now, watching the light leave your eyes. “Higuruma…” she choked out, her hands flying to her mouth to stifle a ragged scream of grief. The sheer cruelty of the poetry broke something inside her. “Not today. Please, God, not today.”

“Leave the light off,” he murmured, his gaze drifting, the edges of her silhouette blurring into a soft, featureless mist.

The room was fading, the edges of the tatami mats dissolving into gray smoke. “Go home... to your family. Do not let the last thing you see... be a man who forgot how to live.”

“I’m not leaving you alone in the dark!” she wept, bending double. She buried her face into the crook of her arm against the edge of his futon, her shoulders shaking violently as the dam broke. “I can’t— leave you like this. You’ve been alone for so long. Please, Higuruma, just let me stay until…”

“I am not alone,” he whispered.

And he wasn’t.

As the dizziness reached a beautiful, numbing crescendo—as his vision liquefied into a vast, lilac haze—the agonizing friction in his lungs suddenly smoothed out.

The sound of Shizumi’s sobbing began to distance itself, fading out like a radio station losing its signal, replaced by a profound, heavy quiet.

The memory of the courtroom, the sterile hospital corridors, and the five years of heavy, suffocating black suits evaporated into the dark, but he did not look backward.

In those final, precious seven minutes where the dying brain flings open its windows to catch the last light of existence, Hiromi did not walk through the cemetery of his past. He did not look at the blood on his hands or the cold tiles of the courtroom floor, instead, his mind built a tomorrow as the light in his eyes was no longer the dying amber of a Tokyo sunset; it was the brilliant, unfiltered gold of a Sunday afternoon in mid-May.

The grass beneath him was lush and deep green, cool and prickling gently against his skin and there was no pain in his ribs, no burning in his throat.

His lungs expanded fully, easily, drinking in the sweet, heavy scent of real lavender floating from a nearby garden bed. He took a breath—a massive, clean, unhindered breath—and it didn’t hurt. “Hiromi, look at him! He has your nose when he frowns like that.”

He was lying down, his head resting heavily, peacefully in your lap and he could feel the small, rhythmic movement of your thighs beneath his head, the gentle, slow stroke of your fingers through his hair—long before the sickness had taken it, back when it was thick and dark.

Your thumb traced the line of his jaw, your skin warm and smelling of the citrus soap he used to buy for you as a few yards away, near the shade of a massive elm tree, a toddler with soft, dark curls was chasing a yellow butterfly.

The boy’s small legs tangled in the high grass, sending him tumbling down with a high-pitched, musical laugh that echoed across the field.

A nanny sat on a nearby bench, watching over the child with a quiet, distant smile, leaving the two of you entirely alone in your sanctuary. “He’s stubborn, just like you,” you murmured as you leaned down, your face hovering over his, blocking out the sun.

He could see the tiny amber flecks in your eyes, the absolute safety of your smile, the way your hair fell forward to brush against his cheek. “You always bury yourself in those briefs, Hiromi, but look what happens when you actually leave the office!”

Hiromi reached up, his hand didn’t shake, and it wasn’t bruised by IV lines or thinned to the bone as he cupped the side of your face, his thumb brushing over your cheekbone, feeling the solid, undeniable reality of you as a soft, breathless laugh broke from his chest—a sound he hadn’t made in five lifetimes, a sound that felt foreign and beautiful on his tongue.

Tears pricked the corners of his eyes, but they weren’t the tears of a dying man in a dark room. They were bright, clean, and full of a profound, unadulterated joy. “I’m here…” he whispered to you, his eyes crinkling as he looked up into your face. “I’m finally here. I won’t go back to that cramped room again… I promise you, the office can burn.”

“The court can burn. I don’t care about any of it… anymore…”

You leaned down further, pressing your lips softly to his forehead, right where the grey knitted hat should have been. Your breath was warm against his skin. “Good,” you whispered against his brow, your voice wrapping around him like a blanket. “Then stay. Just stay with us…”

“I will,” he swore, closing his eyes as your fingers resumed their slow, comforting trace through his hair. “... I’m staying right here.”

In the dim, silent bedroom, the rattle in Higuruma’s throat stopped as his chest gave one final, long, shuddering sigh, collapsing inward and remaining perfectly still.

The harsh, mechanical scraping of his breath was replaced by an absolute, crushing silence that filled the corners of the room. His fingers, which had been twitching weakly against the cool, empty sheet on your side of the bed, relaxed.

They uncurled slowly, turning open and empty toward the ceiling, resting in a gesture of quiet surrender as Shizumi slowly lifted her head from the edge of the mattress. The silence was louder than his breathing had ever been as she looked up, her face streaked with tears, her breath trembling as she looked at his face.

The tension was entirely gone from his brow as the lines of agony, the heavy furrows of guilt that he had carried for years, had been smoothed away by an invisible hand.

The shadow of that beautiful, phantom smile remained touched upon his pale, cold lips, even as his eyes went glass-flat and fixed on the nothingness of the wall.

She reached out, her hand shaking violently, and gently pulled the grey knitted hat down over his eyes, hiding the stillness.

Shizumi collapsed against the side of the futon, burying her face in her hands as her sobs finally broke through the quiet house. He had chased the law until it broke him, and then he had chased a ghost until the earth claimed him back.

Higuruma had spent his last years mourning over someone for longer than he knew them, but in the end, the dark hadn’t caught him.

You had.

normal + timeskip au sfw short drabble mutual pining tooth rotting fluff soft angst scar tending + gentle caretaking unlabeled rls fem reader 11.9k words

The heavy, rhythmic crash of the waves against the shore of Kuantan’s beach was the only sound that dared to puncture the thick, suffocating silence between you. The air was thick, heavy with the humid warmth of Malaysia, carrying the sharp, salty tang of the sea mixed with the faint, comforting scent of the sunscreen you had applied to his uninjured skin earlier.

Underneath it all, if you leaned in close enough, there was still the faint, bitter smell of sterile hospital sheets and old ointment that never truly left either of you as you stood right behind Kento Nanami’s wheelchair, your boots sinking slightly into the soft, shifting sand.

The heat radiated off the ground, a contrast to the cool, mechanical weight of the bionic prosthesis replacing your left arm. It thrummed with a low, barely perceptible vibration against the rubber handles of his chair.

Your left ear was gone, the scarred tissue hidden beneath the careful drape of your hair, a permanent reminder of the price you paid to pull him from the brink of Mahito’s touch.

But you had saved him, and he was here.

Nanami sat quietly, his single visible eye closed shut against the brilliant glare of the setting sun. The left side of his body—once immaculate and strictly tailored—was a tapestry of tight, gnarled, ash-black burn scars that crept up his neck and mapped across his jaw as he wore a dark patch over his ruined left eye, and a heavy, black leather glove covered his left hand to protect the sensitive, damaged skin.

Even in retirement, even in a wheelchair, he held himself with that same rigid, unyielding dignity. A sudden gust of wind swept across the coast, catching his golden strands of hair and sending them whipping wildly across his face as you leaned forward, your right hand reaching out.

Your fingers gently brushed the stray, blonde fringe upward, sweeping it away from his scarred brow. The texture of his hair was soft, contrasting sharply with the coarse, uneven heat of the burn tissue just millimeters away on his temple, “You need to get a haircut, Kento,” you murmured, your voice carrying a soft, teasing lilt despite the heavy weight in your chest.

“Your fringe is reaching well below your eyes now. You won’t even be able to see the ocean.”

Nanami didn’t open his eye immediately. Instead, his brow furrowed slightly, a familiar, deep line appearing between his eyes. The book resting on his lap—a heavy, leather-bound novel he had been pretending to read while you pushed him down the boardwalk—remained closed under his gloved right hand. “It is fine,” he finally spoke, his voice a deep, gravelly baritone that vibrated right through the humid air.

It was a little rougher than it used to be, a little slower, but it was entirely him. “There is no schedule to keep anymore. Appearance is... a secondary concern.”

“Is that so?” you replied, your fingers lingering just a second too long near his hairline, feeling the contrast of the sea breeze against his skin. “The Kento Nanami I know would never tolerate a sloppy silhouette.”

He slowly opened his right eye, the sharp, dark iris locking onto yours with an intensity that made the breath catch in your throat. He didn’t look away, his gaze heavy and thick with an unspoken, simmering tension that had been building between you two ever since the smoke cleared in Shibuya.

It was the tension of two survivors who had traded pieces of their own flesh just to keep the other breathing. “The Kento Nanami you knew died in that basement,” he said softly, though there was no self-pity in his tone—only his trademark, brutal honesty. “What is left is simply a man enjoying a very expensive, very quiet retirement thanks to you.”

His gaze drifted down to your left side, staring fixedly at the place where your ear used to be, hidden beneath your hair, and then down to the metallic sheen of your bionic arm resting on the handle of his chair as the air between you grew hot, charged with a lingering, suffocating heat that had nothing to do with the Malaysian sun.

A small, breathless laugh escaped you. “You know… I could do it for you again, like last time.”

Nanami’s gloved left hand twitched against the pages of his book as the leather creaked, a sharp, tight sound that cut through the monotonous roar of the ocean. Even through his wire-rimmed glasses, which sat slightly askew on his scarred nose, his gaze felt heavy.

It was a physical weight, pressing into you, stirring the thick, unresolved tension that always seemed to hang between you both in the quiet spaces. “You cut it unevenly on the right side last time,” he noted dryly, though there was no real malice in it.

Just the familiar, pedantic stubbornness of a man who refused to let his broken body break his standards. “I looked like a poorly groomed cadet for a week.”

“I was working with one hand and a pair of kitchen shears,” you countered, stepping closer until your knee brushed against the side of his wheelchair.

The heat radiating off him was immense, a contrast to the cool sea breeze that was beginning to chill the back of your neck. “Cut me some slack.”

Nanami lifted his right hand—the uninjured one, free of a glove—and reached back. His large, warm palm cupped the side of your face, his thumb brushing just below your cheekbone. His touch was firm, grounding, and completely devoid of his usual reservations. “... You shouldn’t have jumped in,” he whispered, his eye darkening with a profound, quiet emotion that mirrored the restless sea behind him.

“You should have run with Itadori. Look at what you traded for a retired man’s life.”

“And let you have all the peace and quiet down here by yourself?” You leaned into his touch, your own hand resting over his, feeling the steady, calm pulse in his wrist as the phantom ache of your missing arm seemed to fade against the sheer reality of his warmth. “Not a chance.”

A ghost of a smile tugged at the unscarred right corner of his lips. He didn't pull his hand away, and neither did you, leaving the two of you frozen in the golden light, listening to the tide pull the sand out to sea. “Besides, I didn’t trade anything I wasn’t willing to lose,” you said, your voice steady despite the hammering of your heart.

You leaned into his touch slightly, your gaze locking onto his single, piercing eye. “If anything, I’d do it again, Kento. Every single time.”

Nanami’s thumb stroked the inside of your wrist, a slow, deliberate pressure over your pulse point as the tension hung between you, taut as a wire, filled with things left unsaid in the dark of hospital rooms and quiet evenings.

For a long moment, the only sound was the heavy thud of the waves, crashing against the shore over and over again, as the last of the sunlight died out as the salt in the air always tasted a bit heavier right before sunset.

It clung to the back of your throat, a thick, humid weight that smelled of roasting kelp, hot sand, and the distant, metallic tang of the tide pulling away from the shore of Kuantan.

Beneath your right hand, the rubber grips of Kento Nanami’s wheelchair were warm, baked by a tropical sun that was finally dipping below the horizon. Your left hand—or rather, the matte-black titanium alloy that had replaced it—rested against your thigh.

The internal servos hummed so faintly that only you could hear it, a constant, low vibration that mimicked the pulse you no longer had on that side as you moved at a deliberate, slow pace along the elevated wooden boardwalk that skirted the edge of the beach.

The planks groaned softly beneath your weight and the rolling wheels, a rhythmic creak-thump, creak-thump that kept time with the distant crashing of the waves. “The wind is picking up,” you murmured, leaning down slightly so your voice wouldn't be completely lost to the sea. “The locals say it brings in the monsoon moisture earlier than usual this time of year.”

“But it’s a relief from the midday heat, isn’t it?”

Nanami didn’t answer right away as he sat rigidly in the chair, a posture that even a devastating defeat in Shibuya and a forced retirement hadn’t been able to break.

His right eye was closed, the pale lashes resting against his cheek. The left side of his face, however, was a landscape of jagged, violent history as the skin there was a mosaic of deep, puckered crimson and shiny, dark scar tissue that stretched all the way down his neck, disappearing beneath the collar of his linen shirt.

A stark black eyepatch covered his left socket, and his left hand, resting on the open pages of a novel in his lap, was encased in a heavy, black leather glove. Even in the tropical heat, he kept it covered.

A young couple walked past, the man slowing his steps to stare openly at the left side of Nanami’s body. Whispers floated back to you on the breeze, sharp and intrusive.

“Look at his face...” the woman whispered, pulling her partner’s arm to drag him along, though her own eyes remained glued to the heavy scarring. “An accident, maybe? Fire? It looks so… raw.”

“Gotta be a fire,” the man murmured back, loud enough to carry over the wind. “Half his hair is gone on that side, too. Man, that’s rough… looks like a monster got a hold of him.”

Nanami didn’t look at them as his posture remained rigidly upright, his jaw clenched so tightly that the scarred, puckered crimson skin on his left cheek pulled taut, stretching the severe lines where tissue had been lost to Mahito’s idle transfiguration and Jogo’s flames.

His gloved left hand gripped the armrest of the wheelchair, the black leather creaking under the sudden force of his strength. A few feet ahead, a mother quickly ushered her young son to the opposite side of the boardwalk, placing her body between the boy and the wheelchair.

“Don’t stare, Leo,” she scolded in a rushed hiss, though she herself couldn't help but cast a pitying, slightly unnerved glance back. “It’s impolite.”

“But Mommy, what happened to him?” the boy asked loudly, pointing a small finger. “Is he burned?”

You stopped the chair for a moment, stepping closer to Nanami’s right side to block the child's view, your chest tightening with a protective, fierce anger as you reached down with your right hand and gently brushed his golden fringe away from his forehead.

Your fingers lingered for a second too long against his brow, feeling the dry heat of his skin, before you smoothed the hair upward. “Ignore them, Kento,” you said softly, your voice dropping into a tone meant only for him.

You leaned in closer, blocking his view of the passing crowd, letting him breathe in the familiar scent of your soap rather than the stale sea air. “You’re still perfect exactly the way you are. Don’t let people who know nothing of what you carried make you look away.”

Nanami’s single hazel eye softened just a fraction behind his wire-rimmed glasses, though he kept his gaze fixed ahead on the horizon as he exhaled a long, heavy breath, the tension in his broad shoulders melting away just a fraction under the touch of your fingers.

“You are far too idealistic,” he rumbled, his deep voice carrying that familiar, tired fondness. “The world is inherently superficial, Y/N… but I suppose I cannot argue with your stubbornness.”

The heavy, lingering warmth between the two of you was suddenly shattered by a loud, echoing crash from behind—the sound of someone tripping over a stray cooler, followed by a frantic, incredibly familiar shout.

“Hey! Out of the way! Watch out, watch out—!”

You immediately turned around, a massive smile breaking across your face. Raising your bionic hand, you waved it high in the air, the metal fingers gleaming in the twilight as Nanami whipped his head around so fast his glasses slid slightly down the bridge of his nose.

His right eye widened in genuine shock as a tall, broad-shouldered boy with spiky pinkish-blonde hair came sprinting down the boardwalk, weaving through the startled tourists like a maniac. “Y/N! Nanami-san!” Yuji Itadori screamed at the top of his lungs, a giant, goofy grin plastered across his face as he skidded to a halt right in front of you, chest heaving, his arms absolutely loaded with bags and packages.

“Yuji!” you cheered, the sheer joy of seeing him making your heart swell. It always felt this way—like a pair of parents seeing their kid finally come home after a long, dangerous journey.

He looked healthy, vibrant, and so full of life compared to the dark days of the war as Yuji immediately dropped his bags onto a nearby bench and turned to Nanami, throwing his arms out wide with boundless energy. “Nanami-san! Give me a hug! I missed you guys so much!”

Nanami stared at him for a flat, unblinking three seconds. He raised his right hand, palm flat, effectively stopping the boy in his tracks. “Absolutely not. It is far too humid for unhygienic displays of physical affection, Itadori.”

Yuji didn’t even look disappointed; he just laughed, his bright, boisterous chuckles drawing even more stares from the passersby. Instead, he gripped Nanami’s right hand, giving it a firm, respectful handshake that made the older man’s lips twitch with a hidden smile.

Then, Yuji turned to you, his eyes softening as he took in your missing left arm and the way your hair was carefully parted to hide your missing ear. Without asking, he stepped forward and wrapped his thick arms around you, burying his face into your shoulder.

He smelled like sweat, Tokyo convenience stores, and laundry detergent as he squeezed you tight, but with a gentle care that showed he knew exactly how fragile you both still were.

“I missed you, Y/N,” he whispered against your shoulder, sounding so much like a kid seeking comfort from home, “I missed you too, kiddo,” you replied softly, hugging him back tightly with your right arm, while your bionic left hand patted his back with a dull, heavy thud.

Yuji pulled away, beaming as he grabbed the items from the bench. “Look, I brought gifts! Direct from Japan, I had to carry them through the airport so carefully.”

He proudly handed you a massive, beautifully wrapped bouquet of fresh white lilies and carnations. “These are for both of you, to brighten up your place!”

Then, he dug into a bag and pulled out a soft, perfectly baked loaf of milk bread, handing it to Nanami. “I remembered this was your favorite from that one bakery in Tokyo, Nanami-san. I made sure to buy it right before my flight.”

Nanami looked down at the bread in his lap, his expression unreadable for a moment before he looked up at Yuji as the corners of his mouth curved upward into a rare, genuine smile. “Thank you, Yuji. Your attention to detail is appreciated.”

“And for you, Y/N!” Yuji grinned, handing you a chilled styrofoam box. “A whole box of those super sweet, expensive strawberries from Japan. I know how much you love them.”

“Oh, Yuji, you shouldn’t have,” you said, pulling him into another quick, one-armed hug, which he gladly returned as Nanami watched the two of you, a quiet, protective warmth radiating from his posture as he adjusted his glasses.

“Alright, let me push!” Yuji insisted, stepping behind the wheelchair and grabbing the handles with absolute enthusiasm. “You guys gotta tell me everything about Malaysia. Is the food good? … Is it always this humid?”

As the three of you set off down the boardwalk, you consciously fell into step on Nanami’s right side. With your left ear completely gone, you needed to be positioned so that both his deep rumbles and Yuji’s energetic chatter could hit your right ear clearly.

The pace was slow, matching the lazy drift of the evening tide. Yuji pushed the chair with steady, careful hands, chattering away about his new missions and how Tokyo was rebuilding, his voice a comforting, familiar anchor.

On your left, Nanami listened quietly, occasionally throwing in a dry, sarcastic remark that had Yuji bursting into laughter. “Man, Megumi and Nobara wanted to come so bad,” Yuji said, leaning over the handles of the chair a bit. “But they were saddled with some paperwork and a minor curse cleanup in Kyoto.”

“They sent their best, though. Nobara literally threatened to break my legs if I didn’t take a million pictures of you guys to prove you’re actually resting.”

“Please inform Kugisaki that her threats of physical violence are unnecessary, though entirely expected,” Nanami sighed, though his tone lacked any real bite. “We are resting. As you can see, I am entirely sedentary.”

“Yeah, but you still look like you're plotting a budget report in your head, Nanami-san,” Yuji teased, poking the back of the older man’s shoulder. “You gotta relax your face! Look at the ocean!”

“My face is perfectly relaxed, Itadori. This is simply how my features are arranged.”

You let out a bright laugh, nudging Yuji with your elbow. “Don’t push him, Yuji. If he smiles too much on a Tuesday evening, it disrupts the space-time continuum. We wouldn’t want anyone having to fix that.”

Nanami shot you a look from the side, a mix of dry exasperation and deep affection. “I am sitting right here. I can hear both of you plotting against my character.”

“We’re not plotting, we’re observing!” Yuji grinned, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He slowed his pace just a bit, looking down at Nanami, then across at you.

The playful energy faded just a fraction, replaced by something much more grounded and profound. “Seriously, though... you both look good. Different, yeah, but good. When I look at you guys now, I don’t see the blood anymore… I just see home.”

Your breath hitched slightly at his words. You reached over and gave Yuji’s forearm a gentle squeeze. “We feel the same way looking at you, kiddo. You’ve grown up so much.”

“I had good teachers,” Yuji said softly, blinking back a sudden wave of emotion before quickly brightening up again. “Oh! Speaking of home, Y/N, you have got to tell me what you did to this bionic arm.”

“Did you let Shoko mess with the wiring, or did you get a private engineer? Because the matte black looks incredibly cool. Can it shoot lasers? Tell me it shoots lasers!”

“No lasers, Yuji,” you laughed, lifting the arm to flex the metallic fingers, the gears whirring with a soft, satisfying click. “Though I did threaten to have them install a built-in coffee maker just to spite Kento’s morning routine.”

“That would be a gross misuse of prosthetic medical technology,” Nanami interjected seamlessly, though his right eye danced with amusement. “And a terrible waste of good beans.”

“See? He’s prioritizing the beans over my convenience,” you complained dramatically to Yuji.

“Hey, Nanami-san takes his coffee seriously, I can’t take sides on that one!” Yuji laughed, pushing the chair smoothly over a slight bump in the wood. “But man, I’m just glad we can walk like this. Just... talking about normal stuff. No curses, no domain expansions. Just bread, strawberries, and the beach.”

As you walked, Nanami’s right hand reached out sideways, his fingers brushing against your hip. You looked down, and he silently offered his hand to you as you slipped your right hand into his, your fingers intertwining tightly.

The lingering, heated tension that always existed between you and Nanami felt different now—it wasn’t just born of trauma and survival anymore. Looking at Yuji walking ahead, hearing his bright laughter ring out against the crash of the waves, and feeling the solid, warm grip of the man you loved beside you, it finally felt like peace.

The front door of the quiet, coastal home slid shut with a soft, heavy thud, instantly locking out the humid rush of the Malaysian evening. Inside, the air smelled intensely of fresh cedarwood, dried lavender, and the faint, sweet tang of the ocean that always managed to cling to the curtains.

It was a sanctuary, cool and dimly lit by the golden hour filtering through the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Make yourself at home, Yuji,” you said, your voice echoing gently off the high ceilings.

You cradled the heavy bouquet of white lilies and carnations in your right arm, while your bionic left hand securely held the styrofoam box of expensive Japanese strawberries. “Wow... this place is incredible,” Yuji breathed, taking off his shoes at the genkan with a reverence that felt profoundly sweet.

He looked around like a kid stepping into a museum, his eyes wide and bright as Nanami unbuckled himself from the wheelchair with a slow, practiced patience. Though his left leg still carried a heavy stiffness from the extensive muscle damage, he insisted on walking once inside the house.

He leaned his right side against the wall for balance, his tall, broad frame casting a long shadow across the polished wooden floorboards. The left side of his body was a quiet testament to what it had cost to stand in this hallway. “Go sit in the living room, Kento,” you murmured, stepping close enough to let your shoulder brush against his uninjured right side.

The proximity sent a sudden, familiar hum of heat through your chest. “I’ll bring the food out.”

Nanami turned his head, his single hazel eye locking onto yours behind his wire-rimmed glasses. The gaze was heavy, thick with a lingering, unsaid depth that always seemed to exist between you two in the quiet spaces of this house. “Do not strain yourself, Y/N,” he rumbled softly, his deep voice sliding over you like a warm weight.

“I’m just washing fruit, counselor. I think my bionic arm can handle it,” you teased softly, offering him a small, reassuring smile before turning toward the kitchen.

In the kitchen, the cool water from the tap splashed against your skin as you carefully washed the strawberries. The rhythmic swish-swish of the water was a soothing background noise to the low, rumbling murmur of conversation drifting from the living room.

You arranged the bright crimson berries on a ceramic plate, their sweet, sugary fragrance instantly filling the small kitchen space. Beside them, you sliced the soft, pillowy milk bread Yuji had brought, the yeasty, comforting scent making your mouth water.

Out in the living room, Yuji sank into the plush couch, leaning back with a contented sigh before turning to Nanami, who sat in the armchair opposite him as Nanami had crossed his legs, his posture inherently formal despite the casual setting, his right hand resting loosely on his knee.

That was when Yuji’s eyes caught the glint of silver. On the ring finger of Nanami’s right hand sat a simple, unadorned silver band as it caught the amber twilight perfectly, gleaming against his pale, calloused skin.

Yuji blinked, his jaw dropping slightly as his eyes darted between the ring and Nanami’s face. “Wait... Nanami-san! Are you and Y/N... married?!”

Nanami looked down at his hand, his thumb unconsciously sliding over the smooth metal. A rare, incredibly soft smile tugged at the right corner of his lips, though he gently shook his head. “No, Yuji. We are not married.”

“Eh? But the ring!” Yuji leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his face a mix of pure curiosity and excitement.

“Y/N gave this to me the day I was officially discharged from the hospital,” Nanami explained, his voice dropping into a lower, gentler register that he only ever used within these walls. “It was a reminder that the war was over. A marker for a new beginning… but it is not a wedding band in the traditional sense.”

Yuji slumped back a bit, a genuinely pensive look crossing his youthful features. “Man... you guys really deserve to get married, though.”

“After everything you’ve been through, having a big wedding, signing the papers, making it official... you both deserve that kind of happiness.”

Nanami let out a quiet, rhythmic huff through his nose—not of dismissal, but of profound understanding. “We have discussed it, and we both disagreed on the necessity of it. A marriage license is merely official paperwork, Yuji.”

“Legalities and societal expectations cannot define what exists between Y/N and myself. Love is not proven by a ceremony; it is proven by how we choose to care for each other’s ghosts every single day.”

Just then, you stepped back into the living room, balancing the plate of strawberries and milk bread with your right hand while holding three tall, condensation-beaded cups of water with the matte-black fingers of your bionic left hand as Yuji immediately scrambled to his feet, his reflexes as sharp as ever.

“Ah! Let me help you with that, Y/N!” he said quickly, taking the heavy plate from your grip and setting it gently on the low coffee table.

“Thank you, Yuji,” you smiled, sinking onto the soft cushions of the couch right next to Nanami. The moment you sat, the heat radiating from Nanami’s side seemed to draw you in. You didn’t hesitate to lean your right shoulder against his uninjured side, your bodies slotting together with an effortless familiarity.

The lingering, heated tension of just being near him—knowing how close you had both come to losing this—warmed you from the inside out as you reached down and took a bite of a strawberry, the burst of sweet, tart juice a nostalgic explosion of flavor on your tongue. “Oh, these are incredible, Yuji! Absolutely perfect.”

Yuji grinned, but as he sat back down, his eyes began to wander again as he looked up at the high, exposed wooden beams of the ceiling, the way the large windows perfectly framed the crashing ocean waves outside, and the minimalist, cozy layout of the room.

The design was seamless, practical, yet deeply warm as his wandering gaze caught your attention. “Do you like the design, kiddo?” you asked, resting your arm along the back of the couch, your fingers just barely brushing the fabric near Nanami’s shoulder.

Yuji’s head snapped back to you, and a giant, toothy grin broke across his face as he nodded his head excitedly. “I love it! It feels so... peaceful. Like, it doesn’t feel like a standard hotel or a regular house. It feels like you guys combined! It’s awesome!”

Nanami shifted slightly, his right hand reaching out to find yours, his long fingers intertwining with your warm, real ones, squeezing gently. “That is because we built and designed it entirely on our own,” Nanami explained, his chest rumbling against your shoulder as he spoke.

“Every plank of wood, the positioning of the windows, the layout of the kitchen... Y/N and I chose it all. We wanted a space that belonged solely to us, far away from the world we left behind.”

You looked at Nanami, meeting his soft hazel eye behind his glasses, feeling the solid, grounding heat of his hand in yours. Sitting here with the boy you had fought so hard to protect, in the house you had built with the man you loved, the lingering shadows of the past finally felt entirely out of reach as Yuji sat there for a moment, his chest heaving with a deep, happy breath as he looked at your intertwined hands.

The scent of the fresh strawberries and the yeasty warmth of the milk bread filled the space between you all, heavy and comforting. He reached down, grabbing a slice of the bread and tearing it in half with a soft rip, stuffing a massive piece into his mouth. “Mmph! This is so good!” Yuji cheered around his mouthful, his cheeks puffing out like a squirrel.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Itadori-kun,” Nanami chided softly, though his tone held that familiar, parental fondness that had replaced his old, rigid sternness as he adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses with his gloved left hand, the black leather creaking quietly against the metal frame.

“You will choke.”

Yuji swallowed quickly, turning his bright eyes back to the two of you. “Sorry, sorry! It’s just... seeing you guys like this, in this house... it makes me really happy. When I was running over here from the station, I was kind of worried, you know?”

“I thought maybe things would be weird, or sad, because of... well, everything. But walking in here, it just feels like a real home.”

You smiled, the cold texture of a strawberry sweet and tart against your tongue as you took another bite as you swallowed, leaning a bit heavier into Nanami’s uninjured right side, feeling the steady, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest. “It took a lot of work to get it to feel this way, Yuji,” you said softly.

Your voice carried a gentle weight, your right hand turning slightly within Nanami’s grip so your fingers could trace the edge of his silver band. “For the first few months, we didn’t even have the furniture fully set up.”

“We just slept on a mattress in the middle of the living room because the sound of the ocean was the only thing that could drown out the quiet.”

Nanami’s thumb stroked the back of your hand, a slow, deliberate pressure that instantly grounded you, melting away the phantom chill of that memory. “The adjustment period was... inefficient,” he rumbled, his deep voice sliding through the quiet room like a low chord.

“But necessity breeds adaptation. We learned to construct a life that accommodated our new parameters.”

Yuji looked between the two of you, his expression softening into something profoundly sweet, his eyes shimmering with an emotion that looked a lot like pride. He looked like a kid who had spent years worrying about his parents, finally seeing them resting in the sun after a lifetime in the dark. “You guys really did it,” Yuji whispered, his voice cracking just a little bit.

He rubbed the back of his neck, a massive, watery grin breaking across his face. “You actually made it to Malaysia. You’re living the dream, Nanami-san, both of you!”

“We are,” Nanami said. It was a simple, definitive statement. He turned his head toward you, his single hazel eye locking onto yours with an intensity that made the air between you feel thick, charged with that lingering, heated tension that never truly left the quiet spaces of your lives.

His face, half-ruined by jagged crimson scars, was completely open to you. “Because we are here together.”

You looked back at him, your heart hammering against your ribs, entirely captivated by the profound devotion in his gaze. The soft shhhhh of the waves outside seemed to fade into the background, leaving only the warmth of his skin against yours and the sweet, lingering scent of lilies in the air.

Yuji sniffled loudly, entirely ruining the heavy, romantic silence as he grabbed a strawberry and threw it into his mouth. “Man, you guys are gonna make me cry! This is the best trip ever. I’m gonna eat all your fruits if you keep being this sweet!”

A breathless laugh escaped you, the sudden warmth breaking the tension as you shook your head at him. “Eat as much as you want, kiddo. We have plenty.”

The shrill, cheerful chime of your phone suddenly shattered the quiet warmth of the living room. The sound felt jarringly normal, a stark contrast to the heavy, profound silence that used to follow a ringing device during the war—back when a ringing phone meant someone was dead, someone was dying, or you were being sent to ensure neither of those things happened in vain.

You pulled the device from your pocket, your eyes scanning the screen. It was your boss from the local flower shop just a few blocks down the boardwalk; a peaceful, low-stress job you had taken up to pass the time and help tourists select vibrant tropical bouquets.

It was a mundane life, full of soft petals and easy smiles, intentionally devoid of blood and cursed energy. “Ah, I have to take this,” you murmured, the fabric of your clothes rustling as you slid off the plush cushions of the couch.

Before you stepped away, you paused as it was an automatic reaction, a habit born from months of survival and a deep, unspoken devotion.

Leaning over the side of the armchair where Nanami sat, you reached out. With your right hand, you gently brushed past the frame of his wire-rimmed glasses to smooth down a few stray, sandy-blonde hairs that had fallen out of place on his right side.

The texture of his hair was soft, contrasting sharply, brutally, against the thick, jagged ridges of scarred tissue just an inch away on his left cheek—the permanent, melted reminder of Mahito’s idle transfiguration that had nearly claimed his life.

Nanami’s single hazel eye tracked your movements with an intense, quiet gravity. There was a lifetime of unsaid words in that gaze, a heavy weight that always seemed to linger between you.

Lowering your head naturally, you pressed a soft, lingering kiss directly to his forehead, right above his brow. It was brief, gentle, and utterly routine, but to you and Nanami, it was just how you breathed; it was the unspoken reassurance that you were both still alive, still anchored to the same earth.

Yuji, who was right in the middle of reaching for another strawberry, froze entirely as his hand hovered in mid-air, a strawberry clamped between his fingers, his jaw dropping as his eyes went wide.

A faint, dusty pink color bloomed across his cheeks as he stared in absolute, respectful awe. To Yuji, the gesture wasn’t casual at all. His mind immediately went into overdrive, his thoughts racing at a million miles an hour. ‘Wait, a forehead kiss?!’ Yuji’s internal dialogue screamed, his eyes darting between you and the older sorcerer. ‘Hold on, hold on. Is that... is that what they do? Did I just interrupt something?’

He looked like he had just witnessed a secret, holy ritual, his brain completely short-circuiting as he tried to process the effortless, casual intimacy.

“I have to head into the shop for a bit, kiddo,” you said, breaking Yuji out of his spiral as you turned to him with a warm, easy smile as you grabbed your keys with your left hand.

The bionic metal clicked softly against the brass keyring—a quiet reminder of the price you had paid during Shibuya. “Take care of Nanami for me while I’m gone, alright? Don’t let him scheme about doing any paperwork.”

“Y–Yeah! You got it, Y/N! Drive safe!” Yuji stammered, his voice cracking slightly as he waved a hand enthusiastically as a massive, supportive, yet slightly panicked grin broke across his face but Nanami didn’t say a word, although his gaze followed you all the way to the front door, the heavy, lingering heat of his undivided attention pinning you until the wooden door clicked shut behind you.

The silence that settled over the living room after your departure was thick, carrying the sweet, heavy scent of the sliced milk bread and the cool, salty draft from the patio doors as Yuji stared at the closed door for a long moment, the gears in his head still visibly turning as he tried to analyze the casual gravity of that forehead kiss.

Finally, he leaned back into the couch, a soft, incredibly genuine, yet slightly teasing smile softening his features. “Man... you guys are really, really close, aren’t you? Like... that was intense, Nanami-san. It was like watching a romance movie.”

Nanami adjusted his glasses with his right hand, his thumb resting against the silver ring on his finger. He didn’t acknowledge Yuji’s prying tone, instead, he looked out the window, watching the waves crash against the shoreline in a slow, hypnotic rhythm.

“Y/N has been... entirely unwavering,” he rumbled, his deep voice carrying a sudden, heavy resonance that seemed to echo off the cedar walls, instantly pulling the lighthearted energy out of the room.

“Since the moment I woke up in that hospital bed, suffocating under the weight of what I had lost, they have refused to leave my side.” Nanami shifted slightly, the linen of his shirt rustling against the leather of the chair. He looked down at his gloved left hand, his broad shoulders dropping just a fraction.

“But it is an arrangement born of a terrible circumstance. Every time Y/N helps me stretch the stiffened, ruined muscles in my leg, or carefully parts their hair to conceal the ear they lost protecting me in that subway station...”

Nanami’s voice faltered, a raw, bleeding edge of grief cutting through his usual stoicism. “I am… reminded of the burden I have become, I am a ghost occupying a space meant for the living.”

Yuji’s smile vanished completely as his posture straightened, his chest tightening as he listened to the profound bitterness in the older man’s voice. “I cannot entirely rid myself of the guilt, Itadori,” Nanami confessed, his voice dropping into a vulnerable, raspy whisper he would never dare utter if you were in the room.

He stared at his scarred hand, his throat tight. “Y/N is young and still energetic. She deserves to live a life entirely unburdened by the ghosts of jujutsu sorcery, she deserves to… run free, to find someone whole, without having to anchor themselves to a half-broken, disfigured man who can barely walk the boardwalk without drawing pitying stares from strangers.”

“I have tethered her to my own decay.”

The room grew suffocatingly quiet, the sound of the ocean outside filling the gap between them like a mourning shroud as Yuji sat quietly for a moment, his chest aching.

He thought about the scars on his own body, the weight of the people they couldn’t save, and the terrifying reality of what it meant to survive when everyone else was gone.

Then, he let out a soft, heavy breath, looking directly into Nanami’s single eye with a fierce, unwavering maturity that made him look far older than his years, “Nanami-san,” Yuji said, his voice steady and deeply personal. “You’re completely wrong about that!”

Nanami blinked, slightly caught off guard by the boy’s bluntness.

“Y/N doesn’t look at you and see a burden,” Yuji continued, leaning forward, his eyes shining with an emotional intensity that hit Nanami right in the chest. “Think about it. We fought monsters! We saw people get torn apart, we lost Gojo-sensei... we lost so many people… Y/N knows better than anyone that surviving things like that isn’t something you just shrug off and walk away from.”

“She doesn’t look at your scars or your wheelchair as a chore, if anything— she definitely looks at them as proof that you’re still here. That out of everyone we lost... she didn’t lose you.”

Yuji reached out, gesturing toward the kitchen where the strawberries still sat, his voice cracking slightly with the weight of their shared trauma. “If she wanted to be free in the way you’re thinking, she would’ve left a long time ago.”

“She could have run away to the other side of the world, but she didn’t! She built this house with you. She kisses your forehead like you’re the center of their entire universe because, to her, you are!”

“In a world where everything else was destroyed, you’re the only thing that made it out. She isn’t trapped, Nanami-san. She chose this… she chose you because being with you is the only place she actually feels safe.”

“Don’t call yourself a burden for being the reason she’s still holding on.”

Nanami sat entirely frozen, his jaw subtly tightening as Yuji’s words ruthlessly dismantled the rigid, self-sacrificing walls he had spent months building in his mind as a strange, profound warmth bloomed behind his chest, painfully clearing away a layer of the cold, suffocating guilt he had carried for so long.

It hurt—to realize that his self-pity was undermining the fierce, agonizing loyalty you had shown him as his eye widened slightly behind his lenses, looking at Yuji as if truly seeing the boy’s wisdom for the first time.

To break the sudden, heavy emotional tension before it completely overwhelmed them, Yuji shifted back, a mischievous, boyish smirk suddenly replacing his serious expression.

He leaned in closer, lowering his voice playfully, eager to lighten the heavy air. “Besides... did Y/N ever actually find out that you had a massive, secret crush on them back during your high school days at Jujutsu High? Before all the tragedy and stuff?”

Nanami’s entire posture instantly stiffened, his formal, unbending demeanor snapping right back into place like a rubber band. He shot Yuji with a sharp, warning glare, though a telltale hint of deep crimson pricked the unscarred skin of his right ear. “No,” Nanami said flatly, his tone clipping short, the vulnerability from moments before locked away in an instant.

“And they never will. I plan on keeping that piece of information entirely to myself, Itadori.”

“Eh?! Why?!” Yuji whined loudly, throwing his hands up in the air in exasperation, grateful for the return to normalcy. “Nanami-san, come on! You basically have the ultimate green light! It is so incredibly obvious that you guys are completely in love with each other.”

“You’re just... too stubborn to break that fragile boundary! You’re overcomplicating a forehead kiss!”

Nanami crossed his arms tightly over his broad chest, wincing slightly as his left side protested the movement, though his stubborn expression didn’t waver for a second.

“The current dynamic of our relationship is perfectly stable and functional. There is no need to complicate matters with confessions of adolescent sentimentality… we have survived enough complications.”

“You are so hopeless!” Yuji groaned, burying his face in his hands, though his shoulders shook with a fond, helpless laughter as Nanami merely turned his head back toward the window, his hand coming down to rest over the silver ring once more.

The lingering, heated memory of your lips against his forehead still felt warm against his skin—a brand of living, breathing devotion. For the first time in a very long time, he didn’t feel the urge to push the warmth away.

The front door clicked shut with a familiar, heavy thud, and the quiet hum of the air conditioner immediately washed over you, a cool relief against the sticky, salt-rimmed heat of the Malaysian evening.

The house smelled faintly of the sweet, floral scent of jasmine and cut stems that had clung to your clothes from the flower shop, mixed with the rich, comforting scent of the cedar walls as you adjusted the heavy plastic grocery bags in your right hand, while your bionic left arm held a neatly wrapped book against your chest—a special find from a quick detour you had taken to the mall after work.

As you stepped out of the genkan and into the open hallway, the rhythmic, slightly uneven sound of footsteps caught your attention. It was a slow, deliberate drag-step, drag-step coming from the kitchen as you walked in to find Nanami standing by the counter.

He was dressed in a soft, dark gray linen shirt that hung loosely over his broad frame, though the fabric clung tightly to the rigid, uneven contours of his left shoulder. His glasses were pushed up the bridge of his nose, the wire frames catching the dim light of the kitchen as his left leg trembled slightly, a subtle betrayer of the dull, aching pain that always plagued his joints when he stood for too long without his chair.

He was still fiercely getting used to the agony of walking again, his jaw set in a hard, stubborn line as he gripped the edge of the marble island for balance. A wave of tender warmth, laced with a familiar, protective tension, rippled through you as you set the wrapped book down on the bar table and stepped closer.

“Where’s Yuji?” you asked softly, breaking the quiet but Nanami didn’t even look up, his right hand carefully arranging a few kitchen towels. “He is in the guest room,” he rumbled, his deep baritone sending a comforting vibration through the small space.

“He claimed he needed to call Kugisaki and Fushiguro to give them an updated report on our condition. I believe he is currently being yelled at through the receiver.”

A small chuckle escaped your lips as you moved closer to the counter, setting the heavy grocery bags down. The moment you stepped into his space, Nanami’s head turned as his single hazel eye locked onto you behind his lenses, tracking the movement of your hands, then sliding up to the stray hairs catching the kitchen light.

It was a lingering, longing look full of a quiet, burning devotion that he always kept locked behind his teeth. “You should not have carried all of this from the car,” Nanami stated, his tone shifting into that strict, slightly lecturing register.

He immediately stepped forward, his tall frame looming over you as he reached out with his uninjured right hand. “Let me assist you.”

“Kento, your knees are aching. I can hear the stiffness from here,” you murmured, but you knew better than to completely strip him of his agency.

Instead of arguing, you stepped into his right side, your bodies brushing together in a sudden, breathless heat that always lingered between you two when you were this close as you passed him a carton of milk and a few lighter items, but your real, warm right hand found its way to the small of his back.

You pressed your palm firmly against his spine, offering him a silent, steadying support as he leaned his weight forward to reach the bags.

The touch was lingering, your fingers tracing the firm muscle through his shirt, anchoring him against the pain as Nanami’s breath hitched for a fraction of a second, his broad chest rising and falling against your arm, but he didn’t pull away. He accepted the contact, his posture relaxing just a fraction under the heat of your hand.

For a few quiet minutes, the two of you worked in tandem in the slow, domestic rhythm you had built together. The only sounds were the rustle of plastic, the soft clink of glass jars, and the hum of the refrigerator. Nanami was meticulous, his personality shining through the neat, perfectly aligned organization of the groceries.

The dairy products were placed squarely together in the fridge, the labels facing forward, the vegetables sorted into their respective crisper drawers with absolute precision as you watched him from the side, stealing your own long glance at the profile of his face—the smooth, handsome lines of his right side shifting into the severe, tightly puckered crimson burns on his left.

To you, the asymmetry was just a roadmap of his survival, and it only made the aching affection in your chest grow heavier.

Once the bags were empty, you turned to the sink and poured him a tall, cold glass of water as you slid it across the marble bar table toward him, then leaned your hips against the edge of the counter, crossing your arms.

With a subtle movement of your bionic hand, the metal fingers clicking softly against the wood, you slid the wrapped book across the table, right next to his water. “I saw something in the bookstore while I was getting the groceries,” you said softly, your voice carrying a gentle, affectionate undertone. “It caught my attention, and I thought of you.”

Nanami looked down at the package, his brow furrowing slightly behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He opened his mouth, no doubt preparing a logical argument about how you shouldn't be spending your hard-earned money from the flower shop on unnecessary luxuries for him.

“Before you say anything,” you interrupted smoothly, a knowing smile playing on your lips, “it’s just a small gift... and plus, there was a massive discount on it! It would have been a waste to leave it there.”

Nanami went entirely quiet as the strict, unbending ex-salaryman seemed to melt away, replaced by a profound, gentle stillness.

He reached out with his right hand, his long fingers brushing against yours for a lingering, heated second as he took the book.

The deliberate touch sent a soft shiver down your spine as he carefully unwrapped the paper, revealing the crisp, heavy cover of a new historical novel—the exact genre he loved to lose himself in during the quiet afternoons.

His single hazel eye softened completely as he stared down at the title, his thumb tracing the embossed letters as a rare, genuinely beautiful smile graced the right side of his lips, pulling gently at his features.

When he looked up at you, the sheer depth of the emotion in his eye was almost overwhelming, thick with a silent, heavy love that words could never fully capture. “Thank you, Y/N,” he rumbled softly, his voice incredibly thick and human, stripped of all his usual professional armor.

“Your thoughtfulness... is a luxury I am entirely grateful for.”

Nanami set the book down on the smooth marble counter, his long fingers lingering on the cover for a brief second before he reached for the glass pitcher.

The ice rattled softly against the glass—a cool, rhythmic sound that seemed to punctuate the comfortable quiet of the kitchen, “You should sit,” he rumbled softly, his single hazel eye tracking you behind his glasses as he poured a fresh glass of water. His movements were slow, deliberate, and entirely focused on you.

He pushed the condensation-beaded glass across the counter, his uninjured right hand brushing against your bionic one, leaving a trail of warmth on your skin. “How was your day at the shop? I imagine the tourist crowd was quite demanding this evening.”

You took the glass, leaning your hips back against the counter so you were facing him completely. The proximity between you two always felt magnetic; even in a space as ordinary as a kitchen, the air between you felt thick, charged with a quiet, heated intimacy that had taken months to rebuild from the ashes of the war.

“It wasn’t too bad, actually,” you smiled, taking a slow sip as the cold water was a relief against the lingering heat in your throat.

“A lot of couples looking for hibiscus bouquets, and a few families asking for directions to the good sunset spots on the beach. I think I pointed half of Tokyo toward our boardwalk.”

Nanami let out a low, rhythmic huff—a sound that was uniquely his, a soft phantom of his old, dry laugh. He shifted his weight, his left leg giving a small, painful throb that made his jaw tighten for a fraction of a second.

Before he could mask it, you set your glass down and stepped directly into his space, you didn’t ask as you simply slipped your right arm around his waist, letting his broad, heavy frame lean into you for support.

Your bionic left hand rested gently against his chest, feeling the steady, reassuring thud of his heartbeat beneath the linen shirt. Nanami didn’t pull away, instead, he let out a long, ragged exhale, his right arm coming around your shoulders to pull you flush against him.

The contrast between your bodies was staggering—the cool, matte-black metal of your arm against his chest, the smooth skin of your right hand against the rigid, puckered ridges of the burns on his left side.

But here, in the quiet safety of your home, none of it mattered. It just felt like two pieces of a broken world fitting perfectly back together, “You work too hard for a place meant for retirement,” he murmured, his deep baritone vibrating directly against your temple as he rested his chin in your hair.

The scent of him enveloped you completely, “I like keeping busy,” you whispered into his chest, your fingers tightening against his shirt. “And I like coming home to you… it makes the boring parts of the day worth it.”

Nanami’s grip on your shoulder tightened, his fingers digging in with a sudden, longing intensity as he tilted his head down, his breath warm against your cheek. For a long, breathless moment, neither of you spoke.

The only sound was the distant, lazy crash of the ocean waves outside the window and the faint, muffled sound of Yuji’s animated voice laughing from the guest room down the hall.

Slowly, Nanami reached up with his right hand, his thumb gently tracing the line of your jaw, tilting your face up to meet his gaze.

His hazel eye was dark, filled with a fiercely protective, unsaid devotion that made your heart skip a beat, “The house is entirely too quiet when you are not in it,” he confessed, his voice dropping into a rough, intimate whisper meant only for you. “Even with Itadori here... it feels empty until you walk through that door.”

Your breath hitched at the sheer honesty in his voice as you leaned into his touch, your cheek pressing against his palm. The silver ring on his finger felt cool against your skin, a solid reminder of the promise you had made him when he left the hospital—that you were in this together, forever, ghosts and all.

“Well, I’m here now,” you murmured, stepping up slightly on your tiptoes to close the small distance between you. “I’m not going anywhere, Kento.”

Nanami smiled, a genuine, soft curve of his lips that reached his eye, before leaning down to press a slow, deep kiss against yours, sealing the unspoken vows that lived in the quiet spaces of your everyday life.

The scent of lavender soap and the damp, clean warmth of the bathroom followed you out into the cool air of the bedroom. You had changed into a soft, oversized pair of cotton pajamas, your bare feet making a faint, brushing sound against the polished cedar floorboards.

Through the open window, the night had settled completely over the Malaysian coast, bringing with it the steady, rhythmic shush-shush of the tide and the heavy, brine-thick smell of the sea.

Nanami was already waiting in the bed, propped up against a stack of pillows on his side as he wore a loose-fitting, dark gray pajama shirt that sat open at the collar, revealing the sharp demarcation line where his smooth, pale skin surrendered to the thick, uneven landscape of his burn scars.

His wire-rimmed glasses were still on, catching the amber glow of the small bedside lamp as he stared down at the book you had bought him earlier.

In the center of the mattress, stretching perfectly from the headboard to the foot of the bed, lay the long, heavy body pillow. It had been there since the very first night he came home from the hospital. It was a silent, mutual boundary—a physical barrier to ensure that neither of you would accidentally jostle his healing joints or press against his sensitive, newly grafted skin in the dark.

You walked over to the wall switch, flicking off the main overhead light. The room plunged into a soft, intimate twilight, illuminated only by the single lamp as you slid under the cool sheets on your side of the bed, the mattress shifting under your weight.

Your bionic left arm felt heavy and cold against the mattress, contrasting sharply with the residual warmth of your shower, you settled in, pulling the blanket up to your chest and prepared to say your usual goodnight across the divide.

“Y/N.”

Nanami’s deep, textured baritone cut through the quiet rustle of the sheets. He hadn’t turned the page of his book as he slowly closed it, setting it down on his nightstand before reaching up to remove his glasses.

Without the lenses, his single hazel eye looked softer, holding a heavy, unguarded vulnerability that he only ever showed when the rest of the world was asleep.

“Yeah, Kento?” you whispered, turning your head toward him.

He didn’t look away as his gaze lingered on your face, taking in the damp strands of your hair and the quiet, relaxed curve of your shoulders. Slowly, his uninjured right hand reached out, his long fingers resting on the fabric of the body pillow between you.

“Remove it,” he rumbled softly.

You blinked, a sudden wave of confusion mixed with a sharp, fluttering heat rising in your chest. “The pillow? Are you sure? Your leg—your side, Kento. If I roll over in my sleep—”

“I am sure,” he interrupted, his voice dropping into a lower, steadier register that brooked no argument. “The pain has subsided to a manageable degree tonight. And... I find the distance entirely unnecessary this evening.”

The lingering tension in the air became thick, almost heavy enough to breathe as your heart gave a distinct, rhythmic thud against your ribs.

Carefully, using your right hand, you gripped the long pillow and slid it out from between the sheets, dropping it onto the floor beside the bed.

Without the barrier, the expanse of the mattress felt suddenly smaller as the heat radiating from Nanami’s body drifted across the empty space, wrapping around you.

You shifted closer, closing the distance just enough so that you were lying on your side, facing him. He did the same, turning his large frame toward you, his right arm resting bent beneath his pillow as the proximity was intoxicating.

In the dim, amber light, you could see every detail of his face—the handsome, stern lines of his right side, and the severe, puckered crimson texture of his left cheek. “Yuji was in a good mood tonight,” you murmured, your voice low as you broke the heavy silence.

You reached out, your real fingers tentatively tracing the edge of the blanket near his chest. “He looked so happy when he was talking to Nobara and Megumi earlier... I could hear him laughing all the way from the kitchen.”

Nanami let out a soft, rhythmic huff through his nose, his chest rising and falling beneath his shirt. “He possesses a ridiculous amount of energy. It is exhausting just to observe him, however... it is a relief to see that the war has not entirely stripped him of his light.”

“He really missed you, you know,” you said softly, your eyes lifting to meet his. “The way he carried those gifts all the way from Tokyo... he was so proud of that milk bread.”

“He is a thoughtful boy,” Nanami agreed, his hazel eye tracking the movement of your fingers against the sheet. “Extremely undisciplined, loud, and entirely disregardful of personal space... but inherently good.”

A soft, teasing smile tugged at the corners of your lips. The domestic warmth of the moment washed over you, pushing away the lingering ghosts of the past. “You know, the way you lecture him and the way I have to keep making sure he actually eats his vegetables... it’s kind of funny.”

You let out a quiet chuckle, shifting a fraction closer. “We’re basically like his parents at this point, Kento.”

“He’s like our kid.”

The joke hung in the quiet air between you, light and full of affection but Nanami went entirely still. He didn’t answer right away, the slow, deep silence stretching out between you like a taut cord as his gaze locked onto yours, his eye darkening with an intensity that made the breath catch in your throat.

The playful atmosphere suddenly shifted, replaced by a deep, simmering heat that seemed to pull the air right out of the room.

Slowly, deliberately, Nanami reached his right hand across the space that used to hold the pillow. His long, calloused fingers brushed against your cheek, his thumb gently wiping away a stray drop of water from your damp hair.

His touch was incredibly light, almost reverent, as if he were handling something fragile and precious. “If he is our child,” Nanami murmured, his deep voice dropping into a rough, intimate whisper that vibrated right through your skin, “then he is incredibly fortunate…”

“Because he has the most fiercely devoted soul I have ever known looking after him.”

His hand lingered on your jaw, the silver ring on his finger pressing cool against your warm skin, while the heat of his palm sent a shiver straight down your spine.

The unsaid words, the years of hidden longing, and the profound weight of your survival all converged into the space between your lips, leaving the air thick with a beautiful, terrifying promise as the ambient warmth of the room seemed to deepen as the midnight hours crept in, the persistent, rhythmic shush-shush of the tide outside the window serving as the only heartbeat in the quiet house.

The scent of lavender soap on your skin had begun to mingle with the clean, masculine scent of Nanami’s linen sheets—a scent that, for the longest time, you feared you would only ever have to mourn as Nanami’s hand remained anchored on your jaw.

His skin was rough, calloused from years of gripping a blunt blade, yet his touch was lighter than a feather, as if he were terrified that a fraction too much pressure might cause you to vanish into the Malaysian night.

His thumb traced the soft line of your cheekbone, but the quiet rhythm of his breathing changed. It grew heavier, catching in the back of his throat with a fragile, fractured sound that made your chest tighten.

The amber light of the bedside lamp cast long, stark shadows across his chest, emphasizing the jagged, uneven boundaries of the burn scars on his left side.

They were a brutal, warped tapestry of what should have been his grave—ruined skin that pulled tightly against his frame, a constant, silent reminder of how close the dark had come to swallowing him whole, “Y/N,” he rumbled, the sound was low, scraping against the quiet of the room like flint on stone.

He withdrew his hand from your face, and the sudden absence of his warmth felt like a physical ache as his fingers curled loosely against the mattress as he stared up at the dark wooden beams of the ceiling, his jaw tight, his profile carved from a devastating kind of sorrow.

“Itadori spoke to me while you were at the shop this evening.”

You didn’t speak, sensing the sudden, tectonic shift in him as the fragile peace you had been building since arriving in Kuantan felt as though it were balancing on the edge of a knife.

You moved your head to the side against the pillow, shifting your body so you could look at him properly, your eyes tracing the stern view of his uninjured right side, desperate to anchor him before he drifted too far into his own head. “He told me that I was entirely wrong,” Nanami continued, his voice dropping into a slow, deliberate cadence that bled with a profound, exhausting weariness.

His brow furrowed, a faint line appearing between his eyes as he fought to articulate the thoughts that had clearly been festering, rotting away at his resolve all evening. “He insisted that you do not view me as a chore.”

“... But it is difficult to reconcile that with reality.” He closed his single hazel eye for a long moment, his chest rising in a ragged breath. “When I look at you… at what you lost protecting me, the years of your youth swallowed by my ghosts, and then I look at myself... a man who requires assistance simply to navigate a boardwalk…”

“I feel an immense, suffocating guilt. I look at this ruined body, and I feel like a burden that you are simply too kind, too loyal, to rid yourself of.”

The raw honesty in his admission cut through the lingering warmth of the bed, leaving a sharp, heavy ache in your chest that made it hard to breathe.

It was the old Nanami—the man who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders and believed he deserved none of its grace, as you slid closer across the mattress, closing the final few inches of distance until your right shoulder was pressed flush against his uninjured right side, offering him every ounce of your own warmth.

“Kento,” you whispered, your voice fracturing slightly, carrying a fierce, quiet intensity that demanded his attention. “Look at me, please?”

He hesitated for a fraction of a second, a tremor running through his broad shoulders, before he slowly turned his head on the pillow to face you.

Without his glasses, stripped of the corporate armor and the sorcerer’s guise, his single hazel eye looked incredibly wide, entirely unprotected, and glistening with a vulnerability that broke your heart. “You are not a burden,” you said, each word deliberate, weighted with an absolute, desperate certainty. You reached out, placing your hand over his heart, feeling its steady, miraculous thudding against your palm.

“You never could be, we fought through hell together, Kento. We bled until we had nothing left, and we survived.”

“I don’t help you because I have to, or because I feel some hollow obligation to a man I used to know… I do it because I love you. Because being right here, next to you in this house, is the only place I have ever felt entirely safe.”

“Your scars aren’t a mistake, Kento. They’re just proof that you stayed with me.”

“... They are proof that I got to keep you.”

Nanami’s jaw relaxed just a fraction, a long, shaky exhale escaping his lips as your words washed over him, a soothing balm on a wound that ran far deeper than the physical burns.

The tight, defensive line of his shoulders softened against the mattress, the crushing weight of his guilt visibly lifting, if only for tonight, in the quiet space between you as he stared at you for a long, quiet moment, the deep silence stretching between you until a phantom of a smile—soft, exhausted, but devastatingly tender—touched the right corner of his mouth.

“You possess a remarkable capacity for stubbornness,” he murmured softly, his rich baritone wrapping around you like a heavy blanket on a cold night.

He looked away then, his gaze drifting toward the open window where the moonlight silvered the crests of the ocean waves. “Yu Haibara would have loved it here.”

The sudden, unexpected mention of his late best friend from your shared high school days made your heart soften into something aching and liquid.

The grief was always there, a quiet third resident in your home, it felt like twilight as you stayed perfectly still, listening as Nanami let out a quiet, nostalgic breath. “He would have found Kuantan entirely mesmerizing,” Nanami noted softly, his eye crinkling slightly at the corner with a fondness he so rarely permitted himself to feel.

“The heat, the food, the ocean... he would have embraced all of it without hesitation. And... he would be teasing me relentlessly right now.”

You tilted your head, your curiosity piqued, a small, fragile smile tugging at your own lips as you tried to pull him further into the light. “Teasing you? For what?”

Nanami tilted his head back to the side, facing you completely on the pillow. The distance between your faces was so small now that you could feel the soft, rhythmic puff of his warm breath against your skin as the lingering, heated tension from earlier returned tenfold, thick, intoxicating, and heavy with a lifetime of unspoken words.

“He would be mocking me,” Nanami revealed softly, his voice dropping into an incredibly intimate, velvety register that made your skin tingle, “for keeping my high school crush an absolute secret for so many years.”

Your smile grew wider, a soft chuckle bubbling up in your throat, a desperate attempt to keep the overwhelming emotion from spilling over into tears. “A secret crush?! You?! The model student of Jujutsu High actually had a crush on someone back then? Who on earth were they, Kento?”

Nanami didn’t blink. He simply stared at you, his hazel eye locking onto yours with an intensity so profound, so devastatingly clear, it made your breath catch in your throat as the silence stretched between you, heavy and sudden, filled only with the distant, eternal sound of the tide.

“It was you, Y/N,” he said softly. “It has always been you.”

You went entirely silent, your heart skipping a beat as the shock rippled through you, followed by a wave of bittersweet realization that made your throat tight as the memories of your teenage years—the shared missions, the quiet library sessions where he would read while you dozed, the way he would always silently offer you his umbrella or stand just close enough to block the biting winter wind—suddenly reframed themselves in your mind.

All this time, beneath his rigid formality, beneath the standard-issue uniform and the cold logic, he had been harboring a quiet, burning, protective devotion.

Before you could speak, Nanami reached his right hand out across the sheets as his long, calloused fingers brushed against yours, hesitant, before sliding underneath your palm.

He intertwined his fingers gently with your warm, real ones, squeezing with a quiet desperation. The silver ring on his finger pressed against your skin, a solid, grounding point of contact in a world that had tried so hard to tear you apart.

“I was too afraid to disrupt the balance we had back then,” Nanami continued, his thumb gently caressing the back of your hand in a slow, hypnotic rhythm, trying to soothe both you and himself. “And after we lost Haibara, I convinced myself that I did not deserve such sentimentality.”

“... I ran away to the corporate world, and when I returned, I told myself my only duty was to protect the next generation. But sitting here with you now... in the house we built... I realize how foolish I was to waste so much time in the dark.”

He squeezed your hand tightly, his gaze burning into yours with a fierce, unwavering promise that felt like a vow written in the stars. “I do not care about official certificates, or societal validation, or the world we left bleeding behind us, Y/N.”

“My only desire is to grow old together with you in Kuantan. To spend the rest of my days waking up beside you, hearing your breath, knowing that the nightmare is finally over...”

The sheer depth of his vulnerability made tears finally prick the corners of your eyes, spilling over your lashes, but the warmth blooming in your chest completely overwhelmed the ache.

It was a happy ending, bought with blood and scars, but it was yours as you squeezed his hand back, your fingers locking tightly with his as a radiant, emotional smile broke across your face.

“I’d… like that, Kento,” you whispered against the quiet of the room, leaning forward to press your forehead gently against his uninjured temple.

“I’d like that more than anything in this world.”

Nanami’s hazel eye softened completely, the ghosts of Jujutsu High and Shibuya finally fading into the background. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, a genuine, beautiful smile spread fully across his face, pulling gently at his features.

He pulled your joined hands up, pressing them firmly against his chest, right over the steady, peaceful, living beating of his heart.

You were home, and you were finally safe.

cowboy au sfw short drabble short ow ref romcom confession scene tooth rotting fluff jason todd has a southern accent fem reader jason todd as your favorite cowboy 8.9k words part one

a/n: next post is a nanami x reader soft angst-fluff fic !

The Texas heat had spent the entire afternoon baking the earth, leaving the scent of dry cedar, sweet alfalfa, and hot leather thick in the air. As the sun began its slow descent, bleeding a bruised purple and gold across the wide horizon, the aggressive humidity of the day finally gave way to a cooling evening breeze.

The only sounds for miles were the rhythmic, heavy thud-thud of Caesar’s hooves against the dirt trail, the occasional, low jingle of the bridle, and the steady, synchronized sound of your breathing as you were seated right in front of Jason, tucked securely between his long thighs on the massive Western saddle.

It was supposed to be a serious training session—his final run-through before the rodeo’s big finale match next week—but the moment he had lifted you up onto the gelding, all thoughts of his own technique seemed to vanish.

Instead, he had spent the last two hours teaching you how to hold the reins, how to shift your weight, and how to find a rhythm with the horse… or rather, that was his excuse to keep you as close as humanly possible.

Every time Caesar shifted or picked up speed, you took it as the perfect excuse to lean back against Jason’s broad chest, letting your spine melt into his solid frame as you wrapped your hands firmly around his biceps.

They were massive, stretching the fabric of his faded flannel shirt, rock-hard and radiating a comforting, steady heat. Slowly, deliberately, you slid your palms up and down the curve of his arms, feeling the thick muscle bunch beneath your touch as you squeezed them just a little tighter than necessary, a quiet, playful challenge, and let a small, knowing smile tug at the corners of your lips.

Above your head, you heard the deep, rumbling vibration of his chest before you actually heard his voice. “Now, sweetheart,” Jason murmured, his thick, slow Southern drawl dragging over the words like molasses. “I highly doubt you’re loosin’ your balance on a straight, flat trail.”

You didn’t let go, instead, you tilted your head back, looking up at him, your smile widening into something distinctly mischievous.

From this angle, you could see the sharp, rugged line of his jawline, dusted with a dark shadow of stubble, and the way the dying sunlight caught the stark, silver-grey patch of hair right at his fringe. He looked intimidating—a mountain of a man built for rough riding and hard work—but the look in his blue eyes was entirely soft, completely captivated by you.

“Oh, you’d be surprised, cowboy,” you cooed, your voice a playful purr. You nudged your shoulder back against his chest, holding his gaze. “This trail is treacherous. A girl’s got to hold onto something sturdy.”

Jason cleared his throat, a sudden flash of heat darkening his tanned cheeks as he looked down at your hands wrapped around his arms, then met your teasing eyes. He knew exactly what you were doing. He wasn’t dense, but the sheer and heavy weight of the puppy-love crush he’d been harboring for months made his heart hammer a frantic, erratic rhythm against his ribs.

“You’re s’posed to be focusin’ on the reins, not usin’ me as a safety blanket,” he teased softly, though he didn’t make a single move to pull away. In fact, he subtly flexed, his massive biceps shifting beneath your palms, giving you an even better grip.

You let out a soft, breathless laugh, your eyes crinkling at the corners. “Maybe I like my safety blanket, it’s warm and it has a very nice heartbeat.”

A low huff of laughter escaped his nose, blowing a warm gust of air past your ear that made you shiver. “Yeah, yeah. Loud and clear, sweetheart… but if you keep squeezin’ me like that, I’m gonna forget how to steer this animal entirely. You’re distractin’ the teacher.”

“Am I?” You tilted your chin up just a fraction more, your lips parting as your smile turned soft, intimate, and devastatingly flirtatious. “Good. That was the plan.”

The tension between you grew thick, heavy, and undeniably warm, lingering in the small space separating your faces. Jason’s gaze flicked down to your lips for a split second before he looked back to the trail, his hands tightening on the leather to guide Caesar to a gentle halt under the shade of a sprawling oak tree.

The horse let out a long, shedding sigh, the scent of dust and animal sweat kicking up around you, sealing the two of you in your own private world.

Slowly, carefully, Jason brought his hands forward to adjust your grip on the leather reins. But as his hands hovered over yours, he hesitated as his fingers twitched, hovering just an inch above your skin.

You looked down at his hands. They were huge, scarred, and incredibly rugged—the hands of a man who worked himself to the bone as the skin across his palms and knuckles was thick and severely calloused, rough enough to snag on silk.

You could see the slight tremor in his fingers, a silent testament to the fear that always gripped him in these moments: the terrifying thought that his rough, violent world might accidentally bruise something as soft and precious as you.

“Jay,” you whispered, your voice dropping to a soft, tender note that cut straight through the quiet evening air as you turned your hands over in your lap, palms up, waiting for him. “It’s okay.”

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I don’t… I don’t wanna scrape you up, darlin’,” he admitted, his accent thick and heavy with a sudden, raw vulnerability that made your heart ache. “Hands are like sandpaper. Ain’t meant for touchin’ somethin’ so gentle.”

You smiled up at him again, a soft, reassuring expression full of affection as you reached up, gently brushing the tip of your finger against his stubbled jawline, tracing it down to his chin. “I like it when you touch me anyway, Jay. Plus, I love your hands.”

With a shaky, hesitant breath, Jason finally let his palms settle over yours as the contrast was immediate—his skin was hot, rough, and violently unyielding against yours. But his touch was unbelievably light, as if he were handling something priceless.

He slid his fingers between yours, lacing them together, guiding your hands back to the leather reins while his chest pressed flush against your back as his heartbeat was a frantic thumping you could feel right through your spine.

He leaned down, his face burying into the crook of your neck. His lips brushed dangerously close to your sensitive skin as he spoke, his voice dropping an octave into a gravelly, heated whisper that sent a delicious shiver straight down your column.

“You’re playin’ a dangerous game with me, you know that?” he breathed, his lips skimming your skin with every syllable.

The tension between you snapped taut, electric and heavy with unspoken desires. “I’m s’posed to be the teacher here. But you’re the one makin’ me forget every single rule I ever learned. If you keep lookin’ at me like that, we ain’t never makin’ it back to the barn.”

You leaned your head back against his shoulder, a soft, triumphant smile on your face as you whispered back, “Then let’s stay out here a little longer.”

The canopy of the woods swallowed the last rays of the dying sun, plunging the trail into a cool, shadowed twilight. The air out here was different—crisper, smelling faintly of damp earth, pine needles, and the sweet, lingering musk of horse sweat as Caesar’s hooves made a soft, muffled crunch-crunch against the blanket of fallen leaves, a rhythmic backdrop to the sudden, heavy silence that had settled between the two of you.

But while the woods were cooling down, the space between you and Jason was practically boiling. The playful confidence from earlier hadn’t dissolved; if anything, the shadows of the evening gave you a sudden burst of boldness as you shifted slightly, your hips pressing flush against his lap, and let out a soft, pleased sigh.

Every rise and fall of his chest pressed directly into your back, and the sheer heat radiating off him was enough to make your cheeks burn in the dim light, but you didn’t shrink away. Instead, you tilted your head back, letting your hair brush against his collarbone, and smiled up at him with pure, unadulterated mischief.

Jason wasn’t doing any better, for a man who could stare down a charging bull without blinking, he was suddenly wound tighter than a guitar string. Usually, the city girls who came around the rodeo or the ranch were polite, a little detached, or too timid to do much more than ask for a picture.

They certainly weren’t turning around in his saddle, flashing him wicked little grins that made his head spin as he cleared his throat, the sound of a low, raspy rattle in the quiet woods, and shifted his weight.

His face was burning a deep, dark crimson that even the twilight couldn’t hide, “Just… wanna make sure you’re secure up here,” he mumbled, his thick Southern drawl dropping an octave, laced with a nervous, boyish hesitance that completely contrasted his massive frame. “Trail’s gettin’ a mite uneven, sweetheart.”

“Oh, is it?” you asked, your voice a silky purr. You leaned back just a fraction more, feeling the hard line of his chest. “I hadn’t noticed. I felt perfectly safe. Though, maybe you should hold onto me a little tighter… just in case.”

Jason let out a shaky breath, completely flustered. Slowly, almost tentatively, he brought his right arm around your waist. His bicep was massive, a solid bar of pure muscle that pressed firmly across your lower abdomen.

The sheer weight of it was anchoring, trapping you against him, but he held you with an absurd amount of caution. He was paranoid—terrified that a sudden jolt from Caesar would send you slipping from the saddle, but even more terrified of how good it felt to have you right there as you placed your smaller hands over his massive forearm, your fingers tracing the thick veins that mapped his skin. “See? Perfect fit,” you whispered, looking back up at him over your shoulder.

His heart was hammering a frantic, erratic rhythm against your shoulder blade, revealing the truth his tough cowboy exterior tried to hide: he was completely, utterly captivated, and entirely at your mercy.

He bit his lower lip, a nervous, shy smile tugging at his mouth as his blue eyes flicked down to your hands, then up to your eyes, utterly overwhelmed by the electric current humming between your skin and by the time the trail opened up to a small, secluded clearing, the tension had reached a delicious boiling point.

Jason guided Caesar to a halt near a massive, fallen oak log, seemingly eager for an excuse to get his feet back on solid ground before he completely lost his mind.

“Let’s, uh… let’s give the big guy a rest,” Jason murmured, his voice a little breathless as he dismounted as he reached up, his rough hands catching you by the waist to lift you down.

Instead of letting him set you straight on the ground, you lingered, keeping your hands resting on his broad shoulders as your faces were inches apart. You flashed him a slow, dazzling smile, your eyes locked onto his.

Even through your clothes, the heat of his palms seemed to scar, and he set you down so gently it was as if you were made of the finest porcelain. “Thank you, cowboy,” you murmured, your lips brushing dangerously close to his jawline as you spoke.

Jason practically choked on his own breath, a dark flush spreading from his collar all the way to the tips of his ears. He quickly looked away, clearing his throat again as he turned to tie Caesar’s reins to a sturdy pine branch.

You watched him, thoroughly enjoying how much power you had over this giant of a man. He was so sweet, so fundamentally respectful, that your boldness was knocking him completely off balance—and he was clearly loving every single second of it as Jason sat down on the thick log, the bark groaning slightly under his immense weight. He leaned back, resting his elbows on his knees, trying to regain his composure.

The silver-grey patch at his fringe caught the soft moonlight filtering through the trees as he looked up at you, his blue eyes dark and pooling with an affection so heavy it made your breath hitch.

Without a word, you walked over and claimed the space right next to him, but you didn’t just sit as you swung your legs up, draping your calves comfortably across his thick, denim-clad thighs, deliberately claiming his space.

Jason’s entire body went rigid for a fraction of a second, his breath catching in his throat as his eyes went wide, staring at your legs over his lap like he couldn’t believe your audacity.

Then, a soft, helpless, incredibly shy smile broke through his rugged stubble as he shook his head, looking down at his boots, a low, rumbling chuckle vibrating in his chest.

“You are somethin’ else, you know that?” he whispered, his voice thick with a sweet, flustered awe. “Most girls from the city… they’re careful around a guy like me. Afraid of the dirt... afraid of… well, this.”

“Then they’re missing out,” you said softly as you leaned in close, wrapping both of your arms securely around one of his massive biceps, pulling it against your chest. You rested your cheek right against the hard curve of his muscle, feeling the scratchy, warm flannel of his shirt against your skin.

You looked up at him through your eyelashes, your smile turning soft and incredibly intimate. “I like ‘this.’ I like it a lot.”

“You’re gonna spoil me, actin’ like this,” Jason teased softly, his voice trembling just a fraction as he looked down at you as he tentatively rested one of his massive hands on your ankle, his thumb making small, hesitant circles over your jeans. The sheer adoration in his eyes was dizzying.

“Just tell me about the ranch, cowboy,” you whispered, tightening your grip on his arm, nudging your shoulder into his side.

He swallowed hard, looking out toward where Caesar was softly snorting and stamping his hoof in the grass, trying to anchor himself. Slowly, the nervous tension began to melt out of his frame, replaced by a quiet, passionate warmth as he started to speak about the thing he loved most.

“Well,” he began, his thick accent wrapping around the words like a warm blanket. “My granddaddy started the place with just three mares and an old, broken-down barn.”

“Took years to break the soil, to make it somethin’ worth keepin’. But there’s a ridge right on the western edge of the property… if you stand there at dawn, the whole valley just opens up. Looks like God spilled gold all over the earth.”

You smiled, closing your eyes and just listening to the rumble of his voice vibrating through his bicep against your cheek as the scent of pine and his distinct aroma of leather, cedar, and tobacco swirled around you, intoxicating and comforting all at once.

“And the horses?” you asked softly, nudging your nose playfully against his arm, leaving a soft kiss against the flannel.

A low, rumbling chuckle vibrated through him, and you felt his grip on your ankle tighten just a bit, growing braver. “They’re a handful. Caesar there, he’s a sweetheart, but he’s stubborn as the day is long.”

“Got a little paint mare named Sarah Kate, too. She’s spirited, rebellious, and reminds me a bit of…” He trailed off, his voice dropping into a husky whisper.

You opened your eyes and looked up. Jason was staring down at you, his rugged face entirely soft, the shyness returning tenfold but overridden by a deep, simmering heat.

His hands—those huge, heavily calloused hands—were resting on his own knees, his fingers twitching as if he desperately wanted to reach out and stroke your hair, but was still too scared of his own rough skin as the silence hung between you, thick, heated, and heavy with everything he wasn’t saying.

The cool night air brushed against your skin, but between the two of you, the heat was suffocating in the best possible way.

“Reminds you of who?” you prompted, your voice barely a breath. You slid your hand up his arm, your fingers brushing the warm skin of his neck, your thumb lightly tracing his jaw.

You gave him a slow, encouraging smile. “Say it, Jay.”

Jason’s blue eyes flicked down to your lips, then back to your eyes, his chest expanding deeply against your side as he finally stopped fighting the pull.

“Reminds me of you, darlin’,” he breathed, his voice dropping to a raw, gravelly timber that sent a shiver straight down your spine. “Beautiful, stubborn, and keepin’ me on my toes so bad I can barely think straight. I swear, you’re gonna be the ruin of me.”

The cool night air seemed to still around the clearing, the gentle whinny of Caesar tethered nearby breaking the quiet of the woods as Jason’s gaze lingered on you, the soft moonlight catching the sharp lines of his jaw and casting a silvery glow over the grey patch at his fringe.

The heavy, sweet scent of crushed pine needles beneath your boots and the earthy aroma of leather hung thick in the air, wrapping around the two of you like a velvet blanket as Jason shifted slightly beneath you, the dense muscle of his thigh flexing under your legs as his expression turned a fraction more serious.

He cleared his throat, a low, gravelly sound that vibrated right through his chest and echoed against your own ribs. “That finale match… it’s only a few days off now,” he murmured, his thick Southern drawl dropping into a quieter, almost vulnerable register.

He looked down at his huge, calloused hands resting on his lap, his shoulders dropping just a fraction. “Fellas from three counties over are comin’ in. It’s gonna be a hell of a fight to stay on that saddle. Sometimes I wonder if…”

Before he could even finish the thought, you slid your legs off his lap and leaned in closer, cutting off his doubt before it could take root as you reached down and boldly grabbed both of his massive, rugged hands.

His fingers twitched in shock at the sudden contact, the rough, sandpapery texture of his severe callouses scraping against your smooth skin, but you didn’t let go. Instead, you lifted his heavy hands and used them to mock-clap together in an enthusiastic, early celebration, flashing him a bright, dazzling smile.

“Stop right there, cowboy,” you said, your voice full of playful, teasing energy as you hyped him up. “You’re the best rider in this whole damn state and you know it… there isn’t a bull or a bronc born that can throw you off.”

“You’ve already won it, so stop doubting yourself!”

A slow, breathless grin began to crack through his stubble, his blue eyes darkening with a sudden, intense warmth. The sheer puppy-love adoration he had for you flared up, making his chest expand heavily under his flannel shirt as he let out a low, rumbling chuckle that sent a delicious shiver right down your spine.

“Is that right?” he teased, his voice dropping into a husky, playful rumble. He squeezed your hands back just a fraction, incredibly mindful of his own strength, though his grip was solid and grounding. “You got that much faith in me, sweetheart? Well now, that begs the question… what exactly do I get if I win that match?”

You let go of his hands and hummed softly, tapping a finger against your chin as you faux-thought about it, letting the silence stretch out between you as the lingering, heated tension in the air grew so thick you could practically taste it. Slowly, deliberately, you tilted your head up to look him dead in the eyes, a smug grin playing on your lips.

You slid your arms up his chest, feeling the rock-hard definition beneath the fabric, and wrapped them securely around his thick neck, pulling yourself close enough to feel the heat radiating from his skin.

“If you win…” you whispered, leaning in until your lips were fractions of an inch from his, your breath fanning across his mouth. “I’m going to give you a kiss.”

Jason’s entire body went dead rigid beneath you. His breath hitched sharply in his throat, his eyes widening for a split second before burning with a sudden, fierce heat as his massive biceps flexed against your sides as he fought the overwhelming urge to pull you flush against him.

He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he stared at your mouth, completely caught off guard by your boldness.

“Now, don’t you go playin’ with a man’s heart like that,” he breathed, his thick accent wrapping heavily around the words. He leaned a fraction closer, his voice dropping to a gravelly, demanding whisper.

“... On the lips or the cheek?”

You offered him a teasing smile, tightening your arms around his neck just enough to drive him crazy. “That’s a secret until you actually win.”

A loud, breathy scoff escaped his nose, and the tense, electric spell broke into a warm, genuine laugh as Jason raised one of his massive hands, the rough callouses gently scratching against your scalp as he affectionately ruffled your hair, messing up your strands.

“You’re a mischievous little thing, you know that?” he chuckled, shaking his head as he stood up from the log first. He towered over you in the moonlight, a mountain of a man, looking every bit the rugged cowboy as you laughed, standing up after him, smoothing down your hair with a self-satisfied grin.

You felt entirely in control, thoroughly enjoying how flustered and sweet he was. But before your boots could fully grip the dirt, Jason stepped directly into your space as the sudden shift in his energy made your breath catch.

The shy, boyish hesitation vanished, replaced by the sheer, unyielding confidence of a man who handled wild animals for a living as he reached out and caught you by the waist. His huge hands completely engulfed your sides, the heat of his palms burning through your clothes as he effortlessly lifted you into the air. He didn’t just set you down, though.

He held you suspended for a heartbeat, his face level with yours, his blue eyes locked onto your lips with a sudden, intense hunger that made your stomach flip. “You like games, darlin’?” he murmured, his voice incredibly low, a dark, gravelly vibration that resonated right in your chest.

He slid his hands slightly higher up your ribs, his thumbs tracing the underside of your breasts through your shirt. “Because if we’re talkin’ about secrets... I’ve got a few ideas about what I'm gonna do with that prize when I collect it. And I don’t think you’re ready for ‘em.”

Your heart hammered violently against your ribs, a sudden wave of heat rushing to your face as the tables had turned so fast your head spun. Your confident smile faltered, replaced by a wide-eyed, breathless gasp as your own heart raced.

You became acutely aware of how easily he lifted you, how small you were in his grip, and how utterly devastating he was when he stopped being shy. “Jay! Hey— you’re playing dirty now!” you stammered, your voice losing all of its previous swagger, completely flustered by the raw promise in his eyes as he let out a low, deeply satisfied chuckle at your reaction, thoroughly enjoying the fact that he had turned the tables on you.

He hoisted you up onto Caesar’s back, but instead of putting you in the front, he set you down right behind the saddle. “Better get your favorite lipstick ready then, sweetheart, ‘cause I sure as hell ain’t losin’ now,” he whispered, leaning close to press a brief, burning kiss right to the sensitive skin just below your ear.

“That prize is mine.”

Your breath hitched completely, your skin tingling where his lips had grazed you as you sat there, utterly dazed and blushing furiously in the dark, watching as Jason swung his long leg over the gelding, settling into the leather seat in front of you.

This time, he was the shield, and you were at his back.

“Hold on tight now,” he murmured, turning his head just enough to flash you a devastating, crooked grin over his shoulder. “Don’t want you slippin’ off. Unless you want another excuse to grab onto me.”

You bit your lip, still flustered but unable to hide the helpless, captivated smile stretching across your face. You didn’t need to be told twice as you leaned forward, pressing your chest flat against his broad, muscular back, and wrapped your arms tightly around his waist, hiding your burning face against his shoulder blade.

As your hands slid across his midsection, you could feel the rigid, iron-hard contour of his abs shifting beneath his shirt with every move he made as a deep, contented purr of a rumble vibrated through his spine and into your chest as Caesar started a slow, steady walk back through the dark woods, the lingering heat of your promise—and his sudden, breathtaking boldness—keeping the both of you burning hot against the night chill.

The following days passed in a blur of anticipation, the memory of that moonlit clearing lingering in your mind like a fever dream. Every time you thought about the sudden, burning heat in Jason’s blue eyes or the rough, calloused weight of his hands on your waist, your heart would do a frantic little dance against your ribs.

You had successfully turned the rugged, shy cowboy into a man on a mission, and today was the day he was set to claim his prize as the atmosphere inside the massive, indoor rodeo arena was electric, thick with the heavy scent of buttered popcorn, stale beer, trampled dirt, and the sharp, metallic tang of adrenaline.

The air was a swirling vortex of noise—the booming, echoey rattle of the loudspeaker, the thunderous stomping of thousands of boots against the metal bleachers, and the distant, aggressive snorts of the bulls being loaded into the bucking chutes.

You were sitting squarely between your parents on the crowded benches, just a few rows up from the dirt floor, right where the action was closest as your hands were tightly clamped in your lap, your fingers nervously smoothing down the fabric of your jeans.

The sheer scale of the event was dizzying.

This was the grand finale, and the best riders from three different states were packed into the back, waiting to risk their lives on two thousand pounds of furious, bucking muscle.

Suddenly, the arena lights dimmed, replaced by a blinding, spinning array of colored spotlights that cut through the rising dust as the crowd let out a deafening roar as the commentator’s voice boomed over the speakers, crackling with high-voltage energy.

“Alright, Texas! Welcome to the main event! The big show! The championship finale you’ve all been waitin’ for!” the announcer yelled, his voice echoing off the corrugated metal ceiling.

“Tonight, we’ve got the meanest bulls, the baddest stock, and the toughest cowboys in the country ready to leave it all in the dirt! Let’s meet our finalists!”

One by one, the riders were introduced, stepping out onto the dirt under the heavy glare of the spotlights as the crowd went wild for each name, the commentator hyping every single player up to the absolute extreme, rattling off their hometowns, their winning streaks, and the terrifying names of the bulls they had managed to conquer.

Your heart hammered a frantic rhythm against your chest, your eyes glued to the tunnel entrance.

You were barely listening to the names being called, your entire body wound tight with a mixture of intense pride and a sudden, fierce protectiveness, “And next up into the arena…” the announcer’s voice pitched higher, practically vibrating with excitement.

“He’s a hometown favorite, a man built like a brick wall and twice as tough! Riding out of Gotham County… let’s hear it for the one, the only… Jason Todd!”

The crowd erupted, the noise was absolute as a wall of cheering and whistling shook the very bench beneath you while Jason stepped out of the shadowed tunnel and into the bright, harsh glare of the spotlights.

He looked absolutely massive, a towering mountain of a man who completely commanded the space around him. The black protective vest strapped over his chest only emphasized the absurd, broad width of his shoulders, and the sleeves of his dark Western shirt were rolled up to his elbows, revealing those thick, powerful forearms and biceps you had been squeezing just days prior.

Beneath the brim of his low-slung cowboy hat, the stark, silver-grey patch at his fringe caught the artificial light, a rugged, distinct mark on an otherwise fiercely handsome face as he looked intimidating, a dangerous, unyielding force built for rough riding and hard work, but as he stepped further into the arena, his blue eyes began to scan the crowded bleachers.

He wasn’t looking at the thousands of screaming fans. He was looking for one specific face as your breath hitched as his gaze swept over your section, and then, entirely by instinct, your eyes locked.

The moment he spotted you sitting there, the fierce, focused expression on his rugged face instantly softened. A slow, devastatingly crooked grin cracked through his dark stubble, his eyes darkening with that familiar, intense warmth that always made your stomach flip.

Right there in front of the entire stadium, Jason raised a hand to the brim of his hat, tipped it slightly, and gave you a deliberate, slow wink.

Then, keeping his eyes locked entirely on yours, he subtly tilted his head as his lips moved slowly, deliberately exaggerating the words so you could read them perfectly through the distance.

“Can’t wait for my kiss, darlin’.”

The thick, heavy Southern drawl practically bounced off his moving lips, a private, sizzling promise delivered in front of thousands of people as a sudden, intense wave of heat rushed straight to your face, your cheeks burning a bright, undeniable crimson as your heart did a violent flip.

You bit your lower lip, a helpless, breathless smile breaking across your face as you instinctively gripped the edge of the bench as the confidence you had maintained on the trail completely vanished under the weight of his public boldness, leaving you thoroughly flustered and utterly captivated.

“Well now,” your dad muttered from right beside you, leaning forward slightly as he squinted down at the dirt arena, his brow furrowed in deep thought.

“Who do you suppose he was lookin’ at? Boy looked like he was starin’ a hole right in this direction.”

Before you could even think of a lie, your mom leaned past you, using her elbow to give your ribs a sharp, knowing nudge as she had a massive, triumphant grin plastered across her face, her eyes twinkling with pure amusement as she looked at your bright red cheeks.

“Oh, I think he was just checkin’ out the scenery, dear,” your mom said, her voice dripping with playful sarcasm as she gave you another meaningful look, knowing damn well exactly who that wink was meant for. “Isn’t that right, sweetie? He’s got an awful nice view from down there.”

You couldn’t even answer, your eyes flying back to the arena floor where Jason was now turning toward the bucking chutes, his broad shoulders squared and his massive chest expanding with a deep, confident breath as thelingering, heated tension of his promise hung thick in the air around you, and as the announcer started the countdown, you knew one thing for certain: that bull didn’t stand a chance.

The heavy iron gates of the bucking chutes rattled violently as the pressure in the arena shifted from anticipation to pure, chaotic electricity. All around you, the bleachers shook with a deafening cacophony of sound.

Men with thick Texas accents were leaning over the rails, waving crumpled twenty-dollar bills and shouting over the din to place frantic, last-minute bets. “Fifty on Black Out! That bull ain’t never been rode for eight seconds!” a man a few rows back bellowed, his voice hoarse from beer and screaming.

“You’re crazy, Wyatt! Todd’s got the left-hand delivery down to a science! A hundred says he stays on!” another roared back, slamming a heavy palm against the metal seating.

The air grew thick with the choking stench of kicked-up dirt, stale sweat, and the pungent, raw musk of an agitated animal. Down in chute number three, a massive, midnight-black Brahman bull named Widowmaker let out a low, terrifying rumble that vibrated right through the soles of your boots.

The beast slammed its massive, muscular flank against the steel pipes, sending a shuddering clang through the entire stadium and perched right on top of that furious mountain of muscle was Jason as the playful, devastatingly confident cowboy who had just winked at you was gone, replaced by a hyper-focused warrior. He was tucked down low, his massive thighs gripping the bull’s broad back, his heavy Western boots dug in tight.

His left hand, wrapped in leather and thick rigging rope, was clamped down like a vice. You could see the incredible width of his shoulders tensing beneath his vest, his knuckles white, those severely calloused hands putting every ounce of their legendary strength into the rope.

“Watch his head, Jason! Watch the spin!” someone from his pit crew yelled from the top of the chutes, spitting a stream of tobacco into the dirt.

The announcer’s voice cut through the madness, soaring over the roar of the crowd. “Alright, folks! This is it! The ride that decides the whole damn season! Jason Todd versus the unrideable Widowmaker! Pull that gate!”

The steel door flew open with a violent, metallic crash as the stadium seemed to hold its collective breath for a fraction of a second before exploding into absolute bedlam. Widowmaker erupted out of the chute like a freight train, launching all four of his massive hooves clean off the dirt as the bull twisted mid-air, a violent, bone-shattering contortion designed to snap a rider’s spine.

“Hold on, cowboy!” your mom screamed beside you, completely abandoning her teasing demeanor as she gripped your father’s arm.

Your dad was already on his feet, his jaw set, his eyes glued to the chaos in the dirt and for the first four seconds, Jason was a machine as his massive biceps flexed, the thick muscles bunching beneath his shirt as he countered every brutal, jarring thrust of the bull.

The silver-grey patch at his fringe flashed under the stadium lights as his head snapped back with the sheer force of the movement. He looked unyielding, a force of nature matching the beast dollar for dollar.

But at the five-second mark, disaster struck as Widowmaker dropped his massive front shoulders and executed a brutal, erratic counter-clockwise pivot that caught everyone off guard.

The sudden, violent shift in momentum tore the rigging rope just a fraction out of Jason’s grip as a collective, horrified gasp sucked the air straight out of the stadium. “He’s loose! He’s tracking right!” the announcer shouted, his voice cracking with panic. “Todd is losing his seat!”

Your heart violently stopped as the world slowed down to an agonizing, suffocating crawl. Jason’s massive frame was thrown violently to the left, his center of gravity completely destroyed. His right leg flew out of position, dangling uselessly in the air as the sheer, terrifying force of the bull dragged him sideways.

He was slipping as you could see the raw strain on his face, his jaw clenched so tight the muscles looked ready to snap, his dark stubble drenched in sweat and dirt. “He’s going down!” a man next to you yelled, throwing his hat into the air in frustration. “There goes my money!”

It looked entirely impossible. He was too far gone, his body hanging at a devastating angle off the side of the spinning monster as the bull sensed the weakness, bucking even harder, throwing its massive head back to finish the job and trample the cowboy into the dirt.

Seven seconds as Jason was practically dragging against the bull’s flank, held on by nothing more than the raw, desperate friction of his calloused fingers locked into the coarse rope.

Then, in a spectacular, blind leap of faith at the absolute last microsecond, Jason didn’t try to pull himself back up—he used the bull’s own violent upward buck to launch his entire weight in the opposite direction.

It was a reckless, terrifying gamble that should have broken his arm… but with a burst of pure, unadulterated adrenaline, his massive thighs clamped back down onto the beast’s spine with the force of a hydraulic press as he snapped back into the center of the saddle just as the bull gave one final, desperate twist.

BUZZZZZZZZER!

The horn wailed through the arena, signaling the end of the grueling eight seconds but before the sound could even fade, Jason cleanly released his rope and threw himself off the back of the slowing bull, hitting the dirt in a practiced, heavy roll.

He scrambled to his feet, dust swirling around his massive boots, as the rodeo clowns rushed in to distract the roaring beast as the stadium went absolutely primitive.

Thousands of people slammed their seats, jumping to their feet in a unified, thunderous roar that shook the concrete foundations of the building as the air was filled with flying cowboy hats, spilled beer, and deafening cheers.

“He did it! By the grace of God and a whole lot of grit, Jason Todd stayed on!” the announcer screamed, his voice completely drowned out by the ecstatic crowd. “A perfect ride! We have our champion!”

Your dad was cheering at the top of his lungs, throwing a fist into the air, while your mom was laughing and clapping beside you. But you were barely conscious of them as you were standing on the bench, your chest heaving, your hands trembling with a dizzying mix of relief and pure, uncontainable pride.

Down in the center of the dirt, breathing heavily with his hands on his knees, Jason finally looked up as he wiped a streak of sweat and dark Texas mud from his forehead, his chest expanding with massive, exhausted breaths.

He ignored the cameras, the flashing lights, and the judges rushing toward him as his blue eyes cut straight through the chaos, searching the roaring crowd until they landed directly on you.

As he saw you standing there, flushed and breathless, a wide, triumphant, and devastatingly crooked grin broke across his rugged face. He didn’t say a word, but the burning, lingering heat in his gaze told you everything you needed to know.

The cowboy had won his match—and now, he was coming to collect his prize.

The chaotic roar of the stadium became a distant hum as the judges and a swarm of eager reporters descended upon the center of the dirt arena. Camera crews shuffled frantically, their heavy lenses catching the glare of the bright spotlights as they crowded around Jason.

He was completely surrounded, drowned in a sea of microphones and congratulations, but his eyes kept darting back toward the stands, trying to keep you in his sight. “Come on, Elena, let’s go grab some of those jumbo hotdogs and a couple of cold sodas before the lines get longer than a Texas mile,” your dad grunted, his hand firmly taking your mom’s arm as he began navigating the crowded steps.

Your mom resisted for a split second, casting a knowing, mischievous look back over her shoulder at you. “Oh, but don’t you want to wait for—”

“The boy’s busy gettin’ his trophy, let’s go,” your dad interrupted mildly, completely oblivious as he dragged her away into the concourse.

You stayed behind on the metal bench, a soft sigh escaping your lips as the cool evening breeze from the arena’s ventilation system brushed against your flushed cheeks as the air here still smelled heavily of fried food, trampled dirt, and the electric tang of adrenaline.

You slid your phone out of your pocket, your fingers flying across the screen as you opened a group chat with your friends back at school. ‘You guys will literally never believe the hot cowboy I’ve been hanging out with,’ you typed, a sudden, helpless giggle bubbling up from your chest.

You tapped your foot against the floorboards, a bright, goofy smile plastered across your face as the text bubbles popped up in response as every few seconds, you would look up from the glowing screen, your eyes tracking across the dirt to where Jason was still being pampered and complimented.

He looked entirely out of place among the city slickers with microphones, a towering mountain of a man who looked like he just wanted to escape the suffocating crowd. Even from a distance, you could see the massive width of his shoulders tensing beneath his protective vest, his biceps stretching the fabric of his dark Western shirt as he politely nodded at a reporter.

The distinct, stark silver-grey patch at his fringe stood out proudly under the harsh lights, dusted with a light layer of arena grime as you looked down at your phone again, biting your lip as you started typing out a detailed description of just how big his arms actually were.

“Well now, I surely hope you ain’t textin’ some other fella after what I just pulled off down there.”

The thick, heavy Southern drawl cut through the stadium din like a sharp blade as your attention was violently swayed as you snapped your head up, your eyes widening in surprise. Jason had completely abandoned the media circus as he came jogging right toward your section, a wide, triumphant grin breaking through the dark stubble on his face.

Before the security guard near the rails could even blink, Jason gripped the top of the metal barrier with one massive, calloused hand and effortlessly vaulted his entire body over the railing in one smooth, athletic motion as the crowd nearby gasped and muttered, and out of the corner of your eye, you could see a camera crew quickly pivoting their heavy equipment, lenses zooming in on the two of you as they loudly wondered into their headsets who on earth you were.

Jason didn’t care about the cameras. He stepped up into the bleachers, huffing and puffing from the sheer exertion of the ride, and immediately planted one heavy, dirt-caked boot up on the bench right next to you.

“You were lookin’ so pretty up here, I just couldn’t stay down in that dirt a second longer,” he panted, his chest expanding deeply against his vest as he reached out, his huge hand catching the back of your head, his thick fingers ruffling your hair with an overwhelming, affectionate fondness that sent a shiver straight down your spine. “Lord have mercy, sweetheart, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

You immediately clicked your phone off, completely abandoning your friends to give him your undivided, breathless attention.

You smiled up at him, your hands instinctively reaching up to play with the damp, dark curls at the nape of his neck, your fingers brushing past that beautiful silver-grey fringe.

“You were amazing, Jason,” you congratulated him, your voice full of genuine, soaring emotion. “I thought you were going to fall for a second, but you were so stubborn.”

“Told you I wasn’t losin’,” he chuckled, his voice dropping into a husky, heated rumble. “Had a mighty fine incentive waitin’ for me in the stands. Couldn’t go bitin’ the dust in front of my girl, now could I?”

“Oh, so I’m your incentive now?” you teased, your heart doing a happy little flip at the words my girl.

“Darlin’, you’re the only reason I even held on for the past five seconds,” he murmured, his eyes crinkling at the corners with pure, unadulterated devotion as he backed up just a single step, his teal eyes flashing with a sudden, playful burst of energy.

Before you could even ask what he was doing, his huge, rugged hands reached forward and securely grabbed you by the waist as the absolute heat of his palms burned straight through your clothes.

With a low grunt of effort, he effortlessly hoisted you completely off the bleacher bench, lifting you high into the air as a breathless, delighted scream escaped your throat as he began to twirl you around in a tight circle right there in the stands.

The world spun in a blur of stadium lights and cheering faces, but your hands immediately clamped around his broad shoulders. You buried your face into the crook of his neck, completely ignoring the thick layer of sweat, arena dust, and raw musk clinging to his skin.

Once the dizzying twirling finally stopped, you didn’t let go as you wrapped your arms tightly around his neck and hooked your legs securely around his large, muscular waist, clinging to his massive frame like a koala.

Jason let out a deep, rumbling laugh that vibrated powerfully against your chest as he slowly tilted his upper body downward, leaning back slightly as if he were losing his balance.

“Whoa there, darlin’... hold on tight, I might just drop you right into the dirt,” he teased, a wicked, boyish smirk playing on his lips as he tested your grip.

“You wouldn’t dare, cowboy,” you gasped, a beautiful, radiant smile breaking across your face as you squeezed him tighter with your thighs.

“Nah, you’re right. I wouldn’t,” he whispered softly, his playful demeanor melting away in an instant.

His expression turned incredibly tender, completely captivated by you as those huge, heavily calloused hands—the ones he was always so terrified would scratch your smooth skin—settled firmly against the small of your back, lifting your weight effortlessly, supporting you with an unbelievable, gentle reverence.

He held you as if you were the only thing that mattered in the entire crowded arena and down below, the scene was absolute chaos.

The lead sports reporter, a sharp-faced woman holding a microphone with the network’s logo, stood frozen mid-sentence, her mouth slightly open.

“Cut the B-roll! Get the camera up there, now!” the field producer barked into his headset, frantically waving his clipboard toward the bleachers.

Three separate camera crews moved in a synchronized, panicked scramble as heavy, shoulder-mounted lenses swiveled away from the empty winner's podium, tilting sharply upward to capture the towering champion cradling a mystery woman in the stands.

The red recording lights blazed to life. Boom mics were hoisted high on long metal poles, thrust blindly toward the bleachers to catch whatever private words were passing between you. The stadium’s giant Jumbotron screen flickered, suddenly cutting away from the replay of the ride to display a massive, high-definition live feed of the two of you.

A collective, roaring gasp rippled through the thousands of spectators as they realized the rugged, notoriously closed-off Jason Todd was looking at someone like they were his entire universe but you didn’t wait another second as you leaned down, closing the small distance between your faces, and pulled him directly into a deep, breathless kiss.

The moment his lips met yours, the entire world seemed to go completely silent as the flashbulbs of the camera crew exploded below in a rapid, blinding strobe, capturing every single angle of the embrace, but the glaring lights faded into nothingness.

His lips were warm, slightly chapped, and parting eagerly against yours with a raw, lingering hunger that had been building for months as he let out a low, needy growl against your mouth, completely losing himself in you.

His thick arms tightened around you, crushing you against his massive chest as he returned the kiss with a beautiful, unyielding intensity. It was slow, detailed, and utterly consuming as the rough texture of his stubble scratched pleasantly against your jawline as he tilted his head, deepening the kiss, his thumbs rubbing soothing, affectionate circles into your lower back.

He was completely unbothered by the fact that their faces were currently plastered across a sixty-foot screen for the entire state to see; in his mind, he was entirely alone with you.

When you finally pulled back just a fraction, both of you were breathing heavily, your foreheads resting together. Down on the dirt floor, a reporter was frantically whispering into her microphone, “Folks, we are witnessing an unprecedented moment here at the finale... the champion has completely abandoned his trophy for a mystery woman in the stands!”

Jason’s teal eyes were dark, pooling with a heavy, undisguised adoration as a soft, breathless smile broke through his stubble as he ignored the frantic camera operators shoving their lenses right against the safety railing just a few feet away.

“Best damn prize in the whole state,” he murmured against your lips, his thick Southern accent dragging over the words like a sweet, heavy promise.

He leaned up to press one more soft, lingering kiss to the tip of your nose, his eyes shining with a pure, giddy happiness. “Let ‘em take their pictures, darlin’. I want the whole damn world to know you’re mine.”

You couldn’t help the soft, breathless laugh that bubbled up against his lips, your fingers tightening in his dark curls. “Oh, they’re taking pictures all right… I think we’re currently the main event, cowboy.”

Jason finally glanced down over his broad shoulder, his teal eyes narrowing slightly as he took in the absolute circus below. The camera operators were virtually climbing over one another, shoving their massive lenses as close to the safety railing as they could manage without falling into the dirt.

Flashbulbs continued to pop in a blinding rhythm, casting sharp, dramatic shadows across the metal bleachers as the lead reporter was practically vibrating with excitement, gesturing wildly to her cameraman to get a tighter zoom on your locked hands.

“Let ‘em look,” Jason grunted, turning his attention right back to you, his expression softening back into that incredibly sweet, melting look reserved only for you as he adjusted his grip on your waist, lifting you just an inch higher to settle you more comfortably against his chest.

“They can take all the pictures they want. Ain’t none of ‘em getting a piece of this.”

“Jason, your trophy,” you whispered, though you weren’t making even the slightest effort to untangle yourself from his massive frame.

“The announcer is still calling your name...!”

And it was true. Over the roaring stadium speakers, the announcer’s booming voice was sounding increasingly desperate. “Uh... a spectacular finish tonight folks, and if we can get our champion, Jason Todd, back down to the center arena for the official presentation—”

“The trophy ain’t going nowhere,” Jason murmured, his voice dropping into that husky, intimate register that made your heart do backflips as he leaned forward, burying his face in the crook of your neck for a brief, heavy second, inhaling deeply.

You could feel the rough scratch of his stubble against your sensitive skin, followed by the warm, lingering press of his lips against your pulse point. “Besides, I already told you… I got the only prize I care about right here.”

A cheer erupted from the section of bleachers nearest to you, a group of older roping fans clapping loudly at the sheer, unapologetic romance of it all as you felt a bright flush creep up your neck and into your cheeks, but looking down at Jason—seeing the fierce, protective pride shining in his eyes—any lingering embarrassment completely evaporated.

He slowly began to slide you down his body, letting your feet find the solid metal of the bleacher bench, though he didn’t dare remove his hands from your waist.

Even standing on the bench, you were only just eye-level with him as his large hands remained anchored on your hips, his thumbs rubbing soothing, affectionate strokes through the fabric of your clothes.

“You’re really not gonna go get that giant piece of silver?” you teased, your hands resting flat against his broad, solid chest, feeling the rapid, heavy thudding of his heart beneath the protective vest.

“I’ll get it when I’m good and ready,” he chuckled, a boyish, wicked smirk pulling at the corner of his mouth as he reached up, his thumb gently wiping away a stray speck of arena dust from your cheek with an unbelievable tenderness.

“Right now, I’m busy making sure my girl doesn’t run off with any of those city slickers down there.”

“Not a chance, you big baby,” you smiled, leaning in to press a quick, playful kiss to his chin. “I happen to have a thing for stubborn cowboys.”

Jason’s smile widened, bright and triumphant, completely unbothered by the lens of a camera that was currently capturing every single second of your conversation for the giant Jumbotron above as he looped one massive arm securely around your shoulders, tucking you tightly against his side as he finally turned to face the media circus below, ready to claim his title with you right by his side.

normal au long oneshot fluff fem reader workplace/office romance semi oblivious reader jealous higuruma confessing under the snow not proofread sfw 18k words

The clock on the wall of the dimly lit office clicked over to 12:30 AM, its rhythmic ticking swallowed by the heavy, hushed stillness of the Tokyo night. Inside, the only light came from the harsh, blue-white glow of a laptop screen and the amber warmth of a single desk lamp.

Hiromi Higuruma sat behind the cluttered mahogany desk, the steady clack-clack-clack of his typing filling the room. He was drafting the final pretrial motions, meticulously dismantling the prosecutor’s suppressive tactics.

He looked every bit the dedicated, weary defense attorney he was—but beneath the sharp tailoring of his unbuttoned vest, his sheer physical presence was undeniable as the faint smell of old paper, rain-soaked asphalt from the open window, and the bitter, dark coffee he’d been surviving on clung to the air.

As he paused, running a hand through his hair, the distinct streak of grey on his fringe caught the lamplight, a stark contrast to his dark locks.

Suddenly, the heavy oak door burst open as you stumbled into the room, breathless and flushed, your chest heaving as you tried to catch your breath.

You hadn’t even had time to fully put yourself together; your dress jacket was clutched tightly in your arms, wrinkled from your frantic rush across the city as the cool night air you’d brought in with you swirled into the stuffy office, carrying the faint scent of the midnight rain.

Higuruma’s fingers froze over the keyboard. He stopped mid-sentence, the sharp, analytical edge in his dark eyes instantly softening the moment they landed on you as he leaned back into his leather chair, the wood groaning slightly under his weight.

He crossed his lanky arms over his chest, looking up at you with a heavy, lingering glance that held a quiet, unspoken longing. For weeks, the perpetrator of your current case—a corrupt corporate executive who had systematically silenced every whistleblower on his payroll—had been a thorn in his side, stalling the wheels of justice and wearing you both down.

The prosecution had been breathing down your necks, threatening to dismiss the case entirely due to a lack of foundational evidence.

He had taken you under his wing years ago, watching you grow from a green assistant into a fierce, capable partner, and he hated seeing you stressed but you didn’t even give him a chance to speak as a brilliant, triumphant smile broke across your face as you rushed to his side, the soles of your shoes squeaking softly against the polished floorboards.

“I did it, Hiromi,” you breathed out, your voice a mix of exhaustion and pure euphoria. “I actually did it!”

You leaned against the edge of his desk, the cool wood pressing through your clothes as you launched into a passionate, breathless rush. “I tracked down Sato,” you said, dumping your wrinkled jacket onto a stack of legal pads. “The prosecution thought they buried him, but I checked the sub-contracting logs from three years ago!”

“I… huff, found the off-the-books warehouse in Ota district and he was shaking, convinced that if he stepped forward, huff… the firm’s security detail would ruin him.”

“I sat with him for three hours in a dingy diner— huff, I broke down Article 321 of the Code of Criminal Procedure for him! I explained the witness protection clauses, the… exact parameters of judicial immunity, and how we could shield his family from corporate retaliation.”

Higuruma didn’t interrupt you. As you talked, his posture shifted as he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk, bringing himself closer to you.

He clasped his thick fingers together, pressing them right against the bridge of his nose and mouth, his eyes never leaving yours.

He was staring up at you in absolute awe.

“He gave me everything,” you continued, your eyes flashing with fierce satisfaction. “The dual-ledger accounting records, the encrypted emails ordering the disposal of the toxic waste samples—it’s all there!”

“The entire chain of custody is unbroken. He’s going to show up at the Tokyo District Court tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM sharp and he’s taking the stand!”

The harsh, cynical world he fought in every day seemed to melt away as his dark pupils dilated, his eyes glistening under the lamplight as he drank in the sight of you—your animation, the flush on your cheeks, the absolute pride radiating from you.

The sheer magnitude of his size was intimidating to most, his thin build making him look more like a man forged from heavy labor than a courtroom, but right now, he felt entirely captivated, humbled by your light.

“They signed the affidavit,” you whispered, finishing your frantic tale, pulling a crisp, blue-inked document from your bag and laying it flat on his keyboard. Your voice dropped as you finally ran out of air, looking down at him.

Your heart was hammering against your ribs—not just from the run, but from the sudden, thick tension that had settled over the space between you as the silence in the office became deafening, heavy with a simmering, heated friction.

Higuruma slowly lowered his hands from his face, unclenching his fingers as he looked at the signature on the affidavit, then up at your hand, which was resting on the desk just inches from his own.

His arms flexed beneath his rolled-up sleeves as he subtly shifted, a deep, rumbling sigh escaping his chest. “You are extraordinary, Y/N,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly timber that vibrated right through you, carrying a formal, deliberate weight. “This is an exceptional piece of legal execution.”

“You have completely dismantled the opposition’s defense; the prosecution will possess no viable grounds to petition for a continuance once this is entered into the record.”

“I never doubted your capabilities, but... you should not have compromised your own safety by pursuing this witness without adequate support.”

He wanted to reach out. You could see the subtle twitch in his wrist, the way his gaze dropped to your bare arm, but he hesitated as Higuruma’s hands were large, and slightly rough from years of hard, physical labor before his life in the law, a stark contrast to his brilliant mind.

He was always fiercely protective of you, and in his mind, those hands were too rugged, too harsh for someone like you. He was terrified of being too rough, of marking you or causing you discomfort with his callouses, so he kept his distance, preserving the agonizing space between you.

Instead, he just looked at you, his breathing deep and synchronized with yours in the quiet office as the heat radiating from his tall frame was palpable, warming the inches of air that separated your bodies.

“You should have seen the prosecutor’s lead counsel’s face when I told him we were still hunting for a missing link yesterday,” you murmured, your voice suddenly softer, caught in the gravity of his intense stare.

You didn’t move away, if anything, you leaned a fraction of an inch closer, daring him to close the gap. “They think they’ve already won tomorrow’s hearing.”

“Let them maintain that illusion until tomorrow morning,” Higuruma replied, his eyes darkening with a profound, simmering emotion as he looked up at you, his tone shifting into something intensely focused and quiet.

“The final verdict is already written in your dedication tonight. That is more than enough to restore my faith in the adversarial system.”

The heavy silence that followed your words stretched, pulling tighter and tighter like a drawn bowstring as you noticed him leaning his heavy frame against the dark wood of the table, his broad shoulders squared, and without even realizing it, you subconsciously mimicked him.

You leaned closer into his space, the warmth radiating from his body washing over your face. Your hands slammed against the polished surface of his desk as the sudden vibration jolted a sleek, heavy fountain pen from its resting place.

It wobbled for a fraction of a second before rolling down the incline of the table and tumbling over the side, “Oh crap— I’m so sorry,” you gasped, the words tumbling out as you immediately crouched down to grab it, your knees scraping softly against the low-pile carpet as Higuruma’s instincts kicked in instantly.

The moment you dropped out of his line of sight, his form shifted as he leaned over the desk, his arms flexing hard against the rolled-up fabric of his white sleeve as he stretched his arm out.

He placed his hand flat against the underside of the table, hovering it directly over your head and every single time you moved your head to search the shadows near his boots, his rough palm shifted with you, acting as a protective shield so your head wouldn’t crack against the unforgiving mahogany.

He didn’t touch you—he was far too careful for that—but you could feel the sheer heat radiating from his large hand just inches above your hair as your fingers wrapped around the smooth metal of the pen, and as soon as you stood back up, he smoothly retracted his arm, leaning back.

Your chest felt tight as you delicately placed the pen back into the leather pen holder, your fingers brushing the rim as Higuruma watched your hands, his gaze dark and unreadable, before he finally spoke.

His voice was a low, gravelly rumble that seemed to vibrate in the small office. “You do not need to apologize, Y/N. And... congratulations, managing to convince a witness like Sato under these circumstances. It is no small feat.”

“From a procedural standpoint, your handling of his hesitation was flawlessly executed.” A slow, rare smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, the grey patch on his fringe catching the amber lamplight. “Then again, I knew you could do it. I did take you under my wing myself, didn’t I?”

“I’d expect nothing less from my best student.”

“I learned from the best, Counselor,” you replied, your voice carrying a playful yet soft edge that made his dark eyes flicker.

The praise felt warm, settling deep in your chest as Higuruma stood up, his towering, lanky frame casting a long shadow across the room. The scent of old paper and leather followed him as he walked over to the small kitchenette setup in the corner of his office to make coffee—one for you, and one for him.

The quiet sound of water heating and the rich, bitter aroma of fresh coffee grounds filled the room, masking the smell of the midnight rain outside as you watched his broad back as he reached into the cabinet. He didn’t even have to ask as he reached for the sugar bowl and dropped exactly two cubes of sugar into your porcelain cup.

He knew your routine by heart as he stirred the liquid, the spoon clinking softly against the ceramic, and with his back still completely turned toward you, he quickly licked the sweet coffee from the spoon so you wouldn’t see the uncharacteristic, boyish gesture.

When he turned back around, the stoic, professional mask was firmly back in place as he walked over and handed you your cup, his fingers carefully avoiding yours.

Even the briefest phantom brush of his knuckles against your skin made him tense; he was always so terrified that the rough, scarred texture of his hands would be too harsh for you as he leaned his hip against the edge of the table, taking a slow sip from his own black coffee, his dark eyes fixed on you as you did the same.

“The prosecution will likely attempt to challenge Sato’s credibility during cross-examination tomorrow morning,” Higuruma stated, his tone thoroughly professional, though his gaze lingered heavily on your lips as you sipped the hot liquid. “They will try to argue that the dual-ledger records were obtained through coercive means or that Sato has a personal vendetta against the executive board. We must ensure our foundational questioning is ironclad.”

“I’ve already cross-referenced the timeline of the encrypted emails with Sato’s employment records,” you replied, setting your cup down and holding his intense gaze. “There’s no overlap that suggests fabrication. If they try to attack his character, we can cite Article 321 to protect the integrity of his written affidavit.”

Higuruma’s eyes darkened with a quiet, profound appreciation. He took another slow sip, the amber lamplight catching the sharp angle of his jaw. “Exemplary work, your grasp of the statutory exceptions is flawless.”

While keeping his eyes locked onto yours, Higuruma reached into his dress jacket’s pocket, pulling out the very fountain pen you had just rescued as he reached for a piece of coarse, brown tissue paper resting on the desk.

With practiced, deliberate movements, his large hand moved across the paper, the scratch of the nib loud in the quiet room as he slid the tissue paper across the dark wood toward you. You immediately grabbed it, the paper crinkling between your fingers. You stared down at the neat, bold handwriting tracing out a specific detail: Le Petit Restaurant @8:00 PM.

A massive, brilliant smile broke across your face, stretching from ear to ear, though a flicker of confusion danced in your eyes. You looked back up at him, tilting your head slightly. “What’s this, Hiromi?” you questioned, your voice soft, even though deep down, a fluttering feeling in your stomach told you exactly what he was trying to say as Higuruma cleared his throat, taking another sip of his coffee to hide the slight tightness in his jaw. “I intended to arrange a proper dinner for us,” he said, his voice maintaining its measured, formal cadence, though the underlying rasp betrayed his composure.

“Following the conclusion of tomorrow’s court session. To celebrate the culmination of your hard work on this case, you have earned a reprieve.”

Your brilliant smile faltered, dropping into an awkward, apologetic curve. You shifted your weight from one foot to the other, holding the tissue paper a bit tighter. “Oh... Hiromi, I... I’d love to, really, but...” You tilted your head to the side, looking at him through your lashes, the sudden shift in the air making your pulse jump.

“Another seasoned lawyer—the one from the firm downtown, the senior partner who’s been consulting on the corporate compliance angle with us, he uhh… already offered to take me somewhere tomorrow night. And I... well, I already agreed.”

Higuruma froze as the subtle and relaxed posture he had maintained vanished in an instant. He placed his coffee cup back down on the table with a sharp, heavy clack that echoed like a small explosion in the quiet office.

His dark brows drew together, a sudden, suffocating wave of possessiveness instantly shattering his professional veneer as the careful, polite boundaries he usually guarded so fiercely evaporated.

His jaw clenched, the muscles ticking violently beneath his rugged stubble. When he spoke, the formal honorifics and measured vocabulary were entirely gone, replaced by a raw, gravelly edge. “You’re going out with him?” he asked, his voice dropping a dangerous octave, thick with a dark, simmering jealousy.

He took a deliberate step forward, crowding into your space until the sheer mass of his broad chest blocked out the light from the desk lamp. “Tomorrow night? After we close this case together?”

“It was just for networking, Hiromi, and he asked before we even got the witness,” you explained quickly, your breath hitching at his sudden proximity as the thick tension between you twisted tight, making the air feel scarce.

You took a small step closer instead of backing away, your eyes softening as you looked up into his tense, shadowed face. “It’s purely professional. Maybe next time... the both of you—I mean, the both of us—can have dinner together?”

“Just you and me. Next time, I promise.”

Higuruma didn’t answer right away as he stood towering over you, his chest rising and falling heavily as he drank in your expression.

His dilated pupils scanned your face, tracking the slight flush on your cheeks and the sincerity in your eyes as his large hands clenched into fists at his sides, the fabric of his sleeves straining against his arms as he fought the overwhelming urge to reach out, to pull you against him and erase the agonizing inches remaining between you.

“A networking dinner,” he rasped out, the words sounding bitter on his tongue as he forced his breathing to slow, though the jealous fire in his dark gaze didn’t fade in the slightest. “He has no business taking you out, Y/N.”

The heavy silence returned, thick and suffocating, vibrating with the raw energy of his confession as Higuruma’s gaze remained locked on yours, his dark eyes searching your face for any sign of hesitation, any indication that you understood exactly what he was truly saying beneath the guise of professional territory.

For a fleeting second, the sheer proximity of him—the heat radiating from his tall frame, the bitter scent of coffee mingled with the faint musk of rain—made the rest of the world vanish completely.

Then, with a slow, deliberate effort that looked almost painful, Higuruma closed his eyes as he took a deep, steadying breath, his chest expanding against the fabric of his dress shirt. When he opened his eyes again, the fierce, unbridled jealousy had been forcibly pushed back behind his dark irises.

He stepped back, restoring those agonizing, safe inches of distance between your bodies as the rigid, unyielding mask of the seasoned defense attorney slid back over his features, though his voice still carried a residual roughness that he couldn’t quite smooth over.

“Forgive me,” he said, his tone dropping back into a formal, disciplined cadence, though it was quieter now, empty of its usual clinical detachment. “That was... an unprofessional lapse in judgment on my part.”

“Your networking and professional associations outside of this office are entirely your own prerogative.” He reached down, his large, lean hand moving with extreme care as he picked up his coffee cup from the desk, avoiding even the slightest risk of brushing against your fingers.

“However, the reality of our immediate schedule remains unchanged,” he continued, looking down at you with a heavy, lingering glance that still held a quiet, unspoken longing.

“Tomorrow’s hearing will demand the absolute peak of your cognitive faculties. The prosecution will be vindictive, and Judge Iwata will not tolerate a disorganized presentation.”

He walked over to the mahogany desk, closing his laptop with a decisive, soft click that signaled the end of the night work as he turned back to you, his broad shoulders squaring as he gave you a small, definitive nod.

“You have performed an invaluable service for our client tonight, Y/N, and for that, you have my highest professional regard. But your exhaustion is palpable.” He glanced toward the coat rack near the door, his eyes softening just a fraction.

“Go home and gather your notes, review the witness protection clauses one final time, and ensure you get some rest for tomorrow’s court session.”

“We need to be flawless at 10:00 AM.”

The sterile, suffocating atmosphere of the courtroom was a stark contrast to the quiet intimacy of Higuruma’s office from the night before as high ceilings bounced the echo of coughing spectators and the shuffling of legal documents across the mahogany benches.

The sharp, bitter scent of industrial floor wax mingled with the sweat of a tense audience, and the bright, unforgiving fluorescent lights overhead hummed a low, vibrating note that seemed to dig straight into your temples.

The trial was in full swing, and it was a masterpiece of legal warfare as you and Higuruma sat side-by-side at the defense table, a united front defending your client. All those weeks of sleepless nights, the tireless dead-ends, and the witness you had triumphantly secured the night before were finally paying off.

You had laid the groundwork flawlessly, but it was Higuruma who was truly carrying the heavy weight of the case on his broad shoulders. Every time he spoke, his deep, gravelly voice commanded the entire room, cutting through the prosecution’s flimsy arguments like a blade.

“If the prosecution intends to introduce the defendant’s past employment termination as a reflection of character,” Higuruma stated, his tone cool, precise, and rigorously formal, “they must first establish relevance under Article 317 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Thus far, they have offered nothing but conjecture.”

You watched him from your seat, your fingers tightly gripping the edge of a manila folder. Even in his neatly pressed three-piece suit, his lean, slender build was imposing as his broad back stretched the fabric of his vest, and his arms flexed against his sleeves every time he reached for a document.

The distinctive grey patch on his fringe stood out starkly against his dark hair under the courtroom lights, giving him the look of a seasoned, weathered wolf. Slowly, surely, the tide was turning. Up on the bench, Judge Iwata was leaning forward, nodding slowly as he listened to Higuruma’s meticulous breakdown of the facts.

The Judge was taking his side—taking your side as the sweet taste of victory was right there, lingering just out of reach, but the prosecution, desperate and cornered, suddenly threw out a venomous, uncalled-for insinuation about your client’s character, completely disregarding the rules of evidence.

“Your Honor,” the prosecutor interjected sharply, “the defense’s sudden acquisition of an uncorroborated witness overnight speaks less to legal diligence and more to a desperate, late-night manipulation of the facts.”

You felt the shift in Higuruma before you even saw it as the air around him grew instantly heavy, thick with a suffocating, sudden heat as the prosecutor’s barbed mention of a ‘late-night manipulation’ struck a dangerously raw nerve, instantly dragging Higuruma’s mind back to the agonizing jealousy of the previous night—to the thought of you leaving him for another man’s company.

His righteous fury flared up instantly as his jaw clenched so hard the muscles ticked violently beneath his rugged stubble. Higuruma stood up to present the definitive piece of counter-evidence, his towering frame casting a long, intimidating shadow over the defense table.

BANG!

His hands slammed down hard against the polished wood of the table, the sharp, thunderous sound echoing off the high walls of the courtroom and causing a few people in the gallery to gasp. The sheer force of his movement shook the microphone on the podium.

He was pushing past his usual stoic composure, his dark eyes flashing with a dangerous, embers-and-ash anger as he prepared to dismantle the prosecutor entirely.

In his blind frustration, he hadn’t realized just how close he had positioned himself to you as his hand had come down right beside your notes, his thick thumb resting flat against the dark wood.

Without thinking, driven entirely by an instinct to protect him from letting his temper flare in front of the Judge, you reached out as your hand was small against the desk, and you deliberately slid your pinky finger over, resting it gently on top of his thumb.

The contrast was immediate and jarring. Your skin was smooth and cool against his hand as his hands were forged from years of brutal, physical labor before he ever touched a law book, scarred and rugged, which was exactly why he always kept his distance from you—he was terrified that his rough touch would somehow hurt or ruin you.

But you didn’t pull away, instead, your pinky finger began to gently, rhythmically rub against his skin, a silent, secret caress beneath the level of the podium where no one else could see. “Calm down…” your gentle touch pleaded as Higuruma froze mid-breath.

The fiery tirade that had been building in his throat died instantly as a sudden, dizzying wave of heated tension flooded the small space between you two, completely separate from the courtroom battle raging around you.

The lingering friction from the night before—the jealousy, the unspoken longing, the agonizing proximity—snapped back into sharp focus. You could feel the intense heat radiating from his large frame, his breathing turning shallow.

Underneath your finger, his thumb twitched. He didn’t move away, but he didn’t lean into it either, paralyzed by the sheer sensation of your soft skin intentionally pressing against his hand.

His slender arms trembled slightly under his sleeve as he fought the overwhelming urge to turn his hand over, trap your fingers in his large palm, and hold on tight. For a long, agonizing second, Higuruma broke his own rule but he didn’t look at the Judge, nor did he look at the prosecutor.

Slowly, his head turned a fraction of an inch, and his dark, dilated pupils dropped to look directly at you. It was a stolen, heavy glance, burning with a quiet intensity that had absolutely nothing to do with the law as his eyes traced the line of your jaw, the soft curve of your mouth, and the fierce, protective loyalty shining in your gaze.

The longing in his expression was profound, a silent admission that he was utterly captured by you, helpless against the soothing weight of your touch as the silence stretched for a beat too long, the tension between your touching fingers thickening until it felt almost palpable.

Slowly, Higuruma let out a long, slow breath through his nose. The rigid, angry tension in his shoulders visibly melted away, replaced by a deep, simmering focus.

He tore his eyes away from you, locking them back onto the Judge, but his thumb shifted just a fraction of a millimeter, leaning into the comforting pressure of your pinky finger. “As I was saying,” Higuruma began, his voice dropping back into its low, smooth, and utterly captivating rumble, completely composed once more.

“The defense would like to present Exhibit C. The signed affidavit from Mr. Sato, which explicitly outlines the timeline of the corporate compliance infractions.”

He paused, his voice taking on a lower, deliberate weight that vibrated right through the desk. “Furthermore, any insinuation by the prosecution regarding the integrity of my co-counsel’s methods is not only entirely defamatory, but legally irrelevant.”

“This affidavit was executed in strict accordance with legal protocol.” He didn’t look down, but his thumb gave a microscopic, firm press against your pinky finger, a silent, professional acknowledgment that was entirely intimate. “The evidence speaks for itself, Your Honor. The defense rests its motion.”

The gavel struck the sounding block with a sharp, resonant crack that echoed through the high-ceilinged room. “Motion granted,” Judge Iwata announced, his voice booming over the courtroom speakers.

“The affidavit is admitted as Exhibit C, the prosecution will refrain from making unsubstantiated claims regarding the defense’s investigative methods. We will recess for lunch and reconvene at 1:30 PM for cross-examination.”

The courtroom instantly erupted into a low hum of activity. Spectators began to shuffle out of the gallery, and across the aisle, the prosecution team began furiously whispering to one another, their faces grim.

Only then did Higuruma smoothly lift his hand from the table, breaking the contact between his thumb and your pinky finger as the sudden absence of his warmth felt like a cold shock against your skin.

He stood up straight, towering over the defense table, and meticulously began gathering the loose documents scattered across the polished mahogany. His movements were deliberate, formal, and entirely controlled, but you could see the slight tremor in his broad shoulders as he forced himself back into the role of the unflappable senior partner.

“An exceptional counter-maneuver, Y/N,” he said, his voice dropping into that quiet, gravelly register meant only for your ears. He didn't look at you right away, keeping his eyes fixed on a stapled brief as he aligned its edges against the desk.

“Your intervention was... well-timed. From a procedural standpoint, allowing the prosecution to bait us into an emotional response would have compromised our standing with the bench.”

“I just knew you had the upper hand,” you murmured, keeping your voice low as you packed your own legal pads into your briefcase. “I wasn’t going to let them take that away from you… from us.”

Higuruma’s fingers paused on the manila folder. Slowly, he leaned down, resting one hand flat on the edge of the table as he bent his head closer to yours. It was a completely professional posture to any outside observer—just two lawyers discussing strategy—but the proximity was intoxicating.

His dark, intense eyes locked onto yours, holding a heavy, lingering gaze that made your breath catch and under the bright, sterile lights of the courtroom, his dilated pupils searched your face with a raw, unspoken longing that completely contradicted his formal demeanor.

“Your loyalty to this case—and to myself—is noted, and deeply appreciated,” he rasped, his voice dropping an octave, carrying a sudden, thick friction that had nothing to do with the law. He looked at your lips for a fraction of a second before pulling his gaze back to your eyes.

“However, you must maintain that same level of vigilance during the afternoon session. The prosecutor will be looking for any opportunity to retaliate.”

“I’m ready for them,” you said, offering him a small, confident smile.

Higuruma stared at you for a beat longer, a profound, quiet awe softening the rugged lines of his face and he looked as though he wanted to say something more—something that crossed the strict boundaries he so fiercely guarded—but he pulled back, his jaw clenching as he straightened to his full, imposing height.

“Excellent. Then let us utilize this recess to review Sato’s cross-examination outline.” He adjusted the lapels of his three-piece suit, the formal, stoic mask firmly back in place. “We shall take our lunch in the law library upstairs. It will provide the necessary privacy to ensure our strategy remains ironclad.”

As he stepped out from behind the table to let you lead the way, his hand hovered briefly behind your waist—never quite touching you, preserving that agonizing, respectful distance—but the palpable heat radiating from his looming frame followed you all the way out of the courtroom.

The law library upstairs was a sanctuary of silence, smelling heavily of aged leather binding, dust, and the faint, sweet scent of old paper.

Tall rows of oak bookshelves blocked out the harsh fluorescent glare of the courthouse hallways, casting the room in long, muted shadows as Higuruma sat across from you at a heavy wooden study table, his laptop open alongside a meticulous stack of case files.

He had unbuttoned his suit jacket, his broad shoulders and arms shifting beneath his unbuttoned vest as he quietly reviewed the cross-examination outlines. The atmosphere between you two was quiet but charged, the lingering electricity from your secret, under-the-table touch in the courtroom still humming quietly in the space between you.

The heavy oak door of the library swung open, breaking the silence as the senior partner from the downtown firm—the one who had been consulting on the corporate compliance angle—stepped into the room.

He looked entirely too pristine, his tailored gray suit immaculate, carrying a lavishly packaged bento box in his hands as he walked in with a casual, overconfident stride that completely disregarded the unspoken rules of a closed legal workspace.

“I brought you some lunch, Y/N,” the attorney said, his voice entirely too loud for the library as he walked straight toward your side of the table, offering a dazzling, practiced smile.

“I figured after a grueling morning session like that, you’d want something better than the cafeteria food. I also wanted to confirm our reservations for eight tonight.”

Higuruma froze as the air in the room instantly plummeted, turning thick and suffocating. He slowly lifted his head, his dark eyes narrowing into dangerous, icy slits as he looked at the intruder.

The sheer, imposing mass of his frame seemed to expand as he leaned back slightly in his chair, his jaw clenching so hard the muscles ticked violently beneath his stubble. His expression practically screamed, ‘Who allowed this man into a secured defense workspace?’

He didn’t say a word, but the protective, possessive aura radiating from him was loud enough to fill the entire room as his hands slowly flattened against his legal pads, his knuckles whitening as he fought to maintain his composure.

You, however, were mortified.

“Counselor Minami,” you said, your voice dropping into a sharp, hushed whisper as you immediately stood up, stepping between him and the table.

While you appreciated the gesture of the food, the sheer lack of professional boundaries—barging into a closed, mid-trial strategy session—was completely unacceptable. “This is highly inappropriate! We are in the middle of a trial recess, preparing a crucial witness for the afternoon session… this room is reserved for active defense counsel only.”

“Oh, come on, Y/N,” Minami laughed, waving a hand dismissively, entirely oblivious to the fact that Higuruma was staring at him like a weathered wolf calculating the precise trajectory of a strike.

“I’m a consultant on the case. I just wanted to check in on you. Besides, a quick break won’t ruin your strategy.”

“The integrity of our client’s defense relies entirely on our focus during these hours,” you scolded him sharply, your tone unyielding and thoroughly professional as you gesture toward the door.

“You are not on the active trial team, and bringing personal matters into a secure preparation space is a direct violation of protocol. I must ask you to leave immediately. We will discuss our professional networking schedule after the court adjourns for the day.”

Across the table, a fascinating shift occurred as Higuruma slowly picked up his fountain pen, lowering his gaze back down to his notes, but he wasn’t reading as a slow, rare, and thoroughly satisfied smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, softening the rugged, stoic contours of his face.

The deep, possessive irritation that had flared in his chest melted into absolute, quiet smugness. He sat there, crossing one long and slender leg over the other, deliberately sliding his pen across a legal pad with practiced, rhythmic scratches, entirely enjoying the melody of you fiercely defending your shared workspace—and, in a way, him.

Minami’s smile faltered, his face flushing with embarrassment as he realized he had overstepped. “Right… of course. My apologies. I’ll... see you at eight then.” He hastily set the bento box on a nearby cart and practically scurried out of the library, the heavy door clicking shut behind him.

The silence that returned to the room was entirely different—warm, thick, and laced with a teasing friction as you let out a long, frustrated sigh, running a hand through your hair before sitting back down, your face still slightly flushed from the confrontation.

You looked across the table, only to find Higuruma still looking down at his notes, though the amused smile was still firmly etched on his lips. “You find this amusing, Counselor?” you asked, tilting your head, a mix of exhaustion and playfulness in your voice.

Higuruma slowly raised his head, his dark, intense eyes locking onto yours with a heavy, lingering glance that held a profound, unspoken warmth. He set his pen down, his large, rough hand resting flat on the table, just inches from yours.

“On the contrary,” Higuruma rumbled, his voice a low, gravelly timber that vibrated right through the wooden table. “I find your adherence to courtroom protocol... deeply commendable. Your cross-examination of Counselor Minami’s boundaries was flawlessly executed.”

His eyes darkened with that familiar, intense longing, his gaze dropping to your hands before rising back to meet your eyes. “Though, I must admit... I am glad you dismissed the distraction. We have far more important matters to conclude today.”

The digital clock above the heavy oak double doors of Courtroom 402 clicked over to 1:30 PM sharp as the sharp, mechanical ring of the bailiff’s buzzer signaled the end of the recess, and the heavy silence of the gallery was instantly replaced by the rustle of tailored wool and the snapping of briefcase latches.

You and Higuruma sat side by side at the defense table, a flawlessly coordinated front. The sterile, white fluorescent light overhead glinted off the polished mahogany surface between you, where the signed affidavit of Mr. Sato lay resting like a loaded weapon.

Higuruma sat perfectly upright, his towering frame imposing even while seated. His unbuttoned vest had been meticulously refastened, his tie straightened, and the formal, unyielding mask of Tokyo’s most formidable defense attorney was firmly back in place.

Yet, as you arranged the final set of cross-examination indexes, his dark eyes flicked toward you. It was a heavy, lingering glance—brief, silent, but thick with the shared triumph of the library upstairs.

“All rise for the Honorable Judge Iwata,” the bailiff announced, his voice echoing off the high, sterile walls.

The courtroom rose in unison. As Judge Iwata took his seat on the elevated bench, his sharp gaze swept over the well of the court, landing first on the visibly perspiring prosecution team, then on Higuruma.

“We are back on the record in the matter of Tokyo District Corporate Fraud, Case Number 409,” Judge Iwata stated, adjusting his glasses. “The defense may call its witness.”

Higuruma stood up as his broad shoulders squared, his broad chest expanding beneath his white dress shirt as he took his place at the center podium.

The sheer gravity of his physical presence seemed to command the entire room, drawing every eye to the sharp angle of his jaw and the distinctive streak of grey in his fringe. “Thank you, Your Honor,” Higuruma began, his voice dropping into that low, gravelly, and utterly captivating rumble.

“The defense calls Mr. Daisuke Sato.”

The side door opened, and Sato stepped into the courtroom. He was pale, his hands trembling slightly as he took the oath, but as his eyes found yours at the defense table, he took a steadying breath.

You offered him a precise, encouraging nod—the exact reassurance you had promised him during those late-night hours in the Ota district.

What followed was a masterclass in judicial execution as Higuruma approached the witness box with measured, deliberate steps. He systematically guided Sato through the dual-ledger accounting records and the encrypted emails, establishing an unbroken chain of custody for every piece of evidence you had recovered the night before.

His questioning was formal, incisive, and completely airtight. Every time the prosecution attempted to object, attempting to muddy the waters with character assassination, Higuruma countered instantly, citing statutory exceptions with absolute clinical precision.

“Objection, Your Honor! Speculation on the witness’s part regarding executive intent,” the lead prosecutor barked, his face flushed with frustration.

“The witness is testifying directly to an explicit directive received via an encrypted server, verified under Article 321,” Higuruma shot back, his tone cool, formal, and utterly unyielding. “The intent is not speculated; it is documented.”

“Objection overruled,” Judge Iwata declared, his gavel falling with a decisive thud. “The witness may answer.”

By the time the prosecution took the podium for cross-examination, they were already beaten. Their arguments were desperate, fragmented, and entirely dismantled by the legal framework you and Higuruma had spent weeks constructing as Sato held firm, protected by the ironclad clauses you had briefed him on.

As the afternoon sun began to dip, casting long, amber slants of light through the high courtroom windows, Higuruma stood up for his closing summation.

He didn’t use notes as he simply stood before the bench, his lean, slender frame casting a long shadow across the courtroom floor, “Justice is not a matter of corporate convenience,” Higuruma concluded, his deep voice vibrating through the sterile room, holding the entire gallery captive.

“The evidence presented by the defense demonstrates a systematic, illegal suppression of truth. The statutory requirements for a conviction have not merely been met; they have been overwhelmingly established… the defense rests.”

Judge Iwata leaned back in his leather chair, looking at the mountain of evidence before him. The silence in the room was deafening, heavy with a simmering friction as everyone awaited the inevitable as the Judge did not even retire to his chambers.

He looked down at the defense table, his expression solemn but respectful, “In light of the irrefutable evidence presented in Exhibit C, and the corroborating testimony of Mr. Sato,” Judge Iwata announced, his voice booming over the microphone.

“This court finds the corporate entity and its executive board guilty on all counts of structural fraud and hazardous disposal. Sentences will be handed down during the formal hearing next term.”

“This court is adjourned.”

BANG!

The final strike of the gavel echoed through the room like a thunderclap.

It was over… and you had won! The gallery erupted into a flurry of motion and excited whispers as you let out a breath you felt like you’d been holding for weeks, your shoulders instantly dropping as the immense weight of the trial lifted from your chest.

A brilliant, radiant smile broke across your face as you looked up as Higuruma turned away from the podium and walked back to the defense table. The rigid, calculated tension in his posture finally melted away, replaced by a profound, quiet relief.

He looked down at you, his dark pupils dilated under the harsh lights, drinking in the sight of your euphoric expression. For a moment, the bustling courtroom around you faded into absolute nothingness but he didn’t care about the spectators, the lingering press, or the defeated prosecutors packing their bags across the aisle.

His gaze held a quiet, unspoken longing so intense it made your pulse race. “We did it, Hiromi,” you breathed, your voice a soft, ecstatic whisper amidst the courtroom din as Higuruma slowly leaned his heavy frame down against the desk, bringing his face closer to yours. He reached out, his hand resting on the polished wood just inches from your own.

His knuckles twitched, the rough, scarred skin of his thumb subtly brushing against the very edge of your desk calendar—close enough that you could feel the immense, radiating heat of his palm, yet still preserving that agonizing safety he forced upon himself to keep from being too rough with you.

“Correction, Y/N,” Higuruma murmured, his voice a low, gravelly timber meant entirely for you, carrying a deep, simmering emotion that sent a shiver down your spine. “You did it. This victory belongs entirely to your diligence, your intellect, and your unyielding resolve.”

He looked down at your hand, then back up to your eyes, the grey patch on his fringe catching the last rays of the afternoon sun.

The formal boundaries of the senior partner were still there, but beneath them, the raw, possessive heat from the night before was burning brighter than ever.

“It has been the distinct privilege of my career to sit beside you today,” he rasped softly, his jaw tightening as he glanced toward the courtroom doors, his mind tracking the impending arrival of eight o’clock and the man waiting for you. “Now... let us conclude our administrative filings. Your evening engagements await.”

The word engagements hung heavily in the narrow space between you, sharp and bitter. You felt your smile falter slightly, the lingering heat between your hands turning into a taut, agonizing pull. “Hiromi,” you said softly, your voice cutting through the rustle of papers as the courtroom slowly emptied around you.

You shifted your hand just a fraction closer to his, daring to close the distance. “You make it sound like I’m rushing out the door. The dinner isn’t for hours, we still have to file the post-trial motions together.”

Higuruma didn’t move his hand away as he looked at your fingers, so close to his rough, leather-like skin, and his jaw ticked.

He let out a low, rough breath that smelled faintly of the black coffee he’d consumed during the recess. “I am simply ensuring you have adequate time to prepare,” he replied, his tone clipping, trying to sound like the detached mentor he was supposed to be.

But his eyes gave him away—dark, intense, and practically smoldering with a jealousy he couldn’t entirely choke down. “A seasoned lawyer from downtown likely expects absolute punctuality. I wouldn’t want my junior partner keeping him waiting.”

The human, possessive edge in his gravelly voice was unmistakable. You couldn’t help the small, breathless laugh that escaped your lips, leaning in just a fraction more until you could feel the warmth of his chest radiating against you, “Are you jealous, Counselor?” you murmured, your tone a daring mix of playfulness and undeniable heat, your eyes locking onto his.

Higuruma froze and for a second, the only sound was the distant hum of the ventilation system and the heavy, synchronized rhythm of your breathing.

His pupils dilated further, swallowing the dark iris as he stared down at you as he lowered his head slightly, his voice dropping into a dangerous, gravelly whisper that vibrated right through the wood of the table.

“And if I am?” he asked, the filter entirely slipping away. He leaned closer, the scent of his cologne—earthy, rugged, like cedar and rain—flooding your senses. His hand twitched violently on the desk, desperately wanting to reach out, to wrap around your wrist and pull you against him, yet still holding back out of that stubborn, deep-seated fear of his own roughness.

“If I told you I would rather you spend your evening across a table from me, rather than some man who didn’t spend the last three weeks watching you pour your soul into this case... what would you say to that, Y/N?”

The sheer intensity of his gaze made your breath hitch, the heated friction between you stretching so tightly it felt ready to snap. “I would say,” you whispered, your heart hammering wildly against your ribs, “that you should have asked me first last night... and that you better not forget about that promise for next time.”

A slow, heavy silence settled over you, the tension lingering thickly in the air as Higuruma stared at your lips, his chest rising and falling deeply.

Finally, a tight, rugged smile broke the harsh lines of his face as he slowly pulled back, breaking the intoxicating proximity, though his eyes never truly let you go. “A binding verbal contract,” Higuruma murmured, his voice returning to a smooth, quiet rumble as he reached for his briefcase. “I will certainly hold you to that, Y/N. Now, let us finish these files.”

The clock on the wall of the office clicked past 7:30 PM, the rhythmic tick-tick-tick sounding much lighter now that the crushing weight of the trial was behind you.

The amber warmth of the desk lamp cast long, relaxed shadows across the dark mahogany, and the scent of rain-soaked asphalt from the open window had settled into a pleasant, cool breeze as you sat at your desk, the soft click of your keyboard filling the quiet space as you typed up the final post-trial memo.

Across the room, Higuruma sat behind his own desk, his unbuttoned vest hanging open over a frame that was deceptively lean. He was a tall man, commanding a striking height that naturally drew the eye, but his build was distinctly lanky—an average, healthy weight distributed across a long, slender torso and narrow, sharp shoulders.

His sleeves were rolled up, revealing thin, wiry forearms defined more by tight sinew and a few prominent veins than bulk. To anyone else, he looked like a man meticulously wrapping up administrative loose ends.

In reality, he was executing a highly calculated, entirely uncharacteristic act of corporate sabotage as a heavy stack of red-labeled folders sat prominently on the corner of your desk—files on an upcoming compliance audit that weren't due for another three weeks.

Higuruma had personally retrieved them from the archive room twenty minutes ago, placing them down with a perfectly straight face and a calm, clinical explanation about “procedural expedience.”

‘... He absolutely hates me,’ you thought to yourself, staring bitterly at the massive pile of paper. Your eyes darted from the red folders over to him, watching how smoothly his fountain pen glided over his own work. ‘There is no other explanation! He takes me under his wing just to bury me alive in paperwork and he’s absolutely sadistic…!’

‘He probably saw me smiling after the trial and decided my joy was a personal insult to his workload…’

Your phone buzzed on the desk. The screen lit up with a text from the downtown senior partner: ‘Just leaving the firm. See you at 8:00?’

You let out a soft sigh, looking at the mountain of fresh paperwork Higuruma had assigned you. With a wry, slightly defeated smile, you picked up your phone and typed out a reply: ‘I’m so sorry, but I won’t be able to make it tonight. My boss just handed me a sudden influx of urgent post-trial filings and audit prep. I’m stuck at the office for the foreseeable future…’

Across the room, Higuruma’s fountain pen paused against a sheet of legal paper. He didn’t lift his head entirely, but his dark eyes flickered upward beneath his brow, tracking the movement of your fingers on the screen.

He watched you set the phone face-down, his sharp, analytical mind instantly calculating the timing as a slow, thoroughly satisfied, and devastatingly soft smile tugged at the corner of Higuruma’s mouth.

The dark, suffocating jealousy that had been simmering in his chest all day instantly evaporated, replaced by a deep, smug sense of triumph. He lowered his gaze back to his paperwork, the scratch of his pen on the paper resuming with a rhythmic, almost cheerful pace. “Is there an issue, Y/N?” he asked, his voice dropping into that low, gravelly rumble that vibrated right through the quiet office.

His tone was a masterpiece of formal, professional innocence. “If the volume of the compliance files is too burdensome for this evening, we can certainly prioritize them first thing in the morning.”

You looked up, catching the faint, residual curve of his lips before his stoic mask slid back into place as you tilted your head, a knowing, slightly annoyed look in your eyes. “No, Counselor. It’s fine,” you said, your voice laced with heavy, deliberate sarcasm. “It’s completely fine. I just had to cancel my dinner plans.”

“Apparently, my supervising partner has decided that corporate compliance from a month from now is a matter of absolute midnight urgency.”

Higuruma didn’t look up immediately, but his thin shoulders relaxed completely, his narrow chest rising and falling in a deep, steady breath as he carefully aligned the edges of a document, his long, slender, scarred fingers moving with practiced deliberation.

“Regrettable,” he murmured, though there wasn't a single shred of regret in his tone. He finally lifted his head, his dark pupils dilated as he fixed you with a heavy, lingering glance.

The grey streak on his fringe caught the amber lamplight, making his sharp, angular features look exceptionally striking in the quiet room. “However, in our line of work, the momentum of a major victory must be maintained. Indulging in distractions so soon after a verdict can compromise one’s professional focus.”

“Distractions,” you repeated softly, leaning back in your chair and looking at him through your lashes, stepping right into the banter. “Is that what you think a nice dinner is? A distraction?”

“Or are you just trying to break my spirit by giving me enough work to kill a lesser attorney? Honestly, Hiromi, sometimes I think you just plain ol’ hate me.”

Higuruma froze as he slowly lowered his pen, the silence in the office suddenly thickening, turning heavy and charged with a simmering, electric friction.

His jaw clenched, the muscles ticking beneath his rugged stubble as he absorbed your words. “Hate you?” he rasped, his voice dropping an octave, becoming dangerously low and quiet. He stood up from his desk.

His tall, lanky frame seemed to unfold elegantly, casting a long, slender shadow that stretched across the floor until it touched the edge of your desk. He walked over with slow, deliberate steps, his long legs crossing the space quickly, the faint scent of his cedar-and-rain cologne moving with him.

He stopped right in front of your desk, leaning his thin frame forward as his wiry arms braced his hands against the wood, the fabric of his white shirt pulled taut against his slender shoulders.

He brought his face closer to yours, his dark eyes burning into your own with a raw, fierce intensity that made your pulse instantly sprint.

“You think I give you this work because I hate you, Y/N?” he murmured, the jealousy from earlier flaring back up, mixed with an unspoken, agonizing longing.

His eyes dropped to your lips before snapping back up to lock onto yours. “If I hated you, this would be easy. I would have let you leave months ago without a second thought. Instead, I’m stuck standing here, completely at the mercy of whatever you decide to do next. Does that sound like hatred to you?”

The air between you grew suffocatingly hot. His long, slender hands twitched against the dark mahogany of your desk, just inches from your fingers as you could feel the immense, radiating heat of his palms.

He was so close you could see the fine lines of exhaustion around his eyes, his lean angles casting sharp shadows across his face, yet he forced himself to maintain that tiny, agonizing boundary of safety—scared that his rough, labored hands would be too harsh if he dared to touch you.

“Your place is here,” Higuruma whispered, his voice a gravelly, possessive timber that sent a furious shiver down your spine. “Perfecting the craft… with me.”

You swallowed hard, your heart hammering wildly against your ribs, entirely captivated by the sheer weight of his presence as you leaned forward just a fraction of an inch, your voice dropping to a matching, breathless whisper. “So... this whole mountain of paperwork was just a high-class kidnapping?”

A sudden, soft huff of a laugh escaped his nose, the intense, smoldering expression on his lean face melting into a rare, genuinely amused smile.

He slowly shook his head, though he didn't pull his face away from yours. “It was an administrative necessity,” he shot back smoothly, his tone laced with a smug, teasing warmth. “And since you are now required to remain late under my tyrannical rule, it is only logical that I provide sustenance.”

He finally straightened his tall frame up, though his eyes lingered on your face for a beat too long before he reached into his pocket for his phone. “I shall order from the sushi place down the block,” he said, the formal cadence returning, though his eyes were still dilated, still drinking you in.

“The one that prepares the spicy tuna roll exactly to your specifications. If we are to handle this ‘urgent’ workload, we must be properly fueled.”

You couldn’t help but laugh softly, the heavy tension breaking into something sweet, thick, and deeply shared. “Thank you, Hiromi. That sounds perfect... even if you are a terrible boss.”

“I am an efficient boss,” Higuruma corrected, a brilliant, content glint in his dark eyes as he walked back to his side of the room.

As you opened the first red folder, his gaze continued to flicker up and down from his papers to you, entirely satisfied to have you trapped in his space for the rest of the night. The frantic rush of adrenaline slowly bled out of the room, leaving behind a heavy, comfortable quiet.

True to his word, Higuruma had ordered the food, and for twenty minutes, the only sounds were the quiet rustle of brown paper bags, the snap of chopsticks, and the soft murmur of a shared ‘thank you.’

Eating at your desks felt like a quiet conspiracy as he sat across the room, lanky legs crossed at the ankle, elegantly navigating a bento box while his dark eyes occasionally drifted over to make sure you were actually eating the spicy tuna rolls he’d ordered.

Once the containers were cleared away, a seamless, unspoken rhythm took over. The playful friction of the evening melted into the background as you both truly locked in as the clock ticked steadily past 9:00 PM, then 10:00 PM.

The silence between you was thick with mutual focus. It was the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of your keyboard answering the sharp, deliberate scratch of Higuruma’s fountain pen against yellow legal pads.

Every so often, the heavy rustle of a turning page from the red compliance folders would break the monotony as Higuruma was entirely in his element. Under the stark amber light of his desk lamp, his thin, angular silhouette looked like a painting of sharp contrast.

He had discarded his suit jacket completely, and his unbuttoned vest hung loose over his slender torso. As he leaned over his desk, his long spine curved gracefully, his narrow shoulders hunched slightly in absolute concentration.

Whenever he paused to ponder a specific clause in the compliance code, his long, slender fingers would rhythmically tap against his jaw, his rugged stubble catching the light.

Around 10:45 PM, a sudden, sharp breeze swept through the open window, carrying the crisp, damp scent of the late-night rain as you winced slightly from the sudden chill hit your bare arms, your shoulders tensing.

Across the room, the scratching of the fountain pen instantly stopped but Higuruma didn’t say a word as he simply stood up, his tall, lanky frame unfolding into the dim light of the office.

He moved with a quiet, feline grace that belied his height. Walking over to the coat rack near the door, his long arms reached up to smoothly slide his heavy, dark trench coat off the hanger as he walked over to your desk, his steps completely silent on the carpet. Before you could even look up from your monitor, the large, heavy fabric of his coat was gently draped over your shoulders.

It was still warm from his earlier commute, and it completely enveloped you, smelling richly of cedar wood, expensive ink, and the faint, bitter trace of black coffee. “The temperature drops rapidly after rain,” Higuruma murmured, his voice a low, gravelly friction in the quiet room.

You pulled the lapels tighter around yourself, burying your chin slightly in the collar. “Thank you, Hiromi. But… aren’t you cold?”

He offered a faint, almost imperceptible shake of his head, his dark eyes locked onto yours for a lingering moment. His lean face softened just a fraction. “No. The workload keeps me quite warm.”

A small, amused huff escaped your nose. “Right... the tyrannical rule.”

“Exactly,” he replied smoothly, a tiny, smug curve returning to the corner of his mouth but he didn’t linger, stepping back with his long strides to return to his own desk as he slid back into his chair, picked up his pen, and immediately immersed himself back into the sea of text, but the atmosphere had shifted.

The cold was gone, replaced by the heavy, protective weight of his jacket around your shoulders, and the quiet scratch of his pen felt less like a deadline and more like a steady, reassuring heartbeat keeping time in the dark office.

By 11:30 PM, the lines of text on the compliance documents began to blur. The rhythmic scratch-scratch-scratch of Higuruma’s pen across the room turned into a rhythmic, hypnotic lullaby.

Your eyelids grew impossibly heavy, the warmth of his oversized trench coat acting like a weighted blanket that slowly anchored you down as you tried to blink the sleep away, propping your chin up with one hand, but the heavy scent of cedar and rain radiating from the fabric was too comforting.

Eventually, your hand slid down. Your head lowered onto the smooth mahogany of your desk, resting right on top of a half-filled post-trial memo.

Subconsciously, your arms crossed over your chest, your fingers tightly bunching the lapels of his coat, hugging it closer to your body for warmth. Within minutes, your breathing slowed into a deep, heavy rhythm, punctuated by a faint, soft, and utterly adorable snore that puffed against the paperwork beneath your cheek.

Across the room, the scratching of the fountain pen abruptly ceased as Higuruma paused, his hand hovering over a sheet of legal paper. He lifted his head, his dark eyes tracking the sudden absence of keyboard clicks.

When his gaze landed on your slumped form, completely swallowed up by his dark coat, his expression softened into something intensely tender but he didn’t move for a long moment, simply resting his chin in his hand, his long, slender fingers tapping idly against his jaw as he watched you sleep.

A quiet, breathless huff of amusement escaped his nose at the sound of your soft snoring. You had fought so hard to prove you could handle his ‘tyrannical rule,’ only to be defeated by a mountain of corporate audits.

Gently setting his pen down so it wouldn’t click against the wood, Higuruma stood up as his tall, lanky frame unfolded silently, and he crossed the office with long, careful strides, making sure not to let his shoes scuff against the floor.

He stopped just beside your desk, towering over you in the amber lamplight as he leaned down slightly, his sharp, angular features cast in soft shadows as he looked at your peaceful face.

Your fingers were still white-knuckled, gripping his coat like a lifeline. The sight sent a strange, tight ache through his chest—a raw, protective instinct he usually kept locked behind layers of professional detachment.

Carefully, so as not to wake you, he reached out with one long, slender hand. His thumb gently brushed a stray lock of hair away from your forehead, his skin contrasting sharply with your soft skin as he lingered for a second, the warmth of your face radiating against his palm.

“You completely lack a sense of self-preservation, Y/N.” he whispered into the quiet room, his gravelly voice dropping to a breathless, velvety murmur.

He glanced down at the open laptop screen, seeing the unfinished sentence you had left behind. With a quiet, resigned sigh, Higuruma reached around your sleeping form, his lean torso hovering just inches above your back.

He carefully slid your laptop closer to himself, his long fingers hovering over the keys but instead of waking you, he simply leaned against the edge of your desk, his long legs crossing at the ankle as he began to type.

Working at an awkward angle, he seamlessly picked up exactly where your memo had left off, his quiet, rhythmic typing replacing the sound of his pen.

He was going to finish your work for you, completely content to stay right here in the quiet dark, guarding your sleep while you remained securely wrapped in his weight.

As the clock ticked toward midnight, the quiet tap of the keyboard was the only sound accompanying your soft, rhythmic snores as Higuruma paused his typing, his long fingers resting on the keys as he looked down at you.

Wrapped tightly in his oversized trench coat, your face pressed against the legal brief with a tiny puff of air escaping your lips every few seconds, you looked entirely defenseless. It was a stark contrast to the sharp, fiercely sharp attorney who had stood beside him in court just hours prior.

For a man who lived his life governed by strict logic and heavy burdens, the sight was a rare, pure pocket of peace… and he wanted to keep it.

Moving with deliberate slowness, Higuruma slipped his right hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out his phone. He wasn’t a man who took photos—his camera roll was a bleak expanse of scanned documents, evidence photos, and legal texts—but the sudden, uncharacteristic urge to capture this moment was overwhelming as he held the phone out, his long, slender arm extending to frame you perfectly in the amber glow of the desk lamp.

His thumb hovered over the screen, adjusting his grip on the device. Because he rarely used the camera app, his finger inadvertently clipped the camera flip icon in the bottom corner just as he pressed the shutter button.

Click!

The artificial shutter sound echoed loudly in the quiet office. Higuruma froze, his dark eyes instantly darting to your face to see if the noise had disturbed you as you merely stirred, burying your nose a little deeper into the collar of his coat, letting out a slightly louder snore before settling back into a deep sleep.

Relieved, Higuruma looked down at his screen to check the photo as he stared at it for a flat, unblinking three seconds.

There was no picture of you, instead, the screen displayed a stark, slightly low-angle, glaringly high-definition selfie of Hiromi Higuruma himself looking profoundly confused.

Because he had been leaning forward, the amber lamplight hit the sharp angles of his lean face perfectly, illuminating his rugged stubble, the deep lines of exhaustion around his eyes, and the silver streak in his hair, all framed against the backdrop of the dark office ceiling.

He looked less like a distinguished defense attorney and more like an older man having a deeply stressful technological crisis as a heavy, silent sigh expanded his narrow chest. He pinched the bridge of his nose, a faint flush of embarrassment coloring the tips of his ears.

The sheer absurdity of a brilliant legal mind being defeated by a front-facing camera was almost insulting. Deciding that trying to fix it would only risk waking you up with another loud click, Higuruma gave up entirely.

He locked the phone, setting it face-down on the mahogany desk with a muted thud but he didn’t return to typing, instead, he simply leaned his tall, lanky frame back against the edge of your desk, crossing his long legs at the ankle.

He rested his chin in his hand, his long, slender fingers tapping a slow, meditative rhythm against his jaw as he went back to simply staring at you.

The amber light caught the soft curve of his mouth, the earlier frustration melting into a quiet, enduring warmth. He didn't need a photograph anyway.

Having you right here, completely safe and sound asleep under his care, was more than enough as a sudden, particularly loud snore jarred you awake.

Your eyes snapped open, blinking wildly against the amber glow of the desk lamp as your brain scrambled to process your surroundings as you sat up so fast your chair groaned, the heavy fabric of Higuruma’s trench coat slipping slightly off your shoulders.

Panic surged through you as you realized you had completely passed out on the clock. “I am so sorry!” you blurted out, your voice thick and slightly raspy from sleep as you frantically tried to smooth down the wrinkled post-trial memo beneath your hands.

“Hiromi, I’m so sorry, that was incredibly unprofessional. I didn’t mean to—I just closed my eyes for a second, I swear—”

“Y/N.”

Higuruma’s voice cut through your panic, a low, steady rumble that instantly grounded you. He was still leaning against the edge of your desk, his long, lanky legs crossed casually but he hadn’t moved an inch, and his dark eyes were crinkled at the corners with a quiet, patient amusement.

“It is alright,” he said softly, his deep voice carrying a soothing weight. “You have been working tirelessly for weeks and the human body requires rest, even under administrative tyranny.”

He checked his watch, the metal glinting in the dim light. “It is past midnight, the office cafeteria is closed, and I imagine the sushi from earlier has worn off. There is a 24-hour convenience store just down the block.”

“Shall we go find something to eat?”

The thought of food made your stomach give a timely, quiet growl, sealing the deal. “... Yeah,” you murmured, sheepishly smiling. “That actually sounds really good.”

You stood up, your legs a little stiff from sitting so long, and immediately reached up to fix your hair, fingers acting as a frantic comb to smooth down the sleep-mussed strands.

As you did, you shrugged your shoulders to slide his heavy trench coat off, holding it out to hand it back to him. “Here, thank you for letting me borrow—”

“Keep it on,” Higuruma interrupted smoothly but he didn’t take the jacket. Instead, he stepped closer, his towering, slender frame completely eclipsing the light from your desk lamp and before you could protest, his long, slender hands caught the lapels of the coat, pulling it firmly back up and securing it over your shoulders.

He didn’t pull away immediately; instead, his large palms smoothed down the fabric, patting your shoulders with deliberate, gentle strokes to fix the wrinkles that had formed while you slept as the sudden, intense proximity made your breath hitch.

He was so close you could feel the radiating heat of his chest, his cedar-and-rain scent enveloping you all over again. Your heart began a frantic, erratic sprint against your ribs, a warm flush crawling up your neck.

Then, his hand moved from your shoulder as his long, slender fingers gently reached up to your face, his touch incredibly light as he tucked a stray, stubborn lock of hair behind your ear.

His thumb lightly brushed against your cheekbone, lingering for a fraction of a second. His dark eyes searched yours, utterly dilated, his sharp, angular features softening into a look of pure, unadulterated tenderness. “... Besides,” Higuruma murmured, his gravelly voice dropping into a breathless, velvety whisper that vibrated right through you.

“You look quite pretty when you have just awakened. It would be a shame to ruin the aesthetic.”

Your brain short-circuited. You stood frozen under his touch, your face burning a bright, undeniable crimson as you tried to find your tongue, your eyes darting nervously from his gaze down to his collarbone and back up.

“I—uh,” you stammered awkwardly, forcing a small, incredibly flustered smile onto your face as you looked up at him through your lashes. “Thank you, Hiromi.”

A slow, thoroughly satisfied smile tugged at the corner of Higuruma’s mouth, his dark eyes glinting with a smug, teasing warmth at how easily he had rattled you.

He finally let his hands drop, stepping back just enough to give you room to breathe, though his gaze never left your face. “Come,” he said softly, turning toward the door with his long, elegant strides. “Let us get that food before you fall asleep on your feet again.”

The midnight air was crisp and heavy with the clean, ozone scent of the recent downpour. Outside the brightly lit convenience store, you sat side-by-side at a small, slightly rusted metal table.

The neon sign above buzzed with a low, rhythmic hum, casting a pale, electric glow over the steam rising from your Styrofoam cups of instant ramen as you were still completely buried in Hiromi’s dark trench coat.

The heavy fabric kept the biting wind at bay, but it also kept you thoroughly intoxicated by his scent—that persistent, comforting blend of cedar wood, bitter black coffee, and expensive fountain pen ink. It smelled exactly like his office at 3:00 AM: exhausting, yet intensely grounding.

As you lifted a plastic forkful of noodles to your mouth, your heel accidentally slid against the side of his shoe. Higuruma’s long leg shifted, his leather dress shoe nudging your foot back with a subtle, deliberate pressure as you peeked at him from over the rim of your noodle cup.

His sharp, angular face was illuminated by the neon light, highlighting the faint, permanent frown etched between his brows and the deep, stressed wrinkles around his eyes.

He looked tired—he always looked tired—but right now, the corners of his mouth were twitching as you nudged him back, a little harder this time, your eyes narrowing playfully.

A sudden, breathless huff of a laugh escaped his nose. What began as an accident quickly devolved into a silent, childish game of foot tag beneath the small table.

Your heels clicked against his shoes, your ankles brushing as you tried to outmaneuver his long, lanky legs. It was a ridiculous sight—a brilliant defense attorney with a sharp silver streak in his dark hair, a man known for his stoic, unyielding, and terrifying courtroom presence, engaged in a petty foot-war outside a convenience store.

“You are being incredibly disruptive, Y/N,” Higuruma murmured as he took a slow sip of his black coffee, though his tone was entirely devoid of any real irritation. A (soft, genuine giggle bubbled up from your throat.

Hearing it only made his smile which smoothed out the harsh, exhausted lines of his face. “Me? Disruptive?” you laughed softly, your foot aggressively tapping the toe of his shoe. “You started it, Counselor.”

“... Besides, I am just celebrating our victory. Did you see the prosecutor’s face during your closing argument? He looked like he wanted the concrete floor to swallow him whole.”

“He was entirely unprepared for the precedent we cited,” Higuruma replied, his gravelly voice rich with a quiet, smug satisfaction as he leaned his thin torso forward, his narrow shoulders rolling as he rested his elbows on the table.

Even in this casual, cheap setting, his lanky frame possessed a sharp, disciplined fitness, the fine fabric of his white button-down shirt clinging to the lean muscles of his back. “Your research on the corporate compliance loopholes was flawless. He didn’t stand a chance once you handed me that cross-reference.”

“Flawless, huh?” You beamed, stirring your noodles. “I should get that in writing. Maybe a raise?”

“Don’t push your luck,” he replied, though the ghost of a smirk remained on his lips. “A bowl of premium convenience store ramen is your bonus for tonight.”

For a while, the air was filled with the easy, comforting warmth of shared success and the casual slurping of noodles as you traded notes on the trial, dissecting the judge’s subtle micro-expressions and the opposing counsel’s blunders.

The heavy, academic nature of the conversation beautifully clashed with the crumpled wrappers and plastic forks sitting between you, but as the noodle cups were emptied, the laughter slowly tapered off, leaving behind a profound, heavy silence.

The neon sign buzzed overhead.

Bzzz. Bzzz.

The distant, hissing sound of a lone car driving over rain-soaked asphalt echoed in the night as the playful friction beneath the table faded, replaced by that thick, simmering tension that had been building between you all evening—through every shared glance across the defense table, every late-night file exchange where your fingers accidentally brushed.

You looked down at your hands, tracing the rim of your paper cup, before the question that had been lingering in the back of your mind for weeks finally slipped out.

“Hey, Hiromi?” you asked softly, your voice dropping into the quiet night.

“Yes?” He shifted instantly, his dark eyes locking onto yours beneath his heavy brow. The casual demeanor vanished, replaced by that intense, undivided attention he gave to things he cared about.

“Serious question... Do you hate me? Just a little bit?” You looked up through your lashes, trying to keep your tone light, but there was a genuine, vulnerable curiosity in your eyes.

“You keep giving me so much work and you bury me in these files, night after night. Sometimes it feels like you’re trying to push me away… or break my spirit.”

Higuruma didn’t answer right away as the silence stretched, turning heavy, charged with an agonizing, electric gravity, instead of speaking, his gaze drifted downward as he looked at his heavy trench coat draped over you, noting how ridiculously big it looked on your shoulders, completely swallowing your frame.

A deep, weary sigh expanded his narrow chest, shaking his thin shoulders. The permanent frown between his brows deepened—not with anger, but with a raw, agonizing conflict.

When he finally looked back up, his dark pupils were entirely dilated, burning into yours with a fierce, quiet intensity that made your heart instantly sprint against your ribs.

“If I really hated you,” Higuruma whispered, his voice dropping an octave into a rough, gravelly rasp that vibrated right through the soles of your feet, “you would be at home sleeping right now. I would have let you leave at five o’clock.”

He paused, the air between you turning suffocatingly hot despite the cold midnight breeze.

He reached across the small, rusted table. His long, slender fingers were hesitant for a fraction of a second, hovering in the space between you, before his hand slid firmly over yours as his skin was radiating an immense, burning heat, his rough palm contrasting sharply against yours.

“Instead,” he murmured, his thumb slowly, deliberately tracing the back of your hand with a heavy, lingering pressure that made your skin tingle, “I am selfishly keeping you where I can see you.”

Your breath hitched, completely trapped in your throat. You froze, staring at him in absolute, breathless awe as the raw honesty of his confession stripped away every ounce of his professional armor, leaving behind nothing but a man consumed by a quiet, possessive longing.

“Hiromi…” your voice was barely a breath.

“I try to justify it to myself,” he continued, his gaze dropping to your joined hands, his thumb never stopping its slow, mesmerizing stroke. “I tell myself I need your mind. That your research is indispensable.”

“But the truth is much simpler, Y/N… and much more pathetic, I just don’t want to walk out of the courtroom alone.”

You didn’t let go of his hand. Instead, your fingers instinctively turned, intertwining with his long, slender digits, holding on just as tightly as the heated tension between you stretched taut, thick and undeniable in the quiet dark.

“It's not pathetic,” you whispered, squeezing his hand. “I stayed because I wanted to do this.”

Higuruma’s eyes snapped back to yours, a sudden, sharp vulnerability flashing through his dark irises. For a man who always knew exactly what to say to a judge, he seemed entirely speechless.

He pulled your hand just a fraction of an inch closer across the table, his grip tightening as if verifying you were real as you sat beneath the buzzing neon light, the remnants of cheap dinner between you, completely captivated by the brilliant, tragic man holding your hand—and for the first time in a long time, the lines on his face completely vanished.

The silence that followed was thick with a mutual, grounding gravity. He didn’t release your hand, if anything, his grip tightened, his long fingers anchoring yours against the cold metal of the table as if anchoring himself to the realization of your words.

“You wanted to stay,” Higuruma repeated. It wasn’t a question, but a slow, deliberate processing of the truth. He looked down at your intertwined hands, his thumb pausing its rhythm to rest firmly against the pulse point of your wrist. “You say that with such terrifying ease, Y/N.”

“Because it’s true,” you said, leaning in just slightly, the heavy fabric of his trench coat shifting around your shoulders. “I’m not a hostage to the workload, Hiromi. I could have walked out weeks ago… but I didn’t.”

A slow, wry smile touched his lips, though it carried a trace of his usual self-deprecating edge. “A pragmatic assistant would have filed an institutional complaint about the hours. Instead, you're sitting outside a convenience store at midnight, freezing in my coat, validating my worst, most selfish habits.”

“Someone has to keep the brilliant defense attorney from turning into a complete ghost,” you countered softly, your index finger lightly tracing the prominent knuckle of his thumb. “You spend all day carrying the weight of everyone else’s flaws and injustices. Who carries yours?”

Higuruma’s breath caught as the sharp, analytical mask he wore so effortlessly in the courtroom seemed to crack entirely, leaving him exposed under the harsh, unforgiving neon light.

He looked at you, really looked at you, with a raw intensity that made the surrounding darkness fade away. “I don’t ask for charity,” he murmured, his voice rougher now, a low vibration that seemed to settle deep in your chest.

“Good, because I’m not offering it,” you replied, your voice steady despite the rapid drumming of your heart. “I’m offering a partnership. In and out of the office.”

He was quiet for a long moment, the only sound between you being the rhythmic, low hum of the convenience store sign. Then, slowly, Higuruma stood up as his tall, lanky frame cast a long shadow over the table, but before a cold wave of panic could hit you, he stepped around the small metal barrier.

He didn’t let go of your hand as he used it to gently guide you to your feet. Standing this close, the height difference was pronounced. You had to tilt your head back to meet his gaze as Higuruma reached up with his free hand, his long, slender fingers hovering near your face before gently tucking a stray lock of hair behind your ear.

His knuckles brushed against your cheek, his skin still radiating that immense, comforting heat. “... A dangerous proposition,” he whispered, his dark eyes searching yours, dropping down to your lips for a fraction of a second before returning to your gaze.

“I am a difficult man, Y/N.”

“I’ve seen you at your worst, Counselor. I’m still here.”

A genuine, unburdened laugh escaped his lips—a sound so rare it felt like a triumph. He slid his hand from your cheek down to the collar of his trench coat, which was still draped over your shoulders, gently pulling the heavy fabric tighter around you to block out the sudden, cold gust of midnight wind.

“Then I suppose,” Higuruma murmured, his face tilting down toward yours, his breath warm against your skin, “I have run out of excuses to keep my distance.”

The heavy fabric of his trench coat still shielded you from the biting wind, but the temperature was dropping rapidly, turning the midnight air sharp and crisp. He hadn’t pulled away after his confession, instead, he remained standing close, his tall, lanky frame cutting a striking silhouette against the harsh, pale glow of the convenience store window.

The heavy fabric of his trench coat still shielded you from the biting wind, but the temperature was dropping rapidly, turning the midnight air sharp and crisp.

He hadn’t pulled away after his confession; instead, he remained standing close, his tall, lanky frame cutting a striking silhouette against the harsh, pale glow of the convenience store window as a quiet hush fell over the empty street, and then, the first stray flake of white drifted down between you.

Within moments, a slow, gentle snow began to fall, dusting his dark hair and catching on the eyelashes of those intense, searching eyes but instead of pulling back, you let a small, knowing smile touch your lips. It wasn’t a smile of surprise, but of quiet victory.

“You really thought you were being subtle, didn’t you, Hiromi?” you murmured, looking up at him through the falling snow.

Higuruma’s brow twitched slightly, a faint look of perplexity crossing his features. “Subtle about what?”

“... About us. About this,” you said, your smile widening just enough to show him you had the upper hand. “I’ve suspected it for weeks, but tonight really gave you away. You aren’t the type to suddenly realize there’s an ‘emergency filing crisis’ at 7:00 PM on a Friday.”

A flicker of realization crossed his face, followed by a rare, slightly abashed look that he tried to mask with his usual stoic composure. “Minami is a perfectly pleasant department head downtown,” you continued, your voice teasing as you watched him carefully.

“He brought me flowers. He had reservations at that new French place downtown… and yet, the formidable Counselor Higuruma suddenly declared that the entire firm’s infrastructure would collapse if I didn’t stay behind to organize case files.”

Higuruma let out a low, defeated sigh, though the corner of his mouth ticked upward as the grip he had on the lapels of his coat—still draped over your shoulders—tightened just a fraction, pulling you a breathless inch closer.

The heat radiating from him was the only defense against the growing chill of the winter night. “Minami is an idealist who doesn’t understand the grueling reality of your schedule,” Higuruma said, his voice dropping into a deeper, rougher register that vibrated right through you.

He stepped closer, completely closing the distance between you until the tips of his shoes brushed yours. “And his taste in restaurants is pretentious.”

“So you admit it? You used the paperwork to keep me here.”

“I admit nothing that could be used against me in a court of law,” he murmured, but the sheer intensity in his dark eyes contradicted his legal defense as the playful banter melted away, replaced by a gravity that made the falling snow seem to freeze mid-air.

He reached up, his long, slender fingers gently catching a stray snowflake that had landed on your cheek, his thumb brushing against your skin with an aching tenderness. His gaze dropped to your lips, lingering there long enough to make your breath hitch, before rising back to lock onto your eyes.

“But if you want the truth, Y/N…” He paused, his chest rising and falling with a heavy, deliberate breath as the raw honesty in his expression was breathtaking—a man who spent his life hiding behind logic and law, completely exposing his heart to you under a convenience store awning.

“The thought of you sitting across from someone else, laughing at someone else’s jokes while I sat alone in that office... it was intolerable.”

The snow was falling thicker now, creating a quiet, isolated world just for the two of you. “I tried to be rational… I told myself I was being possessive, unfair, a distraction to your career,” he whispered, his face tilting down, his warm breath fanning across your cold cheeks.

“But watching you walk out that door tonight broke something in me. I don’t just want a partner in the office... I want you. If you’ll have a man as complicated as me.”

The sheer, breathless sincerity of his speech hung in the crisp air as you stared up at the formidable, usually unshakeable lawyer, only to watch a sudden, bright flush creep up from his collar, painting his cheeks a vivid pink.

The gravity of what he’d just admitted seemed to catch up to him all at once as a soft, breathless laugh bubbled out of you—you couldn’t help it.

It was just too endearing.

Hearing your laugh, Higuruma’s eyes widened in sheer panic. The legal genius completely short-circuited. “Y/N—” he choked out, his voice cracking slightly but before you could answer, he abruptly dragged both of his large hands up to cover his face, completely hiding his burning blush from your view.

His broad shoulders slouched, and he looked entirely defenseless, trying to shield himself from his own embarrassment. “Please don’t look at me,” came his muffled, thoroughly defeated voice from behind his palms. “That was... incredibly undignified.”

Your heart melted completely. Stepping into his space, you gently reached up and took hold of his wrists, tugging his hands away from his face as he resisted for a fraction of a second before letting his hands drop, looking down at you with a gaze that was painfully shy, his dark eyes wide and vulnerable. “Hey!” you said softly, your voice wrapping around him like a blanket.

“I’m not laughing at you, Hiromi. I promise.”

Before he could overthink it, you slid your arms around his waist and pulled yourself flush against his chest, burying your face into his sweater. You squeezed him tight, letting him feel the steady, rapid beat of your own heart. “I’m laughing because I’m happy,” you murmured into his chest, feeling him freeze in surprise before his arms slowly, tentatively came up to wrap around your shoulders, holding you back.

“You don’t have to worry about Minami, or anyone else. Because I have a crush on you, too… I have for a really long time.”

Above you, Higuruma let out a long, shaky exhale that sounded like a prayer as the tension melted right out of his lanky frame, and he buried his face into the crown of your hair, squeezing you so close that the winter chill vanished completely.

For a long, quiet moment, neither of you moved. The only sound was the muffled crunch of snow beneath his boots as he shifted his weight, pulling you even closer into the warmth of his chest.

The heavy wool of his coat wrapped around the two of you like a cocoon, shutting out the rest of the freezing world but he didnmt speak right away, but you could feel the erratic, heavy thud of his heartbeat settling into a steady, rhythmic pace against your cheek.

Slowly, his hands shifted as one large palm rested flat against your lower back, pressing you firmly against him, while his other hand came up to cup the back of your head. His long fingers gently tangled into your hair, his touch so careful, so deliberate, it felt almost reverent.

“A crush,” he finally murmured, his voice rumbling deep in his chest. There was a faint, breathless thread of disbelief in his tone as he pulled back just enough to look down at you, though he didn’t let go of your waist.

The blush was still dusting his cheekbones, but the panicked edge in his eyes had entirely softened. “You... have a crush on me…?”

“I do,” you smiled, looking up at him, your hands resting against the lapels of his suit jacket. “Though I usually tried to keep it professional. Unlike a certain defense attorney who manufactures administrative emergencies.”

Higuruma let out a low, genuine chuckle—a sound so rare and warm it sent a thrill straight through you. He shook his head, looking down at his shoes for a brief second as that endearing shyness threatened to take over again, before forcing his gaze back up to lock onto yours.

“I suppose my legal arguments in favor of my own restraint have completely fallen apart,” he admitted softly as he reached out, his thumb gently tracing the line of your jaw, his skin warm against the winter air.

“I’ve spent weeks convincing myself that I was misreading the signs… that you were simply being an exceptional colleague.”

“And tonight?” you teased gently.

“Tonight, I lost my cross-examination with myself,” he whispered, his eyes dropping to your lips again, but this time, there was no hesitation. The gravity of his affection was heavy, sweet, and entirely certain. “I don’t want to be professional with you anymore, Y/N.”

“I want to take you to dinner, to a restaurant that isn’t pretentious… and I want to be the one who gets to walk you home every night.”

The snow was settling thick on his shoulders now, turning the dark wool of his coat white, but neither of you cared about the cold anymore. “I’d really like that, Hiromi,” you said softly as a beautiful, unburdened smile broke across his face—the first completely relaxed smile you had ever seen from him.

He leaned down, his forehead gently resting against yours, his warm breath mingling with yours in the crisp night air. “Then consider the motion carried,” he murmured against your skin, before closing the remaining distance to press a soft, lingering kiss to your lips.

When he pulled away, his lips left behind a lingering, burning warmth that contrasted sharply against the icy bite of the midnight air as he exhaled a soft, tremulous breath, his dark, searching eyes blinking down at you through the thick flurry of falling snow.

His slender, towering frame was still slightly bent to accommodate your height, completely enveloping you in the scent of aged parchment, expensive fountain pen ink, and the sharp, crisp aroma of winter air.

Before he could fully straighten up or retreat back into his usual defensive posture, you smirked. Your fingers shot out from beneath the oversized sleeves of his trench coat, wrapping firmly around the dark silk of his tie.

With a deliberate, playful tug, you yanked him back down as Hiromi let out a sharp, muffled gasp of surprise, his long legs stumbling a half-step forward to catch his balance.

The sudden movement sent a faint crunch through the fresh blanket of snow beneath his boots. His eyes widened, a sudden spike of electric, heated tension snapping between you as your lips met his properly this time.

For a fraction of a second, the formidable attorney completely froze, his brilliant mind utterly short-circuiting under the audacity of your touch. But then, the rigid tension in his tall, lanky frame melted away entirely as a soft, surrendered sigh vibrated through his chest as he leaned into the kiss, his large hands sliding from your waist up to the small of your back, pulling you flush against him.

The kiss was deep, slow, and dizzyingly sweet, sealing out the hum of the convenience store’s fluorescent lights and the quiet whistling of the wind. When you finally parted, the silence of the empty street felt heavier, charged with a thick, simmering warmth as Hiromi stepped back, his chest rising and falling with a slightly labored breath. A fierce, crimson blush rushed up his neck, staining his sharp cheekbones and the tips of his ears.

He abruptly cleared his throat, adjusting his crumpled tie with long, trembling fingers while intentionally averting his gaze toward the snow-covered pavement.

“This is… highly unprofessional,” he murmured, though the severe weight he usually carried in his deep voice was completely ruined by the breathless, shy tremor underlying his words. He shot you a sideways glance through his thick eyelashes, his brow twitching with a mix of affection and faux-seriousness.

You smiled, your eyes crinkling as you watched the brilliant legal genius struggle to regain his composure. “Oh, really? Because it felt like you complied pretty willingly, Counselor.”

“I was acting under duress,” he countered smoothly, though the corner of his mouth ticked upward into a helpless little smile. He looked back down at you, the intense gravity in his dark eyes returning, laced with something incredibly tender.

“Besides… We are technically dating now. Correct? Or have I fundamentally misunderstood the terms of our verbal agreement?”

Instead of giving him a straight answer, you reached out and slid your hand into his. Your fingers slotted perfectly into the spaces between his long, slender ones, squeezing tightly as you swung your joined hands back and forth between you, deliberately acting like a pair of giddy middle school lovers under the pale glow of the awning.

Hiromi stared down at your intertwined hands, his expression a comical mixture of utter bewilderment and absolute adoration. He let out a low, defeated chuckle that rumbled pleasantly against your palms.

“You are entirely shameless, Y/N,” he said softly, his thumb tracing the back of your knuckles as he finally began to lead you away from the store.

“And you love it,” you shot back, stepping in sync with him as the snow crunched rhythmically beneath your feet.

“The court reserves its judgment on that matter,” he replied, though he didn’t loosen his grip on your hand for even a second. The biting wind blew a strand of dark hair across his forehead, and he brushed it away with his free hand, looking out toward the main road.

“We should get moving. The trains have likely stopped running for the night. I will drop you off at your home with my car. It is parked just around the corner from the office.”

You leaned your shoulder against his arm, tilting your head up to look at his sharp profile. “Mm, a private escort? Is that really the only reason you’re driving me home, Hiromi? Just a logistical necessity?”

He stopped in his tracks, scoffing quietly as he turned his head to look at you. For a second, he looked as though he was going to craft a flawlessly logical rebuttal about safety and temperature statistics.

But as he looked into your teasing eyes, his stoic facade crumbled as he looked away again, rubbing the back of his neck with a hesitant, endearing awkwardness.

“It is also because…” he trailed off, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly whisper that was almost swallowed by the falling snow. He cleared his throat, forcing the words out. “…because you are my lover now. And it is my responsibility—and my preference—to ensure you return home safely.”

Hearing him call you his lover made a wave of dizzying, giddy warmth rush straight to your chest as your smile widened, your heart doing a violent flip against your ribs.

Deciding he was far too fun to tease, you leaned in closer, stepping into his space until the fabric of his coat brushed against his suit as you tilted your chin up, lowering your voice to a sultry, conspiratorial whisper right against his ear, letting your eyelashes flutter as you gave him a slow, deliberate wink.

“Well… if the trains are down and it’s so cold out, you could always just stay over at my place tonight, Counselor. I have plenty of room.”

Hiromi stiffened instantly as the sheer, unadulterated embarrassment that washed over his face was magnificent. He pulled back, his dark eyes wide with a mixture of shock and sheer panic, his blush flaring so bright it practically radiated heat.

“Absolutely not,” he stammered, his legal eloquence completely deserting him as he shook his head rapidly. “That is—it is far too early for that kind of… of arrangement! We have been a couple for less than ten minutes, Y/N. A proper boundary must be maintained, and jumping into such domestic intimacy is entirely premature—”

“What exactly were you thinking about, Counselor?” you interrupted, letting out a delighted laugh that echoed beautifully in the quiet street.

You gave his hand a playful tug, your eyes dancing with mischief. “I was merely suggesting you sleep over so you wouldn’t have to drive back in a blizzard. You could sleep on the couch… butttt your mind went straight to something scandalous, didn’t it?”

Hiromi snapped his mouth shut, realizing he had just walked right into a trap as he stared at you, his jaw tightening slightly as a deeply amused, albeit thoroughly flustered, look took over his features.

“I was merely analyzing the potential implications of the invitation,” he retorted, his voice rising in an attempt to sound authoritative, though the smirk tugging at his lips betrayed him. “As a lawyer, I am trained to anticipate all possible outcomes of a vague proposal.”

“Your phrasing was deliberately misleading.”

“Sure it was,” you teased, laughing as you pulled him along the snowy sidewalk. “Just admit your mind was in the gutter, Hiromi.”

“I admit to nothing,” he grumbled, but he stepped closer to you, his long arm wrapping securely around your shoulders to pull you against his side, shielding you from the wind as you walked together into the quiet winter night.

The December morning was brutally sharp, the kind of deep, biting winter cold that turned every breath into a thick puff of white fog as the sky above Tokyo was a pale, sterile grey, and the concrete plaza outside the defense law firm was slick with a thin layer of overnight frost.

The distant hum of commuter traffic and the synchronized, rhythmic clicking of hundreds of leather shoes against the pavement created a sterile, bustling soundtrack for the start of the workday as you hurried up the wide stone steps, your hands buried deep into the pockets of your coat, the thick knit of your woolen scarf pulled all the way up to your nose to shield your face from the freezing wind.

Slung securely over your shoulder was a canvas tote bag, carrying a very specific, heavy weight inside it.

Then, you saw him.

Standing just to the side of the towering glass entrance doors was Hiromi Higuruma. Even in a sea of Tokyo salarymen, he was impossible to miss as he stood exceptionally tall, his lanky, slender frame cutting a stark, almost architectural silhouette against the modern building.

He was wearing his signature charcoal suit, the fabric draping elegantly over his narrow shoulders and long, thin limbs as a dark scarf was looped loosely around his neck, and a prominent silver streak gleamed sharply within his otherwise pitch-black hair.

Despite the early hour, his sharp, angular face carried that familiar, permanent frown between his brows—the heavy, stressed wrinkles around his eyes speaking of a man who carried the weight of the world's flaws on his shoulders and in his large, slender hands, he was holding two paper takeout coffee cups, steam lazily escaping the small sipping holes.

A genuine smile broke across your face. You raised a hand, waving enthusiastically through the frosty air to catch his attention.

The moment his dark eyes locked onto you beneath his heavy brow, the severe, unyielding courtroom expression he usually wore seemed to fracture, softening into something remarkably fond as you broke into a quick jog, your boots clicking rapidly against the stone until you came to a halt right in front of him, panting slightly as a cloud of mist swirled between you.

The rich, bitter aroma of fresh espresso and roasted coffee beans instantly drifted from the cups, cutting through the sterile, frozen smell of the city.

Without a word, Higuruma extended his long arm, handing you one of the cups as the cardboard sleeve was wonderfully hot, radiating a fierce, localized heat that immediately began to thaw your frozen fingers through your gloves.

He looked down at you, clearing his throat lightly. Then, with a completely straight face, his gravelly baritone voice dropped into a low, smooth cadence.

“What’s good, pretty girl.”

You froze entirely as your jaw slightly dropped in sheer, unadulterated confusion, your mind struggling to process the words that had just come out of the mouth of the most stoic, brilliant, and terrifying defense attorney in the district.

You blinked up at him through your lashes, your brows wrinkling tightly together as you stared at his deadpan expression. The silence stretched between you for three long, agonizing seconds, filled only by the distant chime of a train station bell.

“Who…” you started, your voice a mixture of awe and absolute bewilderment. “Hiromi, who on earth told you to say that?”

Almost instantly, the cool, collected armor of the legendary counselor shattered as a deep, intense crimson blush rapidly crept up his neck, burning across his sharp cheekbones and turning the tips of his ears bright red.

He looked away abruptly, staring intensely at a random spot on the concrete plaza, his thumb nervously tracing the plastic lid of his coffee cup.

“A friend,” Higuruma muttered, his voice dropping an octave as he rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand, looking deeply embarrassed. “An old friend from high school. He… we caught up over drinks over the weekend.”

“He noticed how highly I spoke of you, and he promised me that it was a modern pickup line…. He… he swore it would swoon your heart.”

A breathless, delighted laugh bubbled up from your chest, the sound bright and human against the bleak December morning. “A pickup line?” you teased, leaning in slightly, entirely captivated by how flustered this brilliant forty-year-old man had become.

“Hiromi, that sounded like a teenager trying to act tough in an alleyway. I am highly offended… in fact, I’m threatening to report you to HR for an unwarranted, highly horrible flirting outside the firm’s premises.”

Higuruma let out a sudden, breathless huff of a laugh through his nose, his shoulders relaxing slightly as his dark eyes flicked back to yours, a familiar, academic spark returning to his gaze. “An HR complaint?” he countered smoothly, his lips twitching into a rare, smug smirk as he leaned his tall torso down just a fraction closer to you.

“I believe you lack the necessary leverage, Y/N. In accordance with corporate policy, the plaza outside the building is public property. Furthermore, my statement contained no explicit malice or coercion and it was, legally speaking, an objective observation.”

“An objective observation, Counselor?” you laughed, your foot playfully tapping the toe of his leather dress shoe. “You’re grasping at straws. The prosecution rests its case on the sheer awkwardness of your delivery.”

“I was merely testing the waters of contemporary vernacular,” he replied, his tone deadpan, though the lingering, heated tension between you was growing thick and undeniable, a warm current defying the freezing winter air.

You looked at his sharp face, seeing the faint lines of exhaustion that never truly left him, and your playful teasing softened into something incredibly tender. Reaching up, you placed your free hand—now warm from the coffee—firmly against his cheek.

Your palm felt incredibly soft against his cool skin, and you could feel the slight, rough texture of his morning shave as you gently cupped his face, forcing him to keep his eyes locked onto yours.

“You don’t need to test any waters, Hiromi,” you said softly, your voice rich with genuine emotion. “You being yourself is more than enough to swoon my heart. You don’t need any ridiculous lines.”

Higuruma’s breath hitched in his throat. He went entirely still beneath your touch, his dark pupils dilating as he stared down at you in absolute, breathless awe as the raw honesty of your words seemed to strip away the final remnants of his professional guard, leaving a heavy, simmering warmth between you.

“...Though,” you added mischievously, your thumb giving his cheek a playful squeeze before you dropped your hand, “him being himself is slightly less charming when he buries me in a mountain of corporate compliance files until midnight.”

A genuine, unburdened laugh escaped his lips, a sound that completely smoothed out the harsh lines of his face. “A fair point. I shall take the criticism under advisement.”

As the crowd of lawyers and paralegals began to thicken around the entrance, Higuruma subtly stepped closer to you, his long, lanky frame blocking the cold wind.

Slowly, deliberately, he slid his large, calloused hand into the deep, capacious pocket of his heavy wool trench coat. He paused for a fraction of a second, looking at you with a quiet question in his eyes.

Smiling, you slid your hand right in after his. Inside the dark, silk-lined pocket, the heat was immense as his long, slender fingers immediately intertwined with yours, holding on tightly, his rough, scarred palm pressing firmly against your skin. It was a secret, hidden paradise of warmth away from the prying eyes of the firm.

“By the way,” you murmured, leaning your shoulder against his arm as you walked slowly toward the doors, your hands still locked together in his pocket. “Here’s your heavy winter jacket inside it from last friday night. I washed it, dried it, and lint-rolled it so it’s perfectly clean!”

Higuruma glanced down at the canvas bag slung over your shoulder, noting how the heavy fabric seemed to weigh down your smaller frame. Without a word, he slipped his hand out of his pocket—a brief, cold pang of loss hitting your fingers before he reached across and gently lifted the straps of the tote bag off your shoulder.

His long, slender fingers brushed against your neck as he did so, leaving a lingering trail of heat. “Thank you,” he murmured, effortlessly slinging the heavy bag over his own narrow shoulder so you wouldn’t have to carry the extra weight.

He then immediately guided his hand back into his coat pocket, his long fingers finding yours once again, intertwining just as securely as before as he looked down at you, the silver streak in his hair catching the pale morning light, his dark eyes burning with a quiet, possessive tenderness as he squeezed your hand.

“Let’s go inside,” he whispered, his gravelly voice vibrating softly in the crisp air. “We have a trial to prepare for, my dear.”

cowboy au sfw short drabble romcom tooth rotting fluff jason todd has a southern accent fem reader jason todd as your favorite cowboy apologies if you’re lactose 8k words part two

The oppressive, heavy heat of a Southern Texas afternoon hung thick in the air, smelling of dry dust, sweet alfalfa, and the sharp, metallic tang of the baked tin roof as you shifted on the porch swing, the wooden slats groaning softly, sticking slightly to the back of your bare thighs.

It was a brutal, suffocating warmth that made every movement feel like it was happening underwater. Then came the heavy, rhythmic thud of worn leather boots sinking into the parched dirt.

You didn’t have to look up to know as Jason Todd was walking up the path, the brilliant sun catching the distinct, stark white-grey patch in his dark fringe where his cowboy hat sat pushed back. To call him big felt like an understatement; he was built like a brick wall, his broad chest stretching the fabric of his faded, sweat-damp chambray shirt.

The rolled-up sleeves showed off forearms thick with ropy veins and biceps that looked heavy enough to crush cedar posts. He was rugged—far more rugged than the polished guys back at your college campus—with a faint dusting of dark stubble along a sharp jawline and a few faded scars that only added to his rough edge.

And, right on cue, he was cradling a massive, wax-sealed wheel of cheese against his ribs. “Hey there, little lady,” Jason drawled, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that seemed to vibrate straight through the floorboards and up into your chest.

He flashed that goofy, slightly dorky grin that always felt entirely too soft for a man of his size. “Figured you and the folks might be runnin’ low.”

You swallowed hard, your throat suddenly dry. That made the sixth wheel this month. From inside, the screen door clicked open. Your mother, Elena, peeked out, wiping flour-dusted hands on her apron as she took one look at the cheese, and for a split second, sheer terror crossed her face. From deeper in the kitchen, your father, Arthur, yelled, “If that’s more parmesan, Jason, I’m lockin’ the gates!”

Jason’s chuckle was a rich, deep sound that crinkled the skin around his eyes. “Not parmesan, Arthur! Gouda this time!”

“Oh… how lovely,” Elena murmured, offering you a quick, conspiratorial look of desperation before taking the heavy wheel as her arms visibly dipped under the weight.

“Thank you, Jason. I’ll just… go find some room for it.” She retreated quickly, likely heading for the backup livestock freezers out back where the last three wheels were currently staging a hostile takeover.

With your parents gone, an immediate, thick quiet fell over the porch, save for the rhythmic, high-pitched buzz of cicadas.

Jason didn’t leave… he never did.

He took two slow steps closer, propping one heavy boot up on the bottom step of the porch as he took off his cowboy hat, his movements deliberate, and wiped his brow with the back of a thick, scarred hand and up close, the radiant warmth of his skin hit you, carrying a heady mix of leather, cedarwood, and the clean, masculine scent of sweat.

“You look nice today,” he murmured, his tone dropping from the booming neighborly greeting to something much lower, much softer as his blue eyes locked onto yours.

They lingered, tracking the line of your collarbone before dragging back up. He reached out, his thick fingers lightly wrapping around the chains of the porch swing just above your shoulder as the metal rattled softly under his grip, stilled only by the heavy pressure of his hand.

As the swing shifted, a stray beam of intense, blinding afternoon sun cut right past the awning, hitting you square in the face. Your eyelids fluttered shut instinctively against the sudden glare, a small, involuntary crease forming between your brows but Jason didn’t say a word.

But without a second’s hesitation, he shifted his massive frame. He stepped directly into the path of the light, his broad shoulders easily swallowing up the harsh glare. To make sure, he raised his free hand, holding his cowboy hat just high enough to cast a perfect, cool shadow over your face.

Feeling the sudden relief from the heat, you slowly opened your eyes as the world was darker now, framed entirely by his silhouette. He was just looking down at you, his expression steady and quiet, entirely unbothered by the fact that he was now absorbing the full, brutal heat of the sun just to keep it off you.

“Not gettin’ too oppressive out here for you, I hope?” he asked, his voice dropping into a soft, molasses drawl. “Sun’s regular beating down today.”

“It’s miserable, Jason, and you know it,” you said, your voice a little breathier than you intended. You tried to keep your tone light, trying to ignore the way his gaze dropped to your lips, holding there for a beat too long before darting back to your eyes.

Every time he did this, a knot tightened in your stomach. Your brain screamed at you to stop being so vain. ‘He’s just being neighborly!’ you told yourself, a familiar wave of self-conscious cringe washing over you.

‘He’s the town’s golden boy… don’t go making a fool of yourself thinking a guy like him actually wants you.’

To imagine those massive hands holding yours, or that smirking mouth pressing against your neck, felt like a dangerous game that would only end in embarrassment.

“Miserable, huh?” Jason repeated.

He took another step up, bringing himself deep under the shade of the porch but keeping his body positioned as your shield. He leaned his weight forward, his other hand coming down to rest on the wooden support beam of the porch roof as the muscles in his bicep flexed tightly against the strain, mere inches from your face.

The silence stretched, pulsing with a sudden, heated electricity that had nothing to do with the Texas weather. He was standing so close you could feel the whisper of his breath against your forehead. “Is that why you keep coming back every three days?” you asked, a sudden spark of boldness taking over as you looked up at him through your eyelashes.

“To appreciate the cool down?”

Jason’s dorky grin vanished, replaced by a slow, dangerous smirk that made your pulse skyrocket as he leaned down just a fraction, his face inches from yours.

You could see the individual dark lashes framing his eyes, the slight roughness of his sunburned cheeks, the faint white line of an old scar cutting through his eyebrow.

His hand shifted on the swing’s chain, his knuckles brushing against the bare skin of your shoulder, the contact was agonizingly slow, a casual, heavy warmth that sent a sharp shiver down your spine despite the stifling heat.

He didn’t pull away as his thumb hovered just a hair’s breadth from your collarbone, the calloused skin barely whispering against yours. “Maybe I just like the view on this porch,” he whispered, his voice dropping an octave, thick with a sudden, raw sincerity.

His eyes searched yours, heavy and full of a longing that you couldn’t just dismiss as ‘friendly’ anymore. He tilted his head slightly, his gaze dropping to your mouth one more time, his breath hitching just enough for you to hear it over the cicadas.

“And truth is… I’m clear out of excuses to be seein’ you.”

Jason leaned a fraction closer, his thumb finally making a soft, deliberate swipe against the side of your neck, his rough calluses catching against your skin with a friction that made your breath hitch entirely.

“So,” he murmured, his gaze dropping to your lips and staying there, his voice like velvet over gravel. “If I come back Friday... I reckon you’re gonna make me invent another cheese, or can I just come see you?”

A breathless laugh caught in your throat. “Depends on if you can find anything better than Gouda, Todd.”

“Darlin’, for you, I’d find a way to smuggle the good stuff straight out of France,” he teased, his smirk melting back into that soft, dorky grin that made him look completely helpless against you.

Before you could reply, the sharp clack of the kitchen window sliding open shattered the heavy quiet. “Sweetie!” your mother’s voice called out, entirely oblivious to the thick tension she had just sliced right through.

“Can you come help me slice up some of this... whatever it is? And see if we have room in the chest freezer!”

The spell broke as Jason slowly drew his hand back from the swing's chain, though his fingers dragged along the metal link by link, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to fully break the connection.

The sudden absence of his massive frame shielding you from the world made the Texas heat rush right back in. “Duty calls,” you sighed, offering him a small, genuinely regretful smile as you stood up from the swing as your legs felt a little weak under his intense gaze.

“Guess it does,” Jason said softly as he stepped back just enough to give you room, but his blue eyes never left your face. You walked backward toward the screen door, holding his gaze the entire time.

Just before you pulled the door open, you lifted your hand and gave him a small, playful little wave as Jason let out a quiet huff of a laugh. He lifted his own massive, scarred hand and mimicked the gesture exactly—waving his thick fingers in a tiny, teasing imitation of yours.

The contrast of a guy built like a tank doing a dainty little wave made your heart do a ridiculous flip. “See you around, Jason,” you murmured.

“Countin’ down the days,” he replied but he didn’t move an inch as he stood perfectly still on the top step, his cowboy hat held loosely at his side, just watching you.

Even as you stepped into the dim, air-conditioned relief of the house and the screen door clicked shut behind you, you could feel his eyes on your back through the mesh.

Only when you finally turned the corner into the kitchen and completely disappeared from his sight did he finally turn to leave. Through the kitchen window, you couldn’t help but peek out as he made his way down the porch steps and back onto the dirt path.

He walked with that slow, unhurried cowboy swagger—a heavy, deliberate stride that carried the weight of his massive frame with a distinct, rhythmic roll of his hips.

With every slow, heavy step of his boots into the parched earth, his leather belt and heavy brass buckle rocked up and down, a steady, captivating rhythm that matched the swagger of a man who knew exactly how much space he took up but he didn’t look back, but the easy, lingering smile on his face told you everything you needed to know as he disappeared down the dusty ranch road.

The silent, heavy stillness of midnight had long since settled over the house, broken only by the low, monotonous hum of the central air conditioning. It was the absolute final week of your summer break, and you had spent the vast majority of the day masterfully bed-rotting, utterly glued to your phone screen in a nest of pillows.

Your mother had eventually lost her patience with your vegetative state, dragging you out of your bedroom hours ago with a stern lecture about wasting the sunshine. This left you currently tangled in a fluffy, oversized blanket on the living room couch, mindlessly doomscrolling through the dark, your face illuminated only by the harsh blue glow of social media.

Suddenly, the sharp, echoing chime of the doorbell cut through the quiet house as you sat upright instantly, the sudden noise making your heart give a frantic, fluttering leap against your ribs.

Your thumb habitually tapped the corner of your phone screen to check the date, your breath catching in your throat. Three days, it had been exactly three days since he last dropped off a delivery.

You had been counting the hours, though you’d never admit it out loud as a familiar, wildly nervous flutter bloomed in your stomach, like a swarm of tiny butterflies waking up all at once.

You bit your bottom lip to hide a silly, helpless smile, throwing the blanket aside as you scrambled off the couch. Pausing by the hallway mirror, you quickly raked your fingers through your messy, sleep-tousled hair, smoothing down your ridiculously oversized t-shirt and trying to make yourself look at least somewhat presentable.

Your heart was pounding a frantic rhythm against your ribs as you took a deep, steadying breath, stepped over to the front door, and swung it open.

… Surprise, surprise.

Jason Todd was standing on the porch, looking entirely too big and breathtakingly handsome, illuminated by the harsh yellow glow of the porch light.

And there, cradled tenderly against his massive, broad chest like a prized possession, was yet another wax-sealed wheel of cheese. Internally, you let out a long, exhausted, yet secretly giddy sigh. Just the sight of the dairy made your stomach turn; you had consumed so much cheese over the last two months that you were pretty sure you were permanently cured of any future cravings.

Your refrigerator was practically a dairy exhibit at this point, yet, looking up at him, the mild nausea instantly vanished, completely replaced by that heavy, sweet, familiar heat that always pooled in your chest whenever he was near.

He was just so cute, standing there like a giant, nervous boy despite his terrifying size. “Come on in, Jason,” you murmured, stepping aside and gripping the edge of the door a little too tightly.

“Hey there, darlin’,” he rumbled as the sheer depth of his voice was a low, gravelly vibration that sent a delicious shiver straight down your spine.

He stepped past you into the house, bringing with him a sudden rush of the warm night air as he walked through the entryway and toward the kitchen as if he owned the place, his heavy leather boots making the floorboards groan under his sheer, undeniable weight.

Even in the dim house, he was a massive, imposing presence that made the hallway feel incredibly small, yet entirely safe. He had his cowboy hat pushed back on his head, revealing the thick, dark fringe of his hair and that distinct, stark white-grey patch right at the front that caught the dim light.

He looked beautifully rugged—sunburned across the bridge of his nose, impossibly broad-shouldered, and smelling faintly of the outdoor night air, expensive leather, and sweet cedarwood as you closed the door behind him, your hands trembling slightly, and followed him into the kitchen like a helpless moth drawn to a flame.

He set the heavy cheese wheel down on the counter with a soft, definitive thud before settling his large frame at the wooden dining table.

Moving on complete autopilot, your body knowing his routine by heart now, you opened the fridge, grabbed the glass pitcher of sweet iced tea, and poured him a generous glass.

The ice clinked sharply, a musical sound in the quiet room, as you set it down in front of him. Pulling your legs up slightly, you took the seat directly opposite his, desperately wishing the table wasn't so wide so you could be closer to him.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Jason said, his voice dropping into a soft, intimate register. He flashed you a tiny, boyish smile that crinkled the outer corners of his brilliant blue eyes, immediately taking a long, thirsty sip of the cold drink.

You couldn’t help but stare as his prominent throat shifted when he swallowed, the collar of his unbuttoned denim shirt moving with the rhythm, exposing a glimpse of his tanned collarbone.

As he set the glass down, his gaze drifted nervously to the ceramic fruit bowl in the center of the table, looking for anything to do with his hands. He reached out, his massive, muscular forearm practically taking up half the table space, and picked up a small, bright tangerine.

An intimate, heavy quiet settled over the kitchen, so thick you could practically taste it as the only sound in the room was the rhythmic, tearing scrape of his large thumb digging into the citrus peel.

The sharp, sweet, and tangy scent of the tangerine instantly filled the air, cutting through the stagnant midnight heat and making the moment feel frozen in time. “Your folks already asleep?” Jason asked quietly.

He kept his eyes fixed on the fruit in his hands, his thick thumbs pulling away a long, perfect strip of orange peel with agonizing slowness. “Out cold,” you whispered back, leaning your elbows on the table and resting your chin in your hands, completely captivated by him.

“Which is probably good for you. If my dad saw that new wheel on the counter, he’d actually carry out his threat and lock you out of the neighborhood.”

Jason let out a rich, low chuckle—a beautiful, rumbling sound that vibrated right through the wooden tabletop and into your arms, making your skin tingle. “Yeah, well. I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess.”

He finally looked up, his intense, burning blue eyes locking onto yours through the dimness of the single kitchen light.

The dorky, sweet neighborly act completely melted away, replaced by a slow, heated focus that made your pulse skyrocket. He looked at you with so much unfiltered, agonizing adoration that it made your chest ache. “Besides,” he murmured, his eyes dropping briefly to your face before meeting your gaze again.

“Like I said… I was runnin’ right out of excuses. I just couldn’t go another day without seein’ you.”

You swallowed hard, your throat suddenly dry despite the iced tea sitting nearby. You looked down at his hands—massive, heavily scarred across the knuckles from a life you could only guess about, and deeply calloused from years of hard, rough work.

Yet, right now, he was peeling that tiny tangerine with an almost heartbreaking gentleness, a stark, beautiful contrast to how easily those hands could probably crush cedar posts.

You knew, instinctively, why he always kept his distance, why he never quite crossed the line as he was terrifyingly big, a creature of muscle and scars, and he handled you like you were made of the finest, most breathless glass.

He was always hesitating, always pulling back his chin, so clearly scared that his rough, calloused skin or his sheer strength would hurt your softness.

It was a beautiful, agonizing torture.

He wanted you so badly it was written in every tense muscle of his back, yet he was holding himself back for your sake, “You could just come over without the cheese, Jason,” you said softly, a sudden spark of boldness cutting through your racing nerves.

Your voice was barely a breath, but it carried perfectly across the small distance. “You don’t need an excuse… I’m always waiting for you anyway.”

Jason’s hands stilled completely as the half-peeled tangerine sat heavily in his open palm. The silence stretched between you, pulsing with a sudden, thick electricity that felt entirely too loud in the empty house.

You could hear the rapid, heavy rise and fall of his chest. His gaze dropped to your lips, lingering there for a long, agonizing beat that made your entire body ache for him, before dragging back up to search your eyes as the yearning in his expression was completely raw, a desperate, hungry thing that he had tried so hard to hide under cowboy charm and silly gifts.

It was a heavy, breathless tension that made it hard to breathe. Slowly, carefully, as if dealing with something fragile, Jason set the fruit down. He drifted his massive hand across the wooden table, his fingers crawling forward until they stopped just a mere inch away from your elbow, but he didn’t touch you as his calloused knuckles just hovered there, casting a warm, radiating shadow against your bare skin.

His thumb twitched visibly, a silent testament to how desperately he wanted to close that final, agonizing inch, to wrap his hand around your arm and pull you into his lap, but he forced himself to stay back, his jaw clenching with the effort.

“Is that right?” Jason whispered as his voice dropped a whole octave, thick, gravelly, and laced with a dangerous, terrifying sincerity that made your heart do backflips.

He leaned forward just a fraction, his broad shoulders completely blocking out the rest of the dim kitchen, trapping you entirely in his heated focus. “Because if I come over here without an excuse, darlin’... if I come over just on account of starvin’ for you... I won’t have a lick of restraint left to keep my hands to myself.”

Jason’s knuckles remained just an inch from your skin, the radiant heat of his body bridging the small gap between you as the silence between you grew heavier, thick with the scent of fresh citrus and the low, rhythmic hum of the refrigerator in the corner.

“I’m leaving next week, Jason,” you murmured softly, the words feeling incredibly heavy in the quiet kitchen. “Summer break is almost over.”

The shift in his demeanor was instantaneous. Jason’s hands stilled completely, his broad shoulders tensing beneath the fabric of his shirt. He stopped peeling the tangerine, the quiet, methodical scraping sound ending abruptly. Slowly, he looked up, his intense blue eyes locking onto yours with a sudden, dark gravity.

For a long moment, he didn’t say a word as he just looked at you, his gaze tracing the lines of your face as if trying to memorize it before you could slip away. Then, with an agonizingly slow movement, he flattened his massive hand.

Resting in the center of his palm was a perfectly peeled tangerine section as every single bit of the bitter white pith had been carefully, meticulously removed by his thick fingers.

A soft, breathless smile touched your lips. “Thank you,” you whispered as you leaned forward slightly, reaching out to take the fruit from his hand. As your fingertips brushed against his palm, a sharp jolt of electricity seemed to shoot straight up your arm.

His skin was rough—incredibly rough—the heavy, dense calluses from years of working the ranch scraping lightly against your softer skin. He didn’t pull away, instead, his thumb swept in a slow, lingering stroke across the back of your hand, a deliberate, grounding touch that made your breath hitch.

Up close, his hands smelled distinctly of the sweet, sharp citrus, masked beneath the deeper scents of worn leather and cedarwood as Jason watched your every move intently, his breathing hitching slightly as you finally pulled the tangerine section away and popped it into your mouth.

You chewed slowly, trying to ground yourself, before crossing your arms and leaning your elbows heavily against the wooden table. You looked at him through your eyelashes, a sudden, nervous tightness gripping your chest.

“So,” you started, trying to keep your voice steady, though it lacked its usual confidence. “Do you want to keep in contact with me after I leave? Or… was I just a summer fling to you?”

Jason scoffed, the sound sharp and rough as it tore from his throat. He shook his head, a dark strand of his fringe falling across his forehead, highlighting the stark white-grey patch of hair near his temple.

“A summer fling?” he repeated, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly rumble that was laced with sudden offense. “Lord, are you serious, darlin’? You think I’ve been haulin’ forty-pound wheels of gourmet cheese out to your place every three days just 'cause I wanted a temporary distraction?”

The effortless reassurance in his voice made your heart do a violent flip against your ribs. He looked almost exasperated that you could even think such a thing, his massive chest rising and falling with a heavy, troubled breath. “I don’t even like artisanal brie,” he muttered under his breath, his eyes softening into something hopelessly whipped as he looked at you.

“I just needed an excuse to see you. I’ve been reading Cheese Aficionado magazine for three months just to have talking points.”

A breathless laugh escaped you. “You subscribed to a cheese magazine for me?”

“I’ll have you know I bought a premium digital membership,” he corrected solemnly, though a tiny, helpless smirk tugged at the corner of his lips.

Slowly, his larger hand began to slide across the table again as his biceps flexed against the wooden edge, looking massive in the dim light as he reached for you. His hand hovered directly over yours, so close you could feel the whisper of his pulse.

He wanted to touch you—you could see it in the way his thick fingers twitched, the way his jaw clenched as he stared down at your hand, but he hesitated as he looked at his own scarred, rough knuckles, and that familiar fear of being too big, too rough, and too careless with you took over.

With a tight, restrained exhale, Jason finally drew his hand back, gripping the edge of the table instead. He looked up at you through his dark brows, and right there, in the dim light of the kitchen, you froze.

His pupils were completely blown, swallowing up the blue of his irises until his gaze looked incredibly dark, heavy, and full of an uninhibited, raw hunger and you noticed it instantly.

… It was right in front of your eyes, entirely impossible to ignore.

A sudden, intense wave of self-consciousness washed over you. Feeling the sting of what felt like a quiet rejection when he pulled away, you quickly looked down at the table as you awkwardly reached up, scratching the back of your neck as a hot flush crept up your throat.

Your hands retreated from the table entirely, dropping down to your lap where you tightly laced your fingers together, an uncomfortable and heavy quiet stretched between you as Jason crossed his massive arms over his chest, leaning his heavy frame back against the wooden chair, the wood groaning softly under his weight.

He didn’t take his eyes off you as an anxious energy buzzing through your veins, you began to rhythmically drum your fingertips against your thigh, the soft, repetitive thudding sound filling the silence of the room.

Jason tilted his head slightly, his sharp jaw shifting as he listened to the pattern. “What melody is that?” he asked quietly, his tone softening, trying to break the sudden tension.

You stopped drumming for a fraction of a second, your fingers hovering over your lap. “About You by The 1975,” you answered softly, looking up to meet his gaze again.

Jason nodded his head, a slow, appreciative expression crossing his face. “Good song,” he murmured, and that single response opened the floodgates as you started talking about the album, the words spilling out of you a little fast at first out of sheer nervousness.

But as you kept going, the awkwardness began to melt away. Jason didn’t interrupt you once as he just sat there, completely entranced, his chin resting in his hand as he drank in every single expression on your face.

He was so visibly captivated it was almost ridiculous—the tough, stoic cowboy reduced to putty just because you were rambling about indie pop.

The more excited you got, the more he smiled. It wasn’t that goofy, neighborly grin from before; it was a soft, incredibly tender smile that reached all the way to his eyes, completely melting the rugged, dangerous edge of his features.

“And then the saxophone solo hits in the middle of the track,” you explained earnestly, leaning forward, “and it’s just— it feels like the musical equivalent of a main character realization in a movie, you know?”

Jason let out a low, rumbling chuckle, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Is that right? A main character’s realization?”

“Yes! Don’t laugh at me!” you giggled, playfully swatting at his arm, instead of pulling away, Jason caught your hand mid-air as his large fingers wrapped securely around your wrist, not squeezing, but holding you there.

He slowly guided your hand down to the table, his index finger tracing a slow, mesmerizing circle over the sensitive skin of your inner wrist as his gaze flicked down to your lips, then back up to your eyes, a heavy, simmering warmth behind his lashes.

Before either of you even realized it, the distance between you began to shrink again. You were both leaning heavily against the table now, your elbows propped on the wood as the conversation drifted into lighter, sillier topics.

“Okay, but you still haven’t explained why you brought truffle gouda last week,” you teased, your voice dropping into a playful, conspiratorial whisper. “That stuff smells like a wet dog, Jason! I had to wrap it in three layers of tin foil.”

Jason burst out laughing, a rich, booming sound that vibrated right through the wooden tabletop. “Hey, now! The boy workin’ the deli counter down at the Piggly Wiggly swore up and down it was an aphrodisiac! I was desperate, darlin’—pure t-desperate!”

“An aphrodisiac?!” You threw your head back, laughing so hard your shoulders shook. “You tried to seduce me with fungus cheese?”

“I didn’t know no better!” he defended himself, though he was laughing just as hard, his eyes bright and absolutely helpless. “I’m a cattleman, sweetheart. If it doesn’t come sliced up in a yellow plastic Kraft wrapper, I am completely out of my depth. I saw a French name on the label and figured I was pullin’out the big guns.”

“I was just tryin’ my damndest to impress the smart city girl, and look where it got me! Gettin’ interrogated over some moldy dairy in my own kitchen.”

Every time a laugh escaped your lips, you would unconsciously lower your head, your body naturally gravitating toward his massive warmth.

You moved a bit closer, and Jason met you halfway, his broad shoulders relaxing as he leaned in, his hand sliding up from your wrist to weave his fingers through yours, anchoring you to him.

The quiet midnight air around you felt charged, thick, and dizzyingly intimate as the laughter gradually tapered off into soft, breathless smiles, and as you tilted your head up, you realized just how close you had gotten.

Your foreheads were almost touching, the space between you down to mere inches and you could smell the sweet citrus on his breath, see the individual dark lashes framing his blown pupils, and feel the intoxicating, heavy heat radiating directly off his skin.

Jason’s gaze dropped to your mouth again, his thumb smoothing over your knuckles in a slow, agonizingly sweet rhythm that screamed he was never, ever letting you go.

The space between you stayed small, the air thick with a warmth that had nothing to do with the summer heat outside as Jason’s fingers remained loosely woven with yours on the table, his thumb continuing its slow, rhythmic stroke against the back of your hand as if he were trying to memorize the texture of your skin.

“So,” he murmured, his voice dropping into a low, cozy register that felt like a late-night radio host. “If I’m barred from buyin’ you that fancy truffle cheese from here on out... what else am I supposed to ask you about? What’s a regular day look like for you when you ain’t takin’ pity on a lonely cattleman?”

You let out a soft snort, nudging his knee with yours under the table. “I don’t take pity on you. And my regular days are boring. Just… a lot of studying, drinking way too much iced coffee, and trying to survive group projects.”

“Group projects, huh?” Jason tilted his head, a faint, amused smile tugging at his lips as he shifted closer, his broad chest pressing slightly against the edge of the table. “Now, that sounds like a mess. You got a good crew down there?”

“Some folks who take care of you when you’re stressin’ yourself out? Because you’ve got a bad habit of carrying the weight of the world on those pretty shoulders, and I’d reckon a smart girl like you is probably doin’ all the heavy liftin’ for the whole lot of ‘em.”

You scoffed, a dramatic sigh slipping past your lips. The sudden wave of exhaustion from just thinking about the upcoming semester caught up to you. Without really thinking about it, you let your grip on his hand loosen just enough so you could fold your arms on the table, burying your face in your sleeves.

You turned your head to the side, resting your cheek against your forearm so you were still looking up at him from table-level.

From down here, Jason looked absolutely massive, his dark silhouette framed by the dim kitchen light as he immediately leaned down with you, propping his chin on his free hand, his intense blue eyes fixed entirely on your face.

The sheer weight of his gaze was enough to make your stomach do a dizzying flip; he was looking at you like you were the only thing in the room that mattered.

“My friends are great,” you mumbled into your arm, your voice a little muffled but full of genuine affection. “Maya practically lives at my apartment, and Leo always brings over takeout when he knows I’ve been staring at a computer screen for twelve hours. They’re amazing!”

“Nothing but good things to say about them, they’ll probably be thrilled to have me back.” You paused, letting out another groan that vibrated against the wood. “But the actual school part? The classes and the professors who act like their syllabus is the holy grail? I’m already dreading it... It’s just endless reading and exams.”

Jason scoffed, a low, rumbling sound in his chest. A look of playful disdain crossed his rugged features. “Sounds like a total racket to me. You’re tellin’ me you pay all that good tuition money just for some fella in tweed to make your life miserable?”

He leaned in a fraction of an inch closer, his eyes dancing with a sudden spark of mischief. “Tell you what, darlin’—I got a better proposition.”

“You just stay right here on the ranch. I’ll write you a fake diploma on the back of a Purina feed bag. ‘Certified Expert in Artisanal Brie.’ No exams required, no sleepin’ on a library desk. Just practical application.”

A bright, genuine laugh bubbled up from your throat, breaking the heavy atmosphere instantly as you shook your head against your arm, your shoulders shaking with giggles. “A feed bag, Jason? Really? I don’t think that’s accredited.”

“Hey, now, don’t go knockin’ it. It’ll have my signature right there at the bottom, and I’ll have you know that it still holds some weight in this county,” he teased, his voice incredibly soft, utterly whipped by the sound of your laughter.

He watched you melt, a lazy grin stretching across his face. “Besides, I’ll even throw in a gold star if you promise to keep testin’ out the cheese recipes with me.”

As your chuckles faded into a content sigh, Jason’s hand slowly lifted from the table as he hesitated for a brief second, his thick, calloused fingers hovering just above your head, before he finally closed the distance.

His large hand slid gently into your hair but you didn’t pull away, instead, you let out a soft, pleased breath, leaning your head a little heavier into his touch. Jason’s fingers were surprisingly careful, contrasting completely with the rugged, scarred look of his knuckles as he began to slowly weave his hand through your strands, gently ruffling the hair near the crown of your head before smoothing it back down.

His thumb lightly brushed against the top of your ear, a lingering, tender touch that sent a pleasant shiver straight down your spine. He just watched you, his jaw relaxed, his pupils still wide and dark as he took in the sight of you letting him touch you so freely.

“There,” he whispered, his thumb catching a stray strand and tucking it behind your ear with agonizing slowness. “Much better, no school stress allowed in this kitchen.”

The rhythmic, soothing motion of Jason’s thick fingers in your hair was working its magic with dangerous efficiency. Every slow, deliberate stroke against your scalp felt like a physical anchor pulling you deeper into the plush cushions of the couch.

“I don’t know,” you murmured, your voice growing a little softer, losing its sharp edge as the exhaustion finally started to win. “Maybe a feed-bag diploma isn’t the worst idea… at least the tuition is cheaper.”

Jason let out another low, vibrating chuckle. The sound rumbled deep in his chest, a comforting acoustic wave in the quiet room as his fingers paused for a fraction of a second to gently press against the crown of your head, a grounding weight that made your eyelids flutter. “Cheaper? Darlin’, it’s free,” he said, his Texas drawl wrapping around the words like a warm blanket.

“Plus, it comes with a lifetime supply of tangerine peelin’ services, courtesy of yours truly. I’d say that’s a pretty solid benefits package right there.” He leaned back a fraction, hooking his thumb in his pocket with a slow, easy grin.

“Most folks gotta negotiate for that kind of dental and vision, but for you? It’s just standard policy. Heck, I’ll even throw in a designated driver for life, long as you don’t mind ridin’ shotgun in a dirty truck.”

“Mmm. Sounds tempting,” you whispered. You leaned your head back just a fraction more, implicitly demanding he resume the stroking.

He complied instantly, his thumb tracing a slow line behind your ear. “Do I have to wear the little graduation cap, or can I just wear a cowboy hat?”

“Well, now, that depends on your GPA,” he teased, his voice dropping an octave, rich with quiet amusement. “But seeing as I’m the dean of this particular academy, I think we can arrange a dress code exception for you.”

The initial burst of nervous energy that had been keeping you wired all evening was completely gone now, replaced by a heavy, syrupy exhaustion that felt like lead in your veins as the conversation drifted, slowing down to a lazy, comfortable crawl as the minutes ticked by on the kitchen clock.

You found yourself fixating on the sheer absurdity of his daily routine. “Explain to me again,” you mumbled, your eyes remaining closed for three seconds before you forced them open a crack, “how you actually manage to wake up at four in the morning without wanting to physically fight the sun.”

Jason laughed softly, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “The sun and I got a mutual understandin’, darlin’. I don’t bother it, and it stays out of my way till I’ve had myself at least one cup of black coffee. Besides, them horses don’t care much for sleepin’ in.”

“Horses are overachievers,” you decided, your voice barely above a breath. “What’s the weirdest coffee order you’ve ever had to make at the shop? To survive that early?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said, his fingers winding through a soft knot of your hair, untangling it with infinite patience. “Had a fella come in last month, swore up and down by a large drip with a shot of espresso, a pump of peppermint, and a healthy splash of lemonade.”

You let out a weak, horrified sound, shifting your weight. “That’s a crime! He should be in jail.”

“That’s just what I told him,” Jason murmured, his thumb catching the edge of your jaw. “But the man paid in crisp cash and looked like he hadn’t slept since the turn of the century, so I figured I’d let it slide. Can’t say the same for you, though. You’re fadin’ fast on me, aren’t you, sweetheart?”

“No,” you lied.

The word was delayed, a sluggish defense as your eyes fluttered shut again, and this time, it took a monumental effort to pull them back open to look at him. “Just… resting my eyes. I’m listening to every word. Lemonade coffee… and jail.”

“Yeah, I can see that. You’re a real conversational powerhouse right now, ain't you?” he replied softly, his lips twitching into a tender smile as he brushed a stray strand of hair from your cheek. “Go on and close ‘em, darlin’. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

Then, the room went entirely quiet as the only sounds left were the familiar, low hum of the refrigerator and the gentle rustle of the wind outside the window, cutting through the warm Texas night.

You meant to keep talking—you really did as you had a whole defense prepared about why resting your eyes was a legitimate form of active listening.

But the steady, radiating warmth of Jason’s body beside you was intoxicating. The mesmerizing, slow trace of his fingers through your hair felt like a weighted blanket pressing you down into a deep, safe well of sleep.

Your breathing slowed, the shallow catching of your lungs evening out into a deep, peaceful, rhythmic sigh as your eyes finally stayed shut.

The room, the kitchen clock, the smell of old wood and Jason's cedarwood cologne all dissolved into a soft, dark blur as Jason noticed the exact moment you went under.

Your shoulders, which had been held with a faint residual tightness, completely dropped. The tension left your frame as you sank fully forward, your head coming to rest on your folded arms atop the hard wooden table.

With agonizing slowness, terrified he would startle you awake and ruin the peace you so desperately needed, Jason shifted his massive frame closer as the wooden chair beneath him groaned slightly, and he froze, holding his breath until your deep, even respirations confirmed you were still fast asleep.

He reached out, his thick, calloused fingers gently catching a few stray strands of hair that had fallen across your cheek, clinging to your eyelashes. He tugged them back with a surgeon’s precision, smoothing them tenderly behind your ear just to get a clear, unobstructed view of your sleeping face.

He stared down at you for a long, quiet moment. In the dim light of the kitchen, his expression went completely unguarded as the tough, unbothered, stoic cowboy facade he wore out in the world evaporated entirely, replaced by a look of pure, helpless adoration.

He looked at you the way a man looks at something fragile and infinitely precious—something he couldn’t quite believe he was allowed to hold.

A small frown briefly marred his forehead as he noticed the angle of your neck. Your cheek was pressed flat against your sleeve and the unforgiving, hard edge of the kitchen table since he knew you’d wake up in an hour with a stiff neck, a bruised cheek, and a grumpy disposition.

Carefully, moving with a fluid, liquid gentleness that contradicted his large size, Jason slid his right hand underneath your face. His palm was rough, mapped with lines of hard labor, but it was incredibly warm.

He cradled your cheek in his hand, lifting your head just a fraction of an inch so your skin rested against his soft palm instead of the harsh wood.

As if sensing the change in sleep, a low, deeply contented hum vibrated in your throat as your lips parted slightly, exhaling a soft puff of warm air against his wrist. A faint, sleepy smile touched the corners of your mouth, and your face naturally, instinctively nuzzled deeper into the heavy comfort of his hand, seeking his warmth like a plant turning toward the sun.

Jason’s breath hitched at the movement and for a second, his heart did a frantic, erratic thud against his ribs, loud enough that he feared you’d hear it.

A soft, breathless smile broke across his own face, a silent chuckle shaking his shoulders. He didn’t move his hand away, instead, he just sat there in the quiet Texas night, keeping completely still, his thumb beginning to move in a slow, impossibly tender circle against your cheekbone.

He was completely content to stay frozen in that kitchen, holding the weight of your sleep for as long as you needed him to as Jason’s eyes flicked over to the small digital clock on the microwave, the bright blue numbers casting a faint glow in the dark room.

1:14 AM.

A soft sigh escaped him and as much as he wanted to stay frozen in this exact position forever, he knew he couldn’t let you sleep the rest of the night on a hard wooden kitchen chair.

Moving with the absolute utmost care, Jason began to slide his hand out from beneath your cheek.

He did it in microscopic increments, ensuring his rough calluses didn’t catch on your skin, substituting his palm with the soft cushion of your own folded arms so your head lowered gently back down.

You let out a tiny, discontented mumble at the loss of his warmth, but your eyes stayed closed, your breathing deep and even as Jason quietly pushed his chair back, the wooden legs making barely a sound against the floor.

He stood up, his massive, broad-shouldered frame instantly towering over the table, his shadow completely eclipsing your small form in the dim light.

He stepped around the table, positioning himself right behind your chair. Bending down, he slipped one thick, powerful arm beneath your knees and wrapped his other massive arm securely around your upper back.

With a single, effortless fluid motion, he lifted you into his arms, gathering you into a secure bridal carry, and to a man who spent his days tossing eighty-pound hay bales, you felt entirely weightless.

Your head naturally lolled sideways, your face burying right into the crook of his neck. The soft fabric of his shirt scraped against your cheek, and you instinctively curled closer, your hands weakly clutching at his chest as you sought out his radiating body heat as Jason froze for a second, his chest tightening in pure affection, before he stepped out of the kitchen.

The hallway was dark, but he knew the layout of your house by heart. He walked with heavy, deliberate, yet completely silent footsteps, mindful of the doorways as he carried you into your bedroom.

The room was cool, the window cracked open to let in the fresh night air. Jason navigated around the edge of the bed and carefully lowered his knees, laying you down onto the mattress.

The sheets rustled softly as you sank into the pillows, your arms finally letting go of his shirt as you rolled onto your back, completely dead to the world.

As you shifted, the hem of your loose shirt caught on the fabric of his sleeves, riding up a few inches to expose a sliver of your bare belly to the cool room.

Jason’s hands stilled as he stared down at you in the dark, a rush of blood hitting his ears as his jaw clenched. He looked away for a split second, clearing his throat silently, before he reached down with two fingers.

With agonizing care, he caught the edge of your shirt and pulled it back down, smoothing the fabric over your stomach to cover you back up and keep you warm. He then reached for the comforter at the foot of the bed, pulling it up over your shoulders and tucking you in safely.

He didn’t leave right away as he stood over your bed for a long moment, just watching the steady rise and fall of your chest. The realization that you were leaving in a week felt like a heavy stone in his gut, but looking at you now, so peaceful and safe in his space, he knew a little bit of distance wasn’t going to change a damn thing.

He was already too far gone.

Leaning down, Jason placed his large hand flat on the mattress beside your head to support his weight as he pressed his lips gently against your forehead, the kiss lingering for a few long, quiet seconds, “Goodnight, sweetheart,” he whispered against your skin, his voice a rough, gravelly rasp.

He pulled back slowly, his eyes sweeping over your face one last time before he turned on his heel and quietly slipped out of the room, closing the door behind him with a soft, final click.

jason todd’s literary lines

normal au sfw short drabble neutral reader late night conversations kissing whipped jason todd 6.4k words

The heavy, muted silence of dawn still hung in the bedroom when the mattress shifted, it was a subtle movement, but to Jason, sleep was never truly deep. The moment the warmth of your body began to slip away, his eyes cracked open.

He watched your silhouette through the gloom, groggy but hyper-aware, waking before your bare feet even made contact with the cold hardwood floor as his body moved on pure instinct.

Silently, he forced himself out of the tangled sheets, his towering frame casting a massive shadow in the dim light. Standing well over six feet of pure, dense muscle, he was built like a brick wall—a reality emphasized by the sheer breadth of his shoulders and the thick, heavy curve of his biceps as he flexed his arms to shake off the sleep.

He stalked after you, his quiet footsteps betraying his massive size, guided by the soft, warm light spilling from the bathroom doorway. You were standing in front of the sink, having just slipped your shirt off over your head, preparing for a morning shower before work as the air in the bathroom was cool against your bare skin, carrying the faint, crisp scent of your peppermint body wash and the metallic tang of the pipes.

Before you could reach for the faucet, a sudden wave of heat enveloped you as Jason stepped up behind you, his presence instantly crowding the small room. He engulfed you entirely, his massive and scarred arms wrapped securely around your waist from the side, pulling your back flush against his broad, bare chest.

You were only in your undergarments, and the contrast between your soft skin and the rough, calloused texture of his hands sent a quick shiver down your spine as he buried his nose deep into your hair, inhaling the familiar, comforting scent of your shampoo.

A low, gravelly rumble vibrated against your shoulder blade as he squeezed you closer, his chest expanding against your back. “Hey, beautiful,” he murmured, his voice a thick, sleepy purr that sent a pleasant thrill straight to your toes.

You leaned back into his solid weight, a small smile tugging at your lips as you tilted your head to give him better access. “Good morning, Jay,” you whispered, your voice still thick with sleep.

“Morning, sweetheart,” he rumbled against your neck. The sound was a low, heavy vibration that resonated right through your bones as he shifted, his rough stubble scraping pleasantly against your skin, the distinct grey patch on his dark fringe falling slightly over his eyes as he nudged your jaw. “Why the hell are you up so early? It’s Thursday, sweetheart.”

“I have work, Jay,” you replied softly, twisting slightly in his grip to look up at him, your hand coming up to rest against the massive, warm expanse of his bicep. “And I really need to get in the shower now, or I’m going to be late…”

Jason let out a soft, pathetic whine directly into your hair, his grip tightening just a fraction more in a silent plea for you to stay. He was notoriously stubborn in the mornings, craving the quiet peace he rarely got anywhere else, especially when he had you in his arms like this.

But, knowing he couldn’t actually keep you hostage from your livelihood, he slowly let his arms drop, his palms dragging lazily down your hips before releasing you as he pulled back, but he didn’t go far. He retreated just a couple of steps, leaning his massive shoulder against the wooden doorframe.

Crossing his thick arms over his chest, his gaze locked onto you—heavy, dark, and lingering with a heated, lazy tension that made the room feel suddenly smaller.

Then, you turned around to face the shower, reaching out to turn on the handle as the movement pulled your hair completely over your right shoulder, exposing the entire left side of your back to the warm bathroom light. Jason’s lazy, sleep-deprived gaze instantly sharpened.

The air in his lungs hitched, catching in his throat with a sharp, audible snap. There, etched beautifully into the skin of your left shoulder blade, was a long, sweeping tattoo. Written in a delicate, elegant cursive font were the words ‘Most ardently’, accompanied by a trail of dark, intricate flowers that stalked upward from the bone and spilled gracefully down the top of your arm.

But Jason’s eyes didn’t just stop at the artistry as his gaze locked onto what lay beneath the ink. The flowers were intentionally woven around a thick, jagged, pale line of scar tissue. It was a brutal, uneven mark—the permanent reminder of a bank robbery months ago.

You had been the one to secretly call him, saving dozens of lives, but before he could burst through the doors, a robber had swung a heavy iron crowbar, catching you squarely on the shoulder blade.

Because you two had always kept the lights low or stayed beneath the covers during your most intimate moments, you had managed to hide the scar from him for months, terrified of the crushing guilt it would ignite in his chest.

And now, under the unforgiving morning light, it was entirely bare as the silence in the bathroom became deafening, thick with a sudden, suffocating weight.

The hot water from the shower began to hiss, sending a slow plume of steam into the air, but neither of you moved as Jason’s arms slowly uncrossed, dropping heavily to his sides. The lazy affection in his eyes vanished, replaced by a raw, burning intensity that made the space between you crackle with friction.

He took a slow, deliberate step forward, his eyes burning into the ink on your skin, his knuckles whitening as his hands curled into loose fists but before you could even register the shift in the room, Jason’s hand shot forward as his massive, calloused fingers wrapped around your wrist—firm but remarkably gentle—and with a subtle tug, he twirled you around.

Your back pressed firmly against the solid, radiating heat of his bare chest. The contrast was dizzying; the cool morning air of the bathroom hit your front, while his towering frame completely shielded your back from the chill.

Jason tilted his head down, his sharp blue eyes locking onto the delicate cursive script, tracing the dark ink of the flowers before his gaze sank into the jagged, pale line of the scar beneath it as you looked over your shoulder, catching the way his jaw tightly clenched, a muscle feathering in his cheek.

His hand hovered just inches away, his index finger twitching in the steam-filled air, wanting to reach out but completely frozen by a rare, hesitant fear.

“You can touch it if you want, Jay,” you murmured softly, your voice cutting through the hiss of the shower.

“... Mm.”

The permission broke his trance, slowly, the pad of his large index finger made contact with your skin. He traced the elegant curves of the tattoo first, his touch light as a feather, before sliding down to the uneven, raised texture of the scar tissue.

A heavy, dark shadow crossed his face, and his chest heaved against your back, “I almost didn’t make it,” he murmured, his voice dropping into a rough, gravelly register that scraped against your ears.

His finger paused on the center of the scar, pressing just a fraction firmer, his knuckles turning white. “I still want to find that bastard and break a crowbar over his head… I should’ve been faster.”

“Hey, c’mon,” you said softly, leaning your head back against his shoulder to catch his eye. “You got there as fast as you could, sweetheart. You saved everyone, and you saved me.”

Wanting to pull him out of the dark spiral of his own mind, you shifted the focus to the ink under his finger. “I got the tattoo to make it look like something beautiful grew out of it,” you explained, a small smile forming as you felt his finger resume its slow, soothing strokes. “It’s from Pride and Prejudice!”

“There’s a scene where the main character gets this sudden, overwhelming confession: ‘In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed’...”

Jason’s finger stopped completely against your shoulder blade. “... ‘You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you,’” he finished.

The words tumbled from his lips effortlessly, his deep voice carrying a quiet, unexpected reverence. You blinked, completely caught off guard, and immediately spun around in his loose grip to face him properly. “I didn’t take you for a literature boy, Jay,” you teased, your eyes wide with genuine surprise as Jason let out a low, breathless chuckle.

He leaned back against the wooden doorframe, his massive arms stretching out behind him to support his weight as he looked down at you. The lazy morning haze was entirely gone from his face; his pupils were completely blown, turning his sharp blue eyes into deep, dark pools of pure devotion as he drank in the sight of you.

“I’m full of surprises, sweetheart,” he murmured, a smug, boyish smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. “What, you thought I only read tactical manuals? The Count of Monte Cristo is practically my autobiography.”

Your jaw practically dropped. “Wait... you read that too? Why did you let me ramble your entire ear off about it last week if you already knew the whole plot?”

Jason’s smirk softened into something incredibly tender as he stepped away from the doorframe, closing the distance between you until the heat radiating from his body wrapped around you once more.

He reached down, his large, warm hands gently enveloping yours, his rough thumbs slowly rubbing soothing circles against your skin. “Because I like listening to you talk about your interests without interruption, sweetheart,” he confessed, his voice dropping to a soft, intimate whisper.

“Seeing your eyes light up like that... I’d let you explain the entire book to me a hundred times over.”

A fierce, burning blush rushed to your cheeks, warming you from the inside out. Before you could stutter out a response, Jason lifted your hands and gently twirled you around once more, seamlessly bringing your back against his chest.

He folded his massive, slightly cool forearms over your warm stomach, pulling you securely against him as he rested his heavy chin on your shoulder, and as the shower steam began to fog up the bathroom mirror, he began to gently rock you back and forth in a slow, comforting rhythm.

The fabric of his sweatpants brushed against your legs as you swayed. Suddenly, you felt the soft press of his lips against your left shoulder blade as he kissed the cursive ink, then kissed the pale scar tissue, his breath warm against your skin.

“Jay,” you breathed, your heart hammering against your ribs.

He murmured something incoherent against your skin before turning his head, nudging your jaw until you turned your face toward him. His lips met yours in a soft, lingering peck.

You could feel the distinct, vibrant curve of his grin pressing directly against your lips, a low rumble of pure contentment vibrating in his chest. Unable to resist, you turned around completely to face him properly, your hands coming up to cup his jawline, feeling the rough texture of his morning stubble as Jason’s large hands slid effortlessly against your skin, his warm, calloused palms resting securely against the bare skin of your waist, anchoring you to him.

The kiss deepened, tasting like sleep and lazy Thursday mornings, the tension between you thick, heated, and utterly addictive.

But the ticking of the clock in the bedroom echoed faintly, reminding you of reality, and with a breathless gasp, you gently pulled your lips away from his as Jason immediately let out a soft, pathetic whine, his grip on your waist tightening as he tried to lean back in to steal another taste. “Come on, just five more minutes, sweetheart...”

“No more kissing, or I’m going to be completely late,” you laughed softly, preventing his advance by burying your face in his chest and pulling him into a tight, grounding hug instead as Jason sighed, a heavy, defeated sound, but he didn’t protest any further (yet). He buried his face in your hair, pressing a firm, loving kiss against your forehead.

His massive arms slid down your back, wrapping securely around you just right below your chest, holding you so close that the rest of the world completely faded away as the stubborn, playful edge in his voice frayed, giving way to something much heavier, much more fragile.

As you tried to shift your weight again, a desperate, genuine fracture broke through his morning grogginess. He let out a low, shuddering breath that felt less like a pout and more like a plea, his forehead dropping heavily onto your shoulder as if the sheer weight of the looming day was too much to bear alone.

“Pleasee, sweetheart,” he whispered, the gravelly rough edge of his voice cracking with a raw, unexpected vulnerability. “Just... just stay. Todayy… please?”

His large hands shifted, his fingers clutching at the fabric of your undergarments, his palms pressing flat against your lower back as if he were trying to anchor himself to the only solid, safe thing in his universe.

“You don’t need that place anyway. I can take care of us. I can provide everything we need, I swear... I just... I can’t stand the thought of you walking out that door today.”

You felt a familiar, painful ache in your chest. Your eyes drifted over the broad expanse of his shoulders, tracking the faint heat bumps of bacne scattering across his upper back, interspersed with the jagged, white lines of bullet grazes and blade marks. It was a map of a meat grinder.

You knew exactly what unsaid horrors were fueling his desperation. His line of work meant every single night was a gamble with his life. It meant late-night arrivals where the smell of iron and cheap alleyway rain clung to his clothes, his knuckles split to the bone, his face bruised a horrific purple.

He would always sit on the edge of the tub, hands shaking from adrenaline, quietly murmuring, “I’m okay, I’m fine, I promise I’ll be more careful next time,” while you cleaned the glass out of his skin. You loved him fiercely, but you couldn’t let his trauma swallow your entire life.

“Jay,” you breathed, your voice trembling slightly as you put your hands against his ribs, gently but firmly trying to create an inch of distance. “I have to go. I love you, but I need this. I need to shower now.”

The moment he felt the physical boundaries of your body drifting from his, a cold panic seemed to strike him. Instantly, his massive biceps flexed, clamping down around you like iron bands.

He completely consumed you, hauling you flush against his chest so suddenly that your face was smudged entirely into the hot, solid center of his torso, he didn’t let go, instead, he wrapped himself around you tightly, burying his face deep into the crook of your neck, his chest heaving against your cheek.

“Don’t go,” he choked out, the tough, unyielding Red Hood completely evaporating, leaving behind only Jason—the boy who had been left alone in the dark too many times. His voice was a ragged, muffled string of admissions against your skin. “I’m so lonely here without you…”

“The apartment gets so quiet, and the walls just... they close in, sweetheart. Please… just come back to bed and hold… me for a little bit. Just five minutes, sweetheart. Please? For me?”

The sheer desperation in his grip, the way his massive, muscular frame was slightly trembling against yours, made the lingering, heated tension in the room shift into something profoundly emotional.

He was trapping you, yes, but he was also holding onto you like a drowning man clinging to a lifeline, begging you to save him from the quiet wreckage of his own mind as you stared up into those heavy, pleading blue eyes.

The fearsome Red Hood was trying his absolute best to give you the most pitiful puppy-dog look his scarred face could muster, entirely shameless in his quest to drag you back under the covers. For a few agonizing seconds, you tried to hold your ground, but the sheer, desperate vulnerability radiating off his massive frame completely melted your resolve.

With a dramatic, theatrical sigh, you rolled your eyes, a fond smile breaking through your exasperation. “Fine, fine... fine! You win, Master Jason.”

Jason immediately let out a loud, rough scoff at the old title, his jaw twitching. It was your favorite way to mock him, a playful jab at the stories he’d shared about his childhood and the elegant British butler who used to cater to him.

For a split second, his pride flared, and he looked like he wanted to snap back with a witty retort—but he caught himself. He knew better. One wrong word and you’d unleash the ultimate threat of “That’s it, I’m going to work,” and he wasn’t about to risk his victory.

Loosening the iron grip of his biceps, he finally pulled away just enough to let you breathe, though he didn’t let go completely as his huge, calloused hand slid down to catch yours, his thick fingers tangling securely with your own.

With an eager, impatient tug, he began guiding you out of the humid bathroom, reaching back with his free hand to firmly shut the door behind you, locking the hissing steam inside.

He didn’t waste a single second as the moment you were back in the dim, cool shadows of the bedroom, Jason stepped in front of you and began to gently, yet thoroughly, sifting through the clutter on the floor with his foot, he hooked a stray t-shirt of his, along with the soft shorts you had worn last night.

Technically, they were all his clothes, but in this apartment, anything that belonged to him belonged to you, too as Jason retreated a few steps, sinking back into the messy, unmade bed with a heavy, contented sigh.

He propped his back against the pillows, his bare chest heaving as his eyes locked onto you. As you reached for the shirt, his gaze darkened, lingering one last time on the elegant cursive of your ‘Most ardently’ tattoo and the jagged line of the crowbar scar beneath it.

There was a quiet, solemn reverence in his eyes now, a silent promise to keep you safe, before the fabric finally dropped over your head and covered it as the semi-oversized shirt swallowed you whole, smelling faintly of gunpowder, cedarwood, and him.

The moment you adjusted the shorts, Jason threw his massive arms wide open, a lazy, welcoming smirk returning to his lips. “Come here, sweetheart.”

You didn’t need to be told twice as you crawled back onto the mattress, the residual warmth of the blankets immediately enveloping you as you dove straight into his waiting embrace.

You buried your face deep into the warm crook of his neck, inhaling his familiar scent as you wrapped your arms tightly around his broad upper body.

Your fingers brushed against the slight texture of his bacne and the rugged lines of his shoulders, anchoring you to him. Facedown against his warm skin, your voice came out as a muffled, incoherent mumble. “...you’re gonna have to call my job and tell them I’m sick.”

Jason’s chest rumbled beneath you, a low, vibration of pure satisfaction bubbling in his throat as his massive arms locked around your waist, pulling you so close there wasn't a single inch of space left between you. “Later, later,” he murmured sleepily, his large hand gently stroking your back as he pulled the heavy duvet over both of you, finally content now that he had you right where you belonged.

The dim light of the bedroom felt entirely separate from the rest of the world, casting long, lazy shadows across the tangled sheets. Outside, the faint, distant hum of morning traffic began to pick up, a reminder of the Thursday you were actively abandoning, but inside the room, the only sound that mattered was the steady, deep rhythm of Jason’s breathing.

The cool morning air rolled in softly from the cracked window, carrying the crisp scent of upcoming rain and damp pavement, cutting through the heavy, enveloping warmth of the duvet as Jason’s massive hand moved with a surprising, deliberate gentleness, his thick fingers tangling into your hair.

He combed through the strands slowly, his rough palm scraping softly against your scalp as he stared down at your face as you shifted weight, sliding yourself semi-on top of him, resting your chin against the massive, solid expanse of his chest.

His pectorals rose and fell beneath you like a steady tide as he leaned up just enough to press a soft, lingering kiss to your lips.

It wasn’t the rushed, desperate kiss from the bathroom, but the slow and intoxicating romance that made the space between you feel dense and heavy as his other hand found your thigh beneath the hem of his oversized shirt, his large palm warm and heavy against your skin.

He roamed it up and down, his callouses catching slightly against your skin, sending a quiet thrill straight down your spine. “You’re so beautiful… sweetheart,” he murmured against your mouth, his breath hot and smelling faintly of the mint from earlier.

His blue eyes scanned your face as if he were trying to memorize every single line, his voice dropping into a rough, vulnerable register. “Perfect… so absolutely pretty.”

You let out a soft hum, reaching down to catch his hand before it could wander any higher as you pulled his massive palm away from your thigh, holding it gently between both of yours.

Your fingers traced the crisp, white edges of the medical tape and fabric bandages wrapped around his knuckles—the fresh armor from whatever alleyway war he had fought the night before. Beneath the cloth, you could feel the hard, unyielding framework of his hand, a weapon that had been broken and rebuilt a hundred times over.

You rubbed your thumb over the cotton wrapping, caressing the hidden hurts he so stubbornly tried to shield you from. Opening your eyes, you looked up into his gaze, the blue of his eyes almost completely swallowed by his blown pupils. “I love you, Jay… even when you’re being a selfish, demanding vigilante who ruins my work schedule.”

A low, breathy chuckle rumbled through his ribs, vibrating right against your chest. “I’m not selfish,” he murmured, his thumb hooking under your chin to tilt your face up just a fraction more. “I’m just greedy… there’s a difference.”

“Is that what the literature boy calls it?” you teased softly, leaning up to press a quick, reassuring kiss to the center of his palm, right over the bandages. “You’re just lucky I love you enough to risk getting fired.”

“They won’t fire you,” he growled softly, a sudden touch of that protective, dangerous Red Hood edge bleeding into his tone before it melted back into lazy affection. “If they do, I’ll make sure you become the boss and fire whoever annoys you. Problem solved.”

You rolled your eyes with a laugh, shifting your position until you were laying flat on the mattress beside him. You dragged your legs over, resting them comfortably over his thick, heavy thighs. Jason immediately rolled onto his side to face you, propping his head up with one hand.

His massive bicep flexed under the weight, the sheer size of his arm emphasizing how easily he could overwhelm your entire frame if he wanted to. But here, in the quiet safety of the dark, he looked completely disarmed as he just watched you; there was a profound, quiet romance in the way he stole glances at you when he thought you weren’t looking, his eyes tracing the line of your collarbone, the curve of your jaw, and the way his oversized shirt hung off your shoulders.

His pupils remained massive, wide and dark, reflecting the absolute adoration he usually kept locked away behind a red mask as his free hand came down to rest on your tummy, his palm covering nearly the entire expanse of your midriff.

You instinctively reached down, your hands wrapping around his thick bicep, holding onto the heavy muscle as if it were an anchor. “You still think about it, don’t you?” Jason asked suddenly, his voice dropping into a quiet, serious depth that cut right through the comfortable silence.

His finger tapped a slow, rhythmic beat against your stomach. “The bank… and the crowbar.”

You quieted, your fingers tightening slightly around his bicep. “Sometimes. When it gets too loud, it aches a little. But mostly, I just think about the sound of the doors bursting open, knowing you were there was enough for me.”

Jason’s jaw tightened, his gaze dropping for a split second as he fought back the ugly, dark memories of his own past—the smell of warehouse dust, the laugh of a clown, the weight of an iron bar.

He knew that pain intimately, and the fact that a piece of his violent world had chipped off and struck you was a burden he carried every single day. “I… was too slow,” he whispered, the admission raw and bleeding with a vulnerability he never showed anyone else.

“Every time I look at that ink, I just think about how I almost lost the only thing that matters to me.”

“Jay, look at me,” you insisted softly, letting go of his arm to gently cup his cheek, forcing his blue eyes back to yours. “You didn't lose me. You found me!”

“The tattoo isn’t a reminder of what went wrong. It’s what you said—‘most ardently.’ I chose those words because despite everything ugly out there, what I feel for you is the only thing that stays constant.”

“You’re my wait and hope.”

A profound, heavy silence settled over the room, thick with a lingering, heated tension that was entirely emotional as Jason stared at you, his chest heaving with a ragged breath as your words settled deep into his chest, soothing the jagged edges of his soul.

Slowly, his hand on your tummy slid downward, his fingers hooking firmly into the waistband of your shorts. With one possessive, unyielding pull, he dragged your body flush against his. He closed the remaining distance entirely, burying his nose deep into the crook of your neck, his face hidden in the sweet, familiar scent of your hair.

He inhaled sharply, a long, desperate breath as if he were drinking you into his very lungs, before letting out a slow, heavy exhale that fanned warmly against your collarbone as his massive arms locked tightly around your waist, holding you so securely against his chest that you could feel the steady, powerful thud of his heart beating in perfect time with your own.

The rain finally caught up with the morning forecast, tapping a soft, rhythmic patter against the windowpane. Inside, the sound only made the bedroom feel smaller, safer, and entirely insulated from the rest of Gotham.

The cool scent of wet asphalt drifted through the cracked glass, mixing with the warm, familiar scent of Jason’s skin as he kept his face buried in your neck for a long time, his breathing deep and heavy against your skin.

His massive arms remained locked around your waist, his biceps pressing firmly against your ribs. You could feel the sheer, overwhelming size of him wrapping you up, but there wasn’t a single ounce of threat in it; he was just anchoring himself.

Slowly, he shifted, tilting his head up so his chin rested on your shoulder. Those blown, dark blue eyes looked at you from mere inches away, heavy with a lazy, romantic intensity that made your heart skip a beat. “‘Wait and hope,’ huh?” he murmured, a faint, lopsided smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.

He reached up, using one of his large, bandage-wrapped fingers to gently boop the tip of your nose. “How dorky.”

“Oh, please,” you laughed softly, your hands coming up to rest on his broad shoulders, your fingers tracing the bumps of his bacne through the soft cotton of his shirt.

“You’re the one who memorized Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen just to flex on me in a bathroom. Who’s the real drama queen here, Master Jason?”

“Hey, I’m a man of culture,” he rumbled, his chest vibrating pleasantly against your front. He slid his hand up from your waistband, his large palm resting flat against your tummy again, warmth seeping through the fabric of his oversized t-shirt. “Besides, you started it! You can’t just drop Darcy lines on a guy when he’s half-asleep and expect him not to finish them. It’s a reflex.”

You smiled, but as you looked at the faint, white scars cutting through his brow and across his jawline, the tone of the room softened, drifting into that deep, quiet space only the two of you shared. “Seriously, though. You actually read them…? I thought you just collected first editions to look intimidating on your bookshelves.”

Jason’s smirk faded into something much gentler, a rare, vulnerable softness taking over his features as he stole a long, lingering glance at your lips before his eyes locked back onto yours.

“When I was... before everything went sideways, when I was living at the manor, I used to hide out in the library. It was the only place that felt quiet. I read everything I could get my hands on just to keep the noise out of my head.”

He paused, his thumb tracing a slow circle over your hip. “And then later, after I came back... those books were some of the only things I remembered clearly. Before I remembered my own name, I remembered stories.”

Your chest tightened with a profound, aching tenderness. You moved your hand up, your fingers gently tangling into the dark hair at the nape of his neck, your thumb brushing over the distinct grey patch on his fringe. “And now?”

Jason leaned into your touch, his eyes fluttering shut for a brief second before he opened them, staring at you with a terrifying amount of devotion.

“Now, I don’t need the books to keep the noise out. I just need you to ramble about them for three hours.”

A beautiful, breathless silence fell over the bed, the romantic weight of his words hanging heavy in the air as your face flushed a deep, bright crimson, and you instinctively tried to hide your face by burying it back into his chest. “Stop,” you muffled against his collarbone. “You can’t just say things like that! I’m supposed to be at work right now, and you’re making it impossible to regret staying.”

Jason let out a low, victorious chuckle, his massive arms squeezing you tight against him, pulling your thighs over his legs completely. “Good. That’s the plan, sweetheart. Complete and total sabotage.”

“You’re terrible,” you laughed, turning your head to look at him properly.

“I know I am…” he corrected smoothly, leaning in to press a soft, lingering kiss to your jawline, before trailing his lips up to your cheek. “Now, are you going to call your boss, or do I have to use my scary Red Hood voice over the phone to tell them you’ve been struck down by a sudden, incurable case of ‘needing to cuddle your giant boyfriend’?”

“I don’t think that’s on the sick-leave form, Jay,” you grinned, your hands sliding down to rest against his massive biceps, feeling the thick, solid muscle flex beneath your palms as he held you close. “I’ll make them add it,” he murmured against your lips, his smile stretching against yours right before he caught your mouth in another deep, lazy, and utterly perfect kiss.

Before you could even fully process the taste of his grin against your mouth, Jason’s hands shifted from your waist down to your thighs. With one effortless, sweeping hoist of his massive arms, he adjusted your weight and pulled you entirely on top of him.

You let out a breathless gasp as you found yourself straddling his midsection, your hands instantly dropping onto his broad, solid chest for balance as he looked up at you with that lazy, triumphant smirk, his thick biceps flexing against the mattress as he settled his hands heavily on your hips, entirely satisfied with his new vantage point.

BZZZZ!

The sharp, aggressive vibration of your phone cut through the quiet romance of the room like a buzzsaw. It was sitting right on the nightstand, its screen flashing a harsh, bright light that illuminated the dim shadows of the bedroom.

You let out a heavy, defeated sigh, your shoulders dropping. “Jesus, it’s only been a few minutes,” you groaned, already preparing to slide off him to answer it.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Jason rumbled, his grip tightening on your hips just enough to keep you pinned securely to his chest. With a reach that only someone over six feet tall could manage, his massive arm shot out toward the nightstand as his large, bandage-wrapped fingers scooped up the device effortlessly.

He brought the screen up to his face, and a soft, dorky smile instantly broke across his scarred features when the lock screen immediately chimed and swiped open. You had set up his face on your phone’s facial recognition—partly for emergencies, but mostly because you loved seeing the phone unlock just by him looking at it.

“Look at this,” Jason murmured, turning the screen toward you so you could see the banner notification. It was a direct message from your manager.

Before you could read the full text, the phone began to ring proper, the manager’s name flashing across the screen.

“Jay, give it to me, I have to answer—”

“I got it, sweetheart,” he interrupted smoothly.

With a wicked glint in his blue eyes, Jason tapped the green accept button and instantly slid the call onto speakerphone, but before the first syllable could leave your manager’s mouth, Jason’s free hand firmly clapped over the back of your head.

With a gentle but unyielding pressure, he pushed your head straight down, burying your face flush into the warm, solid center of his bare chest. He began to casually ruffle your hair, his thick fingers tangling in the strands to keep you pacified while your mouth was completely muffled against his skin.

“Hello?” Jason spoke into the phone.

Instantly, the lazy, gravelly tone of your sleepy boyfriend vanished. It was replaced by a smooth, perfectly modulated, and incredibly professional voice—the kind of voice he only pulled out when he was playing the part of a high-society Wayne enterprise heir, or dealing with people he actually needed to respect.

“Yes, hello, this is a… very, very close friend of Y/N’s,” Jason lied seamlessly, his chest vibrating right against your cheek as he spoke. “I’m calling on their behalf. I’m afraid they woke up with a violently high fever and a severe respiratory infection this morning. Yes, it’s quite bad.”

“They’re completely bedridden and can barely speak. I’ve already advised them that they absolutely cannot make it into the office today... or tomorrow, for that matter. They’ll need at least the next two days to recover properly.”

Your eyes went wide against his chest. ‘Two days?!’

Muffled, panicked noises escaped your throat as you desperately tried to thrash out of his grip as you clawed at his ribs and reached wildly for the device, but the moment your fingers even brushed the casing, Jason simply hoisted his arm straight up into the air.

With his absurdly long reach and the sheer breadth of his shoulders, he held the phone completely out of your hemisphere. You were stuck hovering over him, straining your arms in vain while he lay there perfectly relaxed, easily keeping you at bay with a single hand resting on your back.

On the other end of the line, your manager sounded completely taken aback by the sheer authority and professionalism in Jason’s voice. “Oh... oh, wow. I see. Yes, of course, health comes first! Please tell them to rest up and we’ll see them on Monday. Thank you for calling in for them.”

“Much appreciated, have a good weekend,” Jason finished smoothly, his tone clipping off with a polite finality before he tapped the screen to end the call as the silence returned to the bedroom, save for the soft patter of the rain outside.

Finally, Jason lowered his arm and handed the device down to you with a smug, self-satisfied grin as you snatched the phone from his grip, quickly sitting up on his lap.

Your heart was pounding as you frantically opened the messaging app to look at the stream of increasingly urgent texts your manager had sent earlier, demanding to know where you were. You let out a breathless, half-stunned laugh, staring at the screen in utter disbelief.

Behind you, the mattress shifted heavily as Jason sat up with you, his massive, broad chest pressing flush against your back as he wrapped his thick arms around your waist from behind.

He pulled you securely against him, tucking his chin over your shoulder so his scratchy morning stubble nudged your neck, “... There,” he murmured, his deep voice thick with satisfaction as his fingers hooked into the waistband of your oversized shorts, anchoring you to his lap. “Look at that.”

“The both of us are completely free for the next two days. No work, no distractions. Just you and me.”

You turned your head slightly, looking at him over your shoulder with an amused, slightly judging brow. “Jesus, Todd! I didn’t know you were such a terrifyingly good liar. You didn’t even hesitate.”

Jason’s blue eyes gleamed in the dim, romantic light of the room, his pupils still wide and dark as he looked at you. A slow, lazy smirk stretched across his lips, his biceps flexing securely around your middle as he squeezed you tight.

“What did I tell you earlier, sweetheart?” he rumbled, his voice dropping into a low, affectionate purr against your skin. “I’m full of surprises.”

normal au tooth rottin’ fluff short drabble fluff fem reader 4.6k words jason todd has an eyebrow piercing

The digital glow of your phone was the only thing cutting through the oppressive darkness of the bedroom, a sharp, artificial blue that made your eyes ache, it was currently 3:00 AM, that hollow hour where the world feels suspended in amber. Outside, Gotham was a muffled symphony of distant sirens and the relentless, rhythmic drumming of rain against the windowpane—a cold contrast to the stifling stillness inside.

You leaned back against the mahogany headboard, the scent of the room grounding you: the musk of old wood, the metallic tang of rain-slicked concrete drifting through the vents, and the faint, lingering spice of Jason’s sandalwood cologne clinging to the linen sheets.

Beside you, Jason Todd was a mountain of muscle silhouetted in the shadows, a landscape of jagged scars and raw power. He was sprawled on his stomach, his heavy arms tucked beneath the pillow, his face turned away, but even in sleep, he looked like a coiled spring.

Shirtless and clad only in low-slung, worn-out denim jeans, he was a distraction you were desperately trying to bypass. His skin felt like a furnace, the sheer caloric heat of his vigilante metabolism radiating off his broad back and brushing against your side like a physical weight.

Your thumb hovered over the screen, scrolling with a slow, rhythmic hesitation. You were deep into a Tumblr thread, a fanfiction that had started as a slow-burn romance but was now spiraling into something far more visceral as you felt a flush creep up your neck as the prose grew dense and heavy, describing the way a character’s hands traced the line of a partner's spine, the friction of skin against skin, and the breathless, whispered promises exchanged in the dark.

Your heart hammered a frantic rhythm against your ribs, the silence of the room amplifying the sound of your own pulse. Just as the story reached a fever pitch—a lingering, evocative description of a heated embrace that made your breath hitch—a low, gravelly groan vibrated through the mattress, traveling up through your thighs.

Before you could even blink, the stillness shattered. A massive, scarred hand shot out with predatory, practiced speed, his fingers locking around the casing of your phone. “Wh— Jason!” you yelped, the sudden movement jolting you forward.

“Go to sleep,” he grumbled. His voice was a thick, sleep-heavy rasp that sounded like gravel grinding together. Without opening his eyes, he used the momentum of his reach to toss the device onto the far side of the bed, where it landed with a soft thud against the duvet.

The sudden loss of the light left you momentarily blind, the afterimage of the screen dancing in your vision but Jason didn’t pull his hand back immediately. Instead, he let his arm go limp across your lap, the sheer weight of it pinning you in place.

“... It’s three in the morning,” he muttered, his face still buried in the pillow, though you could hear the smirk in his tone. “Whatever you’re doing, that’s making your heart race like a getaway car... it can wait until the sun’s up.”

He shifted then, rolling onto his side to face you. In the dim light filtering through the curtains, his eyes were mere slivers of blue as he reached up, his calloused thumb catching your chin and tilting your head down.

He didn’t move to reclaim his space, instead, he stayed close, the heat from his body narrowing the gap between you until the air felt thick enough to choke on.

The silence of the room was no longer oppressive; it was expectant, filled with the sudden, sharp realization that the fiction you had been reading was nothing compared to the reality of the man currently watching you from the shadows as the springs groaned in protest as Jason shifted, his movements fluid and deceptively fast for a man of his size.

In one heartbeat, he was beside you; in the next, he was over you, pinning you into the soft depths of the mattress. He was a landslide of solid muscle and radiating heat, burying his face in the crook of your neck while his biceps—thick, scarred, and immovable—locked like iron pillars on either side of your head.

“Jason, give it back,” you whined, though the sound lacked any real bite. You poked at the dense, warm marble of his shoulder, your fingertips catching on the familiar, jagged ridges of his scar tissue.

It was a grounding reality, a sharp contrast to the polished heroes in the story you'd been reading as he let out a heavy huff of air against your collarbone, his stubble grazing your skin with a delicious, stinging friction.

“It’s three in the morning, darlin’,” he vibrated against you, his voice a low-frequency hum. “What could possibly be so important that you’re keeping the whole bed awake with your racing pulse?”

“Nothing! Just... plot development,” you whispered breathlessly. To keep him from retreating, you hooked your legs around his waist, anchoring his heavy frame against yours as you reached up, your fingers diving into the soft, messy hair at the nape of his neck, your thumb tracing the stark, silver-grey patch at his temple.

Jason lifted his head just enough to look at you. In the bruised light of the room, the silver glint of his eyebrow piercing caught a stray beam of Gotham’s neon.

His eyes were hooded, a stormy, piercing teal that seemed to read every frantic thought in your head. “You’re a terrible liar,” he murmured, his nose brushing against yours. “Your heart is thumping against my chest like a trapped bird.”

“I don’t know what you're talking about,” you countered, trying to sound indignant while trailing a row of soft, lingering kisses along the sharp line of his jaw as he scoffed, a dark, rich sound that rumbled through both your chests.

A smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth—that dangerous, charming look that usually preceded trouble. “Nice try with the distractions,” he whispered, leaning in to catch your bottom lip in a brief, punishingly firm peck that left you breathless. “But I’m a detective, remember?”

With a sudden, explosive burst of energy, he bolted upright, lunging across the bed toward the dark corner where your phone lay, “No! Jay, stop!” You scrambled after him, grabbing at his waist, but it was like trying to restrain a moving mountain.

He caught the device with a triumphant flick of his wrist, holding it high out of your reach as he thumbed the screen back to life as the blue light flooded his face, illuminating the wicked grin spreading across his features.

“Let’s see what made you so worked up,” he chuckled, his eyes scanning the glowing text. “Oh... wow. Is that what we’re doing? Is that how he’s holding her? That’s anatomically ambitious.”

“Jason Todd, put that down right now!” you cried, face burning as you tried to climb up his back to reach the phone.

He laughed, a genuine, boisterous sound, and effortlessly shifted his weight to keep you pinned under his arm while he kept reading aloud in a mock-dramatic, gravelly noir voice. “... ‘His touch was a brand, searing into her skin as he—’ Okay, okay, I see why you’re blushing. I think I can do better than this guy, though, he’s got no technique.”

He tossed the phone aside again, this time onto the floor with a soft thud, and turned back to you with a look of pure, predatory intent. “I think you need a live demonstration of how that scene is actually supposed to go.”

He held the phone high, his long fingers wrapped around the edges, keeping it well out of reach as his blue eyes scanned the glowing screen.

For a second, he just blinked, his expression shifting from pure confusion to a slow, wicked realization that bloomed across his face like a smirk in the dark. “Red Hood x Reader?” Jason read aloud, his voice dripping with a mix of disbelief and immediate, teasing delight.

“Hate-sex? Four hundred thousand words? Jesus, sweetheart.” He looked down at you, one eyebrow arched so high it practically vanished into his messy dark hair, the silver hoop in his brow catching the dim bedroom light. “Really? You’ve got a whole manifesto on me in here?”

A wave of intense, burning heat flooded your cheeks, turning your ears bright red as the sheer embarrassment felt heavy in your chest, making you feel entirely exposed under his piercing gaze.

You lunged for the phone, your fingers clawing at his wrists, but when that failed, you threw your weight forward and actually sank your teeth into his bicep in a desperate, panicked attempt to get him to drop the evidence.

The muscle was solid, practically like stone beneath his t-shirt, barely giving an inch under your teeth as Jason didn’t even flinch. Instead, a deep, chesty laugh rumbled against your ribs—a sound that was entirely too smug.

With a single, effortless sweep of his free hand, he manhandled you backward, his palm pressing firmly against your waist to pin you back into the pillows. “Nice try, wildcat,” he chuckled, tossing the phone onto the nightstand just out of your peripheral vision, though the damage was already done.

Mortified, you tried to roll out of bed, scrambling for the edge, but his hand clamped around your ankle like a shackle. With a single, casual tug, he dragged you back across the sheets with terrifying, effortless strength until your back bumped flush against his broad chest.

He didn’t let go; instead, he wrapped his massive frame around yours, hooking his chin over your shoulder as his nose brushed slowly against the sensitive skin of your neck, inhaling deeply, catching the sweet, familiar scent of your shampoo. “You’ve got the real thing right here,” he rumbled against your skin, the vibration sending a shiver straight down your spine.

His voice dropped an octave, laced with a sudden, sharp edge of possessive jealousy that he wasn't even trying to hide, “Why are you reading four hundred thousand words about some guy I haven’t even met yet? Am I not keeping you entertained?”

He nipped playfully at your earlobe, a tiny, teasing bite that made you squeak and try to shoulder him away, though you only succeeded in burying yourself deeper into his embrace. “I get shy,” you admitted softly, your face burning so hot you felt like you were going to combust right there in his sheets.

You hid your face in the crook of his elbow. “Sometimes... I’m too shy to ask you for… this… for attention.”

The teasing tension in his heavy frame softened instantly. The mocking edge vanished, replaced by something incredibly tender as he let out a soft, defeated sigh, his massive arms sliding under your armpits to pull you back against him in a crushing, rib-cracking hug that made you feel completely safe, completely swallowed up by him.

“You don’t have to be shy with me.”

“... Ever,” he murmured, his tone fiercely earnest. He leaned in, kissing the side of your neck, his lips warm, soft, and lingering against your pulsing vein, soothing the embarrassment right out of you.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, a lazy, beautiful smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Well, I’m wide awake now... and highly competitive.”

You turned in his arms, shifting your weight until you were facing him fully, your knees framing his hips. You reached up, cupping his jaw with both hands, feeling the faint, scratchy prickle of morning stubble against your palms as he leaned into the touch instinctively, his eyes heavy-lidded.

As you pulled him down, tilting your head to press your lips to his, the playful energy in the room completely evaporated. It was replaced by a thick, heavy heat that made the air feel suddenly scarce but Jason didn’t hold back as he groaned softly into your mouth, deepening the kiss with a slow, deliberate intensity that made your head spin.

His tongue slid against yours, tasting like the mint toothpaste from earlier, sweeping away any lingering thoughts of the phone or the story as he guided you down toward the floor, dragging the blankets with you until the soft, heavy weight of him was looming directly over you, pressing you into the thick rug.

He followed you down seamlessly, his heavy thigh sliding firmly between yours, pinning your legs to the side and anchoring you beneath him. The contrast of his sheer size against yours was dizzying as your hands flew to his biceps again, your fingers digging in, squishing the flexed, hard muscle as you pulled him closer, utterly refusing to let the contact break.

You tangled your fingers in the collar of his shirt, pulling him down until there wasn’t a single millimeter of space between your chests. When he leaned down to press his lips to the corner of your jaw, the cool metal of his eyebrow piercing pressed firmly against your forehead, a sharp, grounding contrast to the burning heat of his skin.

He trailed a path of slow, heavy kisses back up to your lips, nipping gently at your bottom lip until you gasped, letting him back in. “Forget the story,” he whispered against your lips, his breath hot, his thumbs tracing soothing circles over your hip bones beneath your shirt.

“I’m right here... every single page of it.” He didn’t give you a chance to answer, his lips sealing over yours again to completely smother any reply you might have tried to formulate. The kiss was deeper now, less of a playful tease and more of a deliberate, slow-burning claim.

His mouth moved against yours with a heavy, intoxicating rhythm that made your thoughts scatter like autumn leaves in a gale as your fingers tightened convulsively in his hair, the thick, dark strands slipping through your fingers as you arched into him.

Jason let out a low, satisfied sound into your mouth—a vibration you felt deep in your own chest—and shifted his weight, pressing his entire solid length down against you. The sheer, unyielding heat of him was entirely overwhelming, trapping you beautifully against the floor.

He broke the kiss just an inch, his lips wet and flushed as they dragged across your cheek to the sensitive line of your jaw. He bit down gently on the soft skin right beneath your ear, making you gasp and tighten your grip on his shoulders.

“Still think the guy in the story has better dialogue?” he teased, his voice a rough, breathless gravel against your skin.

“Jayy…” you whined, your hands slipping down his back, feeling the hard ridges of muscle shifting beneath his shirt. “Stopp it—! You’re being unfair!”

“Unfair?” He chuckled, the sound vibrating against your collarbone as he moved his lips downward, kissing the hollow of your throat with agonizing slowness.

His hands, massive and warm, slid beneath the hem of your oversized shirt, his calloused palms tracing the sensitive skin of your waist as his thumb stroked upward over your ribs, making your breath hitch. “Sweetheart, I’m being incredibly generous. I’m giving you the live-action adaptation.”

You flushed an even deeper shade of crimson, a fresh wave of embarrassed tension locking your muscles. You clamped your eyes shut, hiding your burning face against his neck, the scent of him filling your senses, “You’re never letting me live this down, are you?” you mumbled into his shoulder.

Jason paused, his hands resting gently on your ribs, his chest rising and falling heavily against yours. He let out a soft, amused huff that ruffled your hair. With agonizing slowness, he propped himself up on his elbows, looming over you so you were forced to look at him.

His blue eyes were dark, heavy-lidded, and incredibly soft, entirely devoid of any actual mockery as the silver hoop in his eyebrow pressed briefly against your temple again as he nudged your nose with his.

“Never,” he promised with a wicked, devastating grin. “I’m going to bring it up every single time you get shy. Every time you think you can’t just reach out and grab me.”

To prove his point, he took your wrist, guiding your hand up until your palm was pressed flat against his heart. It was hammering a frantic, heavy rhythm against his ribs—just as fast as your own.

“See that?” he murmured, his thumb gently wiping away a stray tear of sheer embarrassment from the corner of your eye. “You don’t need a four hundred thousand word script to get me like this… you just have to look at me.”

The remaining tension melted right out of you, replaced by a sweet, aching warmth as you reached up, your fingers tracing the sharp line of his jaw, your thumb brushing over his lower lip, “Show-off,” you whispered.

“Always,” he whispered back, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He leaned down, burying his face in the crook of your neck, his arms wrapping entirely around you to lift you slightly off the floor, holding you as close as humanly possible, “Now, come back to bed. You can tell me exactly what happens in chapter two.”

The duvet settled over you both, trapping a pocket of shared, intoxicating heat against the chill of the room. Jason claimed it entirely, shifting his massive frame until he was rolled onto his side, facing you.

With a slow, deliberate tug of his forearms, he hauled you against him until there wasn't an inch of breathing room left between your chests as your head came to rest perfectly in the crook of his shoulder, your burning cheek pressed flat against the bare, expansive curve of his bicep.

Up close, the sheer density of his arm was staggering. It was a map of hard-earned strength, the thick bundles of muscle fibers shifting smoothly under his warm skin as he adjusted his grip around you.

Even relaxed, the bicep was broad and slightly rounded, forming a heavy, perfectly sculpted shelf that cradled your head like a pillow made of heated stone.

You could feel the distinct, heavy pulse of his artery beating rhythmically against your jawline as a small, helpless smile bloomed across your face, your lips brushing against the smooth, slightly rough texture of his skin.

You leaned your weight fully into him, shifting your face sideways to deliberately take in the shape of his arm. The flexed, hard curve of the muscle bunched slightly under your cheek as he tightened his hold, a tangible, overwhelming reminder of his size.

You heard rather than felt the soft, rumbling vibration of satisfaction that started deep in Jason’s chest as his fingers twitched against your spine, a quiet, contented reaction to you finally settling down.

Smiling against him, you tilted your head just enough to press a soft, deliberate kiss right into the center of his bicep, your lips parting slightly against the warm skin. He let out a low huff of laughter, the muscle beneath your face flexing instinctively at the sudden, tingly sensation of your breath.

Moving slowly, you trailed a path of tiny, feather-light kisses upward, following the deep groove where his bicep met his shoulder, before burying your face into the warm hollow of his neck as you pressed a final, lingering kiss against the sharp, prominent ridge of his collarbone, letting your lips rest against the hard bone as you murmured a sleepy.

“Goodnight, Jay.”

Jason’s response was immediate, all the teasing energy completely melting into a thick, heavy tenderness as he shifted his head down, his jaw brushing against your hair as his lips found the center of your forehead.

He pressed a deep, heavy kiss there, his mouth warm and slightly damp, lingering so long it felt like a silent anchor holding you in place. “Goodnight, sweetheart,” he murmured, his voice a rough, low gravel that was thick with a lovely, late-night drowsiness.

As if to ensure you couldn't possibly slide away from him in the dark, Jason threw his long, heavy leg entirely over yours. The thick, solid weight of his thigh pinned your lower body to the mattress, a possessive, comforting barrier that completely grounded you.

One of his massive hands slid up to tangle gently in your hair, his calloused fingertips massaging your scalp in slow, lazy circles, smoothing the strands down your back as his breathing began to slow into a deep, steady rhythm.

Wrapped up securely in his heat, with the incredible bulk of his arms framing your world and his weight anchoring you close, the fictional stories completely faded away, leaving nothing but the beautiful, heavy reality of him holding you tight.

The bright, golden light of a Gotham morning filtered through the kitchen windows, chasing away the usual grim shadows of the apartment as the smell of freshly brewed coffee, sizzling bacon, and warm pancakes filled the air. You were humming softly to yourself, carefully arranging the plates and silverware on the small wooden breakfast table you shared with Jason.

It was a peaceful routine, a stark contrast to the chaos that usually governed his life.

Movement by your feet caught your attention as two tiny, fluffy bundles of fur were weaving an intricate figure-eight around your ankles.

Your heart melted instantly as you bent down and gently scooped the two small kittens into your arms, cradling them against your chest. They were so small, barely filling your hands, but their purrs were loud enough to rattle their tiny ribs.

Jason had brought them home two weeks ago after a brutal, late-night patrol as he had caught a couple of cruel neighborhood kids throwing heavy rocks at them in a dark alley. Jason, despite his terrifying reputation as the Red Hood, had scared the kids off with a single glare, gently tucked the shivering, terrified balls of fluff into his tactical jacket, and brought them straight home to you.

You knelt down, gently scooping the brother and sister duo into your arms. The little black-and-white tuxedo cat, whom Jason had insisted on naming Barnaby, immediately started purring like a tiny chainsaw and his calico sister, Mochi, meowed sharply, her little pink nose twitching. “Good morning, my little troublemakers,” you cooed softly, lifting them up to eye level and kissing each of their tiny, fuzzy foreheads.

They both let out a chorus of high-pitched squeaks, “Are you guys hungry?” you cooed softly, kissing the tops of their tiny heads as they both let out high-pitched, synchronized meows, their little pink noses twitching. “Do you wanna go wake up Daddy?” you cooed softly, kissing the tops of their tiny heads.

At the mention of the word, Barnaby pawed at your chin. Giggling, you stood up and carried the squirming bundle into your shared bedroom. The room was dark, the heavy curtains blocking out most of the daylight. Spread-eagle in the center of the mattress was Jason, completely dead to the world.

He was lying flat on his stomach, his face buried sideways in a pillow, a massive expanse of scarred, bare skin exposed to the cool morning air as you crept up to the edge of the bed and gently set the kittens down onto his back.

Barnaby immediately claimed the high ground, his tiny paws kneading into the broad, muscle-bound slope of Jason’s upper back. Mochi, completely chaotic, decided Jason’s sweatpants-clad butt was the perfect launching pad as she let out a tiny, demanding meow, looking right at you with wide, glassy eyes, before suddenly sprinting straight up the length of his spine like it was a climbing wall.

She scrambled over his shoulder and landed directly on his face, her tiny claws accidentally nicking his cheek as she sought balance as Jason groaned—a deep, gravelly sound that vibrated right through the mattress. “Ugh… what the…” his voice was thick with sleep.

But the moment his green eyes blinked open and focused on Mochi’s tiny, whiskered face just millimeters from his nose, his gruff expression melted into a soft, helpless smile. “Hey there, monster.”

He shifted, rolling over with a heavy sigh to sit up against the headboard. As he moved, the sheet fell to his waist, revealing the staggering, god-like bulk of his upper body. He carefully scooped both Barnaby and Mochi into his hands as his biceps bunched and flexed—massive, thick cords of solid muscle that could easily tear iron apart—yet right now, his giant, scarred fingers were visibly shaking.

He held the kittens with an almost comical amount of fear, terrified that a single wrong twitch of his strength would hurt them. With extreme caution, Jason lifted the two kittens and balanced them perfectly on the thick, rounded shelves of his flexed biceps as Barnaby immediately curled up on his right arm, while Mochi batted at the silver hoop in his eyebrow from his left.

“Look at you, showing off for the kids first thing in the morning,” you teased, leaning against the edge of the bed.

“They need a strong role model,” Jason rumbled, his voice low and raspy from sleep as he looked up at you, his eyes instantly darkening with affection.

His free hand shot out, his thick fingers wrapping securely around the waistband of your pajamas, tugging you effortlessly closer until your knees pressed into the mattress.

He leaned forward, burying his face right against your chest as his faint morning stubble scratched pleasantly through your shirt as he rested his cheek against you, inhaling your scent. “Morning, beautiful.”

“Good morning, tough guy,” you smiled, running your fingers through his messy, dark hair, feeling the warmth radiating from his skin. “Breakfast is done, and coffee’s hot.”

“You’re an angel,” he mumbled against your chest, his grip on your waistband tightening just a fraction in a silent plea for you to stay.

He tilted his head back up, his green eyes heavy-lidded and soft, and puckered his lips out like a dork, demanding a kiss as you laughed, leaning down to meet him. The kiss was sweet, warm, and tasted faintly of sleep, his mouth soft against yours as his thumb stroked the soft skin of your hip.

Suddenly, Mochi lost her footing on his left bicep, and seeking purchase, she lunged forward and dug her tiny, needle-sharp claws directly into Jason’s bare chest—right on his left pectoral.

“Yowch!” Jason barked, his entire body jerking as he pulled his head back. “Jesus, Mochi—!”

You bursted out laughing, pulling away from him as he glared half-heartedly at the calico kitten, who was now innocently licking her paw on the pillow. “Hey! I saved your life from the rock-throwers, remember? Show some respect to my chest, kid.”

“Maybe don’t flex so hard next time,” you bantered, turning around to head back to the kitchen to serve the food.

Slap!

A sudden, stinging heat flared across your backside as Jason’s massive palm had delivered a perfectly aimed, crisp smack to your butt, the sound echoing loudly in the quiet bedroom.

You whirled around, your face instantly flushing a bright, indignant pink. “Jason!” you gasped, spinning back around, your face flushing a bright, amused pink. “You’re terrible!”

Jason just leaned back against the headboard, a wicked, completely unrepentant smirk plastered across his handsome face as he held the two kittens tightly against his chest. “Hey, just making sure you’re awake too, sweetheart,” he bantered back, his eyes dancing with pure mischief.

He carefully set the kittens down on the mattress, finally sliding his legs out from under the covers as he stretched, his massive muscles rippling under the dim light, before giving you a wink. “Give me a second. I’m gonna go put on a shirt before our little demons decide to scratch me up any further.”

modern college au sfw short drabble fluff fem reader performative sukuna 4.3k words

The bell above the shop door chimed softly as you stepped inside, the sound swallowed almost immediately by low, dreamy vocals drifting from the store’s speakers—some lo-fi track you didn’t recognize but immediately wished you'd saved to your study playlist.

Warm amber light spilled from pendant lamps hung at uneven intervals, casting the rows of vinyl racks in a honeyed glow that made everything feel slower as the air smelled of old paper, worn cardboard sleeves, and something faintly like the vanilla candle burning on the counter near the register.

Dust motes floated lazily through beams of late afternoon sun slanting through the front window as you exhaled, shoulders dropping an inch. ‘Home sweet home…’

A few other customers milled about, a couple near the jazz section and an older man flipping through classic rock with the careful reverence of someone who had all the time in the world.

The store was the kind of place that asked nothing of you except to exist in it.

Exactly what you needed after the week you’d had. Your fingers brushed against the canvas strap of your tote bag as you adjusted it on your shoulder, the familiar weight of your notebook and pens shifting.

The Hangyodon keychain—limited edition, Sanrio’s 50th anniversary; you’d nearly cried when you managed to snag one after dragging Nanami around the Shibuya for six hours—swung gently with the movement, the little fish’s face staring up at you with its permanently vacant expression.

Shoko’s birthday.

Right! That’s why you were here.

You made a mental checklist as you wandered toward the indie section: something she could put on while chain-smoking and pretending to study for her organic chemistry exam. Something with texture. With feeling—because for all her deadpan exterior, Shoko Ieiri felt things harder than anyone gave her credit for.

The vinyls were organized alphabetically by artist, the cardboard sleeves crisp and full of promise as you ran your fingertips along their tops as you walked, the slight drag of plastic covers against your skin grounding you in the moment.

Mitski? Maybe. No, too obvious.

Faye Webster! … She already has that one.

Alex G—

You rounded the corner, and stopped.

No way.

There he was.

Ryomen Sukuna, bent slightly at the waist, his broad back partially blocking the display case behind him as he examined something in his hands. He was wearing a gray Nirvana hoodie—the In Utero cover art faded from what you assumed was actual wear rather than aesthetic artifice—with the sleeves pushed up just enough to reveal the corded muscle of his forearms with black shorts and a cap pulled low over his face, though you’d recognize that build anywhere.

The height of him and the way he seemed to take up more space than should have been physically possible… and he was holding—you squinted, heart doing something strange in your chest—a Clairo vinyl. Sling, the pale blue cover.

The soft, tender, bedroom-pop album that had absolutely no business being in the hands of someone who looked like he could snap a lacrosse stick in half with his thighs. Beside him, propped against the shelf, was another: beabadoobee. Beatopia, the whimsical pink cover with the strange fantasy creatures.

Your brain short-circuited.

What the hell?!

The store’s ambient music seemed to swell in the silence of your shock—some gentle acoustic guitar, a woman's voice humming about nothing in particular.

A floorboard creaked somewhere to your left as the cashier was humming along behind the counter, tapping their fingers against the register in a rhythm only they could hear. You stared for exactly four seconds too long. Long enough to watch him turn the Clairo sleeve over to read the tracklist… long enough to see the concentration on his face—the slight furrow between his brows, the way his mouth moved almost imperceptibly as he read.

Oh, absolutely not.

You couldn’t do this, could not have a run-in with Ryomen Sukuna of all people!

Not here!

Not when you were wearing your rattiest jeans and last night’s mascara smudged under your eyes because you'd been up until 2 AM finishing a paper.

Not when he was wearing that hoodie and looking like that and buying music that suggested he had an inner life you'd never even considered. You’d known him for over a year—if ‘known’ was even the right word…

Sukuna’s circle, that’s what people called it, you’d been dragged in because Shoko wanted another girl around, because you and Nanami were academic rivals in the most affectionate sense, because somehow you'd passed whatever unspoken test let you exist in the orbit of the most infuriatingly competent people at school.

… But you’d never talked to him. Not really, not alone at least.

He was loud in group settings. Cocky, cutting, charming in a way that made you want to roll your eyes and laugh despite yourself. He could back up every boast with grades that didn’t make sense for someone who never seemed to study, with athleticism that left the rest of the lacrosse team in the dust, with a casual confidence that felt like gravitational pull.

And he was big, not just tall but broad in a way that made doorframes seem smaller; made you feel smaller. There was a reason no one ever tried to physically intimidate Sukuna, the way he moved suggested controlled violence, like a tiger that had learned to walk on two legs but hadn’t forgotten what its claws were for.

You’d spent a lot of time not looking at his arms, at the biceps that strained against hoodie sleeves, at the way his hands dwarfed whatever he was holding.

Like that Clairo vinyl.

You shook your head, hard.

Nope. Nope.

Panic flared as he began to turn as you scrambled toward the nearest pillar by the stairs, sliding down until your back hit the wood with a soft thud. You tucked your chin into your knees, heart hammering against your ribs like a trapped bird.

“Please just leave. Pay and leave. If he sees me, I’ll never hear the end of it, or worse, I’ll be the one person who knows his secret and he’ll make my life a living hell,” you told yourself, eyes squeezed shut.

But you had forgotten one thing. Attached to the strap of your tote bag was a small, bulging Hangyodon plush, the ugly-cute teal fish stared out into the aisle, its bug-eyes a dead giveaway as the heavy, rhythmic sound of footsteps approached.

They stopped right in front of you.

“Y/N.”

His voice was a low rumble that seemed to vibrate in the very floorboards beneath you as you looked up slowly, your neck stiff. Sukuna loomed over you, his silhouette blocking out the shop’s dim lighting.

You stood up awkwardly, your legs feeling like lead, your hands balling into tight fists at your sides but he didn’t move back, instead, he stepped closer, raising a thick arm and slamming his palm against the pillar right above your head.

The sheer scale of him was suffocating. He leaned in, the scent of expensive cologne and something spicy—like cinnamon and ozone—wafted off him. Up close, his presence was a physical weight. “You saw those, didn’t you?” he asked, his crimson eyes narrowed beneath the brim of his hat as he gestured with his chin toward the bag in his other hand.

You gulped, your gaze flickering from his sharp jawline to the records he’d just bought. Lying to Sukuna was a death sentence for your social life, and he had a way of sniffing out a floral lie from a mile away so you nodded once, a sharp, hesitant movement.

“Don’t tell a soul,” he muttered, finally backing off an inch, though the tension didn't leave the air.

He shoved one hand into his hoodie pocket, the fabric straining against his bicep. “Why?” you found yourself whispering, the adrenaline making you bolder than usual. “Is it a crime to like Clairo? Or… are you just performative because of the hoodie?”

Sukuna paused, his head tilting. A dangerous glint entered his eyes. “Performative? Watch your mouth, brat. I’ve probably been listening to Cobain since before you knew how to read a map.”

“Right. And the Beabadoobee? Is that for your ‘grunge’ aesthetic too?” you retorted, a small, nervous smirk tugging at your lips as he stared at you for a long second, stunned by the sudden bite in your tone. He’d clearly pegged you as the quiet, boring student who followed Nanami around like a shadow.

Then, his chest heaved, and a short, genuine laugh barked out of him. “You’ve got more of a mouth than Kento let on,” he chuckled, the sound deep and surprisingly pleasant. “Fine. You caught me. Just keep it between us.”

The air in the record store felt pressurized, like the cabin of a plane losing altitude as you blinked, staring at the empty space where he’d been standing. Your brain was struggling to process the glitch in the matrix: Ryomen Sukuna had just laughed.

Not a mocking huff or a dry sneer, but a genuine sound that had vibrated in the air between you, before your survival instincts could kick in, your mouth staged a coup.

“Wait.”

He stopped, his momentum dying with a slow, deliberate grace as he tilted his head, the sharp curve of his jaw catching the harsh hum of the overhead fluorescents.

The black Nirvana hoodie stretched taut across his shoulders as he exhaled, the fabric straining against his frame. “What?”

The word was flat, but it carried a jagged edge of curiosity that made your pulse jump. “How did you… well, see me anyway?” you blurted out, the question sounding thin and breathless in the narrow aisle.

He turned then, a slow pivot on his heel as his crimson eyes dissected you once more. They swept over your mussed hair and the frantic heat blooming in your cheeks, pinning you to the spot.

He didn’t answer, instead, his gaze dropped, sliding down your body with agonizing slowness until it landed on your bag. Specifically, on the small, bulging eyes of the Hangyodon keychain dangling from the zipper.

His lip curled in a mix of revulsion and dark amusement. “That hideous fish-lips thing gave you away. It was shaking harder than you were.”

“Excuse me?”

Sukuna took a step forward. Just one, but he was tall enough that it erased the safe distance between you. “You heard me,” he drawled, his voice dropping an octave, vibrating in your chest. “It looks like something a kid would win at a carnival and immediately regret. It’s an fuckin’ eyesore.”

“That’s Hangyodon,” you snapped, your voice climbing an octave in indignant defense. “He’s a classic! He’s myopic. He has dreams of being a comedian and fails at them. He’s—”

“Ugly,” Sukuna finished, deadpan.

“Charming,” you corrected, clutching your bag to your chest like a shield. “There’s a difference, but I wouldn’t expect someone wearing a cracked 90s reprint to understand nuance.”

The silence that followed was heavy. Behind the counter, the cashier stopped shuffling papers as the hum of the AC felt like a roar. Sukuna’s eyebrows rose, a silent and dangerous challenge. “You’re really going to stand there and defend a polyester fish while I’m holding Clairo vinyl?”

“At least my fish has a personality,” you countered, your heart hammering against your ribs. “What’s yours? ‘Brooding guy in black’? How original. Groundbreaking, really.”

He moved, hovering over you, his shadow swallowing yours. You could see the fine, pale scar cutting through his right eyebrow and the way the light turned his irises into pools of molten garnet. “You talk a lot of shit,” he murmured, leaning down until his breath stirred the stray hairs at your temple, “for someone whose hands are still trembling.”

“I’m cold,” you lied, the word catching in your throat.

“Sure you are.”

His hand came up as your breath hitched, certain he was about to tilt your chin up or push you back. Instead, his long, calloused fingers brushed past your shoulder, his knuckles ghosting over your collarbone.

The contact sent a jolt of pure electricity straight to your toes. He hooked one finger around the keychain, lifting the plush until it was level with his eyes.

Up close, you saw the silver ring on his middle finger and the faint, rhythmic way his thumb rubbed against the band—a restless, nervous habit that felt too human for a monster like him, “Myopic,” he repeated, the word rolling off his tongue like a secret. “So he’s blind, ugly, and a failure.”

“He’s relatable,” you whispered.

Something flickered in his expression—a hairline fracture in his mask. It wasn’t a smile, but it was close enough to be terrifying. “You’re weird,” he said as he let the keychain drop. His hand lingered, his thumb catching on the strap of your bag for a second too long before he pulled away, leaving your skin burning in the wake of his touch.

He held your gaze until the air felt too thick to breathe, then, he turned and headed for the door as you watched the way his broad shoulders moved, the easy, predatory confidence of his stride.

He had to duck his head to clear the frame. At the threshold, he stopped one last time as he looked back, his eyes tracing over your frozen stance, your fingers still white-knuckled on your bag, your lips parted in a silent question.

A faint, genuine softness touched the corners of his mouth. He ducked his head, a sharp and quick motion to hide the ghost of a smile as he stepped out.

The bell above the door chimed and the cold night air rushed in to fill the vacuum he left behind as you stood there, your skin tingling and your heart performing a frantic, ridiculous rhythm against your ribs.

“…Weirdo,” you breathed into the silence.

You quickly moved to the counter, grabbing ‘Punisher’ by Phoebe Bridgers for Shoko—the perfect blend of haunting and clinical—and a copy of ‘Loveless’ by My Bloody Valentine for yourself as the cashier, an older man with thick glasses, grunted as he scanned the items.

“Busy day for the young ones,” he muttered, his voice gravelly. “That big fella who just left... nearly knocked over my jazz display with his shoulders. Friend of yours?”

“... Something like that,” you murmured, sliding your card.

“Right. Twenty-five even. Have a good one,” he said, sliding the bag across the counter. You tucked the vinyls into your tote and pushed through the door, expecting the cool afternoon air to clear your head.

Instead, you stopped short, Sukuna was leaning against the brick wall of the shop, arms crossed over his broad chest as the fabric of his sleeves were bunched up, highlighting the sheer mass of his biceps and the casual power in his stance.

The vinyl bag dangled from one finger, swinging lazily. He looked like he’d been waiting for a while.

“You,” you said.

“Me,” he mocked.

“You’re still here,” you noted, finding your voice. “Waiting to threaten me again? Or did you realize Clairo has a B-side you missed?”

Sukuna let out a huff of air, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Careful. You’re getting comfortable, and we both know you were vibrating like a phone on silent back there.”

“What are you—”

“You come here often?”

You narrowed your eyes. “Why?”

“Just asking.”

You hesitated, clutching your bag a little tighter. “Yeah. It’s quiet.”

“Hm. Figures,” he said, his eyes lingering on your face for a second too long, the tension between you thick and strangely heated. The vinyl bag swung from Sukuna’s finger like it weighed nothing, his gait a lazy, predatory slouch that screamed: ‘have detention every Friday and I’m proud of it.’

“You’re going the wrong way,” he said, glancing up as the sunset caught the sharp line of his jaw, highlighting the faint, irritated twitch in his cheek.

“No, I’m not. My apartment is in this direction.” You pointed over your shoulder at a cluster of gray brick buildings, already taking a step to leave… but you didn’t get far as his hand landed on your lower back—firm, unyielding, the heat of his palm searing through your shirt, steering you around like you had never actually had a choice.

“Who said anything about your apartment?” Sukuna kept his eyes forward, but that smirk was sharp enough to cut glass. His fingers pressed slightly, a silent command. Walk. “I’m hungry. You’re coming with me.”

You dug your heels in on instinct but the pressure on your back didn’t budge. If anything, he pulled you closer to his side, herding you past the intersection like you were a stray cat he’d decided to keep.

“I’m— what? You don’t just abduct people for food, Sukuna.”

“It’s lunch, dumbass.” He said it like you were the one being difficult, thumb tapping an impatient rhythm against your spine. “You look like you haven’t eaten in twelve hours, and I’m feeling generous. Don’t make me fucking regret it.”

Your stomach chose that exact moment to betray you with a low, embarrassing growl as Sukuna’s smirk widened into a full-on, jagged grin—all teeth, no mercy. “That’s what I thought.” He gave your back a light shove, just enough to stumble you forward a step. His laugh was low, rough, right by your ear. “Move it, short-stack.”

“Short-stack?” You twisted to glare at him, but that only made his hand slide to your waist, steadying you—or restraining you, hard to tell. “I’m average height.”

“For a middle schooler, maybe.” He didn’t let go, nor did he slow down. His thumb traced a lazy circle through your shirt like he had all the time in the world. “Keep up. I hate waiting.”

"You hate everything."

“Not true.” He looked down at you, dark eyes glinting with something dangerous and amused. “I like Bea’s music.”

The restaurant was three blocks away. You already knew you weren't getting out of this—not with his hand a warm, heavy brand on your back, not with the way he matched his long stride to your shorter one like he’d been walking beside you for years.

“You’re insufferable,” you muttered.

“And you’re still walking with me.” His fingers squeezed once, quick and almost gentle, before his palm settled flat again. “Shut up and let me buy you food. You can insult me after you’ve got carbs in you.”

Behind you, the gray brick buildings shrank smaller and smaller. Ahead, Sukuna's shadow stretched long in the dying light, and his hand never once left your back.

The ramen shop was a hole-in-the-wall joint squeezed between a laundromat and a graveyard for old books. Inside, the air was thick and humid, smelling of roasted pork bone and ginger as the sound of boiling water and the clack of wooden spoons on ceramic filled the cramped space.

Sukuna didn’t ask, he just barked an order at the lady behind the counter: “Two tonkotsu, extra chashu, and a side of agedashi tofu. Make the soup spicy as hell on one of ‘em.”

“I didn’t say I wanted spicy,” you hissed as he nudged you toward a booth. “I know. That one’s mine.” He slid into the seat, his knees knocking against yours under the small table. “Sit.”

He leaned back, stretching his arms along the top of the vinyl booth as his hoodie rode up, revealing a strip of toned stomach and the waistband of his boxers.

You looked away so fast you almost gave yourself whiplash, staring intently at a chipped soy sauce bottle. “Weirdo,” he said.

“Real original.”

“Both things can be true.” He tapped a rhythm on the table with his knuckles. “So… You’re friends with Shoko.”

“Obviously? She’s the one who introduced me to you and the rest of the guys.”

“And Kento.”

“We’re... adjacent. Academic rivals with benefits!”

You paused, seeing his eyes widen. “Not those kinds of benefits, you pervert! We proofread each other’s essays. It’s a symbiotic relationship based on mutual suffering.”

Sukuna snorted, the sound rough and mocking. “Nerd shit. Absolute fucking nerd shit.”

“You’re literally holding a Clairo vinyl, Sukuna.”

His eyes narrowed, a flash of genuine irritation crossing his face. “We’re not talking about that.”

“Oh, we absolutely are.” You leaned forward, feeling bold in the steam-filled room. “How many Beabadoobee albums are there?”

“Three.”

“Wrong stupid. Four, if you count the Our Extended Play EP, which you should, because it has Glue Song on it.”

Something flickered in his dark eyes. “You actually know her music, or did you just Google that to piss me off?”

“I know music. Some of us don’t just wear band shirts for the aesthetic.” You gestured vaguely at his Nirvana hoodie to tick him off.

“I already told you—”

“What’s the name of Beabadoobee’s cat?”

He stared at you, his mouth slightly open. “Miso,” you continued, deadpan. “She has two. The other one is named Kimchi. Unlike someone I know who tries to act like a delinquent while listening to bedroom pop.”

The waitress appeared with the tofu—golden-brown, crispy cubes soaking in dashi. Sukuna didn’t break eye contact as he grabbed a pair of chopsticks. “You’re fucking insufferable.”

"You bought Beatopia.”

“I bought it for the production quality, you brat.”

“Sure. I’m sure the pastel pink cover art looks great next to your collection of... I don’t know, brass knuckles and skulls?”

He shoved a piece of tofu into his mouth, chewing with deliberate, slow movements. “You’re not going to tell anyone.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I’m not a narc.” You took a piece of tofu for yourself, the outside crunching satisfyingly before the soft center melted on your tongue. “I just think it’s funny, the scariest guy in school, the guy who made the varsity captain cry in the locker room, likes songs about being tired of being pretty.”

“Terrorizing the lacrosse team is a hobby,” he muttered, his voice dropping an octave. “That’s rich coming from someone whose favorite emotional support fish is blind.”

“He’s not legally blind, he’s myopic! He just needs a little help navigating his tank!”

“He’s a lost cause. Just like you.”

The ramen arrived then, huge steaming bowls that smelled like heaven as Sukuna broke his chopsticks with a sharp crack. You watched his hands—large, scarred across the knuckles, but oddly precise as he swirled his noodles.

“... Okay,” you said, blowing on a spoonful of broth. “Real question. What's your favorite Bea song?”

He chewed a slice of pork, taking his time. You expected a deflection, maybe a “shut up and eat.” Instead, he looked at the table and muttered, “See You Soon.”

You froze, noodles dangling from your chopsticks. “That’s... actually a deep cut.”

“I told you I knew her music. Don’t act so shocked.”

“Yeah, but See You Soon? That’s a B-side single. That’s for people who actually feel things, Sukuna.”

“I feel things,” he snapped, though his ears were turning a faint shade of pink. “For example, I feel like if you don’t shut up, I’m going to start charging you for the entertainment value of this conversation.”

“I’m just saying. I had you pegged as someone who only listened to heavy metal or the sound of bones breaking.”

“My playlists would give you a fucking stroke. It’s a mess.”

“I bet it is. Okay, Clairo. Favorite track?”

He didn’t even hesitate. “Amoeba.”

“Solid choice. Not her best, but solid.”

“Then what’s her best, genius?”

“Slow dance, obviously. If you disagree, you’re objectively wrong and your taste is trash.”

Sukuna laughed, it was low, rough, and sounded like gravel being kicked around—entirely too attractive. A few people at the counter turned to look, due to how loud and obnoxious it sounded. “You’re annoying,” he said, but the ‘mean’ edge was gone, replaced by something that sounded suspiciously like fondness.

“Takes one to know one.”

The bowls were soon empty, the salty-savory warmth settling in your chest as Sukuna wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—normally gross, but on him, it just looked... rugged.

He leaned back, his eyes tracking over your face, lingering on the dark circles under your eyes as he stood up abruptly, tossing a handful of crumpled bills onto the table—way more than the check.

“I’m not taking your charity—”

“Shut up. It’s not charity, it’s a bribe so you don’t tell the wrestling team I like bedroom pop.”

He was already out the door before you could argue. Outside, the air had turned crisp as Sukuna was a few paces ahead, his shadow long against the pavement.

He slowed down, waiting for you to catch up. “Am I going the right way now?” you teased, falling into step.

“I know where you live.”

“... That’s not creepy at all.”

“I pay attention, you idiot. Hangyodon gave you away weeks ago.”

You walked in silence for a block, your bags bumping together with a soft thud-thud rhythm. When you reached your building, you stopped at the steps. “Thanks, Sukuna. For the food… and for being a semi-decent human for an hour.”

He shrugged, his hands shoved deep into his hoodie pockets. “Don’t mention it. Literally. If I hear one word about this at school—”

“Your secret’s safe.”

He turned to leave, but stopped after two steps as he looked back over his shoulder, the streetlights reflecting in his eyes. “Hey.”

“Eat more. You look like shit.”

“Wow. My hero.”

“I’m serious.” His jaw set.

“If you keep showing up at the shop looking like a stiff breeze could kill you, I'm gonna have to keep buying you food. Consider it community service for the myopic fish. Someone’s gotta look out for you since you’re clearly failing at it.”

A laugh bubbled up in your throat, genuine and bright. Sukuna’s expression softened for a split second—a crack in the mask—before he turned away. “Thursday,” he called out, not looking back. “Same time. Don’t be late or I’m eating your portion too.”

“I didn’t say yes!”

“You’re already thinking about the gyoza, don’t lie!”

You watched him disappear into the shadows of the street, the scent of cinnamon still lingering in the air as you clutched your vinyl bag, a small, ridiculous smile tugging at your lips.

“... Total weirdo,” you whispered.

But you knew you’d be there on Thursday.

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