𐔌՞. .՞𐦯

she's completely fine with being unremarkable by jujutsu standards. she doesn’t have any secret resentment over not being powerful and she has never dreamed of becoming some famous grade 1. she likes being useful, she likes staying on the sidelines, and before tokyo she was perfectly happy with the life she had.

she doesn't have a general anxiety disorder or live her life in a constant state of fear—sukuna's her the problem lmaooo. before meeting him, she was cautious and sensible, but otherwise lived a fairly ordinary, stable life.

family and growing up around jujutsu:

reader comes from a mixed-sorcerer family: her father's a sorcerer and her mother isn't.

her father is a retired grade 2. he spent years doing field work, so reader grew up very aware that sorcery is dangerous even when the sorcerer survives.

she’s the first person in her family to manifest a support technique instead of a combat-oriented one.

her technique first manifested when she was around seven or eight. her father came home injured after a mission, she went to hug or comfort him, and without understanding what she was doing, she smoothed some of the residual cursed energy left behind after the fight and his recovery went noticeably easier afterward.

it took time for everyone to understand what had actually happened. eventually they realized reader perceives cursed energy differently from most sorcerers and can detect the tiny frays and splinters left behind after heavy use of their ce.

her father has absolutely no idea what her actual situation in tokyo is. as far as he knows, his daughter’s unusual technique was finally recognized by the main school and she received a prestigious new posting.

reader has very intentionally allowed him to keep believing that. she's convinced that if he knew ryomen sukuna was spending his days frightening, cornering, and generally tormenting her, her retired father would get on the first train to tokyo and attempt to teach sukuna a lesson.

reader'd like to avoid watching a 60-year-old grade 2 sorcerer challenge the walking calamity from heian era currently terrorizing her office, so her reports home are extremely selective. if her father asks how work is going, he gets answers like “busy,” “very specialized,” and “they really need my technique here.” of course all are technically true, but absolutely none of them explain the actual problem.

since her mother is a non-sorcerer, she understands approximately none of this. she doesn’t have cursed energy, can’t see curses, and has spent most of her marriage relying entirely on her husband and daughter to explain what exactly they do for a living. when her husband first tried to explain jujutsu society to her, she genuinely considered the possibility that he was delusional and briefly wondered whether marrying him had been a mistake lmaooo.

eventually, after enough impossible injuries, bizarre work calls, and a daughter who also started talking about cursed energy, she accepted that apparently invisible monsters are real and her family deals with them for a living.

she still doesn’t fully understand the technical side of any of it, but she's extremely supportive. if reader tells her, “my technique helps people recover after missions,” her mother’s response is “wonderful, sweetheart. i have no idea what that means, but i’m proud of you.”

reader's education:

reader received formal jujutsu training when she was younger, but she never attended tokyo or kyoto jujutsu high. in lamb au, there are smaller regional training schools connected to local branches. they don’t have the prestige, resources or level of combat education that tokyo and kyoto do, but they teach young sorcerers cursed-energy basics, technique control, curse knowledge, safety, and enough practical jujutsu to function within the system.

reader attended one of those schools for roughly a year. once her technique was properly understood, there wasn’t much reason to keep forcing her through a combat-focused curriculum when she had no technique capable of exorcising curses, so she eventually returned to ordinary education, finished normal high school, and later studied mathematics at university, which is why she’s actually qualified to teach math later.

reader's old regional branch:

after university, she joined the regional branch in kyushu where we meet her at the beginning of the story. it was her first permanent posting, and by the time she's reassigned to tokyo she has already worked there for around seven to ten years.

the branch covers a large part of western japan, but mostly deals with low-grade curses. anything genuinely dangerous generally has to be escalated because the branch doesn’t even have its own grade 1 sorcerer. when she left, there were around six active combat sorcerers working there.

she was well respected there! people could absolutely recover without her, but she'd make that recovery easier, less painful, and often faster, so the sorcerers there knew exactly what a difference one of her sessions could make after a difficult mission.

reader herself doesn’t treat that usefulness as anything particularly extraordinary. she knows her technique matters and she knows she’s good at her job, but she doesn’t need it to make her special.

how reader worked before tokyo:

reader always reads the mission report before working with an injured sorcerer. she wants to know what happened, how heavily they used their cursed energy, what injuries they sustained, and whether more residue is likely to accumulate afterward. she writes her own reports and manages her own cases.

she's extremely organized at work. the color-coded files from chapter one are very much her normal system rather than a one-off detail, and she absolutely expects everyone else to understand why this is obviously superior to whatever chaotic filing system they were using before.

before sukuna, weaving itself usually wasn’t especially dramatic or hard. she could sit beside an injured sorcerer, work through the leftover residue, talk to them normally, and finish without feeling like she had just spent an hour putting her hands on a running chainsaw. interruptions were annoying, but they didn’t completely destroy her concentration because ordinary sorcerers’ cursed energy is nowhere near as overwhelming or difficult for her to work with as sukuna’s.

reader's old coworkers:

haruki and akiko remain two of her closest connections to her old life. despite the way the reassignment happens, reader still keeps in contact with akiko (her supervisor at the branch) afterward. she still texts both of them, hears branch gossip, asks how people are doing and keeps track of the coworkers she left behind.

she doesn't tell them very much about sukuna. they know she was transferred for a high-priority stabilization assignment, but reader leaves out most details about her actual day-to-day reality. they know more than reader’s father, but still not nearly enough to understand the scale of that assignment.

they’re hundreds of kilometers away, they can’t do anything about it, and she doesn’t want them worrying themselves sick over her. so if they ask how the stabilization case is going, they’re probably getting some variation of “complicated” and very little elaboration after that.

reader and shoko:

shoko becomes reader’s closest friend in tokyo pretty quickly and they see each other almost every day or every other day.

sometimes reader stops by the infirmary between responsibilities, and sometimes they meet for dinner in the evening because they both live on campus. they also text each other throughout the day when they’re both too busy to see each other.

shoko’s younger than reader, but somehow still ends up acting like the older sister in the friendship, because she spent her entire adult life at tokyo jujutsu high and has been dealing with the higher-ups, gojo, and all that for years.

reader and kasukabe:

reader's also fairly close with kusakabe. he sometimes joins her and shoko for dinner, so the three of them end up being friends, and they jokingly formed a club called “i would prefer to survive my employment, thanks.”

reader gets along with him because he’s one of the few people in this profession who openly appreciates the concept of surviving your own job, which is why he qualifies for membership in said club lmao. he’s easy for her to talk to, relatively normal by jujutsu standards, and somebody she’s comfortable spending time around.

reader and gojo:

reader genuinely likes gojo. he’s friendly, entertaining in manageable doses, and she can relax around him enough to joke or tell him when he’s being annoying.

he’s also exhausting, but his version of exhausting is very different from sukuna’s. sukuna makes reader wonder whether she’s about to die and gojo makes reader wonder whether he’s physically capable of going fourteen consecutive seconds without talking.

she’s a little wary of him specifically because of his relationship with sukuna. for her, anyone who voluntarily eats dinner with sukuna and then goes to spar with him for fun has very questionable judgment.

she isn’t afraid of gojo, but she looks at him sometimes and wonders what exactly is wrong with him.

gojo sometimes invites himself to dinner when he finds out reader, shoko, and kusakabe are going somewhere, but he joins them less often than kusakabe does.

routine and sukuna:

routine has always mattered to reader, but it wasn’t originally an anxiety-management thing. she just likes knowing what she’s doing, having her work organized, and being able to plan her day.

after being reassigned to tokyo, routine becomes much more important because sukuna makes so much of her schedule unpredictable. when he isn’t around, she functions normally—she works, teaches, sees shoko, eats dinner with friends, handles paperwork, and does whatever hobby you decide she has.

she tries to build her days around the patterns sukuna develops and keep whatever pieces of normal life she can. unfortunately, sukuna has absolutely no respect for calendars, lesson plans, office hours, personal schedules or the basic human concept of “i’m currently busy,” so more often than not sukuna walks into her classroom in the middle of a lesson because he’s decided that whatever she’s doing is less important than whatever he currently wants.

one last note:

reader being terrified of sukuna shouldn’t be mistaken for her entire personality! before meeting him, she was a competent adult who has spent years doing her job independently, laughing comfortably with coworkers, managing her own cases, and living alone.

she knows curses are dangerous and she knows sorcerers can die, but she’s accustomed to the scale of danger that exists in ordinary jujutsu work. sukuna’s completely outside that scale, though.

she can perceive cursed energy unusually well, so she’s also experiencing his presence in a way that makes the gap between him and every sorcerer she has ever met painfully obvious. her reaction to him is specific to him.

sukuna happens to be extremely talented at making that outgoing, funny version of her difficult to access lmaooo

okay, one last note (final-final-3):

Sukuna doesn’t bother to look at him. His gaze stays glued to you, watching you laugh with Shoko, and a small, proud tilt curls at the corner of his mouth.

"Hard not to," Sukuna rumbles. "She looks way too damn good for a place like this."

"Right?" the stranger says, taking another slow sip of his drink, clearly taking that agreement as an invitation to keep talking. His gaze drags over Sukuna’s massive build, the plain shirt, joggers, and face tattoos, and a cocky smirk appears on his face, like he’s already decided he’s got the upper hand. “Hottest woman in here, hands down. Gorgeous, carries herself well, and that smile… I was just about to head over, buy her a drink, see where the night takes us.”

Sukuna finally turns his head, sizing the man up with calm, almost lazy interest. He’s objectively handsome—tall, impeccably groomed, his shirt tailored tight over a sharp, well-built frame. He looks like the type who’s used to getting whatever he wants and moves through the world with the confidence that says he’s never had to fight for attention.

"Yeah?" Sukuna rasps, amusement flickering in his eyes as the man keeps embarrassing himself.

"I mean, c'mon, look at her," the stranger continues, sipping his drink. "She looks like she’s got real standards. Probably has a great job, drinks the good stuff. She needs a guy who knows how to keep up with her and actually treat her right."

Leaning back against the bar, Sukuna crosses his massive arms over his chest, thoroughly entertained by the sheer audacity of it all. Listening to a complete stranger explain what kind of man his wife needs is absurd enough that he's more than happy to let him keep digging his own grave.

"Yeah, she’s something else alright," Sukuna drawls. "You really think she'd go for you?"

"Oh, I know she would," the man replies, adjusting his cuff with a smug grin. "I've got the job, the car, the looks. Women like her know a good thing when they see it."

A deep, amused huff rumbles out of Sukuna. If this idiot so much as crossed a real line, he’d snap his neck without a second thought. For now, though, watching this polished suit walk himself straight into a wall is way too funny to interrupt.

"You've got it all figured out, huh?"

"Hey, confidence gets results," the stranger says, grinning. “Tell you what—friendly wager.” He reaches into his pocket, pulls out his leather wallet, fishes out a crisp, high-value bill, and slides it across the bar between them. "This says I'll have her number and a kiss before the night's out."

Sukuna tilts his head, a wicked smirk slowly spreading across his face.

"Alright,” he says. “Mind if I go first?"

The stranger gives Sukuna one last once-over, lingering on the intimidating ink on his face, the back of his neck, and the lines wrapping around his wrists and biceps. To him, Sukuna looks like someone who got lost on his way home from the gym, or maybe a prison, though he’s a little too well-kept for that. He lets out a dismissive chuckle, already certain there's no way a woman like you would give a brute in joggers the time of day.

"Go right ahead, man," the guy says, waving him on. "Show me how it's done. No chance in hell you're pulling her."

"Watch," Sukuna says simply, pushing off the bar and walking across the floor, his massive frame cutting right through the crowded room.

Over by the bar, you're mid-sentence when a broad, warm palm gently taps your shoulder. You turn around, and the moment your eyes land on your husband, your whole face lights up.

"Hey," you breathe, the sight of him instantly making your cheeks flush warm. He looks stupid hot tonight, towering over everyone around him.

Sukuna steps in so close that your back presses into the edge of the bar, his body boxing you in until there's nowhere else to go. He pulls his phone from his pocket, unlocks it, and hands it to you, leaning down until his mouth hovers right at your ear.

"Can you look up that Korean place we went to, like, two months ago?" he rumbles, his voice low and soft against your ear, his warm breath sending a shiver racing down your spine. "I can't remember the name."

"Oh, so now you need me?" you tease, but your fingers are already flying over the screen. "Yeah, hang on…"

Across the room, the man at the bar narrows his eyes, watching you take Sukuna's phone without a hint of hesitation and immediately start tapping away. He smirks, swirling the melting ice in his glass, already convinced he's seen this play before. Classic move, he thinks, assuming you're just typing in a fake number to get the giant out of your personal space. He's already rehearsing his opening line for when Sukuna walks away empty-handed.

You hand the phone back to Sukuna, a triumphant little smile tugging at your lips. "Found it."

“Thanks, baby,” Sukuna murmurs, sliding the phone into his pocket.

His palm reaches up, fingers gently catching your chin, and he tilts your face up to his. Leaning down, he presses a soft kiss to your lips, sweet, unhurried, and so deliberate it makes your heart skip a beat. When he pulls back just a breath, his crimson eyes catch yours, gleaming with smug, mischievous heat. A knowing smirk tugs at his mouth as he shifts his weight, about to step away.

Across the bar, the guy rolls his eyes, muttering, “A polite peck? That doesn't count for shit—"

He doesn’t even get to finish the thought. The second Sukuna starts to pull away, your hands fly up, and your fingers twist tight into the front of his shirt. You yank him back down, but even then, you still have to rise onto your toes, stretching just to reach him. Your mouth crashes into his in a kiss that’s deep, intense, and filthy enough to strip away any composure he might have had left.

A low, surprised rumble vibrates against your lips before Sukuna's arm snaps around your waist and his other hand finds the nape of your neck, pulling you flush against his chest. He only deepens the kiss, his thumb digging into your hip while you cling to his shirt just to keep him close.

The stranger hasn’t moved at all, his jaw practically welded to the floor. His eyes are wide, blown out in pure shock, watching as the gorgeous woman he’d been so sure about just yanked a terrifying brute down for a kiss that leaves nothing to the imagination.

"What the fuck..." he mutters, staring in disbelief. "No way he actually pulled that off..."

Toji passes by on his way to the bathroom and hears the words. Without even slowing his pace, he just glances at the man’s stunned expression, lets out a dry, wheezing chuckle, and deadpans over his shoulder, “That's his wife, moron."

By the time your grip loosens and you drop back onto your heels, your breath is ragged, lips flushed and tingling, and you’re staring up at your husband with nothing but shameless, unfiltered adoration.

Sukuna’s thumb drags slowly across your lower lip, tugging it just a little, while a broad, utterly satisfied grin stretches across his face.

“Good girl,” he rasps, lowering his voice, and the praise sends a jolt right between your legs.

"Every fucking time," Shoko groans from the side. "One drink and you're attached to him again."

"You say that like I'm complaining," Sukuna chuckles.

"I fail to see the problem either," you chirp with a shameless grin.

Shoko shakes her head at you, then looks at your husband. "You know, I used to have a lot less patience for you. It's annoying how much harder you've become to stay mad at."

Sukuna just snorts at that.

"Anyway," he says, giving your waist one last squeeze before glancing at the rest of the group. "You girls joining us at the booth?"

"Yeah, yeah, we'll be there in a minute. Now shoo," Yuki says, waving him away. "We've got gossip to catch up on first."

Sukuna just lifts his hands in mock surrender, huffing an amused laugh as he turns on his heel and heads back toward the stranger waiting at the end of the bar.

“Easiest money I've made all week,” he drawls, picking up the bill. He gives the stunned man a small nod and walks toward his friends at the booth.