Bluey

You are avoiding him again. 

Aerion paces the length of his solar irritably, waiting for Magister Vyrano to arrive. He has worn a groove into the mosaic floor these past three days, stalking from balcony to hearth and back again like a caged beast. The torches along the wall gutter in the late afternoon light, their flames bending in the draft from the open arches. 

One moon.

One entire moon of relative peace.

A month of wild laughter and biting kisses, of stolen afternoons on sun-warmed rocks and nights tangled in silk and sweat, of games that have begun to feel less like battles and more like something dangerously close to companionship. He had almost grown accustomed to it—your voice at his shoulder, arms around his waist, fingers threaded through his hair, the infuriating smile when you won whatever invisible contest you’d devised for the day and the softer one when you think he’s not looking. 

He had almost grown accustomed to you.

And now, you are gone. Again. 

You did not attend the feast at Magister Aeripharos Stassah’s manse two nights ago, despite the fact that you’ve been attending most all recent ones just to walk in on his arm, so he was left alone to make conversation about the seasonal spices and the troupe from Braavos that has recently arrived in Lys for a show. The First Magister claims you have taken ill, but refuses to let him visit you in his manse. Your whores claim not to have seen you, and he thinks they are being honest this time. The harbor brats flee whenever he approaches.

Aerion knows the truth: you are avoiding him. Again.

His knuckles whiten against the railing of the balcony, staring out at the pale domes of Lys, anger flaring hot and fast. He had done nothing wrong—not this time. He had not driven you off. He knows it. There were no beachside declarations of independence or grand speeches about how dragons belong to no one. 

He has been tolerable. More than tolerable—more than you deserve, since you’re clearly ungrateful. He lets you curl against him in Vyrano’s gardens while musicians play softly and lanternlight paints gold across your skin. He indulges your games and chases and hunts, and your smug little smiles while you slip between tongues mid-sentence just to watch him react to your High Valyrian. He walks beside you through the central market like some common lord escorting his betrothed, ignoring the looks the two of you received. He wears the steel you gifted him openly at his throat, letting people look, and whisper, and make assumptions. 

And now, you are gone. Again.

He had thought it another one of your hunts at first when he’d woken up to a cool bed and you nowhere to be found. He wandered down to the square like a fool with mild irritation and the faintest hint of anticipation, expecting to feel your eyes on him from some rooftop perch, expecting a harbor boy to scatter too quickly or a courtesan to smirk too knowingly. But he was met with nothing—no trails, no whispers, no glimpse of silk vanishing around the corner. 

By midday, he was seriously irritated, and by evening, it had curdled into something darker, but he told himself still that it was just one of your games, even as he returned to Vyrano’s manse alone. He expected you in his chambers, lounging in his bed with a maddening smile, pleased with yourself for having outmaneuvered him.

But you were not there, and when the next morning came, you were still gone.

Now, on the third day, this game no longer feels clever, and no longer feels fun. The irritation and anticipation have shifted into something vile and churning, and he is aching with a need to release his frustration onto something.

If you think you can vanish at whim—if you think you can toy with him like one of your silk boys, he thinks furiously, then you seriously forget who you are dealing with.

The doors creak open at last. Aerion will not accept evasions and half-answers this time.

“My prince,” Magister Vyrano begins cautiously as he enters the solar, rings glinting in the torchlight. “You requested—”

“Where is she?” Aerion cuts in without turning.

Silence stretches.

“I am not certain to whom you refer,” Vyrano says smoothly.

Aerion pivots sharply, violet eyes burning. “Do not insult me.”

The magister inclines his head faintly. “I would never insult a prince of the blood.”

“You insult me every time you lie.”

The magister’s smile tightens. “My prince, Lys is full of women.”

“There is only one who concerns me.”

Vyrano studies him, calculating. He hates the way the man measures him—he is always measuring him—looking for cracks and leverage, wondering if there’s something between you and Aerion that he can use against him. He forces his shoulders to settle, temper leashed by sheer will. He hates this fucking island of snakes and hyenas; he almost forgot how agonizing it was dealing with these people during the past moon he’s spent with you. It’s all so much more bearable with you at his side.

“She has not been seen at courtly functions,” Vyrano says what Aerion already knows, and his eye twitches. “Her household claims she is indisposed.”

“Indisposed,” Aerion repeats mockingly.

“A seasonal fever, perhaps.”

Aerion hates Lys. 

“If she is ill,” Aerion replies, voice cold, smile poisonous, “then the First Magister would have sent for the finest physicians. Yet no such summons has been issued.”

The magister does not reply, and Aerion’s skin itches as the silence draws on.

“Is she being sent away?” Aerion demands abruptly, and he hates that he feels as though there’s a lump in his throat, an ache in his chest just at the thought. Damn you, he should’ve just fucking killed you and been done with it. He doesn’t like whatever this is that has him feeling so bothered by your absence. He should not care—he should go find a whore to fuck and bide his time until you return, not pace his solar agitatedly for days on end. “Well?”

Vyrano frowns. “Sent away?”

“Back to Volantis?”

The words taste bitter in his mouth.

“I have heard no such arrangements,” Vyrano replies, only partially putting him at ease, because if you haven’t been brought back home, that means you really are avoiding him, and Aerion is at a loss as to why. “If the Old Blood intended her return, the harbor would not be quiet about it.”

His teeth grind together. Aerion turns his back on the magister, facing the balcony again, mind assembling all of the possibilities whether he wishes it to or not: Volantis recalled you and word has not spread yet, you’ve left for a new Free City to spend your exile in, you grew bored of him and you found a better dragon to toy with. The last thought sends heat surging through him so violently that he nearly laughs—impossible, there is no other dragon, only him, he’s the only one enough for you.

And yet, it is not enough to quell the uncertainty that suddenly spreads through him, mind tracking back to the last few days he spent with you before you disappeared. Searching for some careless word he might’ve said, or some shift in your expression that he might’ve missed. You had seemed more restless than usual, gaze tracking out toward the east whenever conversation lulled, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. You laughed at something trivial in Vyrano’s garden three nights ago as you lay between his legs, and you argued with him over nothing the day before that, insisting that ghost grass has begun to spread across the Dothraki Sea and is soon to consume the world, so it’s good that the two of you are confined to this island—so earnest that Aerion had started to believe you until you burst into laughter. Nothing out of the usual, nothing that might have indicated you were tiring of him.

“You may go,” he says abruptly, dismissing Vyrano in his own manse, but the man does not move, and Aerion gives him an irritated look over his shoulder.

“My prince,” Vyrano says after a moment, clearing his throat. “It is not… unusual for her to disappear this time of year. I am sure she will return soon.”

Aerion’s head snaps around. “What does that mean?” he demands, furious that the man didn’t lead with this. 

Vyrano exhales through his nose, as though weighing how much to say, and Aerion has half a mind to put a blade against his throat just to show him the consequences of lying to and stringing along a prince of the blood. He refrains, if only barely.

“Five years ago, to the day, she arrived in Lys,” Vyrano says after a moment, and Aerion blinks once, “on a ship that did not fly Volantene colors, though every magister in this city knew precisely whose daughter stepped onto our docks.” His gaze flicks briefly to the Valyrian steel resting at Aerion’s throat before returning to his face. “She has never attended a feast during this week, but she always returns on the seventh day as though nothing occurred. You need not fret.”

“I am not fretting,” Aerion scoffs, teeth grinding together, ignoring the curious looks Vyrano directs toward him. He then prods, tone clipped, “She isolates herself?”

“She withdraws,” Vyrano corrects. “She dismisses her attendants. Refuses visitors. Even the First Magister does not intrude.” A pause. “It is… understood.”

As though it were a ritual. As though the entire city knew to let the Volantene dragonling lick her wounds in private. It does not suit you. It does not suit you at all, and it makes him furious. 

Aerion bristles at the implication. “She does not seem so burdened as to need to withdraw.”

He thinks of you lounging on the sun-warmed rock. He thinks of you curled at his side. He thinks of your taunting smiles and antagonizing laughs, the way you provoke him like it’s sport, have him hunt you through the day and chase you through the night, and kiss him like you can’t decide if you want to fuck him or kill him. It does not suit you. The idea of you needing to withdraw, of the whole island being aware of this weakness. Aerion hates it. Aerion hates you. 

“Appearances,” Vyrano says mildly, “are a specialty of hers.”

His eye twitches, and then he asks clipped, “Why was she exiled?” 

Vyrano presses his lips together. “That, my prince, is not my story to tell.”

Aerion scoffs, turning away again, teeth grinding together as he tries to process what he’s just been told. He does the calculation without meaning to—five years ago, you would’ve been seven and ten, a year younger than he is now. Young and freshly furious, he imagines. Not yet polished into the languid creature who lounges on velvet cushions and laughs at princes.

He imagines you stepping onto the docks—alone, angry, proud enough not to show it. He imagines the whispers that must have followed you, the same way they do him. The calculation and the measuring and magisters trying to pawn off sons and brothers. He imagines you alone in a foreign manse, on the first night, with no one to mock and no one to spar with; the bored expression on your face as you let a magister’s son kiss you and courtesans paw at you just to pass the time. 

He thinks of the day in the market when the merchant tried to slip him poison under the guise of flattery, and the way you diverted his lapse of temper on a holy day so he could avoid the consequences of it, and he wonders if you had someone to look after you in your early years of exile, or if you had to sharpen your own claws through trial and error. 

“She was seven and ten when she arrived,” the magister adds, as though to appease his curiosity. “Whatever occurred in Volantis, it was not a trivial matter. Even we only know whispers and rumors, they have been careful to keep the story within their walls. The Old Blood does not cast out daughters lightly, especially ones of her standing.”

Aerion presses his tongue to the back of his teeth, curiosity eating him alive. What could you have done? Why is it so under wraps? Aerion is pretty sure the whole world must know why he was exiled—certainly all of Westeros, and certainly all of Lys—but Aerion hadn’t even heard whispers of a Volantene noble being exiled from the Black Walls. His first instinct would be to assume that it’s because you’re not a high-standing noble, but he knows very well that’s not the case.

Still, he fishes for more information with: “Her standing?”

For a second, Aerion thinks that Vyrano will only hit him with another evasive answer, but the man finally sighs and says, “Her father is one of the Triarchs.”

———————

The manse had not yielded easily.

The First Magister’s guards had attempted civility first—polite refusals and bowed heads as they told him that you were not receiving visitors. Aerion had dispensed with civility after the third repetition. Steel speaks more cleanly than Lysene riddles, and he learned, valuably, that the Lyseni have been instructed not to draw their weapons on him, which will be useful in the future.

Now, the doors to your chamber hang open behind him, one hinge cracked from the force of his irritation over this whole situation. Aerion stands in the threshold, chest rising and falling rapidly, the last of his temper still burning hot in his veins.

You know he’s there—he was not subtle in nearly bringing down your door—but you keep your back to him, looking out over the balcony to the east. To Volantis, he recognizes after a moment, lips thinned as he presses them together. He figures you’re not going to say something until he does, but he assumed that you would speak first, angry that he’d interrupted your isolation, that he’d fought past guards and servants to get to you when you do not want to be seen. 

Instead, you are just silent, and he is left uncertain, words forming on his tongue and falling away because he isn’t quite sure what to say. 

Look at me. 

This is unbefitting of you.

Why didn’t you tell me? 

The last one tastes sour, feels too desperate, so he shuts it down with a more vile: you look pathetic, on his tongue, but you speak before he can let it loose.

“Do you know how the Volantene execute traitors?” you suddenly ask from the balcony, back still facing him. Aerion stares at you once, blinking, but you continue before he’s even processed the question. “It is considered the most grievous crime in Volantis—to betray the old blood. Worse than murder. Worse than rape. Those crimes stain a single life. Treason stains a lineage.”

Aerion is not sure if he likes the direction of this. “No,” he answers after a moment, voice level and wary. “I do not make a habit of studying Volantene punishments.”

“The Triarchs do not soil themselves with the blade,” you continue as though he hadn’t spoken at all. “Execution by sword is too clean. Too quick. It leaves the traitor with dignity in death. Instead, they are brought to the Ivory Yard, before the assembled houses. The family stands present on the dais and does not intervene. The blood must witness its own correction.”

Aerion does not move. “And then?”

“They bind the traitor to the ground. Ankles and wrists shackled with chains thick as a man’s arm. Each limb is fastened to a separate elephant. The beasts are goaded,” you continue, voice steady in a way that unsettles him more than if it trembled. “Slowly at first. They strain. The chains pull taut. The body resists, until it can’t anymore.”

Aerion’s fingers curl at his sides.

“It is considered fitting,” you finish quietly. “The body is divided, as their loyalty was. I watched it happen for the first time when I was ten. The man—boy—was seventeen, from a rival house. He refused an arranged marriage because he fell in love with a slave girl. She was with child, and he wished to marry her.” There’s something wry in your voice as you continue. “Sullying the blood—a very grievous form of treason. They killed the girl in front of him before they forced him to his knees in the Ivory Yard. The elephants walked for so long that the boy’s blood and entrails stained the marble for a mile.”

You exhale, and then you turn to look at him. There’s a smile on your face, but it is much like the ones you cast toward courtesans and magisters’ sons when you are indulging their attention, when you wish to be anywhere but. His stomach inexplicably flips, tongue pressing to the back of his teeth. 

He finds that he dislikes it when it is directed toward him.

“Magister Lorento is hosting a revel,” you say. “Let’s attend.”

Aerion blinks, half wondering if he misheard you. “What?” he asks flatly. “But—”

“Let’s attend,” you say again, making your way over to him. Aerion only stares at you as you grab his bicep, pulling him along with you out of your chambers. “It’ll be fun. I think this is the first one the island has had since you arrived. You ought not miss it.”

Aerion does not move, brows furrowing, because you must have some play right now, and he can’t figure out what it is. Why were you prattling about Volantene execution methods for traitors, and now you’re talking about going to a revel? Gods, you don’t ever make any sense, and Aerion is always struggling to keep up with you, but he has a feeling he’s made a mistake somehow; he just doesn’t know how or what. 

“Aerion,” you say when he doesn’t seem keen on joining you, and he almost startles at the sound of his given name on your tongue—not a teasing prince or little dragon. He thinks this is the first time you’ve said it, and he would like the sound of it rolling off your tongue were it not for the severity behind it. “Let’s attend.”

His teeth grind together as his gaze meets yours, and he lets out a sharp breath through his nose.

“Fine,” he agrees. “Let’s attend.”

———————

He was separated from you soon after your arrival at the revel. 

Bitterly, he realizes that must have been your plan—you were cornered in your chambers, had nowhere to go but to answer to him, so you manufactured a situation where you’d be able to escape him. He doubts you’re even still here; you probably slipped away from Lorento’s manse as soon as the two of you were separated.

He swats a hand off his bicep as he makes his way to the back of the manse, doing one final sweep to find you, just to make sure, before he storms back to the First Magister’s manse in a fit of righteous fury. 

This whole place reeks, and Aerion can hardly push through the crowds of intoxicated nobles and courtesans to move around. Incense hangs thick enough in the air to make him dizzy, clinging to the back of his throat with every breath. Even when he steps out of the building into the night air, he cannot seem to find fresh air. 

Where the fuck are you?

His gaze scans the back of his manse. Men lounge on low cushions strewn across mosaic floors, bracelets chiming as they reach for grapes and skin, and courtesans draped in gold and feathers drift between rooms like fucking peacocks, jewels glittering at their temples, their throats, between their breasts. He has half a mind to rip them off and shove them down their throats. They laugh loud as they press goblets to noble lips, fingers trailing deliberately over silk sleeves and rings heavy with gemstones, and it gives him a headache.

It is fucking suffocating, and Aerion feels eyes on him everywhere he turns, agitated and on the verge of losing his temper. The only thing that stops him is that they can all see him losing control. 

The eyes on him feel like blades poking at his skin, cold water to his face, even as something hotter coiled in his chest—humiliation, maybe. He is hyperaware of the tightness in his jaw and the jittery feeling spreading through his body. Aerion does not lose control, but he can hear their whispers now, wondering how long it’ll take for him to snap, each one wishing to be the one to send word back to his father. They’re all waiting for the famed temper, waiting for the mad dragon to bare his teeth and give him a story to send back across the Narrow Sea. He will not give them the satisfaction. 

He hates them, he hates Lys, he hates—

Paranoia flares hot and bright; his gaze sweeps around again, inexplicably seeking you out. It enrages him.

He hates you. He hates you. He hates you. 

He desperately needs to settle down, but his thoughts are plagued with the thought of you. How dare you bring him here just to leave? How dare you make him grow accustomed to you and then disappear as though he were nothing more than another toy to be set aside when you tire of it? How dare you make him feel as though he isn’t alone on this perfumed prison, only to abandon him in a room full of enemies?

He hates himself most of all, because why did he ever allow himself to grow comfortable? Why did he let the edge dull? He knew what you were from the first day—quick and restless, a bird that refused to be caged. He should’ve kept you at arm’s length, should have treated you as he treats everything else, useless and amusing, but most of all, disposable. 

Instead, knowing what you are, he still grabbed your face and told you that you were his. 

Instead, somewhere between hunts and chases, nights tangled in silk sheets and bodies pressed together, he had let you close enough to matter. 

Fuck, he thinks furiously. If it’s distance you want, he should give it to you—give you distance so vast it chokes, so vast that when you come crawling back at last, there’s nothing left. 

His teeth grind so hard his jaw aches, and he has to force himself to stay still. A prince does not stalk like a jilted lover. A prince does not allow a woman to make him look foolish before a hall full of silk-clad vipers waiting to stick their venom into him. A prince is above it all—above you. A prince can bed a woman and walk away untouched. A prince can laugh and drink and indulge and never feel the weight of it after. He had done so before. He could do so again. He could. 

If you think you can ruin him with a disappearance—if you think he will rage and roar and tear down half of Lys because you slipped through his fingers—you misjudge him.

But gods, he wants to, and he hates that most of all. 

He swats another feathered hand from his arm, irritation simmering dangerously close to the surface. He lied—he hates the fucking feathers most of all. He wishes to pluck them and stick the quills into their eyes. He hates Lys. He hates you.

“I have no interest,” he says sharply when a woman with gold dust brushed across her cheek attempts to loop herself around his waist.

“Let me please you, my prince,” the woman insists, and Aerion’s eye twitches as her fingers slide down his abdomen. This would never happen in Westeros. No one touched him unless he gave his express permission. “You seem tense.”

For a heartbeat, he considers snapping the offending digits—just to remind this perfumed court that he is not one of their silk-draped ornaments, that he is a dragon and should not be pawed at as though he’s anything less, but he refrains and opts instead to grab her wrist hard enough that her laughter cuts off abruptly.

“I said I have no interest,” he says, voice low and edged with something that makes her smile falter at last. He releases her with a shove that sends her stumbling back into a cluster of giggling companions. They whisper as he turns away, but none reach for him again.

He pushes deeper into the rear of the manse, past the open archways and trailing silks, past the last ring of musicians whose drums thud heavy and slow. The incense thins the farther he goes, replaced by night air, and Aerion can finally breathe again, temper cooling at last. He rolls his shoulders once, jaw unclenching as the suffocating press of bodies finally loosens its grip.

Where the fuck are you?

Why is he still seeking you out?

He makes his way into the garden, following the paths between tall hedges, sandals crunching over fallen leaves and white petals that release a faint sweetness beneath his feet. The noise of the revel dies behind him, swallowed by the hedges' height, and the garden shifts as he moves deeper—the paths narrow, and the cypress grow taller, the lanterns cast long, distorted shadows that make the carved marble nymphs almost look alive.

He realizes once he comes to a split in the path that this is no open garden—it is a maze.

His eyes slide shut in irritation, and he bites back a heavy sigh. He will find you at the center of it. He knows that for certain. You and your fucking games. He should turn and leave, shouldn’t give you what you want, shouldn’t chase, but his feet move before he can turn in the opposite direction. He doesn’t hesitate long at the split, turning left and not giving himself the chance to second-guess his decision. The air is cooler here, at least, damp with watered earth and flowers from Yi Ti that only bloom in the night. 

It doesn’t take long for him to find where the maze opens, and he considers whether it’s just a simple maze, sheer luck, or if he’d been drawn to where you were waiting. He doesn’t like the idea of relying on luck, but he knows Magister Lorento well enough to know that nothing about this man and his manse is simple, and he likes the idea of being instinctively drawn to you even less.

You are there at the center, as he expects.

Aerion pauses at the threshold, gaze trailing over where you’re lying against the marble, fingers tracing through the pool of water on your left. You look beautiful beneath the moonlight, and something catches in the back of Aerion’s throat the longer he stares at you, anger slipping away. Your head falls to the side when you hear his arrival, and your lips curl up as though you expected him. 

Of course, you did, he thinks bitterly, half-inclined to storm back the way he came, knowing he won’t. 

“Took you long enough, dragon prince,” you say after a moment, voice distinctly lacking the playful tease he’s become used to. “Come.”

“Do you think it’s amusing to leave me to suffer through that alone?” he asks, voice tight, making his way over to you. His temper should still be blazing, he thinks, furious at the betrayal—it had been, moments ago, hot and vicious and clean, but now it feels muddled, tangled up with something far more infuriating.

“I think,” you say, turning your head back up to look at the night sky, “that you look particularly murderous when surrounded by feathers. That amuses me. I have never seen a man with such a strong aversion to them.”

A faint twitch at the corner of his mouth betrays him before he can suppress it. 

He hates you.

“This place is suffocating,” he mutters, coming to sit near you, back against one of the marble statues decorating the small pavilion, an arm draped over his knee, head tilted to the side as he looks down at you. “Why did you run off?” 

You don’t answer right away. Then, instead of answering his question, you ask, “Why did you come to find me when everyone told you I wished to be alone?” He stares down at you for a moment. Your gaze finally shifts over to him. “To mock?”

He doesn’t like the way his stomach inexplicably twists at the accusation.

“You think I came to mock you for it?” he scoffs. He’s not sure why the idea of you thinking that bothers him so much, but he shoves it away.

“You enjoy provoking me,” you say at last. “I thought perhaps you wished to see what I look like without teeth.”

“You are the one who provokes. I did not come for games,” he mutters. “I came because you were gone.”

“And?” you prompt softly.

His pride rears, furious at the trap he’s walked into, but he does not retreat.

“And I did not like it,” he finishes, blunt and unpolished.

You exhale, as though considering his words, and you turn your gaze back up to the night sky. After a moment, you admit, “I do not like being seen when I am… less.”

Aerion scoffs again, harsher this time. “You are not less. You are as infuriating as you are any other day.”

You laugh at that, and Aerion hates most of all the way it makes the tension bleed from his shoulders. You’re looking at him again, an unreadable expression on your face, and then you hold your hand out to him. You say quietly, “Come closer.”

“I am already close,” he mutters, but he shifts anyway, drawn in despite himself until his legs are brushing yours. 

A part of himself rears in disgust at the casual touch, at how easily his body answers to yours. He is accustomed to proximity only when it serves a purpose—when it ends in teeth and kisses and silk twisted in fists. This feels much like that night you brought him out to that cove in the storm, knee-to-knee beneath the moon, skin pressed for no purpose other than closeness, and it feels much more dangerous, like a blade pressed to his throat, but not quite breaking skin but threatening to. 

“Closer,” you say again, and he hesitates, staring at you, trying to determine what it is you want from him, but he can’t figure out what you’re plotting. He exhales through his nose and shifts closer still, watching as you reach out to him once he’s close enough, fingers wrapping around his wrist to pull him nearer still.

“What is it that you want? Haven’t you put me through enough torment tonight already?” he asks, a bit on edge as your hand slides up his arm to the back of his neck, dragging him until he’s half hovering over you. His gaze instinctively slips down to your lips when he feels your breath on his, and he notices that you’re smiling slightly—it still does not reach your eyes.

Your free hand moves over to the marble ledge at your side. He watches, suspicion flickering back to life as your fingers find a small carved dish half-hidden in shadow. White-gold powder rests within it, fine as sifted flour, faintly shimmering in the lanternlight.

“What are you doing?” he asks suspiciously, but he doesn’t pull away.

“Something very Lysene,” you reply.

“That inspires no confidence.” His gaze sharpens as you gather some of the powder on your fingers. “If this is an attempt at poisoning me, it is a poor one. I would be disappointed.”

“It is not poison,” you say mildly. “It is indulgence.”

He squints at you, unconvinced.

“It will make you warmer,” you elaborate. “Looser. Less inclined to bite.”

His brow arches. “I do not require assistance in that regard.”

“I beg to differ,” you say dryly, “but I digress. I require it tonight, and I would prefer not to take it alone.”

He exhales through his nose, but when his gaze meets yours again, he nods, and you lean up, one hand still cradling the back of his head, lifting the other with the fine powder scooped onto the tips of your fingers. You lift it to his mouth, and Aerion’s lips part; two fingers brush his lower lip as you press the powder to his tongue, and he closes his mouth around your fingers, tongue dragging against your skin, swirling around the digits, tasting the sickly sweetness of it, pointedly holding eye contact with you.

Your breath catches, and Aerion likes the way your eyes widen slightly, likes the way that the dullness in your eyes finally slips away. His lips curl up smugly around your fingers before he releases them, licking up the length of them one last time as he sits up again, looking down at you. 

Your pupils are larger than they usually are as you look up at him, eyes glittering prettily beneath the moonlight, and Aerion’s chest feels tight. He blames it on whatever you just made him take, not on the way you’re looking at him. 

“You are playing a dangerous game,” he murmurs.

“You always say that.”

“And you never listen.”

It’s already working its way through him—he didn’t anticipate that it would hit him so quickly. He can feel his shoulders loosening, the slowness of his heartbeat, the way his gaze involuntarily slips down to your body and the sheer chiffon you wear, lingering on your chest, your hips, the way the silks shift as you move closer to him. He can feel the warmth of your body through the fabric, and his fingers reach out before he can stop himself, recognizing the shape of your body before he’s even realized he’s moved, tracing up your thigh, palming the curve of your hip. His throat bobs as he swallows, fingers tightening, heat fogging his head. 

“Is it dangerous,” you ask lightly, “to ask questions tonight?”

His brow furrows faintly. “That depends on the question.”

His gaze flicks up to you, calculating, watching as you hum lightly. You shift closer to him, and Aerion stiffens as you rest your shoulders and head in his lap, eyes sliding shut as you nuzzle close to his hip. He inhales sharply, jaw tightening as he tries to steady himself. His hand is still curved around your waist, fingers flexing involuntarily when you shift. He is far too aware of the warmth of you through the thin chiffon, of the slow drag of your breath against his skin. 

The powder you gave him burns hot in his veins, aching, and he’s hardly breathing as you slide his silks to the side, letting them slip off his shoulders, kissing slowly up his toned abdomen until you’ve shifted so that you’re sitting in his lap, legs loose around his hips, arms draped around his shoulders. He shudders when you drag your tongue against his clavicle, hips rolling languidly over his stiff cock.

Shit, he thinks, breath already too ragged for his liking. Your skin feels like flame on his, hands sliding up and down his abdomen; his head lolls back instinctively to give you better access, lips parting as you graze your teeth over his pulse.

“How long?” you finally ask, lips brushing the crook of his neck. His lashes flutter, barely processing the question, too consumed by the fire rapidly spreading through his body, how his cock twitches in his pants.

“For what?” he asks after pausing a moment, blinking hard to try to focus. Irritably, he notices that you look much more present than he feels, and he wonders if you even took the powder you gave him, or if your excuse of needing it was just a trick to get him to take it.

“For this,” you say. “Lys. Your exile.”

His jaw tightens, anger flaring hot, tangling messily with desire. He hadn’t even realized his hand drifted up to your hair, but he grips it hard, pulling your head back to force you to look at him. He does not want to think about that—not his father, not his exile, not the Trial of the Seven. You are a conniving whore, he thinks furiously, drugging him with that powder so you can pry into something he would ordinarily not want to discuss.

He hisses,  “That is not your concern.”

“How long?” you ask again, more insistently this time. “Humor me.”

Aerion’s nostrils flare as he inhales. “I was not given a number,” he says through his teeth. “I will return when it suits my father, when my absence has proven its point, and I am more useful at his side than discarded across the sea. Why does this matter now?”

Something flashes across your face that he can’t quite catch, lips pressed tight, gaze sliding to the side—disappointment? Gods, he doesn’t even know how you’re thinking right now—his body feels so wound tight and lax at the same time that he feels as though he’s going crazy. His attention flicks to the bowl on your left, accusingly.

“I was only curious,” you finally tell him. “It doesn’t matter.”

His gaze cuts back to you, assessing. You are lying—he can tell—but he doesn’t know why you’re lying, why you’re asking. Paranoia briefly takes hold again, wondering if you’re some sort of spy of his father’s, or worse, one of the Blackfyres’. He knows the bastards are still out there biding their time—are you in league with them? Trying to get more information on what’s happening in the inner workings of House Targaryen to report back to them? 

Aerion isn’t accustomed to being wanted without motive. He has been desired, yes—coveted, chosen for advantage, and spectacle, and proximity to the Iron Throne. He was raised in a court where affection is currency, and loyalty shifts with the wind. Women have smiled at him because of his name, and men have bowed because of his blood, but this is not that. And it would make sense, he tells himself—the way you latched onto him, the way you do not flee when he bares his teeth. No one stays simply because they enjoy the heat of him; no one likes being burned. There is always something to be gained from standing near a dragon.

His heart is racing in his chest, and he’s not sure if it’s because of the way you’re kissing his neck and rolling your hips or if it’s the dawning realization that all of his initial suspicions about you might have been correct.

He hates you. He hates you. He wants you—

His breath catches, teeth clamping down on his bottom lip to bite back a moan that nearly rips from his lips when one of your hands slips beneath the waistband of his silks, fingers wrapping around his cock. His eyes roll back slightly when you run your thumb over his tip, stroking him slowly as you kiss under his jaw.

“You do not seem half as affected as I do,” he spits out, accusatory, pride and embarrassment and anger rearing when his hips jerk and he lets out a choked noise. He reaches haphazardly for the bowl, dipping his fingers in and holding it to your lips. “Suck.”

You only look amused. “I cannot take more,” you say. “I will—”

You choke when he shoves his fingers into your mouth, deep into the back of your throat. Your eyes prick with tears as he presses down hard on your tongue, making you gag slightly. Your hand comes up to his wrist, trying to pull out his fingers, but he holds you in place, raising his eyebrows, waiting for you to swallow. 

After a few long moments, you do, and he finally releases you, fingers sliding from your mouth. Instantly, you slap him so hard that his head snaps to the side. He stares at the hedges, so stunned by the taste of his own blood in his mouth that he can’t even muster anger.

“Idiot,” you spit furiously. “I already took it.”

He is still staring at the hedge when your words register.

Slowly, he turns his head back toward you. You’re blinking rapidly now through a wrathful glare, chest rising and falling at an erratic pace. Your tongue darts out to wet your lips, throat spasming.

“I told you,” you hiss, “I required it. Not you.”

He sneers, still shocked. “You seemed perfectly clear-headed,” he bites back, pride still stinging more than his cheek. “Forgive me for assuming you meant to dull only me.”

“I have been taking it for five years,” you snarl. “I am more used to its effects than you. That does not mean I am less affected, only better in control of it.”

Aerion finds that there’s something fascinating in your anger. He should be indignant at the way you are speaking to him, furious at the fact that you dared to lay hands on a prince of the blood, but all he can manage is a slow, heated exhale.

Your chest is heaving, and your eyes are bright and full of rage, lips still slick with spit from how he’d shoved his fingers in. He has never seen you angry before—teasing, taunting, playful, bored, amused. You have been the bane of his existence wrapped in fine silks and dangerous smiles, but never angry. Aerion had almost thought you incapable of it, and yet, here you are.

His tongue presses to the inside of his cheek where you’d slapped him, and he finds himself almost—is he smiling?

He should remind you of who he is, who you just struck, but instead, he finally says slowly, “You struck me,” voice riddled with disbelief, tasting the truth of the words as though he still can’t believe it.

“Yes,” you snap, “and I would do it again.”

The heat in his blood surges, breath leaves his mouth in ragged pants. Aerion wants you—Aerion hates you. Aerion has never felt so strongly about anyone in his life; his fingers twitch for the dagger he keeps hidden on his forearm and for your body at the same time.

“You asked about my exile,” he forces out, defensively. “You drug me. You press. What would you have me think?”

“You are an idiot,” you spit again. 

Before he can take insult, you press your lips to his, hands coming up to hold his cheeks, tilting his head back to deepen the kiss. Aerion lets out a low moan into your mouth, tasting the sweetness of the powder he forced you to consume before he bites down hard on your lower lip, drawing blood as you did to him. His hands find purchase on your hips as he drags you impossibly closer, until your chest is flush to his and your cunt slides against his cock. 

Shit, he thinks, eyes snapping open when his tip slides between your soaked folds, thighs tensing, heat spreading through him so rapidly that he’s not sure if he’ll be able to stop himself from teetering over the edge. 

One of his hands immediately flies to the base of his cock, squeezing hard. He breaks his lips from yours to look down, eyes wide and something too close to a whimper spilling from his lips before he can catch it when he sees that your cunt is dripping, slick leaking down your thighs, staining the silk of his pants.

“Fuck—” he breathes, gaze snapping up to meet yours, but you grab his wrist when he’s not expecting it, forcing his grip off his cock. A wave of panic hits him, “Stop, I’ll—”

Aerion’s voice breaks over a sob, abdomen spasming and shoulders curving inward. He presses his face into your chest, jaw agape as he finishes after barely having been touched. His cheeks burn with humiliation—he doesn’t even want to look up from where he’s hidden himself, but he feels your fingers knot in his hair, yanking his face from your chest. 

He can’t hold your gaze. He doesn’t even want to know what he must look like—he can feel the blood and spit smeared on his lips, the heat in his cheeks, and they only burn hotter the longer you stare at him. Did he seriously just—

After a moment, you tilt his face down, forcing him to look down. He feels dizzy at the sight of his cum painted all over your cunt, dribbling down your thighs, and then—

Is he still hard?

His gaze flicks up to you, incomprehensive, and then slowly over to the bowl he spilt in his frantic attempt to force it down your throat. You grab his cheeks and make him look you in the eye. 

“I had taken enough for it to wear off at the same time,” you say through gritted teeth. “I hope you are ready to put that vicious tongue of yours to work once it wears off for you, because I will not nearly be sated.”

Aerion doesn’t respond, still panting, still processing, and his mind goes blank when you press your lips to his again, not quite as violently this time. He sighs lightly into your mouth as you kiss him slowly, tongue dragging against his inner lip. His hands drag up your sides, fingers pressing into your skin as you finally sink down on his cock—you let out a breathy noise into his mouth, and Aerion’s jaw falls partially slack at the feeling of your tight heat wrapped around him.

You kiss him again, again, nipping at his bottom lip before kissing him deeper, you do it over and over and over again, until he’s dizzy from the taste of you, the feel of you, until that pleasant heat has him so fogged that he can’t even think. Your nails scratch lightly against his scalp, and he lets out a low moan against you as you start to roll your hips.

“Aōha orvorta iksin vēttan syt nyke,” he groans, eyes rolling back when he feels your walls flutter around him. “Sīr ȳrda—bāne—qrugh!”

Your cunt was made for me. So tight—warm—shit!

His hips jerk when you gasp abruptly into his mouth, back arching into him, thighs tensing, body trembling beneath his touch. Aerion is almost lightheaded at the feeling of you falling apart on his cock so quickly, grip tightening on your hips as he maneuvers you onto your back, forearms braced on the cool stone at either side of your head.

You stare up at him, whatever the powder is clearly in full effect now—sharp, playful eyes uncharacteristically hazy, unfocused as you trace along his face, chest rising and falling rapidly, saliva pooling at the corner of your lip. Aerion leans his weight on one arm so he can grab your cheeks, fingers biting into your skin, thumb pressing against your lower lip until your lips part for him. He slides it into your mouth, and Aerion thinks he might have finished a second time the moment your lips close around the digit, lashes fluttering and eyes rolling back as you swirl your tongue around his thumb.

He snaps his hips against you hard, breath ragged as he finally takes control of the pace. He can feel your thighs trembling around his waist, and the vibrations of the soft, helpless moans you let out around his thumb, and Aerion hates you—Aerion wants you, Aerion has you and it isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly enough. He needs this, needs you, needs it like he needs air to breathe, needs it like the fire in his veins and the steel around his throat.

“Emā pryjata nyke,” he accuses through hitched pants and moans. He means for it to come out sharp and angry, furious at how he reacted to your absence, furious at how you make him weak, furious at how he cannot be furious at you, but his voice is too pitched, too drawn, he’s drowning in the slaps of skin on skin, the sloppy sound of your cunt sucking him in deeper and deeper, the noises spilling from your lips. He says again, voice breaking over the words, “Emā pryjata nyke.”

You have ruined me.

He hates you, he thinks as he pulls his thumb from your mouth to kiss you, hips stuttering when he feels your cunt spasming around him again, wetness splattering against his thighs and pelvis. 

He hates you, he thinks as he kisses you like he wants to consume you, as he fucks you like he can’t bury himself deep enough into you, as he hikes your leg up to his shoulder just so he can reach deeper inside of you. 

He hates you, he thinks furiously as your back arches off the stone and his hand drops from your face to slide his arm beneath you, because he can’t get close enough to you, because his tongue in your mouth and his cock in your cunt isn’t enough, because he needs to feel you everywhere, your skin pressed to his, every part of him against every part of you, until he doesn't know where he ends and you begin. 

He fucking hates you, he thinks as he lets a broken moan into your mouth, dizzy and hot and unable to think anything beyond want and need and your body and his, as he realizes that there’s no coming back from this, that if he had it his way, you would never leave his side again, because you are his—only his, always his, he will never be satisfied with anyone else, not as long as he lives, as long as his heart beats and his lungs breathe. 

He hates you, he hates you, he hates—

Your hands cradle his face, and Aerion’s entire body feels numb and prickly, thighs aching with every thrust, dots spotting his vision. He kisses sloppily up your neck, breath ragged as he presses his lip against your ear, and his eyes roll back when he feels your nails drag from his scalp, down to the nape of his neck, across his shoulders, his back, and Aerion’s whole body gives out on him. 

He chokes over something caught between a gasp and a moan, biceps trembling before he collapses, and his body weight drops onto yours. He buries his face into the crook of your neck, lips still parted into a silent moan, shuddering as he feels you writhing beneath him, clawing at his back, still trying to rock your hips, but Aerion only twitches, body heavy and lax, breathing hard against your skin, pulse still racing, sweat dripping from his temple. The powder settles from raging fire into a deep, molten warmth, spreading through his limbs, loosening every tense muscle. His thoughts blur at the edges, not with frenzy anymore, but with a dangerous, languid contentment. 

The world beyond the maze feels impossibly far away—no revel, no politics, no feathered whores or jeweled vipers—just him and you, the warmth of your body and the sound of his heartbeat echoing in his ears.

His face remains buried at your throat, breath hot and uneven against your skin. He exhales long and slow, murmuring into your skin, “You are ruin.”

“And you are not done yet,” you spit at him, still worked up. Aerion groans into your skin, not wanting to move. His body still feels heavy and feverish, breath slowly starting to even out, the haze melting his thoughts and humming beneath his skin. You jerk your hips, and Aerion hisses, cock sensitive and twitching, softening inside of you. “Do not groan at me, dragon prince—this is of your own doing.”

He forces himself off of you, rolling onto his back, limbs heavy as he props himself up on one elbow. He lifts his hand to your face, fingers tracing over your cheek, and there’s something heavy in his chest as he watches your lashes flutter, seeking out his touch. Your skin is hot to the touch, lips swollen and slick with saliva and the blood he drew. He hates how his thoughts mellow, hates the way his chest physically tightens. He blames it on the powder, and he hates most of all that he knows he’s lying to himself.

“I do not like this,” he says quietly, fingers trailing down your chest and stomach, watching raptly as your body responds to his touch.

“This?” you echo, breath still shaky—he likes this at least, that he’s coming down from what you gave him while you’re still in the thick of it. Likes how responsive you are to his touch, likes that you can’t hide behind teasing grins and calculating eyes. 

“This feeling,” he clarifies, “like I have been disarmed.”

“Hah—” you gasp, the back of your head pressing against the marble as Aerion’s fingers glide between your slick folds. His gaze slips down your body, nostrils flaring when he sees how much of his own cum he fucked deep into your cunt, enough that it dribbles out of you, pooling onto the white marble beneath you. His throat spasms as he gathers some with two of his fingers, smearing it as he slides his fingers through your cunt to your clit, circling the bud so slowly that you rock your hips against his hand to try to get him to move faster. “Iemnȳ!”

Inside!

Aerion has half a mind to deny you just to make a point, and he blames the way he immediately indulges you on the boneless feeling in his limbs and the pleasant warmth that makes his head dizzy and his chest fluttery. He keeps his thumb pressed to your clit as he sinks two fingers into you, hissing at the feeling of your heat wrapped tight around him, the stickiness of his cum stuffing your cunt. Your lips part into a silent moan, the whites of your eyes as your back arches off the marble, and Aerion watches raptly as one of your hands darts down to his wrist, nails digging into his skin, and the other fumbles for something to hold on to.

He blames the powder again for the way he immediately slides his fingers between yours, letting you cling to his hand as he slowly fucks his cum deeper into your cunt. 

“Kesan dōrī jikagon lenton,” you gasp after a moment, and it takes a moment for the words to process. I will never go home. Aerion’s gaze drags back up to your face from where he’s watching his cum ring around the base of his fingers with each snap of his wrist, blinking away the haze when he sees the way you’re looking at him, gaze tracing his face with a type of desperation he’s never seen on you before. “Nyke jeldan naejot gīmigon skorkydoso bōsa eminna ao. Konir sagon skoro syt nyke eptan.”

I wanted to know how long I will have you. That is why I asked.

Aerion’s throat suddenly feels tight, pausing in the steady rolls of his wrist, only for you to hiss and tighten your grip on it, beckoning him to continue. 

“Dōrī?” he echoes, voice hoarser than he intends.

Never?

“Dōrī,” you confirm, breath hitching, and Aerion’s mouth goes dry when you let out a low moan of his name and squeeze his fingers hard, a shiver running through his spine. “Lo jān lenton, kesan sagon ossēntan.”

Never. If I go home, I will be killed.

Aerion’s jaw tightens at your words, trying to focus on unraveling you again instead of the pit that forms in his stomach. He curls his fingers deep inside, lashes fluttering at the keening whine you let out as your hips stutter against his fingers. Your walls tighten and flutter around him, and he lets out a breath to steady himself when you stare up at the sky, chest heaving, gaze lidded, body limp on the stone.

“Skoro syt?” he finally asks.

Why?

Your gaze shifts to him, voice cutting despite the haziness in your eyes. “I thought I said I wanted your tongue.”

Aerion manages to bare his teeth at you through the pleasant haze. “You do not order me, wench,” he says coolly, but he shifts to kneel between your legs, pulling his hand free from yours and slipping his fingers out of you, gnawing at the inside of his cheek as he watches cum dribble from your hole and join the mess on the ground beneath you.

His gaze flicks up to the bench on your left, and he ignores the surprised yelp you let out when he hooks his arms under your knees and shoulders to move you onto it. Before you can kick out your leg to catch him in the shoulder, he presses his hands to your slick thighs to spread them, leaning in to drag his tongue between your folds.

He blames this on the powder, too, he decides—the fact that he’s on his knees, face buried in your cunt, your legs draped around his shoulders. Aerion would have to gouge out the eyes of anyone who saw him like this—might gouge out yours later just to make a point. He lets out a low groan into you as he sucks your clit lightly, toying with the bud with his tongue before lapping at the mess of his cum and yours between your legs. 

“Did you know—” you start to say, voice pitched and breathy, fingers twisting in his silver hair as you rock your hips against his face. The sting at his scalp makes him hiss, offended, and he digs his nails into the skin of your thighs in response, but you don’t seem to care. His gaze flicks up to through pale lashes. You are not looking at him. Your chest rises and falls in quick breaths, your expression strangely distant as you stare past the hedges toward the slice of night sky above the maze. “—that from the top of the Black Walls, you can see Old Valyria?” 

Aerion falters, eyes widening as he pulls back slightly to look up at you more directly, and you instantly glare down at him. He sneers at you out of sheer instinct, because he will not be cowed like some trembling Lyseni boy, but lowers his mouth again all the same, tongue dragging lazily through folds as though nothing has changed, teasing at your entrance as he waits for you to continue, listening far more intently now. 

“On clear days, when the wind blows the smoke thin, you can see the black towers of the old city touching the sky,” you continue. Your hand begins to stroke through his hair now, absentminded, as if you have forgotten you are holding him there. Aerion should resent it. He should bare his teeth and remind you that he is not some pampered pet to be stroked while you speak of things that belong to his blood, but he’s too focused on your words to push away the pleasant feeling that rises in his chest—he blames that on the powder too. “I would spend hours sitting there staring at them, from dawn to dusk. It’s… a different type of cruelty to be so close and yet so far from everything that could’ve been. In that regard, I’m almost jealous of your house. At least you are not taunted by the ruins.”

Aerion doesn’t answer, though he thinks he would beg to differ. 

He was raised on the stories all his life—the Doom, the Smoking Sea, the towers that once ruled the world. For most men, it is a myth, something distant, more legend than history. For him, it is an ancestry forever out of reach. For you, it had been something you could see from a wall. 

He ignores the green feeling that curdles ugly in his chest, willingly leaning into the pleasant warmth still weighing him down instead. He relishes the way your breath hitches when his teeth graze your clit. 

“When we were young, we would sail to the shores at the outskirts of Valyria,” you tell him after a moment. “It was a rite of passage, so to speak, for children of Tiger families. We would bribe a captain bold enough—or foolish enough—to take us out past the merchant routes, to the northern shores. Take a small rowing boat to the sand and wander along the shore, daring one another to go into the forest. None of us ever went very far. The trees there grow wrong—twisted, blackened things that creak even when there is no wind. They say there are creatures that live in the ruins that are neither human nor animal, scaled things that look like men but feast on flesh and bone.”

Aerion watches your face as you speak, the heat settling into something heavier as he rests his head on your inner thigh. This time, you don’t glare at him to put his mouth back on your cunt—he wonders if this is why you made him take the powder, to loosen yourself up enough to speak of this. His chest inexplicably tightens. 

“I went farther than the others,” you say, giving him a smug smile that doesn’t quite reach your eyes. “I was always the one who went the farthest.”

Aerion snorts quietly. “Yes,” he says dryly. “You strike me as the sort who would.”

“Half a mile inland, there’s a ruined outpost off the shore, on one of the old dragonroads,” you tell him. “Half-collapsed, choked with vines, but I climbed through the stones because I wanted to see the carvings up close. That’s where I found this.”

Your hand lifts slightly, brushing the Valyrian steel you put around his throat a moon ago, fingers tracing the metal reverently. Aerion goes very still—this is not some relic passed through markets and merchants, hoarded in vaults like you led him to believe. You found it in the ruins of Valyria itself, amongst the broken stones of the old empire, pried from the bones of a city that once ruled the world. His fingers rise unconsciously to the metal at his throat, swallowing thickly as he looks up at you.

“I wasn’t allowed to bring any of the family heirlooms with me to Lys—my armor, sword, jewelry, they all went back into the vault. But since I found this, they couldn’t take it from me,” you say with a wry smile, lashes fluttering before you look away again. Why did you give him this? he wants to demand again, furious, indignant, a lump in his throat he can’t push away. You continue before he can spit out the words. “I wanted to go further. The forest beyond the tower was… it was strange. Too quiet. But my brother ruined the moment.”

“You have a brother?” Aerion asks, blinking, trying to remember if you ever mentioned it to him before, but he doesn’t think you have. He’s not sure why it catches him off guard so much.

“A twin,” you confirm. “When he realized how far I had gone, he started shouting from the beach—crying, screaming at me to come back before something in the forest came out to eat me. I laughed at him, but he sounded so scared that I turned back around. He wouldn’t stop crying until we were halfway back to Volantis.”

You exhale suddenly, looking away, a wistful expression on your face, but there’s a tightness in your jaw that wasn’t there before. 

“It was a tradition,” you say after a moment, hands fisted in your lap. “Children of the Tiger families have done it for generations. It is known. Everyone in the East is aware; ask anyone here in Lys, and they will tell you. Before we come of age, we sail to the northern shores of Valyria and step onto the sand. It is meant to prove that the blood is still brave—that the blood remembers. Five years ago, nine of our children left to sail to the northern shores, and their heads were delivered to the Black Walls in sacks.”

Aerion stills. The warmth of the powder lingers in his limbs, heavy and slow, but the words cut clean through it. For a moment, he only watches you, waiting for the smirk that would turn it into one of your strange jokes, but it never comes. 

“How would you respond if your enemies delivered the heads of Targaryen children to the Red Keep?” you ask him.

“I would burn their city,” he says without hesitation. “And when the fires died, I would find whoever thought to send such a gift and make certain the rest of the world understood what it cost them.”

Your lips curve up into another smile that doesn’t reach your eyes. “The Elephant families called for inaction. They said the matter should not escalate. That the loss of nine children was tragic, but a war would be worse. Trade must continue, alliances must remain stable, Volantis must appear… reasonable.”

“Reasonable,” Aerion echoes, voice riddled with disbelief. He almost laughs, thinking that this is one strung-out joke, but the expression on your face makes it die in his throat.

“I doubt they would have been so lackadaisical if it were Elephant children killed, but I digress,” you say with a bitter scoff. “The Tiger families didn’t agree with them, of course, but the Elephants have held majority power since the Century of Blood, and they declared that no military action will be taken against the offenders—that they will settle the dispute through gold, as if any amount of gold can replace the lives of sons and daughters.”

You shake your head, rubbing at the lower half of your face as you look away, and then you look down at Aerion again. 

“So, the Tiger families decided to go through with it anyway, knowing that whoever led it would be branded traitor and dragged to the Ivory Yard,” you say. “My father is the Tiger Triarch—our family controlsl the military, so it had to be one of us who led the unsanctioned attack.”

“So it was you,” Aerion realizes. “This is why you were exiled.”

“It was supposed to be my brother,” you say with a wry smile, “because he was the spare, so my father could afford for him to be killed. Volantis follows the old Valyrian tradition of power over gender. Whoever is most fitting to rule will rule. My brother is… soft. Sensitive. He hates fighting and politics—all he wants is to drink and play music and read books, whereas combat and strategy and politics came to me more naturally. By the time I was five and ten, my father was preparing me for elections; he was supposed to step down when I turned twenty, and I was supposed to take over the Tiger party. My brother barely knew how to properly swing a damn sword, much less command an army—how the fuck was I supposed to let him march off to war, knowing that if by some fluke he managed to survive, I would have to watch him be ripped apart in the Ivory Yard?”

You exhale heavily, looking away, and Aerion does not know how to respond, does not have a quick remark or a comment that would feel appropriate, so he presses his lips together, waiting for you to continue.

“He and I—people cannot tell us apart when we have our hair styled similarly. Same build, same face, same voice. So, I took his armor, and I went myself,” you say, and then you give him a sidelong smile. “I had a similar idea of retribution to you, dragon prince. I told you way back when—birds of a feather, you and I.”

Aerion lets out a breath through his nose, eyes sliding shut when you reach out to brush his hair from his face.

“I was taken to the Ivory Yard and chained, and my father and the other Tiger families said that if I were executed, there would be a civil war. They never would have done the same for my brother, but because it was me, the matter suddenly became… complicated. They could not afford to let the Elephants make an example of someone who was supposed to be the face of the future of the Tiger party.”

“And so you are here,” Aerion drawls, but there is a tightness in his chest that he cannot quite push away. 

He presses his lips together, trying to reconcile the languid creature he has known with the past you just described. He half expects you to laugh loudly and tease him for falling for your elaborate tale, but he knows in his gut that this is the truth, and he thinks that he has seen it all along. 

You have longed for blood and steel on this island of pillows and silk just as he has—the boredom in your face when you are surrounded by whores and vipers is not the careful calculation of someone who enjoys decadence and gorge, it is the look of someone who is starving. The laughter, the flirting, the games you play across rooftops and through markets—the endless teasing smiles and practiced languor. It is distraction, because you are restless—violently, dangerously restless. The same as he is, just more skilled at hiding it.

“And now I am here,” you agree dryly, drawing him from his thoughts. “From future Triarch to a prince’s whore. How the mighty fall.”

You say the words carelessly, as you always do, but they land somewhere in his chest with a weight he does not expect. You’ve said this countless times before, deliberately to provoke him into one of his usual quick retorts, but this time, he cannot muster the energy for it, fingers brushing the steel on his neck, and the image of the wistful expression on your face as you told him of your past flashes through his mind. 

He swiftly pushes it away and exhales, forcing his mouth into a sharp smile. “If that is what you are, then you chose your prince very poorly,” he says wryly. “I have no court, no favor, and no patience for the sort of arrangements Lys seems to enjoy.”

“Poorly?” you ask with an amused smile. You shift off the bench so that you can sit with him on the ground, and this time, when you kick his legs apart, he doesn’t protest as you settle between them, resting your back against his chest. “I believe that means we are quite perfect for one another.”

Aerion snorts, though the sound lacks its usual bite.

He tells himself the tightness in his chest is the powder.

The warmth spreading through his limbs is also the powder.

The way his arm slips around your waist, drawing you closer without thought—that is certainly the powder.

He rests his head back against the marble pillar behind him, looking up at the sky. The stars are bright here, and the music and laughter from the revel sounds far away. He breathes out through his nose and says after a moment, “Your city is full of fools.”

He feels your shoulders shake as you laugh lightly. You agree wryly, “That, it is.”

“Why do you remain here if you hate it so much?” he asks after a moment. “Surely, you are not confined to this singular city—”

“I do not hate it,” you interrupt. “I was quite content before you arrived.”

Aerion does not like the way his stomach flips at your words—he blames this on the powder, too, even if the warmth and boneless feeling have finally started to subside. 

He forces a scoff. “You were bored.”

You scoff right back. “Boredom is survivable.”

“And I am not?”

You do not respond for a long while. Long enough for him to understand what your answer is without you having to say anything at all. For a fleeting moment, he tries to imagine the raven he will receive when his father inevitably summons him back home. One of Vyrano’s servants will send for him to return to the manse, and there will be a letter waiting on the table in his solar, sealed with the three-headed dragon in red wax. He pictures the ship waiting in the harbor, the sails unfurling as Lys fades into a smear of pale domes behind him. The revels, the markets, the coves and sea wind—gone, as though they had never been real at all.

And you.

You would be gone with it.

​​Unless—

“Tomorrow, we will pretend as though this conversation never happened,” you say after a moment, tilting your head back and to the side so that you can look at him directly, halting his train of thought before he can even properly consider it. You lift your hand to turn his face so that he’s looking at you—Aerion does not find himself protesting, even though he should. This is the powder’s fault as well. “We’ll return to your chambers once the revel begins to die down, and I will be gone by morning, and you will find me by midday, or I’ll have won the day’s game.”

He sneers. It feels forced. “You do not order me, wench.”

“I do as I please,” you reply a sharp curve of your lips, shifting around so that you’re facing him, leaning in to ghost your lips against his. If he shivers, he blames that on the powder too. Everything tonight is that wretched powder’s fault—your fault. Perhaps it is best to forget it happened at all. “And you have yet to satisfy me since you forced me to take double what you did. So what I please to do is you.”

Aerion grimaces slightly, still sensitive, but that only seems to delight you from the way you burst into laughter.

Three high school boys have you cornered near the vending machines by the station. You're clutching your bag to your chest, trying to step around them, but they keep shifting in your way, grinning like idiots.

Chuuya doesn’t remember crossing the street.

One second he’s watching. The next he’s there, fingers hooked in the collar of the loudest one’s uniform.

“Move.”

His voice isn’t loud. It doesn’t have to be.

The boys recognize him. Everyone around here knows the Sheep. Knows the gravity user with the temper. Their laughter dies quickly. They mutter excuses and scramble off, not even trying to save face.

Chuuya clicks his tongue at their retreating backs before turning to you.

You're staring at him like he just descended from the sky.

“You okay?” he asks, scratching the back of his neck. Up close, he suddenly feels awkward. Too aware of the scuffs on his sneakers. The wind-tangled mess of his hair.

“I- yeah,” you say softly. “Thank you.”

He shrugs like it’s nothing. “Tch. They’re just punks.”

There’s a pause. The afternoon sun slants gold across your face. He realizes he’s still standing kind of close.

“I can walk you home,” he blurts, immediately regretting how eager it sounds. “In case they come back.”

Your smile is small and warm and makes something strange happen in his chest. “I’d like that.”

That’s how it starts.

After that, it becomes routine. He just… happens to be nearby when school lets out. Just happens to lean against the wall by the gates, pretending he’s not waiting. Hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders slouched, trying to look cool.

The Sheep tease him about it, of course.

“You’ve got a girlfriend, Chuuya?” one of them sings.

He nearly uses Corruption on them.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” he snaps, ears pink. “I’m just making sure she gets home safe.”

But he times his errands around your schedule anyway.

Walking beside her is easy. Easier than fighting. Easier than leading. You talk about school, about a teacher who keeps mispronouncing your name, about a stray cat you want to adopt. He listens, pretending not to hang on every word.

Sometimes your hands brush.

The first time it happens, he jerks like he’s been electrocuted.

You just giggle.

He thinks about that giggle at night. Thinks about it while staring at the hideout ceiling, arms folded behind his head. It’s stupid. He’s fought grown men without blinking. But one smile from you and he feels like he’s fifteen in the worst (best) possible way.

Which he is.

One afternoon, rain starts unexpectedly. You end up huddled under the awning of a closed shop. His hoodie is half-soaked. You're trying to shield your bag from the drizzle.

He wordlessly shrugs off his jacket and drapes it over your shoulders.

“What about you?” you ask.

“I’m fine,” he mutters, though he’s definitely not fine. Not with how close you're standing. Not with the way you smell like soap and rain.

You run the rest of the way to your street, laughing when you nearly slip. By the time you reach your gate, both of you are breathless.

“Thank you, Chuuya,” you say again, softer this time.

He rubs the back of his neck. “It’s nothing, [name].”

You hesitate.

Then you steps forward.

For half a second, he thinks you're going to hug him, and his brain short-circuits trying to prepare for that. Instead, you rise on your toes and press a quick, warm kiss to his cheek.

It’s gentle. Chaste. Over in an instant.

But it might as well be a meteor strike.

“See you tomorrow,” you say, cheeks pink, before slipping through the gate.

Chuuya stands there.

Frozen.

His entire face feels like it’s on fire. Slowly, mechanically, he lifts his fingers to his cheek. Touches the spot you kissed.

He turns around and walks back toward the hideout in a daze.

The Sheep are mid-argument when he pushes open the door. Someone’s complaining about food supplies. Someone else is laughing.

Chuuya doesn’t hear any of it.

He makes it three steps inside before it hits him.

You kissed him.

On the cheek.

On purpose.

He clamps a hand over his mouth.

A sound escapes anyway.

It starts as a strangled huff. Then another. And suddenly he’s crouched against the wall, shoulders shaking, giggling helplessly.

“Oi, what’s wrong with you?” someone demands.

He can’t answer. He’s too busy pressing both hands to his burning face, grinning so wide it hurts.

“She kissed me,” he whispers to himself, disbelieving. “She actually-”

He kicks his sneakers lightly against the floor, mortified and ecstatic all at once. If anyone tries to tease him right now, he might actually use Corruption. Or maybe he’ll just float away out of pure embarrassment.

Later that night, he flops onto his bed, staring at the ceiling again.

His cheek still tingles.

Tomorrow can’t come fast enough.

“You—girl. Are you a whore?”

You raise your eyebrows from where you’re splayed out on a rock on the shores of Lys, basking in the warm sun. You’re the only one who comes to this edge of the island, so you can only presume the bored voice is addressing you. You let your head loll backward over the side of the rock, the tips of your hair brushing the crystalline water sloshing against the shore.

A man stands at the edge of the water, frowning down at it when it comes too close to his expensive leather boots. He is pretty, you decide—you can tell that much even peering at him upside down the way you are—but most who live on Lys are, so he’s nothing special. Pale hair, pale skin, violet eyes—you could find dozens of him at any pillow house in the city. 

“Do I look like a whore?” you hum, voice lilting with amusement when you see the way his expression twists in irritation. 

“I did not ask for wit,” he says sharply. “I asked for an answer.”

You roll onto your side instead of replying at once, propping yourself up on one elbow. The setting sun glints off the water, catching in his silver hair. He’s younger than you first thought—likely around your age—but his clothes are what catch your eye. They are not the sheer chiffon and smooth silks you’re accustomed to seeing boys draped in, but dark, expensive leathers. A Westerosi, maybe? There’s a sigil on the pommel of his sword, but you can’t make it out from a distance. 

His gaze drifts over you, curiosity plain in his expression before he masks it with indifference.

“You may come closer,” you say lazily, calling out his lapse. “If you wish to inspect me properly, that is.”

His eyes narrow, jaw tightening. “I have no wish to inspect you.”

“No?” you ask, kicking your feet idly as you tilt your head to the side. Your fingers drop to skim the warm waters of the Narrow Sea, flicking the water uselessly in his direction, even though you know it won’t reach him. He still looks incensed by the mere attempt. “Then why ask?”

His mouth curls—not prettily. “Because I’ve been taught in Lys one does not stumble upon a woman alone without discovering she belongs to someone else.”

“Oh?” you echo, entertained, realizing he’s trying to insult you. “To someone else?”

He tilts his head the same way you did, mocking. “Or to everyone,” he drawls, smile sharp. “I prefer to know the nature of what stands before me.”

“And who do you suppose I belong to? One or everyone?” you ask lightly instead of letting the insult land, which only seems to irritate him more from the way he sneers. “Do you wish to be the one? Is that why you ask?”

He falters, and your lips quirk up in amusement. He doesn’t look like a boy accustomed to being mocked; he looks like one accustomed to being obeyed. You wonder how far you can press before he snaps. You haven't had much for entertainment since you were cast out to this idyllic paradise, so you have to make your own.

You rise to your feet at last, purple chiffon tumbling around you. It drapes from shoulder to ankle, sheer but layered, the violet deep enough to obscure what men desire most—modest for Lys, considering it covers more than what most girls in the pillow houses bother with. The fabric clings where the sea has kissed it, outlining the curve of your hips and the length of your thighs.

His gaze drops before he can help himself—to the low V-cut of your neck, and lower still. Then, as though he catches himself, his gaze snaps back up to your face, furious. You smile lightly as you drop off the rock into the shallow water, gentle waves brushing your ankles. You lock your hands behind your back as you make your way over to him; as you draw near, you finally make out the sigil on the pommel of his sword. 

A dragon prince, you realize, amused. So, the rumors you heard of a ship flying the banner of the three-headed dragon are true. You never thought you'd get the chance to play with a dragon—the prospect of being burned thrills you in a way that the soft, perfumed sons of Lys never have.

“You did not answer my question,” you note, leaning in just enough to let your breath ghost against his mouth. To his credit, he doesn’t react beyond his eyes narrowing and tongue darting out to wet his bottom lip. “Do you wish for me to belong to you? Is that why you ask?”

“You,” he says tightly, “are very bold for someone who could be bought.”

“Everything in Lys can be bought,” you agree easily, “but not everything wishes to be. Unfortunately for you, you can’t afford my price.”

His eyes flash with indignation, but you continue before he can say anything.

“Tell me, Dragon Prince,” you begin, reaching out without asking permission. His hand snaps up to grab your wrist hard, but you only raise your eyebrows at him, fingers brushing the silver strand of hair that has fallen across his brow. It is softer than you expected, and he is much more beautiful up close. If only there wasn’t something dangerous lurking behind those pretty violets. “Did you come to Lys for pleasure?”

He says through his teeth, “You dare try to touch me.”

No.

“For business, then?”

“Are you slow, whore?”

No.

“Then, for exile.”

The rage that crosses his face is answer enough. 

You had a feeling that was the case. You recognize the look in his eyes very intimately—alone, uncertain, cornered, all veiled behind a wall of arrogance and steel so as to not allow the snakes that wander the Lysene gardens a chance to sink their fangs in. He's a Targaryen prince—if he were back home, he probably would've struck you or imprisoned you for taking such tone and proximity to him, but he's not home, and he's still gaining his footing here in Lys, so he can't afford to react how he normally would.

Well, at least you're not alone in this regard anymore, you suppose, but only time will tell whether he'll make for good company.

You smile lightly and step away, brushing his grip from your wrist.

“Next time,” you call, glancing over your shoulder at him with an easy smile, “try asking my name before you ask my price.”

——————

His name is Aerion Brightflame of the Royal House of Targaryen in Westeros—a second son of a fourth son, tenth in line to the Iron Throne of Westeros. Lys is a city of silk and secrets—nothing truly disappears here, so it’s not hard for you to get the information you want on him. Stories drift through the pillow houses and lavish gardens as easily as perfume. He is cruel and capricious, prone to bouts of anger and violence, according to the whispers you’ve heard, but careful to keep up a charismatic front when before the magisters; exiled after his fickle whims led to the death of his uncle, the crown prince. 

The dragon prince arrived under polite pretense—a guest of Magister Vyrano Naeranar—but word spreads swiftly that his vacation to Lys is not one of his own choosing. He spends his days in Vyrano’s manse, reclining on cushioned couches beneath painted ceilings, letting serving girls drape themselves across the arms of his chair like ornaments—grapes pressed to his lips, wine poured without asking, musicians summoned to entertain his boredom. 

Today, he has the central market on edge, prowling about disdainfully with a white-cloaked shadow that came with him from the west. You watch from the tiled roof of a nearby building. He hasn’t noticed you yet, but you think he can feel you looking, because his gaze periodically sweeps around the square, as though searching for something he knows is there but can’t spot. 

It’s entertaining—almost. Spice merchants from Yi Ti bow low, and the fishwives temper their usual shouting. Lys has returned to the tense state it was in when you arrived five years ago, and the whole city holds its breath as it waits for its draconic guest to return back to his cave.

You tilt your head to the side with an amused smile, watching as Aerion pauses at a stall heavy with Myrish glass and lacquered casks. The merchant fumbles his greeting once his gaze settles on the prince's silver hair and violet eyes—no easy flattery of someone who has sold to nobles before, no honeyed cadence of a seasoned trader. His tongue catches. His eyes flick to Aerion's hair, his sword, the crowd, then settle on the white cloak behind him.

You squint.

He rushes too quickly to the back of the stall, foregoing all of the best goods he has on display.

You don’t recognize him, you note absently, sliding down off the roof and onto a stack of boxes before you realize what you’re doing. You hop down to the ground, easing through the crowds in the direction of the stall. Most merchants who come to Lys are repeat presences—regular ships, regular routes, regular loyalties. You recognize them by name and face now, laugh at jokes they’ve told you too many times, and tease them with sleight of hand before tossing coin in their direction.

This one is not, and unfamiliar never bodes well, especially when word has begun to spread about Lys’s new royal guest. 

“Firewine from the finest vineyard in Myr,” you hear the man say with a too eager smile as you draw close. “Firewine for the Brightflame. Worthy of a prince of the blood.”

Aerion’s mouth curves faintly, and you almost roll your eyes—all men are fools, you think disdainfully, weak to shallow flattery. He reaches for the decanter, and the merchant's fingers tighten slightly around it before releasing it to the prince. He holds the glass up to the sun's light and tilting it slightly, admiring how the bright liquid clings to the crystal.

You pluck the wine from his hand before he can make a decision on whether or not he’d like to taste it, skipping out of reach as his gaze snaps toward you, outraged. This will be today's entertainment, you decide, pleased. Not a single day since the prince has gotten here has been dull, and you're finding yourself increasingly pleased with him. The white cloak behind him makes a move to apprehend you, but Aerion waves him off when he recognizes you, expression twisting with irritation.

“You again,” he says. “Plucking a gift straight from my hands—do you have a death wish?” 

You give him an easy smile, tilting your head to the side. “Not me,” you reply, “but you, perhaps? Shouldn’t your royal training have taught you not to accept wine from strangers, prince? Many are fond of sweet death, you know?” 

Aerion’s eyes flash, and his gaze slides from you to the merchant, who looks aghast as he stares at you. He fumbles out, “My lady jests—”

You swing around, one arm sliding around the man’s slim waist, the other lifting the decanter up to his lips. “Then, the good merchant wouldn’t mind tasting his own wine, would he?” you coo, smiling.

The merchant freezes. His mouth opens, then closes again, throat bobbing as you press the rim of the crystal against his lips, tilting it ever so slightly toward him. Aerion and his white cloak watch with sharp eyes. Your chest bubbles with excitement—god, the last five years have been dreadfully boring, and one week of this dragon prince has brought color and sharpness to this gray, pillowed world.

“You called it worthy of a prince of the blood,” you remind him sweetly. “Surely it’s worthy of your own.”

The market has gone still—all eyes on you, the dragon prince, the merchant who had the nerve to try to assassinate him. Your gaze flicks up to meet the burning violet of Aerion, who stares at the decanter in your hand with rising fury.

“My lady,” he wheezes, voice cracking, “it is strong, that is all—too strong for an empty stomach—”

“Drink,” Aerion finally says, voice cold and clipped. “Drink, or I’ll have you skinned and hung from the harbor walls for the gulls.”

The merchant’s legs give out entirely. He sags against you, sweat soaking through his tunic, the rim of the crystal trembling against his mouth.

“My prince, mercy—”

“Drink,” Aerion repeats.

The white cloak has already drawn steel. The blade rests so lightly against the merchant’s throat that it barely dents the skin—but everyone in the square can see how little pressure it would take.

You tilt the decanter again.

A dark ribbon of wine spills past the man’s lips. He chokes, sputtering, trying to twist away, but your grip at his waist tightens just enough to steady him.

“Careful,” you tease. “You’ll waste it.”

He yanks away from you and spits up the wine, making his answer clear. The white cloak immediately sheathes his sword and grabs the man by the neck, scruffing him like an unruly pup. You let the decanter drop carelessly to the ground, shattering against the stone, and you turn to leave, bored now that the excitement is over.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Aerion calls after you, put off by your unspoken dismissal.

“Here, there,” you say dismissively, tossing raised eyebrows over your shoulder. “Everywhere? Nowhere?”

Aerion looks seriously irritated by your disrespectful attitude. You only smile.

“Return with me to Vyrano’s manse,” he says firmly—an order, not a request. Unfortunately for him, you do not take orders from anyone, much less foreign princes. “You will explain to me how exactly you knew that was poison, or I will presume that you were in league with the assassin.” 

“I would rather die,” you say, voice a sing-song, enjoying the way indignation crosses his face. “Til next time, prince.”

——————

“I thought you said you weren’t a whore,” a familiar voice drolls from the now undrawn curtains leading into the room you’re relaxing in a few days later. 

You bite back a sigh—you had a feeling he was going to come looking for you sooner or later, but you didn’t anticipate it would be so soon. You suppose he’s just as bored as you are, stuck on this island with nowhere to go and no one to call your own. There's only so much wine you can consume and music to listen to before you drive yourself insane. Your gaze lifts to where he’s standing.

Aerion is dressed prettily today in red silks, but you have yet to see him go anywhere unarmed. The girls around you stiffen when they recognize the three-headed dragon on the pommel of his sword—they’ve become used to your presence and whims over the years, but the dragon prince is a new unknown that they don’t know how to deal with yet, so you wave them off, silently telling them to leave. They all scatter, but not before giving you concerned looks.

“I’m not,” you say easily, tilting your head to the side as Aerion steps into the lavish, perfumed room, “but it doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy their company. Men have loose lips when their cocks are wet. Sometimes friends in low places are much more useful than friends in high ones.”

“Is that so?” Aerion's gaze sweeps the room once, as though assessing for any threats. Once he determines that there are none, he makes his way over to you, boots silent on the rugs. He doesn’t sit immediately; instead, he stands over you. Red silk catches the lamplight, the violet of his eyes brimming with something you can’t name as he looks down at you. He looks every inch the Targaryen prince—ornamental and dangerous and terribly beautiful, fire and blood and all things in between. Your lips curl up slightly, which only serves to make him incensed. “You are impudent. Disrespectful. I should have your tongue removed.”

You give him a lazy smile, head half-lolled back against the cushions to look up at him with lidded eyes. “Ah, but my tongue can be so useful,” you murmur. “You wouldn’t deprive Lys of its many talents, would you?”

“You grow tiresome,” Aerion says through his teeth, though his irritation is edged with something hotter. “Do you even know who you speak to?”

“Prince Aerion Brightflame of House Targaryen,” you drawl. “Everyone on our little island knows who you are.”

“And yet, you toy with me as though I’m some Lyseni fool come to squander coin,” he replies, leaning down, one hand braced at the cushion beside your shoulder, coming so close that his nose nearly brushes yours. You tilt the lower half of your face up to brush your lips against his, just to see how he reacts, but his free hand comes to your throat, holding you in place. “Who are you?” 

“No one,” you reply with a mysterious smile, and his fingers tighten slightly around your neck. You try again, amused, “Anyone you want me to be.”

“Your name, woman,” Aerion insists, voice low and dangerous, temper fraying. “Give me your name, or I’ll do much worse than take your tongue.”

You let out a huff of laughter, gaze flicking down to his lips for a long moment, watching the way they tighten in annoyance. You give him your name after a few seconds pass—only your first. He waits a moment for your family name, but when you don’t give it, he clicks his tongue in irritation, hand dropping from your throat to take a step back, falsely assuming you don’t have one.

“How did you know that the wine was poisoned?” he asks you coldly. “Were you in league with the assassin? Turned against him to try to gain the favor of a prince?”

You rest back against the cushions when he lets you go, and Aerion’s gaze slides down again to the silk draped loosely around your shoulders, the way it slips down your skin. He catches himself, glaring at you furiously as he waits for an answer.

“He was an unfamiliar face,” you say dismissively. “Merchants in Lys are all familiar. I was suspicious, considering word has surely begun to spread about our resident dragon prince, and he looked far too anxious. Luckily so, seeing as you would’ve drunk the Weeping Lady’s tears without a spare thought.”

Aerion’s lips curl up into a snarl. “I would not have been so foolish as to drink wine from some unknown merchant.”

“If you say so, prince,” you agree blithely, waving your hand. “Is this all you came for? If so, I was in the middle of an entertaining conversation. Unless you’d like to join us girls in our gossip, that is?”

“You do not dismiss me, whore,” Aerion spits. “Why intervene then? If not for gold or to curry favor?”

“Well, I would never say no to gold,” you answer easily, “but in truth, the island has become boring these past few years. You’ve entertained me in the week you’ve been here. I would hate to lose you so untimely.”

Aerion stares at you as though he didn’t hear you properly. “You would speak of me as though I’m a court jester?” he asks, voice low. Dangerous. Ah, things are getting fun—the spark of interest you felt before returns in a blaze, you’ve always enjoyed dancing on the razor’s edge. “As entertainment?”

Heat crawls up your spine. Your lips curl up. You correct, “An island jester, but to the same accord, I suppose.”

His hand darts out to wrap around your throat again. This time, he drags you to your feet, into his chest. His thin fingers dig into your skin, sharp nails biting crescents. You still only smile lightly, gaze not leaving his, watching as chips of amethyst burn into swirling pools of dragonfire—the same color as you imagine the flames Meraxes breathed over Dorne in the war of conquest your tutors forced you to read about. 

You find yourself breathless just for a second, regretting your initial assessment of him. There are no dozens of him in the pillow houses of Lys—Lys houses boys of silk and perfume, with soft skin and syrupy voices, not boys whose blood is fire and breath is ash, not dragons.

You are not one to deny yourself what you desire—your wants are fickle and fleeting, and boredom is the most terrible punishment of all in the years you’ve spent trapped on Lys. You are quick to indulge and quicker to discard, because it’s all you have to do while you’re here. 

You want him, you decide. You want the dragon prince, and you will have him, one way or another. Dragons have always existed to be tamed by the old blood, and you do not care if you burn in your attempts to make him heel. 

“You mock me,” he breathes out, eyes wild as though a part of him still doesn’t believe you have the nerve. “The last person who dared mock me to my face, I put to the sword.”

You lean into his grip, lifting your own hand to cradle his cheek. He startles at your touch, grip tightening on your throat instinctively. You murmur, lips almost brushing his as you speak, “We are in Lys, prince. Even a prince of the blood has to obey the law of the magisters—and you will be hard pressed to find the conclave willing to indulge your violence over banter.”

His lip curls up into a snarl, a noise ripping from his lips, more dragon than man, and he lets go of you harshly, sending you sprawling back down on the cushions. You smile easily, tilting your head to the side as you look up at him, and he looks even more incensed by your lack of fear, that you’re treating his righteous fury like a joke.

“Who are you really?” he demands. “A spy for my father? Another assassin?”

“So paranoid, dragon prince,” you murmur, fingers sliding up against your throat, skin still warm where he touched you. “I’m just a girl who enjoys playing with fire, that’s all.”

Aerion bares his teeth. “Girls who play with fire get burned, whore,” he says, voice low and furious. 

“That’s part of the fun, isn’t it?” you say flippantly with a pointed raise of your eyebrows, eyes glittering as you watch how he seethes.

“You think this is fun,” he asks slowly, pupils blown wide, violet slivers around black marbles. “You prattle about magisters and laws as though I’m some merchant who can be summoned and fined. I am not a merchant, I’m a dragon, and dragons are not bound by laws of cities built on pleasure and perfume. They answer only to blood and fire.”

Your pulse jumps, and you raise your chin, giddy.

“Well, dragons have always answered to the right hand, haven’t they?” you drawl, grinning when you see the rage and indignation that cross his face once the implication of your words hits him. 

For a moment, you think he’ll draw his sword and cut you down where you lounge, consequences be damned—or maybe he won’t even bother sullying his sword with your blood. He’ll wrap his hands around your throat and squeeze, watching the life leave your eyes up close and personal, your pulse fluttering and dying beneath his fingers. 

What an intimate way to die, you think with a wistful breath.

But he catches himself before he can do something that would end with him being thrown in the damp cells beneath the city, letting out an irritated hiss before he turns on his heel and storms out of the pillow house.

“‘Til next time, prince!” you call after him, barely catching the way he glares furiously over his shoulder at you as he turns the corner.

As soon as he’s gone, the girls you were chatting with creep back into the room, one of them curling at your side, hand coming up to brush the bruises already blooming where his fingers once were. Her touch is soft and warm, and you find that you prefer the harsh, scalding imprint he left behind. You brush her hand away gently before she can wash away the feeling of his touch.

“You must be more careful, my lady,” she says softly. “You provoke him too openly. He’s not like the others.”

“I know,” you answer easily, gaze still trained on where he left, replaying the moment in your head over and over again. His hand at your throat, his breath hot against your cheek, the restraint trembling beneath his skin like a tethered beast. “That’s exactly what entices me.”

——————

Aerion Brightflame asks about you incessantly after that. 

He returns to your favorite pillow house and tries to threaten the girls into telling him more about you, but they prove loyal, misleading him with vague answers and directing him to the wrong people. It infuriates him, and he rages and threatens for hours, but the girls of the Perfumed Garden remain out of reach. The Maryls, in spite of their misgivings over the last century, remain one of the more powerful banking families in Lys, and Aerion, for all of his fury, at least knows better than to go making an enemy of them during his time in exile.

He tries the magisters next, but the magisters are even less inclined to indulge him. Smiling men with poisonous tongues—they bow to kings when it’s profitable and to coin when it’s safer. They will not choose between you and the dragon prince, because to take a side would be to make an enemy, and an exiled prince, tenth in line, with no army and no dragon, holds little weight on the scale when you’re sat on the opposite side. Your father might be cruel enough to keep you on a forced vacation at this little idyllic paradise for years on end, but he will not stand for disrespect.

Aerion’s wrath is apocalyptic when he realizes that the magisters are being as evasive as the whores, meeting his questions with riddles and half-answers. He leaves their manses with his temper fraying, red silk snapping like a banner behind him. He is not accustomed to doors closing in his face, and you find yourself too entertained when the magisters send a serving girl to find you and warn you that the dragon prince is poking around about you.

He has his white cloak follow you around some days—you see him trailing from the corner of your eye, and instead of making moves to lose him, you let him follow several paces behind, amused by the lengths Aerion is going to for answers. His white cloak only returns with reports of laughter and music, of you moving freely between pillow houses and manses alike as though you belong to none and all at once. 

At last, he does what pride has resisted: he tries seeking you out again.

Unfortunately for him, you make a game of cat-and-mouse. The harbor children run to you the moment they see a flash of red silk and the dutiful white cloak following behind, warning you that the prince is out hunting again, and you’re quick to make yourself scarce from all of the places he would ordinarily be able to find you, lounging in the hidden coves of the island where the sun is brightest and the water is warmest. 

You spend a week toying with him like this, watching from a distance as he becomes more and more incensed by his inability to find you, but all fun must come to an end, and you’re expected at the First Magister’s manse for a mid-summer festival, so you don your prettiest silks and make way to the manse you’ve been residing in the past five years.

The manse is ablaze with torches and lanterns before the sun has even fully set, hundreds of them, hung from archways and balconies, glass tilted in rose and amber so that the entire property glows like a living jewel. Musicians line the outer courtyards, flutes and lutes carrying through the warm night air, drums pulsing in time with the tide below. 

You make your way to a partially secluded balcony of the manse, lounging back against velvet cushions, the scent of orange blossom and wine thick in the air. From here, you can see everything happening down below, and people can’t easily make their way to you for conversation. Making your appearance for all intents and purposes, in sight of all of the attendees below, as the First Magister asked of you, but distant enough not to be bothered. The perfect compromise, in your fair opinion.

The gardens are the picture of decadence—marble statues wound with garlands of fresh roses, silk canopies rippling overhead in the gentle breeze, servants refilling goblets before they’re empty and cooling flushed faces with fans of dyed peacock feathers. 

It is obscene and glorious—it is Lys, and you are terribly bored. 

You exhale, gaze flicking up to the night sky, stretching languidly against the cushions as a pretty boy from the Perfumed Garden settles at your side. He’s all silk skin and silver lashes, bracelets chiming softly at his wrists. He smells faintly of sweet wine and summer berries—looks like the dragon prince, you think blandly as your eyes trace amethyst eyes and lithe limbs, but without the fire that comes with. Without asking, he leans in, mouth brushing the hollow of your throat tentatively, waiting for you to send him away or accept him at your side. 

You tilt your head obligingly in response, granting him better access, and he lets out a hum against your skin, to the irritation of the golden-haired girl already curled on your opposite side, pouting against your skin from where she’s nuzzling your wrist. They don’t like sharing—more likely one will be sent away in favor of the other, and it’s nicest up here with the view of the gardens, not having to deal with merchant lords and magisters pawing and groping. 

The girl presses a soft kiss to the inside of your wrist, sucking gently at your pulse, and the boy at your throat grows bolder when you do not dismiss him, mouth traveling from your collarbone to the curve beneath your ear, teeth grazing lightly before he soothes the spot with his tongue.

You sigh, head lolling back against the cushions, gaze drifting upward to the lanterns swaying above the terrace before you allow your eyes to slide shut. You are bored—they are beautiful, and attentive, and they know exactly how to please you, but you’ve long grown weary of soft skin and pillowed touches. But you’re expected to be here until dawn, and there are still hours left until then, so you may as well use them as a way to pass the time. 

Just as the boy’s hand starts to drift cautiously along your waist, testing the line between invitation and overstep, your hair stands on end, eyes reopening as your instincts warn you that you’re being watched. You're used to being watched in Lys—by curious nobles and idle voyeurs whose stares follow pleasure like sport—but this is not that. Your head falls to the side when both courtesans at your sides stiffen, gaze drifting over to the curtained entrance to the balcony you lounge on.

You hum when you recognize the figure standing there, half in shadow, lanternlight catching along the sharp line of his jaw and his silver hair. He doesn’t say anything, violet gaze flicking to the two at your side. You let out a long exhale through your nose, eyes flicking up in irritation. 

“Go,” you tell the two courtesans, who immediately take the opportunity to scurry away from Aerion Brightflame’s imminent ire. Your gaze meets his again, and you say dryly, “Ao zūgagon qrīdrughagon ñuha līvi. Gaomagon ao kȳvanon naejot ropakagon zirȳ, zaldrīzes dārilaros?”

You scared away my whores. Do you intend to be their replacement, dragon prince?

Aerion tilts his head to the side slightly, gaze lidded, eyes sharp shards of amethyst. “First, you liken me to a jester, now a whore. It’s almost as though you are determined to see how far you may push before I remind you what I really am.”

“I am simply offering ways for you to recompense,” you reply lightly. “You frightened away my night's entertainment, after all.”

“I did not tell them to leave.”

“You did not have to.”

His mouth curls up faintly at that. “I am not here to replace anyone,” he says coolly.

“Pity,” you sigh. “You would be far more interesting.”

“You have been avoiding me,” Aerion says after a moment, changing the subject as he steps fully onto the balcony, staring down at you coldly. 

“And you have been asking about me,” you drawl. “Sit with me, prince. My neck aches craning upward to look at you.”

Aerion’s lip curls up in distaste, gaze flicking to the cushions where the courtesans had just been sitting. He asks, “You expect me to sit where your whores were just pawing at you?”

“You expect me to continue craning my neck?” you counter lazily. “It’s terribly inconvenient.”

His jaw tightens, and for a moment, you think he’ll refuse you on principle, but then, with visible reluctance, he steps closer and lowers himself onto the far edge of the velvet cushions, lounging back against them and giving you a disdainful look. You curl onto your side to look at him through your lashes, smiling lightly. 

“You mock me, you antagonize me, and you disappear for days,” he says, voice low. “Who are you? A real answer this time.”

“My name was not satisfactory?” you ask, teasing, purposely shifting a little closer, knee almost brushing his thigh. His eyes flick over you once, wary. “Well, what have you learned then, prince? From your many inquiries?”

His lips curl into a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. With a voice as thin as his smile, he says, “Nothing of import.”

You lean in a little closer, fingers dragging up the red silk of his sleeve, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath it, warmer than the summer night, than the wine still sweet on your tongue, fire burning under man. Your fingers itch to slip beneath the silk, to slide against his bare skin, feel the thrum of his pulse. His gaze snaps down to where you’re touching him, lip curling up in distaste, but not brushing you off. Your heart races in your chest, delighted, a smile touching the corner of your lips. 

“But that tells you something of import in itself, does it not?” you hum, fingers sliding higher, grazing the seam at his shoulder, then down again in a slow, idle path, memorizing the shape of him through silk.

His breathing shifts—barely, but it does—and his eyes follow the trail you trace down his arm sharply. His attention pulls back up to your face, calculating your words. “You move between manses as though you belong to all of them,” he says, more to himself than to you. “The Perfumed Garden protects you. The magisters evade my questions. Even the harbor brats run interference on your behalf. That is not coincidence.”

You tilt your head, studying him.

“Perhaps they simply like me.”

“No one is liked that thoroughly without reason.”

“Indeed,” you agree, inching closer. Your knee presses against his thigh firmly now, head resting against the same velvet cushion that supports his shoulders. You can feel the tension in him through the thin barrier of silk. His face tilts toward yours, within a breath of one another—you can almost taste the wine on his mouth. You have to stop yourself from leaning in to drag your tongue against his bottom lip. “Why ever would the Lyseni insult a prince of the blood for a common whore?”

His gaze doesn’t leave yours, even as your fingers slip from the silk of his sleeve to his collar, tracing the edge where fabric parts to reveal pale skin beneath. You don’t quite touch him there, but you long to. 

“You do not speak in the Lysene dialect—no common whore of Lys would speak fluent High Valyrian,” Aerion continues, voice low, picking up on the hint you dropped him earlier. Your gaze slips down to his lips as he speaks, and you have to force it back up to his eyes. “Nor would she openly antagonize and—” His hand darts up, lithe fingers wrapping around your wrist, tight enough to bruise when you start to trace down the embroidered patterns along his chest. “—freely touch a prince of the blood.”

You hum, pulse fluttering beneath his thumb. He feels it—you know he does. “And where does that leave your answer?” 

Your breath catches in the back of your throat as he drags his nail down your inner wrist, sharp enough to draw blood if he chooses to press a little deeper. His gaze drifts from your face to your wrist, the edge of his nail pressing just enough to sting, and then deeper, a small bead of blood welling against your skin before he eases the pressure. He watches it rise and then shifts his thumb beneath it and rubs upward, smearing the blood against your pulse. 

“You were quick to recognize what I was,” he says at last, voice quieter now. His thumb lingers at your pulse. “Quicker than most.”

“You did deny pleasure and business,” you remind him easily, lips curled up slightly.

“And yet, not many would immediately jump to exile,” Aerion murmurs, gaze sharper now. “Not unless they are well acquainted with it themselves.”

“Udrimmi dārilaros,” you purr—entertaining and intelligent, you think you’ll have fun with the dragon prince. Clever prince. “Birds of a feather, you and I.”

Aerion makes a noise in the back of his throat as though he doesn’t quite agree, but his eyes slide back up to your face, calculating. His tongue darts out to wet his lip, and your gaze fixes on it. He muses, “You’re no ordinary exile, if the Lyseni will insult a prince of the blood to retain your favor.” 

You watch his eyes slip over your features, trying to put together all of the pieces, irritation swimming in violet when he can’t immediately do so. You can’t blame him—you suppose they don’t fit together too neatly. For the Lyseni to favor you over him, he would assume you would have to be royal yourself, probably initially leaning toward an imperial princess of Yi Ti or the daughter of a Qartheen merchant prince. But you speak fluent High Valyrian, and the YiTish and Qartheen people hold the Valyrian Freehold in high disdain—they do not teach its tongue in their court, much less prize it with the reverence you speak it in. That makes him lean toward the Free Cities, and yet—you do not speak in bastardized Valyrian. Your Valyrian is clean, as old and measured as it was when the Freehold ruled the world before the Doom.

Frustration flashes across his face, and he runs his tongue between his teeth, trying to put together the jagged pieces you’ve handed him. You watch the movement with open interest. He is thinking—calculating lineages and alliances, which houses of which cities might keep the old tongue unspoiled, who the Lyseni might favor more than the dragon. You can see the names forming and falling away behind his eyes, each failure leaving him more incensed.

His grip on your wrist loosens as he thinks, and you slide your hand down the length of his forearm, shifting closer. He does not stop you, too occupied with his thoughts. That’s when you lean in, mouth brushing against the hollow of his throat, the same way the pretty silk boy did to you when he curled up at your side before.

He stills, inhaling sharply the moment your lips touch his skin. You feel the warmth of his body, flames burning beneath skin, the faint thrum of his pulse. You let your lips linger before drawing back slightly, breath ghosting across the same place, waiting to see if he’ll push you away.

“I did not give you leave to touch me, whore,” he finally says, but he doesn’t move away, nor does he push you back. 

“I thought we had established that I’m not a whore,” you murmur, and then press your luck by pressing your lips to his skin again, firmer this time. A third time along the ridge of his throat as it bobs beneath your mouth, a visible swallow that betrays him.

You feel the tension ripple through him—anger and desire warring with one another, braided too tightly to separate. His hand comes up fast, fingers tangling in your hair roughly. He doesn’t pull you away like you expect, and you can’t help the way the corners of your mouth curl upward slightly. 

“You behave like one,” he hisses.

“A whore would not be so bold as to touch a prince of the blood without leave,” you echo his own words back at him. When he doesn’t shove you away and rise to his feet, you shift closer still, half into his lap, hands sliding against the smooth silk covering his abdomen, not slipping beneath yet. His fingers twist in your hair again—a warning—you do not heed it. “Iā līve daor ikson kostagon naejot kostilus ao isse aōha muña ēngos.”

A whore would not be able to please you in your mother tongue.

His breath hitches, grip on your hair tightening at the sound of High Valyrian spoken so cleanly against his throat. His pulse jumps beneath your mouth, and you flick your tongue out to circle it, sucking gently at his skin. He pulls your head back slightly, fingers tight in your hair. His pupils are blown wide again, violet slivers around black, except that last time he was fueled by rage, this time it’s something far more dangerous—his free hand slides up your thigh to your hip, thumb pressing hard into your skin. Your hips twitch, aching to grind against the thigh between your legs, but you catch yourself, waiting for him to speak.

“You presume much,” he says, voice low. “You enjoy seeing how far I will allow you to go.”

You smile lightly, gaze lidded. “I enjoy discovering where the line truly is.”

He twists your hair just enough to make it sting, nails carving crescents into the skin at your hip. “Do you really think the laws of this city will protect you from me?” he breathes out. “You think coin and courtesy mean anything if I decide otherwise?”

Your gaze drops to his lips as he speaks, and his fingers tighten in your hair, forcing your gaze up to his. “I am dragon-blood. Exile does not strip that from me. It does not make me tame. You play at this because you believe I will abide by Lyseni custom—that I will bow to their law. If I wished to make an example out of you, Lys would not stop me.” His lips curl faintly, eyes flicking briefly to your mouth, then back to your eyes. You feel his breath against your lips. “You provoke me in my own tongue. You touch me without leave. You grind against me like a bitch in heat and call it entertainment. And you think I’ll simply indulge you.”

His hand at your hip shifts, sliding slightly higher to yank you fully into his lap. You suck in a breath as your bodies align. You feel him pressed against your inner thigh, hard, aching as much as your cunt is, but his grip is iron at your waist, refusing to allow you grind down.

“I allow this,” he continues, nails dragging slowly against your scalp as he tilts your head another fraction, “because I choose to, and if I withdraw that choice, no law or magister in this pillowed city will save you from me.” His thumb presses deep into the small of your back, forcing your spine to arch subtly toward him. “If you want to please me, then please me like a good whore, but my patience wanes with your games, and you will not like the result if it’s exhausted.”

You lean in to latch your lips to his jaw, lashes fluttering as you press an open-mouthed kiss there, mapping the sharp lines, teeth teasing pale skin. He inhales sharply through his nose, hand tightening reflexively at your waist, but then he loosens his grip just enough for you to lower your hips so that his clothed cock is pressed against the damp silk covering your cunt. 

He settles back against the cushions, violet eyes lidded as he stares down at you, and you drag your tongue up his throat, along the underside of his chin, to his lips. You bite back a noise that builds in the back of your throat when he parts his lips, tongue sliding against yours as you swipe along his bottom lip before he leans in to press his mouth firmly to yours, deepening the kiss on his own terms.

You let out a quiet moan into his mouth, fingers curling in the silk at his shoulders, heart racing as his tongue maps the inside of your mouth the way you’d mapped the line of his jaw. He tastes exactly how you expected—fire and ash, blood and steel, you want him. You haven’t wanted anyone or anything so badly in your entire life. Before you were cast from black walls and marble palaces, you were given everything you wanted on a silver platter, before you even knew you wanted it yourself; and after, your life became so dull and colorless that even your fleeting desires were shallow, monotonous things, passing and predictable, boring, never lasting for more than a few moments' time. 

But this—the sting of his nails dragging against your skin, the taste of his tongue, the heat of his body, it’s different, it burns, consumes, and you want him. The exiled prince, the dragon—you’re sick of perfume and silk, you want blood and fire, claws that cut through skin and touches that burn, incandescence. Your hands slide from his shoulders to the back of his neck, fingers threading through silver strands, and his mouth falls half ajar against yours when you roll your hips and tug lightly at his hair. His hand slips from your waist to between your legs, and you gasp into his mouth, eyes sliding shut, forehead pressed to his, noses nudging when he slides his fingers against your clothed cunt.

“You say you’re not a whore, yet your cunt weeps like one,” Aerion breathes against your lips disdainfully before leaning in to drag his tongue up the length of your neck. Your lashes flutter, eyes rolling back slightly as his fingers dip beneath the silk, sliding between your wet folds. 

“And you speak as though disgusted,” you reply, breath shuddering against his temple as his teeth bite deep into your pulse point, “yet your body disagrees.”

Aerion doesn’t even bother with a reply, pushing two fingers into your cunt and watching the way you arch against him as he drags them in and out of you. He tilts his head back against the cushions, lips wet and kiss-swollen, eyes lidded as he looks up at you. He says scornfully, “I thought you were to be the one to please me. It seems as though I’m the one doing the pleasing.”

“Shijetra nyke, dārilaros,” you murmur, relishing in the way his breath hitches and body visibly shudders when you speak High Valyrian to him. “Kesan mazverdagon ziry bē naejot ao.”

Forgive me, prince. I’ll make it up to you.

You lean in to press your lips against his again, gasping lightly into his mouth when he presses his thumb to your clit, before he slips his fingers out of you, looking up at you expectantly. You roll his bottom lip between your teeth, feeling his chest vibrate as he fights a groan, and you slide your hand from the nape of his neck down his chest, fingers slipping beneath the hem of his silk pants. 

“I see Vyrano has you dressed like a proper silk boy,” you murmur into his mouth.

Aerion’s lips immediately curl into a snarl, teeth sinking into your bottom lip, as though to prove he’s a dragon and not one of the pretty boys you can find in the pillow houses. Iron floods your mouth, lip stinging painfully, and his lips part to snap out an insult, surely, but your hand dips into his pants before he can, fingers wrapping around his cock. Whatever words were on his tongue immediately die, jaw falling half-slack as your hand glides up and down his length. 

You kiss him again, deeper this time, pushing the blood he drew into his mouth and swallowing the moan he lets out into you when you squeeze gently at the base of his cock, thumb sliding over his tip, smearing the precum leaking from his slit. 

Anyone could see the two of you, you think distantly, a thrill running through your body as your gaze flicks over the balcony, where lanternlight spills gold across flowery decadence, and the drifting servants and laughing nobles below. Some are watching, you realize, noticing that several gazes are already flicking upward to where the two of you are entwined, sharing breath, kisses, touches. 

This is Lys—it is not ordinarily scandalous. Lovers are displayed as often as jewels and tapestries. Half-hidden trysts on balconies are as common as wine spills on marble. Men and women press each other against pillars and cushions every festival night, and the city merely hums in approval, but this—

This is different.

You and the dragon prince are not some merchant’s bored heir and his purchased distraction, or a magister’s son and a painted courtesan. He is fire and blood, and you come from black walls and marble palaces. This is not scandalous, not if it were anyone else, but it is not anyone else.

You let out a breathless laugh, kissing him again, deeper this time—can’t get enough of the taste of him, the warmth of his lips against yours, the heat of his body. One hand still works his cock, quick snaps of your wrist that make his head loll, while the other slips beneath silk to flatten against his abdomen, nails raking gently against his skin. His eyes roll half-back, muscles tensing beneath your hand, hips stuttering, but before he can finish, you pull your hand from his pants.

Aerion hisses, eyes snapping open and violet flaring furiously as his hips jerk up against air, ruining his high just when he was on the precipice. He spits, “You dare—” but you press your lips against his before he can finish the sentence, pushing the silk down to his thighs, just enough so that you can sink down on his cock.

“Hah—” you gasp, head falling back slightly at the feeling of his cock stretching your walls. Your gaze blurs as you look up at the stars above, trying to give yourself a second to adjust, but Aerion’s hands drop down to your waist, nails digging into your skin as he snaps his hips up. Just for a second, you see stars—the tip of his cock forces itself so deep inside of you that you swear, just for a second, that you can feel him in your stomach. “Oh—”

Aerion pushes himself up from where he’s lying back against the cushions, sucking at the crook of your neck before he drags his tongue up to the spot behind your ear. He presses his lips against it as he breathes, “Ao ȳdragon hae iā līve se gaomagon hae iā līve, yn aōha orvorta iksis tolī ȳrda naejot sytilībagon naejot iā līve.”

You talk like a whore and act like a whore, but your cunt is too tight to belong to a whore. 

His abdomen tenses as you answer him by scratching lines through his skin, and you guide him back against the cushions, leaning down to kiss bruises up his pale throat. You press your lips to his again as you finally start to rock your hips, the drag of his cock against your walls making you hot and dizzy. You force down a whimper when he sucks the blood from your bottom lip, where he sank his teeth in before. One of his hands comes up to hold the back of your head, tilting your head so that he can drag his tongue against the roof of your mouth.

He tastes like fire, you think again, licking the inside of his lip, fire and smoke and blood, everything you’ve ever wanted. The more you kiss him, the more heat spreads through you—like a dragon, breathing flames through his mouth into yours, spreading through your chest, your stomach, your whole body, you almost make yourself laugh, but a pointed thrust makes your eyes knock back. 

Aerion lets out a low moan into your mouth, lashes fluttering, the violet of his eyes rolling back slightly when you pick up the pace of your hips. “Fuck,” he gasps. “Ao qogralbar hae iā līve.”

You fuck like a whore.

You laugh into his mouth, rolling his lip between your teeth and biting down hard, drawing blood as he did to you before. He hisses into your mouth, hips jerking, cock twitching inside of you; his pupils are blown wide as he stares up at you, caught between disbelief and desire—can’t believe you have the audacity to spill blood of the dragon, can’t believe the fact that you did almost made him cum.

“Nyke jaelarys naejot kostilus, zaldrīzes dārilaros,”

I aim to please, dragon prince.

Your hand slides behind his head to pull him up so that he’s sitting upright again, chest flush to yours, lips sliding together sloppily, a mess of blood and saliva. His nails dig into your thighs, body tensing briefly as though he plans to flip you onto your back, but before he can, your hands dart down to push his hands off of you, not letting him take control from you. 

He snarls into your mouth immediately, furious, snapping down on your lip again like a—like a dragon, you think again, breathless. A dragon, yes—your dragon, or he will be. Dragons have always existed to be claimed by the old blood, you echo, and he will be yours, one way or another. Your thighs burn on either side of his narrow hips with each bounce on his cock. For the first time since you were cast out, you feel alive again. Your world has returned to fire and steel and incandescent light, and you’ll be damned before you let it go back to the colorless, pillowed world it's been for the last five years.

You kiss him deeper, fuck him faster, and he lets out a ragged, choked noise, breaking his lips from yours to tilt his face to the sky. Your blood and his is smeared across his lower face, lips pink and wet and swollen, a flush high on his cheeks. 

“Gevie,” you breathe out, hands sliding back up his body to cradle his face, forcing him to look at you again. His violet eyes are partially glazed over when they meet yours. 

Beautiful.

Aerion’s head falls forward, and his whole body seizes as he cums inside of you, and you tangle your fingers in his silver hair to crane his head back so that you can press your lips to his again, swallowing his moans. Your free hand slides between your bodies to rub circles over your clit, rolling your hips still, slower now, so you can feel every inch of his cock drag against your walls. His nails claw your thighs when you don’t ease up, teeth grinding together, pulling his lips from yours to toss his head back.

“Qogralbar aspo—qrugh—ōregon va—”

 Fucking bitch—shit—hold on—

Your hips jerk, a gasp muffled into his mouth—the sting of his nails in your thighs, his softening cock twitching inside of you, the way his jaw is clenched and how the vein running down the side of his neck bulges as he strains to not let out a pitched whine, overstimulated. It’s all too much, one last roll of your hips as he spasms beneath you, cock head dragging up against that sweet spot inside of you, and your jaw falls slack against his mouth, a hitch and a whine as your hips stutter, finishing on his sensitive cock. 

The two of you remain like that for a long while, the sound of music and chatter below, foreheads pressed together, sharing the same dizzying sliver of air. When that pleasant, boneless feeling in your limbs starts to subside, you finally roll off of him, onto the velvet cushions next to him, head lolling back so you can look up at the sky, trying to catch your breath, chest heaving, and eyes sliding shut briefly. 

After a few moments pass, you stretch languidly and rise to your feet.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Aerion asks, voice low and gaze lidded as he watches you carefully. 

“Down to the garden,” you say easily, fixing your dress. Aerion looks distinctly offended, pushing himself up onto his elbows. You explain, “I promised the First Magister I wouldn’t hide away up here all night, and now I feel, ah, properly energized to go socialize with these peacocks.”

His eye twitches, and he looks as though he wants to argue, but you turn to leave before he can, ignoring the aggravated puff of air he lets out.

“Tell me,” Aerion calls after you. “Where are you from? Why were you exiled here? Who are you really?”

You give him an easy smile over your shoulder. “I revealed enough secrets tonight, haven’t I?” you drawl as you push the curtain open to leave the balcony and head back down to make your official appearance at the festival. “It would ruin the fun if I revealed the mystery all at once.”

Aerion doesn’t respond, gaze dragging over you as he leans forward to pluck one of the grapes you left on the table between his fingers, rolling it once before popping it in his mouth. After a long moment, his lips curl up into a slow smirk, as though finally deciding to go along with this little game of yours. His eyes slide away, effectively dismissing you as though you weren’t already leaving.

 Your smile widens. “‘Ēva hembar jēda, dārilaros.”

The flowers perched on the table stuck out like a sore-thumb. He grabbed them by their stems, chucking them into a trash can. It didn’t matter that he took his anger out on some innocent flowers—there was no one to call him out for it.

You always teased him whenever he handed you a bouquet. It wasn’t his fault your previous lovers had no class! And there was something about the smile you tried to hide under fragile arguments: “They’re gonna run out of flowers at this rate!” But you loved them, arranging them around the apartment with care, a mournful frown dotted on your brow as you were forced to throw old ones away. It was then that he decided that you’d never be without fresh flowers. It was the least you deserved.

Even now.

Breathe. He braced against the table like a lifeline—couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t bear to look at you. The call haunted him. He had never run so fast, but not fast enough. Finding your body beneath the rubble was a consequence of his failure. He should’ve known it was a trap. Instead, his last memory of your face—pained and scared—would torture him for the rest of his days.

He almost lost control of himself.

That scared him, too.

The room was quiet, his only company the sound of an electronic heartbeat. He was sick of hearing it, yet simultaneously found comfort within it. The contradiction brought an ache to his fingers. Life stopped at the door. Footsteps and chatter didn’t dare breach beyond the threshold. It was a reminder. Everything he’d ever lost. Everything he could lose.

He didn’t know what he’d do if you—he couldn’t continue the thought. He’d faced loss before, but he was faced with the terrifying realization that no person had ever ingrained themselves within him the way you had. The uncertainty alone drove him crazy. How could he ever be without you?

“Are those for me?”

His fingers, drumming into indents on the table, stopped. He hesitated to turn. But he did.

“They’re lovely,” you said, eyes tired. Your smile formed an oasis in the eye of a drought—voice hoarse and sore from disuse. It slipped through his ear like a whisper in the wind, almost left unheard.

But it wasn’t.

He once imagined this in short moments of hope before erasing the thought entirely, reminded of the chance it wouldn’t happen. To run. To hold you and feel you hold him back. Everything he’d say, words he had never been brave enough to utter.

Those plans shattered as he fell to his knees.

“Chuuya!”

Something foul crawled up his throat, paralyzing him from the inside. Tears pooled, stinging his eyes. He choked on every breath, like the ribs around his lungs caved in. His arms trembled beneath him, and he had to ask—why could’t he move? Why couldn’t he do anything right?

The sound of fabric heaved from a broken body became an anchor in the sea. Panic climbed to a peak as his eyes met yours, attempting to clamber out of bed despite the obstacle of tubes, chords, and strained muscles.

“No—shit, baby, don’t get up!” he yelled, barely able to stand as he scrambled toward the bed, almost knocking down the machines around you as he kneeled at your side, head buried in the warmth of your lap. He almost sobbed when your fingers brushed through his hair with a love he no longer believed he deserved.

“Are you okay?” Your voice was laden with concern.

He couldn’t even laugh at his pitiful state, the noise coming out strangled. “Focus more on yourself, sweetheart.”

“Not when you look like you’re about to keel over.”

His spine curled at the stern sweetness of your voice, holding you tight. To think he’d never hear it again—feel the warmth of your body or the touch of your hands.

“I almost lost you.”

Your hands stilled.

“I’m not leaving that easily.”

You didn’t receive the laugh you wanted, Chuuya lifting himself from your lap to note your scattered injuries. Despite being unconscious for a week, many of your injuries remained intact. Blemished speckled your skin with a cut on your lip and a bruise on your cheekbone. Your complexion was puneish, and your eyes were bloodshot. The worst of it was the scattered blistering around your temple, creeping back into your hairline. You were an absolute mess.

But you were breathing and alive, and that’s all you needed to be beautiful.

His hands were gentle, cupping your face like you were the most precious thing in the world—you were to him, at least. You followed after, prying his gloves with your fingers before intertwining his calloused hands with your own. He couldn’t help himself from tracing the ridge of your palm before meeting your wrist, thumb steady against your pulse as he counted every beat.

His lips pressed to your arm, rough and fervent like he was trying to leave a mark—but whether it was on yourself or him, you didn’t know. He was especially careful around your injuries, combating the urge to kiss every inch of skin he could see. Instead, he settled into ghost-like touches, like there was nothing there to begin with. But you both knew.

It wasn’t long until he had mapped your entire arm, traveling up your neck before claiming your lips with the intensity of a man scorned.

“You can’t”—he spoke between panted breaths—“leave me like that. I couldn’t stand it.”

Your hands fastened to his shirt, breath stuttered. “Chuuya, calm down! You don’t know if—”

A creak echoed into the little room. The nurse shared your horrified expression as you tried not to die once more from sheer embarrassment. The worst part was Chuuya—not an ounce of shame written on his face. Honestly, he looked a little smug, only tilting his head to glance before matter-of-factly stating, “She’s awake.”

Thankfully, the nurse decided it was not the time to prod, slipping out of the room like a rabbit caught carrot-handed—or pawed, really.

“Really?” you said, unimpressed.

Yeah. He wasn’t the least bit ashamed.

“Come here, baby,” he replied, deliberately neglecting to answer as he settled you into his lap. And you would’ve teased further—the public display quite an out-of-character moment for the normally chivalrous mafioso—if not for the aching sigh that escaped him as he brought you back into his arms.

His silky red locks were matted and tangled, his complexion pale as he sagged against you. He looked like he’d had a battle with death itself.

“You’re as white as a ghost.” You traced the dark circles that lined his eyes. “When’s the last time you slept?”

He scoffed. “Couldn’t tell ya’. The chairs here ain’t shit when it comes to back support.”

Your brow furrowed.

“Why didn’t you go home?”

He looked at you like the answer was obvious.

“I am home.”

Your heart stuttered. This soft-hearted man would be the death of you, if not anything else. For a moment, nothing else was exchanged but the breath between you. And that was enough.

“You scared me, you know?” He pressed his head against your own, taking you in. Words trembled with the realization that you truly had another chance, one in which he would never take a second for granted. “I’m not leaving you. Not ever. But if I’m not leaving, you can’t either.”

The gentle press of your lips to his skin was more than enough to break the dam welling behind his eyes.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

You hum lightly, but pointedly do not quit it, trailing your finger along the lines of his jaw, down his throat, nail scratching along the curve of his clavicle. His body shivers lightly at that last one, and a sigh pulls from his lips, eyes still too heavy to open.

“Pissin’ me off,” he warns, voice thick with sleep, no real heat behind the words.

“You’re always pissed off,” you say, sliding back down so you can lie with him. You nudge your nose against his cheek, and he exhales, lashes fluttering to look at you. “Can’t I appreciate my husband?”

“Tch,” he clicks his tongue sleepily, pointedly turning his back to you. Childish, you think, almost fondly. Almost. “Y’never this sweet unless ya want something. What is it?”

“I don’t want anything,” you answer, shifting closer to him to slink your arm around his waist, brushing your lips against his shoulder blade before pressing your face into the nape of his neck. He smells like your shampoo—asshole, you told him not to use it. “Maybe I’m just in a good mood.”

You suppose it’s a testament to how tired he is, because he’ll usually bristle and tell you to stop cuddling him like he’s the woman. Now, he only exhales, one hand coming up to where yours is resting so he can entwine your fingers.

“Yeah? Did that old fuck Ogi croak overnight?” he asks, and you let out a huff of laughter, pressing your lips to his shoulder again. “‘m serious. Why ya acting like this? It’s creepin’ me out.”

“Did you know I hated you when we got married?” you ask after a moment, exhaling as you nudge your nose against the nape of his neck.

He snorts. “Ya think your little death glares were subtle or somethin’?” he asks. He adds, “I didn’t exactly like you either.”

You scoff lightly, but you’re smiling. “You had no reason not to like me. I was perfect. You, on the other hand, were an arrogant, entitled asshole.” You pause and then add, “Well, you still are.”

“Perfect,” he echoed with a sharp puff of air. “You were the most infuriating, stuck-up little—” he cuts himself off with another yawn, sighing as he presses his face into the pillow, “—thing I’d ever met. Always lookin’ at me like ya wanted to stab me. Talkin’ back. Didn’t know your place.”

You smile against his shoulder, fingers tightening around his where they’re laced together. “My place is wherever I want to be. Lucky for you, right now I want to be laid up right here in your arms. Aren’t you so lucky?”

“Hn.” He shifts, adjusting so your chest presses more firmly to his back. “You’re trouble. Swear I ain’t ever met a woman who acts so much like a man. Y’tricked me too—actin’ all sweet during the wedding ceremony. Got my hopes up. Thought ya were actually gonna be a good wife.”

You let out a small laugh. “I’m a great wife,” you disagree with a smile, and you don’t have to see his face to know he’s rolling his eyes. “Don’t act like you’re innocent,” you hum, tightening your arm around him. “You made it your mission to antagonize me as much as possible.”

“Were fun to rile up,” he admits, voice muffled against the pillow. “Face would get all twisted up. Thought you might actually try to kill me one day.”

Your lips curl up as you press a kiss just beneath his ear, listening to him let out a soft sigh. “I did try. I would put poison in your tea every morning.”

His back shakes as he laughs. “Yeah? What changed?” 

“Nothing,” you say honestly, nuzzling your face back into his back. “Sometimes I still put poison in your tea, but it’s nonlethal now.”

He snorts and says without heat, “Crazy bitch.” He means it fondly. You know because his thumb brushes your knuckles, slow and absent, because he doesn’t pull away, because he lets you stay curled around him like this. You like him when he’s like this, you decide, too sleepy to be petty and annoying, content to just rest in your arms. You wonder if you should start dosing him with low grade sedatives instead, keep him drowsy and in bed with you, nowhere to go.

“Takes one to marry one,” you murmur, pressing another lazy kiss into the warm skin of his shoulder.

“Tch,” he huffs, but it’s weak. Sleep tugs at his voice again, dragging out the edge of it. You press your forehead between his shoulderblades. The sun has climbed higher now, warming the room, and he sighs, long and deep, dozing back off again. You let your own eyes droop shut again, taking advantage of Naoya’s rare inclination to sleep in.

“Oi,” he says after a moment, voice slipping back toward sleep. “Ya still hate me?” 

“Hm,” you draw out, pretending to take some time to think about it, smiling when you feel him bristle in your arms. “No.”

“... Like me?” he asks, quieter.

You smile softly, kissing the place where his shoulder meets his neck. “Don’t push it.”

DAZAI OSAMU

He's had dark urges like this before. The urge to make blood spill was an urge for him. The use of a gun heavy in his hand making people bleed.

Sure he tasted cake before, but none of it really satisfied him. Never did he feel the overwhelming urge to bite into someone.

Not until now.

Not until you. Bringing back those urges of wanting to make blood being spilt, but now in a different way.

Getting his teeth all and up in you. As of right now he had his face in your opening licking you with all the effort in the world. Fingers pressing down onto your thighs like he was holding a gun.

"Osa-" You whined with a smile. Such sweet yet sick smile. After all, this world was sick. A world of for forks and cakes. Normals should count themselves as lucky. They don't have to be blind by these urges to eat and to be eaten.

"Eat me~"

Dazai grinned widely. Looked like a feral animal. Even felt your body freeze up. Never thought he could go back to that place so soon. Dazai went down on you. Teeth picking at your thighs, pricking with hus canines.

"Oh I will, my sweetness."

Blood eventually did fall down your thighs. Writhing in pain and pleasure as his teeth tore your thighs apart as he opened you up on his fingers. Fluid gushing out furiously without a care. Sliding up his tongue on your skin tasting beloved sweetness befitting of a cake.

Above all the cakes he's had you've been the only one to trap him like this. God, how he wished to savour this but the animal in him was strong. Dazai just wanted to consume you.

Make you part of him so that he won't lose you to anyone or anything.

"Are you really gonna let me do this to you?" Dazai titled his head, like wolf looking down at helpless sheep. Except this sheep welcomed the terror.

"You can do anything to me," Dazai's cock was led to your entrance with no problem. Your lips on his ear whispering, "take whatever you want from. Anything, nothing is too little or too much."

A predator tore your arms and neck. Blood flooding his mouth and onto the sheets. Cruel, that was love. Thrusts onto your ruined hips; both sore and ruined skin. Raw flesh opened wounds hurting back with your walls squeezing so tight onto him.

Clinging to him as he bit hard into your shoulder. Taking more and more.

More than he deserved, but even so, combined with your words, he complied.

NAKAHARA CHUUYA

As a fork Chuuya devoted himself to never fall into his urges. Always trying to stray from cakes to not harm them.

It wouldn't be right of him. To consume ssomeone out of hunger, overwhelming the love you had for them, was cruel. Chuuya was cruel enough.

He was bad enough. Inhuman enough. The world deserved it.

Then you came into his life. A cake that craved him. Letting him feel normal just for once. Letting him feel human, feeling normal for these thoughts of consuming you.

Maybe that's how he ended up with nose sniffing up your forearm. A comforting hand running through his hair.

"Go ahead, Chuuya," You whispered so sweetly into his ear. "Take a bite."

Between your words and the smell of you Chuuya gave in. Teeth seeping into your flesh. Your hands holding onto him as he savored your taste. The frosting, citrus, unbearable sweetness. All so overwhelming.

"More," Chuuya pushed you down. His ability pushed you down. Fingers drifting down the arms that bled. Your own blood, tasting of tastiest buttercream ever, on his tongue. "Can I have more?"

"Oh Chuuya," You pulled him down so that his chin could sit in the valley of your chest, "You can always have more."

Leading his head to lick at your chest. Tongue swirling at your nipples, sucking, and pulling. Chuuya took more and more. Allowing himself to indulge.

"Take all of me Chuuya if you want. Just this once following what your heart wants."

"Thank you-" He moaned when entering you. Flinging your head back at he consume you with so much need. Fingers clinging to his back as he thrusted in to you. Holding on so tight, especially with the sudden activation of his ability.

"Yes-take me! All you want, Chuuya!" You egged him on. It all got so much more intense. Your wetness, tightness, darling words, the pain on him and you. Chuuya kept on going for seconds and you let him.

Feeling his nails gripping so tighr onto your skin, making you bleed. His teeth making you bleed and cry. Pain and pleasure. Chuuya forever making the taste of you last forever.

"Thank you-" Chuuya would thank you.

Thank you for letting him indulge.

EDOGAWA RANPO

A voracious eater he is.

Ranpo ate all kinds of things. Of course, he was curious. The existence of cakes was enthralling.

Above all else, you were a cake. Just the smell of you enticed him. The scent of you is his favorite treat in the world. Both in the food and your existence as a cake. Ranpo can't control himself when introduced to such a darling scent and taste.

His tongue slides down your soft belly. You whined, feeling his tongue, hot and slimy, running down to the valley of your chest. Hands are squeezing your curves, so much like fingers actually running through a physical cake.

"Just lie there and let me devour you." Ranpo's green eyes were layered over with dark desire. He had some restraint to an extent, but even at this point, it was a losing battle.

"You taste so good, cupcake."

You smiled and giggled as he licked up your palm. "That tickles."

A bit of pain itched in your eyes when he bit into your palm. The stretch in your nether regions distracted you from the pain in your palm. A flush of blood floods down onto you and him.

"Good. What a good cake. Fitting for a great detective." His lips licked the blood on his lips. A burst of sweetness and citrus bursts into his mouth. He noted your expression changing at his words. Quickly, he kissed it away, biting your lips. "You're more than that, cupcake, my sweetness."

"The only cake for me, the only person for me." Ranpo smiled widely as he kissed your lips, biting them even more, drawing blood from your lips. Licking inside your mouth as he mounted you on his lap. You held on tight, moaning loudly as he came down on your neck.

"I never want to forget this, you. I don't want you to forget me." Ranpo's smile was needy. Eyes pleading like a puppy. Hands still grabbing onto your curves so tight it might lead to bruises.

"Keep being here with me, and let me taste you. Keep you in me and beside me, forever."

Your smile was blood. Lips cracked and bleeding. Tasting your cake flavor of buttercream. Your hands caressed his hair, and pulling as he took more from you.

"Oh, yes, Ranpo, forever and ever."

NIKOLAI GOGOL

Where there was freedom, there was you. The complete freedom to do anything he wanted to do.

And you let him.

Let him push down to the bed and ravage you. Every single bloody bite mark from his teeth. Fingers so tight the bruises stung. Throat sore from Nikolai taking everything and anything from you.

His life was a fork; he relished it, now at least. After all, he had a reason to let himself loose. To be the one to devour you. Not letting any be able to take a piece out of you.

You were his cake. Not just a slice, the entire cake for him to enjoy.

He made sure you knew that.

"Aw, you're so pretty and all mine." Your legs jolted as he bit into your calf. His hips are hitting your core so tight and hard. Tears flood down your face as he continues assaulting your entire body.

Just a simple display for him to devour, to consume completely.

"Tell me, baby, will you let me eat you, all of you, one day?"

You arched your back at the thought of it. His canines are grazing your skin, licking up the countless bloody injuries he left. Being so hard on your poor body.

"You like that, don't you?" He licked your cheek, bending you so that your knees met your chest. Hips are going so hard and reaching the deepest parts of you.

"So nasty."

"So are you, disgusting clown."

He relished your words. Punishing you with all his strength, licking up your flavor. Smearing your wetness everywhere and licking it up with his tongue. Biting down and making you bleed even harder than before.

"I'm going to be gone if you keep going!" Even so, you clung to Nikolai. A gleeful smile on your lips. Eyes blaring with desire. A hunger to be desired, to be eaten completely, to make him, making Nikolai feel full. Make him feel free.

Feel the freedom that he can consume you with no consequence.

"Oh, my dear," Nikolai grasped your chin tightly and painfully. Eyes crazed and dark, full of desire. He didn't stop his hips, nor did he intend to. Just kept on overwhelming you.

2018 | READER, AGE 25; NAOYA, AGE 27

“So, um, one of my students has become Sukuna’s vessel,” Satoru says casually to you one day over the phone. You blink once, looking down at your phone, then back up at the wall. Naoya gives you a questioning look from where he’s lounging on your couch. “I already made sure the higher-ups can’t execute him just yet, but I’m sure they're going to call a meeting with all of the big sorcerer families about it soon. I thought you should hear it from me first. Anyway—”

“Don’t you dare hang up on me, Satoru,” you hiss furiously. “What the hell do you mean one of your students is the vessel for the King of Curses?”

Naoya’s eyes widen slightly across the room, and he puts his phone down before pushing himself to his feet, making his way over to you. He leans in so that his ear is against the back of your phone, trying to eavesdrop on what Satoru is saying to you. You scowl at him, pressing your hand against his face and pushing him away, much to his distinct displeasure. 

“Well, I mean, I guess vessel is kind of a harsh word. They’re more like cohabiting the same body,” Satoru corrects, and like he can hear the disbelief just in the small puff of air you let out, he sighs. He continues, more seriously, “He ate one of Sukuna’s fingers to protect his friends and Megumi—which, before you yell at me, I agree, was extremely stupid, but it was also extremely brave.” He talks so casually that you can almost forget he’s talking about an ancient calamity wearing a teenager as a hoodie. “Mostly brave. I think I’m leaning more brave than stupid.”

“Satoru,” you say through gritted teeth. You exhale, trying to quell the panic that’s steadily rising in your chest as the weight of what he said to you starts to settle in. You knew something wasn’t right—knew it. You’ve had a bad feeling since the incident at the end of last year, but this— “Just, who is this boy?”

“The kid’s name is Itadori Yuji, fifteen years old. Physically gifted, absurd inclination for cursed energy, moral compass that’ll probably get him killed if I don’t interfere,” Satoru tells you. “The higher-ups want him dead. Immediately. Public execution wrapped up in a neat little bow, so no one has to think twice about it.”

“And what do you want?” you ask quietly, leaning against the wall and rubbing your hand against your face, suddenly very, very tired. 

“To keep him alive,” Satoru replies simply. “Long enough to eat all twenty fingers.”

Which means Satoru probably has at least one of the twenty hidden away somewhere no one could ever hope to find. He wouldn’t push for an alternative that still ended in the boy’s execution. You exhale, gaze shifting up to the ceiling. 

“You’re putting a lot on this kid, Satoru,” you say quietly.

“I know, but what am I supposed to do? Let the old bastards murder him?” Satoru asks quietly, sounding a bit tired himself. “Anyway, that’s why I’m gonna be staying right next to him. Like a very handsome, overpowered babysitter.”

You laugh despite yourself, shaking your head. “You’re an idiot,” you say. “I’ll come to the school to meet him before I attend the meeting.” You can see the smug smile on his face without even hearing him say anything. “I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”

“Oh, I know,” he replies easily, “but you are agreeing to look. Still a win.”

“I’ll be there tomorrow. Unannounced. Don’t tell them.”

“Please do—the kids love surprises. Builds character.”

“And if I decide this is a terrible idea, Satory? That the risk is too high?” 

There’s a long pause on the other end. “Then you’ll say it to my face, and I’ll listen. Well, I’ll probably end up ignoring you, but I’ll listen at first, at least.”

You roll your eyes. “How generous.”

“I try,” Satoru answers, and you hang up the phone, turning to Naoya, who’s still disgruntled by the way you shoved him away.

“What the hell was that?” Naoya asks, and you stare at your phone a second longer than necessary before letting your arm drop to your side. “Hello?”

You let out a long exhale through your nose. “That,” you say slowly, already dreading the oncoming headache, “was Satoru informing me that the King of Curses is currently squatting inside a fifteen-year-old, and the higher-ups are going to be dragging us all to a meeting about it.”

Naoya stares at you. “And you’re… going to meet the vessel, instead of just letting it die?” he asks, voice a low drawl. “You know, I know you’re a woman, but you can’t seriously be this soft-hearted. We’re talking about Sukuna, the King of Curses, y’know?”

You give him a sharp look. “Watch it.”

“What?” he scoffs, folding his arms over his chest. “I’m not wrong. This ain’t some stray he found bleeding on the street. It’s the King of Curses wearing some kid like a skin.”

“I’m not arguing with you right now, Naoya,” you say flatly, shaking your head and turning away. “You—”

“There’s no argument at all. You’re not fuckin’ going to go talk to this kid, end of story,” Naoya says so firmly that it makes your eye twitch. “I’m serious.”

“You don’t get to order me around, Naoya,” you remind him, voice low. “Don’t piss me off right now, I already have a headache.”

“There’s no point,” he says dismissively, lips pinched. “You know damn well the clans ain’t gonna protect him. The moment Satoru-kun isn’t looking, they’re gonna push for an execution anyway. You’re gonna go there and talk to this thing, and it’s gonna be wearing the face of a kid, and you’re gonna get attached, and then you’re gonna be all upset when it’s inevitably killed. And I ain’t fuckin’ dealing with it, not when you knew better and went anyway.”

“It’s not your call to make.”

“No, but it’s going to be my fucking problem when this turns out exactly how we both know it’s going to.”

You scoff, looking away. “Fuck off,” you tell him. “You’d rather I sign off on the execution of a kid barely through junior high without even making an informed decision?” 

“Yeah,” Naoya answers immediately, no hesitation. “That’s exactly what I’d rather.”

The two of you stare at each other for a long moment, and Naoya’s expression is tight in a way that you haven’t seen in a while, with frustration and irritation. He really doesn’t want you to see this kid, you realize, exhaling through your nose.

“I’ve seen curses wear human faces before,” Naoya continues through gritted teeth, and your gaze shifts to the side because you know exactly what he’s talking about, even if he doesn’t know you know. “They cry and beg and pretend, but it always ends the same. You know this. This ain’t fuckin’ you. You’re not this stupid—you’ve never let sentiment get in the way of making the right call like this before. You know I’m right. Don’t go see this kid.”

You tell him quietly. “It’s not your call to make, Naoya.”

Naoya lets out a sharp, breathless laugh, shaking his head. “Whatever. Go then. Just don’t come cryin’ to me when the kid is axed, yeah?” 

————————

You meet Itadori Yuji the next day, alongside his two classmates: Nobara Kugisaki and Fushiguro Megumi. You’ve met Megumi plenty of times before through Satoru, but you can tell the boy is on edge this time, because you’re not here as someone who is friends with Satoru—you’re here as someone who will have a say in whether his friend lives or dies. His jaw is tight as you make your way over to the small group, and he greets you properly with an incline of his head, but you can see his fists are tight at his side. Nobara watches you like a hawk next to him, scrutinizing you with narrowed eyes and downturned lips. 

Itadori Yuji is nothing like you expect. He’s painfully ordinary at first glance—just a boy, broad-shouldered, tall for age, athletic. You don’t immediately sense Sukuna’s presence within him; only when you really focus do you feel the pressure of him beneath the surface, a predator lying in wait, amused by the illusion of normalcy. Yuji doesn’t look angry or sad or frustrated, like you expect. He looks too alive, too present, grinning easily as if he hasn’t already been condemned by people who have never bothered to learn his name. The contrast is nauseating. A boy who smells of sweat and summer air, housing something that treats blood as an art form, and a world that simply does not care to distinguish them as different.

Your headache returns with a vengeance.

(“Introduce yourself,” you say, arms folded over your chest as you stare at the boy.

Yuji straightens, pressing his fist to his chest. “My name is Itadori Yuji. I like karaoke and watching TV, and all kinds of food, but my favorite is noodles. And rice bowls. I hate science—and before you ask, my hair is naturally this color.”)

He is just a boy.

They are just children. 

(“Why the hell are you dating him?” Kugisaki demands, jutting her thumb in Satoru’s direction. Your eyes widen, partially at the audacity, and partially at the sheer idea. Also, because Naoya would have a fit if he knew Satoru’s students thought you were his girlfriend. “He sucks. You could do better. I hate seeing a woman waste her time.”

Your brain short-circuits for a half second, lips parting, but no words leave them. You lift your hands and wave them in front of you. “I—no—we are not—”

Satoru, naturally, chooses that moment to lean in, grin widening to an infuriating degree. “Wow,” he says, delighted. “Is that how it looks? Because I’m not against the rumor mill, per se—”

You drive your elbow back without looking; it lands solidly in his ribs. You repeat, “We are not dating, and Satoru should not be encouraging any rumors, because he knows I’ll be dealing with a very unhappy dog when I go back to Kyoto.”

Kugisaki tilts her head to the side suspiciously, and Megumi presses his face in his hands.

Yuji, on the other hand, lights up. “Oh! So you’re not dating Gojo-sensei?” he asks. “That’s good, I was worried for a second.”

“Why,” Satoru asks, wounded, “is everyone acting like that would be a tragedy?” 

“Because it would be,” Kugisaki and Megumi say in perfect unison.

Satoru gapes, and Yuji laughs, easy and unburdened, and the sound catches you off guard. A normal kid, you think again—he sounds like a normal kid. A kid who should be arguing about movies or food, not facing a death sentence. 

“So, who’s the unhappy dog?” Kugisaki asks with a grin, leaning forward. “You are dating someone then?”

“If you think I’m bad,” Satoru cuts in again with a snort, “you should see the guy she actually puts up with. Real charmer. Big personality. Loves tradition a little too much. Megumi-chan has met him, actually. Tell them about Zenin Naoya later, would you? Then maybe you’ll all stop acting like I’m the worst catch.”

Kugisaki and Yuji immediately start hounding Megumi for information, and your smile starts to drop once their attention is off you. You feel Satoru’s gaze heavy on you, even behind the blindfold, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.)

They are just children.

He is just a boy.

The thought follows you as you leave, as you let Satoru keep talking, as Kugisaki’s voice fades into the background and Megumi’s wary attention lifts from your back. Yuji calls after you, shouting goodbye when he realizes you’re leaving, and there’s an ache in your chest that you can’t push away. 

He is just a boy. 

They are just children.

When the higher-ups call for a meeting with representatives from all of the major clans, Naobito sends Naoya to attend in his place. It’s on purpose, you bet, because although the man has stopped with the open meddling and trying to ruin your relationship with his son, he’ll still take any chance to drive a wedge between the two of you. When the higher-ups ask to hear opinions from the sorcerer families, the Zenins—Naoya—is the first to speak, expression bored, voice a low drawl: 

Just kill it and be done with it. This shouldn’t even be a conversation. You’re wasting my time. 

The meeting goes exactly how you and Satoru expect it to go. You stay silent for most of it, letting Satoru do the dirty work of essentially telling the rest of Jujutsu society to fuck off and try him, if they think they can take him in a fight. Still, you make your position clear, because although your eyes are closed and you’re leaning back against the wall, silent, face turned down, you’re still standing next to Satoru, and not Naoya.

Naoya doesn’t come back to your estate after the meeting. You don’t really expect him to, because he scoffs at you and raises his chin as he leaves the room, hardly sparing you more than a glance. Satoru grimaces and makes a comment about a lover’s spat, but you only roll your eyes and keep your gaze lowered, a heavy feeling in your heart because—

Because Naoya is right. 

You know how this is going to end, but you went ahead and did this anyway. You’ve lived long enough in this world to understand its patterns, to recognize when fate has already chosen its shape and is simply waiting for everyone else to catch up. Children who carry curses do not get happy endings, not in a society built on blood and duty—you don’t need Naoya to tell you this. And you think, maybe, if it were anyone other than Satoru who asked you to meet him, to see the boy walking up the thirteen steps to the gallows before the knot is tied, you would’ve turned your back and let it happen, because why the hell would you put yourself through that?

But it wasn’t anyone else; it was Satoru, who stood before the higher-ups and argued on your behalf, similarly to how he does for Yuji now. Satoru, who didn’t let you sink when you lost Naoya for three years after the engagement fell apart ten years ago. Satoru, who stayed with you in the aftermath of you losing your family, forcibly kept you afloat when Naoya was sent away, and you were trying to drown. Satoru knows just how awful this world is, and he still chooses to defy it anyway—and you know he doesn’t expect anyone to stand with him, not even you, not really, but you also know what it costs him to stand alone in rooms like that, and how are you supposed to do that when he’s only ever stood at your side when you needed it?

You think that’s what pisses off Naoya the most.

You don’t mean for it to come across that way—that you’re choosing Satoru over him, because you’re not. When it comes down to it, it is Naoya, who you will always come home to. Naoya, who you always seek out. Naoya, who you see a future with and cannot see a future without. Naoya, who you need if you want to keep walking forward in this shitty world. 

It is Naoya—it’s always Naoya, it has always been Naoya and it always will be him—and you think he knows that, deep down, but he is terribly prone to anger and jealousy, so he doesn’t take this slight well. 

He doesn’t avoid you for too long. By the time Saturday comes along, he finally decides to answer your messages, quite crudely telling you to come over because “he’s sick of fucking his own fist.” You don’t dignify his text with a response, but you do make your way to the Zenin estate. You don’t apologize, and he doesn’t either—you don’t need to, you both understand what the other doesn’t say the moment your eyes meet.

(“Y’know you’re makin’ a mistake,” he murmurs, one arm draped around you as you settle into his lap. For all of his vulgarity, the only thing he seems intent on doing once you arrive at the Zenin estate is keeping you close, so you sink into him, eyes sliding shut as you rest your head against his shoulder. “Y’don’t need me tellin’ ya this.”

“I know,” you reply quietly. “So don’t.”

Naoya exhales hard through his nose, fingers tightening on your hip. “Whatever,” he mutters. “I don’t even know why I try, ya stubborn bitch. You piss me off so bad.” You smile, ghosting your lips against his jaw, down his neck. He clicks his tongue sharply, disapproving, even as he tilts his head to the side to give you better access. “Actin’ like a cockwhore when I’m pissed at ya as if it’s gonna change anything. I’m not in the mood. So fuckin’ irritating, don’t know why I put up with this shit.”

“You’re hard.”

“Shut the hell up!”)

Itadori Yuji dies, and despite Naoya’s insistence about how you better not come to him crying when he inevitably does, he lets you spend the night tucked under his arm, and doesn’t gloat or make any snide comments about how he told you this was going to happen. You don’t mourn, and you don’t cry—not really—you only knew him for a few weeks, the several Fridays you came down to Tokyo to train the new first years. But he was kind, and he was only a boy, and Satoru cared about him, so there’s a heaviness in your chest that you can’t easily push away.

Then he resurrects, and Naoya loses his mind. You think it’s less because he wanted the kid dead, and more because death would’ve ended it. Death would’ve been final, a wound that could scar over. He was there for you when you thought it was done, even though he told you he wouldn’t be, and now, it’s going to happen all over again. 

And then, as though things can’t get worse, hell breaks loose at the Kyoto Sister School Goodwill event when a curtain drops over Tokyo High, and special grade spirit and a bunch of curse users attack the students. 

You don’t like it—you don’t like any of it, and as the days pass, and Halloween approaches, the pit in your stomach only seems to get deeper.

————————

“You been actin’ weird for almost a month,” Naoya murmurs, and your eyes slide shut as he presses his lips to yours again, a long, lingering kiss that makes your chest warm. “What’s up your ass, hm?”

“It never fails to astound me how eloquent you are, Naoya,” you sigh, lashes fluttering as he rolls your bottom lip between his teeth, biting down slightly at the veiled insult. When he pulls back, you lean up to kiss him again, humming into his mouth when one arm slides beneath your back to pull your body closer to him. “I just have a bad feeling, that’s all.”

“Still?” he asks, raising his eyebrows, pulling back slightly to look at you. “How many times do I gotta tell you we’re gonna be fine? You’re gonna give yourself grays—what’s it you said back then? How ya don’t want me graying for our wedding portrait? Well—”

Naoya lets out an oof when you use your leg as leverage to flip the two of you over. He looks far too smug, leaning up on his elbows as he stares up at you, gaze dragging down your body. He lifts his hand to trail his fingers from your jaw to your neck, your collarbone, the valley between your breasts, down your abdomen, before they linger on your pelvis.

“Like seein’ ya all marked up like this,” he says, too satisfied with himself. “I should take a picture, make it my background on my phone.” 

“No,” you say, before his gaze can even flick over to where his phone is lying haphazardly on the tatami mats a few feet away. He scowls. “You leave your phone around too much. You really want to chance Ogi getting a glimpse of it?”

He frowns at the thought. “Old fuck. Can’t get his wife to spread her legs for him anymore, probably’d get off to seeing ya,” he mutters disdainfully. Then he compromises, “I’ll make it my home screen, not lock screen.”

“Everyone and their mother knows your passcode is your birthday, Naoya,” you say dryly, leaning down to ghost your lips against his before he can get annoyed. He lets out a pleased hum against your lips, hands settling on your waist, thumbs pressing into your sides as you swipe your tongue against his bottom lip. He lets out a low groan when you suck it gently into your mouth, grip tightening on your body.

“Yeah? You go snoopin’ through my phone when I leave it around, ya crazy bitch?” he asks, lip curling up into a too-satisfied smile. Leave it to him to get smug instead of offended at the idea of you snooping through his shit.

You hum in agreement, dragging open-mouthed kisses down his throat, relishing in the way his breath hitches. “Installed a tracking app too. Your Reddit posts are riveting, by the way,” you tell him, smiling against his skin as he immediately tenses. “‘Is it normal to want my girl t—’”

You yelp when you feel him shove his hand over your mouth, effectively shutting you up. He flips the two of you over so that he’s hovering on top of you, face flushed and ears burning. He mutters, “Shut the hell up,” before moving his hand away, hardly looking you in the eye.

“It is, by the way,” you add, because you can’t help yourself. “We can try it, if you—”

“Enough,” he complains.

You laugh loudly, genuinely, despite the terrible feeling that’s been haunting you for months, because it’s always easy to laugh with Naoya. Your hand flies to your mouth to smother your giggles, but you only set yourself off into another fit when you see that Naoya is half-hiding his face in one of his hands. Your vision swims with tears, coughing as you try to calm yourself down.

By the time you settle down, Naoya is looking at you with an unusually mellow expression, gold eyes tracing your face, lips curved up only faintly. You blink up at him and ask, “What is it?”

“I got ya something,” he tells you after a moment, throat bobbing, gaze flicking somewhere off to the side.

“Oh yeah? You keep buying me things unprompted. I feel so special,” you tease, but you’re curious when you see his nostrils flare as he takes a deep breath. “What did you get me?”

His brows furrow as he reaches beneath his futon for something he must’ve hidden there. He talks as he rifles around. 

“My family don’t really do shit like this,” he starts to say. “I mean, y’know how engagements go. But I know you and your brother spent a couple years in the west, and part of your mom’s family was from out there, too. And ya kept putting on those shitty western romcoms that always ended with one of those gaudy proposals, and I don’t know if that was your way of trying to clue me in or what—” Your brows furrow in confusion, not sure what he’s going on about, but you don’t interrupt because he seems to be on some sort of practiced spiel. “—and I ain’t gonna do somethin’ gaudy and embarrassing like that, but I don’t mind the idea of you walkin’ around with somethin’ on your finger so people know you’re taken.”

Oh, you think, lips parting as you start to realize where his ramblings are going. You hardly breathe as you stare up at him, when you see in his hand a glittering ring. Not overly garish, but pretty enough that it would catch a person’s eye easily. Something you could wear on missions without having to worry about it getting in the way, something very… you.

“So, you want it or not?” Naoya asks brusquely, still hardly looking at you. “It cost a pretty fuckin’ penny, so if ya don’t want it, I’m returning it.”

You snort, but your eyes are a bit misty. “You’re an idiot,” you murmur fondly. “Of course I want it.”

Naoya exhales through his nose, tension easing from his shoulders, and he reaches for your left hand, thumb grazing over your knuckles before he slides the ring onto your fourth finger. He stares down at it for a moment, and you stare up at him, watching the way his lips tighten and his throat bobs. 

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” he scoffs after a moment—obligatory. 

“I would never,” you say with an easy smile, and then you lift your hands to cradle his face between your palms. 

His lashes flutter shut as he leans into your touch, and you let out a soft puff of air. You want to say something, but you can’t find the words to articulate how you feel right now, and you think he understands from the way his eyes slide back open to meet yours. 

So instead, you lean up and press your lips against his again, and again, and again, until his body is flush against yours, hips slotted between your thighs, and arms wrapped tight around your body.

Being with him like this—in his arms, his bed, a new weight resting on your finger and a familiar one pressed on top of you, it’s easy to believe him when he says the two of you will be fine. 

————————

OCTOBER 31, 2018

At 7:00 PM on Halloween, a curtain with a four-hundred-meter radius is cast over Shibuya. You are at your clan’s estate in Kyoto when it happens, and Naoya is in Hokkaido meeting with the higher-ups on his father’s behalf. You and Naobito go to Tokyo together when Tokyo High calls for reinforcements, and there is a sick feeling in your stomach the whole trip there. Naobito offers you sake to settle your nerves, and you almost throw it in his face, because neither of you should be drinking when you have no idea what’s happening in Shibuya. 

You call Satoru before he goes into the curtain, and even though he tells you not to bother coming because he’ll have it handled before the two of you even get to the city, you can’t push away the way your stomach churns.

(“Just be careful, Satoru. Don’t let your guard down.”

“Who are you even talking to right now?”)

It doesn’t take long for news to reach Hokkaido. You’re sure that the higher-ups were made aware the moment that the curtain dropped, but Naoya, clearly, was not prioritized, because by the time he’s been told what’s happening, you’re already outside the barrier with Shoko.

(“Do not go anywhere near that barrier,” Naoya says before you’ve even brought your phone to your ears.

You stare at the barrier a few feet in front of you. “It’s a little too late for that.”

Shoko stands at your side, cigarette a nub between her fingers before she flicks it off to the side. She tells you, “I’m going to head back to the expressway. You fine on your own?”

“On your own?” Naoya hisses furiously. “Where is my father? Isn’t he in Shibuya too? Why aren’t you with him?”

You give Shoko a dirty look, but she only winks at you before waving lazily over her shoulder. You exhale, leaning against the wall behind you. “Your father is leading a different team. They’ve already gone in. The Kyoto students are meeting me here, and then we’re going into the veil. The transfigured humans have started butchering civilians, and Satoru hasn’t been in contact, I—”

“You think I give a damn about any of them?” Naoya asks with a scoff. “You only just came back from mandatory leave after what happened in Kyoto last year. You’re not cleared for this. You have no business throwing yourself into another disaster.”

Your eye twitches. “I’m cleared enough, and I’m already here.”

You hear Naoya let out a sharp breath on the opposite line, riddled with something caught between panic and fear that he’s probably desperately trying to suppress. You can see the way his lips are probably pinched, eyes teeming with frustration as he rubs at his lower face. “If you go in there—” he starts to say and cuts himself off. “If something happens to you—”

You can’t deal with this right now.

“I gotta go, Naoya,” you say when you see the Kyoto second and third year students round the corner—well, all of them except Todo Aoi, apparently. Your lips curve into a slight frown. Why does that boy always have to be so difficult?

“Don’t you dare fuckin’ hang up on me—”

“How about you go be a proper house husband, take the next flight back, so you can have dinner and a bath ready for me after I finish killing all the big, bad curses, yeah?” 

“This isn’t a fucking joke—”

You hang up as the kids come to a stop in front of you. You greet pleasantly, “Mai-chan,” and then less pleasantly, “Kamo.” You don’t remember the rest of their names, so you ask instead, “Where’s Utahime?” 

“She stopped at the expressway to speak to Yaga-san. She’ll be joining as soon as she’s able to,” Noritoshi explains. “We’re prepared to do what we can in the meantime.”

“Alright,” you tell them. Then tell them the same thing you told the Tokyo second years at Kyoto last year: “I’m not going to be babysitting you. Stick together, and stay in this general area if you can. If you get in trouble, run. We’re sorcerers, not heroes.”

You look down at your phone as Naoya calls you again, exhaling before you decline the call and shove your phone into your pocket, stepping into the veil.)

You don’t plan to use your technique the way you did in Kyoto when you enter the veil, because you can’t risk being put out of commission again. The Kyoto students dart off to engage the transfigured humans attacking civilians in the streets, and you’re left staring at the chaos alone. Screams are coming from every direction, the wet cracks of bodies breaking, and the scent of blood is so thick that it makes you nauseous—Satoru would never let it get to this point, not if he were here.

Something happened to him. You know it.

The thought feels sacrilegious almost because Satoru is Satoru. Gojo Satoru, the strongest, self-proclaimed honored one—he’s the last person you would ever expect to get caught up in a bad situation like this. He wouldn’t get himself hurt, or worse, k—you don’t even finish that thought. But you know Satoru, and he’s not some omnipotent god, he’s just a man, and this was clearly a trap for him if what you heard about all of the civilians saying his name and asking for him was true, so if something tricked him—

You send yourself into a spiral, and to put your nerves at ease, you tell yourself that you will only activate your maximum technique for a second, just enough to orient and pinpoint him, just to make sure he’s okay, and to stop you from spooking yourself. You anchor yourself in the center of the street, and you lift your right hand, pointer finger brushing your forehead and thumb resting on your lip, and the world detonates. 

Cursed energy floods your senses all at once, a violent, blinding surge that makes you stagger as Shibuya peels itself open for you. The streets, buildings, and underground flatten into a board all around you, every square is occupied by something—you’ve never felt so much cursed energy in one place before. Your skull is screaming before you even fully extend your technique. 

This isn’t a battlefield so much as it is a slaughterhouse, and you know where the most serious threats are, and you know where civilians are clustering, but you don’t know where Satoru is.  

You don’t know where Satoru is.

Your nose starts bleeding before five minutes have passed, desperately searching even though you know you should’ve pinpointed him by now—he has always been a landmark in chaos, so overwhelming that it’s impossible to miss. But you can’t, he’s not here, and—and you can feel something faint, something familiar coming from the direction of Shibuya Station, but it can’t be him, it’s too weak, too still, too contained, not Satoru as you know him. 

Something happened to him. You don’t—

(A hand on your shoulder draws you out of your technique. Kamo Noritoshi stands above you, lips curved down into a frown; you brush off his hand immediately. You didn’t even realize that you’d dropped to your knees. You wipe away the blood on your face and stand.

His lips part, then press together, and then he asks, “Should we bring you to Shoko-san?”

“No,” you say. “I’m going in further. To Shibuya Station. You’ll be okay watching over them?” 

Noritoshi nods once, brows furrowing slightly. He says firmly, “Be careful.”

You think that there’s some irony that you’re here, standing with a Kamo of all people, as the world falls into chaos around you, and the smile that curls to your lips is bitter as you shake your head. Noritoshi falters slightly when he sees your reaction. He’s a child, you remind yourself—the sin of the parents is not the sin of the child, so all you say is, “You too,” before you make your way to the center of the veil.)

————————

Shibuya is hell. 

Hell doesn’t even do it justice, really. Bodies are everywhere, too many, everywhere you look, twisted in ways that make your stomach churn. You wonder, absently, if this is what your estate looked like before the Zenins got there to clean up, if this is what you would’ve seen of your father, brothers, and the rest of your clan if you’d arrived before them. Civilians lie where they fell, some half melted into the ground, others collapsed in clusters like they tried to shield each other and failed. Sorcerers are scattered among them, bloodied uniforms unmistakable even when their bodies are broken past recognition.

You try not to look too long.

You can’t look too long.

You don’t stop to help. Sometimes, you divert just long enough to pull someone out of a curse’s path, to kill a transfigured human before it finishes tearing someone apart, to shove a screaming civilian toward an escape route that may or may not still exist, but you don’t stop. Because you are selfish, and if you had to choose between innocent civilians and the people you love, you would choose the people you love every time.

So, you leave countless people to die as you run toward Shibuya Station.

By the time you get there, your limbs feel heavy, and there is bile in the back of your throat. You wonder how many screams have silenced since you passed by, how many people died so that you could selfishly figure out what happened to Satoru.

The putrid scent of burnt flesh floods your nostrils before you can figure out where it’s coming from, and you almost don’t even recognize Naobito when you turn a corner and see a charred corpse on the ground. He’s burned so badly that for a second, your brain refuses to name what you’re looking at as a person, let alone someone you’ve known for twenty years. His clothes are fused into charred flesh, and his arm is missing—somehow, he is still breathing. 

You think that you should leave him there.

You stare down at him. His eyes are open, glassy and unfocused, and you don’t know if he’s seeing you, if he knows what’s going on, or if his body just hasn’t realized it’s finished yet. His mouth moves slightly, a wet, broken sound escaping him that might be a breath or might be a word. 

You could do it. You could just walk away.

You remember the way Naoya would stiffen as a kid whenever Naobito’s voice carried through the estate. You remember the bruises and the wounds that would litter his body whenever he came out of the disciplinary pit. You remember how he would mock you when he was drunk, and you were a child, and you had to stand there and smile through it or risk bringing shame to your father. You remember how he humiliated you by trying to arrange for Naoya to marry another woman right in front of you.

You need to find whatever that familiar energy was, anyway. 

You need to figure out what happened to Satoru.

You should just go.

But he is also the man who stepped in when your family was wiped out, and you know that it wasn’t out of kindness, but he opened his doors anyway. He made sure you could fill your father’s shoes without drowning in the politics of a world and future you were never prepared for. He is—probably—the only reason why you’ve made it this far after the massacre. What type of karma would await you if you walk away from him now after everything he did for you?

Fuck. 

Your jaw tightens, bile burning in the back of your throat. 

Fuck.

“Fuck you, you old bastard,” you say through your teeth, and you crouch despite yourself. 

Your hands hover for a second before you force them to move, assessing injuries you already know are catastrophic. The burns are too extensive, and his cursed energy is unstable. He should not be alive, and you don’t know if saving him is possible, but you’re not even sure you want to anyway. 

Either way, you can’t bring yourself to walk away.

Frustrated, you look back in the direction of where you thought you felt something familiar, and your chest tightens as you look back down at Naobito. You don’t have fucking time for him—you don’t know what’s happening, don’t know what the situation is. Maki and Kugisaki are supposed to be with him, too, but you don’t see either of them anywhere. 

Fuck.

“I hope this fucking hurts.”

————————

Satoru is gone. 

The King of Curses was unleashed. 

Shibuya is a crater, and anyone left in the city is likely dead.

You sit at the expressway, back to the wall, as people rush around you, trying to do whatever they can to save whoever they can. Megumi, Kugisaki, and Maki are here too, evidently having been brought before you arrived with Naobito. Megumi is unconscious, but alive. Maki is bandaged and burned almost as badly as Naobito, but she’s breathing, if only barely. Shoko thinks that she’ll pull through—she’s always been stronger and more stubborn than everyone else around her, you think fondly. Kugisaki, on the other hand—well, you don’t know what happened to her, and Shoko isn’t sure if she’s going to make it. She wasn’t breathing when she was brought to her.

Satoru is sealed. Satoru is gone. Satoru is—

You bury your face in your hands. 

Fuck.

“Is it true, girl?” Naobito rasps from next to you. He is dying—there’s nothing more that Shoko can do for him—but he is not dying fast enough for your liking. “Is Gojo Satoru incapacitated? Sealed away?”

You almost bare your teeth at him, because what right does he have to ask about Satoru? What right does he have to say his name in that tone? What right does he have to sound so dismissive over what happened to him? How dare he? How dare he? Rage eats away at grief as you glare at him. 

“Don’t look at me like that, girl. Answer the question.”

Fuck.

Your eyes slide shut as you will yourself the patience not to expedite the man’s imminent death. You mutter, “Fuck off. Why’s it taking you so long to die?”

Naobito barks out a harsh laugh that he certainly shouldn’t have the strength to let out. You roll your eyes. “Almost there, girl,” he tells you, voice rough as he stares up at the ceiling. He’s sprawled beside you on the concrete, chest hitching unevenly, breath rattling, burned to the bone, and he still finds the energy to sneer. “Bet you’re thrilled, aren’t you? I’ll finally be out of your way.”

You don’t answer him, staring down at the concrete, jaw tight, listening to the wet, broken sound of his breathing. 

Satoru is gone. 

Satoru, who you’ve known for fifteen years, since the two of you were stupid kids lounging in the inner courtyard of the Zenin estate. Satoru, who handed you back your future at fifteen when your father was going to marry you off to the next best suitor. Satoru, who grabbed your hand and dragged you along with him during the three years you and Naoya weren’t speaking, refusing to let you drown. Satoru, who collected an exorbitant amount of Tamagotchi and would light up whenever you brought him a new one. Satoru, who let you be yourself when so many people around you wanted to change. Satoru, who found you safe enough to actually be himself with you—not the strongest, not Gojo, just Satoru. 

Satoru is gone. Satoru is—

Naobito keeps speaking, and you just want him to stop.

“No more old man meddling. No more obstacles. Must feel like freedom, hm?” His lips twitch. “You and my son can ruin each other freely, at last.” Naobito chuckles, though it turns into a cough halfway through. He sighs. “I suppose you’ve won. I’ll be dead soon enough.”

“Can’t you die silently?” you ask through gritted teeth. 

All of his stupid Tamagotchi are going to die, you realize numbly. He has so many of them, how the hell are you supposed to take care of all of them? You want to cry. Satoru is—

“Hope you’ll be enough for him now,” he adds, letting out a long, scratchy exhale. “He’s going to need someone.”

“What does that mean?” you ask, stomach dropping as you finally force yourself to look at him. Naobito’s eyes flick sideways, just barely, toward the mat where Megumi is still unconscious. “Why are you looking at Megumi-chan? What are you talking about?” 

“Gojo Satoru is incapacitated,” Naobito says, wetting his lips as his eyes begin to droop again. “The contract I made with that wayward nephew of mine will be upheld. Toji’s boy will become the twenty-seventh Zenin clan head. Funny how things work out, right?” 

What?

Your ears are ringing, lips parted as you stare at Naobito, half in disbelief, half in shock. You’re almost waiting for him to laugh, to tell you it’s some sick joke, another drunken rambling, a cruelty meant to provoke reaction before he laughs and waves it away. But his eyes are slipping, lids heavy, breath uneven and shallow. There’s no room left in him for theatrics.

“What? How—How could you do that to him?” you breathe out, staring at the man as though he’ll answer, even though he’s slipped back into oblivion. “How could you—he’s spent his whole life—he’s—he’ll never—”

You think you’re having a panic attack. 

You haven’t had one in years—not since the aftermath of losing your clan—but everything starts to hit you all at once, and you can’t seem to breathe. Satoru is gone, one of his kids is dead, Satoru is gone, another will have his death sentence reinstated soon, Satoru is gone, and Naoya—you’re going to lose Naoya, too.

You’re going to fucking lose Naoya.

You know it. You know it. You know it the same way you’ve known something bad was coming for months—you feel it in your bones, in your heart, in your soul. You’re going to lose him. You lost Satoru, and you’re going to lose Naoya. You press your hands into your eyes hard, desperately trying to calm yourself down as your breath comes too quickly and too shallow. Naoya—he’s centered everything, his entire existence, around being the next clan head. You’ve known this for years, you’ve known it since the moment you met him—it was the first understanding you ever came to about him, how everything began and now it’s how everything will end.

Because losing it—losing it—it’ll destroy him. It’ll destroy everything. It will hollow him out, leave nothing behind besides rage and denial. He’ll destroy himself, and he’ll destroy you; he’ll drag the entire Zenin clan, the whole world, down with him if that’s what it takes to prove that this was a mistake, to take back what’s rightfully his. He’s sacrificed too much for anything else. This will destroy him.

You’re going to lose him, you think again, you’re really going to fucking lose him. 

Naobito is a cunt—hope you’ll be enough for him, he said, but you’ll never be enough for him, not after losing this. He knows that, you know that. Naoya will never wake up one day and decide it’s okay. He’ll never decide a life with you is enough to make up for what was taken from him. He will never look at you and say, I choose this instead—and if he isn’t able to get back what he was promised, he’ll die trying. He’ll spiral. He’ll find someone to blame. He’ll try to claw the title back through sheer force of will, and when that fails, he’ll turn to violence without hesitation, without mercy. And if he cannot take it back, he will die trying. There is no world where Naoya will survive having something like this taken from him; no future with you will change that. There is no coming back from this.

And Megumi—you can’t just sit back and let Naoya go after Megumi. Not one of Satoru’s kids, especially not now that Satoru is gone. You doubt he even knows—he hates this part of the Jujutsu world, hates the Zenin name. He would never want this anyway, but Naoya will see him as a thief, as the reason why everything was ripped away from him, as proof that everything he worked for was for nothing. He will kill him to take back what’s rightfully his. You know Naoya well enough to know this much.

And if you try to stop him, he will never forgive you for getting in his way.

Naoya will never choose you over his birthright. You’ve known it for a long, long time, but you thought you were past ever needing to worry about this. You just can’t compete with a loss like this. 

Holy fuck, you think. You squeeze your eyes shut harder, vision flashing white. You taste bile in your throat. You’re going to throw up. Fuck you, you think again, cursing Naobito. You should’ve just left him to die there to rot. Only he would use his last few moments of strength to get one final cruelty in. You lost Satoru, and now you’re going to lose Naoya.

How the hell are you supposed to go back to Kyoto and look Naoya in the eye after this? 

What the hell are you supposed to do?

————————

Tokyo is all but destroyed following the events of Halloween. You return to Kyoto the next morning with a dying Naobito, having to spend hours explaining to Ogi, Jinichi, and the Zenin clan elders exactly what happened in Shibuya. You don’t even have the energy to give them attitude about how they have no right ordering you around, dully explaining that Satoru has been sealed, the King of Curses was unleashed in the city, and what wasn’t annihilated during the incident is being destroyed by the millions of cursed spirits that “Geto Suguru” apparently unleashed onto the city.

Luckily, you manage to get away from the Zenin estate before Naoya returns from Hokkaido. 

Unluckily, he decides to come right to you when he realizes you aren’t there.

(“What the hell? I figured you’d be waiting back at the estate. What happened?” Naoya demands as he enters your office. You can’t even lift your gaze to look at him. Naobito’s words echo through your head. You should tell him. He should know before he finds out at the will-reading. You should—Naoya gets fed up with you staring down at your desk, stepping around it to stand next to where you’re sitting, grabbing your chin between his fingers, and forcing you to look at him. “What happened? Those asshole wouldn’t tell me shit when I asked.”

“Your father is dying,” you tell him after a moment instead. “Doesn’t have more than a day or two left in him.”

“Good riddance,” Naoya scoffs, leaning on your desk, but his expression is all twisted as he looks away from you to the ground. He adds quietly, “It’s about fuckin’ time anyway.”

“You should probably be back at the estate,” you tell him after a moment, voice too rough for your liking. Naoya’s gaze snaps over to you, narrowed and suspicious. “You should be there when it happens, you’ll have to—”

“The hell? Are you sending me away?” Naoya asks, offended. “My father's dying, and you’re sending me away?”

“Don’t act like you care about Naobito,” you mutter spitefully.

“I don't give a damn about him, but it’s the principle!" Naoya snaps, glaring at you. “What’s up your ass, huh?”

You should tell him. 

He should hear it from you—not at the will reading, not from a stranger, not in front of Ogi and Jinichi and whoever else is there to listen. Your gaze lifts to look up at him again, lips parting, and you watch as his brows furrow, studying your face when he realizes something is wrong. Just as you’re about to force it out: it’s not going to be you, Naoya, your father screwed you over. 

Naoya bristles when his phone starts buzzing.  He looks down at it, scowling, and you lose your bravado. 

You lost Satoru, and you’re going to lose Naoya. 

Maybe you’re wrong; you try to rationalize it because you cannot lose them both. There’s no world where you survive losing them both in one fell swoop. Maybe Naobito only said this to you so you would say something to him. He knows as well as you do that Naoya would lose his mind after hearing this, and maybe he wanted to try to put one last rift between the two of you before he croaked. He’s spiteful enough to use the last of his energy for it.

Fuck.)

Naobito stubbornly clings to life following the Shibuya Incident. Naoya is busy at the Zenin estate during that time, and you’re busy at yours, dealing with the fallout. Satoru is gone, and Jujutsu Headquarters has turned against him. The notice they sent out—the one claiming that Satoru was an accomplice in the Shibuya Incident, forbidding anyone from trying to unseal him with the threat of criminal penalties—sits right on your desk, glaring at you every time you sit down to get some work done.

You consider killing the higher-ups. 

You could do it, probably. They’re all old and slow—most of them haven’t seen combat in decades. You could do it. You should do it. What right do they have to turn on Satoru after everything he’s done? Satoru is why the curses have been held at bay for so long. Satoru is the one who protects everyone. And the moment something happens to him, everyone turns their back on him? It’s sickening. You think that they deserve to die. You think you should kill them.

But you don’t—if only because you’re scared to leave your estate when Naobito is still alive, because any day he could die and everything can go to shit. 

A part of you is glad that Naoya is too busy to come over. 

He’s been blowing up your phone, aggravated as he deals with his cousins and uncles and prepares for succession, and you only respond sporadically, short, clipped replies that say nothing of substance, and you think it probably pisses him off more. He tells you to come over, and you tell him that you can’t. He complains and calls you a bitch, and you can’t respond because you can’t bring yourself to act normally with him, not knowing what you know.

It keeps crossing your mind—that you should tell him, that he should hear it from you, that you shouldn’t let him be blindsided—but every time you start to work up the nerve, you end up talking yourself out of it. 

What if you’re wrong? What if Naobito only said this to drive one last wedge between the two of you? What if, what if, what if—

That’s how it goes for the next several days until Zenin Naobito finally kicks the bucket.

(“Where is she?” you hear Naoya shout from outside of your clan’s estate. Your heart sinks. “Where the hell is she? Bring her out here now!” 

You lost Satoru. You’re about to lose Naoya, too.

Your attendant, standing at the gates with a nervous expression on her face, looks back at you with wide eyes, and you wave her off, telling her to go inside quietly before you pull open the gate to come face-to-face with a raging Naoya. You don’t even get the chance to say something before his fingers are curled around your jacket, and your back is pressed against the wall.

“You knew,” he accuses, voice low and venomous as he glares at you, gold eyes sharp with fury, denial—worse, betrayal. “You fucking knew. That’s why you’ve been acting so weird the last few days. Ya fuckin’ knew my father lined up that snivveling brat Megumi.”

You don’t respond—you can’t. Your throat locks up, words piling uselessly behind your teeth as you stare at him. He’s shaking, not much, not enough that anyone else would notice, but you do. You always do. His grip on your shirt is too tight, his knuckles white, and his teeth grind together terribly.

The silence is answer enough.

Naoya’s breath stutters, half a laugh, half a scoff. You wonder if he was hoping you’d tell him he’s being stupid—of course, you didn’t know, of course, you would’ve told him. “You’re not even gonna fuckin’ deny it. You knew. You fuckin’ knew, and you let me go around thinking—”

“I didn’t know for sure,” you finally force out. You hate that your voice shakes. “He was half delirious when he said it, dying, I thought maybe—”

You’re going to lose Naoya.

“Bullshit,” Naoya roars, fist slamming into the wall by your head. You don’t flinch, but he stares at the hole he made, how close it was to your head, with a twisted expression before he forces himself away from you. “Fuckin’ bullshit. You think I don’t know when you’re lying to me? How are you gonna stand here and lie to my face even now?”

You and Naoya have never apologized to one another before. You always know without having to say a word, just with a single glance, and yet now, you let out a wavering breath, the words on the tip of your tongue, because this is it. You knew it. You knew what would happen when he found out, and it should’ve been from you. It should’ve—

“I didn’t know how to,” you tell him, reaching out to grab his wrist. He tries to break free and turn away from you, but you tug him toward you. “How the fuck was I supposed to say, ‘Hey, Naoya, everything you’ve worked for since you were a kid just got handed to someone who doesn’t even want it?’ I tried, I didn’t—”

“I don’t care,” he interrupts, ripping his wrist from your hand. “I don’t fuckin’ care how you were supposed to say it. You should’ve just told me. You let me plan. You let me talk about what I was gonna do once it was official. You let me think—” His voice breaks, just barely, and he swallows hard before forcing it back into something harsh and cutting. “You let me think this was finally it. You should’ve told me. Not them, not at some fuckin’ will-reading where that loser Ogi and Jinichi could see me standing there like an idiot.”

You’re going to lose Naoya.

“I’m sorry,” you breathe out, reaching for him again, but he takes a step away, shaking his head. “Naoya—

“You have no idea what he put me through for this,” he breathes out. “You have no—”

His voice cuts off, and he steps away with another laugh, pressing his hand over his mouth as he tries to calm himself down.

“I do—”

“No, you don’t,” he interrupts, voice loud, echoing through your ears. Your eyes slide shut. “You don’t, because if ya did, you wouldn’t be here lookin’ at me like that—like I already fuckin’ lost.”

“Naoya—” you say, voice wavering, and his expression shifts, tightening, something wounded crossing his eyes, flashing hot and fast behind the anger.

You’re going to lose Naoya.

“So that’s it, huh,” he says, quieter now. “You don’t give a damn. Just expect me to accept it.”

“That’s not—”

“You really think I’m just gonna take it?” he continues over you, voice rising. “That I’m gonna roll over and let that brat walk in and take what’s mine?”

“Naoya, just—”

“I earned it,” he spits. “Every bruise, every time I stood there and let him humiliate me. Every fuckin’ thing he ever did to me, I took it because this was the end of it. This was the point. It was supposed to end with me there, all of ‘em having to admit that it’s me, it’s only ever been me, and you—you let them do it again. You let ‘em line me up and strip it away like I was a fuckin’ joke. Same shit, different room. Same looks, same whispers, and you knew. You knew it was coming and let me walk into it anyway, let ‘em blindside me like this.”

You’re going to lose Naoya.

You feel sick. “That’s not fair,” you breathe out.

“Isn’t it?” he fires back. “You know what it felt like? Standin’ there while Ogi and Jinichi looked at me like they finally got what they wanted, waitin’ years to see me brought down a peg.” His voice cracks, just for a second. He laughs and looks away. “Nah. Nah, it ain’t ending like this.”

He turns to leave without another word, not even a spare glance in your direction. 

You chase after him. “Where are you going?” 

“To Tokyo,” he spits, not even looking back at you. Your heart sinks.

“Why?” you demand. “Naoya, don’t walk away from me.”

“To kill Fushiguro Megumi and Itadori Yuji,” Naoya answers, finally looking at you over his shoulder, like he wants to see your reaction.

The words knock the air out of you. “What?” You knew this was what would happen. You knew it. “Naoya, you can’t—”

“Can’t?” he cuts in, incredulous. “You’ll find that I absolutely can. You gonna get in my way now? Is that how this goes? First, you keep it from me, let me walk into it blind, and now you’re gonna play hero and stop me?”

“They’re kids, Naoya,” you say desperately. “Megumi-chan doesn’t even want this. He—”

“I don’t give a fuck about what he wants,” Naoya shouts. “I give a fuck about what’s mine. So, are you gonna help me take it back, or are you gonna get in my way?”

You stare at him. You don’t answer—can’t answer. You don’t need to. 

He sees everything in your face anyway.

He lets out a harsh laugh, shaking his head, but this one is strained, too forced. “Whatever,” he whispers. “I don’t fuckin’ need ya.”

He turns to leave again. You don’t follow this time.

“Naoya,” you call desperately.

“I never would’ve fuckin’ done this to you,” he tells you quietly as he leaves. “Never.”)

————————

You go to Tokyo anyway, despite your cousins' many protests. 

You don’t know what you plan to do there, because you know there’s no talking him down from this, and if you try to stop him by force, then you’ll make things even worse. The two of you have never had an argument like this before—even a couple of years ago, that argument about labels and what the two of you were, it wasn’t this, wasn’t involving Naoya’s inheritance, the one thing he’ll always choose over you, and you don’t know what this means for the two of you. Don’t know if there’s any coming back from this. 

You can’t lose him. Not him, too. Never him.

It’s not particularly hard to track him down, considering he has his phone with him, but he flits around the city like a goddamn hummingbird, trying to track down Megumi and Yuji. You eventually decide against following him, fed up with always getting somewhere after he’s already gone. A part of you wonders if he’s figured out that you’re following him, but you don’t think he has, partially because he’s probably too tunnel-visioned on finding the two boys to even notice he’s being trailed, but mostly because you guarantee that he would’ve stopped and told you to fuck off by now. 

You’re sitting in a run-down, half-destroyed convenience store, sipping at a soda as you watch Naoya dart around the city. He never stays in one place for longer than a minute or two, and you find yourself gnawing at the inside of your cheek, because he’s been at this all day, no breaks, running himself ragged on rage and adrenaline. You exhale as his location blinks, vanishes, then reappears somewhere else entirely—closer to you this time, he’s in the Ginza area now.

You pause when you realize he’s stopped moving a mile and a half away. A minute passes, then two, then three, five, and you’re on your feet, moving in his direction. It takes you less than five minutes to get there, cutting through alleyways and half-collapsed buildings. You kill a lingering curse that lunges at you from around a corner, splitting it cleanly before it’s even registered what happened. You don’t slow down, gaze flicking down to your phone as you reach his general area, trying to pinpoint where exactly he is. You don’t see him in plain view, so—

The tunnel?

You drop down at the entrance without hesitation, boots skidding slightly as you land. You move fast, slipping through rubble as you make your way deeper into the dimly lit tunnel. There’s blood everywhere, you realize, unnerved—drenching the floor, staining the walls, what the hell happened?

“Sorry, but I can’t understand how you never loved your brothers,” an unfamiliar voice says from farther down the tunnel, and you break into a run. 

You turn a bend, and Naoya is sprawled against concrete, blood pooling beneath him, breath shallow and ragged, barely holding himself up on his hands and knees. Your lips part in shock, a lump forming in your throat. A black-haired man is standing in front of him, left hand extended, posture relaxed. He hears you approach from the right, head snapping to the side, gaze sharpening as he tries to figure out whether or not you’re friend or foe. Naoya’s attention follows his, landing on you, and his eyes widen slightly when he recognizes you standing there.

“Blood manipulation,” Naoya forces out when he sees you, warning you just as the man seems to decide you’re an enemy, the attack he’d been building up for Naoya shooting in your direction instead. 

Shit, you think, activating your technique in the nick of time so you can figure out where to dodge to. Whoever this guy is, he’s faster than you, on you before you even fully finish dodging his first attack, but luckily, you’re used to sparring with Naoya, who is much faster than he is. He comes from your left—low, at your abdomen, it would be an easy dodge right, cutting around him and driving your fist into the side of his neck. Too easy, almost. Your lashes flutter, cursed energy flaring outward as you activate your technique, trying to figure out what his play is. You watch as the blood from the floor spikes upward, piercing through the right side of your body.

You dodge right like he expects you to, so he doesn’t realize that you’ve figured out what he’s doing, and instead of going for a blow, you grab his left hand before he can finish the hand signs, twisting his wrist painfully, bringing your leg up to drive your foot into his forearm. You aren’t able to break it, because he’s more durable than you expect, but he does let out a hiss of pain, expression flashing with frustration as he realizes what happened. You put your other foot into his open side, sending him backward into the wall.

“Damn,” you say. “That would’ve been a good play.”

The black-haired man stands back up, grimacing, tilting his head to the side as he looks over you. “You read ahead,” he realizes, frowning. “That is your cursed technique?”

“Love me a man with a brain. Most people don’t figure it out so quick,” you say with an easy smile, gaze flicking over to Naoya. You need to get to him. “You should just save us both the trouble and give up already. You won’t be able to beat me. I know what moves you’re gonna make before you even know them. It’s checkmate.”

“I cannot,” the man says firmly. “I will not allow you two to go after my little brother.”

“Your little brother?” you ask dryly, tilting your head to the side. “He someone special, or something?” 

“My brother, Itadori Yuji,” he confirms, and your eyes widen.

“You’re Yuji-chan’s brother?” you ask, smiling slightly, gaze flicking over him with renewed interest as your hands fall to your sides. “He didn’t tell me he had an older brother.”

The man blinks, brows furrowing in suspicion, lips curved down. “You are familiar with him?”

“Yeah. He’s one of Satoru’s brats. Annoying, loud, too kind for his own good. I used to come down to Tokyo on Fridays to train them,” you say easily, and the man seems to relax slightly when he realizes you are on good terms with Yuji. “You know—”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” you hear Naoya spit from a few feet away, drawing your attention from the man in front of you. “You—”

Naoya gags suddenly, and your attention snaps to the side when you see how his eyes bulge, blood flying from his mouth as he convulses, coughing hard enough that his hands slip out from under him. He collapses forward with a choked, broken sound, and you instinctively move to rush over to him, but freeze when the man in front of you tenses as though to stop you.

He watches you for a long moment, eyes dark and assessing. Then his gaze flicks over to Naoya again—bloodied and shaking, glaring up at both of you with unrepentant hatred.

“You are protecting him,” he says.

“I am,” you reply, jaw tight.

“Yet, you claim to know my brother,” he adds. “You speak of him fondly. Said you trained him.”

“I do, and I did.”

“This man came after my brother.”

“It’s complicated,” you say through gritted teeth. Your lashes flutter, gaze drawing back over to Naoya, who’s struggling to breathe properly, shoulders hitching as another wet cough wracks his body. Your chest tightens—you need to get him to Shoko, or—

Your gaze shifts to the side when you hear the splashing of footsteps from the left. The black-haired man whirls around, but before he even registers that someone is there, he’s crumpled on the ground. Your eyes flick up, and you only give yourself half a second to register that it’s Okkotsu Yuta standing there before you’re rushing over to Naoya.

You’re at his side in an instant, dropping to your knees in the blood, hands hovering uselessly for a heartbeat before you force them to move. He’s pale, lips tinged wrong, breath coming in short, uneven pulls that make your stomach twist.

“Naoya,” you breathe out, trying to help him up so he’s not lying face down in the blood. Blood slicks his chin and cheeks, smearing warm and sticky across your fingers as you tilt his head just enough so that your eyes meet his, his lashes flutter. He gags again, blood dribbling out of his mouth, weaker, and he takes in a wet, rattling breath that makes panic spike hard and fast in your chest. He tries to pull away from you, but ends up collapsing into you, face buried in the crook of your neck. “Easy. Don’t fight me right now. We can fight later.”

“Shouldn’t be here,” he still manages to force out, you feel blood dribbling down your neck to your collarbone. “Fuckin’ bitch, you always—”

“Senpai,” Yuta says, making his way over to the two of you. You look up, arms tightening slightly around Naoya, even though you’ve known Yuta for two years—the boy isn’t a threat, not to you, but you tense anyway with Naoya as weak as he is. He looks over the two of you with a concerned expression—it twists slightly on Naoya, because you’re sure Maki has told him all about her clan, but softens again when it lands on you. “Do you want me to heal him? My reversed cursed technique can heal other people, too.”

“Yes,” you say, lashes fluttering in relief. You weren’t sure how you were even going to get him to Shoko. Yuta crouches down in front of the two of you, hand extended, and you can feel Naoya bristling, but you pinch his side hard before he can make a snide comment. “Thank you, Yuta-chan.”

“Of course,” he says simply, giving you a kind smile as Naoya’s breathing begins to ease again. “Anything for you, senpai. Would… you and Zenin-san be willing to inform the higher-ups of Itadori-kun’s death, please?”

You stare up at him, confused for a moment, and then your eyes drift back to where Yuta had walked over to you from, and your lips part in shock when you see Yuji limp on the ground next to his brother. Your gaze snaps back to Yuta, eyes wide, heart thudding in your chest. You breathe out, “Yuta-ch—”

Yuta’s gaze flicks down to the ground, away from you. He glances at Naoya, as though making sure he’s still too preoccupied with regaining his bearings after being healed. “Senpai, please,” he insists, voice quiet, just for you. “The higher-ups need to believe that Itadori-kun is dead.”

Believe? Your gaze flicks between Yuta and Yuji, calculating, and then your eyes narrow on Yuta again. There’s a strained expression on his face, like he wants you to understand something he can’t say. Did he not kill Yuji? You can’t imagine that Yuta would kill one of Satoru’s other students; he’s always been too kind, too protective of the people he loves and the people whom the people he loves love. There’s something else going on here, but you can’t press, not with Naoya listening.

“I see,” you say quietly.

Naoya shifts weakly against you, still in a haze, trying to push himself into a sitting position. “The fuck are you two whisperin’ about—”

“You have to report Yuji-chan’s death to the higher-ups,” you tell him, and Naoya’s brows are furrowed. You look back up at Yuta. “We’ll handle it all, Yuta-chan. Don’t worry.”

Yuta exhales, shoulders easing just a fraction. “Thank you, senpai.”

You tighten your hold on Naoya as Yuta turns away, already moving to retrieve Yuji and his brother, disappearing down the tunnel quickly. Naoya finally manages to pull away from you, slumping against the wall beside you.

“Why’d ya come?” Naoya asks you quietly, voice bitter. “To stop me?” 

“I don’t know,” you reply honestly, shoulder pressed to his, staring down at your lap. “Maybe. I just—I don’t know, Naoya. I’m sorry. I should’ve told you.”

Naoya exhales through his nose, looking away. “It doesn’t matter now,” he mutters. “Quit apologizing. It makes me wanna throw up. It’s done. I gotta go be messenger bird for that Okkotsu brat ‘cause of you now anyway.”

Your lips part to say something, but you’re not sure what you want to say. Naoya turns to look at you, gaze meeting yours, and you hate how dull the golds of his eyes are. You ask after a moment, “Are we going to be okay?” 

He lets out a puff of air, gaze flicking down to your hand, and he reaches out for it, thumb brushing over the ring on your fourth finger. His fingers tighten around yours briefly before he lets go. “We’ll always be okay. How many times do I gotta tell you that, hm? You’re gettin’ slow in your old age, ain’t ya?” 

You knock your shoulder against his with a huff of laughter. “Asshole.”

He pushes himself up to his feet, grimacing, hand dropping down to his abdomen. You stand with him, watching him carefully. He tells you, “I’ll get goin’ up to headquarters. You should head back to the estate. Stay away from all this shit, alright? It’s bad news.”

“Will you—” you start to ask, throat tightening, “—come back to mine when you’re done? Don’t go back after the kids, or back to the Zenin estate, come to me. We’ll get you what’s yours back. We’ll figure everything out together, okay? Like we always have.”

Naoya sighs, staring down at the ground instead of you. “We’ll see,” he replies before turning away to leave.

A terrible, terrible feeling settles in your gut. You call after him, “Naoya,” and he pauses, glancing at you over his shoulder. “I have a really bad feeling, okay?”

He gives you a wry smile. “Not this shit again,” he says. “You’re startin’ to sound like the girl who cried wolf, y’know?” 

“Girl who cried—I’ve been right every time, Naoya,” you snap. “So, just—just come over, okay? Let’s wait for all this to settle down.”

He lets out a huff. You can’t tell if it’s a laugh or a scoff, but he turns back around briefly, reaching out to slide his hand around the back of your head to pull you close to him. Your hands instinctively come up to grab his kimono, eyes fluttering shut when he presses his lips against your forehead, uncharacteristically tender.

“You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing,” he dismisses, to your frustration. “Relax. Everything always works out for us, doesn’t it? There ain’t nothin’ to worry about. I’m gonna get back what’s mine, we’ll wait out all the bullshit happening, and then we’ll get married in the spring, and you’re gonna be my wife.” He gives you an easy smile and adds, “A proper one, maybe, considering how much you’ve started fussing over me.”

As a last-ditch effort to get him to drop all of this, you say quietly, “We don’t have to wait.”

“Hm?” he asks you, stilling slightly against you.

“We don’t have to wait until spring, or until things settle down. We can just—we can do it. Now. Tonight. Tomorrow. Whenever you get back from headquarters,” you rush out. “We don’t need to wait.”

“You’re the one who wanted to wait for the cherry blossoms,” he accuses, but his throat bobs. “Why—”

“I don’t care about the cherry blossoms,” your voice rises slightly. “Naoya, just come back to mine, and we’ll do it, alright? You’ve wanted it for years, haven’t you? Let’s just do it. No more waiting.”

Naoya exhales. “You’re messed up,” he mutters, “gettin’ all hysterical and sayin’ all this shit.” Your eyes slide shut in frustration as he steps back. “Let me handle everything I need to handle, and then we’ll talk about this. Properly.”

You want to scream at him. Every instinct you have is clawing at you, begging him not to walk away right now. Something bad is coming, worse than the incident on Halloween, worse than what happened at the Goodwill Event, worse than learning Yuji became Sukuna’s vessel—you know it, you know it. 

If you let him walk away right now, you’ll never—

“Go home,” he tells you. “I’ll be fine. I’ll get shit handled, and then I’ll come to you, okay? Don’t I always come back to ya?”

You scoff and look away, closing your eyes when he takes a step closer to brush his lips against your temple. If you fight with him about this now, he’ll only dig his heels in more. You know him. There’s no winning this, not when you’re up against him taking back what he lost.

Please, you think desperately. Let me be wrong, just this once.

“Okay,” you finally say, and the word tastes like poison on your tongue. “Fine.”

“Relax,” he tells you, looking over his shoulder one last time with an easy smile. “Everything’ll be fine. I’ll see ya soon.”

————————

You wait, and you wait, and you wait.

Naoya does not come.

————————

NOVEMBER 12, 2018

You feel it the moment Naoya dies.

“My lady,” one of your attendants says, knocking briefly before stepping into your office. You stare down at your phone, at your last unanswered text message, waiting for Naoya to respond. It’s been three days since he came back from headquarters, and he is hardly answering your texts. When he does, it’s to bitch about Jinichi or Ogi, or to tell you to quit worrying so much because it’s giving him a headache. Every day that passes, you feel worse. “My lady!”

Your gaze snaps up from your phone: You’re seriously pissing me off, you texted him furiously, when he blandly responded to your request to know what’s going on with a nothing. You let out a soft breath when you see the concerned expression on the woman’s face. You lock your phone and give her your full attention. 

“Sorry,” you say quietly. “What is it?”

Irrationally, you hope she’s here to tell you Naoya is waiting for you at the gate, even though you know that if he were here, he wouldn’t have waited to be announced. Your heart sinks—you don’t even know how there’s anywhere left for it to go, it’s been at your feet since you parted ways with him in Tokyo. 

“Your uncle is looking for you. He’s in the inner courtyard,” she tells you, inclining her head respectfully as she speaks.

You exhale, shoulders slumping, disappointed even though you knew it wouldn’t be him. You push yourself to your feet, shoving your phone in your pocket before you make your way out of your office toward where your uncle is waiting for you, your attendant following behind dutifully. 

You turn your head to the side to look at her as you ask, “Is it raining again today?” 

“No, my lady,” she tells you. “It’s actually very nice out today. Warm, clear skies.”

“That’s good,” you say, quietly. “I’m sick of the rain.”

You push open the doors leading to the inner courtyard, raising your eyebrows when you see your uncle and your three older cousins waiting for you out there. Two of them are sitting on a rock, tossing pebbles at one another childishly, and the other is standing with your uncle, talking quietly. You hadn’t even realized they were all back at the estate since you’ve been in your office working for days. 

You say dryly, “Why does this feel like an ambush?” 

“It kind of is,” one of them tells you with an easy smile, hopping down from the rock, barely dodging a pebble, only for another to smack him in the temple. “You’ve been holed up in there for too long. Come spar with us. You’re gonna get rusty if you keep hiding in there.”

“I’m not hiding,” you reply automatically. “I’ve been working. I’m busy.”

Your oldest cousin snorts. “You’ve been brooding. You’re bringing the vibe of the whole estate down with all the storm clouds floating above your head.”

You roll your eyes before you give him a flat look, but your gaze flicks up to the sky. You thought you’d enjoy coming outside since you don’t have to deal with the ever-present rain that’s been coming down over Kyoto for almost a week now, but it feels all wrong. Clear skies should be comforting, but instead, they make the pit in your stomach churn. 

This is all wrong, you think desperately. Everything is wrong.

You itch to pull your phone out of your pocket to see if Naoya responded, but you think that your cousins really will stage an intervention if they catch you looking at it again. You let out another heavy breath, shoulders slumping, because you don’t think they’ll let up until you give them what they want.

“Whatever,” you mutter. “Don’t start crying when I beat the shit out of you.”

You shrug off your jacket and make your way to the center of the inner courtyard, not even bothering to go over to the training grounds. You point at your oldest cousin, who immediately complains because sparring apparently wasn’t even his idea, but he steps forward to meet you, rolling his shoulders.

“Go on,” you say. The words come out flat, even though you mean for them to be taunting. “I’ll give you the first—”

The world shakes.

You barely steady yourself, eyes widening, and one of your cousins topples right off the rock he was still sitting on. You think, for a second, that it’s an earthquake—another foreboding omen—but you hesitate when you see your uncle staring behind you, eyes wide. You whip around, following his line of vision. For a second, you fear the worst: that maybe another cursed spirit got through the barrier around your estate, and you pull out your tanto knife, bracing yourself for a fight. 

Instead, you find something much, much worse.

“Is that… Chojuro’s technique?” you breathe out, staring at the massive stone arms touching the distant sky. Miles to the west—the same direction as the Zenin estate. Something is… “That’s Chojuro’s technique. Why would he…”

Your uncle tells your cousin to get the car. You hear him vaguely as he snaps at him to get moving when he doesn’t immediately move, but he sounds like he’s underwater, distant, not a few feet away from you. Your ears are muffled and ringing. You blink twice, trying to understand what you’re looking at, because why would Chojuro use his technique like that? Why would—why is Jinichi using his technique? Your lips part when you see fists raining down from the sky above Chojuro’s stone arms, lungs burning, because you are not breathing. 

What is happening at the Zenin estate? Something—something is—

You are running. You don’t even register that your legs are moving, or that you’re using your cursed energy to propel yourself forward—over the estate wall, through trees, you’re running. You won’t wait for the car; there’s no time. It’ll take half an hour to get there, the roads are windy and gravelly, and the fastest way is just straight through the forest. And you need to get there, because something—

Something is seriously wrong. 

You distantly hear your uncle and cousins following, clearly not wanting you to rush off onto your own into a potentially dangerous situation—one of them calls for you, tells you to wait, not to be rash, but you ignore him. You knew something was up, you knew something bad was going to happen, and you knew—

There’s a sharp pain in your chest. You stumble, nearly tripping over a root that you missed as you gasp for air, hand flying to your heart, fingers digging into your shirt as if you can hold your heart in place by sheer force. You force yourself to keep moving forward, breath coming shallow, panicked pulls. You feel entirely destabilized, just for a split second, and the sensation is nauseating—like vertigo, like your soul slipping half a step out of alignment within your body, and not properly slipping back into place. You swallow hard, and you keep running, ignoring the calls of your name.

You get another couple of steps before a sharp pulse spears through your chest, worse this time. You choke on a breath, vision blurring at the edges, and you know—you know—with a clarity so vicious it borders on cruelty that something has happened to Naoya.

The world tilts violently, and you have to skid to a stop, boots dragging through the dirt as you brace yourself against a tree trunk, bark biting into your palm. 

Keep moving, you tell yourself, biting back bile. It’s fear—stress. You’ve been wound up for days, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now that something is actually happening, you’re spiraling. Naoya is fine. Naoya isn’t stupid. He’s one of the strongest sorcerers you’ve ever met—you don’t know anyone who can actually take him in a fight besides you and Satoru, and Satoru is—

You can’t think about that right now. Just keep moving. 

You break into a run again, teeth clenched, cursed energy flaring hard enough that the ground cracks beneath your feet. Branches tear at your sleeves as you barrel through the forest, ignoring the sharp sting where bark scrapes skin, ignoring the way your lungs burn, ignoring the empty ache in your chest that suddenly will not go away. Naoya is—he’s annoying, and reckless, an asshole, but he’s never been weak, and he’s too fucking stubborn to—

Cursed energy? A cursed spirit? Coming straight at you?

You skid to a stop again, heels digging into the dirt as you sense something coming your way, bracing yourself for impact. It’s fast, too fast—you shout at your cousins and your uncle to stay back, activating your technique. You watch as the trees collapse inward from the rush of cursed energy coming in your direction, dirt flying, it slams into you and blood flies, and you won’t be able to move in time, it’s too fast, even seeing it happen, you won’t be able to get out of the way, and then—

The path you’re tracing dissolves, the straight line toward you snaps sideways, jerking violently to the southwest, away from you, before you can even catch sight of what it was. 

What the hell? 

You dart forward into the clearing where it should’ve emerged. The trees lie torn open in front of you, trunks slit through, bark shredded, several uprooted entirely from the force of the speed at which the cursed spirit was moving. The ground is gouged deep where it pivoted, carved straight toward the direction you were coming from until it abruptly veers, path cutting hard to the southwest, unnaturally sharp, like it slammed on a break and wrenched itself sideways at the last possible second. The trees there are obliterated, reduced to splinters and debris scattered in a wide arc. The air still thrums with residual cursed energy, dense enough that it prickles your skin.

Your pulse roars in your ears as you stare in the direction it turned, the destruction left in its wake as it cuts through the forest. 

“What the hell was that?” one of your cousins demands, catching up to you finally. “It came from the direction of the Zenin estate. Should we go after it?”

It would’ve killed you, you think. Why the hell would it veer off like that? Why—

Your uncle says your name, voice rough. You shake your head, casting one last lingering look off in the direction it fled, and you say, “No. Our priority is the estate.” You don’t wait for any of them to respond before you’re moving again, pushing all lingering thoughts of the cursed spirit from your mind—Naoya is your priority. You need to get to the Zenin estate, you need to make sure that he’s—

That he’s okay. 

Because he has to be—he promised. He promised you that everything would be okay, and you cannot lose Naoya. You’ve lost everything—your father, your brothers, Satoru, you can’t lose Naoya too. You won’t survive losing him and Satoru both. You won’t survive losing him. You run until your lungs burn and your legs feel like they’re filled with lead, until the forest thins and the world opens up in a way that makes your stomach drop. 

The Zenin estate is in ruins. 

You smell death before you see it.

You come to a stop so suddenly that one of your cousins almost slams right into your back.

“What the fuck?” he breathes out, staring at the destruction with the same horrified expression that must be on your face. “What the hell did this? How—”

You don’t think your brain fully makes sense of what you’re seeing. 

For a second, you are not twenty-five, and you are not at the Zenin estate. You are twenty again, standing in the wreckage of your estate in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Except this time, the Zenins did not arrive before you, and there is no one here to put together the bodies and place sheets over them, no one to lie to you about how bad it really is. They are not Zenin men butchered before you, but your father, your brothers, your clan. 

Your cousin gags next to you, having the same visceral reaction that you are. 

“We need—” you try to say. You blink once. Twice. You swallow bile, and you take in a deep breath. This is—this isn’t your clan, this isn’t your estate, this is the Zenins, and this is on you to handle this time. Just as Naobito did for you back then. “Cover the bodies, and—” You see a corpse with no head, but you would recognize Jinichi’s body anywhere. “—try to put them back together. For funerary rites. We—”

Naoya, your breath catches, losing your train of thought mid-sentence, tongue darting out to wet your lips. You taste the iron in the air, the copper-sweet tang of blood so thick it coats the back of your throat. Focus. Focus. You need to—you need to find Naoya. If he’s not out here, then he’s probably hurt, and you need to find him. 

What could’ve done this?

You force yourself forward, forgetting you were even giving orders out, feet dragging against the leveled stone as you look for Naoya. The inner courtyard has been demolished, the garden is gone, and there are bodies as far as the eye can see. Most of the buildings are in shambles—roof shingles litter the ground, crunching underfoot with every step you take, and the immaculate symmetry the Zenins prized has been reduced to rubble. Walls that once stood straight and oppressive are split open, beams snapped clean through like matchsticks. Limbs stick out from splintered wood, and the stream that cuts through the estate runs red. 

“Naoya,” you call.

You wonder, briefly, how a place that caused you so much stress and anxiety as a child could look so fucking small now. Just like anywhere else in the world—stone and wood and cooling corpses. 

Just buildings. Just men. 

A part of you that you bury beneath muted panic and disgust is almost satisfied.

“Naoya,” you repeat, louder this time.

Your gaze flicks over to where the main building used to stand, the engawa where you first met Naotaka. You remember his fingers brushing your cheek, the way he tilted up your head, how you could only stand there and hope that Naoya noticed. To the training grounds, where you would watch Naoya spar with his cousins and uncles, longing to join them, only to be dragged off to lessons in tea ceremony or homemaking. To the garden—what’s left of it—where you and Naoya would disappear to when you were sick of being watched and judged and insulted, treated like an object or livestock rather than a human.

“Naoya!”

This wasn’t a cursed spirit, you realize, as your gaze drags over a familiar corpse—one of Naoya’s older brothers, Naohiro, who has had his throat slashed cleanly. A blade, not claws. Jinichi’s headless corpse. Execution, not slaughter. All of the destruction and no residuals of cursed energy besides the Zenins themselves, all of the precise wounds on their bodies instead of carnage. Sorcerer killer, not curse. 

But if it wasn’t a curse, then what was that thing that fled from the estate? Why did it turn away the way it did?

“Naoya!” 

Your feet have brought you to one of the few buildings that are still standing, and your gaze drops to the step leading up to the engawa. There is blood dripping down it, smeared on the wood, like someone had dragged themselves into the building as they bled out. You blink once, gaze lingering on it for a moment before you step around it, following the bloody trail down the hall. You see handprints on the screens, a familiar shape, a familiar size—you blink again, eyes tracing along the hall, down to where one of the sliding doors has fallen inward. 

You blink a third time. This time, your heart is in your throat as you say quietly, “Naoya?”

Your body doesn’t cooperate at first when you try to move forward. Your feet are rooted to the ground. The empty feeling in your chest, the one that hit you while you were running to the estate, returns with a vengeance. You are filled with dread in a way that’s hard to articulate—your tongue is heavy in your mouth, and your limbs are prickling, there is a pit in your stomach, wide and gaping.

You don’t want to go near that room.

You’ve known the truth since you were in the forest—since before that even, for days, since you parted ways with him in that tunnel. You’ve known, but you let him leave anyway. You let yourself believe that you were wrong, let yourself believe in his promise always to come back to you. You know what is waiting for you at that sliding door. 

“Naoya?” you call anyway, soft. Your legs feel clunky and awkward as you force yourself step after step. The tip of your foot catches on wood, and you stumble. Five steps. Four. Three. Two. “Nao…”

You don’t recognize it as him at first. Can’t recognize it as him—crumpled on the ground, bloody, still. That’s not Naoya. Not your Naoya. You stand in front of the room, and you breathe. In, out, in, out, in—

“Naoya,” you say again like he’ll answer. “Get up. What are you doing?”

You don’t cross the threshold into the room. 

You notice, distantly, that the back of the room is destroyed, leading out of the building; the wall surrounding the estate is split and crumbling, as if something had fled from this room, out of the estate, to the east, where you had come from. 

Your gaze flits down to the woman half-slumped on Naoya’s back, her hand still loosely curled around the knife in his back. Ogi’s wife, you recognize her after a second, Maki and Mai’s mother. Why is she here? You haven’t seen any other women killed, you realize, staring down at her. Only men—the Kukuru, the Hei—but her throat is slit, one still hand pressed to the wound as though trying to stop the bleeding, even in death. Someone sought her out specifically.

But why would someone go after her? Who would go after her?

You finally step into the room. Another step. A third. A fourth. You blink, and you’re bending down without really knowing what you’re doing. You numbly drag Maki and Mai’s mother off of Naoya, numbly lay her down on the far side of the room, numbly grab a nearby tablecloth to set it over her cooling corpse to give her a modicum of decency, numb, numb, numb. 

You return to Naoya’s side, standing over him for a moment. He is not sprawled the way he usually is, not careless or arrogant or loose. He is folded in on himself, one arm pinned beneath his body, face pressed into the floor, the other stretched uselessly forward, reaching for something. Not your Naoya. His face is turned slightly toward you, lashes long against his cheeks, mouth parted just enough that you can see red staining his teeth, pooling from the corner of his mouth. One eye is half-open, unfocused, gold dulled to something lifeless and wrong, the other hidden against the floor.

Your next breath is deeper, more ragged. 

Your knees hit the tatami with a dull thud you barely register, and your hand hovers above him, shaking badly enough that you curl it into a fist just to steady it. You touch his shoulder first, tentative, and then you jostle him—just once—like it’s Sunday morning, and you’re bored because he’s sleeping in and you have nothing to do. The fabric beneath your palm is soaked through.

(“The fuck is the matter with you,?” he mutters, sleepy and aggravated, toppling you right over the side of your bed. You hit the ground with an ungraceful yelp, scowling. “Let me sleep, ya irritating bitch.”)

He doesn’t budge. When you let go of his shoulder, his body slides back to how it was, limp on the ground. Your cheeks are wet. Your lungs are burning.

“Naoya,” you repeat. “Naoya.”

You’re more frantic now as your hand slides to his neck, fingers trembling as you place them to his pulse point, where you’ve rested them countless times before without thinking, as though there’s still a chance you might find it thrumming beneath your touch. His skin is still warm, how you’ve always known it to be, and your heartbeat thuds terribly in your ears. 

(“What’re ya doin’?” he asks with a yawn, shooting you a frown, and you tilt your head to the side curiously, unsure what he’s talking about. 

He’s only been back from Tohoku for two weeks, your clan has only been dead for four months—you still don’t sleep well, so you tend to stay up and read while he sleeps in bed next to you. He looks pointedly down at your hand, where your fingers rest over his pulse, and you draw your hand back, a bit surprised with yourself. You hadn’t even noticed you’d reached out to touch him. Immediately, you’re unsettled, fingers twitching to press against the steady thrum, proof that there is someone left in this world you still have to count on. 

He rolls his eyes and reaches out for your wrist, placing your fingers back to where they were. You are at ease again instantly. His lashes flutter shut as he starts to doze back off. “Go the hell to sleep, don’t want to deal with you bitchin’ in the morning that you’re tired.”)

Nothing.

Your chest tightens so hard that it hurts to breathe. You try again, pressing harder, as if pressure might fix this, like his heart might remember how to beat if you convince it that you’re here with him. Your own pulse thunders, frantic and mocking. 

Nothing.

You gag, hand flying to your mouth as you retch over air, turning away from him. Fuck, you gasp—nothing comes up, you’ve hardly eaten in days because you’ve been so wound with anxiety. You double over, palms against the wood, still slick with his blood, and a sound crawls up your chest, small and broken. You choke it down hard, biting the inside of your cheek until you taste blood just to keep it contained. You squeeze your eyes shut, forehead dropping until it nearly touches the tatami, breath coming in sharp, uneven pulls that scrape your throat raw. 

This isn’t happening. 

Not him—not him too. Your mind is crashing. Please, you think over and over and over again, please, anyone but him. You don’t know who you’re begging, what you’re begging, nothing has ever listened, but you beg still.

“This isn’t fucking funny,” you rasp, angry suddenly. “This isn’t fucking funny, Naoya. This isn’t—”

Your voice breaks. You force your eyes back open. Your cheeks are wet. Your vision swims as you turn back to him, crawling the short distance on numb legs. You reach for him again, hesitant, like your body has learned something your mind is still rejecting. Your hands move to his jaw and shoulder, gently turning him so that he’s on his back, half in your lap, and you can’t bite back the wounded noise that builds in your chest, slipping from your lips when see that the right side of his face is shattered, eye swollen shut beneath blood and ruin, jaw broken, cheek caved in.

“Oh,” you finally whisper, thoughts coming to an abrupt halt, anger draining in an instant. It comes out small and stupid, but you don’t know what else to say. You brush his hair back from his forehead, avoiding the ruined side of his face, and then you slide your hand down to his cheek, thumb pressing slightly beneath his good eye, it is gold and dull and so lifeless and so wrong. “Oh, I—”

Your lashes flutter as you sink into the floor, into his blood. You pull him closer now, hand drifting down to his chest, palm flattening there instinctively, like you’ve done a hundred times when he’s pinned you beneath him, smug and irritating and alive. Your breath comes apart again, a strangled sound that you can’t swallow back, and then you’re crying in earnest, silent and wrecked, tears dropping onto his face, onto his collar, into blood that’s already drying.

Naoya is—

“Liar,” you sob, “you fucking liar. You promised me. You promised—”

Someone else is crying too—wailing, really, a terrible, wounded, broken sound that makes your ears bleed. You wonder if your cousins happened upon a survivor. You want to tell whoever it is to shut the fuck up. Irrationally, you think that they have no right to cry when you’ve just lost half of yourself. 

It’s only when your cousin comes flying down the hall, panicked, looking for you, skidding to a stop in front of the broken sliding door that you realize it is you who is wailing.

You don’t lift your head to look at him, forehead dropping to Naoya’s shoulder—he’s cooler than he was a few moments ago. Your arms tighten around him, clinging to him desperately. You’re shaking violently now, sobs tearing out of you in harsh, broken sounds you don’t recognize as your own. Your throat burns. Your chest feels like it’s splitting open with every breath you drag in. You’ve never cried like this before—never—you’ve always just kept moving forward when bad things happened. 

You got used to it, that’s what you did. That’s what you always did because you could never afford to stop moving; you shoved it all deep down so it could never resurface. Forward is survival. Forward is the only option. When everything around you kept changing, you moved forward and refused to let it make you stumble. When your clan died, you moved forward so that others could mourn. When the world demanded more of you than it had any right to, you moved forward because everyone else was relying on you to hold everything together. You locked away the grief, shouldered the weight, and you kept walking because there was no other option. 

But you can’t move now. 

There is nowhere to go. No direction that doesn’t feel wrong. No step forward that doesn’t feel like a betrayal to what’s lying cold and heavy in your arms. There is no tomorrow where Naoya doesn’t take up space in your life, doesn’t irritate you, doesn’t argue with you, doesn’t come back, no matter how badly everything goes wrong. There is no future without him. There is no world where you keep moving forward after half of your soul has been torn away. 

Your cousin reaches out to touch your shoulder, and you slap his hand away hard. You breathe. In and out. Naoya’s skin is cold. In and out. The blood is drying. In and out. You can’t fucking do this. You can’t—

Focus on something else.

“We need to report this to the higher-ups,” you hear yourself say, breathing out shakily, lifting your head to stare blankly at the opposite side of the room, the splintered wood and the crumbling wall, the trees that have been barreled down by something large and fast. You can’t feel Naoya’s cursed energy—not even any residue. “I want you to listen to me very carefully.”

Your cousin says your name, quiet and wary, like he’s afraid speaking might set you off again. You don’t look at him. Naoya is—your gaze shifts over to Maki and Mai’s mother, onto the white cloth you draped over her. You can’t feel any of Naoya’s cursed energy. Not even residue. Naoya is—your fingers press against the cool hilt of the kitchen knife in his back. A kitchen knife, not a cursed tool, driven in by a non-sorcerer, with no cursed energy. There is no residue even around the wound to his face—sheer strength caved it in, no technique, no cursed energy. Naoya is—your gaze flicks over to the back of the room, the demolished walls, the path carved through the forest in the direction of your clan’s estate. 

If he was not killed with jujutsu, then—

“A cursed spirit did this,” you say after a moment, voice empty to your own ears. Before your cousin can protest, you continue. “Report to the higher-ups that a cursed spirit did this. An unregistered special grade wiped out the Zenin clan, and I will be the one to hunt it down and exorcise it.”

He says your name louder this time, panicked. “You can’t—and that’s—there’s no way that cursed spirit was the one that did all of this. There’s no cursed energy residue anywhere, I mean, if I didn’t know any better—”

“Shut up,” you snap, voice sharp, because you know. 

You know that cursed spirit wasn’t the one who did this. The person who did this used a cursed tool because they have no access to cursed energy, otherwise there would be more residue than just the Hei and the Kukuru. The person who did this did not mindlessly slaughter everyone; there are no children amongst the dead, only one woman, so they specifically targeted the Hei and the Kukuru. The person who did this specifically sought out Maki and Mai’s mother, indicaitng a personal vendetta. 

There is only one person who fits that description.

(“I thought maybe you would understand,” Maki once said quietly, when she came to you about her desire to leave the Zenins and become a sorcerer, her dreams of one day returning as clan head. “And help me, maybe.”)

And you do—you do fucking understand. You bite back another sob that threatens to rip from you. You do. You understand what it means to grow up inside a cage that calls itself tradition; you were born luckier than most with an extraordinary technique and brothers who defied tradition, but you tasted what could’ve been every Sunday at the Zenin estate for ten fucking years. To be watched and weighed and assessed—perfect smile, perfect poise, perfect temperament, perfect, perfect, perfect. One misstep, and you’re cast aside and replaced, because you were born a woman and not a man. You don’t know what drove her to these lengths, but you understand. The Zenin clan has always been the epitome of everything wrong with Jujutsu society. You’ve known that from a very young age.

(The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Polite, elegant, submissive. A woman must always watch that she does not overstep her husband. She must be beautiful and obedient. Public image is the most important quality of a woman, as it determines what rank of man would be willing to marry her. Once her image is soiled, she becomes worthless to her family. No man wants to marry a tainted or otherwise undesirable woman.)

And you just—you can’t turn her over to the higher-ups. Not a girl you’ve known since she was ten years old. A girl who would sneak away from her duties to watch you spar with Naoya, wide-eyed and wondrous at the sight of a female sorcerer. A girl who idolized you—looking up to you as a woman meant to become a Zenin-perfect wife for their prodigal son, and instead shattered the shackles, entering the ranks of the very men who tried to keep her down, first as a sorcerer, a grade that has traditionally only ever been given to Zenin men nonetheless, and then as a clan head. 

You can’t do it.

This is just your fate, you realize—every loss you’ve ever experienced, you’ve never been able to avenge a single one because you’re too fucking weak. No closure, no revenge, just an aching, gaping hole where love once kept you warm.

You lean down to brush your lips against the crown of Naoya’s head. 

His skin is cold.

(“I would’ve killed whatever did it,” he told you, “and everyone involved. Happy now? Are ya gonna let me fuckin’ sleep or d’ya have more dumb questions?”)

I’m sorry, you tell him, teeth grinding together. I’m sorry. I know you never would’ve done this to me.

Fuck, you almost choke over another sob, but you catch yourself before you can. You understand, you really do, you know the Zenins are awful, you know they’re everything wrong with traditional society, but you just—you hate that he had to go with it. 

He’s just another Zenin to everyone else—the worst of them, even. The face of the clan, the heir, the embodiment of the Zenin name and the one who benefited most from this corrupted system, the loudest reminder of everything the Zenins valued and everything they cast aside. He wasn’t the man who argued with you over nothing, who stole your skincare and hair products, no matter how many times you told him to quit it, who promised you a future that you desperately needed if you wanted to keep moving forward. He was never the boy who grew up bruised and angry and desperate to prove he was worth something in a world that loved him only conditionally. He wasn’t just a Zenin to you. He was Naoya. Your Naoya. Shitty, insufferable Naoya, who you don’t know how to live without. 

You want him back. 

You want him back so bad that it makes you sick.

“I’m telling you what happened, and that is what you’re going to report to the higher-ups,” you finally say, pushing everything down for just a little longer. “A special grade cursed spirit massacred the Zenin clan, and I will be the one to hunt and exorcise it. Are we clear?”

“… Yeah,” your cousin finally says, voice quiet. “We’re clear, but—you’re not actually going to… go after that thing, are you?”

Your arms tighten around Naoya slightly. His skin is cold. His body is limp. Your lashes flutter slightly before you look back in the direction where the cursed spirit fled to, and your heart is heavy because you know. No one in the world knows Naoya like you do, and you know for a fact that if he was not killed with jujutsu, then he is spiteful and angry enough to come back, and if he has come back, then you have to be the one to exorcise the curse born from him so that he can rest.

You exhale, laying his body down, head in your lap. You cradle his face carefully between your hands, one palm cupping the unbroken side of his jaw, thumb brushing lightly beneath his good eye; the other hovers uselessly for a moment before you carefully settle it on the opposite cheek, fingers grazing the ruined skin. Your gaze slips away, back to the familiar line of his mouth, the arch of his brow, the face you know, the one that still looks like him if you don’t stare too hard. 

You sigh softly as you lean down, pressing your lips against his forehead, gentle in the way the two of you so rarely were with one another. His skin is cold. His lashes don’t flutter at your touch. He does not give you a mocking smile or make a snide comment about how you’re getting sentimental with old age. A tear splashes against his cheek. You trail your lips down the slope of his nose, then lower still, to brush your mouth against his. His lips are cold too. They taste of blood and salt and a future that was taken away. Habit makes you pause, makes you expect the way his lips curve up into yours, makes you wait for the familiar pressure of his lips moving against yours and the way his hand slips around the back of your head.

“You’re so dramatic,” he would tell you, far too smug. “Lookit ya—cryin’ for me like this. I’d say it’s almost cute, but you’re an ugly crier.” 

“Fuck you, asshole,” you would snap back.

Nothing happens.

Your breath shudders, tears rolling over your cheeks more steadily now. You linger a second longer than you should. Just long enough to memorize the feel of him one last time, and then you pull back, just enough.

You tell him quietly, “I would’ve chosen you. Every time. Even knowing how it ends.”

Your thumbs brush once more along his jaw, and then you look away. You ease back slowly, carefully laying him down against the ground, and then you rise to your feet, looking back out in the direction the cursed spirit fled to.

“I want him buried at our estate,” you tell your cousin quietly. “Not here. There’s nothing left for him here.”

Your cousin says your name quietly, and you look at him over your shoulder with a small smile.

“Relax,” you say. “Everything will be fine. I’ll see you soon.”

————————

You are six, and he is eight, and you have just met. 

You have no idea how your life will change.

(You track the cursed spirit all the way down to the Kagoshima prefecture. 

You stare up at the black curtain that has dropped over the area, and you think it’s deeply ironic that it fled here of all places. You exhale, eyes sliding shut as you turn your head away. You wonder what it means—does it remember what this place meant to you and him? That this is the place where you reunited so many years ago? Or is it just a coincidence? 

You don’t know what to think, because if it remembers and it was drawn here, then it must have some semblance of Naoya’s consciousness, and you don’t know how to kill something that has Naoya’s consciousness, even if only a modicum of it.

You press your hands to your face, tired. You’ve been moving nonstop since you left the Zenin estate, haven't let yourself stop for a minute. If you stop, you will crash, and if you crash, you will never be able to come back from it, and you can’t let this thing born of Naoya’s cursed energy roam freely. Your chest aches, and you have to force yourself even to keep breathing—in, out, in, out. 

He never makes anything easy for you, even now. 

Only a little more, you tell yourself, then you can rest.)

You are seven, and he is nine, and you watch how he tenses when his father’s voice carries through the halls of the estate, slurred and loud. Something strange twists up your chest, and when he catches you frowning at him, he snaps at you to look away. You tell him that you don’t want to go to the kitchen anymore, you want to go to the garden, and he calls you annoying, but the two of you turn around and go in the opposite direction of where his father is floundering around drunk. 

You never bring it up, and neither does he. Some understandings don’t need words, especially between the two of you—that’s how it’s always been, even as children. 

(“Hi! I’m a Kogane! Inside this barrier, a lethal contest called the Culling Game has begun! Step inside, and you too become a player! Are you willing to enter?”

You stare at the floating shikigami, lips curved down, gaze flicking between it and the veil behind it. You ask, “What is the Culling Game?”

“A lethal contest,” the Kogane replies to your annoyance. “Would you like to consult the rules?”

You don’t have time for this, you think bitterly, glancing at the barrier again. “Sure. Tell me the rules.”

The Shikigami appears closer to you, its body shifting to reveal some sort of screen. 

You inhale sharply before leaning in, eyes skimming across the rules of this Culling Game: awaken cursed technique… declare participation… technique removal… score points by ending the lives of other people, sorcerers worth five points, non-sorcerers worth one… new rule at one hundred points… score remains the same for nineteen days, subject to technique removal… access to information about other players. Your gaze lingers on that last one.

“I’m looking for someone,” you say after a moment. “Can you tell me if this person is in the Culling Game?”

“I cannot!” Your eye twitches. “You are not a player yet!” 

You press your tongue to the back of your teeth, teeming with frustration. You look back at the barrier. The cursed spirit is in there. You know it is. You could try to use your maximum technique to confirm it, but you don’t know how this barrier will affect your technique if you use it from the outside, and you can’t risk draining yourself so quickly. 

It’s in there.

You know it.

“Alright,” you say. “I’ll become a player. Let me in.”)

You are eight, and he is ten, and you remind him—mutually assured destruction—when he threatens to tell your father how awful you are. He scowls, sulks, kicks the back of your knees when you turn away, and you launch yourself at him without thinking, fists tangling in his hair as the two of you go down in the dirt, flattening a bed of flowers beneath you. 

You’ll deny it later, but you’re laughing—helpless, breathless laughter that you cannot contain, the kind that only ever happens when the two of you are alone. You shove his face into the soil, and he grabs a fistful to smear across your mouth, trying to get you off of him. He’s laughing too, and he will deny it just as fiercely as you will, because the moment the two of you step out of the garden and back under the assessing gaze of his family, everything will have to return to how it should be, because you are not friends, cannot be friends, he is a boy, the Zenin heir, and you are just a girl.

(“Five points rewarded!” the kogane chirps next to where you’re crouched on the ground, hovering around your head like an irritating fly. You try to swat at it, but it only disappears and reappears on the opposite side of your head. “Five points rewarded!” 

“I know,” you say. “Be quiet.”

You can’t track down the cursed spirit. It’s in here—you know it is. As soon as you entered the barrier, you consulted the Kogane’s list of players and activated your maximum technique to pinpoint where it might be, casting your cursed energy thinly across the whole arena. There are hundreds of cursed energy signatures—well, two less now—but only one that you are intimately familiar with. You hate how similar it is. Not him—not quite—but close enough that it makes your chest seize when you first recognize it in the arena. An echo warped by death and hatred, but him in a way that’s impossible to deny. 

A few hours ago, it was lingering in the same area as that abandoned building the two of you were sent to a few years ago to exorcise that special grade curse. You hate that too, because you hate what it means—that it might remember, might be drawn there because it vaguely recalls Naoya’s history with you, or, at the very least, knows enough to know it was an important place. 

By the time you got there, it was gone—halfway across Kagoshima, moving quickly in the opposite direction—leaving you to deal with two sorcerers who had clearly sensed its presence and were looking to score some points for themselves. And you hate the idea of something born of Naoya’s cursed energy being hunted and exorcised by some garbage sorcerers, so when they turn their attention on you, you don’t hesitate.

You flip Naoya’s tanto knife casually in your hand, wiping the blood off on your sleeve, staring down at the engraving along its hilt. You run your thumb over the ridges before sighing, rising to your feet, and lifting your right hand, pointer finger brushing your forehead, thumb brushing your lip.

Time to try again.)

You are nine, and he is eleven, and you hate his brothers. You hate how they look down on him, you hate how they treat him, and you hate the way they make him feel uncomfortable. You tell yourself that it’s because they have no right to do so since they are weaker than him, but that doesn’t explain why you are frustrated to tears when you can only stand and watch as they needle him into something small and unrecognizable. It also doesn’t explain the glee you feel when Naotaka’s expression shifts in surprise when you take Naoya’s side after finally being given the opportunity to speak—they want him alone and vulnerable, you realize, more prone to making mistakes. 

You decide—out of spite, of course—that you will make sure he never is, even if you do hate him. The two of you are enemies, but you’re attached to him as his betrothed, so if he loses standing, then so do you. But it was never spite, and it was never hatred; he was never your enemy, no matter how much you insisted otherwise. He was always just yours, and you would be damned before you let his useless brothers—or anyone—hurt him the way they were trying.

He is eleven, and you are nine, and Naoya falls in love with you for the first, but certainly not the last, time. You do not know this—you will never know this—but he does, and it is this that he thinks of when he is trying to claw his way back to the estate, trying to get to his phone, get to you before it’s too late. He has loved you for longer than he’s ever been willing to admit, he has loved you through years of distance and terrible fights, he has loved you since you were an annoying girl who didn’t know her place and he was a bratty boy who thought himself better than everyone. He has always loved you, he thinks as the knife plunges through his back, always, always, always, but always was not long enough—not for him.

(You think the cursed spirit is hiding from you. Every time you track it down to where it should be lurking, it disappears halfway across the city. It’s like an awful game of cat and mouse, and you realize that if that cursed spirit retained Naoya’s technique, you’ll never catch up to it while it’s playing with you like this. You can’t keep using your technique to track it down either—every time you use it, it puts more strain on your body, and there are too many sorcerers in this arena to put yourself at risk like that. 

You also don’t know what that means about the cursed spirit, either. You don’t think it’s actively avoiding all sorcerers, because you’ve stumbled upon areas it was in after it left and found the corpses it left behind. It specifically seems to be avoiding you, and it’s eating you alive. 

Could the cursed spirit have really retained Naoya’s consciousness? It came here to Kagoshima and went specifically to the building where the two of you reunited, and it seems to be actively avoiding you and no one else. Is it just primal instincts? Lingering remnants of Naoya influencing it to go where places that he might’ve gone, warning it that you might be a danger to it because of your technique? Or is it something else?

You don’t have time to think about it.

“Kogane,” you bark, waiting for it to manifest. “How many points do I have?” 

“Twenty-five points!” the Kogane tells you. 

“If I kill a player with more than five points, will I obtain their points?” you ask.

“You will not!”

Your lip curls up in frustration, looking out over the city from the rooftop you’re perched on. You can’t sustain your technique long enough to hunt it down without killing yourself, so the only option left is to try to get a rule implemented that allows you to track down other players. 

Which means you have to start hunting.

How tiresome, you think. Why does he always have to make things so difficult for you?)

You are ten, and he is twelve, and you miss him. For the first time in four years, Sunday comes and goes without an invitation to the Zenin estate. Your father is angry at you, and your brothers find it all too funny, but there is a lump in your throat that you can’t explain, and an inexplicable emptiness in your chest where there should only be happiness, because you hate going to the Zenin estate. You convince yourself that you are only annoyed that this is all falling on you when it wasn’t your fault. 

You are lying—you are always lying. You wonder now why you lied to yourself so much back then, and you wonder, maybe, if the two of you might’ve had more time together if you didn’t.

He is twelve, and you are ten, and Naoya hurts in a way that’s hard to explain—he is embarrassed, he is frustrated, and he is in pain from many nights in the disciplinary pit, because it is his fault that you’ve gone to Gojo Satoru. More than that, he is inexplicably sad, and he cannot bring himself to walk anywhere near the garden anymore, and he refuses to try to understand why that is.

He is twelve, and you are ten, and Naoya thinks for the first time that he might love you. It is a fleeting thought, but he’s unsure what else the tightness in his chest might be when you stand in his bedroom after sneaking out of your clan’s estate, hiking fifteen miles through the forest to get to the Zenin estate, just so you can stand in front of him and ask him if the two of you are still engaged.

He is twelve, and you are ten, and Naoya realizes you are the first, and only, person who has ever wanted him—chosen him—without him having to prove he earned it first.

(“Five points rewarded! Five points rewarded! You are now at fifty-five points!” 

“Wait, wait, wait!” the sorcerer gasps as he scrambles away from you, nails scraping against the concrete, leaving bloody tracks. You stare down at him, head tilted to the side, waiting for him to speak. “I only just came back, I don’t want to die again, I—”

“Again?” you ask, brows furrowing. “What are you talking about?”

The man’s eyes widen, and yours narrow. 

Does it have something to do with this Culling Game? Came back? Die again? Is the Culling Game bringing people back to life? Irrationally, hope begins to bloom in your chest—could you bring Naoya back? If a cursed spirit born of his energy is darting around the arena, is there a way you could bring him back as he was? You shouldn’t get your hopes up—you shouldn’t, you know that—but you want him back so bad that it makes you physically ill. 

“I’ll explain, if you promise not to kill me,” the sorcerer nods, eyes wide and searching as he stares up at you.

You don’t have the time or energy to play these games. 

“Sure,” you agree. “Explain.”

The man swallows hard, hands shaking as he props himself up on one elbow, blood slicking the concrete beneath him. “I’m—” he pants, eyes darting like you might change your mind any second. “I’m not from this era. Not originally. I died hundreds of years ago.” Your heart thuds in your ears. “The—the one who started this, he made contracts with us before we died. Our souls were preserved and sealed into cursed objects, and when this game began, we were incarnated into modern bodies.”

Contracts before death. Souls preserved. The words ring through your head painfully loud. You knew this was going to be the case—there is no bringing someone back from the dead, not really—but you are still flooded with such a bitter feeling that it makes you sick. Why do these people get a second chance? And why does their second chance come at the cost of so much to you? Satoru, Naoya—everything that’s happened the past two weeks, is it really all to bring back some dead sorcerers? Why? Why? You don’t understand. You don’t fucking understand. What did they do to deserve a second chance? Why did they take Satoru and Naoya? You miss them, you miss him, you miss him so bad that you can’t breathe, that—

“So, you’re telling me that this all began because a bunch of washed up sorcerers who couldn’t survive in their eras think they have some right to the modern one?” you ask, lips trembling. Rage, grief, indignation at the sheer unfairness of it all. Fuck, you think furiously, what the fuck? “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“We—it’s not like that,” he disagrees. “We were strong in our era, and—”

“Five points rewarded!” 

You stare down at the sorcerer as blood pools around his head, seeping from his cut throat.

“Kogane. Show me the information of all of the reincarnated sorcerers in this arena.”)

You are eleven, and he is thirteen, and you learn that he can’t hold your gaze when he tells a lie. You learn a lot of things about him that year—the way his eyes shift the moment he goes from feeling angry to cornered, the difference in how he holds himself when he’s in a good mood versus a bad mood, how when he thinks people aren’t looking, his shoulders slump a little, uncertainty slipping into the curve of his lips as he observes the men around him, trying to figure out how he should act—but this is your favorite, even as silly as it is. You don’t use it against him, not usually at least. You keep it to yourself, something small and private that belongs only to you. 

Once, you ask him, do you think I’m pretty, Nao-chan? and he snaps at you, tells you to stop calling him that stupid nickname, and then calls you hideous. His gaze flits away as he says it, and you find yourself smiling, which only makes him even more annoyed, but there is a skip in your step as you follow him to the garden.

(You miss him.

You choke on air as something warm and wet splatters across your face. Your vision is blurry, and there is a terrible ache in your chest that won’t go away. Not now, you tell yourself again, not now, you can’t crash now.

“Five points rewarded! You are now at seventy points!” 

Your eyes slide shut as you force away the tears that suddenly prick at your eyes. You can see the sun breaching the horizon, and you are angry, you are grieving, because how dare the dawn always insist on coming when your world ends. How dare it be warm, how dare it be bright, how dare it pretend that anything is still moving forward when you are standing in knee-deep blood that isn’t his. The corpse at your feet twitches once before going still, eyes glassy and unfocused, mouth slack.

For a second, you blink, and you are back at the Zenin estate, and it is Naoya at your feet, his blood on your blade, his death on your hands. Bile burns the back of your throat, and you stumble away before you double to your hands and knees and hurl the small meal your cousins forced you to eat before you left. 

How long has it been? You’re not sure. Everything bleeds together. You haven’t slept at all. It feels like an eternity since you held Naoya in your arms, and it feels like five seconds ago, all the same.

You miss him. 

You miss him.

You just want him back.)

You are twelve, and he is fourteen, and he acts strange around you in a way that’s hard to articulate. It makes you angry, and even now, you’re not sure why it did, because he was being good to you. You suppose even as a kid, you hated the idea of things changing. 

You don’t know that he covers for you whenever you slip up in front of the wrong people. You don’t know that he scoffs at his uncles when they mention off-handedly that you might not be fit to be a Zenin wife. You don’t know that whenever you’re not paying attention, he catches himself staring at you, a tight feeling in his chest that he smothers deep beneath pride and derision.

You don’t know a lot of things, and you will never know a lot of things. Maybe in the next life things will be different.

(Distantly, you understand that they do not deserve to die.

You are angry and grieving, and you cannot avenge Naoya the way you should, so you are unleashing your rage onto these sorcerers, who made the mistake of making a contract with the wrong person. They are not the ones who took him from you. They are not the ones who shattered your future and left you standing in the ruins with blood on your hands and nothing left to hold onto.

You cut them down all the same anyway.

“Five points rewarded! You are now at eighty-five points.”)

You are thirteen, and he is fifteen, and he is angry at you all the time now. You don’t understand why he’s angry because you only told him that he should do what you both want, and get his father to end the engagement. Now you know that was something he never wanted—I always wanted you, he tells you in the rain years later, even back when we were kids—and you realize that he had been under the mistaken belief that you had begun to want him back. But— 

But he had no right to be angry, you think with tears in your eyes—he should’ve said something sooner. Then maybe—then maybe you wouldn’t have lost three years, then maybe you might be married, then maybe, then maybe, then maybe.

(Maybe you can bind it to you in the same way Orimoto Rika was bound to Okkotsu Yuta. 

The thought bounces in your head, taunting, dangerous, entirely irrational, but you cannot push it away. If this cursed spirit has partially retained Naoya’s consciousness… If it understands enough to know who you are, if it understands enough to know the importance of Kagoshima and that abandoned building, then perhaps, it has retained enough of Naoya for you to cling to it. For you to convince yourself that he’s not gone.

The thought is reckless, you know that. And you know how dangerous it is. You have seen what that kind of attachment does. You know the cost. Orimoto Rika was not saved by love, she was damned by it, twisted into something monstrous because a boy couldn’t bear to let her go. 

And yet. 

If there is even a fragment of him left in it—if there is something there that remembers your voice, then maybe you can give it a shape that isn’t hatred incarnate. Maybe you can keep it from hurting anyone else. Maybe you can keep it from becoming something that would have disgusted him if he were alive to see it. Maybe you can keep him.

You would carry him with you always. You would feel him everywhere. You would never be alone again. You would not have to suffer to live through a world without him.

Maybe.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.)

You are fourteen, and he is sixteen, and you find yourself staring at him all too often—at the way his shoulders have started to broaden, at how his voice drops when he’s annoyed, at the sharpness of his profile when he watches you from the corner of his eye to see if you’re looking. You tell yourself that it’s nothing, that you’re only noticing the changes because you’ve known him forever, but your chest does something uncomfortable when he catches you looking and tosses you a smug smirk and a wink instead of getting mad. 

You start to look away first, eyes wide and face hot, heart beating way too fast for no reason you’re willing to name, and he starts to watch you when you aren’t paying attention, gaze soft and lingering, and a tightness in his chest that he has long stopped denying—to himself, at least. You wish you had stopped denying it sooner, too.

(You trick yourself into thinking that you have already forgotten his face. 

It is ridiculous, because it has not even been two days and you have known him your entire life, but you are exhausted, running on fumes and grief, and you haven’t slept because you are scared to see him waiting for you in your dreams, angry and accusing, demanding to know why you won’t avenge him. When your lashes flutter, and you cannot immediately picture his face before you found him that morning on the floor, without the blood and gore, partially caved in, you double over and throw up again, even though there is nothing left in you to give anymore. 

You heave and sob, clutching at your chest, your mouth, nails digging into the palm of your hands so deep that blood drips between your knuckles to the concrete. Why can’t you picture him? Why can you only see him like that? Why do you see the golds of his eyes dull and lifeless, instead of dancing with amusement? Why is his expression slack and empty, instead of smug and infuriating?

Naoya, you sob, forehead pressed against the cold concrete—you miss him, you want him back, there is no place for you in this world anymore, not without him.)

You are fifteen, and he is seventeen, and you have lost him for the first, but not the last time. You don’t know at the time that it is only temporary, and you don’t know why it feels like the end of the world. You cannot explain to your brothers why you’re crying when they come to find you the first Sunday after the engagement is called off. 

He is yours, you understand now that you knew it even back then. There’s no future for you without him in it, and that is why the end of your engagement—the most permanent type of loss in your innocent, childish mind—felt so wrong. You just couldn’t—wouldn’t—put it into words. He is yours, he is yours. He has always been yours, and you have always been his. The two of you are bonded in a way that no one can ever understand, and there is no world where you can lose him and move on with your life.

(“You are now at one hundred points! Do you want to spend them to add a new rule to the Culling Game?” 

“Yes. I want to add an extension to Rule Nine. I want the real-time locations of all players to be disclosed, not just what colonies they’re a part of.”

“This is acceptable! The rule will be announced to all players immediately!” 

You stare at the ground, heart thudding in your ears. You press your hands against your thighs, eyes sliding shut. It’s time now, you realize—you can go after the cursed spirit without having to use your technique. It will have to run out of cursed energy eventually, will have to stop running, and you will just keep hunting it down until it does. You don’t have to worry about frying your own brain with your technique now that you can just track it through the Kogane.

It’s time. 

And yet—

“How many more reincarnated sorcerers are in this arena?” you ask the Kogane tightly.

“There are fifteen reincarnated sorcerers currently in the Sakurajima Colony!” 

“Show me the location of the closest one.”)

You are sixteen, and he is eighteen now. Today is his birthday, and you are lying in bed alone, staring at your phone and a message that doesn’t go through: Happy birthday, asshole. Wanna go do something? Your throat swells with frustration as you look at it for a moment before you throw your phone at the wall, bitter and angry and lonely. You think, maybe, that you should take it as a sign, and you call up Satoru to see if he wants to go to a movie instead.

You tell yourself it’s fine, that you’ll get used to his absence in your life, but it was as impossible then as it is now.

He is eighteen, and you are sixteen, and it is his birthday. He sits in the garden alone, watching the naked branches of the cherry blossoms sway back and forth in the wind. His father comes looking for him, drunk, and he laughs as he slaps Naoya on the shoulder. Nearly dying because of that girl, only for her to run off with the Gojo boy. Stupid boy, this is what you get for attaching yourself to a woman. I hope you’ve learned your lesson. Naoya’s lips tighten into a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and he wonders why he is never enough as is. 

(It’s your fault.

“Five points rewarded!”

It’s your fault that he is dead. 

“Five points rewarded!” 

You knew this was going to happen. You knew something bad was coming. You knew that if he walked away from you in that tunnel, you would never see him again, and you let him walk away anyway. It’s your fault. 

“Five points rewarded!”)

You are seventeen, and he is nineteen, and it’s been almost two years, but you still don’t go a day without him crossing your mind. Satoru tries to keep you distracted with training, and missions, and even helping you get promoted to Special Grade One as a slap in the face to the Zenin, whose men were traditionally the only ones allowed to bear that title, but your mind always goes back to him. 

Everything always goes back to him.

He is nineteen, and you are seventeen, and all he ever hears about is you and Satoru. He has always vowed to keep far away from alcohol, having grown up with his father the way he did, but when whispers reach him about how it seems likely that you and Satoru will be married within the year, he cracks open a bottle of sake and drowns himself in his sorrows. He types up long, hateful, accusatory messages, blaming you for screwing everything up when things were good, for giving him hope when you always intended on turning your back on him, for convincing him that there was someone out there who wanted him for him and not his technique or his title, but he never sends them. 

The line between love and hatred had always been terribly thin for the two of you, from the day you met him to the day you lost him, but he knows that this is real, deep-seated hatred. He can feel it in his blood, his bones, his soul. He has been humiliated so many times before, but never like this, never by you. He never wants to see you again, he decides, and he thinks he hates most of all that he knows he’s only lying to himself. 

I wouldn’t have done this to you, he almost sends while drunk one night. I never would’ve fucking done this to you. 

(“Next.”

“There are no more reincarnated sorcerers currently in the Sakurajima Colony!” the Kogane chirps.

“None?” you exhale, throat swelling immediately. If there are none left, then… “But—”

“That is correct! There are none left!”

Fuck, you think, letting out a shaky breath. What the hell are you supposed to do now?)

You are eighteen, and he is twenty, and for the first time in three years, you can breathe. You laugh freely, and it startles you how easily it comes, how natural it feels to be standing at his side again after so long apart. You fall into sync as though no time has passed at all, and you realize, distantly, that the tightness you’ve carried for years has vanished. You had been pushing through each passing day with Satoru at your side, dragging you along with him, but there was an inexplicable emptiness in you that could never be filled. You understand now that living—really living—only feels possible with him at your side.

(You are putting off what needs to be done. 

You stumble off to a nearby convenience store, grabbing a bottle of liquor before curling up in the corner of the store. You try not to drink too much when you’re around Naoya, so it feels wrong having the bottle in your hands like this, the ring he gave you pressed against its neck, but Naoya is gone. Naoya is gone. Naoya is gone. The thought rings through your head over and over again. Naoya is gone, and you are alone. Naoya is gone, and he is a liar. Naoya is gone, and you could have stopped him. Naoya is gone, and it’s because of you. 

You throw the bottle at the wall, and you scream.)

You are nineteen, and he is twenty-one, and everything is okay again.

It is enough. He is enough. 

As long as you have him, it will always be enough.

(You wonder if you’ll be able to do it—exorcise a cursed spirit born of Naoya’s energy. 

You lie in the middle of a roundabout at a park near a primary school, staring up at the sky. You flip Naoya’s tanto knife into the air above you, watching it spin and spin and spin until it begins to drop back down toward you. You catch the hilt as the tip grazes between your eyes. 

It’s not Naoya, not really, you know that, no matter how much that thought of trying to bind it to you lingers. It wouldn’t be him. Not your Naoya. It wouldn’t laugh the way he did. It wouldn’t argue with you over nothing. It wouldn’t sulk when you won. It wouldn’t curl around you in its sleep and then get embarassed in the morning. It wouldn’t kiss you, wouldn’t hold you, wouldn’t smile smugly against your neck when you shiver. 

It wouldn’t be him. 

It wouldn’t be enough.)

You are twenty, and he is twenty-two, and you have lost everything, but never him, and that will always be enough for you to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even as the world tries to take more than it has any right to.

(You felt it the moment he died, you realize later. 

In the forest, before you noticed the cursed spirit coming toward you. You stumbled, and your hand flew to your chest, an empty feeling spreading through you. You convinced yourself that it was nothing, just you spiraling from fear and stress after days of being wound up, but that must have been it. That was the moment he died, that was when the knife was plunged into his back, when he couldn’t muster enough cursed energy to protect himself. 

He didn’t leave quietly—he never did anything quietly, you think, almost fondly. He tore a piece of you loose and dragged it with him, because the two of you had been too intertwined for any ending to be clean. This was always going to happen one way or another. There is no world where he dies, and you can just…

Your eyes slide shut.

Not yet—you can’t fall apart yet.)

You are twenty-one, and he is twenty-three, and you think that you’re losing him again. You’re choking on air as you leave the Zenin estate, desperately trying to hold yourself together. You cannot let yourself fall apart, not yet, but then he comes running, and he wants you, he’s always wanted you, he tells you, voice ragged, desperate for you to believe him. He is yours, and you are his—you have always been each other’s, and looking at him in front of you now, you wonder why you waited so long to admit this to one another.

He is twenty-three, and you are twenty-one, and he knows that he wants to spend the rest of his life with you. He does, but not as long as he had hoped for.

(You blame him. 

He should’ve just come with you. 

He should’ve listened to you.

He should’ve trusted you.

He should’ve, he should’ve, he should’ve. 

“Five points rewarded!”)

You are twenty-two, and he is twenty-four, and things are easy, and you are happy. 

You wish that this would last forever.

(You hate him.

A thick, purple substance splatters across your cheek as you kill a cursed spirit.

“Five points rewarded!” 

You hate him.

You pull your knife out of another’s throat.

“Five points rewarded!”

You hate him.)

You are twenty-three, and he is twenty-five, and you are balanced on the edge of a life that almost makes sense, one hand in his as he pulls you forward and the other still brushing the past, loosened at last, finally starting to let go.

(“I don’t know how you did it,” you gasp to someone who isn’t listening, teeth grinding together. You press your fists to your eyes, fighting another sob. You want to scream again, but you can barely breathe. “I don’t know how you did it, Satoru. I’ll never be able to move on from this. You were right. It really is the most fucked up curse of all.”)

You are twenty-four, and he is twenty-six, and he wants to marry you, and you think that you want to marry him too. You have never liked the idea of you two being defined by words, so you test him, poking at his boundaries, trying to see just how far he’ll go to woo you into marriage. You learn quickly that there are no lengths he wouldn’t go to for you, no unreasonable request he wouldn’t fulfill, no pride he wouldn’t swallow if it meant keeping you happy. It is unwavering—he is unwavering—so when he brings you to watch the sunrise by the cherry blossoms, and he finally asks you what he’s been hinting at for months, you say yes without hesitation, and you never second-guess yourself once. 

He is twenty-six, and you are twenty-four, and he almost lost you. He hides the fear behind anger, as he always tends to do, but he never forgets the way his stomach dropped when you hit the ground or how his fingers shook as he pulled you into his arms. He spits at you for being stupid and reckless, throws your own words right back in your face—you’re a sorcerer, not a hero—and makes cruel comments about how you’re not fit for combat just to get under your skin. 

The two of you fight a lot during the month you’re bedridden, and Naoya only lets the anger drain to exhaustion when he’s sure you won’t see it. He sleeps curled around you like a guard dog, arm locked tight around your waist, breath shallow and uneven like he’s afraid that if he lets himself relax, you’ll disappear. When you stir, even just a little, his hold tightens instinctively, fingers pressing into your body. He wakes at every sound, every shift in your breathing, and you catch him more than once staring at you in the dark, eyes wide and unblinking, watching the rise and fall of your chest just to reassure himself that you’re still here. 

He does not want to know a life without you, and luckily, he will never have to.

(“Show me the location of the cursed spirit created from the cursed energy of Zenin Naoya.”)

You are twenty-five, and he is twenty-seven, and he is dead. One day, you will be twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and he will still be twenty-seven, and you think that is not something that you can live with. 

You are twenty-five, and he will always be twenty-seven, and you realize that there is no world where Naoya dies and you remain alive.

————————

NOVEMBER 14, 2018

It’s wearing his face.

It’s wearing his face.

Your breath is labored as you stare at the cursed spirit from across the street. You’d thought, maybe, that the sorcerers killed it—you weren’t sure whether to be relieved or furious, grateful or bloodthirsty. You’ve been battling yourself since you got to Kagoshima, because you don’t know if you’ll be able to kill something born of Naoya’s cursed energy, something that potentially retained fragments of his consciousness, but you also know that it can only be you. You won’t let some random sorcerer put it down like a rabid dog—it is not Naoya, and it’s certainly not Naoya enough, but it’s still—

It’s wearing his face.

It hasn’t noticed you yet, thrown into a blind rage by the sorcerers who are attacking it. You don’t recognize two of them—older men who don’t seem to belong to this era. You have half a mind to spit at the Kogane for lying to you and saying there were no other reincarnated sorcerers, but you realize that they probably entered the colony after your hunt, and you have more pressing issues right now anyway. 

You do recognize the other two—Zenin Maki and Kamo Noritoshi.

How fucking ironic. 

You watch Maki push herself to her feet after taking a blow from the cursed spirit. You can’t muster the anger you want to feel, not toward her, not toward Noritoshi, not toward the two reincarnated sorcerers, not even toward the thing wearing Naoya’s face—you are just tired. The exhaustion sinks into your bones, heavier than fear, heavier than rage. You are tired; you just want to rest. 

It moves wrong. Too feral. Too loose. Naoya’s movements were always sharp and precise when he was fighting, even when he was furious. This thing thrashes, overcommits, howls without words. It’s disgusting, and it has no right to wear his face the way it is. This is not Naoya, not enough, not even nearly.  

You step off the curb before you fully realize you’ve come to a decision. Asphalt crunches under your boots, and the cursed spirit falters just as it brings its hands up to use a hand sign, head snapping in your direction, gold eyes locking onto yours with something like confusion. Recognition, maybe. Its hands falter mid-motion, fingers twitching as though it forgot what it was doing. It makes you sick. This is not Naoya, and it should not look at you like Naoya would.

“Yo,” you say, voice bland, empty to even your own ears. “I’ve been looking for you, asshole. Why do you keep running from me, hm?”

It doesn’t respond to you. It blinks once. Twice. The same way Naoya always would when he was trying not to have a visible reaction to something that caught him off guard. You hate it—that thing is not Naoya, and it should not be acting like Naoya would. The ring on your fourth finger weighs impossibly heavy. You are so tired. 

Maki says your name, trying to get your attention, and you look at her over your shoulder. Whatever she sees in your face makes her falter. You say, “Stay out of this, Maki-chan. You and Kamo have done enough.”

Maki disagrees, shaking her head, “But—”

“Stay out of this,” you repeat, voice colder this time. “I won’t repeat myself again.” Maki’s nostrils flare as she inhales, preparing to disagree again, but Noritoshi grabs her arm, shaking his head. “Kogane, transfer all of my remaining points to Zenin Maki.”

“I cannot! There is no player called Zenin Maki participating in this game!”

Your eyes slide shut. You exhale and cast another dull look back at Noritoshi. “Kogane, transfer all of my remaining points to Kamo Noritoshi.”

How sick, you think. The words taste bitter on your tongue—giving everything you have left to a Kamo. How much more shame are you going to bring to the people you’ve lost?

The sins of the parent are not the sins of the child, you tell yourself again as the Kogane confirms the point transfer. You turn your attention back to the cursed spirit, and you hate that it’s still standing there. You hate that it’s frowning. You hate that its gaze is dragging between you and the other sorcerers like it's trying to understand what’s happening. Where did the rage go? The blind fury? The animal-like brutality? The hatred? The lust for vengeance? Why is it almost… docile right now? Why is it looking at you like this? Why is it looking at you like—

“I know you can speak,” you say. “Say something already.”

Its throat works once. Twice. When it finally speaks, the sound is wrong—rough and layered in a way that Naoya’s smooth timbre never was—but the cadence makes your stomach drop.

“... Took ya long enough.”

It shouldn’t sound like him. It doesn’t sound like him, but also—it does. It shouldn’t know how to give you that smug half-smile that drives you crazy, shouldn’t know how to drag the words out in the same way he always did when he was trying to piss you off. Your nails bite into your palms hard enough to hurt. You are so fucking tired.

“Hah?” you ask, swallowing down the lump that forms in your throat. “You were the one running from me like a little bitch. If anything, took you long enough to actually face me.”

You don’t even know why you’re indulging it in conversation. This is not Naoya. It does not matter if it’s wearing Naoya’s face. It does not matter if it has some strange mimicry of his voice. It does not matter that it has some of his mannerisms. 

It is not Naoya. Not your Naoya.

But—

What if it really is Naoya enough?

No, it isn’t. It can’t be.

It tilts its head again, the same wrong imitation of a familiar gesture. Gold eyes flick over you, lingering in the same places Naoya’s would—your eyes, your lips, the wound on your left side. Its lips curl down at that last one. 

“Still runnin’ around gettin’ yourself hurt,” it mutters, voice rough. “Thought I told you to stay away from all this shit. Lookit ya now, got yourself all hurt, all wound up. Was gonna come to you once I was ready. Shoulda just waited. Always so impatient.”

This is not Naoya.

This is a cursed spirit.

​​You hate that you're having to convince yourself of this. You shouldn't have given it the opportunity to talk. What were you thinking? Naoya told you this himself—curses that wear human faces lie and trick and beg and pretend. You grit your teeth, jaw aching from the effort to keep from reacting. You miss him. You want him back. But this isn’t him. It’s not him. It’ll never be enough. Not the way he was.

“Come to me?” you ask with a scoff, as though your heart isn’t in your throat, “And what did you expect, huh? That I would just accept some cheap imitation of Naoya with open arms? You’re not him. You’re just some half-baked cursed spirit wearing his face. Quit pretending you know me. Quit pretending to be him. You’re gonna make me hurl.”

You just want to rest. Why does he have to put you through this? Why couldn’t he just—

“... Pretend?” it echoes, and there’s something strange in its voice. You ignore it. “You think I’m fuckin’ pretending? It’s me. You know it’s me. You know it, y’fuckin’ bitch. Don’t stand there acting like you don’t recognize me. Are you serious right now?”

You don’t answer it this time. You keep Naoya’s tanto knife strapped to your forearm, hidden beneath your sleeve, and you pull out your own instead, leaning back on your heels before turning your attention back up to it. Naoya’s face stares back at you, something close to confusion slipping onto it when you pull out the knife—it’s not him, you know it’s not him, but how—how are you supposed to kill something that wears his face? When his face will be the one that twists in pain, shock, anger when you sink the knife in? How are you supposed to do that?

You’re so fucking tired. You’re so tired. You’re so tired.

You’ll have to use your technique, you force yourself to push down all of your treacherous thoughts. You only have to keep pushing a little more, then you can rest. With your technique activated, you’ll be able to see its movements without having to actually see it at all. All you’ll have to do is follow its cursed energy paths. You exhale through your nose deeply, lifting your hand up, and you watch as its eyes widen, and its face twists—fury, disbelief, worse, betrayal—as it realizes what exactly you’re here for. 

“You traitor bitch,” it shrieks at you. It doesn’t sound like Naoya this time, not at all. Too inhuman, twisted with rage and hatred. Naoya has been angry with you millions of times before, but he’s never sounded like this, never so hateful. “I came back for you! I came back for you! And you’re going to side with them? You’re choosing them?! I’m gonna kill you, I’ll fuckin’ kill you—”

Your lips curl up into a small smile as your eyes slide shut. His rage lights up the paths ahead of you in jagged, violent arcs, fast and amateurish, all force and no restraint. Not Naoya. Your Naoya was never so sloppy.

You tell him quietly, “Not if I kill you first.”

He lunges, and you are already moving.

The first strike tears through the space where your head was going to be a breath ago. You pivot on your heel, slipping inside the gap your technique showed you, blade flashing up in a clean strike that cuts through its arm. It makes a noise as the blade clips it, more surprised than angry or wounded, as though it didn’t actually expect you to try to hurt it. You can picture the wide-eyed, betrayed expression Naoya would direct toward you, and it makes your stomach churn.

Focus.

You slip past the next blow just as easily, feet moving on instinct, body remembering a rhythm that you learned a long, long time ago. It’s not Naoya, not really, but it favors its left side, the same way Naoya always used to, and it strikes with its right hand first, just like he would. You can almost imagine that the two of you are back at your estate, sparring in the training grounds while your brothers watched, can almost imagine laughing as you dodge another quick blow, gaze catching his as you toss a smile at his scowl, can almost imagine that this is all just for fun, that you’ll end this sprawled on the ground, shoulder-to-shoulder, laughing the way you always do. You have to swallow back the lump that forms in your throat, ducking under a swing and driving your blade into its side. 

The cursed spirit is faster than Naoya was, and you can hear it laughing as it moves away, a shrill sound that scrapes at your ears. “Lookit me!” it demands, voice pitching high and low all at once. You squeeze your eyes shut tighter, refusing. “I said, look at me! I’m stronger than I ever was—I’m better! Don’t get tired, don’t bleed, don’t need anyone, not even you, not even you!”

You pivot before the next strike even exists, something hot and wet tracks down your cheeks—you don’t know if it’s blood or tears, and you don’t want to know. Every second this fight drags on, the cursed spirit gets faster and faster, and you have to compensate by pushing your technique further, three steps to five, five to seven, seven to ten—you’ve never pushed past ten, and your head is pounding as you force yourself to. 

“Why won’t you fucking look at me?” it snarls, furious, swinging again, wild and overextended, desperate for you to look at it—really look—like it’s waiting for praise, recognition, for you to tell it that it’s enough for you. Naoya would do this too, would linger around and wait for you to acknowledge him, but he was never so open about it. “Look at me, y’fucking bitch. I don’t need you! I never did, I never needed you, fucking look at me!”

You need to get it to stop moving—to cut off the stacks of Projection Sorcery before it ramps up the speed to something you can’t physically react to in time. It doesn’t matter how far you see ahead if it keeps accelerating beyond what your body can handle. You grit your teeth as it flees again, backing away to pick up momentum, and you watch a path start to form behind you, cutting through buildings, tearing up the street, and your jaw tightens. You drop down right as it speeds past the stop sign at the end of the street, grabbing a fistful of crushed asphalt and swinging it upward, flinging it into where his face will be in a few moments.

“Fuck—” it gasps, and you can’t help the way your eyes flutter open as it stumbles back, getting caught in one of its own frames for a split second. Shock flickers across its face before rage swallows it whole. “Cheap fuckin’ trick.”

“Same trick,” you correct quietly. “Naoya never would’ve fallen for it.”

You hesitate for a second too long, gaze lingering on its face—Naoya’s face, his stolen face—and suddenly you’re looking up at the sky, vision white for half a heartbeat. Pain blooms along your spine, and before you can roll away, a familiar shadow looms over you

“Knew I’d get ya back where ya belong,” it says with an ugly sneer. “Always preferred you like this—flat on your fuckin’ back, spread out, lookin’ up at me with that helpless look in your eyes.”

It bends over you, grabbing your face between its fingers, and you glare up at it hatefully. Its skin is cold. You blink, and for a second, the face above you is half-caved in, blood and gore, and you’re back in the Zenin estate, holding him in your arms, begging the world not to take him from you too. 

Focus, you think, and you pray that the wetness on your cheeks is blood and not tears.

You grab the wrist of the hand holding your face as leverage, and you reach up, grabbing a fistful of its hair to yank it down to the ground with you. If you can keep it on the floor, it can’t dart around and regain momentum. It hits the pavement hard with a hiss of surprise, bodies colliding in an ugly sprawl. The impact rattles your teeth, and it snarls, flailing, trying to kick free, cursed energy spiking in erratic bursts as it tries to use Projection Sorcery to get off the ground, but you refuse to let go, pushing its face into the muddy asphalt like the two of you are eight and ten again, rolling around in the garden.

“Get off!” it shrieks, clawing at you, trying to buck you off, and you jab your knee hard into its side. It lets out a sharp and startled yelp, and for a split second, you remember the way he would let out obnoxious squeaks when the two of you were children and you got a good hit in, face flaming red as you make fun of him. You almost let a laugh slip out, but catch yourself. You think you are crying. “Get off!”

You can’t kill it with your bare hands, you know that, but your hands find its throat anyway. Your fingers tighten around it, nails digging in as if you can choke the rage out of it. Its blood isn’t even red—murky purple, disgusting beneath your nails. Not Naoya, not your Naoya. You shut your eyes again, you can’t look at it. It thrashes beneath you, clawing at your arms, dragging red lines through your biceps, but you stay there, knees planted around its waist, grip on its neck tightening, tears and blood alike spilling over your cheeks in hot, uncontrollable streams.

“Why—” you choke out, voice breaking as your grip tightens. “Why couldn’t you have just come over? Why couldn’t you have just listened? Just this once?”

“Get off!” it continues to shriek. You think that it could probably force you off if it really wanted to, but it doesn’t. It claws and screams and tries to roll you off of it to get the upperhand, and you wonder if whatever is left of Naoya in there has fallen back into memory, just like you: knees in the dirt, hands everywhere, neither of you willing to give an inch, breathless and furious and laughing despite yourselves, limbs tangled in the garden mud because neither of you ever knew how to stop. It’s all the same—nothing’s ever changed. You think it was always going to end this way, one way or another. “Get off, get off, get off!”

“Shut up!” you scream, the sound tearing out of you raw and ugly. You hold his throat tighter and shake furiously. “Shut up! Tell me why! Tell me why you had to run off like that! Why did you have to be so fucking stupid? Why did you have to leave? You were always enough for me, why wasn’t I ever enough for you, you fucking asshole?” 

The cursed spirit bucks beneath you again, rage flaring, but there’s something else there too now—confusion, fury tangled with something like pain. It spits again, “I was gonna fix it. I was gonna come back. I did come back. I always fuckin’ come back, don’t I? I’m here—with you. I did it. I fuckin’ did it,” You can’t look at it, eyes still squeezed tight, “and I’m stronger now, faster, can’t you see? Why won’t you look at me? Look at me! Just fuckin’ look at me! Fuck!” 

You do, finally, and Naoya stares up at you, gold eyes wild and unfocused, too bright, too sharp, burning with something that is not life. The face is his and it isn’t all at once. For a second—just a split second—you see it: the boy who kicked dirt at your ankles, the man who always came back to you, the idiot who loved you so fiercely that it curdled into something ugly when he didn’t know how to deal with it. Your chest aches, a shuddering breath spilling from your lips, and then—

Then it’s gone, swallowed by something feral and wrong. 

It knocks you off of it in your moment of hesitation, and your back hits the asphalt hard, pain jolting up your spine as the breath punches out of your lungs. You skid across the street, shirt tearing, skin burning, ears ringing. You’re in so much pain, you are so tired, and you push yourself back up to your feet anyway. It’s gone already, back to using its technique, trying to pick up speed again. Your head feels heavy and tired as you lift your hand back to activate yours, brain throbbing as his path becomes visible again.

You won't be able to keep outmaneuvering it, you realize. You're running out of energy. Everything hurts. You are tired—so tired. You need to end this—you're the only one who can end this, because you won't let Naoya—this thing born of his energy—die by anyone else's hands, not again. You owe him that much, since you didn't properly avenge him.

You see it all before it happens—before you even come to the decision yourself—you see the angle of its approach, the way it comes at you head-on, the moment it expects you to dodge. It always expects you to dodge, so did Naoya, because you always do.

Except this time, you don’t—can’t—don’t. You don’t know for sure. Don’t know if it matters. Don’t care if it matters. You are tired—physically, mentally, and your limbs won’t cooperate with you either way. You need to end this, need to get close enough to reach the cursed spirit's core.

Its hand spears toward your chest, powered by its cursed energy—Naoya’s warped cursed energy—and pain detonates through you, blinding. The impact knocks the air from your lungs in a broken gasp as its hand drives clean through muscle and bone. Warmth floods your chest, and your knees almost buckle.

It freezes, like it’s unsure what just happened.

“What—” it breathes out. “You—why didn’t you—”

You grab its wrist for leverage and force yourself forward, deeper on its arm, before you sling your arms around its shoulders, a twisted mimicry of a hug. You flatten your palm against its upper back, right over the stab wound that killed your Naoya. Your face drops into the crook of its neck, and you say softly, “It’s here, isn’t it? The core?”

It doesn’t seem to register what you said. “Why didn’t you dodge?” it demands again. “Why didn’t you dodge, y’bitch? Why didn’t you dodge?!”

You exhale, blood bubbling at your lips, and you free Naoya’s tanto knife from where it’s hidden beneath your sleeve, and you muster all that’s left of your cursed energy to infuse it into the blade before you drive it into him. 

It gasps—raw and startled and terribly familiar—the blade sinks in with sickening ease, plunging right into the cursed spirit’s core. It goes rigid in your arms, the hand buried in your chest trembles once, before it pulls it out, but it doesn’t push you away like you expect. Its breath tears out in a sound that is too close to your name, and it staggers, leaning into you, and for a moment, you’re pressed together in some grotesque parody of an embrace—blood slicking your clothes, face, hands, pooling beneath the two of you and staining the asphalt. 

“Can’t believe the most romantic thing we’re ever gonna do is die together,” you murmur hoarsely, choking on what you think is a laugh. All of the anger and grief that has been plaguing you for days shifts into something closer to acceptance, eyes sliding shut briefly. This was always how it was going to happen, you think again—you and him dying together like this. One way or another, you always find your way back to each other, even now, even for this. Especially for this. You think, maybe, you wouldn’t have had it any other way. “Asshole, we could’ve gotten married if you weren’t so fucking stubborn.”

“You’re the fuckin’ stubborn one,” he rasps, and like you, all of the rage and malice that caused him to be reborn drains away into something far more human, forehead dropping against your shoulder. “Makin’ me wait for years, then finally agreein’ and wanting to wait even longer for the damn cherry blossoms.”

“All seems so dumb now,” you sigh, propping your chin on his shoulder, gaze lifting to the clear skies. “Could’ve had so much more time together.”

“I woulda waited longer,” he tells you quietly. “However long it took.”

Your knees finally buckle, and he eases you down to the ground before collapsing next to you. His body is disappearing slowly, the lower half first, creeping upward—a cursed spirit, not your Naoya, you remind yourself, but you don’t have it in you to keep making the distinction anymore. Naoya enough, just for a little bit. He’s so fucking stubborn, you think, almost fondly. Even as a cursed spirit, he’s clinging on to his form when most would’ve dissolved the moment the blade pierced its core. 

“Let me go first this time, okay?” you breathe out, head dropping to rest on his shoulder, vision blurring a bit at the edges. You think you feel him reach for your hand, but your limbs are numb, and you don’t have the strength to look down and check. “It’s only fair.”

“Talkin’ about fairness when ya stabbed me in the back,” he mutters. “Y’got some nerve, y’know that?”

You laugh at that, blood bubbling slightly at your lips, eyes sliding shut. He laughs too. You can feel his shoulders shaking beneath your head

There’s a pause, and then you feel pressure on your fingers. You’re right, you realize, he is holding your hand, fingers entwined with yours, thumb brushing over the ring on your fourth finger. You try to squeeze, but the movement is small and clumsy, everything you have left. 

After a moment, he tells you quietly, “I’m sorry. I thought—I didn’t—”

“Quit apologizing,” you mutter. “You’re gonna make me sick. I’m already dying, don’t make it more painful.”

He lets out a huff of air—a laugh, you think—and then asks, “Are we… okay?”

You smile, faint and tired, mind starting to slip. “Idiot, we’ll always be okay.”

“Next time, let’s not fuck around so much, yeah?” he exhales, long and shaky. “Let’s do it right.”

“Yeah, that… that sounds really nice.”

————————

NOVEMBER 25TH, 2018

Satoru asks about you a few days after he’s unsealed. 

(“If she’s not here, then…” Maki grimaces and looks away at his words. Satoru lets out a sigh, an unreadable expression crossing his face as he stares ahead. “How did it happen?”

“It didn’t have to happen,” Maki replies, jaw tight and lips pinched. “If she had just let Kamo-kun and I handle Naoya—”

Satoru’s eyes widen. “Naoya killed her?” he asks, voice riddled with shock. “I was only sealed for three weeks, right?” 

“Naoya came back as a cursed spirit after he died,” Maki says after a moment, and something close to understanding flashes through Satoru’s eyes as soon as he hears it, already having figured out where this is going. “She insisted on exorcising him herself. Wouldn’t accept help. She—I think she purposely—”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.” Satoru lets out a huff of air, gaze solemn as he turns it up toward the sky. “She was always stubborn as hell. Man, she picked the worst possible time to pull something like this, didn’t she? Her technique would’ve been game-changing for this fight.”

“You don’t sound surprised,” Maki murmurs quietly. “I know you two were really close, sensei. You should know, it was—”

He lifts a hand, stopping her without looking at her. “Don’t. I don’t need the details.” His gaze drops back down to the ground. “She made her choice, and I won’t disrespect her by pretending I don’t understand it.” He tosses Maki an easy, familiar smile, mask slipping back into place. “I did warn her. Guess I get to tell her ‘I told you so’ one day. C’mon. Let’s get back to work. No rest for the wicked, right?”)

————————

I actually contemplated so many different endings for this fic, but I feel as though this one was the most fitting for them. If you’re curious, my two big options were: 1) what I’m going to do for the alternate ending, where the Naoya still got caught up in the Zenin Massacre but he was alive when she got there, he was in a coma for a few months before he wakes up again, and 2) Naoya goes to her instead of going back to the Zenin estate. This was my initial idea for the ending, he would go to her, they would end up showing up to help for the Shinjuku showdown arc, and then they would die during the Sukuna fight instead. But then I figured if I was going to kill them anyway, I think it would be best leaving it for canon, and then I got the lovely idea of her having to exorcise curse!naoya and I just had to go with it.

I think the part I struggled most with this part of the fic was balancing her dislike of the Zenins. I think its pretty apparent through the first three parts of the fic that she really does not like the Zenins as a whole (lends to the huge part of our girl being a major hypocrite). She was miserable being there as a kid, even when she started looking forward to seeing Naoya, because they treated her so poorly compared to how she was treated at her own clan's estate. I think I probably could have done a better job of displaying that back in part 1, because it mostly came off in implications (the interactions with Naotaka, how she was always very tense when people other than naoya were around, etc) but I was just more focused on her developing relationship with Naoya. Even when she returns at 19 at Naoya's invite, they literally isolate her and pretend she's not there, AND EVEN AFTER HER CLAN IS KILLED AND SHE BCOMES CLAN HEAD, they are very cold to her. She HATED the Zenins, and that's partially why she couldn't hold what Maki did against her, even without knowing Mai's death was the immediate cause of the massacre. But I was struggling very hard with balancing that & her reasoning as to why she couldn't bring herself to go after Maki when Naoya is literally her whole world, but eventually I just decided that it just would not feel right of her to do that because 1) she literally watched Maki grow up idolizing her as being everything the Zenins hated and THRIVING while being it, and 2) she's still a kid, one of Satoru's kids, one of HER kids really, because she was the one who helped her by talking to Satoru, and I just could not see her going for revenge with all of that taken into consideration alongside how she feels about the Zenins.

I also think it added on to her complicated treatment of Noritoshi and how she felt as if she never got revenge and dishonored her family. Like every time she's lost someone, she's never been able to properly avenge them, and it just adds into the tragedy of it all.

So dfjhusuhfasfd I wasn’t actually sure how to go about handling vengeful cursed spirit Naoya. I think it was pretty obvious in the manga that he retained A LOT of his previous personality whe he was reborn as a curse, and I wasn’t sure how far to extend it with our girl. Hatred/resentment is easy to retain when being reborn as a curse since its a negative emotion, but we see with Rika that love is twisted into something awful, so I thought it would be more fitting if it was partially displayed in resentment toward his dependency on her + his insatiable need for validation from her. So he retained most of his love for her, but it was seriously twisted + he was more aggressive/erratic as a curse. I lowkey probably screwed up a lot of cursed spirit lore with this HDFAIUFHSD especially that ending bit, but I don’t care because it fits the narrative I was trying to create. Their last conversation at the end was meant to reflect the conversation Rika had with Yuta after the curse was severed. 

Also probably screwed up the rest of the culling games by having her introduce a rule of her own, I don't even really know if the kogane would allow that rule, but you already know what I'm going to say: don't care since it builds the narrative I was trying to create KDAFHAIUHDFUASUHDF

Also to get one thing straight before I have people in my inbox annoyed: curse!naoya would have curb stomped her if he was actually taking it seriously. She can use her technique to read into future actions, so she would’ve lasted longer than most, but he eventually just would’ve been going too fast that it wouldn’t have mattered she could see ahead, because she just physically wouldn’t be able to react fast enough. That’s partially why she chose to just take the blow at the end, but I purposely left her reasonings up to interpretation so you could decide for yourself if she 1) let him kill her, 2) was too exhausted to keep fighting, or 3) did it for strategic purposes. Either way, curse!naoya was not taking the fight as seriously, because when he was reborn as a curse, it was partially in attachment to her, so he didn't want to intentionally hurt her, just like rika wouldn't want to intentially hurt yuta, even if it was very aggressive/angry at her. That’s also why it was so shocked at the end when she didn’t dodge.

I also think it’s so funny and we’re going to see this in the alternate ending I’m going to write, but I genuinely think if she’d been around for the Shinjuku showdown, things would’ve gone very differently SDKFJSIHFSUDFH I do need to reread it soon, and I have gojo mention it at the end, but her being able to trace paths however far ahead would have been game changing for the sole reason that she would’ve seen Sukuna’s world slash before it killed gojo when everyone assumed he won. All this to say, I’m a bit excited for the alternate ending because we’re going to get a cute (almost) everyone lives au