Shrug

It wasn’t.

Love wasn’t just first kisses. It went further than that.

Love was holding someone’s hand while they passed from the mortal plane. It was a mother burying her son. A father teaching his daughter to braid her hair because her mother never came home.

Waiting. Forgiveness. Grief. Devotion.

Suguru bore it all.

Meanwhile, everyone feared Satoru. God of War.

Cities locked their gates when his banners appeared. Kings cursed his name. Parents told stories about him to frighten children.

They imagined he delighted in bloodshed.

The truth?

He never started war.

It was always humans.

He’d been simply forced to witness every single one. Every sword drawn in anger called his name. Every battlefield became his responsibility.

He spent eternity walking through fields of corpses wishing people would stop invoking him.

The gods among them think them opposites. Humans, too. But Fate…

Fate always placed their temples beside each other.

Because every prayer to one eventually became a prayer to another.

They get married. The higher-ups hate the idea of their union. They fear what a child born of the strongest sorcerers would become.

A few months after their union, they’re summoned to a meeting. It’s there the higher-ups reveal something even Suguru didn’t know. She’s pregnant. Satoru can only stare. Then he laughs. Then he cries. He kisses his wife’s temple as though the world had become too small a place to hold all of his happiness. For one beautifully impossible moment, all they can feel is joy.

Until someone at the table says, “terminate it.”

Satoru kills him before anyone else can draw another breath.

Weeks later, someone poisons Suguru’s tea. She notices it before she drinks. Satoru hunts the person responsible.

But that night, Suguru realizes something he never will. There will come a day when not even their strength will be enough to protect their child.

The next time Satoru is deployed for an overnight mission…

Suguru doesn’t write a goodbye. She doesn’t pack a suitcase. She only takes the money they’d spent years saving for vacations.

Princess Gojo wraps a blue hair ribbon around the other’s wrist and says: “You’ll always be my knight.”

Suguru doesn’t hesitate: “Forever.”

Years later the princess is to be married to another. The knight is faced with a decision that will redefine honor for her.

Neither of them realized they created the very oath that will one day keep them apart.

Neither realized that the cruelest promise isn’t the one you break.

Sometimes, it’s the one you keep.

When he finally breaks off his arranged engagement, his parents barely speak to him. The future he’d spent years sacrificing himself for disappears overnight.

His best friend, Shoko, drags him to a bar because she’s tired of watching him mourn a life he never truly wanted in the first place.

That’s where he meets Suguru. A beautiful stranger with kind purple eyes and a copy of Pride and Prejudice he’s quietly reading in the corner of the bar.

For one night Satoru forgets what it feels like to perform. Someone sees him exactly as he is. Someone touches his body like it’s worthy of tenderness. Someone makes him feel beautiful.

The stranger treats Satoru’s body with more kindness in a single night than anyone else has in years, including himself.

By sunrise, Satoru thinks maybe this could be his new beginning.

At 9am, the man from the bar walks to the front of his lecture hall.

That is until he meets a man with white hair and impossible blue eyes. Suguru lures him away the same as he does with any meal. A perfectly timed smile. A hand placed in the right spot. Coaxed along until they’re on a quiet street. A promise they’ll go back for another drink soon.

When the stranger’s back meets the brick wall, Suguru closes the distance. Their lips meet. And for a moment, nothing happens. His skin does not pale. Snow white hair never loses its luster. His heartbeat does not falter. The impossible blue light never extinguishes.

The fox comes for Riko, Suguru’s younger sister, but he begs the deity to take her place, even though he’s beyond the optimal age for being a vessel.

For unknown reasons, the fox accepts. Suguru does not get a chance to say goodbye. The fox whisks him away to a place called the prison realm. They do not stay their long, only long enough for the fox to explain that this is where there journey will eventually end. When Suguru’s soul is sacrificed and forced to bond w the other spirits inhabiting the fox.