Maneater 🌹

Reluctantly he slipped from your grip, laying your head softly down upon the pillows and ensuring the blanket was wrapped snugly around you before padding into the bathroom to confirm the truth of his suspicions. His red eyes went straight to the tile beneath the sink, catching his lower lip between his teeth at the easy assessment that something was amiss.

The tile had been put back in the wrong orientation, the pattern not quite matching up with the ones neighbouring it. Sukuna hadn’t shifted that tile in months, and even if he had, he always took great care to line it back up again perfectly to avoid any suspicion.

This was the carelessness of someone replacing the tile in a panic. 

A heavy breath left his lips and for a few moments he’d just stared at it, leaning his palm against the sink, his mind totally blank. He didn’t want this to be happening now - he’d figured one day you’d find out, but had wanted that to be under his careful control at a time when you were more securely locked within his grip. 

Right now he was uncertain where your mind lay and that was a problem. 

At least you hadn’t immediately run from him. That, he supposed, was a positive sign. 

Even through all your jittery anxiety displayed earlier that evening, you’d still given yourself to him, still clung to him like he was the most precious thing in your world. It meant that he still had a chance to shape your opinion on what you’d seen - still had a chance to secure your place with him. 

He wondered if you’d even understood what you’d found. Perhaps you’d made up some excuse or story in your head where Sukuna came off better than the reality. It would be preferable if you had understood and had chosen to stay anyway. If that was the case Sukuna really would’ve struck upon gold. 

Crouching down, he shifted the tile, finding that you’d repacked the items in the space below almost exactly as you’d found them. That pleased him, because leaving the evidence in place suggested that you didn’t have a plan to run off with it or investigate further. Or, perhaps you were just clever enough to know he’d check and didn’t want to risk him realising what you knew. 

It was a thought he shoved from his mind in favour of holding faith in your loyalty to him. 

Putting the tile back where it belonged, Sukuna stood up and leant against the sink once more, red eyes staring back at him in the mirror. He looked tired, with dark circles hanging on his face, and his hair a little more tousled than usual. Despite it all there was a calm quality to his expression - one that he wasn’t quite expecting on account of the fact that he should have been freaking out. 

He was on the precipice of losing you, of losing everything. You’d discovered the secret that could topple everything he’d spent years building. 

And yet, he felt strangely serene. 

You hadn’t run. Not yet. You knew, and you were still there in his bed. That meant that there was a chance for him. There was no point in panicking, what he needed was to stay level-headed and formulate a plan to ensure that you didn’t change your mind. He needed to know where your head was at, and he needed to twist your thoughts until all your affection was directed towards him. 

Assuming that wasn’t already the case. 

Ideally, he wouldn’t need to do much at all. 

—

Sukuna hadn’t needed to wait long to understand your thoughts on the whole situation. 

A day had passed since that fateful evening, and Sukuna had made sure to come home from work as early as possible. While he was feeling calm about the whole thing, he wasn’t entirely confident that you wouldn’t scurry off while he was out of the house. He couldn’t completely comprehend your mental state and was subsequently unsure whether your currently fragile mind might work with or against him.

His gut told him that your distressed condition would probably go in his favour, since you were always so clingy with him, but that didn’t stop the flicker of anxiety over the idea that hours alone to think would have you fleeing from his home. 

If that was the case it would be fine - he’d still get you back. It would just be far more difficult than he’d ideally like it to be. 

He didn’t want to take drastic measures with you - he wanted you to be at his side completely willingly. But if you forced his hand he would act regardless. You were destined to be with him and there was absolutely nothing that would ever get in the way of that. 

The pregnancy had really come at the right time, because he was certain that the baby would make it easier to keep you exactly where you belonged. It was something that would tie you to him permanently, something that would give you serious pause when considering leaving him. God, he was glad he’d had the foresight to steal your birth control pills and poke holes in the condoms when you’d made him use them - that was really paying off for him. 

And just as he’d hoped, upon his return to the apartment he found you there as usual. 

You were curled up on the sofa, all wrapped up and cozy in a blanket. The TV was on, playing an episode of Community - a show you’d often have on as comforting background noise. You weren’t watching it when he walked in through the door, your eyes wide and worried as you watched him enter, a pistol gripped between your trembling hands. 

Sukuna faltered for a moment, his shoulders only relaxing when you let out a choked sigh of relief, lowering the gun down onto your lap. 

“Hey,” he said, almost cautiously. 

“Hey.” You rubbed your face. Sukuna surveyed you carefully, taking note of how tired you looked, with dark circles hanging beneath your unusually dull eyes. You looked sickly - sweat slick on your brow, and your lips a little cracked and dry. 

“Gonna shoot me, baby?” He asked, only half joking. 

“No- no. Sorry.” The apology was bashful, and you were quick to transfer the gun from your lap over to the coffee table. “You’re home so early. When I heard the door I thought maybe…you know…” 

He hummed as you let him fill in the gaps. He hoped you were suggesting that you were concerned he was someone else, rather than fearing that he’d broken his usual routine with the intent of showing up to hurt you. It didn’t seem to be the latter, since your anxiety from the previous night was largely absent. 

You just seemed unwell rather than scared. 

“It’s okay. I like knowing that you can look out for yourself.” He caught the blush that covered your cheeks, his ego boosted by the reactions he could still draw from you. If the evidence wasn’t so clear he would’ve believed you were still totally in the dark about Kashimo, going by the adoration you still seemed to hold for him. 

He hoped that was a sign of good things to come. 

“Not feeling well?” He asked, crossing the room and crouching down in front of you. His hand went to your forehead, pressing against the sweaty skin. You were running concerningly hot, and he quickly moved to stroke your hair comfortingly, pressing a soft kiss of greeting on your lips. 

“Morning sickness doesn’t seem to keep itself exclusive to the morning,” you grumbled with a pout. If you didn’t look so faint he’d find it insanely cute.

A smile played on his lips at your words, the concerns about your relationship fleeing him for a moment. He’d been so focussed on the Kashimo issue that he hadn’t had too much time to bask in the pleasant feeling of you being pregnant with his child. He was happy to hear you talk about something like morning sickness - some mundane part of your shared life. 

It made his fears of a burning future seem almost trivial. 

“Ah. Want me to make you some soup? That should be easy for you to keep down,” he suggested. 

“It's okay, I’ll do it. You’ve been at work all day.” You moved to get up, but Sukuna’s hands were quick to fall upon your shoulders, carefully sitting you back down on the couch. 

“Stay there. You’re pregnant, I’m not making you do anything.” 

You flushed, sinking back down into the sofa as your eyes followed him. There was still a trace of something within them - a slight uncertainty that Sukuna didn’t like, but he brushed it aside in favour of pretending everything was normal. He’d make you dinner and you’d curl up at his side on the couch while you watched TV. 

Just like every night. 

That was your routine, that was how it was for you to belong to him. 

Nothing would change that. 

“One of Kashimo’s old friends called me today.” Your voice rang out after a few minutes of silence. 

Sukuna hesitated for a moment, stalling his cutting of onions for a near imperceptible second before continuing. “Oh yeah?” He was curious to see where you were going to take this, because he was absolutely certain that no such friend had reached out to you. 

“They said he’s gone missing.” 

“Huh. Probably in some drug den somewhere if what Satoru told me is anything to go by.” Sukuna said easily, trying his best to keep his expression neutral. He’d admit to nothing until you came out and actively accused him of something. Coming out with the truth or a half-baked lie could both do damage until he understood where your mind was on the issue.

“I don’t know, I’m kind of worried.” 

“Why? The guy treated you like shit. Good riddance, who cares what he’s doing?” 

For a few moments you were silent, biting down on your lip. Your gaze wasn’t on Sukuna, but on the TV, pretending to be all invested in the show you’d seen hundreds of times. Sukuna knew you well enough to be able to see the cogs turning in your brain - a war raging in your mind over what you should say next. 

“What if he’s dead?” You asked. 

Still, you didn’t look at him. He wouldn’t be surprised if you were holding your breath. It wasn’t an outright accusation, it was nothing more than a roundabout way of trying to get Sukuna to slip up. He needed you to give him more than that, so he simply played along with your thought experiment. 

It's what he would do until you asked him a direct question about your suspicions. 

“Why would you think that?” He asked, adding the chopped onions to the pot, covering it and setting it on a low heat, continuing to prepare dinner like you were discussing something no more important than the next day’s weather. 

To him it was no more important than that. 

“I don’t-” you hesitated, freezing up. “I don’t know. Just a feeling.” 

Sukuna tried to keep himself from smiling at how poorly you’d played this game with him. You’d gone in without any real plan or structure to your conversation, leaving yourself with no excuse or opportunity to understand the truth without asking the question outright. You just weren’t experienced enough at acting sly - not like he was.

It was most amusing to see you trying so hard at it though. 

Cute, even. 

“Baby.” Sukuna dropped the knife into the sink, his attention turning to you. You looked so sweet all huddled up on his sofa, practically drowning in one of his t-shirts. There was something about the scene that provided unquestionable proof that you were his, and he wondered if you even believed in the little investigation you were mounting. 

Were you asking those questions because you really wanted to know? Because you really cared? Or were you simply asking the questions because you felt it was morally correct? Asking with the intention of weakly confirming that Sukuna had done nothing wrong, allowing you to stick your head back in the sand?

Perhaps that was why you weren’t addressing things directly. 

“Lets cut the shit. Why are we talking about that guy? I don’t like thinking about him,” Sukuna said, staring down at you expectantly. 

There, you could have your chance at being direct, if you didn’t want to take it then that was that. Case closed. 

He watched your face evenly, taking note of your nervous, darting eyes, and of the way that your lips trembled at their corners. For a moment he was certain you’d back down from the challenge, but you seemed to miraculously find your resolve somewhere deep within yourself. 

“Why do you have Kashimo’s things?” You asked quietly, and Sukuna grinned. 

“Why do you think I have his things?” 

He couldn't pass up the chance for you to come up with your own reasoning. He wanted to hear your thought process first before offering either the truth or a lie that would fall further from the image you’d already created in your head. 

“I don’t- I don’t know.” 

“Don’t you?” 

Again, there was hesitation. Your gaze dropped down to your lap in a desperate attempt to escape the pressure Sukuna brought with him as he approached your position on the sofa. “No. I don’t,” you murmured quietly. “I don’t.”

There was a resignation in your voice that told him you did know, but were desperately trying to find another explanation, hoping there was something he’d say that could clear all this up for you as some big misunderstanding. 

You’d find no such comfort from him. 

He wouldn’t spend his whole life lying to you, not when the cat was clawing at the bag in a desperate attempt at freedom. One day you’d have to know, and you’d have to make peace with who he was. 

He’d make sure you made peace with it. 

“No, no. Go on, pretty girl.” His hands were on your shoulders, massaging them gently. “You’re not much of a liar, so say it. Say what you’re thinking. Tell me what’s been on your mind since I came home yesterday.” 

You were rigid beneath his touch. “Did- did you kill Kashimo?” 

“Yeah. I did.”  

He felt a shudder run through you, your breaths picking up rapidly at his confession. Instantly, tears began to gather at the corners of your eyes and you shrugged his hands off you, scrambling away further down the sofa. Your gaze was wild and scared, fixed on him with renewed anxiety just like your body language from the night before. 

You’d clearly pushed the thought aside over the past twenty-four hours - buried it deep beneath a slew of delusions. With the truth laid so plainly in front of you it was no longer possible to convince yourself that there was some reasonable explanation for what you’d found. 

And that clearly terrified you. 

To some extent he’d expected your reaction.

Of course you were going to panic - you weren’t like him, you were nice and soft, completely removed from the horrors of his world. But that still didn’t stop your response from wounding him. He didn’t want you to be afraid of him - he’d never do anything to hurt you, and he hated seeing you cowering away from him like you were. 

Even so, he needed to endure for a while. He’d be able to bring you back around once you let him explain - he was certain of that. There wasn’t a single thing that would keep him from you. It was pointless for him to grow overwhelmed with worry or sorrow - this was his chance to make you see the love in his actions, and he wasn’t going to waste it. 

Rounding the sofa, he positioned himself in front of you. His stomach twisted as you drew your knees up to your chest, as if creating a barrier between the two of you. He wanted to reach out and wipe your tears, perhaps card his fingers through your hair and coo about how safe you were with him, but he feared you’d push him away. 

It was a situation that needed delicate handling. 

“Why?” You choked out. “Why would you?” 

“I saw how upset you were at the reunion. I saw how much he’d hurt you. I ran into the guy afterwards and confronted him about it all and things got a bit nasty. I had no choice.” The lie rolled off his tongue easily. There was little proof concerning the framing work he and Satoru had engaged in to make Kashimo look bad, so he wouldn’t admit it to you. 

That would be a pointless overcomplication. 

“Things got nasty?” You echoed, disbelief evident in your tone. 

“Yeah. You know how you said he was going home after the reunion? Well, I ran into him in the parking lot of a bar just outside of town where he was drunk and feeling up some escort. When I cussed him out he attacked me and I retaliated. I went too far and that was that. I didn’t wanna tell you because, well, y’know…” He shrugged. 

He could see confusion glimmering in your eyes as you struggled to understand the facts presented to you. Sukuna was banking on the assumption that your only evidence of Kashimo’s death came from the items hidden in the bathroom. If you had any further info then his construction could easily crumble. 

“No. Kashimo wasn’t- he wouldn’t... He was never violent to me, I don’t- I don’t believe you.” 

It seemed like even you were surprised to hear those words falling from your lips, an awkward guilt clouding over your face, as if ashamed with yourself for being unwilling to immediately believe the love of your life. 

“Yeah, well, if what Satoru stumbled across on his Myspace is anything to go by, you didn’t know him very well at all,” Sukuna pointed out. 

Again you were silent, chewing on your lip for a few moments. Sukuna was getting antsy, wishing he was a mind-reader so that he could take away the difficulty of playing this game with you. He wanted to inject the correct thoughts directly into your head to avoid any chance at losing you. 

He wanted you to be his willingly. He wanted you to accept him for exactly who he was. 

“That doesn’t make it okay. You killed someone, Sukuna. Even if he attacked you, you can’t just kill-” 

“We’ve both killed someone. Sometimes it has to happen. How would you like it if I told you that it was wrong to kill Mahito? You’d say I was victim-blaming.” Perhaps his manipulation was a little-heavy handed there, because you looked like you’d been struck across the face. Maybe that was exactly what was needed though - some comparison to help you realise that it wasn’t all that different. 

No one mattered outside of you and him. 

Mahito’s worth was identical to Kashimo’s. Just as Kashimo’s worth was identical to Ryu’s. The whole world was made up of nothing more than bags of meat with the exception of you. You were the only one with a shining, glimmering soul that he so desperately had to possess. 

“It’s not the same!” Your voice was all wobbly, and fresh tears started dripping down your cheeks, dissolving you into a mess of sobs. “Oh god, oh god. This is so fucked.” You were mumbling into your knees, making it hard to hear your words. 

Sukuna didn’t have much interest in what you had to say anyway. It was all irrelevant, nothing more than a kneejerk emotional reaction which he was going to correct. You were just shocked, that was all.

He took your condition as an opportunity, sitting down beside you on the couch and wrapping his arms tightly around your shaking body. Resting his chin atop your head, he tucked you close against him, savouring the warmth of you pressed against his side just like always. You tensed up for a moment, but remained there all the same. 

If he was right in his belief, you were just as incapable of pushing him away as he was at parting with you. 

“Just breathe baby,” he murmured, listening to your sobs and stroking your hair. “It’s okay, I’m here, I’ll always keep you safe. Everything I do is to protect you, to keep you happy. Weren’t you glad when we killed Mahito? You were grateful to have me there then. This is no different. I’ll do whatever it takes to look after you.”

“But Kashimo isn’t- wasn’t like Mahito! He never-” Your voice came out muffled and panicked, and Sukuna cut you off before you could finish, tightening his grip on you. 

“There was an axe in his car, y’know? A load of tape and rope too. We didn’t say it to you because we didn’t wanna scare you, but on the guy’s private Myspace account he’d made loads of posts about certain fetishes - cannibalism and stuff. It kinda seemed like he wanted to do it to you. I wasn’t going to let that happen. He wasn’t a good guy.” 

More sniffles sounded from you, but you said nothing. Sukuna wasn’t quite sure if you quite believed him, but didn’t labour the point any further. If he tried to over explain it would only make him look like a liar, and he needed you to retain some level of trust towards him. 

“I only ever want to look after you, baby. I’ll never be ashamed of doing that. I’d dispose of anyone who hurts you, that’s what it means to love. To kill for you is an ultimate expression of my love, it's my love language, I need you to see that baby.”

For a long time you were silent, completely frozen within his grip. He took that as a win, if things were dire you’d be squirming and struggling to escape, but still you remained beneath his touch, allowing proximity with a person who'd just admitted to disposing of one of your previous lovers. 

It meant you could be convinced.

“It’s your love language?” You murmured quietly.

“Yeah.” 

The cogs were turning steadily in your brain, and you slowly withdrew yourself from him. Your eyes were glassy as you peered up at him, horror and worry shining through the tears gathering at your lashline. 

“Kashimo wasn’t the only one, was he?” Your voice came out small and uncertain. 

He wasn’t going to lie to you. Not now you’d come this far.

“No. He wasn’t.” 

“Ryu?” You asked shakily. 

“Yeah. Yorozu too.” 

“Fuck. No. No, no, no. Please, this can’t be happening.” You began to scratch and scrape at the skin of your arms, as if trying to awaken yourself from a nightmare. Your nails started to tear at the skin, drawing shallow lines of red to the surface. Sukuna was quick to stop you, grabbing both your wrists with one hand and holding you still. 

The fear that flickered in your eyes was unpleasant, paired with a clear resignation that you could do little to overpower Sukuna if it ever came to that. If he called upon even the slightest amount of strength you couldn’t escape him, let alone if he actually tried. 

“Stop that, baby. You’ll hurt yourself.” 

“I’m already hurt, Sukuna! You hurt me, you ruined-” your tone went all high pitched as you were overtaken by a sob, brows furrowed you tried your best to continue. “Ryu’s death broke me! I spent years in a spiral wondering who could’ve done such a thing, fearing that same thing happening to me, regretting cheating on him the day he died, but it was you! You caused all my misery! You killed my boyfriend and then fucked me while his body was still warm? Oh my god, Yuki was right. What the fuck am I doing?” 

Sukuna tried not to let his irritation show at the mention of Yuki, alerting you to his annoyance only via the tightening of his grip upon your wrists. 

“Did I cause your misery? Because I think you’d still be with Ryu right now if he didn’t die. I think you’d have a baby on your hip, stuck at home cooking his dinner all the while wondering what woman he was out fucking instead of you. You’d be dreaming about me, about the life we have right now, wishing you had this rather than being stuck with that asshole.” 

He saw your eyes widen in horror, and he couldn’t help but let the ghost of a smile slip onto his face. You were so easy to read, so painfully predictable in the things that would cut you deepest.

“I’m sorry for your misery back then, I really am. But you needed it for your own happiness - needed it to lead you into my arms. Can you really deny that’s where you belong? You’re still letting me touch you now, still let me fuck you last night, still clung to me like you never wanted me to escape your grasp. So don’t lie to me and claim you aren’t happy. That misery was worth it.” 

You blinked dumbly a couple of times, your shoulders sagging in resignation. It was clear that you weren’t completely on board, but nor did you have the certainty to bite back against what he was saying. You loved him, you still loved him despite it all, and he knew it. You didn’t want to throw away what you’d built together - it was why you’d curled up at his side the night before rather than flee from him. 

“You don’t know that,” you murmured. 

“Oh but I do. We both do. You’re meant to be with me, we’re made for each other.”

The silence stretched out once more, and Sukuna reached for you. His fingers brushed against your face, and a tremor ran through your body. Still, you made no effort to push him away, letting him dry your tears. His crimson eyes were fixed on you with great adoration, proud at how nicely you were sitting before him. 

Making no attempt to run. 

It pleased him. He had a contingency if you tried to dart away - he was faster and stronger and he’d hold you down and tie you up until you were ready to listen to reason. But he really didn’t want to resort to that.

“Baby, I just don’t think you’re good at making your own decisions, so let me make them for you. There’s too many people who want to take advantage of you and your happiness and I’ll cut through them all. I’ll keep you happy and safe and I’ll give you everything. Please just understand. You don’t have to even think about it - don’t worry about a thing.”

More tears dripped from your eyes, and he caught them easily with his thumb. You looked beautiful at the best of times, but he always liked the way you looked most when you were crying. He enjoyed the sight of you all helpless beside him, your face contorted with a despair that only he could comfort. 

“How can I stop thinking about this?” You asked. “I can’t- things can’t go back to the way they were before now that I know all this. We need to stop- this needs to stop.” Your hand moved to your stomach, and the sudden horror of realisation crept into your expression. “All of this needs to stop.”

“No.” Sukuna said simply. 

He spoke calmly, but inside a rage was simmering. He knew what you were implying - that not only should you break up, but you should get rid of the baby too. That was simply unacceptable to him. Not when he’d worked so hard. 

“Don’t be stupid, baby. Do you really think you can live a life without me? You were miserable before I came into your life, do you really think you wouldn’t be miserable after?”

He leaned closer to you, so close that his breath was fanning against your face, his lips almost brushing against yours. His hand moved down to your chest, pressing down to feel your fluttering heartbeat. 

“I’m the same man I was before you found any of this out, so what does it change? I know you love me, I know you want me. It changes nothing. We’re going to be happy, we’ll be together, we’ll be a family - because I know that’s what you want.” He paused, observing the way your eyes darted nervously, hanging on his every word. “You can’t live without me anymore. Admit it.” 

“But what if I can’t live with you either?” The question came out all meek, barely loud enough for Sukuna to hear it. “How do I know that one day you’re not gonna turn around and kill me?” 

Your eyes were shiny with terror as you met his gaze, and Sukuna found himself incapable of holding back the laugh that bubbled up in his chest. You looked so sweet, all scared below him and yet still leaning into his touch, still making no effort to put distance between the two of you. For all your words of opposition, he didn’t believe you’d act on any of it. 

Even if you were disgusted by his actions, you couldn’t find it in yourself to be anything but attracted to him, still clinging to the relationship like it was the only thing worth having. There you were, voicing a fear that he’d kill you, and you couldn’t even find the will to scamper away. God, he was pleased with himself. He hadn’t realised just how deeply he’d dug his claws into you. 

“Because then my life would have no purpose,” Sukuna said. “Everything I do, I do for you. I don’t kill for sport or pleasure, I kill out of a devotion for you - a gift to make your life easier, if you like. I would sooner pluck my own eyes from their sockets before I would bring you any harm. You’re the most precious thing in my universe, the only thing I cherish. I promise you, with me you’ll always be safe.” 

Miraculously, your eyes seemed to light up. A soft blush blossomed across your cheeks and you quickly lowered your face as if to obscure it from him. Still, he’d seen it, he was aware that the words had struck a chord. You were still clinging to morality, trying to put your foot down - but it was fruitless. 

You loved him. 

That was all there was to it. 

Through the good and the bad, you still desired him. 

“But those were gifts I didn’t want. We would’ve found our way together despite it all, now everything’s just so fucked up,” you murmured. 

“I wasn’t taking that chance.” 

Sukuna’s fingers found your chin, forcing you to look up at him. His lips brushed yours tentatively before kissing you, drawing you in close to him. You could’ve pulled back, could’ve shoved him away - you did neither. Instead, you kissed him back, parting your lips when he pushed his tongue into your mouth, letting him move on top of you - pressing you back down onto the sofa. 

“I’ve always needed you to be mine.” He whispered upon breaking this kiss. “Since the day we met. When it comes to you I won’t take any chances, I want you at my side for all eternity. My soul calls for yours and I know yours calls for mine. I know you want to let this all go, to accept me as I am. So do it, just do it, baby. I’m yours as you are mine.”

“Sukuna-” 

“Please, baby. I love you. Please. I’ll give you a life you’ve only ever dreamed of.” His lips were pressing kisses all over your face, practically worshipping your body. He hoped his affection was enough to convince you of his devotion and remind you just how much you loved him.

“Sukuna, was the Mahito thing even real? Was that- was that your fault too?” Your voice came out all shaky, and he got the idea that the answer to that question was pivotal in your judgement of him. 

He was wounded you’d believe he’d be part of such a heinous plan. 

Sure, he was a killer, but he’d never hire some psycho to rough up you and your friends - that was a step too far. 

“Fuck no. Baby, I already said I’d never do anything to hurt you. I liked Shoko, and finding that house eerily silent was one of the scariest nights of my life. I wanted to rip that guy to pieces with my bare hands and I probably would’ve if you weren’t in the room.” 

Swallowing, you nodded slowly, clearly grateful for the fact that he at least wasn’t responsible for that. Still you seemed nervous, eyes a little unfocussed as he continued to kiss you. He was watching you carefully, trying to puzzle out where your mind was going, but struggling to read your largely vacant expression. 

He wanted to make it all better, wanted to find a way to make you understand that everything was going to be okay. You couldn’t seem to comprehend that you were currently in the midst of shock - that in a few days time you’d be able to view everything with more objectivity and weigh up how much more worth your relationship held when compared to those measly lives Sukuna had taken. 

“Without you I would’ve been raped and killed by Mahito,” you said slowly. 

“Yeah, baby.” 

There was no telling what might’ve actually happened, but he supposed that was probably a true enough guess. 

“Without you, I’d be Ryu’s depressed little housewife, or a victim of Kashimo’s fetish.” Again, the words came out slowly, as if you were trying to process them yourself. Perhaps you were trying to convince yourself of them, and that fact made him very happy. 

He knew you were a little broken, but seeing you jump through so many mental hoops to justify him had his heart racing. You were so perfect, so well trained, he really did want to keep you forever. 

“Exactly. You get it, baby. I’m just trying to protect you. Everything I ever do, it’s all for you.” He nuzzled his nose against yours affectionately, fingers brushing against the soft skin of your cheeks. “I love you. You’re so happy with me, I see it. We can be a perfect little family. Hell, we can start over somewhere else, get out of this dead-end town and really make it. Wouldn’t that be nice? Just you and me, no distractions?” 

No Yuki, no influence from your parents. That was Sukuna’s dream scenario.

He was staring down at you like a cat who had just dropped a dead bird at your feet. He was so pleased with himself, so proud of all he’d done, so proud of his plans for your future. He understood how you could be disgusted by his actions, but he needed you to see it for what it was. 

This was love. 

It was love that most people were never capable of achieving or experiencing. It was devotion in its rawest form, and he knew that you’d be able to see it with just a little time. 

“I love you too,” you whispered shakily, the words leaving his heart racing. “I don’t want this to end. I’ve got so little to hold on to. After Mahito I feel so lonely and hopeless, I can’t- I don’t want-” the words came out choked, and you let out another breathy sob, cutting yourself off. 

Again, Sukuna dried your tears. “I’m not going anywhere, baby. All you have to do is accept me, and I’ll keep you safe forever. I’ll stay by your side for as long as you have me. I’ll love you as long as I’m still living. Just accept me for what I am. Accept my love as it is.” 

And for that evening at least, you did. 

No more words were spoken on the matter. You lost yourself in his kisses, giving yourself to him wholly as you had so many times before, letting his hands roam your body freely, just as they always would. You kissed him like you might never kiss him again, with a passion that had his head spinning, leaving him desperate for more. 

He showed you his devotion in the only way he knew how, thanking you silently for not running from him, by lowering himself between your legs - pushing your thighs apart and feasting on you until you were twitching and whining his name. Your hands were in his hair just as they always were, winding between the strands needily. 

And just like the night before, when he took you to his bed he filled you with a romance and love reserved solely for that very situation. Now that you knew him fully, he would give you everything he’d ever held back - he’d make love to you as something truly sacred, something to be cherished and loved until the end of his days. 

Perhaps even beyond that. 

And as he’d drifted off to sleep with you firmly in his grip, he’d been naive enough to believe that was the end of it - that you had chosen him and forgiven all that had been uncovered. You were so enchanting to him that he couldn’t even consider the idea that you weren’t fully resolved in your decision. 

Awakening hours later to a cold bed had him feeling like a bucket of ice cold water had been tipped over his head. 

It was a feeling that only grew at the sight of a neatly penned letter left on the dresser on your side of his bed. 

Sukuna,

I'm sorry but I can’t do this. I love you, I really do, but you need serious help. I never wanted you to kill for me. I don’t want you to keep killing for me. I think it’s better for both of us if we put an end to it here. I don’t want to live a life stained by death anymore and you shouldn’t either. I won’t tell anyone what you’ve done, I think you need to move on too. 

I’m sorry. Goodbye. 

Sukuna stared at it for a few minutes before calmly placing it back down on the dresser. His heart was pounding against his ribcage, but he took a deep breath and gathered himself before swiftly getting dressed. 

You couldn’t just leave him, the two of you were soulmates.

 The note made it clear you still loved him, as did all of your actions from just a few hours prior, which meant there was no chance in hell that he was letting you slip through his fingers. You were just scared and confused and needed him to set you straight just like always.

And he could do that easily. 

—

The rain had practically soaked you through by the time you reached Yuki’s place. 

You hadn’t risked wasting time packing anything - hadn’t even wanted to chance the rustling of putting on a rain jacket before fleeing Sukuna’s apartment. He had never been the heaviest sleeper, and you were certain he’d been more alert than usual that evening following your conversation. 

So you’d stumbled out in nothing but one of Sukuna’s hoodies and your pyjama trousers, slipping your feet into a pair of trainers and running with nothing in your possession except your phone, wallet, and Sukuna’s gun. 

It was nearly 1am when you rang Yuki’s doorbell, praying that she’d answer, hoping that she’d even want to deal with you after the sour nature of your previous meeting. 

She’d been right about it all. Sukuna was rotten. He’d killed and he’d killed and you were certain that he’d never stop killing. And the worst part was that there was a sick part of you that could see the romance in it all - a horrible, rotten aspect of your mind that could accept it. 

Kashimo, Ryu, and Yorozu had all wronged you in their own ways - had all caused you pain that Sukuna had so lovingly culled. It was wrong, it was evil, you knew that. But that didn’t stop it from being romantic. Nor did it prevent a sick part of you from loving him for it.

Because his words reminding you of your happiness weren’t wrong. You had been happy with him. He’d given you everything you’d ever wanted, even if he’d had to take to achieve that in the first place. You’d still be happy with him now, if you closed your eyes to the elephant in the room and let him treat you as he always had. 

That had been an attractive prospect when you’d laid there in his arms contemplating your escape, because you were certain that you’d never stop loving him, no matter what happened, no matter how much time passed. And you were certain that if you’d stayed there in his arms until the morning, you would’ve stayed forever. 

It was why you’d forced yourself out. 

For the sake of everyone else in the world, you couldn’t stay at his side. You couldn’t abide by his nature, or the sick and twisted definition he had of love when it came to you. You couldn’t allow any further corruption by his hands. This was the one chance you had to end it before it would all be too late for you, before you’d willingly allow yourself to fall into his grasp and stay there for all eternity.

Yuki looked exhausted as she opened the door, chestnut eyes widening in surprise at the sight of you dripping water all over her porch. 

You weren’t sure why you’d gone to seek her out over your parents - perhaps it was a subconscious choice of safety, for you knew that Sukuna was more than capable of breaking into your childhood bedroom at your parents house, and that was likely the first place he’d go to seek you out. 

Besides, you didn’t wish to explain the situation to your parents. You were far too exhausted for that. 

“Are you okay? It’s the middle of the night.” 

“Yuki I-” you hesitated, and fresh tears bubbled up in your eyes. Yuki took stock of your haggard face, concern lining her brow. You deserved better than her - even after everything she was still worried about you. “Sorry, I’m sorry-”

“Come on, let's get you dried up. You’re gonna freeze out here.” Her voice was soothing, and her arm came to wrap around your shoulder, guiding you into her home. 

She wasn’t pushy with you, hurrying about turning on lights and brewing some tea. She instructed you to head to her room and pick some dry clothes to change into, considering you were visibly shivering. You weren’t sure if the tremors were coming from the cold or from the adrenaline of fleeing your boyfriend in the middle of the night. 

Your heart panged at the thought of him still in bed, the desire to run back into his arms building in your chest. 

You made your best effort to squash it back down. 

Once changed into one of Yuki’s sweaters and a pair of comfy shorts, you headed back down to the living room where your friend was waiting. A hot mug of tea was set out on the coffee table, and Yuki draped a blanket over you the moment you sat down in your space on her sofa. 

“You look exhausted,” she said. 

It was a neutral statement, one that you imagined had been picked carefully. After your last conversation, Yuki seemed wary of you - overly aware that she was walking through a minefield and subsequently straying well clear of things that could immediately sour the evening. If you weren’t in total crisis mode you probably would’ve laughed at the irony of her avoiding attacking Sukuna the one time you were open to hearing it. 

“It’s been a long night.” 

“Yeah?” 

You nodded. You wanted to tell her everything, eager to burst into tears and rerun every terrible thing you’d learned over the last twenty-four hours. But you couldn’t. There was a loyalty to Sukuna engraved deep within you, one that wanted to preserve his safety even after everything. If you told Yuki the truth she’d make you call the police. 

You didn’t want that for him. 

So you changed the subject. 

“Is Choso not here?” You asked. They’d been living together for a little while, and you’d been surprised when Yuki had sent you up to her bedroom to get some dry clothes, figuring that Choso would be sleeping in there. You were surprised to find an empty bed. 

“No…” She hesitated. “He’s been busy lately, staying with his bandmates and stuff. Things have been a bit difficult between us since- well, you know. I don’t like being touched anymore. That can strain a relationship.” 

You lowered your head in shame. You’d barely discussed Yuki and her wellbeing the last time you’d seen her - all you’d done was get angry when she attacked Sukuna. At the time that had seemed like the right choice, but now you just felt stupid. Even if you hadn’t asked him about it directly, there was no doubt in your mind that Sukuna had left Yuki to her fate back at the lakehouse. 

He’d made it abundantly clear that the only person he cared about was you. 

And you’d had the audacity to call Yuki a liar.

“Why are you here?” She asked, clearly no more keen to discuss the topic of Choso than you were to discuss Sukuna. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but I don’t think someone ever shows up in the middle of the night for a good reason. Especially not looking as miserable as you do.” 

It was clear that she’d already connected some dots in her mind, her eyes darting towards your stomach for a miniscule moment. She knew that Sukuna was the root cause of your presence, but you were certain she had little understanding of the true extent of your despair. Either way, she stayed silent, urging you to speak first before she imparted any judgement. 

She’d learned from the last time. 

“I’ve been so stupid, Yuki.” 

She opened her mouth to respond, probably to agree, but she clearly thought better of it, remaining quiet once again and allowing you to continue. 

“Sukuna- he-” you realised that you didn’t even know where to start - not unless you wanted to spill the whole story. “I can’t have his baby,” you said finally. “I just- I can’t.” 

Yuki leant forward, again she seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “Did something happen? You seemed…happy with him the other day.” You were grateful for her decision to glaze over the details there - you’d had plenty of terrible moments throughout your friendship, but at the end of the day you’d always be able to move on and find solace in each other.

You nodded, your gaze trained on the ground. You were aware of how badly Yuki wanted to push, her desperation for details poorly disguised. It was no secret that she’d been waiting for this moment, standing by patiently until Sukuna finally slipped up and forced you to open up your eyes. 

“What-” she hesitated, before seemingly reframing her question. “Why did you run from him in the middle of the night?” 

“So he couldn’t convince me to stay.” 

That was just the problem with Sukuna, with you. As long as he was conscious, he was perfectly capable of talking you into anything. Even now, outside of his direct sphere of influence, you were still second guessing all of your decisions, wondering if it was best to keep your mouth shut and go running back to his side. 

“Why would he have to convince you?” Yuki asked, pulling at the string of conversation with great care, as if certain it would snap and you’d clam up if she said the wrong thing. To her you were a ticking time bomb, ready to blow if her actions were the slightest bit off the mark. You wished you hadn’t gained that reputation with her. 

You were a shitty friend. You knew it. 

“I thought you were happy.” She emphasised again, when her question was met with only silence. 

Shuffling uncomfortably on the sofa, you drew your knees up to your chest, hugging them against you in an attempt to console yourself. It felt odd to have to comfort yourself like that - you’d grown so accustomed to Sukuna’s presence, to strong arms wrapping tightly around you and shielding you from any bad thoughts that would come your way. It had become so familiar that you’d almost forgotten how to look after yourself. 

How could you condemn him like you were? All he’d done was be good to you. 

If only you’d never found out. If only the cat had stayed in the bag where it belonged. 

Your voice was shaky as you finally spoke, mumbling into your knees. You didn’t really want her to hear, but you were certain she’d be unwilling to drop the topic. “He’s done- there’ve been some bad things. You were right, oh god, I’ve just been so stupid. I’m sorry.” 

“What things?” She asked, brown eyes wide with alarm. “Babe, what has he done?” She brushed aside the worry in your tone, leaning forward with interest. She didn’t want to hear your sobs and apologies, she wanted to hear the truth. 

And that was the one thing you couldn’t provide to her. 

“I can’t- I said I wouldn’t-” your breathing picked up, your loyalty to Sukuna crushing at your windpipe, keeping any words buried within your chest. You wouldn’t betray him. You were certain that you couldn’t even if your mind had wanted to. Your body loved him with a ferocity that was unmatched. 

To turn on him was unthinkable. 

“Please. You can tell me.” Yuki was pleading with you. She’d stood up from her position on the couch, kneeling down in front of you, a hand brushing against your knee. “You look like a mess. Whatever happened, it's okay, I won’t get mad at you or say I told you so or any of that shit. I’m here, but you need to let me help you.” 

Yuki’s words were kind and caring. They were the right thing for her to say in the moment - exactly what you’d want to hear from a friend who you’d asked for help from in the middle of the night. And yet, a flicker of irritation ignited within you. You hated how enthusiastic she seemed about the situation, how ready she was to condemn Sukuna, like she’d been waiting for this the whole time. 

She believed that he’d hurt you. You could see it in her eyes, in that sympathy that flickered within those chestnut irises. And you hated it, because she didn’t understand at all. Sukuna would never hurt you, and you’d never hurt him. 

Not physically, mentally, or socially. 

You weren’t going to betray him. You’d run from him for the sake of protecting those around you, for the sake of letting Sukuna heal from the obsession you’d ignited within him. You hadn’t run out of fear or hatred, but out of an awareness that it was for the best.

“Do we need to call the police?” Yuki’s voice drew you back to reality, a fresh wave of revulsion coursing through you. The last thing you wanted was for the police to be involved. You wanted Sukuna to be able to live, wanted everything to be swept under the rug because you knew his life had more potential than years of imprisonment. 

It wasn’t fair. 

“No, no.” Gently, you pushed Yuki’s hand away, shuffling back from her ever so slightly. She seemed a little shocked, perhaps even disappointed. “I can’t talk about it, I just- I need to get my head in order, I’m so fucking tired…”

Yuki bit her lip nervously, clearly trying to think up a way to convince you of sharing more. There was little that would be effective on you that evening. The feeling of Sukuna’s body on top of yours, filling you up with his warmth, was still overly present in your mind. You held a great fondness for him that hadn’t even begun to fade, and for that reason all of Yuki’s suggestions would fall upon deaf ears. 

It had taken all of your willpower simply to leave, and that resolve was only hanging by a meagre thread. It was nothing more than a valiant attempt to cling to morality, to remind yourself that you had suffered at Sukuna’s hands. But still your heart betrayed you, begging you to go back and swaddle yourself in the happiness that your lover always brought you. 

To do any more than simply walk out his apartment required a drive that you just didn’t have. 

“If he’s done something you need to-” 

“Yuki, please.” Your voice came out all shaky, tears once again prickling at the corners of your eyes. “Just let me go to sleep. I can’t do this right now. Tomorrow I’ll- tomorrow I’ll try. But please, just let me be for now.”

She wasn’t happy, but she relented all the same, her shoulders dropping in defeat. She offered you a sympathetic smile, and you supposed that she was trying to reason with herself that a promise of tomorrow was better than nothing at all. 

“Okay. That’s okay, I get it. Get some sleep and we’ll talk in the morning,” she said, bidding you goodnight and sending you off to your room. 

Heading up to the spare room, you were only able to hold it together long enough for the door to shut behind you. The second you were alone, the sobs wracked your body once more, and you flung yourself down onto the bed, hiding your tears in the sheets below. Your traitorous mind wished it was Sukuna’s chest you were buried against, your imagination summoning his scent to your nostrils, even in that room where he’d never been. 

You wondered if he was still asleep - curled up in his bed all wrapped up in some nice dream in which you were still there in his arms. That was where you wished you were, where your heart longed to be despite everything. 

God, what was wrong with you? 

The pain in your heart felt unbearable, as though some essential part of you had been ripped clean from your chest. You were terrified at the idea of going back to him, terrified at the thought of what he might do to every person you’d ever cared for in your life. But you were also terrified of a life without him. 

A loneliness would creep into that empty space in your chest, calling out for him, longing for the other half who you loved so deeply. 

You were doing what was right. Staying far away from him was best for everyone. You were the one who had made him crazy - maybe without you he could live a normal life. And yet, jealousy crept up your throat at the thought of him moving on and loving someone else. You wanted his devotion, you wanted him. 

Really, you were just as bad as each other.

Somewhere in your soul you’d always known there was something wrong. Always had that nagging suspicion that Sukuna was far more dangerous than he presented himself as. And you’d ignored it. You’d loved him all the same, against all warnings. 

Now it had to stop. 

You had to stay away before the rot that bloomed between the two of you spread any further than it already had. 

So through all your tears, you turned off your phone rather than calling him like you wanted to, and you crawled into the bed. Ryu didn’t deserve his fate. Neither did Kashimo. That was what you had to keep reminding yourself of. For all Sukuna’s talk of his love language and his desire to protect you, his penchant for murder was nothing so beautiful. 

It was cruel and cold. Not romantic. 

You couldn’t allow yourself to see romance in it - no matter how significantly Sukuna’s explanation might have swayed you to understand it that way. Nothing he’d done was normal, and none of it was okay, and you needed to hold onto that belief and stay away so long as you wanted to retain your own humanity. 

God, you were pathetic. 

How had you ended up where you were? Sad and alone and pining for a man whose hands were stained red with blood. 

If only you’d never met eyes with Sukuna all those years ago, perhaps you’d be living a different life. A life unburdened by death and decisions that all led to your misery. 

But you knew somewhere within you that was nothing more than a fantasy. You and Sukuna had always been destined for each other - one day he would’ve found you, no matter what. He’d always find you. You were two halves of one soul, no matter how hard you tried to condemn him and deny it. 

Really, you’d been stupid to even believe that you could make it through a single night apart after trying to flee from him. 

He’d never let you go. 

You’d huddled yourself tighter between the sheets at the sound of the window rattling and sliding open, wishing you could make the last forty-eight hours disappear if you just willed it hard enough. There was a soft thud of someone dropping into the room, quiet footsteps making their way over to the bed and hesitating beside the lump of your body hidden beneath the duvet. 

Fear gripped your body, and you wished that fear was born from something primal - a fear of him hurting you or killing you where you lay. But it wasn’t. No, your fear came from the depths of your heart, because you knew that the moment your gaze fell upon those crimson eyes, all of your resolve would vanish, never to be recovered again. 

And he would’ve finally succeeded at rotting you from the inside out. 

A hand fell upon your body, stroking at your form through the duvet cover. It was a touch that felt familiar even with the barrier between the two of you. It was all you could do to not lean into it, to not seek out the warmth that his body had always provided. 

How could the hands of a murderer be so warm? How could they feel so gentle and pleasant against your skin? 

“Come on, baby. I know you’re awake.” His voice sent a shiver straight through you - one that shook your body so violently that it earned you a deep chuckle from him. You hated how attracted you were to the sound, how it summoned heat to your core. 

You were repulsive. 

“Don’t shy away from me now,” he purred.

Fingers gripped the edge of the sheets and tore them from their position atop you - any hope of denying him fading as his handsome face came into view. There was fury and hurt in his gaze, an anger possessing his body that he was barely keeping from seeping into his otherwise even tone. 

“Come on. We can work this out.”

a/n: reader genuinely needs therapy but instead she's got manipulator prime making life harder for her :(

anyway next chapter will be the finale, so tune in to find out if sukuna gets his way or if yuki saves our girl!

hope you enjoyed and thank you for the support! comments and reblogs are appreciated as always! <3

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The sun soaked palace is not how he remembered it all those years ago. The orientation of these stone walls are the same, it takes the same amount of steps to lead from the main hall to your guarded chambers. The lingering scent of the sea still drafts in through the cracks in the walls. The same chill that shocks his body when his knuckles brush the cool bronze plates lining his... crowded dining tables.

A spark of rage strikes his brow, forcing it to twitch at the very thought of those suitors clanging his challises loudly at dusk, feasting over his food, lusting over his wife in his absence. To think of how loyalty has soured with him gone, to think that men from across the Mediterranean have damned his glory, his respect, his very name for the chance to steal you away as their wife, to become king of his castle.

He will see to it that they will pay. They will all pay.

Satoru allows himself to peak upward when he hears the familiar rustle of your gowns as you rise, your sweet smell drifting through the intricate grating of your sliding walls soon following. His nose twitches, his heart lurches at the scent, the distant memory that springs to life in mere miliseconds.

The ivory haired warrior has conquered Troy, escaped the clutches of a wailing Cyclops, wrecked his ears and very soul with the screech of a siren's delicious song, watched his man love him, hate him, turn on him, and die just as Tyresius promised him before the gates of hell, where all of Satoru's mistakes stood before him in a crowd of soiled men hungry for vengeance, hungry for answers that death did not provide. Satoru has lived a thousand years within his mind, allowing the fruits of the earth to tear the memory of you, sweet you, from his head, along with the sting of a million miles separating you from him.

Satoru has looked into the very eyes of the gods' wrath, of death itself, and yet, his heart has never beat with such brutality the way it does now, when he allows himself a sliver of light to catch a glimpse of you as you stand before your barrier with your hands clasped polited before you. Satoru lets out a strained sigh, ducking his head once more, tearing his eyes away from your beauty, for he knows you too well. If he allows you even just a peak of his face, you'll know. You'd know your husband anywhere.

But even the slightest glance at you without being able to throw himself against your gates, ripping them open, and pulling you into his arms, smashing his lips against yours to make up for the two decades he spent away, he spent making you wait, chips away at Satoru's heart. He never thought himself to be much of a patient man before the gods forced him to know it up close, forced him to trust in fate rather than his own control.

You're encased in emerald that flutters around your ankles, gold necklaces stacked up the expanse of your lovely neck, flittering earrings shining in the firelight crackling behind you. You're a vision of grace, one that keeps these crumbling walls hardly intact. Raw beauty that spites the likes of Aphrodite, that lures men of ill intent to your doors like vermin.

But Satoru did not see your eyes. He couldn't bring himself to look into them, for he'd see the years of heartache he inspired, the grief that you have yet to accept, the life lost in your gaze.

He settles down to sit slowly, back pressing to the gate. He listens intently to every step you make. The way your sandled feet grace the floor, the way the flutter of your gown cuts through the air as you sit just inches away.

Satoru’s eyes flutter shut and his throat runs dry when you speak. “Hello, traveler,” you greet kindly despite the thick blanket of sorrow that lingers in your once airy tone.

Satoru gulps. His heart flips. Whispers of his name on your breath, that very same voice, flutter through his mind from a past long cherished, long abandoned, and he aches with anticipation. Fighting against his own will to remain disguised.

“Please, make yourself welcome. My maid will return to wash your feet so that you may rest in comfort.”

Satoru’s Adam’s apple bobs, and he presses his lips together to maintain strength. After twenty years, he’s finally made it home to you, but you still feel so far away. He attempts to evade the sting of your amiability, so distant and unfamiliar, driven by duty and generosity rather than love. Rather than knowledge.

He clears his throat. “You’re too kind, but that’s unnecessary. Please don’t waste your water on someone like me.” When he speaks, his voice is gravelly, worn, and hoarse with age and nerves and exhaustion and anger and desperation. All of which he keeps burrowed just at the surface, blanketed by the croak of exaggerated starvation.

He tenses slightly when you take a moment to respond, registering the sound of his weathered voice, toying with it in your mind. He prays you do not recognize him. He prays you’ve at least forgotten the sound of his weariness. “Someone like you?” you repeat slowly. “In Ithaca, we welcome all. We treat the needy and hungry as family. You would not impose. I insist.”

Still, so kind. So thoughtlessly, beautifully generous. It's that very generosity which pulled those men to your door, which allow them to trample over your grace.

At that moment, your elderly servant returns with a basin of water and cloth. Satoru recognizes her, sees the definition of wrinkles worn over her skin. He remembers her careful, maternal touch. How she always mended his split flesh after foolish accidents. If the ocean eyed warrior were less distracted by your warmth radiating just behind his back, he would have remembered the chunk of flesh that was torn away from his shin long ago during a hunting accident with a boar which she patched up herself. He would have been more cognizant of the way her cautious, trembling hands gently unwind the tassles of his sandles, removing the footwear from his person slowly.

"You are... too kind," he mumbles in response to you, as well as to the servant before him.

She moves to bring a soaked cloth to his scarred shin, but when her hand drags his leg forward by the back of his ankle, the strangely familiar callous of his heel brushing her palms, she jumps when her eyes land on the brutish, healed wound, the battered flesh she sewed all those years ago.

She jumps. The water topples over and splatters down the stairs. Satoru's son jolts at the sight, and Satoru's eyes jerk up in slow panic at the commotion.

His eyes go wide when they meet hers accidentally, and he watches as stun gradually morphs her expression, the light catching emotionally in her glistening gaze. Satoru acts quickly, his scarred hand shooting forward to knowingly graze her chin, an urgent fire in his crystal hues.

She shudders a breath of disbelief, awed smile catching her lips. Satoru shakes his head, the corners of his lips curving with nostalgia, and she blinks in her stupor before nodding slowly in understanding, scrambling to get more water.

"It is not kindness. Just humanity. Acknowledgement," you argue softly, and Satoru ducks his head once more as an amused, warm smile tugs at his lips, for you always deny your goodness even when it is presented before you. Satoru hums, allowing his cloak to shield his face once more, tugging the fabric forward. "What is your name?"

"...Senon," he lies.

"Senon," you try the name on your tongue warmly, scooching slightly forward. "Where are you from, Senon?"

"...I am a veteran of the Trojan war. I've... traveled very far."

He hears you pause, feels you tense behind him.

You bring yourself closer to the gate, eyes glittering with mourning as your brows pull together in a hopeful tug. You have been wearing your grief on your sleeve for twenty years now, the very mention of the war that stole your love away bringing a lump to your throat and making something hard and hot and unforgiving settle in your chest. Your breath hitches as you inhale, and he hears you swallow, feels the ghost of your breath.

Gods, he's missed you. He misses the breath warm against his lips. He misses your sighs against his heated, balmy skin.

He's so close, but still not quite home.

"A veteran...?" you whisper. "Then... you knew my - my husband?"

Your voice falters under the mere word, shattering into something momenterily fragile and week. Satoru clenches his jaw. He wants to assure you of his safety so badly. He wants to tell you that he is here. That you have to wait no longer, but he would be lying. The fight is not yet won, and his home - you, his son - are not yet saved.

He must wait. Play his cards correctly.

Satoru angles his head slightly to the left, into your direction. "I did," he says. "Very well."

You lick your lips, failing to hide your hope. Not even trying to. "And? What of him...? Do you... is there any word of..."

"He's alive."

You gasp out.

"And he will return. He swears it." He swears it.

"Then where is he?" you urge, abandoning your poise, voice dipping into something heated and desperate and drastic, yet achingly quiet, as though you are afraid to let your hope ring out too loudly for the fear that it will be crushed. "How is it that you were able to return before him? Do you know where he is?"

"He's close," he says.

"Close?" you almost laugh, eyes wide. "How close? It's been years. I've waited - how close?"

Oh, you are so sweet. You are still the same, after all those years. So fiercely loyal. So unapologetically in love. Satoru was truly blessed in this life to have been able to take you as his wife, to know that you have waited so long knowing, praying that he would one day fight his way back to you against all odds, against all unfavorable winds.

"I don't know," he elects to say. He feels you sink. "But I know that he will return."

"How," you shake. "How do you know? When was the last time you saw him, last spoke to him? How could you know that he is coming, that he is close, if he is still not here?" you ask.

He is here, he wants to say. He's here for you. He's come home to you. He will fight for you.

"The Satoru Gojo I know would have fought with all his life to make it back to me," you shudder out, and Satoru aches, for if only you knew. If only he could show you.

"He still is," Satoru says. "Fighting his way back."

"Then where. Is he," you ask once more.

Satoru sighs softly, looking down at his crooked, scarred hands, a reminder of the years away, of the war that waged within the walls of Troy and against his mind for years to come. “He’ll be here when you need him most,” he answers.

You scoff a sound that Satoru knows so well, your irritation bleeding through the devastation over word of your husband always being just out of reach. You attempt to fight the tears that have come so easily in his absence. You look away for a moment as your eyes sting, your nose scrunching and brows curling.

You catch sight of your son sitting afar in the corner, the eyes of his father shining brightly throughout the room, eying your interaction with this stranger. You assume that he was startled by the commotion of your maid fumbling the bowl of water, your mind too clouded by this stranger’s apparent closeness to your husband to see the knowing tension in your boy’s eyes.

Twenty years. Twenty years have dragged by with no word of your husband but a cloaked stranger’s distance promise. Twenty years since you’ve gazed into the sapphire ocean in Satoru’s eyes. Twenty years since you’ve felt those warm hands caress over your own, traveling teasingly up your arms and over your skin, bringing you close, his voice whispering declarations of passion in your ear. Twenty years since you’ve heard his laugh, since you’ve seen his pretty smile wrinkle his eyes and cheeks, since his humor has poured through the halls in thunderous echoes.

Twenty years without his prideful performances, without the familiar bend of a bow that only he can mold to his will, with his muscles tensing with focus and concentration as he strings his weapon, finishing with the triumphant pluck of a taut string for show.

Twenty years without his sound reign. His wisdom. His control. His heart.

Twenty years not knowing whether your husband is alive or dead. If he’ll ever come back to you.

“Promise me,” you recall him pleading with you in the intimacy of your bedroom all those years ago, before he left for the war.

His large hands had clutched your face, his eyes holding your gaze assertively as your chin wrinkles and your lip trembles. Ocean pools attempt to ease you as he looks into your (e/c) eyes, his thumb smoothing over the curve of your cheek.

“Promise me that if I don’t come back, you’ll remarry.”

The sentiment offended you then just as it offends you now. You frown, nose flaring as your hand instinctively raises to slap him. It’s a swift clap against his jaw that startles him, wide eyes blinking before something soft and tender melts over his gaze despite the subtle sting buzzing over his cheek. So stubborn.

“How dare you ask me to do that, Satoru?” you growl, eyes glistening over. Satoru smiles sadly, with all the world’s knowledge brewing behind his eyes. You shake your head, raising your own hands to hold his face in turn. Snowy lashes flutter, his pupils expanding as you bring yourself closer. “You promise me you will come back.”

Ever the ordinarily sure man, Satoru hesitates. He brings his forehead to yours, and you whimper out something broken, your nose brushing, your hands keeping one another connected. You’ve seen your husband overcome the impossible. You’ve seen his wonderful strength. You’ve seen his power.

But here, before you, with uncertainty lying ahead, he is just a man. Unsure.

“What if I can’t, baby?” he murmurs as though it pains him to say, but it is the reality. Many men die overseas at war. Even more die trying to get back home. “I’ll fight with everything I can to come back to you, but what if I can’t?”

“I won’t remarry,” you hiss. “I’ll never remarry.”

“This home will need a king of I’m gone too long.”

“It will already have one. You.”

“(Y/n)…”

“I won’t.”

He smiled again, full of love and despair. “You’re stubborn.”

“You’re worse,” you bite, and Satoru huffs a weak laugh, closing his eyes, feeling you close against him. “Toru, what if we just run away?”

His eyes peel open, meeting yours as he lifts his forehead from you slightly. A desperate craze holds your gaze as you speak.

“You wouldn’t have to fight in this silly war. We could take Telemachus and go. Get a ship. Take the loyal. Chase the escaping sun on the horizon.”

Satoru clenches his jaw, allowing himself to imagine your fantasy. He feels the imaginary salten wind toss through his white strands as he holds you to his chest, your head tucked under his chin as you watch the sun set behind the line of the sea.

“You know it’s not possible,” he tells you longingly. “I’d rather be killed in war, or trying to return to you than for mutiny. I won't soil my legacy or yours, or my son’s for a dream. I have to go, my love. It’s my responsibility.”

You, of course, know this is true. That does not prevent you from trembling with sadness as you stare into your husband’s eyes, knowing from just a glance that he will be gone for a very, very long time.

“I’d rather you not be killed at all,” you say in a hushed voice. He frowns.

"(Y/n), I'll do everything I can," he promises urgently. "We'll win the war, and I will rage against the gods to return to you."

"Gods do not want your rage, Satoru. Rage is what will anger them in turn. Trust them as you trust me," you say. You catch the hesitant look in Satoru's eye. You release him to fumble with your nightgown, unpinning the golden brooch that frequents your sleeve. He keeps his hands on you, touching, tracing, watching tenderly.

You bring the brooch to his eye level, holding it tight in your grip. He glances down at it: a brooch of the goddess Athena shimmering in the firelight.

“Take this with you. Keep it on your person. Wear it always. Athena will look after you as I long to. I’ll be with you throughout your journey, and so will she.”

Your words are whispered against the bow of his pink lips as his hands pull you back in closer, eyes lidded as your skin brushes. He nods slowly against you, pressing a gentle kiss to your lips.

Your mind plays that night on repeat as you listen to this stranger's broken words. You replay the way Satory climbed over you in a haze of dizzy kisses, a long night of passion following that still could not account for how long he would be away.

You miss him terribly.

"I've needed him for twenty years," you tell the beggar who you do not know is your husband. "What is keeping him from me now, if you are here and not him?"

...What could Satoru tell you?

That on the night of Agamemnon's infiltration of Troy, he watched a city light ablaze at the hand of him and his men? That he watched women's knees drop to the dirt as his comrades held swords to their throats? Their pitched screams haunting him to this day, before the merciless slice of a blade cut their cries short?

What could he tell his grievihg wife, desperate for answers, that Satoru Gojo's conscience could not bear the weight of what he'd done to those people - so much so that he allowed the tides to pull himself and his men further away from you while he thought that he was bringing them back home by his own accord? Untethered to Agamemnon's curse of glory?

He feels the blister of fear hot against his skin. Sees the shadows of the dead marching in the back of his mind when he is ripped from his sleep. Remembers the face of that young girl as his men dragged her to the top of a temple's stairs, hands firmly outstretching her arms as she begged for her life at Satoru's feet. And he could do nothing but watch as her head was sliced from her body, and could do nothing but fear as the very same face came to him in the guise of Athena, haunting him, forcing him to remember the blood that stains his hands.

How could he have brought himself back to you, knowing that he had done to the Trojans what he would slaughter millions for if the very same had been done to Ithaca, to you?

Your breaths grow shaky as you listen to the stranger's weathered, intimate tale of your husband's perspective of the war, of all that he and his men did in the sake of Helen's name. Anger bubbles beneath you as you envision the tolls this violence has taken on your husband, who never shied away from battle, but always wore his heart on his sleeve like armor.

The tears come as easily as they have for the past twenty years. You pinch your lips together, fighting sobs as you listen, such familiarity in the beggar's voice that reminds you so much of him, so much of the fact that he is still not here with you.

And if he isn't now, he never will be.

You tear yourself away from the stranger with finality, bidding him a bitter good night as you retreat to wail. As you retreat to succumb to the reality that you know your husband wanted you to live, to the reality that Satoru has manipulated you into fulfilling.

You will seek a new husband.

And your husband will come. He will make sure of it.

"Just a little longer, baby," he murmurs to himself, to the space you just left. "I promise. I'm here."

ׂ╰┈➤

Suitors crowd the very room that Satoru occupied the previous night. He sits on a stump of stone stairs in the very back, cloak shading his figure as he eyes the monsters who seek to take you for their own. His brows angle, a potent rage simmering in the silent stun of your presentation.

There you are, at the front of the room, looking like a vision the very gods sculpted themselves. Your pain is raw on your expression as you stare resentfully out at the sea of suitors before you with your husband's bow gripped tight in your hands.

Before the suitors, in the middle of the room, lies a row of bound pairs of axes, one before the other, lined up in front of a wooden board. Those who were around to witness Satoru Gojo's old performances of strength and accuracy recognize this set up, for it is the very same party trick that the old king used to showcase during warm nights after filling dinners, when the wine has numbed his cares and the bashful look in his wife's eye encouraged him to parade his strength about.

Telemachus, his son, lingers in the corner beside an old, blind friend, his jaw set as he ruminates over the last twenty years. Satoru, having mistakenly unveiled his identity to his son when he approached his old, weak hunting dog, and the very animal relinquished life the moment his master returned to him with the touch of his warm hand against his fur, keeps his eyes elsewhere to preserve himself from others. Telemachus knew instantly then, recalling that his father's pet was waiting for his master to return home before giving into death.

Satoru had ordered for all the weapons to be stored away by entrusted servants, and for the room to be boarded shut when all the suitors gathered. He knew what was coming. He knew by the determination of his wife's depart from his conversation with her.

And he is ready. Finally ready to reclaim what is his, to return home rightfully.

"I will marry any one of you in this room," your voice booms out, ringing against the stone. "If you are able to complete my challenge."

You hold out your husband's bow, attempting not to break away at the feel of its weathered wood in your hands, the memory of the man you love before those who wish to wipe him away.

The room is still, hanging onto your every word, and Satoru’s eyes gleam at the sight of his prized possession in your dainty palms.

“Whoever can string this bow,” you begin. “And shoot an arrow through these six pairs of axes, hitting the wood behind them, is the man I will take as my husband… and the new king of Ithaca.”

Murmurs rise. Chuckles of the unknowing ring out confidently. The silence of those who are knowing is steady.

Satoru grins.

“Who’s first?” you ask.

The low rumble of voices eventually evens out into hesitant silence before the first suitor steps up arrogantly.

“I’ll go,” he grits. You nod, pressing your lips together, before handing the bow off to your son, who passes it to the eager man.

Tension fills the room as he props the bow upright, pinching the string between his fingers, and stretching it up, up, up.

He grunts, hand trembling, string hovering inches away from the tip of the bow. He remains struggling that way for a moment, bent on one knee, before giving in with a huff, the string snapping back to the floor.

A rumble of laughter erupts and you roll your eyes. “Not enough protein in the diet, huh?” some man shouts out, further encouraging guffaws and chuckles.

The suitor scoffs and turns away with the flick of a dismissive hand, pride wounded. Then comes the next suitor, believing he can show the previous up.

He takes the bow. Kneels down. Brings the string up, up, up. It stretches, he grits his teeth and trembles, cheeks flushing, before stumbling with the snap of the string back to the ground.

More laughter.

“It’s impossible!” he hisses. “No one could do it!”

“My husband could,” you cut in, and the room goes silent once more with resentment and a sudden urge to prove you wrong, to prove that any one of them could take Satoru Gojo’s place. "Who's next?" you raise your brows challengingly.

Satoru swoons. Oh, how he loves you. How he will make up for all the time spent away once he proves himself worthy again, once he rids his home of the plague that is these stupid men.

One by one, suitor after suitor lines up to try and fail miserably at stringing the bow that only Satoru is known to be capable of stringing. The laughter soon dips into gradual panic, and the realization that the task truly is impossible settles in, the challenge unbeatable for all those who are not the very owner of the weapon himself.

"My queen, we get it," one suitor speaks up bravely, wearing a mask of vulnerability and sympathy that Satoru assumes is meant to gain your good graces. The ivory haired warrior scowls and your eyes turn to the man talking.

Dark hair and eyes. A handsome smile. Something snaky behind his eyes that he attempts to soften for you. He steps forward.

"We know what this means. Nearly all of us have attempted to beat this challenge that none of us could ever overcome. We understand what you are trying to say, that we will never fill Satoru Gojo's shoes. But if I may offer myself up as a man who will try, knowing the great shadow that looms over me. Knowing that I will fail. I will do all that I can to please you, to mend this kingdom. I may not be able to win your challenge, but I am eager to win your heart."

No one says a word. Telemachus' eyes fly around the hardened faces of the suitors, discouraged by their own failure, and the mischief of the man who just spoke up. He swallows, and you merely look the man in the eye, doing all you can to remain polite. To stand tall. To give him a chance, when what you truly wish to do is lock the doors behind you and set the entire room ablaze.

Satoru has had enough.

Slowly, he rises, his cloak fluttering around his figure. He is cautious to keep his posture slightly slumped, his head bowd, and his voice low. As if unsure.

"I haven't tried yet."

All heads turn to the back of the room where the former king stands as a beggar. The silence is piercing before it is interrupted by an outburst of laughter, laughter that makes the suitors' inadequacy feel much lighter.

The suitor who had just spoken freely to you chortles particularly loud. "You? A beggar?!" he sputters. "What could possibly make you think that you would succeed if none of us could? You're nothing," he spits.

You watch the beggar slowly step past the man taunting him, his footsteps echoing throughout the space. Your brows knit with curiousity, and something you don't quite allow yourself to acknowledge gnaws at the back of your mind.

The dark haired suitor scoffs as the beggar stands before him, throwing his arm out in disdain. "Your majesty, you can't possibly-"

You raise your hand, and the man immediately cuts himself off. You keep your eyes on the cloaked face before you, the way this stranger approaches so humbly, so surprisingly willing to try after watching everyone fall short of what your husband was - is.

Something is... off here. You can't quite name it, but your heart knows.

The beggar stands still, presenting only himself before you. No titles. No land. No pride. Merely his own hands, a veteran's status, and a face you have yet to see.

You inhale slowly, something scratching at the back of your throat as you lower your hand. You nod toward Telemachus, who holds the bow toward his father.

"Please. By all means," you encourage him. "Good luck."

Satoru reaches his hand out and wraps his worn fingers around the wood soundly. He expels a long, gentle breath as he reunites with the weapon, taking it carefully out of his son's hands, who slowly backs away to stand at the far end of the room, knowing what is to come.

You notice. You notice every movement that occurs from this moment forward.

Sunkissed hands trace over the intricate detailing, following the curve of the bow as he sinks slowly down to his knee. Memories of hunts, of teaching children archery, of battle come to his mind as he methodically fiddles with the bow, then soon comes the memory of his performances in the banquet hall. The roar of triumph. The raise of his bow in the air. Your proud grin and flushed cheeks.

Satoru breathes in. Taking his time. You hang onto each second, brows coming together as you watch this stranger touch your husband's bow just as he would, pinching that string between all thick digits.

Suddenly, arms curve inward and biceps puff. Veins bulge in the strangers muscular forearms and hands as he clutches the top of the bow with one and the string with the other, arching his body inward as the weapon curves and stretches under his force.

Your heart drops.

The beggar gives way for a moment, releasing the string due to misuse, and takes a breath. A rumble of further laughter comes once more as the suitors prepare to throw more doubt at the man, but the room goes silent again when the beggar repeats the action. Only this time, he twists the bow backwards.

He stretches the string. He curves the bow inward. His muscles flex, and his shoulders round. The bow folds, the room freezes, the string catches, and connects.

The bow is strung.

The breath leaves you as your knees suddenly go weak. Your mind spins, dizziness overcoming you, and before you can allow your emotions to get the best of your senses, he does it.

He grips the wooden arch in one hand and plucks the string with the other, a resounding single, daunting note ringing out into the space.

A predator warning its prey for what is to come.

And with the force of his pluck, you almost faint. For you know this motion. You know this presentation. You know those hands, those veins and the way that body curves to match his weapon's mold.

Your husband has returned.

You gasp out a shuddering sigh before retreating back to your chambers. You have no time to think, to process, for you know what is coming the second that bow is strung.

The room is heavy with shock as Satoru rises to his feet, taking the arrow, hooking it, and shooting it through the axes. The arrow flies with a sharp whistle and hits the target in one shot.

Telemachus, who has only heard stories of such demonstrations, lets a grin slip onto his face. The room remains eerily still in the man's victory, and his shoulders gradually ease back, his posture straightening to reveal his true height.

You make it to your doors, hand on either one as you watch from the top of the steps. Your world goes quiet. The beggar you spoke to the previous night stands suddenly tall, and his cloak slips away from his face with such stature.

Sapphire pools. The same ones that have haunted you every night for two decades meet your gaze.

Tears stray past your lashes, dribbling down your cheeks like shooting stars as you take in his face, your heartbeat and his steady breath the only things your ears can catch.

Skin tanned and aged by the merciless beat of the sun. Snowy hair bright and graceful, slipping down to his ears, swiping across his forehead in ivory tendrils. Sharp cheekbones, facial stucture matured, hardened, a beard that garaces his once clean shaven face, and his heart on his sleeve.

Your love incarnate. Disguised as a beggar. Nothing but a man before you, once more seeking your hand the only way he knows how.

He's come back to you.

"You're..." a suitor begins. "You're him. You're Satoru Gojo-"

An arrow pierces his neck before he can finish his sentence, and when everyone focuses, they see the stance for battle that Satoru has taken. Ocean eyes ablaze, arrows hidden under his cloak, teeth grinding.

One down. The rest to go.

A breathless grin breaks across your face, your teary eyes blurring your vision as you close the doors shut before you, granting your husband complete free reign. To kill every last one of them.

Satoru's focus is the sharpest it has every been as his arrows fly and strike through the flesh of one man after another. Chaos breaks out as suitors attempt to search for weapons that were hidden from them. Servants fly to the boarded doors, banging helplessly, pleading for escape as Satoru lays waste to every man he sees.

His hair flies about his face as he whips his head around, locating each incoming attack and stopping it before it could reach him. His pupils are shrunken, face straight and seemingly calm, eyes edged with a hint of insanity and anger.

These men think they can walk into his home? Make themselves cozy within his walls? Drink his wine? Kick his son and dog around? Pursue his wife, the very love of his life, the greatest thing to ever happen to him, and walk away without punishment? Without paying?

Satoru's teeth bear as he reaches forward to grab one pair of the bound axes from the challenge, swinging it around to thrust into an attacking suitors face, the blades chopping away at his flesh, knocking him dead and backward onto the ground. He uses the hilt of the axes to thrust backward, plowing into another suitor's gut blindly, sending him rocketing back into the stone walls.

Satoru huffs. Not a fucking chance.

Droplets of blood splatter as the suitor who spoke freely to you orders for someone to find and retrieve the weapons. One disloyal servant manages to thrust himself out of the wooden barred doors and run for the storage room, a tip having been provided by another servant. Telemachus pursues, engaging in a brawl with the bald headed man as punches are thrown. The servant manages to send Telemachus flying across the room and to the floor with a bloody nose as he thrusts a hole into the wooden floor below, leading into the room where Satoru's murder spree transpires.

He throws spears through the hole, equipping some suitors with weapons to corner the King of Itchaca. Satoru persists, rocketing arrows left and right, when he feels sharp blades pierce his shoulder blades from behind, the long weapons trapping him inside a small circle at a distance.

Telemachus, eager to assist his war hero father, scrambles to his feet and tackles the servant once more. He plunges his fist into his face, pinning him against the wall of weapons. The blue eyed boy stretches his arm to reach for another spear, which he hastily grabs and tosses through the hole for his father to catch. The servant finds an opening, reaching behind him for a dagger, and thrusting it into Telemachus' side. The boy hisses and stumbles back, and the war between the loyal and disloyal persists.

Satoru catches the spear tossed overhead to him and slices it through the air, knocking the other spears into a strayed direction, allowing him the freedom to use his bow once more before thrusting the spear into the hearts of other men.

Above, Telemachus scrambles beneath the weight of the servant pinning him down. His eyes shoot up to the table next to him, spotting a sword dangling off the edge of the wood. Just as the servant raises the dagger high above the boy's face, he narrowly dodges, mustering up all the strength he can find to flip himself over, rolling over to the side as the dagger comes down to split the wood. Telemachus jumps for the sword on the table as the servant rises to his feet, and in a flash, he pulls a swift move, sweeping the blade under the servant's neck stealthily, watching as blood sprays and the body falls limp at his feet.

Beneath him, broken spears impale Satoru's back, but he moves on, three weapons wielded in his hands, alternating between each like a monster as men continue to follow around him. A spear thrusts for your honor. An arrow flies for his son's safety. Two axes slice for his home.

And as blood trickles through the crevices and cracks of stone, heaps of bodies scatter the ground. Those who no longer wish to fight, who no longer desire to risk their lives for an unbeatable battle against and unbeatable foe, drop to their knees and the weapons they happened upon, ducking their heads in homage.

It is not over until Satoru finally corners the dark haired suitor who was mouthy enough to present himself to you in isolation, using the hilt of the axes to thrust against his chest and pin him down to the floor. He stares up in horror as blazing sapphire eyes glare down at him wide, disconnected, furious.

The king's chest rises and falls slowly, his cloth now half ripped from his exposed body. His skin is bare, pectorals swelling and falling with his heavy breaths, lines of blood trickling down his well defined abdominals from the wounds that pierce his flesh. His foot raises to press down into the suitor's shoulder, all of Ithaca's might and Troy's victory hovering over the man who thought he could stand a chance, who spoke far more than he could ever take action. A pitiful coward who Satoru recognizes from youth, who once wanted to follow his footsteps into battle at such a young age.

He grew into a pathetic excuse for a man.

Satoru bends over, leaning in close as the suitor watches with frightened, blown eyes. "My wife," he grits out huskily. "would sooner see you in Hades than by her side. And I'll be sure to fulfill her wishes."

With that, Satoru raises his spear gripped in his right hand and thrusts it down into the man's chest with a strained rumble in his throat.

With the leading suitor dead, all other contendors go mute and drop their weapons in defeat. The ivory haired man slowly lifts his foot from the corpse before him, lowering his arms at his sides to turn around. Before him, the sight of all those who attempted to kill him moments ago now kneeling in a crescent around the room greets him.

The hilts of spears thud into the ground, the rhythm of victory, the beat of recognition for the king's homecoming. Satoru stumbles slightly, muscles stinging under to pierce of spears. He looks around, and finally drops his weapons to the ground with a resounding clang.

He won. The King has finally come home.

But Satoru cares not for the men who kneel at his feet. He cares not for the walls he has reclaimed, for the title he has settled back into, for the fame that his name brings.

What he cares for now lies behind those deep, wooden doors just at the other side of the room.

He shuffles, slightly dazed from bloodlust and domination. The remainders of his cloak drop softly to the ground, revealing him in all of his six foot three mass, all of his rippling, sweat drenched, blood smeared muscles. The very sight of him speaks volumes, exudes power, and strength unbridled.

But he does not care for such things as he trudges toward your doors, limping in a trance. He can hardly feel the little blades sheathed into his skin as he walks, for his mind is fuzzy with adrenaline and the image of you that he can now savor, hold, treasure.

Telemachus rushes back through the busted doors in search of his father, finding that he has already won, and that he is already making his way toward his mother.

Satoru stops before the few steps leading up to your doors. They slide open cautiously, revealing you standing there, awe scribbled over your gorgeous features.

You're as beautiful as the day he left you behind.

You shiver, tears staining your (s/c) cheeks as you stare into your husband's eyes. You ask yourself if this is a trick of the gods, of the light, or of your mind, but as your eyes momentarily sweep over the damage he has done, taking into the kneeled stances of the surviving suitors, you finally breathe.

Your husband came back to you after all those years.

You tremble with soft cries as Satoru stares at you with all the love and relief the world has to afar. His eyes have softened, his pupils growing in your presence, and he carefully reaches back into his pants, lifting his hand to reveal the golden brooch that he promised he'd bring back to you after keeping it on his person at all times.

You blubber out a laugh, overjoyed, overwhelmed, and you rush to your husband. The moment your arms reach out to him longingly, he submits to the exhastion and collapses to his knees with a warm grin and creased eyes. You follow him instantly, dropping to your knees in turn and gathering his body, bringing him close to you. You lay him over your knee as you cry gently, droplets of your tears dotting onto his skin as he looks up at you like you've hung the moon and the stars. His hands grip your waist and upper arm as you prop him up to meet your gaze.

"Satoru," you whisper tenderly, his name no longer a hush that torments your dreams at night. Your shaky fingers trace over his skin as his always did yours, experimentally stroking over his white beard, tracing the lines beside his eyes, his sharp nose, his pink bowed lips. Your heart races, your skin flushed, your mind at ease.

"Hi, baby," he beams despite himself and his wounds, all sap and softness in your embrace, a stark contrast to the raging monster he was moments before. "I'm home."

You laugh, or sob - you aren't sure, disbelievingly. "My love. My Toru," you coo, stroking his lengthened hair. "You came back to me."

"Of course I did," he mumbles, reaching a bloody hand to your cheek. "I'm sorry I took so long."

You shake your head, uncaring of the time anymore. Your husband is here, after so very long, and that's all that matters. "I thought you were never coming back,” you croak.

"I know, pretty. I know," he soothes, brushing a piece of your hair from your face. "But I'm here now. It's been a long journey, but I'm here. I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere ever again."

"You better not," you sniff. "I won't let you. Twenty years, Satoru. I spent twenty years without you."

"I know," his eyes crinkle with happiness, a weight surging from his chest now that he has made it back into your embrace. "I know. It was torture. I know I left you waiting so long. I'm so sorry," he apologizes again. "I carried you with me the whole time. I couldn't rest until I made it back to you. I'm yours. Here. Always."

You don't wait any longer. You've waited long enough.

Your heads both move in unison, your hands hold his face as your lips meet in a hungry, desperate lock. Your body slumps, and Satoru lifts himself higher to chase the taste of your salty lips, years of anguish slipping away at the very contact.

Satoru almost forgot your sweetness. The sugary taste that always lingers in your mouth as though you were made of pomegranate and sugar, as if his tongue was made to taste you. His fingers curl into your hair, eyes lashes fluttering blissfully against his cheek, brow arching as your lips glide together like the sway of a perfect wave.

You cry into the kiss, and Satoru presses in deeper.

Telemachus smiles warmly from afar, clutching his side, forgetting his wounds. The suitors turn their gazes away shamefully, and Satoru shamelessly marks his territory, kisses you as though it is the last time to make up for all the damage he's caused you. Your kiss so addicting, more addicting than the Lotus Calypso fed him and the insatiable song of the sirens, that he has no plans to part from you any time soon.

The two of you are nothing but heated breaths and smacks of lips, sniffles and gentle chuckles.

A string of saliva connects you when Satoru mistakenly parts, the curve of his shoulder shooting lightning up his back from the arrows still embedded there. He hisses with a wince, and you watch him with concerned eyes, looking over his state.

He catches the worry in your expression, and smiles warm again, only ecstatic to see your face before him and not in his tormented nightmares of failing to reach you. You frown as his thumb slides down your cheek and over your chin, light shimmering in his gaze.

"Do you like the rugged look or should I shave?"

You laugh loud, unrestrained, free, for you have longed to here such stupid jokes told at the most inappropriate times for as long as you can remember. You duck back down to kiss Satoru's lips as his head falls back against your knee.

"You're perfect," you whisper against him.

ׂ╰┈➤

You can't put words to the way Satoru looks at you as you finish cleaning the cut on his neck, the wounds on his back having been patched by the servant who washed his feet the previous night.

A thick film of heat occupies your once vacant bedroom, firelight crackling against the distant walls. Celebrations have long concluded, the night's recognition of the king's return and all his accomplishments cut short by your urgency to disinfect Satoru's wounds.

He lay with his back against the wall of your bed, eyes watching every movement you make as you dab cloth over his soothed gash, his face clean shaven and fresh thanks to your steady hand. You sit upon his lap, warm thighs straddling him, your night gown spilling over the exposed spaces of your skin, barefeet tickling the silk comforters.

Satoru feels as though stuck in a dream, watching your calmed face as you bring the cloth away from his skin, placing it back into the water on the side table beside you. You feel your husband's eyes following you, his warm palm soothing over the skin of your bare thigh, his gaze hazy, his body warm under yours.

He is still adjusting to his return, not fulling trusting that he is finally safe and sound within well earned royalty, and renewed by his lovely wife's touch. His son, once a baby, is now over twenty years old, and when he looked in his eyes earlier that day, he saw himself. Brave. Responsible. Noble.

His family has grown up without him.

The king can't quite name what he feels right now, but he knows that a good chunk of it is love as his eyes graze over the signals of beautiful age on your face. How you've managed to keep everything together in his absence continues to baffle him, but he shouldn't be surprised. After all, he's never met a woman quite like you.

Gods, he loves you. He loves the way your lashes curl and the way your teeth sink into your soft lips. He loves the way your hair falls and the way your skin melts in the orange hue of fire. He loves the way your thighs squeeze over him as if he never left, as he if he will never leave again, and he's sure that he won't. After twenty years away, Satoru plans to stay buried beneath your body for his long as he possibly can, unmoving. Sound.

"I'm sorry."

You look up at the sound of his gentle voice, his soft tone ringing out like a whisper in the dark. You tilt your head slightly, abandoning the cloth to turn your attention to your long awaited husband and king.

"Honey, you've apologized so many times," you sigh, smoothing a hand over his chest. You feel Satoru jolt beneath you, feel the way he still reacclimates to your touch, afraid that it isn't real. "It's not your fault that you were away so long. The gods were angry. So were you."

"It is my fault," he denies. "I made them angry. I let my pride get in the way. I let it ruin me. I let it kill my men, and steal away my life with you... with our son..."

"Satoru," you say his name tenderly, yet assertively. He looks you in the eye, brow curving pensively. "You can't take back all those years. What happened is in the past. I don't care about any of that anymore now that you're here."

"You should," he argues. "Look at what I left you to deal with."

"I never gave up hope," you counter. "I always knew you were coming back. Everyone told me you were dead. I didn't believe them."

You reach for his hand, pulling it from your thigh to press to your chest. His palm flattens over your heart, the precious thump pounding against his touch. You see the way he sinks into the feeling, jaw tight.

"I felt you in my heart. All these years."

His eyes flicker back up to you, darker now. "Baby, I'm so sorry I left you alone."

"Satoru, you have to stop apologizing. I'm not angry anymore. I'm happy. I'm relieved," you urge, holding his hand to you soundly. "My husband is back. That's all I care about now."

"You should care about more," he says solemnly.

You furrow your brows. "Did you find someone else out there while you were gone?"

Your husband's eyes go wide at the sentiment, disgust crossing his features momentarily. "What?"

"Well, did you?" you raise a brow.

"Baby," Satoru starts. "There's no one else across the oceans for me but you. I only ever thought of you when I allowed myself to remember. When I didn't block out the pain of being away. How could you even as me that?"

You know there's weight to the things Satoru says, but you don't press it any further. You'd rather not discuss all that happened to him when he wasn't with you. "Then why do you keep talking like I shouldn't forgive you?"

"...Because..."

"Because you haven't forgiven yourself for everything that happened."

He presses his lips together and shakes his head. You know him well.

"My love," you shift, bringing his hand from your chest to clutch between your palms as you look at him. "You've crossed the sea. You've watched your comrades fall. You've burdened the weight of thousands on your shoulders. You almost lost yourself and you found your way back. To your mind. To your home. To your son. To me," you speak passionately. Satoru watches you with great emotion, his nose flaring as you keep his gaze. "You must extend yourself grace. If you can't forgive yourself for everything, or believe that I could forgive you, then what of all that you've been through? What of me?"

Satoru's lips curve downward. "What of you?" he repeats.

You gulp. "I don't want to think about what we lost any more than we have, Toru. I don't want you to look at me and be sad... I want to start building our life again from where we've just picked up. What of me if you can't look past your own guilt to see that all I care about is having you with me again?"

Somehow, even as Satoru torments himself for his sins, you still look at him and see the man you love instead of all his mistakes. You don't blame him for what he took from you. You don't resent him for all his time spent so far away.

He does not understand how, except for the fact that he loves you so very dearly, and you love him in turn. He refuses to argue with you on his first night back, especially if you insist on leaving it all behind when the two of you are in each other's company the way you used to be.

Satoru's other hand slide up to your chin, caresses just beneath your bottom lip. Dark pupils observe you sweetly, his heart aching with want as he watches the way your plush lip drags beneath the pad of his thumb when he touches you. "What of you?" he says again. "You're everything, (Y/n). You're all that's been keeping me together. Just because I'm burrowed in self deprocation doesn't mean you're any less of the woman you have always been to me," he tells you earnestly.

You feel his hand shift in yours to clutch tightly in return, your other hand still holding over his.

"I love you," he says for the first time in twenty years. You fall apart. "You have been and always will be my perfect girl. My queen. Don't ever question where you stand in my mind. Our separation has tormented me for decades. I haven't been able to sleep. My soul ached to be away from you, baby. I love you. You're everything right about this world, about me. Don't forget that."

You breathe in sharp, thighs squeezing, heart lurching for more closeness, for your husband's praise, for his love. You are nothing but sap at his hands as his fingers graze your lips, trailing down to your neck slowly, past your clavicle, over your exposed collarbone. Satoru watches, mesmorized, as goosebumps sprout over your skin. And you feel that familiar tension, the way he hardens beneath you, the way his body presses firm and sound to yours, needing more. For just one touch isn't enough.

He's spent too long away from you. It's been too long since he has been able to savor you in the intimacy of your bed, in the privacy of your chambers, where no one exists but your intertwined souls as he makes love to you in a way that has you seeing stars and planets in orbit, that ruins you for any other man.

And how could you ever want any other man, when you have Satoru?

His hair is messy in that well loved way, from your hands gripping into them during messy kisses, and the freshness of a bath. He looks so much older, much more mature, but still as breathtakingly handsome as ever with lines of stubble tracing his face, white lashes blinking slowly, and dark pupils shrinking the outter ring of blue orbs. His chest is exposed to you, shirtless, and your hands trickle down his heated skin, exploring every scar that you do not recognize, every bump and ridge that you've missed in time.

His exterior has somehow physically hardened, his shape having been beaten into perfection by the gods' brutality. You wince as the pads of your fingers follow every unsaid story of his faded wounds, and you hear his heavy breath grow more weighted under your feather light touch.

Satoru brings you in closer by your chin, lids low, eyes hungry and desperate to make you happy again. To feel you again. "Do you still love me, pretty?"

He knows the answer, and you know he knows as well, but you do not hesitate to give him what he wants. "Of course I do," you murmur, "I've wanted you to come back and kill every last one of those suitors the second they arrived. I have and only will ever love you."

"Yeah?" he hums. You nod, entranced. He smiles. "That's my girl. I'd do it all over for you again in a heartbeat. No one touches my wife."

"I missed you so much, Satoru," you exhale as your noses brush, your eyes falling closed as his scent invades you.

"I missed you too. So much. You don't even know," he says, wrecked.

"I missed your hands. Missed the way they touch me."

"Mhm?" his hand slips from yours to slide back up your thigh. Your lips part as his touch creeps higher and higher, sending vibrations shooting through your body. His fingers reach past the silk that adorns you, creeping between your legs lovingly as he presses a kiss to the corner of your mouth. "What else did you miss, my love? Tell me. Tell your king."

"Missed the way you talk to me," you moan softly. "Missed your voice."

"And I missed those pretty sounds you make," he groans, slipping his hand lower. His thick fingers brush your thinly clothed core, dragging lightly against the ball of nerves that swells knowingly, needily at his slightest presence. You gasp softly against him, leaning further into him, and he hums lovingly. "Just like that," he murmurs, kissing your cheek. "You always sound so beautiful when I touch you. Gods, it's a crime to have been pulled away from this."

"Toru," you whine, your hips grinding desperately down against him. Satoru's breath hitches, something low and unsteady rumbling out against you as you grip his shoulders. "Please don't make me wait any longer."

He wastes no time, hastily tugging your undergarments aside, but doing so with care. "Oh, baby, I won't. I won't torture you anymore. You've been so strong. So good. I'll give you whatever you want. I'll make up for everything. I'm here."

You let his hands grab your waist and carefully flip you over. Your head sinks into the silk sheets and your undergarments are completely discarded, a string of your arousal stretching along with their removal. Satoru hovers over you, soft, primal, and curves down to unite your lips.

You whimper softly, winding your arms around his neck and pulling him flush against you. His warm chest presses to yours, your gown hiking up over your hips, your bottom half bare to the man you love as his fingers slip down your stomach and curve over your swollen clit.

Your soft moans spill into Satoru's lips as his tongue slants past, plunging eagerly into your mouth. The muscle swirls around your own, your tongues tangling in a desperate, greedy dance, the smack of lips rising into the air as Satoru begins to work little circles over your clit.

"Yeah, sweetheart, I'd never forget," he breaks away to grumble against your mouth as you whine, your thighs curving outward to grant him more access. He swoons, taking the opportunity to drag out his touch, slowing his circular motion with two, fat fingers, collecting your sweet juices over his fingertips. He ducks to kiss your jaw. "I'd never forget what makes you whine like that."

"Satoru."

You call his name out like a prayer, and the said man can not help but answer. He's longed for this. Starved for this.

"I'm here," he assures you again, his pace dizzying, his lips gliding down to the sensitive space of your neck. "I'm here. I promise. I'll take care of you."

The squelch of your fruit eases the tension of years when he inserts two of his fingers. Their sheer width stretch you out from years of lack of use, and you groan out something throaty, clinging tight to Satoru as he lavs warm kisses over your skin. His teeth graze your neck as he sucks hot kisses over it, feeling you squirm with delight and hold him tighter, mindful of his wounds.

"Fuck, still so wet for me," he marvels, burying his face in your neck as he sheathes his fingers slowly in and out of your slippery folds, his lashes fluttering with ecstacy. "Oh baby, you have no idea much I've thought of this."

Your thighs tremble around his hand, your body too weak for his dominance and touch. You know you won't last long, for the strength of his fingers ache so deliciously that you can't even think straight. All you can think of is your husband, and how such things were a far off fantasy merely two nights ago.

But now, he hugs you close, marking your skin, fingering your warm pussy like it was made for him, splitting you apart with just the power of his index and middle digits, undoing you in order to mend you both again. "Talk to me, (Y/n)," he huffs into you. "Tell me what else you missed. Please baby, I need to know."

"Mmmm, missed - missed your fingers so fucking much," you mewl, head tossing back as he peppers kissed across your chest.

"I know, honey, you have them now, don't you?" he teases slightly. "What else? What else can your husband do for you?"

You moan at his title, at what he is to you, at the way his fingers curl against that spongey spot inside and hit just a little bit deeper as they plunge into your walls, gliding in and out eagerly. You leak over his palm freely, soaked. The sound lands raw on your ears, and Satoru releases a muffled groand, addicted to the sensation he feared he would never experience again.

"Oh gods, Toru, missed your - hah - missed your mouth," you whine as his lips trail lower, his other hand curving around the hem of your gown to expose your breasts. They spill free, and Satoru lifts his head to gaze down at you. Your head slightly tossed back, your mouth agape, your eyes barely open, brows pinched with pleasure, and your chest bare before him.

"You're ethereal," he breathes, ducking back down to lick a long strip from your nipple to the bottom of your chin. You whine, hips bucking, walls squeezing. "Oh, honey, do that again. Please. Need to feel you. Squeeze me like you love it."

His pace goes faster, his fingers transitioning from a slow and steady rock to a fastened rocket into your core. You squelch loudly around him, moaning out, and Satoru moans in turn.

He ducks back down to you, taking your nipple between his lips and sucking softly. His tongue rolls around the bud as his cheeks hollow, slurping greedily at the plush fat, toying you gently between his teeth. Your back arches, and his free hand follows to hold the position, fingering you swiftly as he sucks at your pretty tits.

You're a piece of art. A masterpiece. Satoru thinks so when he looks up to watch the way your face pinches in that familiar pleasure, the way the breath floats from your chest, and your pussy clamps hard down on his fingers before you gush around them, spilling syrupy release over your bed and onto his palm. He moans freely, marking your breasts as you writhe and squirm beneath him, his hand keeping your back arched against him.

Is this the afterlife? Is the Elysium? Has he achieved immortal bliss?

He believes so as his wife's perfect pussy cums all over his hand for the first time in decades, and his length aches to cum after, unable to stand the pressure of your intimate reunion.

He breaks away from your tit to smash his lips against yours again, fumbling blindly with his pants, grinding his lower half against you as you prolong your high.

"What else did you miss?" he breathes raggedly against you as you see stars and cling to his neck.

There is not much for you to say when the night drags on, and his pants are discarded to free his massive length. You'd almost forgotten the sheer size of it, how it curves at just the right angle, how his tip shines an angry pink, glistening with pre cum as it twitches against your thigh, his lips leaving marks over every patch of skin they can find.

Satoru, ordinarily the talkative type in bed with you, can hardly find the words when his dick presses into you, past your slimy folds, and eases into your tight, hot cavern. You cry out with the sting of his long awaited intrusion, and he kisses away the pain, your lips slick with spit and your own cum from when your husband licked your cunt clean after fingering you over and over.

You're stuffed full when he finally, eventually bottoms out. Tears brim your eyes from both the penetration and the reality of your connection, for it's been so long since you've had sex with your husband. Since he's been home to ease your needs. Since he's filled you up, made you take him all with his starry eyes holding yours.

"I'm here," he says continuously, as though he needs the words to engrain themselves in your mind, so you don't have to worry about him disappearing anymore.

Tears trickle down your cheeks as he pushes in deeper, brushing your cervix, your walls snug around him. He kisses you again, repeatedly, gripping your hips tight, knocking his forehead against yours. You feel the expansion of his girth inside you. You feel every beloved ridge and curve. You feel him throbbing as you tighten, refusing to release him, holding on to the unimagineable pleasure of his intrusion.

You're already spilling around his length, wetting him down to his balls and upper thighs, and Satoru loves every second. Savors it. Treasures it.

"Satoru!" you bellow, throat raw as he pistons in and out of you, thrusting deep and heavy, keeping a slow, agonizing pace. He wants to feel every second, every drop of your release, every snug squeeze of your beautiful walls, every drag of his cock against your pillowy pussy, which went so long without his attention.

Well, no more. He's here to make it better. To love you. To hold you. To make you feel good. To rip that sadness away indefinitely.

"That's it, baby," he praises hot against your ear, voice thick with tension and pleasure. He groans, jaw slack, brows scrunched, eyes heavy as his nose tucks against your pulse. "That's it. Let me make you feel good. Missed this pussy so much, honey. Missed you so much. Let your husband take that pain away."

And he does.

The night drags on in a haze of sweat and fluid and pleasure. Your fingers graze his scars as he makes powerful love to you, acknowledging all that he's done to make it back, all that he's done to be the man that hovers over you, pieced together by your touch.

And as you lay wrapped up in his limbs as the sun peaks over the horizon, the thick scent of sex and Satoru lingering in the air, you thank Athena for bringing your husband back to you.

You tried to rationalize it. You needed to rationalize it. Because catching totally, absolutely, 100% accidental glimpses of the hottest guy you had ever seen living across the street was just a side effect of high-rise living. Basically a zoning issue. Out of your hands.

You even tried complaining about it to your best friend, Shoko, over FaceTime, desperate to frame the whole thing as a nightmare rather than admit you were the questionable one. Because you weren't. Obviously.

"I'm just saying, it's messing with my productivity," you paced around your kitchen island, holding the phone up so she could see HOW stressed you were. "The buildings are too close. Who designs a high-rise without accounting for the line of sight? It seems like the guy doesn't own a single thing with sleeves. It's basically public indecency."

"Lemme get this straight," Shoko narrowed her eyes at you, absolutely not eating any of your shit, the sound of her filing her acrylic nails echoing through the speaker. "You're bitching because the universe gifted you a front-row seat to Magic Mike: The Work-from-Home Edition, completely free of charge?"

"I am trying to work and not see abs daily!" you hissed, gesturing wildly at your laptop. Steak too juicy lobster too buttery ahh. "I can't be subjected to an eight-pack while I'm calculating margins! How am I supposed to focus like that!"

"Then close your blinds, you absolute clown."

You paused, looking at the white plastic cord by your massive window.

"The plants need natural light," you lied, totally straight-faced. "I can't punish my babies just because my neighbor is a walking thirst trap."

Shoko just cackled and hung up on you.

And to be fair, to your neighbour you were a goddamn psychological fascination. A fine research specimen.

His penthouse looked like it had been designed by a man that wanted a bachelor pad. All the interior looked pretty, but it lacked. stuff. Like a few throw pillows or something that screamed actually cozy. It was all imported decor and furniture that belonged in an art gallery. Like if an Architectural Digest had a baby with a corporate office interior, that baby got adopted by a trust fund,  and its stepsister did actual interior design as a leisure side hobby.

It was screaming I'm hot, single, and ready to mingle. And yet from his favourite spot, he had a perfect angle right into your life.

He was an Executive Managing Partner at some massive venture capital firm downtown. His daily life was basically high-stakes corporate warfare, gutting startups, and watching middle-aged executives sweat through their suits just by raising a single eyebrow. He'd conquered the food chain before he turned thirty. He was arrogant, basically legally untouchable, and violently under-stimulated.

Then you moved in and he noticed your hermit lifestyle almost immediately. I mean, it wasn't THAT difficult, if you spent most of your time at home, you'd be there when he got back from work, when he went to client dinners, when he returned from the gym. Always either at your cute little home office corner or sprawled on the sofa.

He watched the way you lived in these oversized sweaters that completely swallowed you whole. He noticed your rare night outings always ended with you face-planting onto the sofa alone.

You seemed real. Kinda funny from afar, messy in the cute human way, and weirdly intriguing. He needed to know exactly who you were.

So lucky for him, the mystery got solved on a gloomy, particularly boring afternoon a few weeks later. Satoru was sitting at his kitchen island, suffering through like his twentieth Zoom call of the day. Mic muted, camera off, while some junior exec droned on endlessly about upcoming tech acquisitions.

He wasn't even listening. He was leaning forward, chin in his hand, just openly watching your apartment like a creep.

He watched you wander into your living room carrying an Amazon delivery box. You dumped it onto your kitchen island and wandered off somewhere else. And motherfucking bingo, because the shipping label was facing the window.

A normal, well-adjusted member of society would've gone ‘cool, my neighbor got a package’ and moved on. Thankfully for you, Satoru Gojo was neither of those things.

He grabbed his phone, opened the camera, and pushed the optical zoom to its absolute limit. He was two seconds away from jogging for his actual camera with the 400mm zoom lens if the quality would've been dogshit anyway.

And if it was certified stalker behavior, that was nobody's business. He literally did not care.

While the Zoom call droned on about profit margins, Satoru opened his gallery and squinted at the barcode. It was still blurry, distorted, but just legible enough. He caught the spelling of your first and last name.

Satisfied, he pulled up LinkedIn and it took him exactly three seconds to find you.

Logistics Coordinator. Satoru smirked as he scrolled through your profile. You looked so stupidly sterile, so impeccably buttoned-up in that made-up corporate way. He hated it. Your profile picture was you in that Nordstrom blazer, smiling politely, endorsed by a dozen middle-managers for "Project Management."

Then he looked back out the window. The highly endorsed Logistics Coordinator was currently sitting cross-legged in her office chair, wearing a hoodie with a cartoon bear on it, frantically fishing a piece of cereal out of her cleavage.

You literally couldn't make this shit up. Greatest comedy show he'd ever seen in his life.

But more importantly, he caught the way your gaze kept sticking to him. Even when you tried to mask it. Especially when you tried to mask it.

He knew you were watching him. It wasn't exactly hard to spot. He knew that every time he stalked around his kitchen in nothing but a towel, or boxers, or anything that basically screamed I'm in my own house, I can be basically naked so piss off — you would just so discreetly stop doing whatever you were doing just to risk a glance. You honestly thought you were being stealthy, hiding behind your monitor or your kitchen counter, sneaking glances when you thought he was looking at his phone.

In the beginning, the first few weeks, it was just a series of accidental eye contact. You'd casually look up while chewing on a pen, catch him pouring coffee half-naked, and snap your neck back to your PowerPoint so fast you nearly gave yourself a concussion. If your eyes ever accidentally met his, you would physically duck below your — well, anything — like you were dodging actual sniper fire.

But you know what they say in docu series: humans adapt to their environments, and proximity breeds boldness, or stuff like this.

Slowly the accidental flinches started to slow down. The panicked one-second glances somehow turned into three-second stares. You'd catch him looking, and instead of immediately diving under something, you'd just freeze like a deer in headlights. Progress, but at what cost.

Satoru would just hold your eyes, daring you. Take a picture, sweetheart. It would last longer.

It developed into a silent game of chicken and it was lowkey endearingly stupid. You would openly track him until he turned around, the air between you inexplicably thick and sticky. He'd lock those pretty eyes onto yours until you finally broke, blushing furiously and clicking aimlessly at your mouse like a fraud.

These fleeting stare-downs had quickly become the absolute best part of his week. He loved watching you panic, the way the flush would crawl up your neck and stain your cheeks, giving him the cutest doe eyes before you turned away.

But Satoru was fucking competitive, and most importantly a prick. Or at least that's what some people and especially his assistant would call him. He'd decided he was going to break your little Good Girl act into pieces. He knew you were deranged, he could smell it from fifty feet away. He just needed to bait the trap.

So Satoru started hunting you down with nothing but the line of sight, weaponizing his own daily routine against you and it wasn't even that hard.

He was, to your luck, very observational. Noticing you did your mandatory back stretches after lunch, he'd stand by the window around the same time, reach his arms high, and essentially pull his sweatpants low enough to showcase his hard-worked-for V-lines.

You told yourself it was pure coincidence. Twice, then somehow eight times, and then you just stopped counting.

But the stretching was only a warm-up, because when Satoru realized the mere sight of his obliques was causing you to basically reach for your inhaler, he decided he could ditch the building complex private gym for home calisthenics. Just for a bit.

You'd be trapped on a muted call when a flash of movement caught your eye. Satoru had rolled out a yoga mat perfectly parallel to his window. He was wearing grey sweatpants — and you know what people say about grey sweatpants on men, you UNDERSTAND — and absolutely nothing else, because why would he.

You sat there with your mouth open, finger hovering over the trackpad like you were about to click "Save" on your own impending doom. You aggressively told yourself he was just a man working out innocently by his window, giving zero flying fucks about his sick, perverted neighbor watching him.

But then he started doing pushups, looked out the window, and held eye contact through an entire slooow rep while you actively tried to remember how to breathe.

Can a person literally die from being this horny on a random Tuesday? You wondered wildly, entirely certain that if you were wearing an Apple Watch, it would be telling you to seek immediate medical attention for cardiac distress.

The isolation of working from home was kind of a double-edged sword. On one side, you were released from the mandatory fake-ass human interactions with colleagues you hated equally. But on the other hand — human interaction, or rather lack thereof, if we wanna be literal. When your only interactions for days on end are disembodied voices on speakerphone, the lack of human touch really starts to mess with your head. Especially when the man across the street was the only moving part in your life for days on end.

His ambushes were basically sabotaging your entire career, but you could at least lie to yourself and call them "accidents." You were just trying to organize your workflow; he just happened to be doing half-naked yoga in your direct line of sight. Basically just collateral damage. How many other women could say they were being visually harassed by the hottest man alive living across the street? Not many, you could already tell.

And when the clock struck five, the guilt of company time officially lifted. You'd slam your laptop shut, and like clockwork, that was when Satoru seemed to officially end his day too — when he was working from home, anyway. The AirPods came off, work clothes swapped for a comfortable tee, without sleeves, naturally.

You'd sit in your living room with a glass of wine and a book, pretending to read while actually waiting for him to sink into the armchair by his window. You had somehow, with a lot of mental gymnastics happening, turned this into spending time together.

He would lounge by the window, winding down and looking at the city below; you would sit on your sofa, looking at him. And look, yes, it sounded weird, delusional, and all other derogatory words imaginable — but for you it felt like you were keeping each other company.

And yeah, he was hot, rich by the looks of it, but you had somehow developed a massive crush on someone whose first name was still a mystery. Great job, for real.

But you were really, really curious about the man behind the window. You wondered what his voice sounded like or what music he liked. Did he laugh at stupid things? Would he laugh at stupid things you would say?

You would stare at him across and let your mind wander. If you  were actually together, your traitorous brain would whisper, your thighs pressing together on the sofa, is this how you  would spend our evenings after clocking out? 

You’d imagine the glass disappearing, finishing your 9-5, walking across the living room, and curling up right there in that velvet armchair with him. His hand would come to rest high up on your thigh, teasing you, while silently listening to you complain about your annoying junior project managers. 

And we are NOT gonna dissect why this was very domestic, intensely intimate and unchavable fantasy to project onto a man who was yours essentially a very hot, living screensaver.

You were becoming a creepy, degenerate voyeur and you knew it. The guilt sat heavy in your stomach every day, right next to a warm, deeply inconvenient knot of arousal. Great combination, if you ask me. Very healthy. Completely fine.

You knew you'd hit an emotional low when a man you'd never even spoken to had this much real estate in your brain. And he finally decided to do something proper about it, because after all, he loved watching your flustered face.

You were sitting in your usual spot on the sofa, nursing a glass of cheap Pinot Grigio, a thriller novel resting open on your lap as a prop. Currently mid-delusion, letting yourself sink into that warm, pathetic fantasy where the two of you were cuddling after a long day.

You stole a glance, expecting to see his profile as he watched the city. But he wasn't looking at the city. He was looking directly at you instead.

Before you could execute your signature panicked flinch and duck, Satoru tilted his head, held your gaze, and slowly raised his glass in a silent, mocking toast.

Your stomach basically dropped to your knees. He knew. He fucking KNEW. He was actively acknowledging it. He was toasting your stupid, creepy stalker behavior. Oh god, did he know all along that you'd been watching him this whole time?!

You slammed the book shut so fast you nearly tore the page clean off, your face burning with a mortification so thick it actually made you dizzy.

You scrambled off the couch and basically crawled to the kitchen on your hands and knees to hide behind the island and Satoru just smiled as he watched you scramble away like a startled mouse.

He took a slow sip of his drink, trying to settle the cheeky, possessive knot in his stomach. You might have thought you were the only one playing pretend, but Satoru was enjoying this just as much — he just needed to be a little shit about it.

Because he hadn't just happened to sit down around the time you did. He would actively cut a multi-million-dollar merger short just to make it to that damn armchair on time.

His big penthouse was usually sterile and kind of hollow, but when he sat here and looked at you sipping your cheap supermarket wine in your cute oversized clothes, it felt shockingly like a home.

He loved the weird and silent domesticity of it. He liked knowing you were waiting for him — he was just a man, after all. A man who could buy absolutely anything in the world, but the only thing he actually wanted was to take that book out of your hands, and pull you clean onto his lap.

He toasted you simply because he couldn't help himself anymore. He needed to push the boundary. He needed you to know that he was in this with you.

Usually, logging off for the weekend was the best part of the week. Forty-eight hours of zero Slack pings, wearing PJs, and rotting on the couch was your personal heaven.

But as you turned off your laptop, you kinda realized that suddenly a weekend with literally nothing to do started to feel more like a psychological suicide than anything else.

Without your trusted emails and Zoom calls to anchor you to reality, you had zero excuses to look away from the window. You'd just be a captive zoo animal, pacing the floor and waiting for him to walk by. The thought of spending your sacred days off playing the role of a touch-starved Victorian widow waiting for her sexy neighbor to perceive her made you physically nauseous.

You needed to break the spell. You needed to touch a real, average man just to prove you hadn't lost your damned mind.

You texted Shoko that you needed a drink immediately, dug out the sluttiest black mini-skirt you owned, swiped on a red lipstick you usually saved for New Year's Eve, and off you went.

When you walked into the trendy downtown bar to meet Shoko, she practically dropped her martini in shock.

You tried to play it cool. You ordered a gin and tonic, leaned against the sticky bar, and actively attempted to ground yourself in the real world. You focused on the shitty rhythm of the popular local DJ currently ear-raping everyone present and the aggressive smell of spilled IPA and Dior Sauvage, trying to ignore the constant, nagging urge to pull the tiny skirt down over your ass every ten seconds.

It took exactly twenty minutes for your grand re-entry into society to derail, because a guy approached you. Let's call him Chad. Chad was objectively handsome in a very safe, very sterile way. He had an okay jawline, wore a very nice watch, and was dressed in the official uniform of men who ask "where's my hug?" — aka a button-down of any shape, form, pattern, and color under a Patagonia fleece vest.

He bought you a violently overpriced drink and immediately launched into an unsolicited TED Talk about his Q4 projections, his upcoming trip to a mediocre ski resort, and his crypto portfolio.

You smiled and nodded, desperately trying to imagine letting this man touch you.

But as you looked at his perfectly fine, average shoulders, you got hit with horrifying realization. He looked flat. Actually, if you looked around, every man in the bar looked like a two-dimensional stick figure compared to the guy living across the street from you.

Watching your neighbor take his suit jacket off is basically a sex show, your brain whispered while Chad explained what blockchain was. He does pushups that defy gravity. You are wearing a fleece vest, Chad. Please cease speaking.

And the worst part is that maybe seven months ago, you probably would have let Chad buy you an Uber home. But your illegally sexy neighbor had fundamentally destroyed your baseline for mortal men, and now you were probably going to die alone.

By ten, Shoko had successfully been charmed by a guy who worked in digital marketing and owned a golden retriever. She gave you a supportive, slightly pitying thumbs-up behind his back and vanished into the night. You were left sitting alone in a booth with a gin and tonic that tasted like shit, vibrating with an apocalyptic level of sexual frustration.

You left not long after, shivering in the freezing autumn air. You walked home feeling frustrated, defeated, bitter, and horny — a terrible combination. The four horsemen of hitting social rock bottom. Mission aborted. You were officially retiring from society.

You marched into your bedroom and changed into your ugliest pair of sweatpants with a mystery hole in the left pocket. They made you look like a shapeless, depressed thumb. It was exactly what you felt you deserved.

You dragged your feet into the living room and instinctively looked across the street. You hated that you were practically Pavlov-trained to look his way every single time you stepped into the room.

His penthouse was pitch black, and suddenly you felt a spike of petty jealousy — because that's completely normal to feel about your neighbor.

Of course he was out, you thought, lying horizontally on your sofa. He looked stupidly rich, probably at some VIP gala for unethically rich people, surrounded by supermodels, doing exactly what Shoko was doing right now. He wasn't sitting in the dark by himself like a loser.

You had about two options to forcibly drown out the bitch-ass frustration.

Option A: violently abuse your vibrator until you forgot your own name and your neighbor's tax bracket.

Option B: put on the most aggressively unsexy thing the streaming algorithm could offer and bury your libido eighty feet underground.

Naturally, you went straight for Option A. But in a cruel twist of fate, your rose toy wasn't charged. The blinking red LED light of the dead battery was the final insult of the night.

So Option B it was. You put on a four-hour documentary about Roman aqueducts. You wanted to be bored into submission. You wanted to learn about lead piping in 300 BC until your brain went completely numb.

The documentary was spectacularly failing. Going to the bar had only made it infinitely worse. Chad had been the equivalent of a plastic apple when you were starving to death. You didn't just want a man anymore. You wanted him.

You tried to focus on how the Aqua Appia was built, but your brain was in a very different location than ancient Rome. Every time the British narrator mentioned "structural integrity," you immediately thought about your neighbor's back muscles. You sighed, closed your eyes, and actively and disrespectfully dissociated from the history of hydraulic engineering.

Your hand slipped down. The heel of your palm pressed against the fabric between your thighs and you started rubbing — slow at first, like maybe if you kept it casual it would be less embarrassing than dry-humping your own hand on a Friday night.

The second that first bit of friction hit, the documentary just... kinda faded out, replaced by the imaginary voice of the guy across the street. He was saying your name. And oh my god, how good it sounded coming from his pretty lips.

The delusion was delusioning. You could feel the heat of him, those muscular shoulders, the way he'd probably just manhandle you off the sofa and plaster you against his chest like you weighed nothing.

Would he be the type to pin both your wrists above your head with one hand just because he could, all mean and domineering — or ruin you with the softest, slowest kisses along your jaw like he was trying to apologize for how hard he was about to fuck you? Both. Fucking hell, you prayed for both.

God, he looked so unfairly biteable too. You could almost taste the column of his throat, sweat-slick and sweet, hovering right above your mouth. You arched into your own hand, breath hitching as the phantom urge to sink your teeth into his pulse point took over. You could practically hear the low, wrecked sound he'd make if you actually marked him. And he would absolutely rock the hickeys you'd give him.

Your hips hitched as you imagined it was his big hand cupping your aching pussy. A shaky, embarrassing little gasp slipped out right as a new aqueduct appeared on screen. Truly magnificent sight.

It still wasn't enough. The cotton was too thick, the friction too muted, your poor clit too understimulated and the horniness getting aggressively unbearable. You huffed, shoved the waistband down your thighs. Your panties were already ruined, the lace sticking to your folds, and you actually whimpered at the sudden contact. Not bothering with them, your fingers slipped past the fabric and grazed your swollen clit.

"Fuck—"

Your fingers slid into your slick cunt so easily it was almost insulting. The slight stretch made your toes curl hard against the cushions. You curled them immediately, chasing the feeling, imagining something absolutely other than your pitiful fingers. Soft squelches echoed through the room alongside your own little whimpers as you felt the ghost of his knee forcing your thighs further apart, his white hair brushing your neck as he breathed into your ear and whispered something filthy about how desperately wet you were for him.

His fingers were probably long. They'd fill you up so nicely while his thumb found your clit. You were entirely lost in it now, thrashing weakly against the cushions, legs fallen open in the flickering TV light, fucking your own fingers and pretending they belonged to the man across the street. A very normal thing to do with the blinds completely open, thinking you were hidden in the dim light, safe from any prying eyes.

But just your luck, across the street, Satoru just woke up. He hadn't been out at some VIP gala for unethically rich people surrounded by supermodels. He'd actually gotten home like two hours ago, mentally drained after a brutal thirteen-hour corporate bloodbath, and had face-planted onto his sofa without even taking off his suit.

He groaned, rubbing his face, and reached out to flick on his standing lamp.

Satoru stretched, his back popping in the quiet room, and turned his head to glance over at your window.

His brain hit a total factory reset. Because what the actual fuck. His good girl neighbor, who usually did notoriously prudish neighborly things, was currently arched completely off her sofa, eyes squeezed shut, hand buried deep between her pretty legs, putting on the most exclusive semi-private sex show he'd ever had the privilege of witnessing.

Satoru sat bolt upright, heart suddenly hammering against his ribs. In the span of about three seconds, he went from dead-to-the-world exhausted to aggressively turned on. His dick was immediately fighting for its life against the zipper of his tailored suit pants and it was fucking uncomfortable.

A sudden, jarring wave of self-awareness slammed into him. What the fuck was happening. More importantly, what the fuck was he doing. He was one of the wealthiest, most ruthless venture capitalists in the country. He could have anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyhow.

Yet here he was, fully bricked up in his own living room just from watching you thrash around in the ugliest pair of sweatpants known to mankind. Honestly kinda pathetic. He had never been so whipped for a woman he hadn't even spoken a single word to.

And actually, for a second, he kinda felt guilty. The civilized part of his brain tried to inform him that watching someone like this was a massive violation of privacy. A decent man would have flicked the lamp off, looked away, and given you your me-time. He even tried to command his body to move. But Satoru wasn't a decent man, and his moral compass had completely yeeted itself out the window the day you moved in.

The ethical dilemma lasted exactly two and a half seconds before his selfish, greedy ego ran it over with a monster truck. It was too hot. You looked too fucking good to look away.

He watched the erratic rise and fall of your chest and imagined the wet, breathy little sounds you were probably making over there. He watched the way your arm moved and wondered how you felt. God, it was scrambling his brain horn-dog style.

So he did the only reasonable thing a man in his position could do: stood up, walked straight to the window, crossed his arms over his chest, and planted himself right in the spotlight like he was about to give a TED Talk on voyeurism.

He was getting uncomfortably harder just watching the blissed-out flush on your face, eyes greedily tracking every frantic movement of your hand behind the lacy fabric that was kinda obstructing his view.

He wondered what you were thinking about. Imagining. Were you thinking about him? He wondered what you sounded like when you came. He'd bet his entire portfolio you were the quiet type — biting your lip, trying so hard to stay silent, letting out only soft little whimpers that he would drag out and drown with his mouth. And being the arrogant prick he was, he also knew that if he ever got the chance to push you properly, tease you, fuck you the way you deserved, he could make you scream until you were getting noise complaints from your neighbors every damn night.

He wanted to be the very first thing you saw when you finally opened your eyes.

In your little sex-imagine factory, he was stuffing you so so full with his fat cock while kissing you stupid, praising you so much, finally tipping you over the edge with a shaky, pathetic exhale. Your hips dropped back into the cushions, fingers completely soaked with your own slimy slick.

But the orgasm was, quite frankly, mid. Technically speaking. For all the mental gymnastics your poor brain had to render.

A tiny spark that briefly bloomed in your lower belly and then disappeared way too fast. Ghosting you without fixing a single craving and leaving you more frustrated than before. If anything, the release just left you feeling hollowed out, hypersensitive, and even more painfully aware of the empty space beside you on the couch.

You lay there for a minute, paralyzed by the most devastating post-nut clarity of your entire life. You had just finished yourself off to a documentary about Roman aqueducts. You felt so incredibly pathetic you genuinely wanted to melt into the upholstery, become one with the sofa fibers, and sleep until the next fiscal quarter.

Finally, you let out a jagged sigh and slowly opened your eyes. Your line of sight was immediately assaulted by the soft glow of his lamp across the street. Your lovely neighbor, who had just pounded you senseless in your little fantasy, was currently leaning against his window, staring right into your soul with a smug, knowing smirk.

Holy fuck. You might as well have perished on the spot, your soul evacuating the premises, packing its bags, and seeking permanent asylum in another dimension. How long had he been there?!

Oh my god, oh my god, OH MY FUCKING GOD.

You didn't even have the breath to scream, your survival instincts completely bypassed any decent human logic and went straight to "insect." You scrambled backward off the sofa, the half-off sweatpants tangling your legs, hitting the carpet with an ungraceful thud and literally flattening yourself against the floorboards like a cockroach caught in a kitchen flashlight.

You refused to stand up, you physically couldn't stand up. You were so life-threateningly mortified it was literally pinning you to the floor. Pure panic doing wonders, you began to army-crawl. You dragged your body across the living room carpet on your elbows, the rough fibers burning your bare forearms and exposed thighs, crawling away and leaving any already unattainable future you thought you could have with your sexy neighbor behind you in the living room.

Your heart thundered in your throat, basically threatening to drop you dead from cardiac arrest in the most humiliating moment of your life, as you scrambled past the kitchen island, entirely terrified that if you stood up, he would see the absolute smoking ruin of your dignity.

You stopped once you reached the hallway. You lay there on the hardwood, the coldness biting into the feverish skin of your ass, staring at the ceiling, praying for honestly anything to take you out of this misery.

You decided that if you never looked out the window again, the incident legally never happened. You were actively contemplating moving abroad. Would you get your security deposit back if you broke your lease due to accidental exhibitionism? Is there a legal precedent for this? Do you need to fake your own death?

Your phone, which had fallen onto the floor next to your head during your tactical retreat, buzzed against the wood. The screen lit up with a push notification from LinkedIn.

Satoru Gojo wants to connect with you.

Huh.

It was him. He had found you. How the actual fuck did he find you? Did the LinkedIn algorithm deity play you in the most horrifying way possible and recommend your profile to him the exact second you finished your pathetic wank session?

You moaned into your hands, the echo of a sad scream bouncing through the narrow hallway.

In his defense, Satoru hadn't originally intended to drop the digital bomb like the deranged stalker he was. But who would have guessed that watching his crush finger herself so prettily on her couch, only to frantically army-crawl away in a desperate attempt to merge her physical form with the herringbone flooring, would force his hand like this.

Maybe he was scared. Maybe he was just violently horny. But he'd come to the conclusion that he needed to make himself known. He had to put his cards on the table so you wouldn't completely board up your windows in shame. The fleeting stare-downs were all fun and games, but he'd be lying if he said he wanted to maintain this prison-cell-like contact any longer. He needed to lure you out, and if you shut down after tonight, he would never get the chance.

With a trembling finger, you tapped the notification.

Satoru Gojo, Executive Managing Partner. You scrolled, your horror compounding with every bullet point. Board of Directors. Forbes "Most Ruthless Executive of the Year." Net Worth: [Redacted].

You were hyperventilating, the wheezing somewhere between an asthma attack and a panic attack like an evil child of both. You looked at your own profile picture and realized Satoru was looking at that exact same "respectable" image on his phone right now, perfectly matching it to the way you had just looked fingering yourself on your sofa in sweatpants you'd owned since high school.

And to top it all off, he wasn't just a hot neighbor, he was also a corporate god. A man who could legally dismantle your entire existence with a single phone call, and you had just put on an impromptu R-rated solo performance for him in your living room. And now fuck you, because you couldn't decide if you'd just made your life infinitely awkward or thoroughly ruined it, because you apparently always did things thoroughly.

You spent the weekend in a state of high-alert paralysis, treating your apartment like an active laser-grid security system, moving through it like a sleep paralysis demon and an international spy in one sad care package.

You didn't go near the windows or even turn on the lights as you lived entirely by the glow of your fridge and your phone, stalking his profile until you could recite his resume in your sleep.

Your brain was trapped in one cute, little psychotic loop. Mortified by what he'd seen, yet absolutely electrified that he'd gone looking for you immediately after. He'd seen you at your absolute rock-bottom worst — literally humping your own hand in depression sweatpants — and his very first instinct was to find your professional credentials. Kinda weird, kinda twisted, kinda terrifying. Yet no cap, it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to you. And they say romance is dead.

But by Monday, reality finally caught up to you. Halfway mentally packed and ready to leave for the airport, you realized you couldn't just fake your own death, ghost your family, and move to Switzerland. You had deadlines. You had morning stand-up meetings with people who expected you to be a functioning member of society.

But how were you supposed to be a functioning member of society when whenever the window entered your line of sight you physically flinched and your skin got hot like a furnace.

The only thing that made you feel somewhat peaceful was the self-imposed decision to live like a fugitive hiding from the law. Only like that would your dignity health bar get back to 1% in the very distant, very uncertain future.

For the rest of the week you officially relocated your entire existence to the eighteen inches of vertical space strictly below the window line. You became a creature of the floorboards. The concept of homo sapiens walking upright was completely abandoned.

If you needed to get from the bedroom to the kitchen, you crawled on your hands and knees, dragging your sweatpants across the hardwood like a highly-trained, highly-aroused commando.

And please do NOT ask about the logistics of your new lifestyle. It's nobody's business if you used a broom handle to blindly push your laptop across the floor just so your arm wouldn't enter the "danger zone" of his line of sight. When you needed to heat up your microwaveable oatmeal, you'd sit flat on your ass behind the kitchen island and reach up blindly with a spoon to press the start button.

You were also almost certain that your Monstera, Gregory, was actively judging you from his superior upright position.

Did you take your corporate alignment syncs sitting inside your dry bathtub, simply because you didn't have anywhere to comfortably sit for eight hours straight unless it was on the floor? Maybe. Though I don't know why you'd ask that — is the already inflicted emotional damage not enough for you?!

You'd stare at your own blurred-out tile backsplash, your still slightly damp loofah tickling your ear, while your boss droned on about data migration. It was fine. It was normal. It was NOT humiliating AT ALL.

You had rug burns all over your arms, crippling lower back pain, and a bad left knee — but all you could think about was Satoru, or rather the self-imposed lack thereof. You were deadass experiencing withdrawals from not seeing his out-of-this-world hotness, so you replaced the physical voyeurism with digital voyeurism like the diligent little junkie you were.

Every day you stalked his LinkedIn profile, though you didn't accept his pending connection request, because you were NOT that desperate or anything. Definitely not too terrified of establishing a two-way connection for that. You were just relentlessly stalking his profile like a normal human being.

You read his articles on market strategy, tracing the sterile corporate jargon just to imagine his voice saying those words. You stared at his professional headshot, zooming in on the sharp cut of his jawline, the piercing blue of his eyes, the tailored line of his suit. A highly covert digital spy, gathering essential recon from the safety of the shadows.

What you didn't know was that Satoru Gojo paid for LinkedIn Premium. Because obviously he did. He was rich, and everyone beyond middle managers paid for LinkedIn Premium — it was just the rule. Hate the game not the player. But that thought didn't even cross your poor brain because you were too hypnotized by his pretty eyes and his intimidating resume to even remember how the internet actually worked.

Satoru was having a fantastic week. He glanced down at his phone as it buzzed. A push notification lit up the screen. It was you, stalking his profile again. For the fifth time today.

He chuckled, picking it up, looking so fondly at your little headshot. You were so incredibly, adorably clumsy. You honestly thought you were being a master spy, completely unaware that the algorithm was aggressively snitching on you in real time. You were leaving muddy digital footprints all over his notifications, and he was savoring every single one.

He looked over at your apartment. A faint blue glow of your laptop was reflecting off the ceiling. He knew you were army-crawling around like a terrified little mouse.

A lesser man might have thought he'd scared you away for good. But Satoru was a predator, and he noticed the most important detail of all: you hadn't closed the blinds.

You'd dropped to the floor, sure, but the curtains remained wide open. You'd left the stage accessible. You wanted the unspoken thing to continue just as badly as he did — you were just probably waiting for him to make the first move.

He figured the floor life would wreck your knees eventually and you'd be forced to stand up and live like a human being again. He just had to wait it out.

And Satoru Gojo was exceptionally good at waiting.

Or, at least, he thought he was.

But  nth day in and his legendary patience was fraying at the edges. The days dragging on with nothing but occasional glimpses of your body below the window line was edging him to a fucking oblivion.

Yes, he could still see you — he'd actually seen it all, by the way. He caught glimpses of your sweatpants dragging across the floor. He saw your army-crawls into the kitchen. He even witnessed the genuinely impressive, though slightly concerning, moment you managed to hook your foot under the fridge handle and pull the door open while remaining flat on your back, just to grab a yogurt cup without breaking the window line.

At first he thought it was hilarious. Great entertainment for the boring stretches between his endless calls. But then the amusement began to curdle into something heavier and faaar more uncomfortable. You were actually scared to look him in the eye.

Satoru had a massive ego, but it took an embarrassing hit watching the woman he was lowkey obsessed with actively choosing to live like a displaced rat rather than risk him seeing her face.

He'd been trying to figure out how to let you know it was fine — that you didn't need to hide, that a little accidental handsie was, by the way, an excellent source for his own daily wanks, thank you very much. But how the fuck was he supposed to communicate that?

'Hey neighbor, thanks for the show on Friday. 10/10 execution. Please stand up now.' If he wrote that on a whiteboard, you would probably just dig a tunnel under your floorboards and live out the rest of your life in the building's insulation.

Satoru was incredibly popular with women. He was ridiculously wealthy, built like a Greek statue, and completely accustomed to women throwing themselves at his feet the second he walked into a room. Yes, it was a massive, arrogant cliché — but what else did you expect. It was his reality. Truly saddening, anyways.

And yet here he was, completely paralyzed like an awkward teenager, entirely unsure how to approach a woman he'd never even seen up close.

He knew he needed to do something to break the stalemate, and soon, or he was going to lose his goddamn mind. He was scared for your lower back and his own sanity giving out for good.

You literally couldn't hide in the bathtub today. You had a mandatory, high-stakes Logistics Review with the CEO, and your boss had aggressively specified camera-on and presentable — though you were slightly suspicious he somehow knew you'd been in the bathroom and just couldn't prove it.

Thus it was big girl time. You took a deep breath, pulled your trusted Nordstrom blazer over your crusty sweats, and stood upright in your living room like a bipedal human being for the first time in a week. You saw the sun. You saw the sky. So this is how people lived.

For fifty-eight agonizing minutes you sweat through the presentation, terrified Satoru was going to casually walk past his window performatively wearing nothing but a towel — or worse, see you and call the police that the exhibitionist across the street was in fact alive, shameless, and not perished from embarrassment on her overpriced apartment floor.

The meeting ended. You slammed your laptop shut and slumped back into your chair. You had survived.

Tentatively, you raised your head and looked out the window. It was an exceptionally beautiful golden hour that day.

Satoru had been sitting by the window for a while, watching the glow of your ring light for the past hour, praying to any god possible that you wouldn't drop back to the floor like a terrified Roomba the second it clicked off.

He knew you thought him seeing you get off was basically the most mortifying, apocalyptic disaster of your entire life. That your dignity had been completely incinerated. But to Satoru, watching you completely lose your mind on that sofa was unequivocally the hottest fucking thing he had ever witnessed. It had been playing on a loop behind his eyelids for a full week, driving him to the absolute brink of insanity, and he desperately needed you to know that. He felt like a deranged, overly horny teenager going through some hormonal changes — he was practically horny 24/7 ever since.

His heart hammered. His dick was throbbing. He knew this was it. This was his window to fix the massive, terrifying wedge he'd accidentally driven between you. He'd originally thought about writing a gentle, reassuring sign to coax you back out, or maybe just waving to acknowledge the massive, horny elephant in the room.

The sign idea evaporated from his mind like water on a hot skillet as a much better, infinitely more reckless idea took its place. Look, it wasn't exactly a good idea to begin with — but discovering new kinks is valid! We do NOT kink shame over here! It is a safe space!

He executed ruthless corpo takeovers for sport, but right now his palms were actually sweating. What he was about to do was career-and-social-life ending. If you picked up your phone and recorded him, his entire empire would burn to the ground in an hour. But he needed to force your hand — by forcing, well, relieving — his own. If he couldn't tell you it was okay to lose control in front of him, he was just going to have to prove it by losing control in front of you. 

You two locked eyes and you sat frozen in your office chair. Satoru rolled his head back slowly, eyes hooded and dark and so fucking intentional it made your skin prickle. Oh god. You couldn't move.

He shoved the waistband of his sweatpants low, exposing those pretty thick thighs and, more importantly, the flushed length of his cock already standing straight up against his abs.

OH GOD.

Your stomach literally dropped out of your body. Fuck. You should look away. This was inappropriate. This was probably borderline illegal. This was the kind of thing that got people put on lists. You should not be seeing this. You should close the blinds, crawl under the desk, and somehow erase this past week from your memory entirely.

So why the fuck was his cock so hypnotizing?

It looked so thick and veiny, even from fifty feet away. The way it rested against the cut lines of his stomach made your mouth go dry and your cunt clench around nothing so pathetically it almost hurt. Your brain was screaming look away look away look away while your eyes stayed locked on every single inch of him, completely, shamelessly, pathologically unable to do the right thing. Dead-eyeing his beautiful body, mouth open and all that jazz.

Half your brain was screaming at you to yank the curtains shut before you got arrested as an accomplice to public indecency. The other half — the one that was currently telepathically deep-throating him through fifty feet of empty air — grabbed the first half by the throat and shut it the fuck up.

Satoru's cheeks actually flushed at the way you were staring. He was losing his entire mind, not believing you were actually willing to watch him. He was unfairly, obscenely beautiful like this, and your eyes were glued to him like they'd been welded there.

He wrapped a trembling fist around his thick cock and gave himself a slow, teasing stroke, clearly imagining it was you — the same way he'd been doing for days. His stomach clenched hard at the thought and a silent, punched-out gasp left his mouth. At first the strokes stayed deliberate and slow, his heavy eyes locked on yours the whole time, that hopeless little smirk growing as he watched you bite your lip like an idiot.

Precum was already gathering at the blunt tip. He caught it with his thumb and carelessly smeared it down the shiny shaft, slicking himself up with his own mess. The visual was so agonizingly good it made your toes physically curl inside your rainbow toe socks.

His jaw flexed tight as he chased the feeling, putting every ounce of his pent-up frustration on display just for you. God, how good it felt, having someone watching him like this. If only you were there with him — so you could feel him up, stroke him, caress him until he came all over your pretty face, your belly, or, if he was lucky enough, your pretty and slick cunt.

You were mid-fantasy of him destroying you on the very same armchair he was sitting in when a movement downstairs caught your eye. His downstairs neighbor had moved close to their window, and the mortification of an ACTUAL realization of what you two were doing collided hard with the biblical level of horniness. Fuck, what if someone saw you — okay, they'd just see some weirdo eye-fucking something in the distance from her window — but what if someone saw HIM? Hell no. You did not want him getting into serious trouble because you were too horny and pathetic to look away.

Your hand shot out, trembling fingers gripping the white plastic pull-cord of your window blinds. It was right there. One sharp tug and the canvas would drop. You would be safe. He would snap out of it, realize what the fuck he was doing, and you could go back to being a very sad, very horny ghost.

Satoru's hand froze mid-stroke the second he saw you reach for the forsaken blinds cord. His broad chest heaved, slick with a fine sheen of sweat catching the bruised-orange light of the sunset. He leaned forward slightly, peeling his back off the chair, his eyes going from daring you to pleading.

Please, those dark eyes begged through the glass. Don't shut me out. Stay with me. Watch me.

Your knuckles went white around the plastic. The silence in your apartment was deafening. The air felt thick with the knowledge that whatever you chose right now was permanent. Close the blinds and the game was over forever. Stay, and you were crossing a line you could never, ever uncross.

And maybe you were just so fucking horny, or maybe some delusional little part of you was still hoping this could turn into something more — either way, your fingers loosened and let go of the cord. It swung softly against the glass like a white plastic flag of definitive surrender.

Satoru exhaled so hard the relief making his knees almost buckle like some lovesick Victorian maiden. The second-guessing vanished, replaced by the raw, possessive realization that yes, you wanted this. You most likely wanted him. And one day, he was going to fucking have you.

You pressed your thighs tightly together beneath your desk, sinking lower into the chair until you were basically melting into the seat, totally and hopelessly spellbound.

The way you were sitting there, absolutely devouring him with your eyes alone, cheeks so prettily flushed, was driving him fucking nuts. You were agonizingly out of reach and it was making him insane. He wanted to wreck you. Completely. Thoroughly. To the point where your only thought about crawling would be crawling to him.

Was your pretty cunt blushing just as nicely as your face? Already slick and wet and ready for him to slide right in? Or would you rather he teased you first, made you come again and again until you were shaking and begging for it?

His pace quickened, strokes turning rougher as he imagined closing the gap between you. He pictured ripping the lapels of that ridiculous ugly blazer open and completely destroying it. Wanted you forced down on your knees between his spread thighs. He could almost hear the wet, sloppy sounds of your mouth working over him — spit slicking up his shaft and every desperate little whimper you'd made swallowed whole until you were gagging around him.

Did you like it fast or slow? God, he would do fucking anything. He would make you come apart for him the exact same way he was currently coming apart for you.

And objectively speaking, it was simultaneously the most horrifying yet hottest thing you had ever experienced in your life. A man with his status and looks going to town on himself with this desperate need, completely at your mercy through a pane of glass.

You were completely drenched. Your panties were soaked through, slick and clinging uncomfortably to your swollen pussy lips. You were in absolute physical agony, shifting your hips frantically against the chair, basically dry-humping the cushion while you watched his hand do those agonizingly slow micro-strokes over the mushroomy head of his cock.

Satoru swallowed hard, the muscles in his neck working as he caught you staring at his half-open, dazed mouth. He adjusted his grip with a choked little sound vibrating in his chest as his balls squeezed at the ghost touch of your soft hand. 

Feeling the scorching weight of your gaze was like being put under a physical spell. The feral fantasy of your mouth on him, of him buried inside you, of him being near you, combined with the fact that you deliberately stayed to watch him, shoved him then straight over the edge. He came in under five minutes flat, like a desperate, overstimulated teenager.

"Ngh — fuck —" he hissed as his back bowed hard off the chair in a broken, pitched moan. Thick ropes of cum spilled over his fist and stomach, warm and messy, trailing down in sticky white streaks to pool under his thighs. Your eyes greedily tracked every single drop as it slid along the sharp cut of his V-line, wondering how the fuck he would taste.

And he wondered if you'd be the type to swallow every drop, or if you'd let him paint that pretty doe-eyed face instead.

You sat at your desk panting like you'd just run a fucking marathon. Your clothes felt like they were actively burning your skin. You were so ridiculously wound up that if he'd gone on for even one more minute, you probably would've come right there in the desk chair without ever touching yourself. Talk about embarrassing — it would be 0-2 in his favour and that simply couldn't happen.

Satoru slowly caught his breath, chest still heaving as he slumped deep into the ruined mess of the armchair. He ran a shaking, cum-slicked hand through his white hair and look what you did to him. He was so blissed-out and wrecked it made something stupid and soft twist in your chest. You wanted to crawl to him, cuddle him, get him hard again, make him come all over himself a second time just so you could keep looking at him like this.

The show was over. The silent game was dead. And there was absolutely no stepping back from this.

You were lying flat on your back in the dead center of your bed, staring blankly up at the dark ceiling. It was around two in the morning and you hadn't slept a single minute. Earlier you'd taken a blisteringly cold shower, aggressively scrubbing your skin with the fuckass loofah like you could somehow wash away the degeneracy of what happened today, but it hadn't worked at all. You still felt sticky. And your mind kept looping back to the absolute show of a wank he had oh so graciously given you hours prior.

The imagery of his cum dripping down his pretty stomach and thighs was seared into your memory, the phantom heat of it leaving a throbbing ache between your thighs that just wouldn't let you rest.

Fuck it, we ball, you thought, the sleep-deprived horny delirium completely wiping away whatever fragile scraps of social dignity you still possessed.

You rolled over and grabbed your phone off the nightstand. The screen glared brightly in the pitch-black bedroom. You went straight to LinkedIn and hovered over the one looming request that had been holding your digital life hostage for a week: Satoru Gojo. Executive Managing Partner.

Seeing his sterile corporate headshot right now was such a massive mindfuck. Your heart was hammering and you were squirming under the covers like a teenager agonizing over her high school crush. Except, you know, you were accepting a professional networking invitation from a guy who had literally just painted his own pretty V-cut white while you aggressively dry-humped a desk chair from fifty feet away.

With a trembling thumb, you hit Accept.

The connection went through and you were now officially a first-degree connection.

You dropped the phone face-down and covered your burning face with your hands, letting out a muffled, hysterical noise. You'd signed the horny, not-so-very-neighbourly contract of god knows what was between you now. You just lay there in the silence, waiting. Was he awake? Did he have notifications on?

Less than a minute later, a light bled through the crack in your bedroom curtains, painting a golden stripe across your ceiling.

You gasped, scrambling up to peek through the blinds. Satoru was standing near the window, phone in hands, wide awake and staring at your bedroom window. He couldn't sleep either — how could he, anyway. And now you'd finally accepted his invitation too? He felt like a god.

Your phone vibrated near your knee. You lunged for it like a starving animal, fully expecting like a filthy late-night text or a demand to come over and finish what he started.

Except it wasn't a DM, but an automated push notification from the app.

Satoru Gojo has endorsed your skill: Strategic Planning.

You stared at the screen.

What?

A second one popped up right under the first.

Satoru Gojo has endorsed your skill: Crisis Management.

Your mouth fell open as a mix of shock and hysterical laughter bubbled up in your chest.

What the fuck, lol. It was petty, it was cute, it wasn't what you expected and everything you kind of hoped for. He was so funny for that. Formally commending your "crisis management" after watching you practically stroke out from horny panic in your home office.

You fell back onto your pillows, clutching the phone to your chest, laughing into the dark while your stomach felt so fluffy. The absurdity of the man was intoxicating, and now you were sure you wanted more.

 ➳❥ all works on this blog are written by me. do not translate them into another language without asking me first, and do NOT feed my writing to AI. :) that's all!

[You]: are you fucking serious right now? i had to find out from HER?

[My Husband 🥰]: what are you talking about?

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

[My Husband 🥰]: babe pick up the phone

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

[My Husband 🥰]: what the fuck are you even talking about? find out WHAT???

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

[My Husband 🥰]: BABE

[My Husband 🥰]: PICK UP THE FUCKING PHONE

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

Missed call from My Husband 🥰

The only reason why the phone calls stopped was because you blocked him, but he would’ve kept calling until his phone died. It’s happened before.

Soon you get a Zelle notification.

R. Sukuna has sent you $200.00.

Memo: unblock me.

You sent R. Sukuna $20.00.

Memo: you can keep your fucking money

R. Sukuna has sent you $20.00.

Memo: you can’t just tell me to keep my money but then pocket more than half of it. and what the fuck am i gonna do with 20 dollars??

You sent R. Sukuna $2.00.

Memo: and now you have 2, see what happens when you don’t appreciate what you have?

R. Sukuna has sent you $2.00.

Memo: what the fuck does that even mean?? can you just unblock me already?

You sent R. Sukuna $0.50.

Memo: no

R. Sukuna has sent you $100.00.

Memo: JESUS FUCKJNGCHRIST UNBLOCK ME

You sent R. Sukuna $0.01.

Memo: NO

You sent R. Sukuna $0.01.

Memo: we’re out of sugar and creamer btw don’t forget to grab some on your way home

R. Sukuna has sent you $100.00.

Memo: wait so im not in trouble?

You sent R. Sukuna $0.01.

Memo: why would you be in trouble?

You have to be dreaming. Hallucinating. Something.

Managing to weakly push to your feet, you stumble through the halls of the ship on a weak gait. It’s a small vessel, with a science bay through a sealing door just outside the medical bay where you awoke, four bunks and a washroom in what you assume is sleeping quarters, and the bridge itself. It’s small, but clearly designed for more than one crew member. Your heart drops at the thought, because that’s when it truly comes flooding back.

Your work. The project. The disease. The creature.

Several pieces of the same puzzle, but each one troubling in its own right.

Still groggy from the induced coma, you force yourself to take a seat in the hall, grateful for what you can only assume is artificial gravity. You might have been sick if you had awoken in zero gravity.

Taking a breath as you sit in the center of a large octagonal hall, you force yourself to breathe. Long breaths, drawing each one out in an effort to keep yourself from boiling over when memories of the very thing that put you here feel fresh in spite of your ten year induced coma. It shouldn’t be you here. You, some entomologist they found online for a paper suggesting beetles are smarter than people think.

You weren’t even really good with people. Just bugs. You spent most of your time alone with your stag beetles, attempting to bring out the very intelligence you’d written about. You never minded being alone. Maybe it’s sad that you spoke to the beetles, but they kept you company in their own way. Yet here you are now, onboard a space ship by sheer coincidence, if it can even be called that. And it’s not the loneliness you fear.

No, you’re content to grab a marker and draw a face on one of the many white walls, call it ‘Wilson’ and name yourself the next Tom Hanks, even if your acting credits are undeserving.

What scares you is the narrow hallways holding you hostage in a vacuum. Once you reach the supposed ‘destination’ that the ship’s programmed voice spoke of being imminent, gravity will cut out. The ship will rely on your ability to navigate yourself through its halls and hell, even navigate the damn hunk of metal through space yourself to send the mission target back. You’re a fucking entomologist. A bug scientist. What the hell are they hoping for from you?

With a sharp inhale, you push back up to your feet, navigating through the cramped hall until you reach the bridge. There are a number of screens and what feel like countless buttons and switches, all labeled with tape. You suppose that’s meant to be for your convenience given that you’re no pilot, but the amount of labels is a textbook in and of itself. Frustrating.

Slipping past the second of two chairs on the bridge, your eyes are glued to the first window you’ve seen. Your lips part as the marvel of space itself comes into view when you slip into the nook by the window.

It’s beautiful. Stunning. It’s full of twinkling stars and the far more consistent shine of distant planets. There’s debris of various different kinds of space rock meandering endlessly through a void. There’s a gorgeous mildly yellow-green planet not too far away with pink and blue accents. Its surface is probably unlike everything you’ve ever seen.

Seeing a planet from space is another kind of beast. Space travel is relatively new to humanity as far as the general public is aware, and you certainly never envisioned yourself aboard a spacecraft. In another world, under other circumstances, it might even be a dream.

The nearest sun has you staring down at your fingers, wondering if the faint heat you feel might be from its rays or if you’re imagining things already, hardly a few minutes into your trip. That is, if you don’t count the several years in which you were in an induced coma.

Flexing your fingers again as you stare at them, it’s not until a shadow takes away the sun’s distant rays, that you notice something incoming quickly. Your eyes widen at the sight of a ship, alien in appearance. Long, slender, dark grays in sharp and jagged angles all come together to build a ship that makes yours look not entirely unlike the very bugs you study. Very, very small. Insignificant.

“Oh shit,” you gasp in wide-eyed disbelief as something straight out of a sci-fi movie moves in a line straight towards you. “Oh shit” you gasp again, racing to push yourself to your feet and clamber for the pilot’s chair as though the labels will push you into action. Paralyzed on the chair, the most you can do is skim each word in hopes that one might magically say ‘turn one hundred and eighty degrees and get the hell away from the giant evil-looking alien spaceship’.

Unfortunately, you never find that button. With your hands hovering over the controls, you find yourself watching in horror as you’re swallowed whole by the other spacecraft. “Oh shit.”

Your ship is harshly jostled as all of a sudden the hull drops like a stone onto something hard and metal, screeching as it slides across what you can only assume is a bay of the other ship as you stare into the darkened corridor of the inside of an alien spacecraft. You grip the chair for purchase in an effort not to get thrown aside while your ship blares warning and lights flicker.

“Oh shit,” you breathe when the lights outside your ship flick on and flood the bridge with the harsh lighting of a warehouse. There doesn’t seem to be any other ships aboard if this is a bay or hangar, but it certainly looks like one… Though you suppose you’re basing that off of movie knowledge, which is probably stupid. Especially for a scientist at the top of your field.

Slowly descending from your chair, you approach the window in awe, staring out into the metal box. It’s largely human, with pipes running up the walls and across the ceiling, lights in long bulbs overhead and lower lighting from small circular vent-like structures. The structure seems rougher than the smooth metals of your ship, almost as though it’s made of an unpolished mineral, with a luster that dictates something akin to quartz or obsidian, but it’s slightly off. The only thing inhuman about the entire thing is the text. It’s not entirely unfamiliar, the sort of thing that you wager you could decipher in time, but when you spot movement at the far bay, you figure time isn’t exactly on your side.

What a way to wake up after ten years.

The alien figure that approaches your ship isn’t human. But… they aren’t inhuman either. You know they aren’t human, with an extra pair of limbs attached to their upper torso and an extra pair of eyes aboard a plate of some sort on the right side of their face, but otherwise the only thing inhuman about them is their massive size, standing at what must be ten feet tall.

A tight shirt clings to their upper torso, some sort of spacesuit loosely draped from their torso in an off-pink that matches their short hair. Markings line their jaw, coming up just beneath their eyes not unlike tattoos, though you can’t be sure whether or not that’s what they are. The most inhuman feature of all, however, is the blood red gaze they fix your ship with as they walk in an even, calm stride towards the door.

A creature with a calm like this is one that knows it’s powerful. It’s the type of confidence befitting of someone who far outclasses everything they’ve ever come across and doesn’t fear the beyond like you do. “Oh shit!”

It’s just about the only words you can manage as you clumsily navigate towards the small porthole of the door where the alien has deduced they may find you. Peering out the small circular window, you can only pray you aren’t about to be probed or something similar.

When the alien approaches your ship with some sort of technology in-hand, you tap on the glass to get their attention. The large alien’s head rises, their brow lowering to a scowl of sorts as they examine you. This close, they look startlingly like a human man. Like the kind of man you might see in a gladiator movie given his sheer size and musculature, sure, but human enough to reason with. He speaks some sort of language, but you can’t understand a word he utters.

The language is a mix of huffs, growls, clicks, and what you would otherwise consider sounds not unlike the languages found on earth. Between each noise that reminds you vaguely of an echolocation sort of noise is a very human syllable. If you were to put the syllables together without the clicking, you might even get something akin to human vocabulary.

By all accounts, this is an intimidating encounter. His gaze is sharp, almost grating in looks alone. His pupils have rings surrounding them that give him a formidable appearance. His mother tongue is so different from any language you’ve ever encountered– human or animal– that the only thing you even can compare it to are films. Some part of you is wired to expect a Xenomorph to uncurl from wires and silently drop to the ground, acidic saliva dripping from its mouth, and yet the man remains still, awaiting your reply before he answers in kind.

Maybe it’s your poor instinct for danger, but you’re far more intrigued than you are concerned.

“Uh– Hello!” You attempt to reply in an effort to keep the peace, further perplexing the alien whose eyes narrow. Your heart pounds behind your rib cage as you give your best effort to not get eaten. Or examined. Or whatever this species does. “I come in peace!” You offer, making a peace sign through the door with a wide grin.

His gaze slides to your hand, his deduction of the action clear in the way his narrowed eyes regard the action. He frowns like you’ve caused him an inconvenience, gliding his finger along the device in his hand briefly as he looks away. You almost wish he was more animalistic. You’re a better read on animal behaviour than human.

“Okay, um– hold on!” You hold up one finger, clumsily dashing back through the ship to the science bay. You grab a white board and marker, making your way back to the porthole. The four-armed alien is tapping on what you assume to be the screen of the device he brought with him, though his attention returns to you once you reappear. You draw a circle and the general outline of the continents, presenting the image to him. “I’m a human. From Earth,” you say, pointing to your drawing.

The alien’s gaze lowers to your drawing, then he taps on the screen of his device, growing more frustrated by the moment. When the device doesn’t seem to give him the results he wishes for, his shoulders visibly fall in frustration as he faces you again. His gaze fixes the drawing, then you once more.

When he doesn't reply, you quickly erase the drawing of earth, and draw something that might be more familiar. You draw the very thing you’re here in search of as clearly as you can from memory.

CRM-12. A creature so foreign, the scientists never even gave it a name. Beetle-like in appearance in spite of its size, which begged your attention, one of the heads in entomology. A creature intelligent beyond any credit they were willing to give it, treating it as lesser than even rodents. It was no more than an experiment, and your reason for being in the middle of uncharted space.

You present the drawing of the creature, a metallic brown beetle with accents that resemble an oil spill, iridescent pinks visible in the sun. Its eyes, however, are completely unlike any insect. Cat-like, they follow movement like the eyes of a higher being. Like they know. You hope that comes across in a crude drawing with a black marker.

The alien looks at the drawing you present, seeming to recognize it. He stares at you and chuffs, almost like a tiger, followed by a syllable unrecognizable to you.

“You know it?” Your brows raise eagerly at the reaction that you’re fairly sure is a yes given the way big cats so often use the first portion of the sound.

Another chuff in reply, then the syllable. You can work with that. The recognition in his gaze tells you that it isn’t a no, which means you’re communicating, even if it’s preschool-level communication. Even if he seems frustrated by the whole ordeal. Or maybe by you. Or the device. You really can’t say.

“Oh my god, you know it? I’m looking for it!” You point with a grin, intrigued by the alien life that seems to be as advanced, if not more than humanity.

He watches your eager movements with hooded eyes, all four following the way your body almost seems ahead of your mind as you attempt communication. In a far more languid movement, he lifts an arm, simply tapping once on the door as he stares at you, awaiting.

You purse your lips, fairly confident you understand. “Oh– I can’t leave my ship,” you glance down at the door’s handle. “Um– hold on.” You raise one finger again, drawing another picture on your whiteboard. This time, you present the alien species with a poorly drawn version of your ship, an ‘X’, and a stick figure of you, with your tongue out and an ‘X’ for either eye. “I would die in your atmosphere. I mean, probably. I guess I don’t know.”

One of his brows raises at the crude demonstration before he looks you up and down once through the porthole. He huffs, something of disbelief or maybe annoyance, before looking around the bay. He replicates your motion, raising one finger in a ‘hold on’ type of manner, disappearing for a minute. When he returns after a few moments, he lifts a lower arm to present to you a new device. From the device comes a hologram far more advanced than anything earth has managed thus far.

Your eyes widen at the sight of the very beetle-like species you’re here for. You nod, giving a thumbs up. “Yes! Yes, that’s it!” You loudly proclaim with a grin.

He recoils, though you can’t quite place why. He watches your reactions, the smile, the thumbs’ up, the nod, and chuffs in reply. Alright, communication. 

“Hey, um, there’s–” You stammer over words, before giving your signal for ‘hold on’. Quickly and crudely attempting to draw your best version of the window by the bridge. You hold it up to the person opposite you, pointing in the general direction of the much larger window across the ship.

His sharp gaze follows the direction you point, his head moving in that direction altogether, before chuffing and surprisingly disappearing. You blink, before quickly moving in that direction as well, cables and tubing still drifting listlessly behind your clothing from when you awoke. You stare down briefly at the ordeal, at the mess you’re sure you look, and figure that’s a problem for when an alien isn’t staring you down.

You’re just grateful he isn’t looking at you in the same way humanity looked at that beetle. That stupid, god forsaken alien beetle. Even if he does seem a bit annoyed with you.

Dragging the cables along with you, you slip past the chairs in the bridge to the larger window where your new alien peer is curiously examining the circuitry within the bridge. “This is the bridge,” you explain, pointing behind you. “For the captain.” You turn to face him again, unsure if he understands a word you’re saying, but the need to fill the air is unfortunately at the forefront of your mind. Slipping into the nook of the window, you watch as his crimson gaze tracks your movements, dropping to the cables that he examines for a moment. “These are just cables,” you explain, holding them up.

He grunts through a deadpan expression as though he has that figured out already, and it’s at this moment that you realize how grateful you are that there’s an atmosphere at all in his ship right now to carry either of your voices so that you can communicate. The entire thing is fascinating beyond any kind of entomology you’ve ever been witness to. Of course, you’d have an easier time grasping his behaviour if he were a bug, but you suppose you didn’t get much of a good understanding of CRM-12’s behaviour anyway in light of the events that took place with the species on Earth.

CRM-12. The thought makes you wonder. “Do you have a name?” You glance down at the whiteboard, but you aren’t sure how much it’ll help. “A, uh–” You point to yourself, stating your name, then to him. “What’s your name?”

He straightens, and in a very alien language gives you a series of growls and hisses, along with a series of somewhat more human-sounding syllables. You attempt to replicate the sound, you really do. The problem is that your vocal chords simply can’t shape the same noises that his can. He frowns as you can’t reach one of the clicks in your vocal range, and surprisingly offers something more familiar.

“Sukuna.”

Your lips purse as you stare out the window at him. It’s shockingly close to the syllables that sit intermittently between the clicks and growls in his name, like his language might not be as far off as you originally hypothesized.

“Human.” He adds, then replicates your name, shockingly nearly perfect.

“Yeah!” You agree with a grin. “That’s my name. I’m human.”

“My name,” he forms the words, copying them in his deep baritone voice. It sounds somewhat foreign after you’ve heard primarily chuffs and hums, but he doesn’t struggle to form the words. They’re clipped, like his tone isn’t intentional and there’s a rasp to his words like his throat wants to add the clicking to the words, but doesn’t.

You have an itch to write and document everything you can, but your lab is a few light years away and your journal is… yet to be found, since you awoke. You do what you can to catalogue every detail for later in your mind.

“Okay, okay.” Beyond interested and excited by the ordeal, you make a wild motion with both arms towards– well– everything. “This is my ship.”

Sukuna’s gaze lifts to the exterior of the ship, then returns to you. An upper arm lifts, muscle that’s inherently humanoid rippling beneath what looks to be something similar to a performance long sleeve clinging to his arm. He taps twice on the window. “Ship.” Then directly in front of you. “Your ship.”

“Yeah,” you breathe in disbelief. “Is this your ship?”

He points back, chuffing. “My ship.”

The velocity of his ability to learn is stunning. In fact, you would wager a bet that not only is he so far advanced that he outclasses Humanity by miles, you would be willing to be there’s more to it than that. The scowls, the grimaces, the huffs. Could he be annoyed that you’re not capable of picking up his language? “Are you–” you point to him, then the chair behind you, “the captain?”

His gaze examines you as you point towards the seat on the bridge behind you. Understanding your gist, he chuffs.

“Holy shit,” your breath. Looking eagerly past him into the rest of the hangar bay, you press your hands to the window. He straightens, taking a step back as he stares at you with a raised chin. “Where are the rest of you? Do you have a crew? Do you have scientists?”

He growls, but it doesn’t appear to be a warning. Your limited knowledge of his language tells you it may just be a vocalization that’s within his language, but you can’t say for sure. You can’t be sure whether he’s answering in his own language or simply frustrated with your onslaught of questions. Maybe both.

“Are you alone?” You offer the option. “Just you?” You point.

To that, he straightens slightly, his gaze dropping as he evaluates your stature. He must determine you aren’t a threat, because he finally replies with a chuff. “Alone. Just Sukuna.”

It’s unbelievable, truly. It’s not the fact that there’s other intelligent life that baffles and equally excites you, but the fact that not only does he seem to be far more advanced, but it’s clear you’re both studying one another’s behavior. More interestingly, he’s making sense of your language so quickly without so much as forgetting a word that you’re fairly sure his species can outdo humanity’s feats in an evening. You watch him pick up words before you’ve even used it in much more than a sentence to yourself. He adjusts so quickly that it has you questioning everything you know about life outside of Earth. About life on Earth. About behavior, intelligence, and everything you’ve studied so hard when it comes to entomology.

Much of the… day? Is spent going back and forth, focusing primarily on language using the whiteboard, and you’re surprised to find Sukuna doesn’t just keep up, but clearly surpasses your intelligence. He’s offput by noise and moves at a much slower pace that gives you the impression that he wouldn’t know the expression ‘life is short’. You wonder how many years he’s wandered the universe.

He primarily listens and learns, letting you yap about tenses and grammar with little more than an aloof frown. He rarely inquires, but as his knowledge grows, he becomes more at ease. The rigidity in his upper and lower shoulders releases, and his expression shifts from one of skepticism to intrigue. Before you can inquire about his species or language, however, your ship comes online. With a robotic timbre, an announcement comes across the speakers. “Please report to the lab for documentation.”

You stare back into the ship for a moment before facing your new companion. “I need to go make a report,” you explain. “The humans back on Earth want a video of how things are going.”

You can’t be sure how much of that he understands given that he’s largely a closed book, but he chuffs his general understanding.

“Do you… sleep?” You make a motion of sleeping. “Or eat?” And point to your mouth.

The mere suggestion has him yawning, revealing primordial fangs behind his lips. He doesn’t grace you with a reply otherwise.

In a series of clicks and hisses, he says something you’re unable to translate and turns on his heel. Your best assumption is that he’s wished you a goodnight, so you opt to do the same. “Goodnight, Sukuna!” You call loudly from your side of the glass.

He tilts his head slightly, then shakes it, but doesn’t look back.

You watch the spot where he disappeared for a long moment. In the barren bay, the lights click as one by one they shut off until you’re left with only the ambient light of the interior of your own ship. Stepping back from the glass, you blink to yourself. He’s unlike anything you could have imagined when it came to aliens. It’s not like you haven’t met one, given that your assignment on Earth was studying CRM-12 and your assignment now is simply to retrieve more of them, and while you know even that creature’s intelligence was largely underestimated, you never imagined another planet like Earth could exist.

Maybe the atmosphere doesn’t match your own. Maybe there’s no oxygen. Maybe his planet is overruled by dinosaurs. You wouldn’t know. But somewhere out there is a planet with architecture and entire civilizations that you don’t know the first thing about.

As you make your way to the lab, a small camera prepped for you to record, you swear you’re still jittery with excitement. The scientist that swims in your veins can’t wait for tomorrow to come, ignoring every natural instinct to exercise caution. You don’t see yourself sleeping well in spite of the fact that your body remains heavy with the weight of several induced years of sleep.

Without thinking twice, you flip the camera’s screen to look back at yourself and begin recording. You recount your ship being engulfed, describe Sukuna, and explain your findings in largely scientific terminology.

“I know he’s not what I’m here for, but– This could be… I mean…” You shake your head. “I’m not giving up on this research,” you steel yourself, staring into the camera. Chewing on your lower lip, you reach for the camera, shutting the screen and effectively stopping the recording without signing off.

You take the extra time in the evening to put yourself back together. You’re not trained for space, or even for the use of this vessel as a whole, but you track down a sponge bath and washroom, before finally managing to find a small compartment with your belongings.

Dragging the compartment out from the netted area in which it resides, you open it slowly. Within are some clothes– some your own, most provided by the company responsible for your launch– along with a few general sanitary items. It’s largely impersonal, which you suppose you expected. Having prepared for this, you reach into the pocket of a hoodie and pull out the one thing you hoped to keep with you.

You breathe out a sigh of relief, unfolding a photo. The lines through the center block out only a modicum of the happiness held within it, but at its core it’s everything you wanted to hold onto. You’re holding the camera with a huge grin, an Extatosoma Tiaratum, a large stick insect, climbs along your shoulder, and your beloved Lucanus Elaphus, an Elk Stag Beetle, is in your hand. To your left is your best friend Shoko and her German Shepherd puppy, a month after she adopted him. She’s holding him like her pride and joy in spite of the fact that throughout her entire veterinary medicine degree, she swore she’d stick to an animal with less genetically pre-disposed health problems.

You had just gotten back from a research trip back then and were meeting her pup for the first time while she cared for your bugs while you were away.

It’s strange to think that she’s ten years older now. Your bugs are surely dead, and Shoko hasn’t seen you in over ten years. Your heart pangs as you pull the familiar hoodie on over your head and tuck the photo back in your pocket as you make your way back to the bed that didn’t exactly do wonders for your neck as you make way for the second day in uncharted territory.

–

The morning greets you in the same way it did yesterday. Cold, sterile, and controlled. The white lights flick on without asking, deciding your schedule before you ever do. You blink away the sleep in your eyes, grabbing a dehydrated granola bar sort of thing to bring with you to the bridge as you dress yourself in white pants and your own hoodie.

Sukuna still isn’t there when you arrive at the bridge, so you do the only thing you really can do in the enclosed ship bay. You come prepared this time, with a model of your ship, your whiteboard, some snacks, water, and a journal and pen to note your findings. Not necessarily for humanity’s sake, but out of habit, for you. With everything spread out around you, you reach into your pocket, pulling out your photo with Shoko. Your thumb smooths along the fold lines before you set it off to the side in front of you. Then as you would on any other day, you note your findings with small drawings in the column of your journal.

After a short wait, the bay’s lights flick on one after another with a metallic clang as each one begins pulling electricity to the large hangar. Sukuna has also come more prepared, with another new device in one of his many hands and what looks to be a spacesuit draped over another arm. He’s wearing much the same top in a slightly deeper tone of gray and baggy pants this time around, with that same overall neutral expression on his face.

Neutral is generous, given how grumpy he looks in human terms. Given how grumpy he is. Maybe it’s just his species, you can’t be sure, but he gives you the impression you frustrate him.

You perk up at the sight of him regardless as he approaches in the direction of the door’s porthole, changing his stride when he spots you at the window.

He clicks and grunts, which you assume is a greeting of sorts.

“Hi, Sukuna! Did you sleep good?”

He doesn’t beat around the bush. “Sleep bad.”

“Oh. Why?”

He approaches the window, dropping the suit on his arm into a pile on the floor. “Human loud,” he states, pointing accusingly at you with a finger to the window.

“Me? This ship is huge, there’s no way you heard me. I don’t even snore!” You pout first, but your mind doesn’t give you the time to be offended as something occurs to you. “Wait, is your hearing really good?” You ask, pointing to your ear.

He chuffs. “You loud.” He makes a motion to his chest, demonstratively inhaling and exhaling in kind. “Like that.”

“Oh my god, you could hear me breathing across the ship?” You instinctively bring up your fancy space pen and journal, scribbling down messy notes as your mouth gets a few steps ahead of your brain. “Wait, but the ship is on. I can’t be louder than like– Is your engine not loud? Or the life support systems? You must breathe some sort of gas or–”

He huffs, tapping the glass with a subsequent growl. Much like yesterday, it’s not a warning but something entirely else. “Ship my design. No sound.”

“No sound? Your design?” You gawk, sitting down at the window. Sukuna follows suit opposite you behind the glass. His movements are heavier in nature and far more languid, one corded muscular arm keeping him upright as he takes a seat. In spite of his constant aloof expression, you note that he does still seem intrigued. “Wait– oh my god, are you an engineer?”

He shifts his jaw, eyes narrowing thoughtfully as he attempts to use context clues to put the word engineer into place in his mental dictionary. He says something in his own language, reaching for the device he used yesterday to show you a hologram of CRM-12. This time, he flicks it on into some sort of 2D image, a screen of sorts. In concise, easy strokes, he pulls up a blueprint of his ship. “Engineer?” He queries, confirming the term.

“Yeah,” you breathe in disbelief. “Yeah, you’re definitely an engineer. Holy shit,” you laugh, tone wrought with disbelief. “The photo you showed me with that yesterday, the uh– beetle species?”

His gaze narrows and he grunts, almost a low growl.

“Um–” you lower your gaze to your whiteboard, drawing a quick sketch of CRM-12 again, writing its name beside the image. “This guy.”

The confusion rife across his features dissolves as he chuffs. “Kerm.”

“Kerm?” You blink, unsure where this word has come from.

He points to ‘CRM-12’ like it’s the most obvious thing he’s ever pointed out, blatantly frowning. “Kerm one two.”

You laugh, airy and light, grinning. “Yeah, Kerm. Yeah, okay. Kerm. Um, you’re looking for them too, does that mean you’re a scientist too? Like, um–” setting the whiteboard aside, you tap your fingers listlessly along your thigh. “You study life and elements? And learn about creatures?”

That clicks with him and he chuffs again.

“Holy shit,” you practically bound to your feet, quickly sitting back down at the revelation with a multitude of further questions.

Sukuna’s brow tents as he watches, disdain dripping from his expression as though you’ve offended him in your bout of excitement when he shuffles back slightly. He leans back on one arm, the other three held as though you might present a threat to him. Still, he remains silent.

“Wait, so you’re the captain, engineer, and a scientist? Oh my god, that’s incredible. Human life is so short we could never even dream of studying all three things and exploring space.” You don’t even pause as your thoughts simply spill from your lips. “You must be able to live so much longer than us. Or maybe you’re just that much smarter. Wait–” Your hand presses to the glass. “Where are you from? What planet–”

“Human.”

“–are you from? How long are your years? How old are you?”

“Human.” Sukuna’s hand presses to the glass with a jarring bang as he leans over you in spite of the barrier, the size difference growing apparent. His voice booms, stopping your endless trail of words in their tracks. Once he has your silence, Sukuna proceeds to click and growl in a series you’ve heard once before, though you now recognize it as displeasure.

It doesn’t take an understanding of his language to put together that he’s calling you ‘too much’. He’s telling you you’re annoying.

Your cheeks heat up and you take the opportunity to sit back, sucking in a breath.

Sukuna’s hand peels from the glass, his prints remaining in the spot where it was. He sits back with a loud huff, rubbing at his temple with one hand as he leans back on another. “Planet is–” he states the name in his language first, then pauses to think before providing something you understand. Removing the noises between the syllables, he lands on a simple name. “Simuria,” he starts, choosing one of your questions and going with it. “Age–” he glances down at the hologram, waving his hand through it to erase the blueprint. He makes ten markings through it like a whiteboard, then clicks, his word for ‘ten’.

“Ten,” you nod your understanding.

He points at the markings. “Ten tens.”

“One hundred,” you nod your understanding.

“Ten one hundreds.”

Your lips part. “One thousand?”

He chuffs, staring blankly at you. 

“You’re over one thousand years old?” Your disbelief is palpable as your jaw hangs slightly ajar, taking in the details of his face and overall physique. He looks to be in his late thirties or early forties, but if there’s one thing you’ve learned in your time interacting with aliens, it’s that you don’t know the first thing about them.

He chuffs again, like it’s plain to see and his age is obvious. “How old you?”

“Um, three tens,” you hold up three fingers. “And a five,” you demonstrate the next number. “But I, uh, spent the last ten years sleeping to get here,” you offer a tight-lipped smile. His eyes narrow as he attempts to decipher the emotion written across your face, but you train your expression back to neutral before he can. “We only live to be about nine tens, though.”

“Nine tens?” He recoils at the mere thought. “Weak.”

You let out an airy laugh. “Weak, yeah. Humans tend to be.”

“Three thousands. Or more.”

“You can live three thousand years?” Once again caught up in the sheer difference in time you’ve both experienced, you’re forced to sit back, leaning on your arms. “Holy shit.”

That’s not even beginning to touch on the fact that his planet’s years could also be longer than Earth’s.

Sukuna has come to recognize your exclamations as disbelief and puffs out his chest. You can’t be sure whether it’s pride or a sort of bragging right he holds over your head, but it’s heartwarming to bond with someone so similar, and yet so different.

“Where your crew?”

“Oh–” You push a hand over your neck, staring back into the ship. “No crew. Just me. Just a scientist. I’m an entomologist. I study bugs.”

His brow dips as he attempts to put together what he understands based on your statements. “No captain?”

“No. No captain,” you reply coolly, the most calm he notes you’ve been since arrival.

“Captain?” He points to the photo of you and Shoko as he peers closer.

“No, that’s my friend Shoko. Another human, on Earth. And these are my bugs. I’m a bug scientist.” You point to the beetle.

“You study bugs?”

“Yeah!” You grin, followed by the familiar feeling of information running through your brain as your most passionate subject arises. “There are thousands and thousands of them on earth. Like, a thousand thousands. More than that. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what we know about them!” You pridefully explain.

“Scratched the surface?”

“Like, we barely know anything about them. So I study them to learn more.”

Leaning back on one pair of arms, he crosses the other pair over his chest, fixing you with a perplexed expression as he clicks and chirps out a word, followed by ‘human’.

You smirk, lopsided but wholehearted. It’s yet another of those familiar moments where you recognize the word from context alone. Weird human, he called you.

“Do you not like bugs?”

“Bugs on Simuria big.”

“They’re big? How big?”

He tilts his head to either side, casting a quick glance off to the side as some sort of debris hits the hull of the ship. His gaze returns to you, unbothered otherwise by the noise. “Big like that,” he presses his finger to the glass separating you.

Following the direction in which he points, you whirl around to find he’s pointing to a duffel bag of sorts. “Oh, we have some like that. Most are smaller though,” you explain as you turn back. “These two are my friends, like Shoko. That’s Spike,” you point to the stag, “and Stipple,” you point to the spiny stick insect.

“Stipple like Simuria bugs.”

“Really?” Your eyes widen, filled with wonder, and Sukuna’s head tilts as he lets out a pleased chuff. The revelation only brings up more questions. “Simuria,” you breathe the word like something sacred. Were the circumstances of your trip to reach CRM-12 any different, you might even be racing to document this beyond messy scribbles in a journal. “Do you all have four arms and eyes?”

Sukuna follows your gaze before he growls, which you take as a no.

“Is it based on region? Or– oh, maybe modification or–”

Sukuna huffs loudly, staring intently at you. “Human weak and loud.”

Ah– insults. The default when you’re bothering him or going too fast. “Sorry Sukuna,” you laugh, still lighthearted and chirpy in spite of his grumpy demeanor.

“Simurians all different,” he explains, waving his hand through the hologram still sitting off to the side to erase it. He draws a stick figure of sorts with horns and an eye on its forehead, then another with a tail that seems prehensile from what you can tell, like a monkey.

“All different? So, it’s not based on regions?”

He growls, confirming your thoughts. “I need four arms for science and making ship,” he points broadly around him.

You blink in complete and utter disbelief, the buzzing of the bay lights audible even over the gears turning in your mind. “So you… grew two extra arms? Like, your body made them yourself?”

He chuffs, pleased once again by your disbelief with a hint of what you might call a smile. You’re coming to notice that he seems to like that. He enjoys praise, even if it’s of his species rather than himself. He enjoys being above you in any way he can. It’s probably one of the most human things about him, in a roundabout sort of way.

“That’s incredible,” you shake your head regardless, watching as he puffs his chest out again, his chin tilted up. You can’t help a smile at the sight of him, the boyish pride on his face is something of a marvel. “What other adaptations do you have?”

He considers this for a moment, before running a hand through his hair and presenting a second ear hidden under pink strands over his humanoid ear. It’s far less human than the first pair, you would consider it closer to an owl. Your lips purse as you near the glass, leaning with both hands splayed across it. He then lifts the hem of his shirt and you damn near choke.

You can’t even decide which part it is that actually chokes you. The fact that he’s sporting a six pack like no other and a second pair of pecks that sends heat to places you do not want to think about while trapped in a box in space, or the huge mouth plastered where a belly button would otherwise be. You cough to distract him from the way your throat seizes, then sit back in an effort to disguise how you’ve reacted to an alien you hardly know.

Sukuna tilts his chin up slightly as he regards you. You want to chalk it up to nothing more than a natural reaction to your cough, but there’s a gleam in his eyes that you recognize. You’re then unfortunately reminded that his hearing is like nothing you’ve ever experienced and he can likely hear your pounding heart. It puts an idea in your head that his sense of smell may… also… be better on that note, too. Breezing past the moment as quickly as you can, you cough once more. “What’s, uh– what’s that for?”

“Eating large food.”

The sensation is jarring, but it occurs to you that you’ve never once asked what he eats. “Like… what?”

To your surprise, he smiles. Actually smiles. “Noisy food. Good food.”

“Are you joking with me? Are you joking about eating me?” You sputter.

His toothy grin is replicated on his stomach mouth as he lets the hem of his shirt drop and for the first time you hear him rumble in laughter.

You don’t even have the instinct to wonder if he’s lying when you’re too intrigued by the whole ordeal and just shake your head. “Oh, so you have jokes now?”

“Always have jokes,” he grins, wide. “You not understand, weak human.”

You scoff. “I see how it is,” you tease, curious about his ability to pick up not just language but the deeper meaning behind it. With a sigh, you cast a glance back at the spot where he revealed the stomach mouth, focusing back on your mission. For as curious as you are, at the end of the day you’re trapped in a box in space with a limit on time and supplies. “How quickly can you evolve?”

He tilts his head from side to side, something he’s seen you do when you reply with ‘maybe’.

“Does it depend? Is it based on how your surroundings are?” You make a motion to everything around you.

“Yes,” he replies affirmatively for the first time in your language, rather than his usual Simurian response.

“How fast are we talking?”

His brow tents, head tilting like the question is stupid. “We talk at normal speed for you.”

You bark a laugh at the realization that he’s now completely misunderstood. “No, it’s a saying, sorry. How fast can you evolve? One planet rotation around the sun? Two?”

Clearly displeased with your laughter, he takes a moment to fix you with a glare before replying. “Not one planet rotation. Smaller time.”

“Less than one planet rotation around the sun or less than one planet rotation?”

“Less than one planet rotation.”

You swear you need to pick your jaw up off the floor. “Less than a DAY?” You shout in disbelief, hand raising to the glass in a slam that echoes over the metal bay.

Sukuna growls, recoiling away from your reaction. It’s not out of fear, but rather that you’re being noisy again. “Human. Weak human. Stop.”

Sitting back down, you offer another apology to the begrudging man sitting across from you. Pieces of the puzzle all suddenly begin to click into place. That’s why he picked up your language so quickly. He didn’t just learn, his throat adapted to the sound. His vocal chords changed in less than a day to work around the fact that humans can’t. His species is advanced in the kind of way you could only dream. Hell, you never even realized he lost the strange rasp to his vocalizations in your language. “Sukuna, I–” you pause, raising a finger as you become aware that you’re about to get ahead of yourself when you go dashing back to the lab.

You gather a space meal, several beakers, pipettes, gloves, and a sterile handling box. When you return and dump it all on the ground beside you in a cacophony of glass, Sukuna still seems displeased with the noise.

“Humans sent me here because of this,” you present a phial of liquid to him. Held within the small glass container is a dark red, almost black liquid with yellow separation. “These are Alveoli. Normal ones. They’re cells in our lungs,” you point to your chest. “And this,” you present another phial, but the color of the liquid is off, almost more of a brown. “Is Alveolarium. It appeared on Earth I guess ten years ago now and we can’t find a cure. Around the same time it showed up, I got called to an island in the middle of nowhere to research a new discovery,” you explain. “They sent a ship somewhere around here back then, and picked up a CRM– um– a Kerm.”

Sukuna doesn’t move, but you have his attention.

“I was sent to research behaviour since it looks like a bug, but they also discovered that Kerm have cells in their shell that are really similar to the pathogen causing Alveolarium which was spreading a lot, but Kerm cells seem to carry properties that might help or stop or kill the disease or something,” you explain, shutting your eyes tightly as you search for vocabulary he’d know. “Basically they have similar cells,” you explain.

Sukuna inhales, long and slow as he sits up. Interestingly, his gaze splits as he looks over both samples at once. His languid movement makes sense when you consider that he’s well over a thousand years old and still has two thousand to go, if not more. Of course life isn’t short for a creature like him.

“We had one Kerm,” you continue. “But it died.”

“Died. Gone?” Sukuna confirms the meaning of the word.

“Yeah.”

He grunts. There’s no real emotion behind it, it’s nothing but sheer acknowledgement.

“So I need to get more Kerm. It’s…” You stare down at the sealed contaminated cell sample. “It’s bad, Sukuna. A lot of humans died. Probably way more since I’ve been gone.”

He stares at you for a long moment, his jaw moving as he evaluates your expression and every little micromovement of your body. He has a way about the manner in which he moves like he’s above life itself, everything in his mannerisms is lazy and unbothered– that is, until you grate on his nerves, anyway. There’s something almost kingly in the way he carries himself. After a long pause, he sets a forearm on his leg, leaning forward. “You want cells. Mine.”

Your jaw hangs open as you attempt to explain yourself. “I mean– you might be able to save us, but obviously only if you’re okay with it! I just– We don’t actually know anything about the Kerm, and I can’t guarantee if it’ll make it back alive or even at all, and–”

“Human.” There’s less heat in his voice as he shuts you up with the low rumbling of his timbre. “I help. You get suit,” he speaks like he’s ordering you, pointing.

“Suit?”

His eyes narrow as he gets to his feet, offense dripping from the very click of his tongue he gives you. “You scientist. You help.”

Your jaw hangs open as you glance back between him and the ship. You seal your lips into a tight line, staring down at fidgeting hands. “Sukuna, I–” You shake your head.

“Your atmosphere weak, humans weak. Use your second heart, my ship pressure not crush you. Stop scared movement,” he points mildly at your twiddling thumbs.

Before you can explain the truth, you’re perplexed by his words. “Second…? I only have one heart.”

He huffs. “Then I help reinforce oxygen tank to survive pressure of sulfur gas atmosphere. Weak human. Foolish weak human.”

You’re left in utter disbelief and mild shock, frozen in place as he turns on his heel to, you suppose, make you a new tank fitting of the pressure of his ship. When the hell did he even pick up the word foolish? Did you say that? Shaking your head of the thought, you need to focus on what matters here.

“Sukuna!”

He stops a short distance away, his gaze thrown over his shoulder.

“Sukuna, I can’t– I can’t leave.”

He crosses his arms– all four of them– unimpressed. “Why?”

“This was always meant to be a one-way trip. I don’t get to go home. I’m sealed in here. I have no depressurization pod, no suit, no way to unseal the ship without losing the oxygen in here. No portable generators, nothing. When the ship loses power, that’s it.”

Slowly, he turns towards you, straightening as he regards you. He doesn’t just look displeased, he looks downright offended. His usual go-to doesn’t seem to cut it either as he spews out something more than just ‘weak’. “Wrong.”

It likely doesn’t convey what he wants, but you get the gist anyway. “Yeah. It’s stupid,” you agree.

“Your stupid.”

“Yeah,” you laugh half-heartedly. “My stupid.”

Clearly realizing you’re butchering your own language to appeal to his limited use of it, he turns on his heel again, muttering something under his breath. Your hand slips away from the glass keeping you safe and trapped in tandem as you watch Sukuna disappear. You find yourself staring at the photo of you and Shoko again. What you wouldn’t give to check in on her right now. Or ever again.

This will be it for you. Your food supply is limited to what it was deemed was a reasonable amount of time to– somehow– procure not just one but multiple specimens of Kerm or CRM-12, or whatever you’re meant to call them. Your power will fizzle out. Your oxygen supply will end. Your ship’s fuel is already near its limit. You’re sealed in a death trap as a final sentencing. You shut your eyes tightly, rubbing your hands over your face in an effort to reset.

When Sukuna doesn’t return in a couple of minutes, you move around the ship in an effort to clear your head and get some exercise. Anything that stops reminding you of just how trapped you are in a void of uncharted territory with an alien that far exceeds any of humanity’s feats.

You grab a bite to eat, rehydrating some macaroni and cheese in a flimsy bag. It’s unappealing as all hell but it’s better than starving. Eating straight out of the bag, you meander back towards the window, blinking when you find Sukuna setting up a mobile science lab of some sort just outside the bridge. You jog closer to the window, taking a seat to watch as he sets out largely similar and recognizable equipment, although the shape and build of much of his technology is infinitely more advanced. Bigger, too, given his size.

One set of eyes glides to your movement, an eerie feat of having an extra pair, while he continues to set up. Your mind goes into overdrive trying to figure out just how much that sets apart his biology from yours to have the energy production and sheer brainpower to manage so much at once.

His nose wrinkles when he watches you spoon food into your mouth. Chuckling, you approach the nook by the window, presenting the bag to him. “It’s macaroni and cheese.” You tilt the bag in his direction.

“It’s bad.”

“Hey!” You chide with a grin. “It’s better than it looks. You can’t call it bad until you try it.”

With an unusually pompous huff, he turns back to the mobile set-up and picks up a box-like device, connecting it to the window by suction. He runs his thumb along the edge like a dial and it comes to life, seeping a sort of caulk onto the glass before it begins drilling through the window. Your survival instinct recognizes the structural instability. Your curiosity chooses to ignore it as the device uses some sort of nanotech to recreate its shape on the inner glass, sealing itself.

You purse your lips, your spoon held in mid-air. “A mini pressurization chamber.”

He chuffs. “Give macaroni and cheese.”

“You need to learn manners,” you mutter more to yourself than to him as he literally holds his hand out to bluntly demand your lunch with that unnatural edge to his voice that never quite fits his genuine intrigue.

“Manners?” He queries, though his hand never moves.

Chuckling to yourself as you give in and offer the small bag and spoon of food to him, you watch as your door closes and the pressure within the device changes. “We say please when we ask for something and thank you when we’re given something if we want to be polite or nice to someone.” When his side opens, the bag and food as a whole are crushed under the pressure of his differing atmosphere, presenting him with a dripping mess of squished pasta.

Admittedly, it does look bad now. As it begins dripping melted cheese that’s entirely too watery out the other side straight onto his shoes, he stares at you with the kind of tight-lipped expression that transcends any language barrier.

He’s not thanking you for this.

“Sorry,” you wince, offering an apologetic grin.

He growls, trudging back across the large expanse of hangar bay to get something to clean up the mess. By the time he returns and cleans up the cheese, he finally opts to take a bite of the crushed food, fixing you with a glare.

“Bad. Bad food for weak human.”

You can only smile, because it figures that he would hate it. “Fair enough,” you laugh, watching as he sets it along with the dirty rag he used to clean the cheese. Your eyes widen a fraction at the thought. “Wait, what do you–”

Rolling his shoulders, he points to the small chamber that connects you. “Give Alveolarium.”

Your thoughts are already long forgotten as you pick up one of the cultures, chewing on your lower lip as you examine the glass. “I think your ship’s atmospheric pressure might crush the vial.” You hold it up to him. “It’s pretty thin.”

With a hum, Sukuna offers a box through the exchange to put the phial in. As you exchange materials and Sukuna begins separating the infected cells into smaller cultures within an oxygen-controlled box with barometric pressure equal to your ship’s, it occurs to you that in spite of your life being cut short, some part of you is happy for this experience. Even if your notes and findings get stranded out here, you can say you found companionship in a grumpy ten-foot-tall genius alien, and that’s pretty cool.

With your plights long forgotten as you watch Sukuna work with your face practically plastered to the glass, the technology and rate at which he’s able to work grabs your attention. Your chest practically rattles in excitement as he moves through practiced motions like he already knows what to do.

“What’s that?” You query, watching eagerly as he injects something into a lower arm.

One pair of eyes flicks to you. “For cells.”

“For stem cells? Like from your bones?”

He chuffs, pulling out a rubber band as he restricts his blood flow to take a sample.

“It’s that fast?” You gawk as he already begins drawing a sample.

His brow twitches as you break his concentration, but he chuffs to give you a reply regardless.

“Oh my god. We have a drug that does that too, but it takes a while before it produces any neutrophils– um– stem cells. You’re so much more advanced than us, I never imagined how much different life could be!” You watch as blue blood is extracted from his arm, and he begins separating the sample in order to work with it. “Your blood is blue? Is that because of the differing atmosphere? Or maybe it’s an adaptation somehow–”

“Human,” Sukuna groans, disenchanted with your rambles. He fixes you with a tired expression, pointing to the experiment in an effort to get you to focus. “Stop. Noisy.”

“Right, sorry!” You apologize with a wide grin.

A series of clicks, syllables, and growls escape the brutish man as he mutters something to himself, undoing the band from his arm and flexing his fingers a couple of times before pulling a sleeve back down. As he introduces his cells to the Alveolar cells that are infected in the controlled environment, he moves a small device over the culture slide, projecting hologram of the microscopic cells. His cells are so different from anything you’ve observed on Earth that you have no issue telling which belong to him in spite of your differing major.

The cells collide once, the Alveolarium attempts to attack Sukuna’s cells, then simply… backs off. “They’re incompatible,” you state dryly, your shoulders dropping. 

Sukuna grunts. “Alveolar cells still functional. My cells not see issue.”

“That could be it.” You shrug.

He hums, tapping a finger twice along the table. “Then we change environment.”

“Create artificial stress until your cells react,” you breathe, your hand snapping down to the ground beside you with a metallic clang that has Sukuna flashing you another glare.

“Loud. Loud human.”

“Sorry, I just– I’m a bit overexcited,” you offer with a smile.

Sukuna continues to stare for a moment, then adjusts the pressure within the glass box where the experiment is taking place to something more dense. He attempts to alter the environment enough that his cells recognize a threat, while not outright killing yours. Striking a balance between them proves to be a multi-day endeavor. In the moments where you can only wait, you slowly begin to unravel the enigma that is Sukuna.

You can’t count how many times Sukuna huffs or makes his disdain known with a very dramatic look in your direction when you suggest something altogether dumb, but you also note that he tells you you’re noisy less often. He picks up on more scientific terms, and even begins to pick up on prepositions purely from your use of them. He teaches you about Simuria, how the Simurians all have extra eyes, two hearts, and are fairly large compared to humanity, though they largely don’t resemble one another. He teaches you about one with horns, who you assume is a friend. He, on the other hand, refers to the horned Simurian as a neighbor.

You get the feeling Sukuna isn’t the friendly type.

“You’re invasive,” he gruffs out in reply to your question.

Your head falls back as you stare at the ceiling with a groan. “I literally just asked if you choose to be alone!” You retort lightheartedly. “You don’t even have to give me a reason!”

“You’re invasive. Like Kerm.”

“Like–” You gawk at him, watching a slow smile curl at his lips. “Like Kerm?”

“Loud like them too.”

“Hey!”

His head tilts as you exclaim your displeasure with that statement, but it’s one of the rare moments where he does seem pleased, which brings a smile to your face regardless. For whatever reason, nothing seems to get him boastful quite like belittling humanity. And since his only knowledge of humanity is you, that puts you at the center of his jokes.

“You know,” you meander back to the topic of Kerm, pulling the smile straight from his lips when you change the subject. “You never did tell me why you’re here. You know the Kerm too, so is it for them?”

He chuffs. “I did tell you. The Kerm are invasive.”

“That’s not really a reason. That’s just like– a statement.”

Seated on the floor with his back against the glass that separates you, he rolls his head along the rigid surface, his gaze finding you. “Kerm are smarter than you humans think,” he grumbles out a baseline explanation. He utters something in his language, then puts together a few sounds until he has a new word for you. “Methalonian weapons. They aren’t natural. They’re–” he taps his fingers on the bay’s floor briefly in thought. “Created by another species.”

“Methalonian,” you test the word. “Are they artificial? Or are they mutated? Like, completely not real or mutated from something that already existed?”

He taps his finger decidedly. “Mutated. Another species mutated them. I’ve been circling this planet for a while now to find where they come from,” he explains. “There are no other species here. They ate all of their resources. Now they invade.”

“How do they even leave? Are they that smart?”

He growls. “They attach themselves to ships and invade.”

“Oh. What are you planning on doing to them, then?”

He sucks in a breath. “Killing them.”

You freeze, staring at him as he examines your expression. You’ve never been much good at training your emotions, your pupils narrowing to mere pinpricks. You swallow, gaze averting to the photo of Shoko. “You were never gonna let me take any.”

“... No.”

“That’s why you trapped me. You knew I was here for them.”

“Made a guess,” he agrees with a hand motion that you’d equate to a shrug.

Slumping back against the bridge’s floor, you stare at the ceiling. Your alien counterpart watches in silence as you process what you know of the Kerm, your current situation, and your species’ survival. You consider Shoko back home, and the rest of your family and friends. You consider your nights out together ten years ago and what that might look like now if you ever make it back. You consider the failing government, and how it’s possible everything has completely fallen apart since your launch. But what really gets to you is that if this doesn’t work, there’s no world where Sukuna lets you send a Kerm back.

Maybe you shouldn’t care. You’re physically welded into a ship in the middle of nowhere. Yet here you are, even after everything, still being hopeful. It’s the most human thing you could possibly do. “What did The Kerm do to you?” You quietly murmur, still staring at the ceiling.

He inhales once, long. His eyes shut. “They’re mutated to kill,” he grunts. “The cells your scientists found in their shells…” his jaw ticks as he clicks, something you can’t decipher as syllables follow it. “It is not your cure.”

You lift your head, leaning on two elbows to look at him.

“It is your cause.”

Your lips part, brow furrowing. “But– I– That’s not–” Your chest tightens, emotions betraying you as you feel your waterline wet. Quickly wiping away the evidence, your fingers curl against the metal floor beneath you.

Sukuna doesn’t budge, his fiery gaze pinning you to place.

“But Alveolarium has been around longer than the Kerm was on Earth.”

He moves a knee, tilting his head. “Has it?”

“I… Don’t know, actually.” At last, you admit it, but things don’t fully add up from what you know. You let yourself fall onto your back again. “The company that sent me here, we had a bit of a disagreement. I guess… Maybe they were right, but still.”

Sukuna’s eyes narrow, minute, as he attempts to decipher the vagueness of your statement, but by nature of a language barrier, he can’t make out what emotion it is that you’re so graciously dancing around.

You swallow hard. “Did… Did they kill a lot of Simurians?”

“Yes. Humans?”

“If it’s them then… yeah, I guess. Millions. Like, thousands upon thousands.”

Morbidly intrigued, Sukuna shuffles to get a better look at you, his face closer to the glass than ever. “How many humans are on Earth?”

“Um–” You quickly pull up the whiteboard, demonstrating a number for ten, then a thousand, then a million, then a billion. “There were eight billion.”

This is the most baffled you’ve ever seen Sukuna, who physically recoils at the mere thought. “How do you keep distance? How do you celebrate the union of humans?”

“Union of humans?” You laugh. “Weddings? I don’t know, you invite a hundred people and call it a day.” But the question sparks something in you as you sit up to face your baffled friend. “How many Simurians are there?”

“Seventy nine.”

“WHAT?” You gape, noting that he doesn’t complain about your noise in spite of his narrowing eyes and defensive posture. “Are you guys close to going extinct? Like, being gone? Are you not worried?”

He simply growls in reply. “No, human. Things are…” He hesitates, his gaze averting. “We all have space and resources, it isn’t cramped.” He rolls his shoulders back. “We celebrate all weddings every year. Then stay alone with our partners.”

There’s a pit of jealousy in your stomach that you cover with a smile. “So you have someone you’ll be going back to, hey?” You grin, prodding at him through the window. You equate the unsettling feeling to a yearning for having someone like that back home, or even the option to return, but it would be ignoring the bigger picture that you’ve both been sitting in this bay for several days together and you’ve grown fond of him. You may not have a choice in being here, but he does. And he chooses to help in spite of his own goals. Your heart likes that he chooses you a bit too much.

To your surprise, your question irks him and his eyes narrow. A harsh hiss erupts from his throat as he suddenly turns back towards the pressurized box where your experimentation is taking place.

Your shoulders fall, watching the muscles over his back pull taut as he busies himself with little more than prep work for a next experiment as you continue to wait.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (hah) to realize that Sukuna has no partner. The thought trickles through the pockets of your mind. Seventy nine people on a planet total… You can only imagine how lonely that gets. Even you, who chooses to be with bugs a majority of your life, always returns home to Shoko and your bugs at the end of a trip.

Seventy nine. That’s thirty nine weddings. Is he the only Simurian with no partner? “Sukuna…” You watch him work, his movements unbothered as he dilutes samples and ups heat to push his cells to react. “Are you lonely?”

He freezes. A muscle in his cheek twitches as he flexes his jaw, choosing not to reply when he continues in his motions.

Your shoulders fall as you watch him silently work, pulling the rug out from under you on the reality of your relationship. A working relationship, really. He’s always chided you for being invasive, and you suppose this is why.

“I’m lonely,” you offer, quietly. His movements don’t freeze altogether, but they slow. He moves as though any noise might distract him from what you’re saying, in spite of the fact that there’s no keeping secrets from a man with ears like him. “I wish I could go back to Earth. Or maybe meet the Simurians, or see more of the universe. I wish I could study bugs again.”

When he still doesn’t reply, but his movements slow to a crawl, you pick up the photo of you and Shoko, presenting it to him again. “I’d love to tell my friend what we’re up to.”

After an extended moment’s silence, he removes his hands from the box, resting them on the table he rolled in. The dense metal protests his weight, even though it was designed for him. Likely designed by him, too. He still doesn’t face you, choosing to protect himself from your prying eyes by continuing to face somewhat away from you.

“It’s not so bad up here though, you know. I mean, I met you. That’s pretty cool.” You scoot closer to the glass, hoping to find common ground through friendship, if you can call this such a thing.

Your movement grabs his attention. His gaze flickers towards you, the only sign he’s heard you at all. He continues to face forward, his shoulders hunched over the cool metal table.

“Why are you alone?” He finally speaks up, unmoving otherwise.

“I’m uh– pretty noisy,” you offer with a grin in terms he knows well, deflecting the question. “So I guess it just never worked out with other people.”

Sukuna straightens, turning to face you. “Not what I meant.”

You smile, half-hearted. “I’m a criminal, Sukuna.”

“Criminal?”

You nod, pulling your knees into your chest as he slowly nears the glass again. He takes a seat, cross-legged as he leans over his forearms to give you his full attention. “I did a really bad thing. Other humans got hurt and I’m here as a punishment. Our technology isn’t as good as yours and the crew that signed up for this mission knew they wouldn’t get to go back to Earth. The choices I made landed me here instead of them.”

“What did you do?”

Your arms tighten around your legs as you settle your chin along your knees. “The Kerm, you know how I told you we had one?”

He chuffs.

“We put it in a cell, a big cage or room,” you explain to the best of your ability. “I was told they just caught it and I was brought in to study it, because it looks similar to our bugs so people in charge made assumptions,” you haphazardly point at the photo where your bug pets are crawling on your clothes. Their features are close enough to the Kerm that you can see the train of thought that led to you. “In my time studying it, I realized it was smart. Like, way smarter than any bug on Earth. Maybe even smarter than any animal. It was listening. It was learning.”

“You opened its cell.”

With a drawn out sigh, you bury your face in your folded arms, muffling your words. “I opened its cell.”

“It ate them all.”

“It ate the crew for this mission. Every last one of them. And then the people in charge killed it, too.”

With two arms relaxed in his lap and two holding him up, Sukuna watches in relative silence as emotions swim through your eyes. He doesn’t have a name for most of them, but he’s seen them in himself. Over a thousand years of life will do that to you.

Your voice is a mere whisper. “It was so smart, Sukuna. I just couldn’t watch it live out its life in a cell.”

“Now you live your life in a cell.”

You lift your head, gaze flickering across the buttons you never bothered to figure out and the white walls you never quite grew accustomed to when all you ever see is Sukuna. “Yeah, I guess so. Funny how that works, huh?”

“It’s not funny,” he hisses, his brow furrowing in such a way that actually has you curious.

It’s not as though you didn’t consider yourself acquaintances at least with him by this point. You've spent several days together and he chooses every day to return when he could have dropped you off at any point and cleaned up his scuffed hangar, but he doesn’t. Every day, he pushes his own goals and mission back another day into the future and chooses to help the trapped little entomologist residing in the back corner of his ship. The whole thing is funny if you’re grim enough about it.

In spite of his frustration, you shuffle forward, pressing a hand to the glass. “It’s okay. I’m glad we met before I’m gone.”

His brow twitches not once but twice as he stares at your hand like it’s a personal affront. “My ship can get you home.”

Your fingers curl just slightly against the glass. Your body inadvertently winces at the thought. “Maybe. But if I go home, I’ll still be arrested and live life in a cell down there. That’s… worse.”

“Even if you bring back a cure?”

“Humans are… complicated.”

“Stupid.”

A puff of air leaves your nose. “Yeah. Humans are stupid.” You do what you can to mask your underlying sadness as your lips curl up into a smile.

You can’t read Sukuna’s expression as his intense crimson stare burns into you. You know there’s a level of disbelief and maybe even frustration at your self-sacrifice in his eyes. Whether you want to admit that an alien could feel something like that for you is another story.

You can see the internal battle raging within him, although you can’t identify what battle it is that he fights. In spite of his troubled scowl, you’re shocked when an arm slowly lifts from where his elbow rested on his thigh. He brings it to the glass, his fingers pressing first over each digit, before his palm splays over yours. The heat he radiates is warm enough that you feel it through the glass, befitting of a ten foot alien that expends far more energy than you. As if you weren’t already aware, it makes it apparent just how much he dwarfs you.

You peel your gaze from his hand, examining the way he refuses to look at you. Softly, you pose a question that might answer some of your own. “How many Simurians were there before the Kerm?”

His frown deepens, his head falling. “Over one thousand. I evolved. Most… did not.”

Something briefly occurs to you of the whole ordeal. You wonder if maybe there was someone that even he– a scientist and engineer clearly capable of incredible feats– could not save. “Your family?” You query, your voice a near-whisper that you know he picks up on.

His eyes slowly drag across the glass, staring straight through you as his reflection startlingly pins him in place. He swallows hard, refusing to confirm when it’s not you staring him down, but his own misplaced guilt that reflects back at him.

His jaw locks, teeth grinding as he pulls back suddenly, on his feet in an instant with an expression you can’t place. He’s scowling with wide eyes, turning on his heel as he excuses himself with nothing more than an “I’m tired,” trudging away with footsteps that echo throughout the bay.

Sitting back, you let out a sigh as you’re left alone once again.

–

The somber tone of that day never fully recuperates itself into something easier. There’s a constant pressure looming overhead that unfortunately isn’t barometric. It’s that of a ship set to fail and a man who treats revenge like a cure for loss. But on the other hand, one thing does change. Sukuna opens up.

He shows you a hologram with images of Simuria that leave you wistful for the greater universe. Space was never your forte, but the dense petrified wood forests and gaseous craters and mountains have your brain tripping over itself in curiosity of what insects could exist in those biomes, much to Sukuna’s dismay as he brushes you off as noisy.

As the days pass and your food supply begins to run short, you’re left with no option but to eat less as you quietly enter survival mode upon realizing Sukuna eats… well, rocks. So you’re left only with what was packed for you.

You were intended to have sent Kerm back by now. You weren’t intended to find life like Sukuna. You weren’t intended to bond. You weren’t intended to be left with a yearning to explore the universe and see the things he’s seen. You weren’t intended to slowly begin to wither. There was an out for you, as morbid as it is. A single dose ready to take once your mission was complete.

And yet, every day, Sukuna brings something new for you to see or experience. It’s small, but it’s surprisingly meaningful. He shows you the vast cliff faces of a Simurian coast that’s a famous vacation spot. He tells you stories of the gaseous craters within the planet that make much of it uninhabitable, hence the far smaller population across it, even before the Kerm. He demonstrates the use of four arms to their full extent and how his brain adapted. He shows you his tattoos. God, the tattoos.

He tells you all about how they each have meaning. How in Simuria, they’re a mark of life events. His wrists were banded when he finished an equivalent of elementary school at twenty-eight. His upper arms were an equivalent of high school at thirty-six, and something akin to university marked his shoulders at sixty-two. It’s a wonder to hear someone graduating university at sixty-two with their life still ahead of them.

He lifts his shirt and points to stripes along his shoulder and back. You swear you’re paying attention. You swear. He smirks, but he tells you nonetheless that they were from what you might consider a bachelor’s degree equivalent.

“What about your face?” You ask, tracing the ink on his jaw along the glass as you leave behind a smear.

“That,” he states, “was my choice. We all choose what our face will look like.”

“No special event?”

“Just me,” he breathes.

It makes you smile.

He hates how much that very action sits under his ribs. It pokes at him, prods at him like it belongs there, reminding him that this won’t last forever.

One morning, he arrives with dark circles under his eyes. He notes that you both look tired. He knows his reasoning, but he can’t place yours. Your energy is largely spent, yet you just awoke. You’re not noisy anymore. He places a circular device on the ground. A holographic device, you recognize it right away, but it’s far larger than the usual one.

“You wanted to see the mountains,” he states simply, ignoring the failed experiment to his left, in spite of the fact that he needs to start a new one with time of the essence. “You will.”

Awaiting him in your usual nook by the window, you’re wrapped up in a blanket, smiling in spite of yourself. For the first time since you met, weak feels as though it properly describes your appearance, but you refuse to give up despite your body’s shortcomings as your stomach rumbles. Sukuna never points it out.

He runs his finger along the outer dial that his machinery tends to run on and it springs to life. You bring a hand up to block the light protruding from a high-lumen-count projector, squinting as the hologram doesn’t just project something in a controlled, small environment, it extends to every wall as though you’re there. The bulb remains bright as Sukuna steps away from it, allowing you to see a mountain as though you’re there.

It’s not a rebuilt landscape either, you realize as you press your hands to the glass to get a better view. It’s a video. It’s a bit shaky, and you’re certain that if it played audio, you might hear the camera operator panting. Every time it shakes and the hologram can’t make sense of what it’s projecting, you squint, but it comes back in a moment. When it flashes suddenly, you catch a glimpse of Sukuna, following along behind the camera operator. He looks young. In human years, you would guess his twenties. Maybe three hundred for him. You can’t help a smile as you note that he doesn’t seem to have four arms. You wonder if they came later.

The camera flashes again as the operator moves it, revealing his own face along with Sukuna and four laughing Simurians. Sukuna still bears his usual aloof expression, but the joy in his eyes is palpable as they all pose for a photo. The camera operator looks largely like Sukuna, though he bears no facial tattoos and only a simple set of extra eyes. A twin, perhaps.

To Sukuna’s left is a Simurian with shoulder-length white hair who’s much shorter than the rest of them with an eye in the center of their forehead, a tall and slender Simurian with horns and the same third eye, one with shaggy white hair and six striking blue eyes, and one with silky-looking black hair and four eyes, purple beyond your wildest beliefs.

“Are those your friends?” You query, covering a cough in your elbow.

Sukuna intently watches the action, chuffing when the camera turns away. “We went on a trip after my fourth tattoo.”

“You look young.”

He steps around the projector, moving closer to your window. “I was.” He’s never been the most talkative, but he does ask more questions. You chalk it up to scientific curiosity. “Are Earth mountains like this?” Were you more keen, you might realize he’s deflecting you from the subject of the friends of which he’s mostly lost.

You stare around at the landscape. Simuria is largely rocky with giant craters. It’s covered in iridescent minerals that seem to form under the far more gaseous and toxic-leaning environment. “Some,” you decide. “The more harsh environments get colorful like this. Mostly, they’re gray with trees. Kinda spiky green ones with pointed tops. We get snow, too, at the tops where it’s colder.”

Simuria is warm, from what you’ve gathered, and his head tilts curiously at the thought of snow.

“You know when you bring a liquid to a cold temperature and it freezes?”

He chuffs.

“Like that, but tiny shavings of it. It’s white and cold. It falls from the clouds.”

“Fascinating.” And he means it, too. It’s the most intriguing part of all of your interactions with him. You don’t learn through questioning as scientists anymore, you learn through sharing as friends.

“It’s beautiful,” you murmur to yourself, watching the video clip play out. It cuts off without so much as a sound of warning, the room returning to the usual bright and barren metal appearance you’ve grown accustomed to. “Snow doesn’t have much friction, so humans would go to the top of mountains and slide down.”

“You have no cliffs?”

“Not really on the snowy mountains.” You scoot forward, leaning your shoulder against the window as you pull yourself into a tight ball with a blanket draped over your shoulders. “Mostly in deserts. Desert mountains look more like Simurian ones, but mostly one color. They’re warmer, too. Most of the time.”

Subconsciously, Sukuna leans against the glass, his shoulder warming you enough that your eyes flutter shut. “What color?”

You yawn. “Orange. It’s kinda like a darker version of your hair. If you squint.”

Absently running a hand through said locks, he stares out at the hangar’s walls, where the hologram projected mountains mere moments ago. “I think I know the color,” he murmurs mostly to himself. Rising from where he leans against the glass, his lips part to speak when he finds you sound asleep slumped against the glass.

His jaw tightens, a sharp pain rising behind his teeth at the sight of the tiny Human he’s grown fond of curled into a little ball aboard her ship. His friend. Slowly, a hand rises to the glass as something in his chest twists painfully. He recognizes the feeling, he’s no fool. He’s spent over a thousand years alive and isn’t a stranger to the pang gnawing at him as the noisy stowaway he picked up passes out in his presence.

To you, he’s safety. To him, you're more than just company.

And you’re wasting away in his hangar bay because some species he’s never come across decided that would be the case simply for having compassion. It brought about a mistake, sure, but you had compassion nonetheless where they did not.

He sucks in a breath, taking long strides over the metal floor to continue experimenting until you rise again. He works quietly, although he knows your hearing doesn’t compare to his. He moves with silent ease in spite of his lumbering form and watches with a frown as every environmental change he puts either of the cells through doesn’t bring out the result he wants. His cells adapt to the environment, but never recognize the Alveolarium as a threat.

Stepping back as he attempts to re-evaluate, he casts a glance back at you. Even if your energy wanes, your heart still beats steadily in his keen ears. He can get you back to Earth so long as he can figure out a solution to get energy back into your system somehow given that his food doesn’t fit within your diet.

You stir with a yawn, seemingly roused by his glance. You press against the glass, sitting up and blinking a number of times. When you meet his gaze, a spark of energy ignites that has Sukuna wincing. You clamber against the metal, some sort of button or zipper on your clothes clanging hard against the metal. “Sorry, Sukuna! I didn’t realize I fell asleep.”

He growls, rubbing absently at his second ear tucked within salmon locks. “It’s fine,” he grumbles, although your company is more welcome than he gives off as you sit upright to watch his experimentation once more.

You offer suggestions that get you deadpan expressions and a dramatic roll of the eyes given your lack of knowledge on the subject of medicinal chemistry is lacking. You figure you’re better at telling stories anyway, and even if you lose your place here and there when your tiredness catches up with you, Sukuna always offers a guiding suggestion when you falter.

The following day is when he starts to notice a trend that doesn’t greet either of you with warmth.

You drag yourself to the bridge later than usual without your morning granola bar. Sukuna offers you a mineral, but he knows it would break your teeth. He also offers meat, but you both already know your system rejects it. The blanket you’ve been dragging around with you for the past few days is bundled so tightly around you that Sukuna would wager a guess that you’re colder than usual, too.

When you make a motion to point at something on the table, his gaze lingers on your trembling finger. He can hear your stomach. He knows you’re starving. He’s watching your spirit fade, completely helplessly.

Sukuna, a man who’s spent over two hundred years coming to terms with the past and adapting to being alone, finds himself completely at a loss and frustrated beyond his means when he finds you the following morning. Or– more accurately– when he doesn’t find you.

His footsteps are even as he makes his way across the hangar. Your belongings remain at the glass, but you aren’t there yet. He tilts his head, catching your heartbeat as a slow, steady thump that keeps him at bay, and moves to check on his most recent experiment. He frowns as he finds after the allotted time, his cells remain by their lonesome, still unable to identify your Human disease as a threat.

Truthfully, it perplexes him. You determined early on that you share enough DNA to potentially be susceptible to the same diseases. Hell, by all means this is something Simurians have already overcome. It came from the same source, so he can’t figure out why his stem cells have yet to take to yours.

Carding his finger through his hair, he lets out a forlorn sigh, eyes shut for a long moment. Your heart is a steady drum in his ear, a reminder of what it is that he’s working towards. Had someone told him two weeks ago that he’d be helping such a pitiful little species overcome a disease of their own doing, he might not have believed them. But there’s more to you than your brittle bone structure and weak muscle mass. You’re smart. Perhaps not as advanced as he is, but you’re smart far beyond your thirty five years.

You’re smart in the kind of way Sukuna can only dream. He’s seen the way your mind works, how thoughts pour out before you even have time to put them together. He’s seen how resilient you are in the face of certain death. But what really gets him is your attitude. You grin through every shortcoming. You ensure him that if you keep trying, eventually your minds will come together and you’ll figure it out. You never acknowledge that breakthroughs like this take centuries. You didn’t even blink when he revealed that he’s been searching for the source of the Kerm for over a hundred years.

You’re unlike anything Sukuna’s ever known. And something dark crawls beneath his skin when you don’t rouse by the time you’re usually eating. Noon, you called it once.

With his experimental cells set in an extremely cold environment, he leaves the workspace to round your ship. His head tilts as he listens for your heartbeat as though it ever left his periphery, but it’s as sound as it’s ever been. Slowed by sleep perhaps, but sound. He comes to a halt when it grows louder as he nears your sleeping bay. His hand drifts across the scraped metal where your ship tilted on its axis when it scraped the ground as he scooped you up, resting along the damaged hull.

He hones in on you, and finds you’re still breathing. Still there. Still alive. But shallow. There’s no wheeze, no sharp inhales. It’s simple and shallow.

His brow furrows as he turns to fully face the ship. You aren’t just malnourished anymore. Something is wrong. His gaze lifts, traveling along the mechanics that keep your ship in one piece, far more primitive than the smooth and compact design of his. He doesn’t know what he expects to find, but when what he’s faced with isn’t an easy explanation, he turns on his heel.

He moves with more severity than he has in a century, no longer silent as he pads over extended corridors of metal that leave him questioning ever having a ship of this size. When he reaches his lab, he reaches for a scanner and jogs back to your ship.

It only takes a moment to calibrate its sensor to search only for organic matter. He lifts it to your ship. Alveolarium, as expected. Blood, and healthy stem Alveolar cells, as expected. All in small quantities.

Until everything lights up red. Immense amounts of blood, of musculature and tissue, along with a high volume of water. He’s found you. And along with everything he expects of an organic creature, a revelation that makes his blood run cold.

An uncontrolled quantity of Alveolarium. You’re infected.

Somehow, between the multitude of items you’ve exchanged and the experiments you’ve run by your lonesome, you must have been exposed. Your energy is being sapped because your body is fighting a disease engineered to kill.

He harshly clicks and growls to himself in a series of muttered curses, as he stares at the reading. For the first time since the bioweapon you call Kerm was found on Simuria over two hundred years ago, he finds himself completely and utterly helpless yet again. Control slips through his fingers like the sands of time as he raises the scanner once more as though it might reveal a different fate, but it never does. 

His chest rises and falls heavily, his arms falling to his sides as he stares blankly. His mind takes a moment to wrap around the reality that you’re not Simurian. You’re human. You’re noisy and weak, your mind can’t keep up with your thoughts, and you’re invasive as hell– you won’t adapt to the illness. And god, is it quiet without you.

Urgency kicks in like a long-dormant volcano coming to life as he moves back to the table, evaluating how many samples he has left. He draws more of his cells, ignoring the tingling feeling in his arm as he injects himself with a drug to draw stem cells from his marrow. He drags more of his lab to the hangar, setting out tables and creating extra boxes able to pressurize to the same barometric pressure as that of an oxygenated atmosphere.

He lowers incubation times to do more tests, changing the parameters so often that his notes become a mess.

You don’t move. He hears you shuffle once on the first day. On the second, he grits his teeth as he listens to your harsh breaths. Your moans, your groans. You move at one point in what sounds like a drag of your feet and he hears water, but he’s not even positive if you make it back to your quarters.

As he watches one of his cells back off from Humanity’s infected lung cells, he leans over the table on two arms, sucking in a long breath. He doesn’t know how long he has. He doesn’t know how long you can survive without food. He doesn’t know if you have more water.

His second pair of hands ball into fists at his sides as he shuts all four eyes tightly. He didn’t know what to do two hundred years ago watching something so similar take out his entire species. He doesn’t know what to do now, stuck in the same situation. His knowledge is far more advanced than everything he knew back then. His technology and abilities exceed everything from back then. So why the fuck can’t he figure it out?

Is it that your suggestions were more useful than he gave you credit for? No, is it that he simply misses them? That they kept his mind from running off-rails into mania?

He works himself to the bone until he’s leaning with his back to your window. With one knee pulled up, he rests his elbow atop it, using his hand to block the light from his pounding head. He absently rubs at the bridge of his nose, eyes shut as he runs through formulas in his head until his mind begins to give in. The only thing he can bring his mind to hone in on is the sound of your heart. The steady reminder of the noisy human he’s doing this for in the first place.

Just as he begins to drift off, the gentle buzz of lights in your ship comes to a halt, a mechanical voice brought to life by necessity.

“Backup power activated. Life support systems online.”

The alien jolts, his slumber interrupted as he stares up at your ship with wild eyes. They flick all around the bridge as he takes in the red light and the way the buttons along the navigation board have dimmed, many shutting off altogether.

“Backup?” He states the word as though the program might respond to him. “Online?” Neither word is in his vocabulary, and as he gets to his feet, all four hands pressed to the glass, he searches desperately for meaning. “Human? Human?” His mind is too worn out to fill in the gaps with context as panic coats his movements like a snake slowly seeping its venom into its prey.

With a final call of your name, his fingers squeak as they drag along the glass. He turns back to his work station, dragging his hands violently over his scalp. He clicks and growls to himself, slamming a lower hand down over one of the sealed pressurized boxes. It cracks easily from his strength, putting his experiments immediately at risk. His eyes widen, two hands raising as though he might be able to stop it with his bare hands. He rushes back through his ship, racing through corridors to find something capable of stopping the crack before it shatters altogether.

Returning with a handful of options, he opts to melt a stone element from his planet into the crack. It’s the safest option he can think of. Sitting back from the soldering gun, he collapses onto the floor in a flurry of exhausted limbs. His stomach mouth parts as his body expends much of his energy on his mental state, only furthering his trouble.

In an effort to gather his thoughts, he leans over his knees, dragging his hands down his face. Backup. Red lights came on, some systems shut down. Using context clues, he can put that together. He pushes down his panic as he works on the second word. Online. He can still hear your ship whirring. He can hear your breathing. Life support must be working.

Okay. One problem down.

No matter how he changes the co-culture or adjusts the selective pressure, no matter how he adjusts his hypothesis or the duress he puts his cells under, the results remain the same. His cells adapt. But never to the disease. They co-exist in separate worlds.

Two eyes flick towards your ship, reminded of you, stuck on your own in a cell of your own doing. His fingers curl into his palm as he drives his focus back to his makeshift lab.

He can’t figure out why his cells won’t recognize yours. You may be different species, but his cells should recognize the pathogen in the Alveolarium as similar to the same illness that took out a majority of Simuria. He’s already adapted past it, and the cell structure isn’t that different.

He drags his nails over his scalp while his lower arms remain in fists. How much power do you have left? How much longer can you survive without water? You’re largely compounded of it based on his scan, can you survive without intake?

With a harsh growl, he pushes to his feet, ignoring the way his muscles protest. Pain simmers as he pushes them, keeping the reins on his control over this situation with an iron grasp. He pushes through the burn, pushes his mind to its limits as he works out chemical compounds with what brain power he has left, all the while continuing to alter the cells’ environment until he has nothing left to give.

–

Your ship doesn’t do its usual chime come morning. What’s worse is that your coughing startles him awake. Your heart stutters, a deadly sound for any species.

Hunched over in an odd position on the floor, Sukuna cracks his neck, rubbing at it as adrenaline pumps through his veins.

You’re dying. For all the tireless work he’s doing, you’re still dying.

He reaches out for the window where you once sat, dragging his fingers over it like your very ship might fall from his grasp at any moment. His breathing accelerates, his chest leaden with the gravity of the situation. Resting his entire body against the glass, all four arms settle along the panel. His head rests unevenly on the panel, off-kilter at the whim of the plate that resides over the right side of his face. A low rumble starts from deep within his chest, erupting in a full-blown furious fit of hisses, clicks, Simurian syllables and roars.

He curses in his mother tongue like he did over a hundred years ago. He’s spent over a century learning, advancing, and searching the damn stars for a bioweapon only for the very same thing to be his demise once again.

Peeling himself off of your ship, he reaches back to rub at a kink in his neck. His first issue was a lack of understanding of your ship system. He fixed that. His second issue is the cells. He can’t fix that without trial and error. His third issue is you dying, which is made up of two issues. The pressure of his ship would crush you, but your own life support systems are failing. When your ship depressurizes, the hull will be crushed, your oxygen will flow out into the sulfuric compounds that make up his air, and you’ll suffocate.

And then there’s the dehydration. And he doesn’t know which one is a more immediate threat. Regardless, his immediate problem is your ship. He stares at it in an effort to figure out how to remove it from the equation.

He could create a new box for you, something smaller than your ship, create his own life support systems for you and pressurize the box by pumping in oxygen and out carbon dioxide, similar to the box he uses for experiments. It’s not impossible in theory, but he doesn’t have the materials on-board to build a box of that size, nor does he have an extra generator capable of creating oxygen at that scale.

The only materials aboard are from your ship, the very thing he can’t tear apart right now. 

He drags his hand back through his hair, tearing it straight from the scalp as he fails to find a way to guarantee containment while also pressurizing whatever he can work out. On a small scale, he can manage with what’s in his lab. On a large scale, all he can truly manage is his ship itself. His shoulders fall slowly. His ship.

The pressure of your atmosphere wouldn’t be a big deal on a creature like him. His ship could handle that without question. His muscles would survive. He could wear a suit, pump the sulfuric components through it. He could save you from the immediate threat. For a moment, the thought sits with him. It slips into his chest along his ribs, curling around his pounding hearts. It almost doesn’t feel real.

But when the dust settles and he’s left simply staring at your window, it becomes suddenly, startlingly, real. He turns on his heel like a man on a mission, moving through the ship as he heads for the mechanical room. He wrenches the small metal door with too much force, causing it to bend as he slips down into the tight space.

Machinery hums and breathes around him, worn pipes humming on every side as he shimmies through the space you might think was built by someone else given how much Sukuna is forced to squeeze through it. A whirring tank brushes his skin– hot– burning him in the process, but it’s barely a distraction when he’s aiming for the back of the room.

Sure enough, the sulfuric gas generator residing at the back comes into view quickly. The generator currently keeping his ship pressurized could be repurposed for oxygen through chemical reactions similar to what’s currently generating his sulfuric gasses. He can suit up, and–

His hands come to a halt as he finds himself scanning his surroundings like it might change his fate.

]He only has one generator. He can only create sulfuric compounds for his own atmosphere on a small scale with what he has onboard his ship, but not enough to support him long-term, and what’s currently stored won’t last forever. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg, when he considers that he still has to kill the Kerm, on a planet whose atmosphere he knows nothing about, with creatures built to kill whether through sheer violence or illness. He can’t risk using what sulfuric compounds he has stored while aboard his own ship.

In the cramped space with the generator’s hatch open, he presses the ball of his palm against his temple. There’s an answer. One that he’s already considering. But the cost could be his life. He could make the change to oxygen and pray his body is forced to adapt and maybe save you, should he survive. It’s either that or sit here and listen to your heart and breathing weaken until you’re nothing but a shadow in his hangar bay.

On the flip side, if he doesn’t adapt, then you’re both dead.

Sukuna has always been a man of certainties. He chose science because it makes sense. He chose science, because variables don’t react without reason. He chose science because it gives him control of his outcomes through error and studious attention. But this decision isn’t about science or reason.

This decision is about the hundreds of Simurians he feels responsible for losing. It’s about his revenge against the Kerm. It’s about the noisy human wheezing in his hangar bay who told him she wanted to see Simuria. It’s about the stupid girl whose heart stuttered as she solemnly lied to him about being okay with her fate. It’s about how cold your hand felt, even through the glass.

He barks out a Simurian curse, reaching for the tools necessary to begin generating a different gas.

He wrenches on a cable, giving it a harsh twist to unlock it from its position. The ship comes alight with warnings that he opts to block out as the pressure of the hull begins to shift. It’s not painful to begin, even as the ship’s very structure complains with harsh moans and groans. He floods the chamber with sodium chloride and ups the heat until it begins producing oxygen. As the remaining sulfuric gas runs into a reserve chamber, he shuts the generator and continues to ignore the creaking and warnings his ship spews.

Getting to his feet again, he slides through the tight space, sucking in every last breath he can of sulfuric gasses as they begin to dissipate.

Oxygen hurts. He pushes through the pain, trudging through the halls as he fails to catch his breath, certain that the generator is working when his muscles feel loose as the pressure of the ship adjusts to the new gas flowing through its chambers. He turns down a long hall, ignoring the flashing lights along every wall while the hull groans. When he finally reaches the hangar, his chest doesn’t ache or burn, it sears like something is clawing at him from within, begging to be let out. It’s not his first brush with pain like this, but there’s something different when it’s his lungs. Tears form along his lash line as he lacks sulfuric gasses to his brain, the compounds unable to pump blood to his most important organs.

When he reaches your ship, he stumbles into it, still upright through sheer willpower alone. He slams his fist into the panel nearest where he last knew you were, loosening the edge. His fingers curl around the newly revealed edge and with all the might left in his body, he tears it off. Along with it comes a series of mechanics as your ship begins to beep and protest in tandem with his. Only once he tears through some wiring with a series of flashing lights does your ship finally shut off.

This is it– the test of his own scientific capabilities. Whether or not you survive in the environment he’s artificially created within his own ship.

The blaring alarms mitigate his ability to find you, his head whipping one way or the other. He drags himself through the pain, through the mind-numbing brain fog, picking up a half-finished bottle of water he spots on a counter along the way, until he finds you.

You’re sitting awkwardly in a corner, shivering, but conscious. Alive.

Your eyes are harshly lidded when you stare up at him, clinging to your blanket like it’s a lifeline. Your dry lips part, a look of sheer confusion falling over your expression like you doubt what you’re seeing in the dark corridor of your ship whose systems have completely failed.

Sukuna’s chest struggles to rise and fall evenly, every breath furthering the pain behind his eyes as his lungs fail to pump sulfuric compounds into his bloodstream and his brain function falters. He doesn’t let his knees give out until he’s able to hand you the water bottle.

“S’kuna?” Your voice sounds as though it’s been scraped against the very compounds that make up Simurian mountains. You sound as though you don’t trust your voice, let alone your mind.

Close enough to leave the water within your reach, the giant alien’s body finally gives out. The water hits the floor beside you just within reach as one arm attempts to grab the counter that you lean against. His palm brushes the surface, but his body drops like a stone to the floor beside you, scraping his palm. His vision is narrow as he uses what little strength he has left to envelop you in his arms, acting as a blanket for your shivering form.

The moment he touches you, clarity shoots through your mind like lightning. This is no fever dream, you’re not waking up out of sheer necessity of needing water or a way to warm up. It’s a shock to your system in more ways than one. He’s not just warm– his body runs like a furnace in comparison to yours. He’s so warm that curling into him isn’t a choice, it’s survival and he knows it.

The very thing that kept you apart for so long hits you harder than the shock that Sukuna is beside you. “Wait–” the word comes weakly as you give his arm a shove. It barely affects him. “You can’t–” A cough settles at the back of your throat, interrupting your thoughts. “What did you do?” You rasp out between the kind of coughs that wrack your body and send spikes of pain to every receptor that will listen.

But he doesn’t respond, any semblance of consciousness long gone as his arms go limp. You can’t move him. You can barely move yourself. The most you can do is hope that his body takes to oxygen like it did to science, or whatever it was that truly gave him an extra pair of arms. You assume that’s his hope too.

The flashing lights and warning buzzers continue to blare outside the hull. Your ship offers very little cover from the noise, but enough that your already-foggy mind is able to drown out the noise with the static of illness. Unable to fight the heaviness held over you, you shakily grab the water. You may be too delirious to grasp the true gravity of the situation and what Sukuna’s done, but you know better than to overlook the gift of water.

The massive alien wrapped around you on the ground makes it easy to lean into him, basking in his warmth as it quells a modicum of your shivers. The longer you sit there in the flashing lights and blaring sirens, the more your body gives in to the grasps of the sandman. Subconsciously, you lean into Sukuna– passed out beside you– until your head leans against his shoulder. It doesn’t rise and fall, but you find comfort in the fact that when you press a hand to his chest in search of something, anything, that might give you hope, his heart pushes a single beat through. One after another, each of his two hearts continues to push through the unlikely situation.

That reassurance makes it easier to give in to the forces pushing you to unconsciousness. Because you recognize Sukuna’s actions as more than just kindness in the face of danger.

This is a species you’ve never witnessed whose primary goal was revenge, brought to his knees by the very stowaway he huffed and puffed over being noisy. Not by manipulation or force either, but by choice. Sukuna didn’t just choose to save you. He chose pain, he chose to bet on low odds. He chose to put off his mission, and he chose to endanger and expose himself to disease, all for you.

He isn’t just asking you to live. He’s commanding it.

–

Sukuna doesn’t stir for forty eight hours. You aren’t much better, but at least your body faces wakefulness in the face of dehydration. You don’t know how long Sukuna can survive without food or water, but you have no other option but to hope it’s longer than you.

Midway through the third day is when he finally stirs. It comes in twitches at first. It’s not dramatic, but in the few moments where you’re awake and delirious and you spot any semblance of movement, you cling to him like your life depends on it. Because it does.

Next come the wheezing breaths. Then groans, and sharp inhales that sound unnatural. You feel his pain deep in your ribs like a stabbing sensation. His fingers drag so harshly against the metal floor that his fingers break through it, the metal proving to be little more than an ant to his elephant strength.

Consciousness is dramatic for him.

Like a switch being flicked, his body comes to life and with it, his pain and confusion. He flies back, head ramming harshly into the cabinets you had been leaning against. He huffs out his displeasure, but the sensation is harsh in his chest. His lungs may have adapted, but oxygen is a harsh forced change to sulfur. The compounds shred within his chest, something that has one of his many hands flying up to grip at his chest.

He mutters a harsh curse under his breath in his mother tongue that sends pain back through his throat like a ricocheting bullet. In the cramped confines of your torn-open ship’s hull, he rests his head back against the door to the lab. Every breath is fire in the large expanse of his chest, his lungs accepting the oxygen not out of desire, but need.

He mutters a curse again, recoiling far less as he pushes through the pain. Ignoring the deliriousness of pain and the cramping in his gut, he cards a hand through mildly oily locks, pushing them away from his forehead. When his gaze glues itself to you, blearily watching him from the floor in a state of suspended wakefulness, he freezes altogether.

You’re alive.

His chest finds a new way to deliver pain as he hunches forward, sliding back to the spot where he had clearly been your pillow if your odd position is anything to go off of. He glides over the floor, taking a seat where he had been in an effort to provide a pillow.

The sensation of his returned warmth has your lashes fluttering as you stare up at him. He can see the gears physically turning in your mind as you make sense of him being there, awake, and alive as well.

For a moment, his brain betrays him. He moves on instinct, brushing his thumb over your collar. Only to be met with a weak smack to the chest. He blinks, staring down at you with confusion woven within his fondness.

“You could–” you cough, “have died.”

A series of growls and clicks between syllables you don’t recognize fall from his lips like he’s giving you a full scolding in a foreign language. It almost brings a smile to your dry lips as you recognize only two words.

“Noisy human.” His muscles are fraught from disuse as he hoists you into his lap.

The alarms may have stopped blaring, but the lights around him continue to flash in warning, reminding him of the reason he underwent this in the first place. Under the duress of having very little energy after evolution and his chest protesting his every movement, he groans as he pushes to his feet with you cradled close. He pulls you into his chest, casting a glance down at you as even in sickness, your eyes seem to shine as you watch your environment change. You never fail to bring wonder along with you, no matter the circumstances.

He treats you with the fragility of a flower as he brings you to his lab, moving over a panel that has no identifiable buttons, yet as Sukuna moves his hand over it, you hear the shift behind you. A bed reveals itself from the wall, not entirely unlike that of a human, though it’s a far harder material that he makes adjustments to in order to conform to your body as he lays you down.

His medical equipment isn’t unlike yours. He gets you started on an IV without hesitation, preventing the first of his major worries, and watches as your body shuts down, grateful for the new fluid intake. Every time you fall asleep is no easier than the last. One of his hearts skips, then the second one, but he takes the opportunity to continue his work. He moves the samples back to the lab, no longer bothering with the oxygenated box as he’s able to work faster now.

Waiting is the hardest part. It leaves him feeling powerless, pushing himself to his limits to distract himself from the fact that you look weaker every time his eyes glue themselves to you.

“Dabura’s anniversary was yesterday,” he mutters one morning, standing between you and his experiments where he can monitor both.

His lower hands rest on his waist, the upper arms crossed over his chest like twisting wrong doesn’t still send a shock to his system as his lungs continue to mold themselves to their new dual-purpose. He pushes through, idly taking a step towards you and the pile of blankets he stole from your ship that keep you from shivering.

“You would like the celebration,” he remarks, meandering to the side of your bed. He lowers himself to take a closer look at you, before sinking to his knees. His upper arms rest along the edge of the bed, chin seated atop them. “We have a–” he pauses, glancing aside at the realization that he frustratingly can’t even tell you about the celebration because he lacks the words. He growls, his expression pushing into a scowl as he utters the Simurian word for ‘fire’. “A heat light. It’s big,” he presses on. “We use chemicals to create oxygen vacuums,” he continues. “Everyone comes from across the planet. We eat a lot. Drink.”

You don’t stir.

“You would have liked Satoru. He was noisy, too.” His gaze rises from where he sits to sweep your face. You don’t have the gentle look he’s grown accustomed to anymore, your features sunken and permanently pulled into a pained expression. It wrenches at his chest more than the pain of evolution somehow. “He studied the Kaliyans. Some Simurians have deep ties to them. Neither him or I did, so he chose to study them. We never did find answers before…” He huffs, muttering a curse of clicks and growls. He lets his cheek fall to his arms, at a loss. He shuts all four eyes at the sound of a timer going off, sucking in a breath as he wearily pushes to his feet.

He stares at the hologram emptily. It irks him to see the Alveolarium still rampant, but he expects no less at this point. He doesn’t know what exactly he’s expecting to get out of these at this point when experiments like this don’t just take days. They take years. They take materials and vigorous testing and… He throws his gaze over his shoulder, noting how shallow your breaths are now.

He doesn’t have years. He might not even have days, yet again. He bought himself more time, but he’s back to square one with control slipping through his fingers yet again. He grits his teeth so harshly it sends a sharp pain straight to his brain. One would only catch his wince if they were paying attention, as his bottom left eye twitches from the sensation.

Padding out from the room to give himself a break to eat as he overthinks every equation until there’s no semblance of hope left, he sits casually at the bridge, staring out at the planet below. Green clouds and space debris make up the remnants of the species that created the Kerm, long extinct by the hands of their own bioweapon. Below those clouds are the pinks and blues that make up the largely crystalline surface where the beetle-adjacent species now resides, hungry and in search of new prey.

Kerm. The thought settles between his ribs alongside the pain of his evolution. He always envisioned his arrival at their planet to be more triumphant. He envisioned traveling to its surface to ensure that his hypothesis was correct and they’ve eaten beyond their means, invasive to their own planet and destroying its very ecosystem until all that remains are themselves. Then leaving without a trace of the Kerm, the planet, or his own actions.

Yet all this trip has done is resurface every scar he buried a century ago. He scratches at them until what remains are no longer just scars, but open wounds. Forcing down what food he can manage, he drags a hand down his jaw, staring out at the planet, Methalon. It’s silent for a long moment as he inhales and holds the breath.

In Simurian, he finds himself muttering to himself. “What if you’re right, human?” Another extended silence as the thought lingers. “What if… Kerm are more than your cause? What if they’re your cure, too?”

He taps his finger along the panel in which controls reside as he mulls the thought over, before springing into action. He doesn’t have the luxury to consider the consequences, pressing a palm to the controls as they react to electromagnetic pulses emitted from his brain and read through his fingers as he brings the ship to life for the first time in a couple of weeks, disturbing the spacerock that’s settled around the ship.

With a groan, the ship’s nose shifts as he points it towards the planet’s surface. The pressure surrounding the ship shifts as he nears the atmosphere, far more dense than what you would be accustomed to, so he thanks the stars that it’s him going in place of you. He stops the ship a short distance from the planet’s surface, setting it to hover within the densely gaseous atmosphere. It’ll keep you out of reach of the Kerm, which he hypothesizes shouldn’t be able to reach you with their stubby wings.

Should he be wrong, he supposes you’ll both succumb to his stupidity. He almost cracks a morbid smile at the thought. Not that you both might be a lost cause because of his decisions, but because he so often chides you for being stupid, when he’s recklessly allowing himself to be stupid now, too.

But he’s certainly not noisy. No, he talks to you because you like it. Not because he does. He’s quiet.

Suiting up, he drops to the planet’s surface with his limited sulfuric compound supply, his tank unsuited for oxygen. Gravity pulls him down like nothing he’s ever experienced as he drops heavily to the surface. He expected the dense atmosphere, but it still presses down on him like a weight.

Crystallic compounds crunch underfoot, and he shouldn’t consider himself shocked when he comes across the first series of Kerm, or as he knows them, Methalonians. He supposes the name isn’t very fitting, however, given that they’re unnatural. They killed whatever species was more befitting of the name.

The first one turns towards him, its head swiveling as its iridescent shell reflects the gorgeous light of the crystalline environment aiding it to blend in. It regards Sukuna with an entirely animal head tilt that might fool someone who doesn’t know their methods, but Sukuna isn’t fooled. He grips his EMP gun tighter, preparing himself for the inevitable. While the Kerm believe he’s fooled, he sets down a heavy containment pod, opening it with a hiss.

When he faces the group again, all fifteen or so creatures are facing him. Their wings buzz and hiss as they communicate, their antennae twitching through the air as they coordinate what Sukuna already knows to be an attack.

This time, however, he’s prepared. The first one approaches him slowly and curious, feigning a kindness they don’t possess. The brutish alien keeps up the facade in an effort to keep himself from being buried by a sea of Kerm.

He reaches a suited-up and reinforced hand out to the creature, watching its mandibles click together. It approaches slowly, peering up at Sukuna’s outwardly non-threatening demeanor. Its head tilts as it nears, nudging his fingers like it might provoke him.

But it’s not Sukuna that breaks the facade first. The creature zips forward, smashing its mandibles together where Sukuna’s hand just was, giving him enough time to lunge back. As the rest of the group moves in a coordinated hive towards him, he unleashes a small EMP attack that temporarily disorients the Kerm, sending them in more varied directions.

One that approaches him meets the fate of a heated vibrating dagger to its thorax, while another leaps at Sukuna’s shoulder. He spins, wrenching his shoulder in an effort to dislodge it from his suit, but its mandibles dig into the material. The material is impenetrable by their mandibles, but fuck if it doesn’t hurt anyway.

Hissing, Sukuna throws an arm around the Kerm to prevent it from leaving as he pulls the gut-ridden blade from the previous Kerm to lodge it into the next one. He remains largely in control, throwing one off to tear another from its own thorax with the blade the following moment until the smaller crowd re-coordinates itself. Sukuna launches another small EMP attack, throwing two of the group off, while the remaining four all leap at him at once. Mandibles clamp down on one shoulder, while another clings to his abdomen, choosing to methodically jab at the spots where his organs are.

Smart little asshole.

Sukuna recoils, hissing as pain rips through his stomach just beyond where his second mouth can reach. It momentarily disorients him, knocking him to the ground long enough that the remaining two Kerm are able to pile themselves onto him as well. They separate him from both the EMP and dagger, the sound of the vibrating tool over the crystalline earth grating on his nerves.

He shuts his eyes tightly, attempting to reset himself as he evaluates how much he’s been stamped down. He grits his teeth, grunting as he manages to lift an arm and throw one creature off with enough force to disorient it. The freed hand allows him to get enough leverage to flip himself over, slamming one hand straight through the creature’s shell. With one fierce glare, he flips the fight back in his favor, grabbing an incoming Kerm by the head and crushing it in one hand.

With a majority of his movement freed, he picks up the EMP again, blasting the remaining three insects and smashing them too, leaving only the one he tossed aside earlier. He grabs it by the thorax, wrangling it between two arms as he shoves it into the containment box with his spare set of hands. Once it’s inside, he lets out a huff, staring down at his gut-covered suit. He’ll need to be sure he carefully washes himself and his suit after this, given that he doesn’t want to expose you to more diseases that the bioweapon could have hidden beneath its shell.

Getting back to his feet, he better evaluates the surrounding environment. There’s evidence of trees, of civilization and buildings in the distance now turned to rubble and ash. He doesn’t have much sulfuric compounds left to breathe, so he figures he’ll do a once-over of the planet from within the ship, focusing his efforts back on a cure for you as he returns to the safety of his ship.

–

Splaying the Kerm’s insides across his workbench proves to be a disgusting feat. Even within a containment box, the smell permeates the damn room. He ends up moving it into the hangar, which by some grace has better filtration, but Sukuna finds himself further beaten down by the smell. As if his failures weren’t enough.

Unlike his cells, the Kerm’s stem cells do attack the Alveolarium… Unfortunately, no matter how he attempts to alter them, they only ever seem to act as aggressors.

For as smart as Sukuna is, he finds himself missing your curiosity. Your stupid questions. You challenge him. Not just because you’re noisy, but because you’re far more willing to approach the unlikely with an open mind. You lack the knowledge he has, specializing in natural biology where Sukuna excels in chemistry, cytology, geology, archeology, and engineering, but he’s also had a few extra years. Your lack of specific knowledge allows you to excel in general knowledge that Sukuna found himself praising you for.

Mentally. It’s easier to show fondness through actions than words, after all.

Bringing a hand up to his eyes, he presses a thumb and forefinger into them, yawning as every continued failure sets him back not just physically, but mentally too.

He collapses at the base of your bed, your breathing setting his nervous system into a furious rage of emotion as he realizes for the first time how close he truly is to losing you, with no cure in sight. Your species is weak in every sense of the word. Your muscles lack the build that Simurians have, your brain’s capacity is low, your immune system could be knocked over by a harsh wind, and yet Sukuna can’t help but find you endearing. Your lifespan is barely a smear in the grand scheme of his life, and yet the brutish alien, a species who mates for life, finds himself wondering how many ways you might be able to throw his life into disarray.

He wants your annoying quips. He wants your too-loud rambles. He wants to feel you warm in his arms, your eyes bright and wide as he shows you a Simurian mountaintop in some dumb-looking suit of his creation.

He slams his head back against your bed with enough force to rattle the very stone that makes it up. Dragging his hands down his face, the most he can do is stare at the experiments as one by one the timers go off and he’s left with one failure after another. His gaze splits as he looks between not just one, but four separate failures. Pushing his hands back through his hair, he balls his fists within the strands, eyes shut tight. Sitting so close to you, he still feels far. He finds himself mourning something he has yet to lose.

You haven’t awoken in several days, and as much as he wishes he could equate it to illness, the fact is that you’re dying. He can pump as many nutrients as he wants straight into your body without allowing your stomach the opportunity to reject his food, it’ll only do so much when it’s not your stomach fighting you anymore. It’s your lungs.

Every round of failed experiments is another scathing tear at his wounds as he leans against your bed on the floor. His gut aches where the Kerm attempted to strategically puncture his suit and beneath his performance longsleeve are several mild puncture wounds that only serve as annoyances in the grand scheme of things.

“I’m the foolish one,” he states simply out of the blue. “Not you.” He doesn’t follow it up with a long-winded explanation or flourish, it’s as simple as he makes it. You only ever did what you thought was right, giving every living creature the benefit of the doubt. It landed you in a cell, parked in his garage, but god damn it. You gave life your all. You lived without regrets. Sukuna’s lifespan trumps yours, and yet he lives with every weight he’s ever conjured still boiling under his skin.

He’s spent over a hundred years building himself into an impenetrable wall. The kind of man that doesn’t let his past haunt him. Yet here you are, under his skin like a leech and wrapped around his mind with roots that dig straight for his hearts.

He’s so wrapped up in his thoughts that he doesn’t feel your hand at first, as it slips into his hair. He jolts when at last he feels movement against his head, whipping up to face you. He meets your eyes from barely over the bed, heavily hooded as you regard him with a small smile in spite of yourself.

His shoulders fall as he approaches the side of the bed again, resting his head atop his arms. His lips press into a thin line as he doesn’t just let you reach back out, but leans into your touch against his cheek.

“You know,” you rasp, unsurprisingly coughing. “I was wrong about Kerm, but I wasn’t–” another cough, “wrong about you.”

His brow furrows, a deep scowl overtaking his features. Your words sound startlingly like the kind of thing that one might say when they’re coming to terms with the decisions they made in life, further wrenching his hearts.

“Thanks for trying to help Earth.”

He growls and clicks his displeasure with your words, earning a laugh that feels warm even in sickness. When you quiet down, his muttering is nearly unintelligible. “I don’t care about Earth.”

“I know,” you smile, your thumb trailing down his cheek as one lower eye flutters shut. “I like you too, Sukuna.”

He allows himself the peace of shutting his eyes, kneeling beside your bed with his cheek in your hand until his legs go numb and you pass out again. Pain spikes through his knees when he finally rises and straightens them, sighing as he wearily looks over his experiments again. His gaze passes over a hologram displaying one of his cells idly standing by as he considers what the hell he could possibly be doing wrong when something finally hits him like the full force of a jet engine as something dangerous surges into his chest– hope.

His cells are part of a system. A system capable of sending electromagnetic pulses like thoughts to his cells in order to trigger mutation. Sure, the cells will mutate on their own no matter what you put them through, but could the reason they aren’t accepting your cells be because there’s no system to indicate to his cells that there’s an issue?

He’s been approaching the whole situation under the lens of his cells being anti-pathogens, when in fact they’re closer to mutagens. They aren’t a cure, they would never be accepted as a cure. In fact, he’s willing to wager a bet that you’re right and there is a cure that could be pulled from the Kerm, but he doesn’t have the time to figure that out.

His cells could very well re-write your DNA. They could overwrite important information, they could make you more sick. He doesn’t know. His experiments will never work without a live test subject. But on the flip side, they could save you. They could mutate your cells into something capable of handling Alveolarium. Quite frankly, when both alternatives are death, he’s willing to give it a shot.

He moves across the room quickly, hitting a dial that brings to life a hologram in order to act as a whiteboard. He takes your weight and general body size, measuring the exact quantity of his cells that would need to be injected in order to fight a full system infection without the dose being lethal, or possibly mutating beyond control. Gene therapy is a risky move by all means, but he doesn’t have any other options.

He moves through the lab with ease as he extracts a new sample from his lower arm, moving it in a box to ensure his cells aren’t contaminated. He isolates the cells necessary at a dosage he prays is non-lethal and injects them into a sample of healthy stem cells you provided before you got sick to act as carriers.

With a final check of his calculations, he moves to your bedside, praying the healthy cells trick your body into accepting his cells. Sucking in a breath, he injects the gene therapy, and pulls up a chair to wait.

There’s nothing ceremonious about the wait. Sukuna busies himself by continuing to search for a cure, something you can send to Earth assuming he didn’t rip through the return vessels in his effort to get to you. After every pair of gloves he tosses aside, he always returns to the same chair to wait, resting his head on the edge of your bed.

On the second day when he wakes up with his hair glued to his forehead by sweat and drool dripping down his cheek, he moves to wipe it when he finds his head weighed down. He blinks, unable to see past the arms crossed under his cheek, but when he lifts his gaze just slightly, he finds you’ve shifted for the first time in days. Your hand is settled on the back of his head, fingers curled into his hair.

When he tries to tilt his head, your hand falls away again. You’re still asleep, but the hope in his chest surges.

Your face fills out properly over the next couple of days. He seems to miss your waking hours whenever they do happen on his horribly varied sleep schedule, but your coughing fits begin to die down and your breathing evens out.

It’s almost a week later when you wake up with an ache in your muscles like no other, but relief in your chest. The ceiling should be unfamiliar, but even within your fever dreams, you knew glimpses of him were real. Your head lolls to the side, the bedding beneath you rough in spite of its conformity to your body. Across the room, Sukuna moves around the ship in a frantic bout of quick movements. There’s a crudeness to his movements that doesn’t fit the put-together Simurian you’ve come to know. You catch a glance of the side of his face, noting the dark circles under two eyes that rest in a familiar fashion on his face, while those that sit angled along flesh are simply squinting more than usual.

He yawns, betraying the obvious. There’s a slight tremor to his hand as he uses a pipette to transfer cells. He sets a phial down, his lower arms heavily leaning over his work table. It’s obvious weariness plagues him to his marrow, but he doesn’t stop for a second.

“Sukuna?”

Crash!

In the flurry of his limbs leaving the table as he whips around, he sends an empty flask to the floor. Not a single one of his eyes shifts to follow the mess, frantically flickering around your face as he searches for signs of illness. Rather than the dull look he’s faced for the past week, he finds a gleam that he mentally pockets for later. He moves towards you in slow, lumbering steps like he doesn’t quite believe what he’s seeing, before lowering down to a kneel. His skin is deeply calloused, far denser than human skin, as his hands come to rest on your cheeks.

You find yourself biting back a smile as the stoic alien you’ve come to know keeps his intense gaze on you as he nuzzles his nose against you. You may not know Simurian, but you know animals. In some species, that’s a kiss.

“Sukuna?”

He hums.

“Was that a kiss?”

His lips press into a line, nudging his nose slightly against yours again like action is easier than a reply.

“Humans kiss with their lips,” you explain softly.

He doesn’t move immediately, his face a breadth from yours. Something cocky and knowing gleams within his gaze. A laugh bubbles from within your chest but it comes out as a cough, which you attempt to stifle, pulling back momentarily. Sukuna drags you back like he can’t stand the mere thought of distance.

Your laughter subsides quickly as you try hard not to grin.

The stoic Simurian’s breath comes out in an eager puff against your face. “Lips are usually for other things,” he offers with a suggestive tone. But he doesn’t know how to deny you anymore. The corner of his lips quirk up as he surges forward, engulfing you in a claiming kiss. You don’t know what exactly a kiss means for a thousand-year-old being that spends their life with one person when you only live a fraction of his lifespan, but in spite of that you don’t think you mind finding out.

Everything about the kiss is all-encompassing. His smell floods your senses first, the sort of sterile musk that comes with a man working himself to the bone in a lab. His taste doesn’t match it, though. There’s a spice to his taste that isn’t Earthly in nature, but it’s pleasant like a warm herbal tea. It’s intoxicating and addicting all the same, the kind of taste you could get drunk on, should he let you.

His grip doesn’t let up, hands sliding up the base of your scalp as he tips your head back to deepen the kiss. Your hands fly up to his collar, curling into the thick material of his muscle-tight shirt for purchase. It’s dizzying, and not just because your head is spinning with the sheer amount of thoughts bouncing around your overactive mind like ping pong balls. His lips move against yours in the kind of rhythm that doesn’t just insinuate passion, but something far deeper. A desperation that can only be conveyed through actions.

You can sense his resistance as you pull back, but you find yourself laughing as your hands splay across his broad chest. “Sukuna,” you tease. “I’m feeling better, but you still need to give my lungs a break.” You laugh airily, chest rising and falling heavily as he refuses to break contact.

The lumbering giant’s shoulders tense for a moment, then relax, his hands gliding down the column of your neck to rest on your shoulders. He takes the opportunity to envelop you in all four arms, grateful to find you’re no longer shivering. You don’t hesitate for even a moment, arms snaking around his neck as you bury your face into his neck.

“How’d you do it?”

He inhales, letting out a breath of relief as he relaxes into your grip in spite of his awkward hunched position over your bedside. “My cells aren’t like yours. They react to neural oscillations and signals sent through electromagnetism. We were trying to use them like anti-pathogens, but they aren’t.”

“They’re mutagens,” you finish the thought in an excited burst, pulling back to face him with those wonder-filled wide eyes he’s come to adore. “You did gene therapy.”

He chuffs proudly, puffing out his chest under your hands. It’s somehow far more endearing up close.

“Wait, oh my god–” You proclaim suddenly like you’ve come to the greatest realization on earth. “Do you think that means I can breathe sulfur? Or– Or maybe I can grow extra arms,” you murmur, wiggling your fingers over his chest.

His expression deadpans. “No.”

“But if you changed my DNA with alien DNA–”

“That’s–” He breathes out a sigh, amused with your overactive imagination and how fast your mouth moves before your mind can catch up. “That’s not how gene therapy works.”

“Bummer,” you pout. It’s clear the word perplexes him as he narrows his eyes, but he cracks a hint of a smile. He gets it regardless.

You let the moment hang, laughing airily as the reality of your last two weeks truly hits you. Sukuna doesn’t handle the situation with the same lightness as you do, pulling you back into his chest and muffling your laughter altogether. You wrap your arms around his torso once more in reassurance. “I’m still here,” you promise.

“Stupid human,” he mutters, his chin dipping over your shoulder as he locks you tightly against him with a squeeze. When you bury your face into his broad chest, he winces, hiding it behind another squeeze as he attempts to ignore the meager injuries left behind by the Kerm. “Stupid, weak human.”

“I know,” you murmur into his chest. “I know. But I’m here now.”

–

The difference between Human and Simurian traditions turns out to be greater than you think. Not in the sort of grand way you might expect, but in the sense that Sukuna doesn’t quite seem to know what to make of being close. Of course, Humanity aims to choose a person for life, but not without trial and error. For Simurians, there’s some sort of instinct. Something Humans don’t possess that has Sukuna uncertain how to navigate the idea of courting you. In particular, while you’re still recovering.

Your pulse increases to a steady waking beat as your lashes flutter open. You’ve gotten accustomed to the strange way the stone bed conforms to your shape, but you have yet to grow accustomed to the way you’re greeted every morning, even a week into your recovery where– by and large– you just have a cough.

You’ve barely roused when Sukuna’s hand is firmly planted on your jaw, tilting your head left and right. “Nngh, Sukuna,” you sigh, fingers wrapping around his wrist. He doesn’t budge, not satisfied until he’s determined that you’re still on a steady road to recovery. His fingers loosen once he lets out a steady breath, his palm sliding down to your cheek. He doesn’t hesitate for so much as a moment to lower himself to his knees and brush his nose against yours. The Simurian nuzzle is something you’ve grown fond to waking up to and even in your half-asleep state, you find yourself unable to hold back a grin.

“You haven’t coughed yet.”

“I just woke up,” you reply groggily, amused.

“You’re better.”

“Getting there,” you chide, staring down at the mountain of a man on his knees for you. Every morning gets easier, and every morning you have a menacing-looking puppy greeting you at your bedside. It makes recovery easier, especially when you’re forced to eat some sort of alien vegetables he cultivated for you upon converting his compost room to a garden as the only food your body won’t reject, alongside nutrients he continues to inject into your bloodstream.

Slowly pushing up to a sitting position, you suppress a cough that comes across as a personal affront to the bulky alien, who stands upright with you. “How did the experiment from last night go?” You query, your vision still mildly blurry from sleep as you look over the holograms opposite you.

“We’re close,” he murmurs, long strides taking him across the room. “Your hypothesis was right. The Kerm cells react to heat, but not too much heat. I was killing them before.”

Rubbing your eyes, you smile. “So we’re close to a cure that we can send back?”

He pauses, facing you. He’d been unwilling to send his own cells back to the very people who sent you to your death, but at your request, he’d continued experimentation for a cure that didn’t require gene therapy. “I don’t understand why you care.”

“There were eight billion Humans, Sukuna.” Your head tilts in sympathy for the fact that he resents a whole species for their treatment of you. “The hundred or so involved in sending me here shouldn’t be responsible for punishing the rest of the species.”

“Punishing,” he repeats the word, though he doesn’t need an explanation when he can use context clues.

Pushing to your feet, you walk on weakened feet to join him, sidling up to his warmth. “You know, I never got the chance to thank you.”

Two eyes flicker down to you, questioning, while the other two evaluate the weakened state of your muscles.

“You’re breathing oxygen.”

“I am.”

“And you risked getting Alveolarium from me.”

He stubbornly looks up. “I did.”

If there’s one thing that remains the same between your species, it would seem it’s embarrassment. Sukuna is over one thousand years old with no partner. You can only assume he never found someone, or prefers solitude. Or, more aptly, preferred. It’s safe to say he doesn’t know how to navigate your healthy return to his life.

As you jovially grin at his side, Sukuna adjusts the temperatures of his experimentations, each by a fraction of a degree, before he turns to face you. The tension in his shoulders has released upon seeing you eagerly facing him with clasped hands. “Yes, human?”

“Can I see the rest of your ship?”

“Not until you’re well.”

“I’m literally fine!”

He crosses both pairs of arms over his built chest. “You coughed.”

“There was something in my throat,” you counter.

His lip curls in haughty frustration. He clicks with intermittent syllables that you’re unable to put together. Missing the word, he goes with the simplest train of thought. “No.”

Stepping towards him, your palms settle over his lower veiny forearms. Your thumbs rub small circles into his tough skin, the hair on his arms noticeably standing on-end. “Please? I promise I’m okay.” His eyes narrow a fraction. “I wanna see how you keep your food, and where you’re growing those turnip things. Oh–! And the bridge, and– Wait, your ship is so big, what else do you even have here? Do you–”

He huffs loudly, but you note that in spite of the scowl pulling his brow down, relief floods his gaze and his lips fluctuate wildly between a frown and smile. It doesn’t take much for him to give in, loosening an arm as he wraps it around your shoulders in an effort to steady you as he leads the way through the ship.

It’s massive beyond anything you could ever comprehend. Metals you’re not even positive exist on Earth line the walls and natural bioluminescent amoebas are used to light long stretches of hall where wasting energy is unnecessary. Light only exists where needed, like bathing a large medical bay with a missing bed and several bottles and boxes thrown astray as though the room was flipped upside down in search of supplies. Your heart surges with something dangerous at the sight, as you know the stoic creature beside you– who doesn’t so much as bat an eye at the mess– did this for you. He tossed aside equipment and tore through supplies in order to keep you alive, who barely lives a fraction of his lifespan.

Hell, he’s almost twice your height and keeps walking at your unsteady and slow pace without so much as a peep. His hand shuffles from your shoulder to your back as he briefly points out a food hall complete with a garden and a large freezer for overgrowth and cured meats. There’s a pungent smell to the room befitting of what was once a compost bay.

“Is this what I’ve been eating?”

He chuffs, lifting a heavy arm to point at what you would otherwise describe as a radish. He states its name in his mother tongue, not bothering to translate given that the syllables thrown in between each click sound painfully like ‘engine’ and he’s heard you use that word before, so it simply doesn’t translate into a word you can both use. You nod your approval as he continues his tour with little fanfare, his hand gliding from your back to your elbow.

“I’m lucky,” he states, “they’re the only plant that will grow in oxygen from what I tried.”

Next, he leads the way through an exercise hall, a gravity converter, and a communications bay. His ship dwarfs yours in every possible way and it’s all intended for just one person. The real enigma, however, is the way his hand keeps shifting on you, like he isn’t quite sure what to do with himself now that he has you back and you’ve kissed.

“I didn’t think you’d be so awkward,” you blurt out without a care in the world, pleased as you tilt your head to find his expression narrowing just slightly.

“Awkward?” He searches for confirmation despite being able to put the context clues together.

“You keep moving your hand. Seven times now, Sukuna,” you tease, your grin widening.

“I’m guiding you,” he grumbles dismissively.

“I don’t need a hand to guide me through a ship. I’m a good follower.”

His gaze glides to the side, teeth gritting as he clicks his disapproval. “Noisy.”

Laughing, you give him a nudge that pulls his attention back. His usual aloof gaze briefly flickers across your face like he expects signs of sickness before fixing on your chiding grin. “You’re allowed to be nervous, Sukuna.”

“I’m not.” He growls out some sort of curse word in Simurian, continuing on the walk through the ship as he finds the explanation he needs. “I don’t know Human traditions. I don’t know how to move forward.”

You bite back a smile at the sweet admission. “Well, humans are a bit different.” You give him a thoughtful peek from beneath your lashes, catching the way it disengages the tension in his shoulders. “We try to stay partners for life, but we’re complicated. Emotions get in the way, people change–”

“You would separate from your partner in such a short life?” Sukuna sounds utterly shocked at the thought, his nose wrinkling as he stops dead in his tracks. He turns to face you, staring at you like he wants to shake the mere idea from existence by your shoulders.

“We try not to. But sometimes it’s inevitable.” You shrug. “Sometimes you fall out of love with the person you marry or date, or sometimes things change or distance gets in the way–”

“Then you talk about it. Or visit.” His voice comes out clipped with edge. You can’t tell whether he intends it to.

“Our transportation isn’t very advanced. The ship I was in,” you explain, pointing over your shoulder, “it’s the tenth one capable of space travel beyond our own moon.”

The brutish alien’s scowl lessens as something of far greater importance occurs to him suddenly. You allow the silence that stretches on as you recognize his troubled expression. He’s grappling with something he doesn’t know how to address. The ship stands by idly in the moment where Sukuna straightens, settling a pair of hands on his hips while the others cross over his chest. He doesn’t move as he speaks with a flat tone that almost conveys solemnity. “I can take you back. To Earth. Along with the cure, once it’s ready.”

Somewhere between the kiss, the illness, and the acceptance that your fate was to die, you forgot that there was another option. “What if I don’t want to?”

Sukuna’s gaze travels listlessly left and right. It’s clear this is something he’s considered. After all, imprisonment awaits you on Earth regardless of the cure. What point is there in returning? And yet, Simuria would be imprisonment in a roundabout way, too. You can’t breathe the sulfuric gas. He isn’t even confident in your ability to withstand the barometric pressure in one of the suits in his ship.

He doesn’t answer immediately, either pretending something caught his attention by tilting his second ear towards something, or genuinely listening to something. Regardless, he glances aside as he considers your question before proceeding to completely ignore your query. “How do Humans wed?” He mutters, as though the concept that he doesn’t know makes him mad.

“We date first,” you chuckle. “We impress one another. We go out and do fun things together. We give gifts and spend time being intimate. Like, cuddling and kissing. Oh–! And then if things are going well, one person presents the other with a ring with a pretty stone in the middle and if things are right, that person says yes and then they wed and there’s a big ceremony, and then both people get rings, and friends come visit, and–”

Sukuna bends down to your height, nudging your nose once, then kissing you. “What’s a ring?”

Giddily, you can’t help a giggle as he shuts you up without complaint of your noisiness, simply backtracking to the portion of your rambling he doesn’t understand. “It goes around your finger.” Instinctively reaching for his face, your finger traces along the edge of the protruding plate from his face. One of his eyes twitches, but he allows you to do so. “It signifies to humans that you’re in a committed relationship with another human.” Your finger traces the side of his face as he stays bent to your height. “Do Simurians have something like that?”

“Tattoos.”

Your eyes brighten. “Humans do that sometimes in place of wedding rings, too. Basically, you present one ring when you want to get married, and then when you do get married, you get matching tattoos around your fingers instead of matching rings. It’s actually really–”

He kisses you again, that familiar spice of tea flooding your senses pleasantly.

Undeterred, you inquire about Simurian traditions. “What about for you?”

“We simply… Know.”

You pout at the mere thought. “Like love at first sight?” You whisper eagerly.

He nudges your nose, growling his disapproval. “Instinct.” He straightens. “No rings. The date of the ceremony is decided based on when other Simurians are available.”

“Oh right, they’re like holidays.”

He chuffs.

“Were they always, though? You said… I mean, you–”

“There used to be over a thousand of us, yes.” He doesn’t bother skirting around the question. “No, we didn’t always do things this way. We used to be selective.” He sucks in a breath, pushing past the question with little fanfare. “The ceremony has a fire,” he states now that he has the word after some experimentation involving it, “and a ceremonial dance.”

“I can’t picture you dancing,” you giggle.

His eyes narrow. “I don’t. The dancers dance.”

“Of course, of course, my bad,” you grin.

“Then, we braid one anothers’ hair, and an elder tattoos us.”

You smile at the differing culture. “That sounds beautiful.” Your gaze slowly rises to his short, pushed back hair. “Your hair isn’t very long, though.”

“Our hair has to be long enough to braid before Simurians can be wed. Or in some cases, exceptions can be made.”

“So you’d have to grow it out?” When he chuffs, you tilt your head with a grin. “That’s kinda hot.”

Catching the compliment in your tone, Sukuna shifts, a rare smirk crossing his features as he tracks the way your hands rest on your hips.

“Are we talking like a braid in your whole hair or just a small portion?”

“A small portion.”

Your grin widens. “That’s kinda cute. You’d be like a Jedi apprentice! Only, I don’t think it’s fitting to call you an apprentice, you’re more like–”

“Human.” Sukuna’s chiding carries far less annoyance since your recovery. “I don’t know ‘Jedi’.”

“Oh–! Right, yeah, I guess you guys don’t have Star Wars. Well, at least you avoided the sequel trilogy,” you mutter more to yourself than him when he lets out a huff as you turn to explore his ship again. He no longer leads the way, allowing you to explore all on your own, only keeping a hand on you to ensure steadiness as though your dwindling cough might blow you over. At least, that’s what he would tell you if you asked why he insists on keeping a hand on you.

His ship is vast. It could be compared to several acreages where your ship is barely the equivalent of a small apartment. The size is staggering, and you begin to realize exactly what he meant when he said Simurians enjoy having large properties to themselves.

“So, do your instincts just like… line up with the other person?”

“Generally.”

“How do you tell one another that you’re in love?”

Sukuna is silent for so long that you stop at the precipice that leads down into a storage and whip around to face him. He’s scowling at you with that kind of look that has you realizing your bug-based brain has missed a very Human– or in this case, Simurian– social cue.

“We nuzzle.”

You purse your lips as you’re faced with an intensity that’s oddly sweet given the frown it’s accompanied by. It’s not like you haven’t figured out by now that Sukuna is fond of you, but the reality of Humanity and Simurians is that he’ll outlive you. You’ll be nothing more than a distant memory by the time his hair goes gray. Assuming it does that, anyway. That’s not even beginning to address the planetary differences, atmosphere issues and dietary needs amongst other things.

Or the fact that you’ve known him for only a few weeks. Unusual by Human standards to be in talks of marriage, but by Simurian standards, you suppose he’s implying he chose you already. As much as the very Human part of you wants to call him yours, the scientist in you knows only compatibility. He’s a Thorny Devil Stick Insect to your Isopod Cubaris. Everything about the situation is absurd and your brain and your heart are fighting for keeps– Sukuna, or the reality that you should return to Earth and let Sukuna find a Simurian that allows his instincts to kick in.

As you stare blankly at him with pursed lips, he steps closer into your space, examining the way you fiddle with the hem of the hoodie draped over your shoulders. His movement kicks you back into the present.

“O-oh–! The nose, uh– The nose thing? The kiss?”

He huffs, shockingly cross as he averts his gaze. “Yes, the nose thing.”

You swallow hard, the reality of your harshly pounding heart bringing to light every issue you’ve already gone over in your head in spite of the fact that you’ve spent so long craving the touch of this ten foot tall man you have no right to. “Sukuna, I barely live like a thirtieth of your life span.”

The noise he lets out is something between an affirmative chuff that he knows and a grumble of sorts. He lets the moment hang, unsure what to make of it before brushing it off with something too simple. “Instincts,” he grumbles, nearing you again as his face lowers to yours. Without knowledge of dates or Earthly traditions, the most he can do is press his lips to yours. There’s something pleading in it that melts every reservation your brain screams at you.

His lips are never soft, neither in texture nor movement. He’s a being that lumbers around and his strength is beyond obvious. You feel that, too, in the way he aims to claim you, should you let him. When he leaves the ball in your court, you press forward, wrapping your arms around his neck as the kiss deepens.

Your tongue slips against his lips like an invitation that he doesn’t hesitate to grasp as he takes charge again. He still tastes of something with an overall spicy tang that you can’t place, but it’s no less pleasant now than it was the first time. No longer weakened by illness, he takes the opportunity to lift your thighs with his lower arms while his upper arms support your torso as he hoists you up, straightening. His lower hands knead your thighs in what feels like a subconscious manner, thumbs gliding over the stretch marks and scars of a life not yet fully lived.

He stumbles towards the wall, caging you between him and it, the strange coarse texture of the metals that make up his ship cool against the spot where your hoodie’s ridden up. He presses in, his lips moving faster, his body pressed against yours so tightly that you can feel the fact that his stomach mouth is panting.

The things that does to your body should be studied. Just as you grip him tighter, fingers curling into fists in his hair, he pulls back with a strange rigidity to him. “You never– I can still bring you back. To Earth,” he offers through pants in a tone that doesn’t suit his usual clipped and formal one. The uncertainty swimming in his gaze is unbefitting of him.

“Wh–” You look around like someone might be around to share your incredulous stare. “You’re asking that now?”

He swallows hard, the movement betraying his embarrassment. Good to know he’s capable of that, truly. “I want to give you the option.”

“Is it greedy of me to ask for both?”

He tilts his head curiously, something of a clicking noise coming from deep within his throat as he places just enough distance between your faces to take in your expression.

“It would be nice to make sure the cure gets delivered to the right people when we get there,” you admit, “but I’d like to say bye to Shoko and my family.”

He sucks in a breath. “You lost ten years getting here. You would lose another ten returning, and–” his hands dig into your thighs, his shoulders tightening as he calculates distance based on where you identified the Milky Way in your many scientific discussions prior to your illness. “Seven more, at least, on the trip to Simuria.”

Your gaze falls. “Oh.” Leaning back against the cool wall that suddenly feels nice on the back of your head, your fingers curl into Sukuna’s multi-sleeved compression shirt. “So I’d be over fifty,” you murmur. It shakes you to your core, and you lean into Sukuna.

He adjusts his arms to embrace you, nuzzling his face into the crook of your shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

The silence that follows is a welcome one of mourning. You had accepted death sealed in a tin can in the void of space. You had accepted death faced with illness, grateful to have met such a wonderful otherworldly being. You had been satisfied knowing you fell for someone, even if it never came to fruition. It had all been enough.

Until Sukuna came barreling through the hull keeping you imprisoned, unwilling to let death be an option.

To say you fell harder would be an understatement. If the option ever presented itself, there was never a question what you would choose. There is no question what you’re choosing.

After an extended period of silence, you lift your head from Sukuna’s shoulder. “The pods aren’t too damaged to make it to Earth?”

He blinks a number of times, questioning your decision-making. “I didn’t damage them.”

“Then… As long as my friends and family know I made it to the cure, that’s enough.”

Slowly, Sukuna sets you back on the ground, a surprising amount of conflict in the way he runs his tongue over his teeth, casting his glance at the makeshift garden whose artificial sun has set.

The low bioluminescence of the hall light glows softly over his features as you watch his expression pull taut. “You don’t seem happy.”

“I am,” he argues, flashing you a glare as he mutters something under his breath in Simurian.

“Then what’s wrong?”

He sucks in a breath, stepping forward as he leans his massive form down to your height. “You’ll be stuck aboard this ship until I can figure out something better.”

“I could use a suit!” You offer gleefully. “Actually, that would be kinda cool if you think about it–” you begin, your mind wandering. “It’ll be kinda like all the movies and shows I watched growing up and then I can come back to my little– no, actually this place is huge– my huge ship, or I guess our huge ship–”

Sukuna doesn’t interrupt you for once, chuffing not in affirmation but amusement. There’s almost a purr to it as you prattle on about how every kid on Earth dreams of being an astronaut and here you are on an alien ship. He casts you a sidelong glance as you make commentary on the hot alien company you’ve found, sidling up to him with a grin as you compliment him.

“Hey, um– Do you wait until marriage?” You query with warmth in your cheeks, sending the conversation in a complete one-eighty.

“For what?”

“Sex.”

Sukuna’s jaw shifts as he regards the small being beside him. “Sex?”

“Um–” Your gaze averts as your cheeks warm further. “Like reproduc–” you pause when you narrowly catch his lip quirking up out of the corner of your eye. “You know what I mean. You’re fucking with me.” You face him with a deadpan expression.

The creature rumbles in amusement. “Noisy human,” he chides. “I’m not having sex with you here. My ship is meant for one. We don’t wait, but this is unsightly.”

“Oh, so now you have decorum?”

Using context clues to put together the meaning of your retort, he straightens. “When have I not?”

“You call me annoying all the time!”

“I call you noisy. And I’m right,” he puffs his chest out as he crosses his arms over his chest as he continues your little tour.

–

The long-awaited day comes far sooner than Sukuna could have imagined. After countless temperature adjustments and endless suggestions from you that may have had him rolling his eyes weeks ago, the fresh Kerm stem cells attack the infected Alveolar cells, curing them.

He straightens, watching the immediate reaction under the duress of an exact temperature, and replicates it once more. Then again. And again.

You’re already watching, on the edge of your seat as you set aside the roasted turnip you were eating. You both wait with bated breath as the fifth experiment comes out as a success.

“It worked,” you breathe, getting to your feet. “You did it.” Disbelief coats your tone, the dimmed lab lighting reflecting off of Sukuna’s gloves as he discards them and steps back, staring at all five successes.

“A cure,” he states. His disbelief is plain, but there’s something far greater woven within the way his fists ball up at his sides and his shoulders rise.

He failed once and his species suffered for it. Maybe it’s not Simuria, but Earth means something to you. And this time, he didn’t fail.

As control weaves itself back into his grasp, he stares down at his hands, sucking in a breath. Blinking as tears prick his waterline, he stays put so as to not reveal his vulnerability to you.

But you’re already bounding towards him, practically whipping yourself around his immovable form to hug him with unmatched ardor. “You did it!” Your whole body trembles with relief at the thought that just maybe Shoko is still out there, and this might save not just her, but your entire home. Your family.

With a sharp inhalation, Sukuna’s arms curl around you, lifting you effortlessly, as he hides his relief in your shoulder. “We did.”

But as you put together instructions for cell breeding and duplication and prepare the cure to be sent to Earth, so too comes the day Sukuna has been dreading.

Staring out the window after sending off the cure, you lean over the control panel, wide-eyed as the stars twinkle back at you. You whip around to face your companion, but your question is met with a solemnity you aren’t expecting. “What now? To Simuria?”

Sukuna’s lips are drawn into a frown. It’s not unbefitting of him, but the dullness of his cerise eyes tells another story.

The pieces fall into place with every ounce of tension in his musculature. The gleam in your eyes burns out like a solar system’s light at the realization that faces you. “You’re gonna destroy the planet.”

Two slanted eyes turn to face you, followed by the two more humanoid ones, his arms crossed over his chest as his heart pangs at your disappointment. He’ll never fault your compassion, but this is something he can’t let go.

“It’s a sacrifice,” he admits. “A few to save many.”

“I know they’re the cause of so much destruction but… do you have to? It feels… wrong. Even if they’re artificial.”

The alien’s voice is a low rumble. “You’re kind, little human. I like that.” The warmth in his compliment echoes over hard stone lining the interior of the bridge. “I flew over the planet’s surface while you recovered,” he explains as he stares down at the stark green gas buildup around the planet that’s been increasing the longer the ship sits just outside of orbit. “There are no other species on the planet. No flora, no fauna. Where there were cities, there are now ruins. Trees are shredded. There’s nothing left. If I leave them, they will evolve. Someday, they will escape, or another unsuspecting species will do what Simuria or Earth did.”

When he puts it like that, you can understand his reasoning. After two hundred years of searching for the Kerm, you can sympathize with his need to follow through.

“This decision doesn’t need to involve you. This would have happened regardless.”

You turn to face him with your arms around your middle, hugging yourself. “I know, but after letting that one go on Earth, I feel like I’m involved now.”

“You had no way of knowing. Then or now,” he excuses your action, something you’re grateful for, as much as you’ll always harbor that guilt and the vision of a creature tearing through a crew.

After a moment of silence as he allows you to grapple with reality, he moves towards the control panel, sliding his finger along a series of sensors as his ship turns to move further from the planet while more systems come to life as he prepares a laser.

The planet looks beautiful from a distance. Pinks and blues scatter the surface, while a gaseous blue-green surrounds the planet. You don’t doubt Sukuna told the truth, but your heart pangs to know that the gorgeous sight will dissipate in mere moments at the hands of someone you care for. Hell, maybe even at your hands, if you think too hard about it.

Guilt bubbles in the pit of your stomach as the whirring of Sukuna’s ship ramps up, a bright light beginning to form somewhere from the side of the bridge where you can’t see. The brutish alien glides his hand over a few sensors, pressing something with finality before returning to your side. His palm settles along your shoulder, pulling you into him as his chest rises and falls, his own guilt palpable in the air between you.

The whirring of the ship comes to a sharp halt, the laser’s light suddenly brighter than the sight of the sunlit planet itself. Sukuna’s grip on your shoulder tightens as he moves deftly, pulling you face-first into his chest and wrapping you tightly in all four arms to prevent you from seeing the blast. With one hand on the back of your head, he prevents you from turning your head.

Even in your peripherals, you see the light. You shut your eyes tight, Sukuna’s grip on you increasing as the blast goes off. Some part of you expects to hear something, forgetting that space is a vacuum, and you’re met with nothing. But nothing is worse. An entire species eradicated, and you’re met with nothing.

Sukuna’s heart pounds hard as he watches the planet splinter. His curse to live with, but never your burden to bear. He won’t let it be. He holds you tight until the planet’s remains are little more than debris floating every which way. You’re far enough away that whatever else was blasted into space isn’t visible, and for that, he’s grateful.

He holds you so long that he isn’t sure whether it’s for him, or for you.

“It’s done,” he murmurs, allowing you at last to look out over the wreckage as his ship’s whirring slowly winds down.

“They won’t hurt anyone else,” you murmur as your brow tents when you look over the wreckage of stone and crystal that floats where Methalon–as Sukuna referred to it– once was.

“Let’s hope that’s true,” he murmurs in return, his body hunching over as he drops his face to your head, eyes shutting tightly.

–

It’s a wonder you make it to Simuria at all. Not because of any extenuating circumstances, but because you have so many questions and queries and noisy impulses that Sukuna seems to perpetually scowl at you. On equal grounds, however, you catch him with a longing stare when you least expect it.

In the midst of a full explanation on the reproduction of Scorpions. When you’re desperately trying to yank a Simurian radish’s roots from the ground while it protests you, sweat dripping down your spine. Even when you’re sifting through the remnants of your belongings from Earth. He trails after you with nothing short of zealous loyalty.

When you arrive on Simuria, you’re trapped on the ship as you expected, only able to experience the planet from the bridge’s window. Still, it’s more than you ever could have hoped. Not unlike Methalon, Simuria is primarily crystalline in nature with petrified trees growing crooked from mountains. You’re able to expand your diet to more vegetables, supplementing your vitamins with injections that Sukuna is damn-near overbearing about.

“Sukuna, I can do it myself!” You try to insist as he nuzzles you, intermittent with kisses.

“It’s my job to take care of you,” he insists into your neck, nipping at the sensitive skin to distract you before pulling back to inject your daily supplement into your thigh while you’re distracted.

“You’re a menace!” You insist through giggles, and the injection becomes nothing more than an afterthought.

Still stoic, you see his warmth within that familiar four-eyed gaze. “You chose me without instincts,” he points out in a teasing manner, pride held within his straightened back. “Now come.”

Rolling your eyes at his shockingly witty retort as he gets too good at your language, you let him lead the way through the ship until you reach the exit door. You’ve only seen the planet’s surface through glass as he promised you an oxygen tank to withstand his atmosphere someday. It had been taking so long that you figured he ran into a snag, but as you stand at the bay and watch his hand glide along the sensors, you realize just how foolish you had been.

For the first time, the bay opens up and you find yourself instinctively trying to search for a way to protect yourself from the sulfur.

“Sukuna, I–”

“Give me your trust, ange.” He holds your bicep as you begin to back away, his gaze insistent.

Ange. The syllables that, intermittent with clicks and growls, make up the word ‘angel’ in Simurian, and french–the language of romance– and his favorite nickname for you. He had explained that when he takes you to meet the rest of his kind, it would be helpful for you to understand more of his language, and that if you paid attention to– and spoke– in only the syllables of the words, you would largely be able to communicate with his kind without issue. The clicks and growls come out of necessity of Simurians having broadly low voices and living in craters. The second ears and extra sounds in each word allow them to communicate from longer distances without the necessity for the syllables, but the same is true for communicating without the clicks. The syllables can also stand, mostly, on their own.

Your jaw tightens as you stop resisting his grip, allowing him to lead you through a small bay door where you’ve often seen him leave through the pressurized chamber. When he leads the way through it, there’s shockingly no change in barometric pressure. Or oxygen.

Off to the side of the ship where you aren’t able to see from the bridge, Sukuna has built out a massive domed biome with oxygen production within, allowing you to touch the surface for the first time. Your lips part as your feet scuff over the crystal-threaded dirt beneath your shoes.

You take small steps at first, glancing to the left where petrified trees protrude from a cliffside within the barrier of the biome, hanging over the mild seafoam that coastal waves leave behind. You tread towards the beach, your shoes sinking into the sand as you take in the smell of the salt water, your mouth still agape at how massive the space is.

To your right is a cavern that you know to be partially artificial, Sukuna’s home held within. You turn to face him, the shock of it all pinning you in place, when you’re met with another surprise.

He’s not down on his knees, but in his hand is a ring crafted from metal with a gorgeous off-pink crystal in the center, clearly carefully procured. It’s simultaneously gorgeous and obvious. The jewel matches his hair. It’s romantic, but it’s claiming too, something you’ve realized of Sukuna over the months that you’ve resided within his ship.

Your hand raises to cover your lips as you stare down at it. “Are you…?”

He runs a hand through his locks. “My hair’s not long enough yet for a ceremony,” he states, the strands falling through his fingers, “but I think your traditions are different.”

“I–” You breathe, staring down at the stone. It’s not like you didn’t know this would all happen in time, but to wrap your brain around being proposed to by an alien who made a barometric dome of oxygen for you is still a feat. Slowly, you reach for the gorgeous stone. “Yes. I’ll marry you.”

His brow scrunches as though there was no need for an answer and he already knew such a thing, but he hands the ring over regardless, watching as you slide it down your ring finger with a gorgeous grin.

“This is beautiful, Sukuna,” you breathe.

He chuffs pridefully, four palms finding their place along your body– two on your hips and two your waist. He doesn’t hesitate to pull you in, his fingers kneading your skin as he nuzzles you hard. His hooked nose rubs against yours before he dips down to kiss you passionately.

Given that kissing in its Simurian form is so different from Humanity’s version, it’s almost unfair just how good he is at it. Your body goes warm as you grip the Simurian robes he’s begun wearing now that he’s home.

Kisses with Sukuna are never slow and sweet. There’s intention behind every swipe of his tongue as he invades your mouth, pleasantly flooding your mouth not with the usual herbal tea you’ve come to expect, but something more minty, like there was thought behind this kiss that makes you smile into it.

He swallows your smile as he deepens the kiss, tilting your head up. There was a point where you were convinced you would die alone in the darkness of a welded ship without feeling the warmth of the sun on your skin again, and by some miracle, the very man who held your life in his hands now holds your heart instead.

When he pulls back, his thumb brushing your waist softly, he inhales, long and deep. “It isn’t Earth,” he concedes, a rare vulnerability within his baritone voice. “But I hope you’ll be happy here.”

Reaching for his cheeks, your thumb brushes the plating along the side of his face. “Sukuna, this is everything I could have hoped for.” You smile softly, turning around in his grip to stare out at the ocean as you shed your shoes and wriggle your toes in the sand, his hands never once leaving you. “I could live here for a lifetime.”

“Good,” his chest rumbles behind you as he chuckles, watching the tide swim ashore to your feet. “Because you very well might, ange.”

You grin up at him, wading further into the warm water. The planet is so much warmer than Earth due to the heavily gaseous atmosphere that the water isn’t cold like much of Earth’s oceans, pleasant around your ankles. “I’m kinda like Sandy Cheeks, if you think about it.”

“What?” Sukuna’s nose wrinkles, perplexed.

You laugh heartily, staring down at the stone around your finger. “Don’t worry about it.”

–

“Are you sure I look okay?”

“You,” your fiancé heartily purrs, “look like my dinner for tonight.”

The worst part is that you can see the maw on his stomach grinning from under his white robes.

You whack his arm softly, earning a playful chuff in reply as he looks you up and down, already mentally undressing you of the traditional Simurian wedding gown that Sukuna had an elder Simurian make for you, giving your measurements and no further details as he perplexed the poor elder on just who his bride-to-be might be.

The robes drape over your shoulders elegantly, the pale green accents of the off-white robes complimenting your traditional makeup. The sweet young (in Simurian years, anyway) woman doing your makeup and using traditional natural skin dyes hadn’t stopped gushing the entire time about Sukuna finding a mate, something you had picked up through broken understanding of their language.

You had even caught on that as it would turn out, he was the only Simurian adult who lacked a mate of those remaining.

“Have you picked out your tattoos yet?” She excitedly inquires, sure to slow her speech down so you can piece together what you can.

In extremely broken Simurian, you reply, “Yes! He chose design and I chose placement.”

She squeals in excitement, going on to tell you about how a Simurian named Dura recently took up tattooing, and you two would be his first wedding tattoos. There’s a certain solemnity in knowing that, with dwindling numbers, you very well may be his last, too.

Your nerves hit hard as you grow closer to emerging from Sukuna’s home where you’ve been prepping.

“If you’re still worried,” Sukuna offers as the young woman heads off to prepare herself for the ceremony, “just remember you and I are the only ones that can breathe oxygen. They’ll all be in suits.”

You’re pretty sure he just told you to picture them all in their underwear essentially, but it helps ease some nerves regardless.

“You’ve got a point,” you breathe out a sigh of relief before sucking in a breath. “Remind me how this goes again?”

Sukuna steps towards you, lowering himself to a knee to speak with you. His hand raises, his fingers gliding along your palm as he takes a moment to stare at your palms pressed together. To think that glass once separated you feels like another reality now. His gaze moves from your hands to your eyes as he intertwines your fingers. “You will wait in a tent by the beach as I am readied,” he explains, referring to his own traditional makeup that needs to be applied, his hair shaggy and a complete mess now that it’s much longer and ready to be braided. “Dabura is to wed us, as he’s my closest ally. He’ll come get you. There will be a ceremony with dancers and a large bonfire, then Dura will tattoo us.”

“And then?” You chew on your lower lip eagerly.

“Then,” he nears you, his fingers delicately brushing your robes. “The night is ours.”

You let out a breath, biting back a smile at the thought given that you had chosen to wait to have sex after all when it took so long to get you out of the ship.

“Are you nervous?” He gruffs, tilting your chin with a calloused hand.

“For the sex, or the wedding?”

“Either.”

It takes you a moment to consider the thought. “Yeah, I guess so. Both.”

“No one can understand your language. If you need something, just say so. I’ll be here the whole time.”

“You know, you never would have had me thinking you were so sweet when we first met.”

His brow twitches, his gaze averting. “I’m not.”

Stubborn.

“Noisy.”

Your eyes narrow. “Just curious, can you hear my thoughts?”

“No, why?”

“No reason.”

The night carries out as he promised. Seventy eight Simurians gather from far and wide, of tribes from a bygone era, of all ages and appearances. A fire is stoked and dancers do what you’re sure was once a much more elegant dance without the added bulk of spacesuits beneath traditional outfits.

The Simurians are kind to you, regardless of your broken ability to speak their language. They pick up on the occasional word in your language too, not unlike Sukuna.

Once the grand part of the ceremony is over, the rest of the Simurians take their seats on the beachside surrounding you and Sukuna as you both take small portions of your hair and braid them for one another. Your husband’s fingers are surprisingly deft, and upon finishing the braid, he gets the rest of his hair cut back down to his preferred length. Once the ceremony is complete, you’re met with cheers as Dabura declares you officially wed.

The horned alien is somehow more aloof than your husband, and the largely disinterested looks he shoots everyone you come to realize is his neutral. Were you not surrounded by far more boastful Simurians, you might even think they’re all like this.

Following the cheers of the ceremony, as things begin to quiet down, you’re approached by a Simurian with long, flowing white hair tucked into his spacesuit. He has a friendly look about him as he grins at you. “Dura,” he introduces himself, extending his hand.

Your brow raises at the realization he’s given you his name in your language, keen to the fact that your ability to speak is broken. Sukuna seems to respect that, taking a step back from the protective shadow he’s been all night with so many people so close to you, wary that someone might disprove his choice to wed a Human. You shake Dura’s hand in turn, offering your name as though he hasn’t been hearing it all night.

“Have you chosen a design?” He asks in his mother tongue.

He speaks slowly, allowing you to keep up. “Sukuna chose design, I chose– um–” your brow furrows as you attempt to place the syllables for the word in Simurian.

“Placement?” Dura steps in.

In a harsh tone, Sukuna steps forward, his lip curled into a snarl. “My wife is talking,” he snaps, the growls and clicks far more bitter than you’re used to hearing.

Dura’s hands raise. “I was just helping with words, Sukuna,” he smiles easily, waving the white flag before anything breaks out amongst the Simurians still lingering from the ceremony. “I wasn’t interrupting.”

You exchange a sympathetic glance with Dura, setting a hand on your husband’s arm. “It’s okay, Sukuna,” you murmur. “I just didn’t know the word, he was helping,” you agree.

Your husband’s shoulders fall slowly into something less aggressive, his gaze immovable as it glues itself to Dura. The tension between the two men is brief, before Sukuna gives into your sweet touch and softens, describing the design and placement to Dura. The white-haired man proceeds to prepare a table for you, sanitizing everything and pulling out what, by Earth’s standards, would be traditional handpoke tattoo materials.

Once ready, Sukuna goes first. The design is small, two zigzags mirroring one another with a simple tear in the center right where you chose– on the ring finger. He’s completely still throughout the process without any complaint, and you find yourself embarrassed when you wince at the first tap of the stone tool. Dura does what he can to distract you, attempting to speak with you– though at you is probably more apt given how broken your Simurian is. Still, you’re proud of yourself for your proficiency with the language and your ability to sit through the tattoo, which isn’t so bad once the first few punctures are through.

Once it’s complete, you hold your hand up to Sukuna’s, comparing the ink to one another with a bright smile before Dura bandages them. Your husband leans down to nuzzle and then kiss you, succinct but meaningful.

As the night winds down and the attendees begin to take their leave in ships of varying sizes, you sit by the entrance to your now-shared home with Sukuna. The stars twinkle overhead as you marvel at how different they are from Earth’s. In spite of everything, you stare out at the same vast expanse of space as your family back home does. You wish they could see that you got married. Pulling your knees to your chest, you rest your chin on them as you stare up at the sky, only able to wonder.

A bulky shadow leans over you after saying his goodbyes to Dabura and shutting the dome for the final time of the night. He blocks your view of the stars, pulling your attention to his ever-intense gaze. His chest rises and falls evenly as he regards you fondly. “I’m sure that was a lot.” Sukuna doesn’t often apologize, and you’re fairly sure it’s what he intends when he speaks.

“I liked meeting everyone,” you shake your head, relaxing as you lean back on your splayed palms. “I just wish my friends back home could see.”

“See how well the robes compliment you?” He comments in a smooth tone, although his expression remains unchanged.

You scoff, shaking your head. “The ring. The tattoo. That I’m married. Here, Simuria. All of it, really.”

Sukuna’s fond smirk fades as the moment hangs. The waves washing ashore have an ambient white noise that barely manages to hide his small sigh. “I’m sorry,” he starts, kneeling down to your level in an act that reminds you just how big he is. “But Humanity doesn’t deserve my ange.”

You let out a breath through your nose, offering a lopsided smile. “Thanks, baby.”

It took him a moment to get used to that nickname, but now he fondly chuffs. “But,” he tacks on, a little more chipper than you’re accustomed to. “I do have something for you, too.”

“For me? Is that something we were supposed to do?” You worry. “Oh god, I didn’t get you anything– I don’t even know what I would–”

“Always so noisy,” he jeers, growling out what you recognize as a Simurian word for ‘mouthy’ even as he offers his hand to help you to your feet.

“Hey!” You smack him playfully, earning a grin as he casts a glance at you, his gaze dipping down to the portion of your leg that protrudes from your robes as he helps you up.

He’s quiet as he leads the way into your shared home, strings of lights and domed bulbs decorating the walls at your request given that your then-fiancé lived largely in the dark aside from bioluminescence, much like his ship.

It seems to be the Simurian version of when men just put a chair and a TV in a room and call that decorating. Despite living in a cliffside, the rest of the house is well-decorated, just not well lit. It isn’t largely personal by any means, something you hope to change with art and photos, but at least you can say he does have furniture.

When you reach your bedroom, the most expansive room in the house, decorated with plants and a small bug-like creature you found within the dome that you’ve been studying– to Sukuna’s dismay– he reaches within a closet and pulls out a large box. Blinking as you stare down at what you recognize as a device, you slowly approach the box as he sets it atop the bed that you requested he make plush, rather than the conforming stone he was accustomed to. With a glide of his thumb, a hologram comes to light.

“What is it?” You ask your engineer husband, nothing immediately giving it away as the light displays nothing.

“Your species uses frequencies to speak from long distances on Earth, right?”

You straighten, staring at the brute in disbelief as he continues fiddling with the machine. “Sukuna, you didn’t.”

It’s all you can manage as you watch Sukuna fiddle with a dial, tapping his nail along the smooth surface of the machine as he makes calculations to figure out how many parsecs the signal will need to travel and at what speed in order to allow you to speak to your friend in real time. Once he’s finished fiddling with it, he turns back to you like this is just another day, handing you what, effectively, looks like an old phone hooked up to the box.

“You use numbers, right?” He chuffs for the latter portion of the sentence, completely ignoring your slack-jawed expression.

“I don’t– I can’t– You did all of this for–”

“Ange.” He chuffs, nuzzling your nose as he pulls you close. “Dial the number.”

A lump sits at the back of your throat, but no amount of swallowing will rid the feeling as you stare at your husband. Tears prick your eyes as slowly you find yourself needing to set the device down in shaky hands, curling into his chest as warm tears trail your cheeks. “You did this for me?” Your voice is hardly a whisper, frail in its delivery into his chest as your makeup inevitably stains his white robes.

“Obviously,” he clicks in his mother tongue, positive you know the meaning.

“You didn’t have to,” you sniffle, muffled. “I brought a bug into our room and I know you think I’m loud–”

“Human,” he growls, his voice clipped as he pulls back. The ceremonial red makeup streaking across his forehead and nose has smeared with the day’s activities, a sheen of sweat over his skin as he lowers himself to your height, holding your cheeks. “You are loud. You are noisy. And you are my wife. I want you to be those and more.”

“Even the bugs?”

A pair of eyes swivels across the room to the beetle-esque creature in a large glass enclosure. A grumble begins in his chest. “I’m less fond of those,” he admits. “But, yes.”

You smile. Lopsided, but genuine. “At least you’re honest.”

“Put in the number for your friend.”

Given that it’s not common to memorize numbers anymore, you’ve never been more grateful in your entire life that you actually know Shoko’s off the top of your head. Your fingers betray your disbelief by trembling as you turn back to the remote of sorts that he gave you, typing Shoko’s number with no regard for what time it might be. It rings once, twice, three times, and a final fourth before your friend picks up.

“Hello?”

Your voice breaks into something between a sob and a gasp the moment you hear her. She sounds older. There’s a rasp to her voice that betrays the weariness of her trade, but she also sounds well. Not sick. Alive. “Sho?” You breathe her nickname in sheer incredulity.

The shuffling on the other end is immediate, a flurry of static as you can practically imagine her flailing out of whatever chair or bed she was slumped over in. “You’re alive?” More static follows, a distraught shout for someone, then, frantically, “oh my god, I thought you were dead, or– I mean after the cure got here, I just had to assume you had taken the drug and I just– where are you? Can you facetime or something?”

It brings a smile to your face to hear your friend again, tears continuing to silently trail down your face in disbelief as tremors ripple through your muscles like waves. You laugh airily at just how much she sounds like you, her mouth at least ten steps ahead of her brain. Turning to Sukuna, you wipe your tears with the back of your hand. “Sukuna? Is there a way to connect to video?”

Standing idly behind you, his gaze lowers to the glimmer of fresh tear trails, his adam’s apple bobbing as he steps forward. He lowers himself to nuzzle your nose first, undoubtedly wiping tears along his own cheek, before fiddling with the box. “What frequency are your videos run on?”

Shoko is practically vibrating on the other end of the line. “Oh my god, who is that?”

“I don’t think Facetime uses frequencies, I think it’s on like… internet. Or LTE, or something.”

Sukuna hums, though he doesn’t seem confident.

“Google says two point four gHz to five gHz!” Shoko much more helpfully adds on the other side.

“Tell Google that helps,” he gruffs as he fiddles with frequencies until the blank hologram gains static.

There’s a brief silence on the other end as Shoko attempts to process how strange that sentence comes across to someone on Earth, but she doesn’t have time to question it when at last a video is displayed for each of you.

It’s clear when the video connects that life has been harsh in far different ways on each of you. Neither of you are the spry twenty-five year olds finishing up degrees and putting out papers that put you at the top of your fields at young ages. Smile lines adorn the corners of her mouth and her eyes have an ever-lidded look to them that only time and exhaustion could bring about. To your surprise, you recognize another acquaintance in the background in Utahime Iori, Shoko’s biggest crush at the time and a big rock on her ring finger.

A wide smile crosses your face and if she were right in front of you, you would surge forward to hug Shoko. Utahime, too.

Shoko’s gaze flicks around your surroundings as she holds up her phone. “Where the hell are you?” She queries as Sukuna rises from where he was fiddling with the long distance radio, popping into the frame behind you.

“Simuria. It’s gorgeous, and the people are so kind, you would love it here.”

“What’s on your face?”

“Oh–! Right, it’s ceremonial makeup,” you explain as you hold up your ring finger to display both your engagement ring and wedding tattoo. “I got married like two hours ago,” you giggle, bubbly.

The sight has your husband closing in on you, unable to stand so far apart when the very sound of your happiness draws him in like a moth to a flame.

With her jaw already on the floor at the revelation of your marriage, she can hardly contain her next question. “Who is that?” Shoko exclaims again, her image a blur as she nearly drops the phone at the sight of your husband.

“This,” you hold a hand out to the brutish alien, “is my husband. Sukuna, this is Shoko.”

It’s not often that Sukuna greets others in your mother tongue, so as he leans into frame, revealing four arms and four eyes, he simply waves at your gawking friend.

“Nice to meet you!” She starts, before it devolves into that scientific disbelief programmed into her brain. “He’s– I mean–” Shoko shakes her head incredulously as she attempts to make sense of the situation. “Aliens are real,” she mutters to herself. “Not just beetle things, either.”

“I feel like you’re really breezing over the four arms and eyes part here,” Utahime comments, surprisingly calm given the situation. You were never particularly close, but the way she evaluates you both seems to anchor your best friend. “Also hey,” she greets you by name with an easy smile. “We’re married too.”

Before you can even congratulate them as well, Shoko is already continuing, too many things to catch up on in too little time. “Honestly after CRM-12, nothing comes as much of a shock.” It comes as an observation more than any kind of blame as she evaluates your towering husband behind you. When he hums, you note that his more talkative personality may be reserved for you only.

“Congratulations, by the way! Wait– Sho, did the cure get there?”

“THE CURE!” She cries out suddenly. You grin through a laugh as everything hits you both at once, over ten years to catch up on. “Girl, yes. You saved– I don’t know, billions of people. And you didn’t even need to send any of those fuckass beetle things back. The company was pissed at first, but I swear they didn’t actually want a cure.”

“They still spread the cure out though, right?”

“They didn’t have a choice. One of the pods landed with NASA. We got lucky.”

“Thank god. I was worried about that.”

“Wait, speaking of beetles–” The hologram flashes and flutters as Shoko moves about the room, a clicking noise followed by something snapping and at last the camera faces her again. “Look!”

You stare in disbelief at the Stag Beetle on her fingers. Sukuna curiously leans forward.

“There’s no way in hell Spike survived this long.”

“Meet Spike Thirteen!” She grins as the stag’s antennae reach for her phone, its mandibles curiously snapping together.

Barking a laugh, you lean back into Sukuna’s warmth. Under the dim lighting of the strung up bulbs, he relaxes into your touch as he instinctively reaches for your waist. “Thirteen makes way more sense.”

Changing the subject again with so many things she wants to go over, Shoko sets Spike on her shoulder. “Are you able to come visit?”

You knew the question was inevitable. The one you were dreading hearing, for there’s no easy way to say it. “I can’t. We’re about seven years apart. I’d be almost sixty by the time we get home.”

There’s a brief somber silence, but it surprises you when Shoko smiles, genuine and kind. “Home.” She repeats the sentiment. “Never thought you’d find one. I think I’m okay with that, knowing that you found a home.”

Your vagabond tendencies make her sentiment make sense, and a tender smile graces your features as Sukuna’s remaining two hands find your hips, like he’s grounding himself in his own home. “Yeah. I hope you did, too.”

“Yeahh, Hime and I are doing pretty well,” she agrees, mirroring the sentiment that perhaps home can be unconventional. For you, an alien in a dome (and just one little bug in a tank), and for her, a person.

“Good. That makes me happy,” you murmur softly.

Shoko’s lips part and it’s clear she has further questions and ten years’ worth of stories to fill you in on, but she shuts them with a smile. “I should let you enjoy your wedding night.” She sits back, Utahime’s hand barely in frame as it rests on Shoko’s shoulder, opposite Spike Thirteen. “Can we talk again?”

You swivel towards Sukuna for confirmation. He shrugs. “I built it for you. Use it as you wish.”

Your hand finds his, threading your fingers through the thick ones resting on your waist. “Yeah, I’ll talk to you soon, Sho.”

“You too,” she can’t help her grin as the line cuts out.

Leaning back into Sukuna, you bask in the thrill of seeing your closest friend again. It doesn’t quite compare to your old dinner and ice cream outings where you claimed dessert was for your second stomach and nearly threw up when that proved to not be the case, but it’s more than you could ever have expected. The lumbering form of your husband leans down slowly, nuzzling your neck from behind. His hooked nose nudges your chin. “Happy, ange?”

“Than I ever thought I could be,” you murmur, tilting your head as you allow him access to the sensitive skin of your neck. There’s a level of harshness to just how much he grinds his face into your neck, earning a giggle as he pulls you closer with ease.

“My wife deserves nothing less.” His lower arms anchor you to his chest as his upper hands trail delicately along the green accents of your robe. One hand dips between your breasts, resting on the tie around your waist. In Simurian, he mutters, “may I make you mine?” against the warm skin of your neck.

A shiver runs stark up your spine as you nod. He sets the transmitter aside, effortlessly lifting you onto the plush of the bed.

“I don’t know how you ever had sex on those stone beds,” you comment breathily as Sukuna parts your legs with a knee.

“My skin is denser,” he replies between nips and licks at your skin. “You’re weak.”

“Yet you married me.”

“Weak and noisy.”

“Whatever you say,” you hum when his lower palms press your hips into the mattress, his torso slipping between your thighs. It comes as a shock when he’s wet on his abdomen and you’re damn sure you’re not the reason. You instinctively search for the cause to find his stomach maw must be drooling under his own robes, more emotive than your husband is himself.

Eager to feel him, your hands slip to the tie of his robes where he leans over you, pulling one end until they hang loosely from his shoulders, revealing a toothy smile along his stomach. The maw’s grin widens, his tongue slipping from within teeth so jagged one would almost think your husband were a predator, not that he eats rocks. Along with his drooling maw, you discover something far more debauched that you had yet to come across.

Simurians don’t typically wear undergarments during wedding ceremonies given that it’s typical to give oneself to the other following the ceremony, hence why the party left at a reasonable hour.

So why on Earth– or in this case, Simuria– does this man have two massive dicks?

“Why do you have two?” You query in bewilderment as he deftly unties your robes.

His expression twists as he lifts his gaze to you, searching for an explanation to your perplexity in the fact that–

“Why don’t you?”

“Why would I need two?”

He points to his two throbbing dicks, each with a black band around the base. “Two,” he states plainly.

“Yeah, I–” You chuckle at the absurdity of it all. “I see that you have two dicks, Sukuna.” Covering your face as you can’t help laughing, you shake your head from behind your palms. “But why?”

“Twice the pleasure,” he states, letting out a throaty noise that you recognize as Simurian for ‘duh’. “Where’s your second one?”

“I don’t– Humans don’t have a second one, Sukuna!”

He hums, something of a grumble. “We’ll make it work.”

Left staring straight through your husband as he moves on while you’re still caught up on him having two dicks, on top of the fact that he’s almost twice your size, he returns to his musings. His nose trails the length of your neck, nudging your robes aside and kissing along the red dyes used to mark you for the ceremony, leaving new marks in their place.

“Gorgeous,” he clicks and purrs in his mother tongue, slipping his hands beneath the ceremonial garments as he pulls your mind to the present. Slipping your arms from the sleeves, you let your hands run along the tattoos that wrap over his shoulders, reveling in the way his rough skin still seems to get a rise from your touch, goose bumps following your fingers’ trail. Ten feet of alien bulk and a tiny human still brings him to his knees.

You let out a gasp as drool from his stomach drips to your abdomen, trailing down to your thighs, warm and wet. If he wasn’t already obvious with how hard he is, his stomach mouth gives him away entirely.

“You’re soft,” he comments, the words slipping from his lips like an idle thought unintended to be spoken. A large tongue swipes from the bottom of your slit to your clit, the sensation sending shivers up your spine as you breathe in a soft gasp.

The room is already warm with the anticipation of arousal, the musky smell of the night’s earlier activities pungent around you. Your husband drinks in the way your back arches for him when he gets a taste of you, a languid pace to his movements as he crawls further over you in spite of his eagerness. Once he realizes he has something, he’s not quick to let it go. The size difference between you allows him to lap at your entrance with his second mouth while he delves his tongue between your lips. Your fingers curl into his shoulders as your nails leave stark half-moons in their wake.

When he adjusts the way in which he laps at your dripping pussy, the flat of his tongue puts pressure on your clit as you realize that his tongue has a mildly rough texture as though it’s intended for your pleasure. Your back arches once more, separating your kiss. One pair of hands drives your hips further into the mattress, while the other pair steadies your cheeks, allowing him to swallow your moans once more.

It’s downright euphoric the way he uses his tongue to work you to the edge so quickly. You want to chalk it up to being over ten years since you’ve felt this sensation, but the only thing to blame here is him. Not unlike your language, he’s learning your body. Fast.

“Hah- fuck–” You breathe when he finally lets up for air, his chest heaving as you cling to him for purchase. “Don’t stop, Kuna.”

His chest rumbles as he lowers himself to one pair of forearms, continuing to knead the plush of your hips with the other pair. His fingers run along the imperfections of your skin, committing each and every stretch mark, scar, and beauty mark to memory without so much as pulling his gaze from your expression.

He drags his massive tongue slower against your clit, the barbed texture pulling you closer and closer to the edge and leaving you breathless altogether. Blood roars in your ears as he slows his pace to keep you right where he wants you, crimson irises mere rings as his blown pupils watch whimpers pour from your slacked jaw.

“I like you like this,” he murmurs, his nose nudging your cheek where makeup has already smudged. “At my mercy and begging me not to stop.”

“That’s because you have a superiority complex,” you mutter even through the haze, still mouthy at the worst of times.

His tongue pulls back, your head lifting in disappointment just in time to watch his stomach maw nip at your inner thigh. You yelp, clinging tighter to his shoulders as you undoubtedly leave behind marks. “I like you noisy during sex, but not mouthy,” he coyly remarks.

“You’re such a–” You sharply gasp when his tongue returns to your clit with another long drawn out stripe up your slit.

“Don’t be smart,” he chides in Simurian, although he speaks so fast he’s positive you don’t catch it. Your head’s already in the clouds, thrown back into the mattress as you cling to him for purchase when at last he gives you what you want.

Adding to the pressure of his tongue, he finally throws you over the edge with shorter, faster licks. Stars encroach on your vision, your nails digging into his tough skin as he nuzzles your chin affectionately while your body twitches with each jolt of static to your abdomen that could damn well be slowing time and you would never know.

When your vision begins to even out, you shift against your husband, suddenly very aware of just how much drool and cum has collectively pooled between your thighs. Your movement rouses his attention as he lifts his head to inspect you. The bliss lighting up your features has his chest puffing out, that stupid prideful and boastful purr that you’ve grown fond of rumbling his chest.

Your lips part as you catch your breath, pulling him back into your shoulder. He doesn’t protest, nuzzling into you so hard you might think he wanted to live there.

“I love you too, Sukuna.”

He lifts his head, his slanted eyes curiously narrowing. “Is that how humans express partnership?”

You smile as he picks apart your traditions so scientifically. “It’s one way,” you murmur softly, tracing a finger along his cheek. His left eyes flutter shut, only opening when your nails rake through his hair.

He chuffs his approval, returning his attention at last to your body with kisses to your breasts. He shifts you up the bed, spreading your legs over his thighs as he sits between them. His cocks are heavy against your stomach, twitching, and equally slick with his own drool and your cum.

As he leans over you, kissing you once more with ease given his extra height. Two thick digits gather the mix of cum and drool, bringing it to his mouth. He runs his tongue along his lips, bringing his wet fingers down to your core. Regardless of species, he clearly knows better than to try sex without adequately working you open for him. You’re small and he has no intention of hurting his wife.

One finger eases in without any friction, the saliva coating it acting as a natural lubricant. The second is met with little resistance too, and he uses the opportunity to pump them slowly. He moves his fingers not like a human might, but as though he’s searching. Like he knows, biologically, that you derive pleasure from a specific point. And god, does he find it. Your hips buck for him as he locates your g-spot, a devious smirk curling on his lips. Your nails rake down his back with each slow pump of his fingers, your arms trembling as you cling to him.

A third finger swipes up the amalgamation of drool and cum and slowly he slips it in to the first knuckle. He watches your shoulders tense, allowing you to pull him closer until your chests are slick with one anothers’ sweat. Your walls don’t clamp so tightly around his fingers as you adjust and slowly, he slides the third one in to the knuckle.

The stretch of three fingers from your massive husband is immense as-is. You both know he isn’t fitting the second of his dicks in you, but he seems satisfied regardless as he watches your expression with blown pupils.

“Fuck, that feels good,” you breathe as he works you open slowly but surely, picking up the pace until he’s got you damn-near at the edge again.

He hums, pulling his fingers away with a wet squelch just as your nails dig into his skin. “Keep that feeling going for me, ange.”

When he lines himself up with you, a shudder rocks your body. He’s always been big. From this angle, he looks massive and his cocks are no different. The upper cock is heavy as it rests atop your abdomen, leaking pre-cum and coated in saliva all the same, both of you equally a mess. When he pushes in the tip, you suck in a breath, a hand flying to his chest to stop him from pressing in too quickly.

He hisses at how tight you are, the size difference more apparent than ever. Swallowing hard, all four eyes turn their attention to you. “Relax, baby,” he coos, his voice dropping an octave as he uses your preferred pet name for him on you. Anything to allow you to anchor yourself. His gruff attitude flips on a dime, with no intention of causing you anything but pleasure and the knowledge that it’s not only been a long time, but you aren’t the same species.

He wets his thumb with his mouth, bringing it down to your clit to massage small circles into it. Your lashes flutter, the muscles in your arms slackening as the pain of the stretch twists into ecstasy, searing and hot. His body runs so warm that the sensation of him stretching you open all the while warming you up is nothing short of heady and intoxicating. Slowly, he sinks in past the black band around his cock until he reaches the hilt, heavy balls resting against your ass.

Your walls convulse, still short of an orgasm but grappling with his size, until they finally let up and he shifts his hips slightly, testing how you react. You throw your head back in a searing moan as you grab his shoulders again, the kind that rips from straight in your chest and to your surprise, your husband groans in response. “Fuck, that’s it,” he gruffs with a pleasureful lilt to his tone. He’s only ever heard you curse twice, but it seems he got the gist of its meaning quickly.

He pulls out to the tip, his breath hot on your sweat-slicked chest, gliding back in swiftly, though he watches you carefully. When he’s met only with a louder moan and your hands raking down his back, he takes the opportunity to dive in.

His hips rock slow at first, speeding up as he chases both of your highs. He keeps one finger perpetually on your clit, moving in calculated circles in spite of the fact that his hips now snap into you. Moans, pants, and the sound of his balls slapping against your ass fill the air as the scent of sex fills the room. 

Your head is too hazy to look, but you’re fairly sure his stomach’s tongue is pleasuring his upper cock, if the feeling of pressure on your abdomen is anything to go off of. It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced before, and just as his hands ball into fists in the sheets where they rest on either side of your head, both begin twitching. A heavy load of cum fills your pussy and coats your stomach all at once. He doesn’t stop once they begin jerking, chasing your orgasm and riding his own out.

The sensation of his cum filling you is enough to push you over the edge moments later like glass shattering as it rocks your body in ways you’ve never experienced before. You cling to him as your vision goes black, the world around you fading into an afterthought when all you can think of is your massive husband, hunched over and finally having stopped his movement. All four of his arms hold him upright and in one unsteady movement, he lowers himself to his forearms.

Both of your chests heave as you ride the highs, eyes lidded when he nuzzles the crown of your head. “I love you,” he murmurs into your hair, a hint of a question to the statement, as though he isn’t positive that he’s using it correctly.

Through pants, you chuckle at his uncertainty, lifting your hands from his back to the nape of his neck. “I love you too.”

He slowly pulls himself from within you, rolling to the side so as not to crush you. As you come back down, you give yourself a onceover, blinking at the mess along your stomach and thighs and coating the sheets.

“Sukuna, there’s drool everywhere.”

“That’s your fault,” he grumbles, eyes shut as he lays to your left.

“Literally how?”

With no words in your language for the matter, he replies in his mother tongue. “You feel too good.”

You can’t help a smile, but you do take the opportunity to turn and curl into him, coating him in every fluid you’ve shared.

“Mm,” he hums as you intertwine your legs, your head resting on his bicep. “You might be right.”

“Just a little bit.”

“I’ll clean us up,” he murmurs, leaning down to nuzzle the crown of your head. “Just give me one more moment of this.”

–

The tides are low as you sit with your bare feet in the wet sand. The water scarcely reaches your toes, coming up to your husband’s calves as he naps in the sun, a hat laid over his head. He stirs every so often as you read a Simurian romance novel with your legs thrown over him, the written text coming easier to you these days.

The couple in the novel are so young– relative to the species– that it has you feeling wistful for days long past.

“Sukuna?”

You know he’s awake, having recently adjusted his hat. His chest rises and falls in a content sigh before he chuffs.

“What will you do when I’m gone?” You wonder about your husband, a species that mates for life.

He moves lazily as he sits up, hunching over you to parse what you’re reading. When it isn’t of interest to him, he adjusts the hat back over his head to block the sun. “I’ll mourn you.” He stares out across the ocean of the dome he’s grown into a much larger space over the years. “But I’ll celebrate your life, too.”

The thought brings a smile to your face in spite of the somber tone of your conversation. “Will you take care of my bugs?”

“That’s what you’re worried about?”

You shrug. “Yeah, a little.”

He sighs. “Not the ones that sting. I don’t like them.” He wrinkles his nose at the thought of them. “But the rest, yes. I like the ones with extra legs.”

“Yeah, the tarantula-looking ones are pretty cool,” you agree, leaning back into his chest.

His gaze softens as he looks over your features. You’ve aged beautifully over the past several years of marriage, and he knows your reservations about the difference in your species’ lifespans, but he knows something else, too.

Your aging has slowed to a near-halt. At around forty in Human years, your body stopped showing the signs of age that you so often describe. He’s more than positive that you haven’t noticed, but every minute change in your features is something he categorizes mentally.

It was never on purpose, but by the will of some God, whether Human or Simurian, his injected cells have slowed your aging. He isn’t sure if he’s gained a lifetime with you, or simply a few more years, but he considers the action the sort of thing you might call star-crossed. Like the gene therapy that saved your life acted as a string of fate too, bonding you together not just for your life, but several Human lifetimes.

One pair of arms holds him up as he leans back on them, the other pair sliding around your waist as he pulls you closer, the feeling of your bare skin familiar and comforting to the lumbering man. His fingers curl into your skin as he watches you happily turn a page, content with his reply. His gaze lingers on the ink on your ring finger that matches his.

However many lifetimes it may be that you’re blessed with, he knows he’ll cherish each and every one.

☾⋆ a/n ; okay so i watched phm and between that, iron lung, and alien earth, i got alien sukuna brainworms. i didn't anticipate it being like 38k 💀 i hope you enjoyed though!! this one was a lot of fun and i'm proud of how it turned out. you may also notice a difference between the tumblr and ao3/wattpad versions of this fic which is because i found tumblr's post limit (1000 paragraphs) and had to do some quick combining/editing. forgive me for any strange pacing on this piece in the tumblr version <3 i also wanna take the time to thank you all for the patience while i deal with some medical issues, i promise my regular series should be coming back soon <33 ☾⋆ taglist ; @lilrosyhaven @tiny-mimi @grimm3r @yujisredkicks @knittybritty98 @sukunahs @saezzi @epicderpface @ynishalee @pandabiene5115 @silibiliballs @ane5e @feyrinnn @jkslvsnella @maomimii @megumuro @beereadzzz @sukunas-one-n-only-peach @beaniesayshi @ryomeowie @suguusatoo