niikaa

When flesh is tucked back into underwear, your mouths start searching for gags elsewhere. They wrap around pencils with pungent violence, sucking them to the lead marrow. They tipple instant coffee out of cracked mugs, twitching lopsided after stumbling over a bitter lump. They swallow cyan chlorine in the shower and cinch shut once a perfunctory ‘Good morning’ is suffered through—homely, but not domestic. 

All is afflicted. Swollen. Scratched sore like a hay fever rash. But it’s a welcome change: you have found a substitute for your dull aches, replaced your wonted numb with that doomed haste of tending to him. Him, with blood-rimmed eyes the color of molten insanity, him, hunched over yet another handkerchief, h i m—abating, sweaty, at odds with health itself, racked by coughing fits in the middle of the night, moderately maniacal, yours. And for that, England is mangled. So are the fresh calluses on your fingers and the dried-up crimson on the A-string. So are Jayce’s calls—missed after missed after missed, trapped in the wires before ever reaching their recipient. 

It starts at four in the morning. Usually, with a gurgling cough expired into your shoulder—just dry enough to pass for a neurotic habit, just damp enough to twist your gut in a concerned, nagging clench. You stir awake. Arch into the palm gliding across your lower back. It is warm—all quivering fingers just shy of frenzied, pawing at your side as if trying to strip the skin off the bone. He rasps something into the pillow. Claws at your hip with that hungry urgency of a lover’s touch and shrinks, sulky, into the tangled sheet—chops your name at the first syllable and spews it into the air, severed. 

“You ought to get that checked out.” 

It’s a quiet conviction murmured over your shoulder—gulped-through and canine, aware of its hypocrisy. You turn around and watch him strangle a gruff laugh with a duvet. Enter the weary staring contest emerging from beneath mauve-ish lids. Then, a shed lash is flicked off his face—a barely-there, fading sentiment. A shaky stroke shaped like a scratch. It lingers, thumbed into the hollow of his cheek. 

You rest your eyes and let him avenge your misshapen gentleness. The retaliation spills over your bottom lip in a cuspid tug—two scimitars kissing through the supple. He bites, he laughs, he soothes with a scaly lick. He aims his tongue at the words swabbing your throat and slips away, having tasted their shape. 

Behind him, in the ajar window, the buttery streaks of inchoate sun are splitting the hefty sky. Like twains of tepid oil in the cracks of concrete clouds. An impasto of Soviet shades all ebbing into Viktor’s hair like a spiky, boring halo. Cement, slate, and leaden with docile, sandy veins. It is going to rain again. 

“Don’t chastise me now, wife.” 

“Oh, but I wouldn’t dare.”

A trade of phlegmy endearments. They ebb from the counter as he fetches the cough syrup, the one that always mingles with your toothpaste as you stand propped up on the cracked sink. Wife, he taunts. The word cinches your lips and rips your legs open. Slips under your chemise and creeps up your spine like a cross-stitch. Scarce evidence of his fervor all bloody lunulas. They are faint aftermath of what follows the click of a toothbrush against the tile; they are a carved-in tally of every swallowed chide (circa thirty nail-prints per spouse). 

“I shouldn’t kiss you,” Viktor always rasps. “I must be contagious.”

But he never abides by it. And you never get sick. Because you both know it’s not just any cough he’s wheezing into your mouth. 

And so you lynch the silence with these half-cocked spurts—through keening, through collisions, through substitutions of ‘why’ with meek, unaccusatory ‘how’. 

For ‘Why did you run away from me?’ there's the nebulous ‘How was your day?’ And his answer will skin the air in thin slices. It will shake like an overripe fruit threatening to burst at the seams.  

There’s the faint sound of nylons getting caught in the stool—the pocket-knife is drawn and ready to strike. There’s the bump of a hip against a minor key—the blade punctures the soft side and lets the pulp bleed into the sink. There’s the kravat shed onto Schumann’s Humoreske—the knife retreats and makes space for the teeth. There’s Humoreske itself. There’s the timid suite, overlapping. Teeth are plunging into the mushy skin, not quite letting the insides dribble down the chin. Instead, the biters choke, rolling their eyes before that voluntary asphyxia. And although this limbo has overstayed its welcome, neither one of you dares break the pattern of fucking the sorrow back into your throats. 

So the cycle repeats. Hoards Jayce’s calls like stolen trinkets. Wakes you at four in the morning with the wet creak of Viktor’s lungs and leaves you lying there, pressed against his rasp until the clock bleats six and you have to go. 

He wriggles out of bed. You follow suit and carry a gown-like train of blankets into the bathroom, shoulders tense under the wool as you fumble with the toothbrush. To your left, Viktor gargles with Becherovka, the boyish abundance of his angles strangely endearing as he stands with his head thrown back, jagged voice-box bobbing. Pop pop pop—his mouth bleeds big, shiny bubbles. You laugh at him, and the toothpaste bursts from the gaps in your teeth. Froth seeps into the soaked blanket, leaving an ever-dried white stain. But Viktor winces at your picking at it. Drives his thumb over your wrist like a tender plow and nails it to the sink. Stares, and sighs, and stumbles over a faint “Please, don’t.” And you oblige. Grab the cool, wet rim all strained-knuckled madness. The yearner’s epistemology. One inevitably going down with a stingy, herbal-tasting kiss that says I loved waking up to this grey sky with you. 

Three stifling lung expansions in, there comes a drawn-out ring from the bedroom. Peevish at first, it travels through the hallway and bounces off the bathroom tiles as if trapped in a jar. The mirror quivers briefly. So does the medicine in the cabinet behind it and Viktor’s reflection when it peels off yours, retreating behind the vapory vignette. It’s the weight of him that remains. A lump of vein and lymph under your nails from where you groped under his jaw and all but pulled at the bone. The exact force of his wrist from where it pinned yours to the ceramic rim. From lissom, white-turned-purple fingers gripping with shaky might. The herbal vodka is puffing your taste cells and prickling them sore. The remnants of his kiss (texture, execution, grittiness, spit, the tongue lightly tapping your soft palate) are all rolling headfirst down your stomach. The phone rings again. Sonorous, pungent. A screech. Viktor winces like a languid cat, and you realise that he’s never looked more unsettling—all askew, appallingly in love, one eye tumid with popped capillaries, Becherovka-swollen mouth kissing your questions away. Good riddance, you think. They weren’t nice ones. 

He perches over the bathtub and shakes through the flooding of another cough, teeth scrabbling together muzzle-like to push the wet sound back where it came from. 

“I really am concerned for you,” you say, the words sticky inside your mouth, almost goading you to cough along. Viktor glares up from above a clenched fist, wiping a grudging tear. Eyes bloodshot from wheezing—the Cabanel’s fallen angel. 

“Aren’t you going to get that?” he nods to the doorway precisely after the third ring. Wipes the tear defiantly with his thumb. 

“Aren’t you going to see a doctor? You told me you booked an appointment last week.” 

“Aren’t you going to? Dr. Talis has been trying to get a hold of you for weeks.” 

“How do you know?”

“I spoke to him when you were rehearsing with that violin quartet yesterday. I told him you’d call him back at your earliest convenience.”

Your heart rate loses its stately percussion and explodes in a row of anxious semiquavers, and you clasp your thumb and forefinger together and drive a nail under a ripped cuticle. Blood draws at the weld and paints your finger an inflated pink. You smear it around—gummed and unyielding, reeking of rust—and look past Viktor’s eyes as though aiming for the back of his head, a startled, lancing shut up. One that picks up a profanity throughout the act, because of course he notices that strain—the slump of your shoulder blades like taut sails when you turn to the mirror and scorn at the audacity—at the smile that’s hardly a smile at all, but rather a goady, familial fuck you.

“Why did you call him?” You ask with such sizzling betrayal it makes your tongue feel hot and deflated. And he smiles at that too (the nerve, the insolence, the sheer, uncanny spunk!), smiles so wide you can hear the wet pop of lips stretching over gums, and answers you, spitefully, wanly: 

“I didn’t. I merely picked up the phone. Speaking of which, maybe you should do precisely that and let the man know you’re—“

“Why were you answering my calls?”

“How was I supposed to know they are yours? You are not the only one people are trying to reach in this household.” 

Askance, you stare at the quiet aberration that is your reflection—a madman at the brink of something you can not quite pinpoint—the kind of image to be slapped over an epitaph of a deranged artist you’re sure to become, wild eyes and jaw slacking, throat tightening around the word-vomit you’re trying to swallow. You want to smash your head against the mirror. Simply lunge at it full force so every time he looks at himself—dried blood in between cracks and all—he’ll know it’s him who reduced you to this, him who drove you insane with his dismissals, with his cynical staring contests and adamant refusals to talk about anything that’s not frivolous or pragmatic because he thinks you can’t handle hearing about why he left you—

But you settle for a micro explosion (a wise decision, for once) and yank the cabinet open instead. Watch the startled blur of your reflection slide rightward, almost hitting you in the cheek with a chipped edge. The rest is neurotic. Mechanical. Scan the shelves for a disinfectant, and, finding none, simply grab the band-aids and slam the thing shut—the madman returning briefly. Reach for the bottle of Becherovka on the sink and pour it into the wound—feel it sizzle, feel it scorch, revel in it for a bit. Choke on a canine whimper. 

“Do you want me to get the phone, honey?” Viktor asks, the damned smile still in his voice, full of itself as a tick. 

“No,” you say. The herbal vodka seeps under your skin. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I want to stop seeing Dr. Talis.” 

“Why is that?”

Because willful ignorance is easier. 

Because you’d rather slice your forehead against the mirror than confront your own husband, and you’d rather not explore that, how about that? 

The band-aid sticks to your finger pad. You twist it, snugly, up in a gross little cone, and turn to Viktor with a smile that matches his in contempt.

“Because you came back to me. What do I need a shrink for now?”

Viktor straightens his back. Rubs his legs together, striped pajama pants shuffling. The light bulb flickers curtly. 

Viktor is, it must be said, petrified. In a way a young man in love is, safe for the heftiness of his spite—tipping corpulent, tipping bloody—that one bruise in his lungs only distinctive of someone who’s loved so much he’s coughing up the excess. 

Viktor is patient. With you, with himself, with everything that’s wrong with the collision of the two. A lover before he’s a plaintiff, and never the other way around. Even when needed. Even when more suffering is at stake.

Viktor has a taste for scoring small landslides. Nail biting. Eyelids twitching. How everything you say sounds either like a reprimand or a jumpy precaution. Fevered autocannibalism (cuticles, scabs, bottom lip). Shoulders slumping in anger—and he’s sure it’s anger, can just tell by the shaking of your knees, the way you swiftly flump a few inches—a sinking stone. He’s gathering evidence. Whatever measly (or grandiose) proof of the plaintiff in him being right to claim that the defendant is deranged and in desperate need of help.

But the lover in him dreams of going blind. His eyes are much too attentive—so much so that dismissal becomes unfeasible, and the only way out is to rid himself of the sense. What good is looking at a wife whose madness has etched into her features? He’d rather put his hands to work. They’re used to it. They know touch is oblivious to perception. He won’t be the first blind pianist out there. He won’t be the first to switch to loving in Braille.

So he pulls his knees together and clenches the edge of the tub. Looks up at you, gravely—a worshipper despairing. A lover and a plaintiff. A malignant two-for-one. 

But he always chooses the former. Cowardly. Dilettantish. 

“If you say so, milackú.” 

“I am saying so.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“It is what I want.” 

Then, a sigh. Hoarse and spent, begrudging. He gropes for his cane and throws you one more deviant glare before getting up, a slight tremor to his wrist that he hides behind his back before you’re able to catch it. Bony shoulder bumping yours. 

“I’ll… pack your lunch,” he mumbles gruffly from the doorway. “Do you want your potatoes baked or mashed?"

I want your heart, raw, but that’s not on the menu, and you doubt he has any left anyway, so you simply mumble “mashed” and stare after him, gulping.

The phone goes down with one last blaring yelp. The air finally grows still. 

—

In the closet, you put your head in between two shelves, Sylvia Plath style—pitiful intention included. But the heat doesn’t come. Doesn’t plaster your brains all over the lacy undergarments. Instead, there’s only a piney smell of resin and a brittle sound of glue declining at the crevices. The death rattles of decaying furniture pleading to retire from storing one too many skimpy things. They catch against your wrist when you grope through the soft contents. A furl of meshwork, cotton, and bows—a silk robe, strangely enough, clasps of bras hanging loosely, an itchy, washed-out black camisole ripped at the fragile stitching.

A garter roughly nips at your bandaged finger. You fetch it by the suspender and stretch the belt to a crispy, elastic snap. The room is cramped and stuffy, the cello strings humming on occasion. You are changing with your back to the door. Thinking of the ozone seeping from under the window frames. Of hinges screeching when it rains. Of the smell of potatoes being boiled in the kitchen. Of the way you wanted to curdle that smile of his into something wet and stretchy. Kiss it worse, kiss it gone. Bare back to his clothed one. Back to back across the walls where he is hunched in front of the stove with his guilt bloating above the pot. Back to back, where you are putting your underwear on with your guilt shyly eyeing the phone and the discarded journal next to it. 

Back to him, where he stands in the doorway watching you roll up a stocking. The curves of your shoulder blades taut sails again. Anger in your shaking knees. The way you pinch the garter so tight there’s a run in the nylon. The way you’re all anger—glorious, languid, pointing your toes and dragging your foot behind. Like this spleen (towards him, no less) has made you drowsy and smooth, with those tendons so awfully tight, with this mouth choking on itself, half-chewed-off, warped, emphatic. 

Phlegm sticks to the back of his throat. He swallows it with a sleazy click and thinks of his lungs rupturing from dread. Tears at his shirt when you turn around, ferocious over a bare shoulder. The strap of your bra loosely catching against your elbow. Eyelids twitching. Cheek a teeth-sinking dent. Yearning for a finger to be pushed in between clenched jaws—animal, canine love. 

He looks away before his pulse can drop from head to tip. You put the strap in place and roughly pull it tighter.

“Your lunch,” he starts, words rendered broken English, affricate sharp and Czech-like. The rest doesn’t come. It stifles him mid-swallow, an amputated predicate. 

“Yes,” you catch on, pulling the garter over your hipbone, the curve of your belly smothered—a delicate, sweltering bulge. “Thank you.”

“Have I upset you?” Viktor asks. Cuts to the chase, really—cuts through the lacy, half-clad silence, through the buzz of electricity trapped somewhere deep within curled wallpapers. A fire hazard. The way he delivers it—abrupt and clanky, the way he waits to be burnt at the stake of your angry eyes. A tripping hazard, too. The unsturdy hold of his cane sliding out of a sweaty palm. The barely-there surge in your legs threatening a topple. 

But it feels good. This obscene, black lace presentation of something he can but shouldn’t attempt to have. The conniving, out-of-place essence of this erotica. Madonna out of her fur coat—sheer power. And he hasn’t got any right now. Terrified and culpable, at his half-naked wife’s mercy.

So has he upset you?

“Evidently,” you say. 

And he nods, accepting his sentence. To what exactly is a riddle yet to be discerned, but he’s signing up for it. He crosses the room and cocks his head like a bow’s dutiful sul tasto. Lands on the bed with a tired groan, cane timidly pushed aside. He beckons you—with every trembling finger, his mouth askew like a vain apology. His shrivelled shirt insignia-like over crooked shoulders. What badge is he wearing? What fringe benefits does it entail? What degree of sadness is behind those irritated retinas? 

Tepid, if you had to guess. Something quite mundane in Celsius but terrifying in Farenheits. Like ten. Or fifteen. You feel it wetting the back of your palm with its lukewarm mediocrity, for when you step in between his legs and let him press tear-first against your skin, there comes no scorch. Only a scarce, saltless drop. A good yawn’s repercussion. He sheds it to rivet into your band-aid and kisses each tired knuckle—a soft, largo-like tread. One hand etches into the hip—covering the expanse of what the dip has left for him to fill, the other hand imperiously pulls your wrist closer.

“Viktor,” you spread it into raucous syllables, Vik for when he lingers above your thumb, tor for when he makes it to the ring, tentative under the golden band. Twitching cheekiness at the tip of his stricken kiss. 

“I did not mean to upset you.” He whispers into your skin. Warm breath setting off gooseflesh.

A self-denying lie, wide pupils atremble. He stares at you from beneath his sun-bleached lashes—sharp little things, beige at the root. Stares innocence into your daggers—a mauve, sleepless shield. He leans back and lets you pierce some more—the stipple of his solar plexus in the swivel of an askew shirt, the minute quiver of scarce muscle where his heart keeps stuttering for you; a pulse impediment. 

“I think you did.”

You wrench your wrist out of his hold—feel the grease of his consternation circle it post-effort. To your left, on the dark, mildewed shelf, a void of even darker sweaters is piling up: it beckons you to quit staring into Viktor, to wrap yourself up in itchy cashmere and storm out of the door with your four-string cross of a cello thrown over a sore shoulder.

“You always do this when we’re back to normal. It’s like you’re trying to spoil it on purpose.”

Your reproach jack-knifes him in the back of a palm—a sharp, belly-dance-like jerk of your hip that sends his hand lonesomely dangling at his side. He sighs at that. A sound like that of a sputtering biro-pen—spent, inglorious. Corporeal, it travels through him, toes to mouth, calls for a hunch over a clenching-uncleching fist, skin wrinkling around yet another squint. 

“Except it’s not normal, moje lásko,” he murmurs. Droops into his lap and shakes his head before pressing his thumb into his nose-bridge. The sound of sheets rustling when he crosses his legs and broods even lower. “It’s never normal anymore.”

You drive your thumb under the band-aid—straight into the picked-apart wound. The stinging comfort of its mucus. Of lymph-diluted blood, and vodka, and cacked, gross pain. 

“But you don’t have to push me to make it obvious,” you beg—barely a whisper. 

“It doesn’t take much to push you.” Viktor scoffs. “My efforts are hardly contrived.”

“But they are efforts.”

“If only to earn your confidence. For once.”

“How come I still haven’t earned yours, then?”

That has him twitching upright—clecnhed teeth like a gnashing accusation. The end of the world in his blown-out pupils. He leans backward—leans on the palms driven behind his back. Squashes the sheets roughly. Slides his tongue over his front teeth like something is stuck in them. Suffers through a harsh suck. The air popping in his mouth flatly. 

“I do confide in you,” he insists with that barely convincing delivery of a liar that hasn’t fully embraced his identity as such. A whiff of something juvenile and cheeky. Except this—the crossed legs, the obscene lean back, the eyes foiling pale and nasty—is not benevolent anymore. And you find yourself meeting it thrice as filthy. With a regal step forward, with a groan bordering on a yelp. 

“Telling me an occasional Beethoven joke and rambling about your mundane tasks is not exactly my definition of confide,” you wheeze, a ball of tears wriggling through like helminths onto your cheeks, and you’re grateful for having forgotten your mascara. 

The string of your cello snaps loose in the case. The dull echo of Viktor’s nerves splitting along.

“What is it you wish for me to apprise you of?” He asks, depleted. Clearly reaching for a genuine question yet landing on a spat-out, rhetorical something. 

You smell iron. Meat and bone and blood boiling inside you. The phantom scent of anger crawling from under your skin. It stains your hair and your lace, paints the bedroom a shade darker. 

“Oh, let me think—“ You hover above him in mock-contemplation, then hold a hand up in the air, spreading your fingers for an ostentatious tally. “England?” You tick off one—forefinger on forefinger, forcing down till it hurts. The nervous laugh tearing through your throat a cartoonish mishap. “Why are you pretending to have caught a cold when that… thing is actually in your lungs?” You tick off the middle finger next. “Don’t you know I know? That terrifying fucking rasp in your chest. I can hear it. I can feel it when I touch you. Speaking of touching—“ The middle finger springs up again, but you paw at it to the familiar, white-knuckled madness—refolding, recounting, raving. “That’s all we ever do to each other. Have we forgotten how to speak?”

“No.” Viktor shakes his head. Contemplative—regretful, but not really. “We haven’t. But that’s precisely why we’ve been avoiding it, don’t you think?” 

“Why did you leave me, Viktor?” That one lands on the ring. Sweeps it away from your sight, yet allows him a torturous peek of that golden little thing before you end your tally and hide your hand behind your back—all bulging eyes and barley-like tears and chest heaving under your bra as though after a lung-shredding scream. “Why didn’t you tell me you were unhappy?”

“No, why don’t you ever tell me anything?!” He cries out. Surpasses you in decibels. The stoutness of his scream spilling out of the windows. 

Suddenly, he renders you exhausted, and you begin to cry. Just so, with your stupid trembling knees recoiling ever more stupidly so you have to sit down on the bed next to him and deal with your muscles growing porous. You drop your face into your knees and start chanting explanations into your nylons. Big, sobbing vowels bouncing off the confines of your pressed thighs. A’s and O’s and chewed on, half-coherent nonsense amid which Viktor finally deciphers “I didn’t want to fight.” 

You can feel him looking at you, and you hate it when that happens—being looked at when you’re not looking anywhere in particular. Giving up power. Being touched and pondered simultaneously—it’s one too many tools scratching your skin. 

Viktor doesn’t aim to scratch. He feels the sweat on your nape and follows the sweet-salty trails of it sneaking in between your hairs. He counts the blemishes on your back and tries to recall when and how those have appeared. He rubs your left shoulder and assesses its stiffness. And it doesn’t please him, whatever it is he concludes. He sighs, and rubs his fingers together with your rigid muscle in the way. Slides lower—where the cello usually falls into its designated crevice.

“There’s quite a… plethora of things we don’t tell each other to circumvent the fight, milackú,” Viktor says, and you huff into your knees, and cock your head in his direction, staring at him through spread strands—not quite Cabanel’s Satan, merely a weary woman. 

“So you’d rather resort to excessive fucking and small talk?” 

“It’s not that I’d rather resort to that—“ He shrugs, and gathers your cheek into his palm; holds your face so the nylon you’re pressing against doesn’t burn your skin. “It’s just that we are no longer capable of confiding in each other peacefully.”

“Were we ever capable of that?” You snort, wetting his hand. 

There’s a convivial sadness to his eyes. A distant flicker of all the sad strangers you’ve ever shared a beer with. He chews at his cheek, and you can hear the soft pulp of it ripping under his teeth. He tilts his head to match the angle of your staring at him, hair getting in the way and splitting into strands. The very tips of them perfect fiery circles in his peripheral. He looks at you in that chestnut vignette, and swallows, and scrapes his throat. The ceiling is grey and rippled. 

“I think,” Viktor finally mumbles, “I should’ve never been exposed to loving you this avidly. That kind of love is lethal to my rationality.”

“So we should keep things frivolous? Misery sex and superficial conversation?”

“Oh, nothing about this is frivolous. It’s perverse. It’s a perpetual preventative measure.”

“And yet?”

“And yet we don’t seem even to consider breaking the cycle.” 

He grows fawn-like when he says this, sheds years of mellow skin to become twenty and petrified again—only briefly, only just in the corners of his mouth and the way he pushes his hair out of his eyes to squint at you. You push yourself upright, straightening your back and swinging your shoulder blades, stance like a spread of wings. His hand stays in your lap, the absence of your cheek sweat and heat in his open palm. He slides it between your thighs—not erotically, but rather seeking leverage, settling slightly above the knee, the taut pull of nylon circling slow mania. 

When you reach to kiss him, he answers it like a work call in the middle of the night—gruffly polite, not fully committed. Your fingers five ardent tugs on his collar. All because you’ve spotted the boy you long for inside the man you’ve rubbed yourself sore getting back. 

Viktor whimpers, and you can taste the rasp at the back of his throat—cloying and lumpy and just the right amount of disgusting. It sticks to your tongue before straining you with a raunchy roll back, eyes and hips and hands and hips again when you thump against the mattress and let out a stifling sigh. Now supine, legs spread. The lack of him on your skin. The sweet abundance of him in your viscera. Dark hoods of his eyelids trembling at you lazily, poring over what his hands fear to touch. His collar crumpled where you held him through the teeth-clashing uproar. 

“We shouldn’t,” he says. “Not again.”

“Yes.” You nod. “I am going to be late for the rehearsal.”

But your hands are around his neck and he allows you to pull him down—to pinch his larynx between two fingers and feel the shape of it dip when he holds his breath, his pupils the blackest color of piety. His heart in his throat just for you. Fluttering when you bite into it, a lush chunk of skin salty with overnight sweat. 

Shouldn’t loses its dull ending inside his mouth and gains a few modal forces as the moan processes it; lulls straight into must and ventures into a rare instance of foul language.

Damp and glorious and slack-hard between your legs, he moves above you, fits jutted hips into your supple stretch, yanks your hands above your head, and watches the muscle grow taut and stark. All is limbs and shackles of fingers, wrists eager for the bounding. 

You choke on the residue of his kiss and smile up at him through the meek flutter of your lashes, and Viktor is twenty once again—the mauve under his eyes suddenly light and dreamy, the struttiness returning. Gone is the scary wheeze, the things he drenches in bile before spitting them in your face. You dig your bitten nails into his hand and revel in the hiss he exhales between your breasts, holding onto the instance of the lovesick boy from years ago—the boy whose nape you kept staring at in the most beautiful cathedral in Brno, the boy whose last name you dreamt of claiming, the boy who laid out his darling on a grand piano and took her apart in the span of five obscene minutes.

Impatient, his love slides two fingers deep into your underwear, and yours goes under his skin—both loves slick and wet, both loves aiming to penetrate whatever filthy inches they’re capable of—the daggers you make out with before driving them into each-other’s throats. Eyes drowsy with want and he peels them warm and wild, peels the lace to the side and looks down where you swell for him under the garter, a line of fine hair running low. 

When Viktor crawls back to you, everything gains a new flavor. For the crawling is always headed between your legs. For the taste is different every time he puts his mouth on you. And this morning you are bitter, so bitter with your thighs around his head, with your nylon rubbing his ears pink— because neither of you cares enough to hold your lovestruck spite for once.

So he bites a hole through your stocking and moans at the way you squeak, listens to its rupture into a giggle before going at it harder. And you laugh some more. Arduous, heavy and arching your back to push your hips into his face. 

And the room will grow heady with the sounds of Viktor fucking you into sheet-tearing oblivion, his cock smothered in his pants to the thoughts of gruesome things you refuse to talk about. Like his ‘cold’ that’s really a somatic cough, risen from the tightness of his nerves around you. Like the silent reasons why you haven’t shown up to Jayce’s office in weeks. 

And when you cum, it will approach tumbling onto your sternum, toes falling torpid mid-curl, and he will prop himself on his elbow and watch you go limp with drool rolling down your cheek. He will wipe his lips on yours, crushing his sour smile against your teeth. He will study the bed, the sprawl of you on the sheets with one leg bent at the knee, breathless with the taste of slick that he transfers to you before you are taken into his arms.

And you will stay there, flush and boneless against the scary croak of his lungs—yet again a devoured darling. 

And yet, he cherishes it. Chases the shock of his very first unbridled weep into the pillow. Clenches his toes and bites, gnaws, tears at his fist as though trying to regain the hum of that very first installment, the seizure-like itch of bones under his sticky muscles—all for the nyloned legs on some raunchy Skin Two cover. 

From then on, he develops fussy tastes. His stance on ‘Playboy’ hasn’t changed: he still thinks it a disgrace, a shiny travesty much too smutty for his liking. No, Viktor prefers a tease. Tawny corsets the size of a wasp’s waist. Stilettos. Thick garters pulling at the welt so it rises in a smooth slope right in the middle of a thigh. A pronounced back seam splitting the calf. He imagines licking along it, thinks of the prickly fabric scraping his tongue dry. 

Every last Friday of the month, he buys an addition to his raunchy collection. Skin Two—a personal favorite—for when he needs a sweet fix. Marquis, for when he momentarily slips towards latex—because Germans do it best and he’ll marvel at anything tight enough to compress a woman’s thigh. He likes the photography, the ritualistic fastening of the garters, the way the legs are captured mid-step, the pointed toes, and the painted toenails seen through the sheer stocking. 

Videotapes, he discards the exact way his precious nylon is discarded in them—cruel, unfazed, and invariably within the first two minutes. He’d rather watch the whole rite: the upward glide of the stocking until it’s pinched by a clip, the dull click of a bra being clasped. Idle fingers spread over sheer underwear to form something damp and heart-shaped. 

He hunts the erotic. Stacks it in his bedroom—the most pretentious of softcore collections—and brings himself to those bone-itching orgasms at the sight of yet another vintage-resembling spread. The daily desecration of his dorm-room is a bold Miller entry—cum-stained trousers and hoarse moans tearing his throat like sandpaper. Though for an engineering student, his perversions remain within decency. 

The scales of room distribution kept tipping in his favor, so the tip of his cock could keep swelling sore. His last restraint had moved out long before Viktor came back for his third year: a timid girl who randomly decided to take a gap year midway through her master’s. With no next-door neighbor to be wary of, he could ease into the habit just so—and ease he did, clammily—alongside his lube and his pointy wrists and his carpal tunnel syndrome swiftly creeping in from being a little bit too besotted with hosiery.

Thrice a day, he sees to the compulsion. Draws out sweet, viscous instances like the slick mess drying in his belly button—just bliss, and blisters, and hand cream shortage, and his innocent deviations in this stifling room. 

It lasts forever (thirty-three sweaty days), and Viktor hopes to secure an entire year of unstifled orgasms. But on October 3rd, when he crawls into his room after a daunting lab class—bones aching, tie wimpled, belt clanking to the floor—everything hitches. He squeezes himself at the base. Wrangles it like a snap of a neck.

Footsteps next door. It takes him long enough to register what they are—his blood is still sticky with agitation, there’s still sweat in the dip of his lower back—heady evidence of his postprandial horny. A vacant taste of grease and soup on his tongue as he tucks himself back into his pants. 

He hears heels and wonders what kind they are. Stillettos? Cones? Ankle-straps? Peep-toes? He hears the sharp snap, the reverberation of old furniture when the click lands into a parquet dent, each one coming down with a shake. But that’s just the price of winning a scholarship somewhere moldy and European: sixty-centimeter walls and windows so back-to-back they’d bump glass panes if opened outwards. He smiles—bitter, morose. There goes his agape-mouthed splendor. There goes his end of the world. 

As the clicks relocate somewhere numb and distant, he has no trouble pinning the direction. More so when the hinge screeches hoarse and slow, and he rushes to grip his cane in his sweaty palm, belt hanging so low it’s as good as lost—and yet a dumb excitement in his lurch to the window, a slippery, shapeless thing like the one he commits over his pile of pornos.  

Right away, October scratches at his every membrane, heady with festering earth, wet soles, and a secret third thing—a steady aim for his nose, reeking not just yet discernible. Viktor cranes his neck to the right and finds it—all of it. The smell, the heels, the culprit—a handbook of safety hazards. Legs carelessly dangling from the sill. A scraped knee framed by a hole in the stocking. Mildly sallow teeth in a wide, lipsticked mouth and full-on sallow fingers stuffing it with a Lucky Strike. 

“Hi,” you say, and he notices the dab of lipstick on your front tooth, one that makes him swipe his tongue over the gap in his own—perhaps to draw blood so he can match you. 

“Cigarette?” You offer him a less gory way of being on a par—a passing of a pack akin to those fine artsy parodies of The Creation of Adam where God’s nails are painted black and he’s squeezing a joint. “I’m fairly certain smoking is strictly forbidden in the dorms,” he tells you, and imagines you prying the window open, the sheer, black length of your legs climbing up the sill. In your mouth, the cigarette smolders, prickly sparks eating at the end when you inhale. You wince and swat some mascara out of the corner of your eye, then rub it into your fingers until it’s a grey smudge. Leaning back, a flash of a garter, and Viktor’s blood flow halts to regroup his every cell into that one muscle. When your left shoe (a mere oxford, by the way) slips just enough to dangle off the toes, he thanks evolution for not letting aneurysms form inside cocks. 

And it’s easy enough to put off his pervy confession. To remember that you’re not one of his porn-mag girls—because they don’t giggle with a squawk this canine and don’t pick at the scabs in their sliced knees. And, most importantly, he doesn’t owe them a mental apology for leering at their thighs.

So Viktor feels his shame wrap around his neck, a fuzzy feeling like choking on a cherry pit—a dark, panicked yawn, a gulp of cyanide. He clutches the offered pack before the thought becomes as concrete as his hard-on.

A plume of blue smoke in your hair, and he marvels at the privilege of his lungs expanding unitedly with the girl’s in a ripped stocking.

“What are you?” he asks, and the shame prevails, plants in him a hope that you’ll reach out and slap him. He fills his mouth with bitter spit and waits for the blow, takes a drag so long it soaks the filter. 

When you introduce yourself, he laughs a lumpy cackle of relief. “No, er… Your major?” He clarifies.  

“Oh.” You flick the ashes with a broken nail. A gust of wind spits it out onto Viktor’s sweater. “English.” 

“English?” His voice rounds up, and you note the slight lisp to his sibilants—stunned and lovely. “How come you were given a room in this building?” 

“Gap year. There were no rooms left in mine.” 

“Oh?” “Writer’s block. Didn’t want to half-ass my paper.” 

He nods at you with a giddy smile of somebody who’s just been trusted with a secret. “Aren’t you interested in what I am?”

“An engineer, of course.” 

“Well, yes, but—“

“Mechanical?” 

“How did you guess?” 

“God, you—“ You laugh, and point to the cuffs of his shirt peeking from under the woolly sleeves of his sweater, “your folk has a look about you.” 

He swallows and reaches to pull at his sleeve. Beckons a curious magpie by crumbling ashes all over the concrete. Tentative, it tries at them with its beak, then looks up to blink with beady-eyed accusation. You chuckle—deep and crispy, voice cracking, a click of phlegm peeling at the back of your throat. 

The magpie screeches and takes off. Viktor nurses the filter with a drawn-out suck before mumbling, “A look about me. What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The haircut,” you explain. “Or, rather, the lack thereof. And this poor-blood-circulation-sedentary-lifestyle way of dressing—”

There is a sudden commotion in his chest, and his heartbeats become longer, itchier. He ditches his furtive smile, and you put it on as if it’s a relay—only you’re wearing it febrile, churlish. And by that smile alone, he knows exactly who you think you are, can just picture the kind of titles you keep on your bookshelf.

“What have I ever done to you?” He manages. 

You shake your head, plucking hair out of your eyes, nails and lipstick matching. “Oh, I’m not insulting you. You’re a lovely specimen. Your lot arrives here, gifted and clueless, with your technical mindsets and clinical bashfulness. Hell, it’s written all over you as we speak. And you always,” You stress, blowing out pretty, sinewy fog, “always graduate with honors and a two-digit body count.” 

Viktor’s cock throbs. Sends through him a nagging tow like the pinch of a nerve—one he knows intimately and by rote. “You seem suspiciously cultivated about men in my department,” he says when it’s over, gripping the windowsill for fear of all the nicotine catching up to him. “Am I to assume you’re speaking from experience?”

And the throb prevails, for you choose to cross your legs and grin at him again, showing teeth. “Go figure.” 

“I’m afraid I… wouldn’t know,” he confesses. “I rarely partake in sleeping with fellow engineers.” “Who do you sleep with, then?”

With girls that look ike you, in the private ambiance of my imagination, he thinks, shrugging his shoulders. 

That calls for a nod—the closest to awkwardness he’s ever seen you. “Well,” you say, tongue-in-cheek, orotund, “that must mean you don’t have people over often. You’ll have no problems keeping it quiet for me, then.” 

Upon finishing a smoke, he brings you the slapstick ashtray from his desk. It’s a cut-off bottom of a tin cup, precisely the type people dunk their stubs into in his home country, and you whistle at the invention, asking if one’d need a tetanus shot if poked with that thing. He shrugs before answering, “Probably. How quiet do you want me to be, exactly?” 

Swift, you throw the chewed-on filter into the ashtray, a lipstick smudge where you mouthed at it with chic violence. It bumps against his with a hiss, a sizzling sound of an indirect kiss. 

“Well, obviously, I don’t expect you to walk around on your tiptoes all the time,” you tell him, throwing one leg inside the room. 

“Good. Not that a request of that kind would be attainable—” A beat, to make the punchline land smoother. “My cane isn’t soundproof, you see.” It lands. You stop mid-turn and laugh, the depth of your throat the color of rotten plum—the kind he’d like to push his fingers into if you let him. 

“What was your name again?” You ask, staring him down one last time. 

“Viktor.”

“Right. Well, Viktor—just try to keep quiet late into the night. That’s when I usually write. No orgies,” you warn him, slipping away; and he blinks, twice and feverish—so contrived that his eyelids make an oily, tired click— en route to snap a mental shot of your wound in its nylon vignette, the exact shade of black on the clasp of your garter, and the shape of your nose when you scrunched it, wiping smoke out of your lashes. 

Later that night, he cracks open a fresh edition of Skin Two and flips through it until he finds a model smoking a cigarette. And when he cums to the sight of her spread legs, he obeys your order and muffles his moans with a pillow. 

— October 5th. Midday. Minutes before thunder, the sky is eerie and methylene blue. When he was eight, Viktor tells you, a bottle of it exploded in his hands, and his fingers stayed this exact color for two weeks. “What’s methylene?” You ask him, yawning into your collar, and Viktor wonders what he’d like to be more: the boy with a missing tooth and shaky limbs stained blue, or the man who’s going to slip those very limbs under your faux fur. He settles on the boy. The man is still under construction, too cowardly to reach across windowsills and ask to be let inside. 

He does lean forward, however. Feels the synthetic cheetah pelt and circles a cigarette burn at the fluffy seam—tries a hand at inducting audacity. Which you don’t reward—not verbally, not just yet. Instead, a scoot closer and a glossy wink. Torture hand-outs, he calls them. He tries to swallow his pulse away, thinks that if only he gulps fast enough, you won’t notice the bobs below his jaw. 

You notice.

He stares at the black lumps gathering at the corners of your eyes—salt, sweat, and shimmer staining the crease with a greasy line and mascara flakes so big it looks as though your pupils bled them. Mean wives wear their makeup like that, Viktor thinks. Uppity, they squint their smoky eyes and reply I know to I love you. He finds he doesn’t mind—not in the slightest. Matter of fact, he strongly prefers it: the cold slap of acknowledgment when you angle his head back and ask him to open up—just so, just with the tips of your freshly-painted-Revlon-Streetwear nails. 

He chokes on the drag you make him suck on and tastes turf; October incarnate spilling over his taste buds like moldy cheese or giving head to a stranger: two preposterous things he’d only tried once and has been sporadically itching for ever since. 

You perch for him, almost falling over. It’s a tad too early to come into his room or let him inside yours—you want to keep it within a window's reach, to draw out the next-door fantasy and the abstinence that comes with it. All for constructing the tease of being separated by this paper-thin wall, which he picks up on and teases you back—as best he can, with his contorted mouth blowing smoke into your face so you can retreat into it while his eyes are watering. He keeps the cigarette, and you light a new one, silent during your exchange of what Viktor hopes are mutually awkward coughs.

“So,” you prompt. “Methylene. What on earth is that?”

“It’s an antiseptic. An ultramarine sort of thing. Almost like, er…” He points to your hand, smiles a charming, asinine thing that makes you roll your eyes, “your nails. Yes, I suppose your nails are methylene blue today.” 

You hum, spreading your fingers over your knee, and Viktor notices the tiny wound again, feels the prickly nylon rub it raw. “I might have some. In my room,” he mumbles before his throat goes parched. “For your injury, if you’d like some—”

“Please,” you cut him off, voice cracking, which only catches up to him mid-reach for his cane.

Fumbling inside his medicine cabinet, the time drags on shapeless and cruel, vials and thermometers clattering while he digs for the infamous blue bottle with the white cap. “Found it,” he announces after his groping proves accurate. 

When he comes back, you’re halfway ready to be patched up—one garter clasp undone (the thick, vintage kind he adores). He pushes his tongue into his cheek and finds the deep molar cut; marks the flavor of his regret coin-like. How could he have missed it? How come he wasn’t there to see the belt lose tautness and dangle free?

But the consolation comes shortly—a deterrent never to berate himself again. Despite the shaky fingers and the friable ash, you hook your thumbs into the band and peel it off your thigh. Only then does Viktor notice what your nails were supposed to match today—and the answer is not methylene blue, nor the lovely pre-thunder sky. 

He finds the shade match between your legs. A sliver of blue lace peeping out for a quick flash of what, incontestably, is the gusset. He squishes the cotton swabs he brought you and hears their plastic bases crack. And you detect him detecting the bait, aiming for a timorous, phony leer. Spreading your legs just a touch wider—with precise show-girl fashion, a mechanical sort of arch. 

When you roll the stocking down, Viktor’s brain resorts to sibilant reprehensions: sex, salivation, slick, and random salacious pictures—a whole lot of S that he’d like to be allowed to do to you. It hits him then, whiplash-force, those very itches you are scratching for him—the dampness of mold and the brusque exchanges before one of the parties gets undressed. The soft, and the trashy, and dreamy, rigorous trysts. 

He holds onto the thought when you stretch your leg out, grazing his sleeve with your shoe. 

“Careful,” he whispers, and instantly regrets the artifice, “wouldn’t want you to fall over, now, would we?” 

You laugh at him again—that canine, aggravating sound. But the pliancy is refreshing—a case of carrot and sticks, mockery and indulgence. “This building is really quite bizarre,” you say, pointing your toes to back up the observation. “I could really just climb into your room if I wanted to.”

“Or—“ He opens the blue bottle and dabs the cotton swab around the rim. “You could simply knock at my door and ask to be invited in like a normal person.” 

“I don’t think normal is what you prefer, Viktor.” 

“Neither do you, it seems.”

“Mmm,” you answer, an interplay of a hum and a hiss. He starts working around the scab, tries not to dribble sweat from his forehead onto your skin. He makes sure to get the raw, pink parts, hunching above you like a squinting jeweler—stunted, endearing. Indeed, this building is quite strange. The walls have ears here—an eavesdropper's wettest dream, yet there’s always an obtuse delight in him at the possibility of you stretching your leg over his windowsill.

For that, he boldens. Lets his cotton strokes gain a shape—a dumbed-down, stock standard one of the organ thrashing inside his ribs at the thought of you ever overhearing his lube-covered endeavors. When he’s finished, you bend your leg to observe his work, and the fear of overstepping turns up—has him looking up at you with wintry, bulging eyes. 

But you smile, all gums and teeth. “Look at that. It’s like a heart-shaped bruise.”

Viktor finds he agrees, steering his thumb through your skin until it presses into the dent of your kneecap. For a beat, the air becomes spiky, and the sound of him choking on it whistles above your wound. If it weren’t so unhygienic, he would kiss it better. If he weren’t such a cum-stained loser, he would already have ended up with his tongue wetly asking for mercy against your shoulder. 

Words don’t come out of him until he rinses them with saliva, the rush of unctuous froth coating his throat as he stifles a coughing fit. Maybe that’s what having rabies feels like: fevered and gooey, with his knuckles pale from pawing at a girl’s calf. 

“A bruise. Is that a bad thing?” The wet pop of syllables makes him as gauche as when he undoes his pants to the sound of your keyboard typing away next door. 

“No.” You catch your coat mid-roll off your shoulder. The slope of your breasts squishing together cognate with what he imagines upon hearing about Madonna-whore complex. “I like bruises.” 

—

October 7th. The night is starless, with a skyline shaped like a cavity. You’re climbing inside Viktor’s room while he’s crooking two fingers into your garter belt, thinking of the intervals between your dates corresponding with his choice of equipment, the inevitability of the third encounter leading down south. Duos, trinities, and a single seven all aligning so he could get lucky —but he doesn’t redeem it, chooses to teeter at the edge of combusting into his pajama pants as you throw your leg around his waist and guide his palm under your cheetah-print coat. Laughing, when he finds his methylene blue heart still perfectly unsmudged under your stocking.   

Between your shoulder blades, sweat is drying a milk crust bead, and Viktor wants to claim a lick; swipes his thumb there twice like a slither of a tongue. Inside his head, a Portishead song is stuck on loop from when he listened to you play it thirty times back-to-back—must’ve been a glorious crisis, or the very sultry act he indulges in behind that thin wall. He hopes for the latter, holding you tighter while you step inside. The slap of your laughter under his jaw, spit drizzling everywhere. On your breath—chalk and coriander. On his—that same rabid salivation. 

He finds he’s leading you by the hand, the whole outline of you a big, imbiding blemish with glowing eyes. “Insane,” he mumbles through a swallow. “You are utterly insane.”

You seem to mark that an endearment, pinching his palm with your nails so hard he can’t help but imagine them slicing his shoulders. Groping for the lamp, his room grows disemboweled of every corner—there’s only you, claiming his sheets with your legs crossed tight and bitchy, shedding off your coat extra slow so he can’t make out what’s under it before the light bulb flickers. 

When it does, the shapes and colors don’t come back. All is corpulent heaps and eye floaters—all but you and the dress you’re wearing as you smile at him with your lipstick smeared over your chin. 

He feels gluttonous at the sight—craves to sink his teeth into that sweet spot where the stocking ceases the thigh; to marvel at the blue mark he’d left on your knee, that perfect little bruise. Instead, he starts blabbering. “You are simply…” He searches for the most English-major word within his range, then chuckles as the option emerges. “Farcical.”

You twitch your head towards him, unimpressed. “Farcical?” “Yes! What is wrong with you? Why don’t you use the door?”

“I prefer the window.” “And I prefer you with your limbs intact.”

“Oh. Not a huge ‘Crash’ fan, then?” 

“Enough!” He runs out of breath, recalling your shoeless leap, your knocking on the glass so sudden and so macabre. He closes his eyes and sees you slipping on his beloved nylon, a dozen gruesome what-ifs settling in with a hypothetical shrill. The entirety of you finally within the walls he commits his crimes of passion in, and yet he’s mortified at the thought of your spine jutting out of that little dress, of those thin nylons ripping if you were to fracture the very legs he’s trying not to ogle. 

It rewards him with the crushing weight of being the bigger person, lifts the heaviness off his boner to migrate into gawky shoulders. Only he can’t tell what it reeks of: nobility or hopeless celibacy. 

“Don’t do that again.” Viktor sighs, leaning his cane against the bed frame and sitting down next to you; your hands instantly in his hair, inspecting their newfound entitlements. “Please,” he whispers, “just come over whenever you like. We both know the hall advisors don’t care about—”

“Fornication?” You are chuckling in his ear, and he finds himself sentenced to the noose of your arms—a willing participant, eager for the strangling. 

His throat contracts against your shoulder, a spoon-worth gulp of phlegm when he mumbles, “Yes, er. Fornication. No use risking a broken neck for it. Nobody cares.” And you smile again, reaching under the waistband of his pajamas. Whimpering, when the pang of your glass-cold fingers gets to him. Through him and around the base. “I know they don’t care. But it’s so much fun to pretend they do.” 

When you bend down to kiss him, he clenches his teeth and keeps his lips shut: not to resist you, but to stop his drool from seeping into your mouth, which he already knows is going to feel silly in hindsight. He feels your fingers claw into his face, a press on his mandible like the berating of a dog that’d just snatched something off the dirty floor. Wide-eyed, he lets you hold his mouth open, hears a slurp before he gets to consider blushing. Your tongue goes at it—all of it—the wet, the foamy, the toothy. For a second, he even thinks you’re about to add bloody to that convergence, with your grip on his lip all needles, all sampling copper. 

You grin: shiny gums and pink saliva bubbling in the tooth gap. That’s when Viktor reaches for his lip and realises the bloody is already there—a dab of torn tissue that has his balls griping a little tighter every time he probs the wound with his tongue. Yet his hands are shaking—a funny impulse to pin you down and stick his teeth into your clavicles. To have the girl with a kiss like every transition metal, with a spine like a scythe blade—a perforated, downward curve. “So voracious,” you call him, and he moans at it, moans and sucks in a charged, spitslick breath, craning his neck so your laughter can uncoil straight into his cochlea—deafening, sultry. Ticklish. “Can I?” He asks, unsure what for. There’s still a belief in him that all fucking, however blithe, must mean something—anything at all—irrespective of the bodily fluids involved. Since you chose blood, he expects a kind of meaty love, fitting his fingers into the gaps of your ribs. Leaning backward, the garter belt pulls taut, a dress-proved-nightgown riding up where thighs could kill if clenched in a headlock.

It comes to him, then—an almost-punch to the crotch. 

“Can I go down on you?” Viktor blurts out—no, spews, really—driving his nails over your skin until you squeal and pull away. It startles him, shakes him out of his cunt-drunk stare, and he rushes to kiss you—a redemptive, soft-mouthed thing. Lazy tongue. 

“Maybe,” you sneer, but it’s a toothless snipe, one that gets lost in his hair when you take a whiff of it. “If you promise not to bite it off, hm?” 

“I can’t promise you that. I really can’t.” Viktor laughs, yet means it—pivots his knee in between your legs and jerks at the sound of flannel scuffing against the nylon like an unzipped fly. Foreshadowing, he hopes, and knows that you’re hoping for it too, guzzling into his neck as if trying to dig his vocal cords out. 

Peeling off your dress, your skin gains a warmer edge, and when he licks it—navel to underneath your bra—his first porn-mag aisle beckons him again, offers him fishbone legs in black tights and flipping through Tropic of Cancer in a banned literature class—a confluence of your-his world where cum and sweat and being obnoxious are the common denominators. 

He watches you writhe and lets his hand writhe with you: over your chest, inside the hook of your bra, tugging but not opening, then dabbling into contours under your tendons—neck, clavicle, ribs. But what he’s really after are ankles—the passage to finding out whether your toenails are painted. Shapes, shades, shadows—so many things to discover, and so he grabs you—thigh, ass, doubling up on thigh again, unsure of what to look for first, what to put his tongue on before sticking it up your cunt. 

The filthy S comes back to him with all its dirty alliteration—sex, salivation, slick, and something else salacious he can’t recall the substance of. Trying to unclasp your bra, his anxiety bubbles over, covers you with a slobbery, scared kiss as he whispers, “No, no, no, don’t.” Instead, he tugs it aside and shoves his thumb into the aureole, itchy lace getting caught in the nipple, prompting a moan, then a slutty chuckle. Dark, hardening flesh, in his pants and inside your underwear: nagging, blood, angry—a profanity-filled slam poem. On top of you, his hands are losing strength, itching to be twisted behind his back, brusquely pushed into orifices, ridden, slapped, broken—perhaps concurrently. He yanks you upright and makes you lick his fingers: a dry swallow to the base until you’re leaving a red smudge of lipstick around it and letting him tickle your throat—the first step to finding out what the inside of you feels like.

Shielding your eyes from the lamp, splitting fingers for a drowsy peek from beneath fluttering lashes—still sweat, still shimmer, still sticky mascara smears. He hauls his shirt over his head and treats you to the slopes of his neck hollowing before a gulp. Has you smiling like people do through a drunken rendition of a well-known song, bending your knee and accepting a kiss where he’d just painted it blue the other day—lips on nylon, his breath on your wound and straight into bloodstream. “My—” He trails off. Ventures into kissing your knee again just to buy himself time to pick a sexy endearment. Girl gets discarded—too frivolous, too precociously possessive. He thinks again, awkwardly shaking his head while scraping slut, whore, and their accomplices—too close of a verge on disrespect, too bold of an assumption. And he’d rather you call him that anyway. 

“Your?” you prompt. Fingers inside the garter belt, and right into a smooth, knowing tease—pulling it just low enough to show off the swell of your stomach and the small trail of pubic hair if he cares to squint. Which he cares, of course—if only to twirl his thumb into it. If only to imagine his fresh, hot cum soaking those thigh-smothering stockings.

His balls start to hurt again, yet this time it’s far from that dull ache—this one’s more like testicular torsion or getting stepped on. Viktor remembers touching himself to the latter and feels the ache worsen exponentially, his embarrassment showing up in a damp stain on his thin pajama pants.

Way down, where ankle bones become palpable, he noses their swells while stretching against the sheets, cock down. Painted toenails almost in his face when you squeeze your legs together to make room for him.

He snatches your feet before you get to push them apart again. Sucks out what appears to be a sample vial load from his tender cheek. Another kiss to the ankle before he lets you throw your thighs on his shoulders; the weight of them slushy, flouting death to block his airways. 

Cognisant, your eyes find him, and his bed becomes a pitfall. He has never been a bellicose boy—has never felt blood gushing out of a broken cartilage; but as he takes a whiff of your underwear, he thinks he knows how being punch-drunk feels. He longs for his capillaries to burst over the garter, grinds his tongue against the gusset before pushing it to the side and aiming for a lick so deep the tip of his nose ends up damp, too.

In his mouth—just you and shuffled dirty talk, and he glues it together, sucking, and groaning, and pushing back, and offering his hair for the yanking.

“My,” he calls you, stares daggers from beneath the curls on your pubes, “my favorite worst nightmare.” 

My personal porn-mag girl. 

When he eats you out, it’s a sloppy endeavour gone rigid and his chin hurts from just how acidic you turn out to be—singy enough to bleach whatever facial hair his razor might’ve left behind. It’s imperfect: a pressure-less swirl, raw tongue missing your clit in a way that snitches on his being out of practice. Yet he likes the scolding you subject him to, smirks and wonders if fucking up on purpose will receive him another nape-yank. 

It does.

“Stop that,” you warn. He pushes hair out of his eyes and finds you knitting your brows at him: bleary-eyed, furious—a proverbial ante-slap. For a never-bellicose boy, he has surely been drooling at the prospect of getting punched a bit too densely in a span of ten minutes (just where does the time go when you’re trying to make a girl cum?)

He can’t name what he’s running on when he props himself on his elbows to present a cheek. All that matters is that he wants it, almost intrinsically, with every feature of his calling for a spanking: those droopy eyes, this slick, swollen mouth. This pathetic infatuation with hosiery. The deep pain slicing his cock when he stalls two-fingers deep inside you and listens to the soft pluck of you being stretched. 

“Slap me—“ he begs, “please,” and the mental pitfall swallows him the second you comply.

What a glorious slap it proves: how precise, how cinematic. It blurs Viktor’s vision into water color swirls and sieges oh so freakishly in turn with his stomach acid. 

“Thank you,” he says, jaw clicking, lungs threatening to leak out of ribs. Above him, you are smiling with every tooth unexpurgated, hair a yellow gloriole at the edges when you throw it back, blocking the lamp. Chest heaving, nipples out and dark. It doubles the slap’s recoil and punches the sublime in him instead of out.

And he discovers he likes it, pushing his mouth back against you. A lesson learned—defter, more refined, sweatier. Trying a new pattern, one that goes up, around and straight in, curling in a suck while he smears you all over his face—so sultry, so swollen, so slippery bordering on the very vampirism he’d promised he’d omit. 

He licks a spasm out of you and feels his mouth expand with everything he derails: cigarette-strained vocal cords, a half-swallowed moan, more pH than he’d ever tasted in a girl before, crooked fingers, calf cramps, fancy adjectives like crepuscular, seditious, and (his favorite) arduous. That just about convinces him the devil herself climbed into his bed to finally satiate him—sexually, semantically and whatever else he comes up with. Viktor’s only regret is that handprints don’t leave welts: he’d love to stare at the aftermath in the mirror after you leave. 

“Right there,” you wheeze, a burst at the seams. Right there, which is a pulp-like spot exactly at the entrance—softer than the rest of you, a hot, almost fluffy thing. With his tongue within it, he reckons he’s messing with your nerves and pretends you’re leaking not slick but cytoplasm. 

“Right here?” Tongue out and showing off the burn of you through his taste buds, yet his fingers stay, voluntarily wound tight, spreading, curling, pulling among other suggestive participles. Stockings in his face again: shiny, new and possibly just purchased, for when he nuzzles your thigh it smells like fresh Spandex. 

You press your foot into his shoulder and shove him away, asking for a breather. He uses those boneless seconds to sit up straight and shyly cover his cock with his hand—a gesture utterly ridiculous given he’d just engaged in something far, far filthier than mere nudity. Climbing on top of him, your mouth creases into its umpteenth laugh, and Viktor is convinced that soon enough he’ll be able to discern the frequency of you laughing at him from with him. 

“Don’t hide from me now,” you whisper, kissing sweat off his brow. “What a strange boy you are. Are you always this capricious? A tease, then a virgin?”

He’s not sure how to answer that. In truth, he’s none and both of these interchangeably, but his tongue feels too heavy to mince that into a clever response. “I suppose,” he simply says, kissing you back—never too tired for kissing, even if it’s just a lazy smack under the earlobe (which tastes like copper because of course he forgot you’ve got earrings on). 

Peeling his palm off his cock and placing it on your hip instead, you both bump foreheads and watch his tip peek out of the waistband—a sort of fleshpot pink that looks like it’ll feel good pressing into you. When you take him out of his pants, he groans, slack-jawed and a little dizzy. He stares at your hand around him with blown-out, first-year-meets-his-first-weed pupils, and thinks that sex has never been more terrifying. But he knows he’s going to manage—has always been an avid horror fan after all—and, judging by your bruising tendencies, you might just dig terrifying, too. 

Part of the reason Viktor indulges in touching himself so much is aesthetics. His cock is a lovely, thick one that looks nice with a fist wrapped around it—possibly his most (and only) narcissistic put in one sentence. “What a pretty thing. No wonder you jerk off every day,” you joke, thumb swiping over the slit.

Shame glues his pants to his buttocks so airtight that he stops feeling the beads of sweat individually. All is wet like landing in a puddle after a swing to the solar plexus, but he finds it in him to look you in the wild eye and bite back a betrayed, “How did you—?” 

“You aren’t exactly subtle, you know.” A kiss to the mole under his eyes. Prickly lashes getting caught in the tenderness. “So loud. So whiny. Didn’t I specifically ask you to cancel your orgies?”

“It seems to me like you’re just indignant because you weren’t invited.” 

“There you go again. So rude—” Biting his lip for god-knows-which-time, drawing blood and chuckling as he groans. “Whatever do I shut that mouth with?” 

The answer comes down with one garter clasp clicking undone. 

Viktor watches you tangle your leg out of the stocking, and it suddenly registers that he’s never seen one being taken off not in the pretext of glossy pages. Or maybe he has, just before the obsession hit, so the memory was rendered inconsequential and got lost in his prefrontal cortex. One thing he knows for sure: he’s going to remember this forever. The reveal of the exact shade of your toenails (vampy-plum), the sultry crack of your voice when you tell him to open up. 

Nylon scrapes his mouth as you swab it nice and tight. 

After that, an inevitably awkward search for a condom and an even worse coil of limbs gone gangly in a trice: your bent knees, his taut thighs, stockpiling, detangling, then shifting to be thrown over each other again. It has Viktor drooling through the texture of his makeshift gag; his full veins suddenly flaccid and hollow. You have to stroke him hefty again—torturous pace, steady fist, a bite to his shoulder just to remind who he’s dealing with. Inside you, heat is narrow and liquid-flat. He bottoms out and hums gratefully for the stocking in his mouth, knowing that otherwise he’d be all up in your ear, thanking deities he doesn’t believe in for those millions of years of evolution aligning so that he got to fuck you tonight.

Nails, everywhere. In his scalp, in your buttocks, stretching, and slipping, and stretching again, now slower. When you moan—tight-lipped, a jolt before a convulsion—he knows to try and make up for the earlier tease, spreads you with two fingers for better friction and tries to angle the heel of his palm in a way that would make you hit it. All is wet again. His hands, the back of his neck, your pubes rubbing against his. No orgies, he thinks, and the irony of it grabs him by the balls and makes holding on for you even harder than it already is. No orgies is his last coherent thought before he cums so torturously balmy it feels like his nerves are on fire, and he can no longer tell if it’s drool or froth seeping through the nylon.

You, your sweat, your garters are all he prays to before the duration of his performance sinks in, swelling like the full condom inside you.

his voice that's usually as bright as the light he is—at least, for you—now sounds rusted in a way dust grows in between telephone cables. old and abandoned.

for the longest time, you keep finding yourself standing in the old classroom that was once everything. proof of the life you shared with him and everyone else. proof that at one point, you had everything in the palm of your hands.

you never wanted him to find out this way. didn't plan on making him know from a piece of paper rather than your mouth. but, in order to ground yourself to the decision of walking out of this society, you were planning on telling him after you handed in the resignation letter.

why? because you understand that if you told him beforehand, the slightest shift and change from him is able to break down through your resolve. crumbling the wall you had built in the last few months. 

although you love him dearly, with everything that's yours, this world you're living in is chasing you down in ways that's suffocating. in a way that you'd find yourself waking up in the middle the night, covered in sweat and trembling.

because no matter how hard you try to push it away— the reality of the life you're facing as a sorcerer keeps showing its fang at you like a viper, unrelenting.

"i can't keep living like this, gojo."

and may whoever deities are listening help satoru gojo, because in that room that's starting to feel cramped, the man can sense the facade which makes him, him, starting to crackle. he didn't say anything for a while before a sudden chuckle left his lips. 

"i see," he said, all the while bitterness is the only thing he can taste on his tongue. 

you didn't say anything, didn't make an expression— only added more intensity to the air that's surrounding both of you. leaving that as the last moment of him before you step away from that city, with more unsaid and unheard words lingering.

satoru gojo is a man of many things.

that one sentence is enough to describe how the man is seen by anyone who knows or heard his name. and to be honest, you agree.

he's absurdly rich, exceptionally smart, ravishing looks from head to toe, musically talented, a sportsman in every field, and the list goes on. there's nothing he isn't, nothing he can't. plus, he's blessed with six eyes and the limitless technique. what a greedy man.

you heard someone say in a passage that satoru gojo was created when god was very much in a delightful mood. he looks like god took the time to sculpt him. the epitome of a human who received blessings from god before they're born. and again, you can't help but agree.

screw the fact that jujutsu sorcerers aren't tied to any belief, this man's existence is the perfect example of god intervening in life. 

how could you not? he doesn't have to lift a finger for anything. all he needs to do is say the word and whatever he desires will be served to him on a silver platter. satoru gojo has a life that everyone envies and yearns for, that goes without saying. and really, you're one of those people, at first. 

it all changed when he started becoming the honored one.

the man who was said to be the strongest one finally embodied the title after the star plasma vessel mission. it wasn't a whisper waiting to become a reality anymore, it's the truth that no soul can deny.

at first, you can't really tell the way his lips pressed tight whenever someone mentioned how he doesn't necessarily face death everyday as the strongest, you didn't notice how his hand would clench tightly that it bleeds when someone mentioned the life that are loss— it wasn't something catches on during the first few months he became untouchable.

but, when the realization started to settle, the picture of him that was painted on your mind started to blur. becoming a fractured memory, false memories.

as the one with power that could turn the world upside-down, even though he never said it out loud, the burden of wanting to save everyone became something unavoidable. because who is satoru gojo if he isn't the strongest one?

he knows better than anyone that he can't save everyone. it's bound for some lives to be lost along the way and he has planted that sentence in his head ever since he realizes that not every life is able to be saved. satoru gojo understands that. he lives with the heavy reality every breath he takes, where it came to the point that he outgrown the idea of saving everyone.

as long as the blood that's shattered doesn't come from his hands, he'll be fine. he'll learn to live with it no matter how much it strangles him.

because at this point of his life right now, he knows he can't save as many lives as he wants. and satoru gojo is still hanging on to the belief that maybe someday he can, he will. and since you see that part of him— he has become the light of your life, your sirius, your salvation.

"do you ever wish for a different life?" your voice cuts through the silence between you and gojo.

the trees surrounding you dance to the gentle breeze as the air kisses your skin in the most tender way while the sun starts to set down. you two are laid down on the training ground, staring at the golden sky as it slowly enveloped by the darkness, welcoming the night with open arms.

he hummed softly, pondering your question. "i don't know. never really thought about that."

it's true, it never crosses his mind. he was born for this society, after all. satoru gojo feet are already planted down the ground the moment he was born. the man could've left everything behind, but he chose to stay. if he wanted to, he would've flown and roamed around the world. beyond the sky, even. he's more than capable of doing that, after all.

"but, if it's possible someday, i'd love to have a family of my own," a long pause as he carefully arranged his words, "no matter how indifference i am— i’m a person with dreams and love, too, you know?"

you stay quiet as his words sink down through your guts. it's a bittersweet thing to hear coming from him.

he was taken away from the love he deserves since the second he was born. the man barely knows his parents, never understanding what it feels to have a home. it's no wonder he craves to have one of his own.

sure, he found family in his friends, the people who lighten up the void in him. but, it's different. far from what he craves. he would explain it— only he doesn't know how to. well, is there any way to explain something he has never experienced?

as you lay there by his side, listening to all the things he buried deep down, while marveling at the way his hair brushes his face, you couldn't help the way your chest tightens in agony.

if this is greek mythology, you would've haunted down the fates—moirai—for threading this fate on him. and they, most likely, will be throwing you all over the place to make sure you don't mess up the "thread".

but, really, the jealousy that used to creep on you whenever you saw him now replaced with longing and helplessness. longing for him to live the life he yearns for, helpless at the fact that you couldn't change this life that has been threaded for him.

you never thought of him as god's favorite anymore since then. how could you? the man who lies beside you is anything but. satoru gojo almost became the most flawless being ever created— until god decided he should bear the burden every soul would be shattered under, but him.

the months, almost a year, that passed without him were nothing but misery. and that gnawing feelings only claws you more when he gets sealed.

you didn't have to be there to know how the society crumbled when they lost him. the world tilted—loses its balance—in a snap of a finger. something inevitable.

for days after he got sealed, you found yourself engrossed in pottery, desperately trying to recreate his face that your mind started to forget. no, you never forgot about him. you're too far gone to let the man slip your mind. he had bewitched you to ever let him be forgotten. 

nonetheless, the fear of him truly slipping away from you was able to make your mind go in a haze. that’s the reason why you suddenly found yourself sculpting his face.

because you can't hold pictures and you physically need to feel your fingers brushing his face— to hold. so, with no other way, you settle for a replica of his face. and when you heard that he was free from the prison realm, you couldn't help but feel relieved. only to be crushed by the reality of his fight with the king of curses himself.

it was satoru gojo destiny. you understand that with every drop of blood which runs through you.

still, the fear of what-if crawled onto you before you were able to stop it and the more you tried to shrug everything off— the more it choked on you. not with a rope, never. it feels like a scarf, more gentle and delicate, yet still able to take you in one go. leaving you breathless.

the worst possible outcome consumed you so much that you couldn't help but stay the whole day at the studio, staring at his sculpted face. tracing every feature of his with shaky hands.

you couldn't bear the thought of losing him— your star, your sirius, the light of your life.

if the brightest star went dim, how are you supposed to continue living as if the whole world wasn't just blanketed by darkness?

praying was the only thing you could do at that moment. hopelessly wishing to any deities that are listening to grant your wishes. you even find yourself saying things you never thought would leave your lips. "if he's alive and well, i promise i’ll start praying. i never wish for anything, so please i'm asking you—"

for him to live.

and as you slowly but surely fall into the deep end even further, with the thoughts that's drowning on you, a voice you never thought you'd hear again echoes throughout the studio.

your eyes that were closed shoot open as your heart stops beating at that single moment.

oh god, if this is some twisted joke—

he called your name, sounding sweet and claiming. almost standing in the line between praying and begging. and that was your unraveling. you slowly turned around to the direction of the voice, finding yourself standing eye to eye with him.

satoru gojo.

the man stands there with scars across his body, looking disheveled, far from the one you used to see. his eyes wide and locked on you.

your breath heaving as you take in his appearance. trying to decode the figure standing in front of you, clinging on to the hope that he's real.

he took a step closer and that's all it took for you to shed tears. satoru gojo is alive.

your sirius is still shining. and he who used to shine in a way that's scorching—almost burning—now in this moment of solitude, shining in a way that makes him glow.

"if i kiss you right now," his gaze fell onto your lips for a second before returning to your eyes. "will you let me?"

he didn't have to ask, truly, because your feet were already moving to him the second he opened his mouth. your arms wrapping around his neck the second he meets you halfway as you feel his lips pressed on yours for a small kiss before he pulls away.

it was only a second before he leaned in, again, and crashed his lips against yours as his hands found their way to your waist, pulling you closer.

his lips moving against yours with tenderness. a hint of desire tasted your lips along with years of pent-up feelings and unsaid words. and oh god, you melted in the warmth that's his. the man himself moves one of his hands to trace lazy patterns on your back while tightening his hold on you.

something he once thought out of his reach is now in the palm of his hands and satoru gojo can't help but finally feel he's home. not in the traditional sense, a profound way.

you.

the scent of you enveloping him, feels similar to a comforting blanket on a cold night. covering him in the warmth that's uniquely you. and after a while, he broke the kiss to catch his breath as he rested his forehead against yours with his eyes half-lidded. full of longing and affection. 

your fingers find their ways to trace the scars that painted his skin— soft and gentle. treating him with the tenderness he always gave to anyone else, he always craved. the way he deserves.

"i was terrified," you whisper to him. your voice cracking a little, overwhelmed by the feelings that clouded you the past few days.

your words weren't answered with words, he answered with a soft kiss press on your temple. and in this moment, it was more than enough.

all his life, satoru gojo has been scattered into many different pieces. something that he has no control over. truthfully, he's not even sure time exists in this world. if it does, he's sure it never moves. but now, with you in his arms, he feels he has just been put back together. with you pressed against his body, time started moving the way they're supposed to.

"... my lucky star, if it weren't for you, i wouldn't be standing here."

you, his lucky star, who keeps hovering around him was the sole reason he was able to fight the king of curses and defy death.

if it weren't for you, he would've been long gone.

standing in front of him is the woman who never left his side and truly sees the person he is. despite never having fully undressed himself, you're able to see right through him— from skin and bones, to his soul. and that was enough reason for him to crawl away far from death, back to you.

in this moment where everything finally falls to where it belongs, finding its rightful place, you couldn't help but feel gratitude to the deities that listens to your prayers and grants it.

while wrapped in the warmth of his arms, you find yourself mentally getting down on your knees, thanking the fates—moirai—for threading this fate on both of you.

you may have cursed them some times ago. though, with him standing safe and sound in front of you, after saving the many lives he always dreamed about— with your pride and ego that's bigger than the sky, you're more than willing to admit defeat and apologize.

if this is greek mythology.

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a/n: hahaha guess who's back from her sickbed.... lowkey after getting sick, I had ZERO motivation to write dude it was TORTURE. after reading other people's smau's I'm back in tiptop shape, I fear this series is probably gonna end soon omg thank u to everyone whose been so (not so)patiently waiting for updates, I love u guys🥺🥺🥺💗💗💗 also, the taglist for this series is officially CLOSED, I'm sorry to some of the people I didnt get to put into the taglist.

ノノ very important query, if I did a small written section for the next episode would ygs fw it? lmk in the comments (I'm thinking of writing a dramatic confession or something idk I'm still thinking)

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if he, who supposedly is a master at the matter, is unable to ask permission in becoming your valentine … what does it make of him?

what word could, perchance, wrapped this whole thing with a pretty ribbon more secure than the word "loser"? because that word can't suffice this shamefulness he's facing in his incompetency at saying a few words arranged, dedicated for you.

ah, right, there's that one word. failure.

satoru is a failure, if he still can't find it in him to ask for a day spent with you. he's a man who arguably near perfect, so if he by the end of this class still choosing the pride of not wanting to look desperate— he may be referred as "good-for-nothing". it is the title he willingly bear due to how such a bum he is when it comes to you.

then again, it's you. in satoru's defense, anyone should be feeling a little miserable, for even having the thought of wanting to hold your hand during valentine. you're the most enchanting, delicate, woman he has ever come across in his life. and having the honor of breathing your air should've been enough. however, satoru is undoubtedly greedy for a simple brush of your skin against his.

he's more than miserable, he acknowledges it.

you're far divine for this world, he would argue with the mirror. it's a blessing for this earth to have you take a step on it, he swears on his life. every soul should be grateful that you even cast a glance in their way or pay them a little attention. it's a stroke of luck, he might add.

which is why, how is he supposed to not feel his pride crumbling, desperation creeping in, and words scattering around, when you're the target of his attention? it drags him off the cliff at how he keeps hopping between the line of a loser and a failure. you just, exceptionally, drive him crazy!

"suguru, give me a pat on the back," he whispers at the dark-haired man sitting beside him. satoru's gaze is locked at you, surrounded by your friend group at the table far to his right, chattering about one topic to another. "give me some courage to even utter a single word to her," the man added.

suguru, who has been scrolling away at his phone let out a sigh at the absurdity of his best friend. it's just too much for him to bear; the scene of satoru being stupidly down-bad, he lost his way in talking. he was a smooth-talker, all sweet nothing with other girls before the cerulean-eyed man fallen deep into your world. satoru is beyond saving, in his opinion, at the very least.

"you speak as if you're heading to war."

"i might as well."

he was not given the chance to answer. suguru was just about to add another sentence, yet he was three steps behind the man whose fingers were now fidgeting one another. it's almost uncanny how the proud student athlete is now reduced into a soon-to-be-good-for-nothing of a man.

"just talk to her like any other day. weren't you in the same group with her semester one?" suguru asked, his eyebrows raised questioningly.

"yeah, but i haven't liked her at that time! it's a whole different interaction now," satoru grumbled, still watching at how the edge of your eyes would crinkle from how your lips is being painted with a subtle, yet undeniably charming of a smile. "i'm not viewing her as a classmate anymore, you know? it's another side of the world. she's a woman now, to me."

"oh … i get it. still though, didn't you practice everyday? that line of asking to be her valentine?" suguru gaze drifted towards where you and your friends were sitting before his mind struck with an idea, his head turned to satoru. "why don't you ask shoko? they're in the same friend group. i don't see why you can't do that."

the one suguru talked with waves his hand at his face, brushing off the words absent-mindedly, "who do you think gave me the courage to even think about having a date with her?" satoru responded, his tone filled with exasperation. "on second thought, it's a little weird seeing her hanging around with shoko, utahime, and yuki. don't you think they're far off from each other? in personality?"

suguru hummed softly as an answer. somehow agreeing, but at the same time he feels it's just bound to happens. "opposites attract one another, satoru. can't you see? they balanced each other's character." the man let his eyes roam around the group of friends before adding one more thing, "we're the opposite, if you have yet to noticed."

"nah, i know that from a long ago. it's just a little strange looking at their combination—" satoru's words halted the second he saw you letting out a laugh. it's faint, due to the distance between you two, but he can still catch the joy from your laugh lingering in the air before wrapping his heart in a warm blanket of content. "—hah … she really is a hot chocolate in winter season."

both satoru and suguru sat in silence, then. due to many different reasons.

for the blue-eyed man, it's due to his wish to relish in the warmness you let him savor even from some radius. for suguru, on the other hand, is quiet due to how it just hits him now; satoru attraction towards you is far more than a simple infatuation. the man's adoration, or perhaps love, is clearly transcending even the night sky.

all these days, he assumed it was just a lighthearted crush. an excitement that'll only last for a short time— turns out, he's been assuming wrong. satoru is so deep rooted in your world, and you don't even seem to notice the man. it's comically ironic and endearing all at the same time, how this fact unfolds right before his eyes, once for all.

"you'll be fine. nobody is going to boo you if you get rejected, no one would dare to do so. just walk over to her and pop the question," suguru assured. his hand which was holding the phone now raised to pat the back of his loser of a friend. "with the exception of me."

"oh, shut up." satoru let out a low huff at suguru words. his attention is now stolen by the lecturer's arrival to their class. his fidgeting has stopped, although his gaze still wanders back to you.

satoru gojo can't seem to save himself from repeatedly getting lost in you, and everything that sculpted you into the person you are, truly. it's a habit as natural as breathing, it's a routine as repetitive as spraying perfume all over his body; far too engraved in his every fiber.

in today's design graphic class, you got an assignment to make a chosen product a poster, and it's something you've done more than your fingers managed to keep in track. so, like any other day, you'd type away the information on the matter to your to-do-list.

however, no matter how forcefully you try to shrug it off, there's a sense of uneasiness in today's class that keeps on finding its path towards where you are; it's clinging to every trace of you it may grasp, for a while. at first you assumed it was just another day of feeling too exposed to the world— but, now, you're sure it's something more than that.

you feel as if you're being watched.

to be fair, you always do. as someone who's deeply self-conscious, ignoring the slightest change of an emotion becomes something difficult to find in yourself. which is why ignoring the feeling of something about to happen is one of many things which goes beyond your mind, as you don't exactly have the hold to how your inner-self reacts to it.

it's without doubt, that you're a person who's sensitively aware of your surroundings, yet dull at the same time. which is quite the reason behind why you jolted from your seat, when the six-foot-three man greeted you. the man, satoru gojo, your classmate.

"ah, sorry, i didn't intend on startling you—" he quickly spoke to you, oh so gently, as if he's beyond afraid you might slip away from him. satoru seems to glance past you towards your friend group, before collecting himself and clearing his throat, a few times. "—can i have some of your time?"

oh … um, what?

his question truly catches you off-guard. you found yourself blinking a few times, trying to see whether all of this is a reality or an illusion your mind created to throw you off. and being true to yourself, you wished it's the latter. because oh, you have little to no clue at how you should act nor respond if you're to engage in a conversation with him, from out of the blue. or with anyone, really.

"we can talk here, if that's what you feel most comfortable," satoru assured. the way he attentively considered your space, as well as carefully making a move from the hesitancy at how you drifted afar from the dialog, had your breath choke on the back of your throat. he makes it seems like he senses your inside turmoil, and it's untangling your flawless composure in real-time.

it could be self-conclusion, it could be due to how you view it from your perspective. nonetheless, what has you positive satoru is doing this intentionally, are the matter-of-fact at how he examines you as if you're worth pouring his time for. for someone like you, it was almost overwhelming, truthfully. if he were to do another similar gesture, you're convinced you might unravel here and there.

"um, i— sure …?" your fingers mindlessly find each other and start fidgeting. your pair of eyes satoru loves to dive in and wander to look at anything but him, avoiding eye-contact. he learned by watching you from a mile that when you start jiggling your foot, it means you're a second away from detaching with your surroundings.

satoru pressed his lips shut into a thin line. he's mentally patting himself in the back before popping the question the man has practiced longer than his dribbles, shoots, and everything there is related to basketball. you're making him beyond flustered, greater than any victory might capable do. "can i … be your valentine?" he finally asked.

and uh-oh. if only the man understands how your brain stops functioning, the second his question left in-between his lips. it was unexpected, coming from him. you two barely interact with one another, yet he decided to ask if he can be your valentine? well, each other's valentine, to be precise. still, it has you left frozen in your seat as confusion starts to invade your emotions.

"… me? why me?"

of course, you would feel bewildered. it's unprecedented. and everyone that has the privilege of knowing you is deeply aware, at how at this moment, your mind is flooding with scenarios as to why the popular student athlete is asking you, rather than other people who—in your opinion—suits better to stand by his side.

what if he lands on you due to a dare? or a silly joke? worse, just for fun?

the man didn't let you immerse in those negative thoughts longer than a minute, though. when satoru catches how the sparkles in your eyes fades and your gaze reformed into one of discomfort, alongside ghosts of worse-possibilities-imagine crawling inside, he immediately takes one step closer as if he's trying to show you that he's being genuine. in his own silly, fumbling way.

"i was thinking of giving you a ticket to my match tomorrow, then uh …" the man paused for a beat, his hand squeezed into a fist before resting on the back of his neck as he rubs it nervously. "go … on a date? with me?" he continued, tone lower than he intended to. it, adorably, became a whisper instead of solid words spoken; something that's expected from him, out of all people.

"oh."

satoru fingers went to fiddled with the collar of his shirt, looking at you with gleaming hope. "shoko, utahime, and yuki will be there, too." his gaze shifts away towards the ceiling for a minute, before landing back on you. and it almost, almost, feel as if his blue-sky eyes crashes onto you, from how consuming it holds your stare. "you won't be alone there," he assured.

you blink once. the information is known to you, since they had asked some days ago, on whether you wanted to come and see the basketball match between their school to a long-time rival or not. but, hearing it from satoru's mouth somehow relaxed you, even by a bit. your shoulders slumped as the tension built up now slowly but surely uncoil.

for a beat there, you wonder if he had bewitched you; satoru makes it too easy for you to let your guard down, even if it's only for temporary. although he's carefully breaking down your well-crafted walls, this is the first time ever that someone has the courage to ask you out on a date, which is why you're still unsure on how to act on the matter.

and no, it isn't because you're unattractive. you're as beautiful as your other friends, standing side-by-side with them only has you beaming even more. it's due to how much of a closed-off person you are. it's hard for you to open up and take risks, for what seems out of reach from where you're standing— something people can guess about you, with only one look at your way.

so, it's a little baffling for you to even comprehend why he's asking you in the first place.

but … the way he's paying attention to the little things that matter to you, has the proposal being embraced tenderly by your heart, in your own way. his consideration of those invisible stuff, has your heart warming and open itself without throwing another second, as if his existence is already ingrained to your beating heart.

however, doubt is still lingering in the thin air. you don't know the man enough to say yes at the moment, in this place where a few people may peer about. which is why after a few minutes of silence from you, accompanied by overly repeated assurances in your head, you gave him a response that's not what satoru expected, but isn't exactly unwelcome.

"can i, think about it first …? i'll let you know if i, um, decide to go."

your head is slightly bowed, unable to look at him straight in the eyes as his gaze strikes right through you. satoru's icy-blue eyes are as vibrant as the day outside this classroom— it's bright enough to light up the whole place from how much it resembles an angelic, sunny day. and for you? it might as well be a scorching sun because it shines far too bright, for a girl who rather hides beneath the trees.

"yes, of course! i mean—" the man clears his throat a couple times, cheeks tainted with rosy pink at how his voice went an octave higher from excitement. "… yes, no pressure at all. take as much time as you need. no rushing, no nothing. we will go at your pace."

everyone around that's watching couldn't help but snicker at the view of satoru being an open mess for them to gobble at; it's a rare occurrence to see the proud man reduced to a loverboy who can't get a hold of themselves. and you, whose corner lips tilted upward into the faintest, but heart-warming smile, has satoru losing his composure even more like a yarn being untangled.

"okay, then. are you done, gojo? we girls have a place to go to, if you don't mind." yuki slipped through the conversation between you and the man. she had a good laugh seeing you two interact with one another, just a minute before stepping into the whole scene of whatever is happening among you two, since she can't quite name it yet. it's still a gray area to meddle about.

"oh … yeah, for sure. i have a practice with the team, too, so … uh, see you all tomorrow?" he replied. satoru look over his shoulder at suguru who's waiting for him a few steps back. "suguru is waiting as well, i should probably get going. or really get going. same thing."

his face turned to you again, gaze trailing over you as he tries to utter even a single word. "i'll talk to you later? um, uh, have fun with your friends and take care. you three— whatever," he cast a uninterested look towards the women behind you, before sprinting away while utahime tries to throw him her plastic water bottle.

"hey, give us some respect! be grateful we allowed you to speak with her, you narcissist!"

satoru answer came in the form of a mocking facial expression as he leaves the classroom with suguru following behind, laughing at how the air shifted within a second from warmness to chaotic.

well, truthfully, satoru would take hits from utahime's water bottle any other day if it means he finds the courage to speak with you, and is welcome to breathe your air.

the man has really whisked away his pride of not wanting to look desperate, standing in front of you. the man is too far gone to even care about his pride, after having your gaze locked on him even if it only lasts a minute.

he'll be miserable all his life, for you. unashamedly.

you've been staring at your ceiling for approximately two hours now.

it's predicted, of course. however, you didn't think you would actually ponder about the matter this … intently. you're sure it's due to one reason only: you thought you're going to reject his proposal as easy as a child's play.

now it's a matter that has you contemplating your very existence from how it's taking up the spaces inside your head— worse, it sneaks into the gaps of your ribcage. your whole being is infiltrated by whether you should accept him as your valentine, or drown in this foreign emotions which starts to loom over you.

a part of you, in the corner of your soul no one has managed to touch, is tingling with an excitement you can't quite catch, yet.

you roll over in your bed one more time. with your face buried on the fluffy pillow, you let out a scream louder than you thought you can muster about. for a moment there, your surroundings disintegrate into the night breeze. only you, your inner turmoil, and the plushies of yours exist in the stillness at this time of the day.

turning down satoru would stings a little.

accepting his offer, on the other hand, will tug the frightened side of you.

plus, you've never gone on a date with anyone before. if you screw things up, you understand better than anyone how your ability in mingling with other people would reduce back to zero. and preferably, rationally— rejecting satoru is the better path.

building this courage of interacting with someone else took quite a while, you don't wish for anything to crumble this years of dedication and sanity whisked away. and truthfully, if yuki didn't go out of her way to invite you for lunch, you would've never made a close friend. only casual, talk once in a while type of friendship. the present you is credited to the three women who patiently guide you in becoming a more brave person.

earlier, you've asked them about their opinion on the issue mentioned. and they, ever so supportive, encourage you to accept satoru's heartfelt wish in becoming your valentine. the three close friends of yours said it'll be a nice experience for you— which you somewhat agrees. it's the truth which can't be denied; you'll learn something new if you decided to say yes.

you groaned into the covered white bundle, head lifting slightly from the pillow before your gaze fell to the plushies facing you. a feeling of shame washes you for a beat, your mind imagining scenes of the plushies coming to life and mocking your current state.

"this is no fun," you grumble to the serenity of your room. a hint of blush paint your cheeks. even in the darkness of your safe place, hints of it can be seen with a keen pair of eyes.

should you let him be your valentine?

once again, you stare at the plushies. "… what do you all think? should i—" your voice screeches at the end, while your already tomatoes face now turned into an even vibrant red. “—should i accept him?”

no sounds filled the room, then. besides the sound of your quicken heartbeats that noise starts to form a rhythm. your heart is pounding against the ribcage as its way of showing your inner turmoil with no words spoken to the crackling air. it's the only thing keeping you sane in this moment of uncertainty, as you are still deciding which path you should walk into before the time of this day runs out.

thump-thump.

thump-thump.

thump-thump.

"… he's a nice guy. it won't hurt to give this a chance … right?"

your hand, trembling with suspense, stretches out to grasp your phone rested afar on the night table with a feeling of hesitation. understandably so. yet, amidst all of these new waves of emotions you've never experienced first-hand before, a profound fever of excitement is following from behind. albeit its existence as faint as the soft rustling of your sheets beneath you.

a breathy huff left in-between your lips while your fingers carefully arranged words for satoru to read. "just this one time," you heard yourself whispering.

you: i'll see you tomorrow you: good luck for your match 23.45 PM

"stop grinning like an idiot," suguru exasperated.

who is the man referring to? well, it's quite obvious who. there's no other soul which can make him rubbing his forehead as a way to soothe the headache, whilst a deep sigh is let free from his mouth like the satoru gojo can.

no, don't get him wrong. the man is thrilled that satoru proposal to you is accepted with open arms. that six-foot-three man efforts didn't go through the drain, so of course suguru is happy on behalf of the man success. after many seconds whisked away of him listening to satoru practicing his lines to the mirror, he is beyond pleased he won't be going through a phase where satoru is whining and moody from being rejected.

only it costs suguru his hearing sense.

as expected, satoru is all smiley and a total bundle of joy from the message you sent his way last night. hell, the man won't stop peering over his phone while engaging himself in a conversation with the other teammates.

it's a once in a lifetime type of scene, if anyone is brave enough to say it out loud. satoru is a proud man. he loves to taunt everyone—in his own way—at how he is the carrier of the team, which in all truthfulness is the reality, and how his head would be held up high all the time is a side of him everyone is more used to. one that they secretly admire, due to every reason he has the ability and is able to prove his words.

for them, it is justified that satoru acts the way he is.

so, the scenery displayed for them is pretty … odd. bizarre would probably be the word most of them used to describe how satoru is acting right now. it is just way freakier than they thought it would be.

the rumor spreads fast like wildfire. whispers of hot, burning revelation that the rising star, student athlete of the university went ahead of his way to carve a path to your heart is a sensation people absolutely went feral for. it's not everyday they got to see the man make a first move, no. it's a rare occurrence.

most of the time, satoru would receive tons of attention from students across the university, from a variety of majors. whenever satoru has a match, or just practice actually, oceans of human gather to cheers the man on with beverages or snacks in hand to further riled satoru into the "zone". of course they came and gave their support to other athlete on the team— after all, the university basketball team is packed with gorgeous men.

there's suguru geto, the team's small forward who people say is more popular with the girls than satoru. ryomen sukuna, point forward of the team who somehow bestowed upon the title as, 'mr. steal your girl'. and oh, right, choso kamo, the shooting guard is quite well-known among the girls for his awkward, yet gentle personality as well.

everyone has their own charms, for sure. but satoru gojo's appeal is by far the only one who attained even the bits of all souls love. he's the type of man that has someone wanting to build a family with, a fan of the man says. whether it's an opinion or a matter=of-fact buzz from people around him is still undecided. all that matters is that the satoru gojo is loved by many kinds of people.

back to the main topic.

you, who's able to tear down satoru's wall became a huge topic overnight. apparently someone in the same class as you recorded the whole exchange between you and satoru, before posting it on the internet for people to see. it alarms satoru last night— because for all he understand, you aren't that comfortable with the whole 'turned-into-a-huge-deal' matter. he learned of the fact from shoko, ever the so big-hearted.

he was shaking in his boots at the thought that you might despise him for bringing in that much attention to you, something you didn't ask for. however, when satoru frantically messaged you this morning like a kid throwing a rampage, you replied with something that's very you and, well, logical. he should've never underestimated you and he ought to learn for the better.

you: it's alright you: you're a well-known person, it's bound to happen. i already prepared myself for this possibility you: i'm fine, no need to worry 07.30 AM

satoru was half pleased knowing you're doing well and half pissed you told him, "no need to worry." as if there's a single fiber circulating in him with a drop of nonchalance in it. the man is too far gone for you, and you have yet to notice the truth is a trait of yours that's both endearing and maddening.

"gojo!"

the wide-grinning man startled. the sudden yell of his name causes his phone to slip from his hand slightly, and god, satoru let out a roaring scream due to the action. "hey! be mindful, can you?" his eyes narrow at sukuna, before sighing out of exasperation. when, truly, it should be his teammates who're annoyed. not the other way around.

"are you fucking with me? the match is about to start, idiot—" sukuna was just taking one step closer near satoru before stopped by choso's voice. "the coach is waiting."

and ever the self-centered man he is, satoru's eyebrows lifted with his chest puffed in a mannerism of a man overly confident enough to be tripped by himself in near future. everyone in the room can guarantee it. "why didn't anyone tell me since, i don't know, a minute ago?"

dear god … if they're not a second away from the match, sukuna would've strangled him.

"satoru, you're the one who's at fault," suguru commented. the way he gazes at satoru makes it seem as if being in a conversation with that idiotic blue-eyed man reduces his life span. suguru pinched the bridge of her nose. "just … put down your phone and let's went ahead to the court."

"oh, right." satoru placed his phone down, then. the man stood up from where he was sitting, the stupid grin still in-tact to his face. "i have someone to impress in the crowd, gotta make sure i look presentable. let's win this match, my wing men."

satoru threaded a hand through his white locks as he walked out of the locker room, leaving behind his other teammates as if he didn't just utter the most disgusting words arranged to ever be spoken into the day breeze.

"i ought to strangle him," sukuna whispers, eyes twitching out of agitation.

it's currently the second half of the game.

and as expected, your university team is leading. truly a powerhouse in flesh, you heard someone muttering about. well, in all fairness, the basketball team consists of athletes that have been known for their immense talent. each of the players already built up a reputation among those who loves basketball— one which is recognized by anyone who has watched them.

you sat alongside the three women who, excitedly, helped you prepare for today's occasion. shoko, utahime, and yuki all went to your place early in the morning for whatever reason they have for themselves. it was a chaotic mess of you being dressed up by them. even shoko who doesn't talk much fusses over you. for a moment there, you became a doll for them to prettify.

not a single word of protest left in-between your pouty lips that greets them this morning, which truly surprised both them and yourself. it caught them off guard as they expected you to, at the very least, wished for them to not extensively meddle about the whole ordeal. you've always been a person who's adamant of one personal space.

so, when you opened the door with puckered lips that screamed hassled and flustered, the three of your friends couldn't help but feel as if they just took a step into the other side of your world. and funny enough, when they were doing mix and match with your clothes utahime mumbled something along the lines of, "you're way … too compliant right now. it's quite odd to look at." and that got shoko's and yuki's attention.

utahime isn't wrong, of course. the sight of you letting them do whatever they desire with fashioning you is one of those rare moments where you would let down your guard, then let them roam freely as they start to dive deeper into what makes you the person you are. undoubtedly, the time when you unlatch the key to the door of your world is their favorite shared memories with you.

"gojo is the one who scored the most, huh?" utahime hummed. she takes a slow sip to her soda in a cup, while her free hand focuses on the screen of her phone— observing the basketball match on live-stream for a better view and gripping on how the game is unfolding down there.

you've never been to a basketball or any sports event whatsoever in your life. since for the longest time, whenever someone asked you to come watch these tournaments, you would politely turned them down. being in a crowded place where people are either screaming, yelling, or standing and throwing curses at one team is far from your ideal life. it's beyond the comfort zone you've keep secured round the clock.

tainting it with these chaotic athletic events would only bring you an unnecessary headache. dealing with the aftermath is above and beyond fun. for you, it's exceptionally draining. the matter discussed takes way too much space and time from your life. so, logically, you'd rather avoid it, choosing the warmness of your room than the buzzing arena.

if isn't due to satoru's request, you would be whisking away your time on the couch; snuggle up beneath the blanket, tv on display as you lose yourself in your comfort show world, accompanied by the snacks in your lap that change daily on rotation.

an amused snickers left yuki's mouth at utahime's in actuality words. "i bet he's trying harder than usual to impress our pretty baby here," she chatted, her gaze drift towards your way for a beat, then back onto the match a few distance underneath where they're sitting on the bleachers. "he has always been a good player, after all. just probably feels he need to leave an impression to her."

you blushed at her words. suddenly your mind decides to rewind back to yesterday's event when satoru approaches you. that gesture of his alone has colored you into a ripe tomato— yuki's observation on satoru right now is a little unappreciated, since it has you avoid eye-contact with her. whether it's the truth or not.

"he definitely is," shoko mumbled. her fingers rolled around the stick of lollipop she has, before popping them back in her mouth. the brown-haired woman peered at satoru, head tilted to the side as she took in the sight of the man who dribbled past the opponent in front of him. "gojo eyes keep searching the bleachers," she added.

"oh? i didn't notice," yuki responded. as she folded her hands in her lap, the corners of her mouth quirked up when she caught satoru's act that shoko just mentioned. "ah, yeah. he just did it."

it is so obvious for anyone who knows of you and satoru history, one which just starts writing itself, that the reason behind satoru's frequent survey at the bleachers is because he's searching for you; trying to catch the pair of eyes he would love to have a glimpse at right now, in the middle of the game as a way to boost his energy.

the man danced around the court, trying to avoid the challengers who were trying to steal his ball by passing it to another teammate of his. satoru ran fast towards the basket of the opposite team, pivoting his body around to get a hold of the thrown ball headed his way. and when the ball was in his hand, he went his way to do a side-step jump shot which has the team make a basket, earning two points.

"they already secured the victory." utahime turns off her phone after swiping close the live-stream page. she leaned back in her chair, eyes gleamed with astonish at how easy the student athletes paved their way to triumph.

"of course. we're a powerhouse for a reason," yuki said.

you chuckled softly at yuki's words. it's a statement in its own way. the sentence yuki just spoke into the air with dusts of success can be translated as in how glory always trails behind the student athletes steps, securing them their win. of course, all of it is also due to their efforts and focus on aiming for one thing only; accomplishment.

“time remaining is only a minute on the clock,” you mumble, threading a hand to your soft locks.

no one truly needs to pay attention to the seconds that went away, as the winner is already determined, it's true. however, everyone can't help but follow how these student athletes are in their 'zone', and lost in their own world— it's a sight to behold.

and as time runs for their life, disappearing and emerging more with the world, your university athletes keep on passing the ball to another. because even though they've secured their spot to bring home success, the love of the sport keeps them aflame.

shouting from the bleachers roar throughout the arena, everyone is burning hot watching these players fighting for their dignity and pride as an athlete. all with only seconds left, ticking on the clock.

“pass the ball!? oh my god, why did geto hog the ball for too long?!” yuki screams, far too loud. she pointed at suguru who seems like he catches on yuki's words, since he glares her way. "why is he staring? focus on the game!"

“oooh … that doesn't look nice," utahime grimaces at the sight of a player tripping over themselves.

your fingers fiddled with one another, somehow feeling a little stressed at the sight of how down in the arena, everyone is becoming more aggressive. “oh, sukuna lost the ball."

“why didn't he pass it to gojo?! jeez, did something happen in the locker room?!”

“get it, get it, get it— yes, good pass! oh, wow, choso get the ball again! gotta love that man.”

"athletes really are scary," shoko muttered. her hazy pair of eyes blinked, taking in the scenery at how this heated last seconds has everyone standing up. with her lollipop in hand, she gestured at the crowds using the candy's stick. "would you look at that ... most of them root for our team. they have good taste."

as the time on the clock tick-tocking closer to one, whenever a player has the ball on their hand, they would pass the ball to their teammates hastily in order to keep the opponents from making a basket.

five.

"gojo, get that stupid ball!"

four.

"sheesh, did you see how sukuna dodged that player in number six? he's nasty."

three.

"in all realness, the winner is already set. why are we screaming our lungs off?"

two.

"choso is saving the day once again, huh? that man singlehandedly saved the team by staying calculative."

one.

a buzzing sound echoes all over the arena, then. it echoes in a high-pitched noise, signaling the end of today's game as it marks the final score when the clock hits one. each of the athletes who were running across the court, trying to steal the ball from one another, has now stopped in their tracks.

everyone standing on the "battleground" looked over at the scoreboard as they tried to catch their breaths after the intense game— while the winner relishes in their team victory, the losing finalist can only let out a defeated sigh.

satoru gojo, on the other hand, didn't just win a match alongside his teammates on this valentine's day. because in a distance away from where he was standing, when his gaze finally set on the pair of eyes he has been searching for the entire game, the man can feel how his heart skips a beat at the sight of you.

you, who stand at the bleachers among countless other supporters with a small, delighted smile painted on your lips has satoru tripping over himself. with your hands that are far smaller than his, you clapped throughout the whole session of winner announcement and roars of blaring scream.

and truly, the sight of you is all what matters. since from the likes of it, the rising star has just earned a victory right through the door of your heart.

a tiramisu cafe.

satoru brings you to a cafe, specialized in making tiramisu.

"i heard you like tiramisu," he whisper. the man's warmth breathing kisses your skin, ever so sweetly, as he brings his lips close to your ear. one of his hand hold onto the sleeve of your cardigan, gently tugging you closer. "shoko was the one who told me, in case you wanted to know."

you blink a few times, nodding in a slight flustered demeanor. shoko being the one to revealed that side of you to satoru is quite expected, considering how she was the one who has been telling satoru to just go for you and ask to be your valentine.

after the celebration of their university team's success ended, satoru immediately rushes off to wash clean the sweat that lingers to his skin from his body. the man had to make sure he was prepared for his date with you. satoru had one thing in mind when he was choosing his clothes; it has to be a comfortable, yet striking outfit that doesn't scream desperate for compliments.

the man cleared off his throat, "… so, uh, are you— what flavor are you, um, planning on choosing?"satoru takes a step right when the last word left his mouth, creating a distance between you two shortly after realizing he had been too close, and meddling in your personal space.

huft .. get a hold of yourself, satoru chant repeatedly inside.

you let out a soft, low chuckle at his act. his consideration of what you prefer and how it impacts you keeps turning into a mess of a red carnation, as you're still not used to the gesture. it's beyond appreciated by you, though, whenever someone makes sure you're feeling safe and comfortable being around them. always.

"i think i'm going to choose strawberry cheesecake … i never had that one," you replied to him. the two of you move forward after another customer finishes ordering with satoru hand still holding onto your cardigan.

at your answer, satoru nodded. he made a mental note of the flavor to make sure he didn't mess up. a precaution. "okay, i got you."

when the customer standing before them walk away after paying, satoru is in front of the cashier in an instant. he repeated the name of what you wanted and another flavor for himself. of course, as the thoughtful man he is, satoru didn't forget to order a mineral water in case your throat gets itchy in need of hydration. it's what sweet does to you.

both of you settled on a table in the corner of the cafe. it was satoru who chose the spot, taking in deliberation to how the tables are packed with people in the center. you are never that fond of attention, after all.

the order he placed came in less than no time. well, it is tiramisu that has been prepared and chilled. it's not surprising how people come in, taste their dessert, and leave not that long after they finish bit by bit of their tiramisu. this cafe isn't one that is suited for hanging out too long, is what you can only assume.

"how's … your tiramisu?" you started off the conversation, after a few minutes of silence. and did it catch satoru off guard. he was planning on asking you the exact same question after trying his tiramisu. not a single fiber in his was prepared for you to be the one speaking first.

clearing his throat, satoru flashes a smile towards your way. "the matcha taste in this isn't that strong, though i think it's still good." with his eyebrows, the man gestured to your tiramisu plated in front of you, "how's yours? is it to your liking?"

you nodded slightly, heartbeat racing rapidly at the smile laced upon his lips. "um, yeah … i can tell they use a quality cream cheese," you paused for a minute, glancing away for a second as another wave of embarrassment washes over you from how intently he's watching you. "the strawberries taste premium, too. it's pretty sweet," you continued.

"really? well, i suppose from how red and juice the strawberries look, it has to be premium." he let out a soft humming, nodding his head as he inspected your cheesecake. "does it lean more on tiramisu or cheesecake, texture wise?"

"i've never eaten this variant before, so i can't really compare this to other, uh … store? but this one is more on the cheesecake side. it's soft and cheesy like?" your head tilted slightly, lashes batted as you look straight to his pair of cerulean eyes.

satoru blink a few times. the way your lashes fluttered as you try to explain your view on how the tiramisu taste got his brain short-circuiting. the man's brows knitted together as he tried to muster up a reply. "oh. that's— that's cool."

and man, did the way he answered bummed him.

maybe it's due to how you're always closed-off, that you developed a trait of being an observant person. growing up, you can easily tell from people mannerisms about what they're feeling at a certain moment. you've always been perceptive, right into other people soul. and it is pretty clear to see that satoru is disappointed at his reply to you.

which is totally understandable, from your side. ever since the beginning—when he proposed the idea of being your valentine—although the man is confident in his shoes, he has the sparkles of someone that wanted to impress his crush. or maybe you read too many romance stories.

either way, satoru demeanor truly screams one that wished for you to have a great day. so, with all the courage you have in you, you try to brighten up his mood.

"… i have so much fun today," you muttered. your gaze drifted anywhere but him for a beat there, as the whole room suddenly feels too hot for your liking. "thank you for the ticket, um, for the basketball match, as well as this cafe … date."

oh, that has satoru's hearts bursting with adoration. it did a back-flip inside his ribcage, causing the man to tremble slightly for a minute, before blinking his way through to keep himself from doing an actual routine inside the cafe. "i— i, it's good. i mean, you know, that you enjoyed today …"

the two flustered mess of a person stayed silent, then. it's one that's serene and has them filled with content. and even though they're not saying anything else to each other, since they decided that the floor or wall is far better than looking at one another, they both understand the air surrounding them has shifted into something more.

it seems everything that has happened today left a certain impact on both of you. and you're sure that your quicken heartbeat, yet toasty in a way, is trying to tell that today's event overflowed the space in-between your ribcage with a sense of belonging. way different than what one might feel aimed at a friend.

"… you did great at today's game. i'll make sure to watch more. in the future."

may every deities that are listening to the sentence left your lips help the man. because satoru truly can't handle another sweet nothing to be uttered from you, for him and only him to hear.

god, you really have him agreeing that good love feels as if its butterflies suffocating one side. it is beyond him that you're sitting close to him. satoru really shouldn't be allowed to be near you, at all. breathing the same air as you should, genuinely, be forbidden for his own sake. the man is serious, on all certain levels.

well, the words arranged you just let free from your lips conclude one more thing for satoru; he really just won a match and strike opened the door to your heart in a single day.

lucky bastard, he is. no one can argue with that, he's sure of it.

( ✦ ) @besidesjustmyamour @httpskrys @1stmagnoila @vegasbabyyyy @mariteez @babybitchy12 @violetpurplez @scaraslover @ritsatoru @enouche @wh1ms1soul @raendarkfaerie @bakugouswaif @mellyie @angelita-uchiha @vamqyx @luvleixo @iam-souless @taylorissogoofy @liveforkny @cruziival72 @buhchira @jennyistrendy @fushiguroooozzz @sovaintilla @fxckinbreathe @neutralizeeverymaninsight @loowyinsixeyes @withersworld @bunnydoeprincesspink @daddyaremi @whispers-of-aurora @sexykissesss @nanahach1

He spent his free time exactly three ways: behind his drum kit in Suguru's garage, buried in a Digimon rewatch he'd already seen four times, or three hours deep into a raid with a headset clamped over messy white hair, screaming at Nanami through the mic to actually heal him this time. His dorm room looked like a Best Buy had a baby with a comic shop — string lights, a wall of figures still in their boxes because "they lose value if you open them," and a corkboard covered in setlists for a band that had, generously, played six shows.

Satoru always knew that if he fell for someone, it would be a nerd. He just never pictured it looking like you.

You met him because of a spilled iced coffee and absolutely nothing more romantic than that.

It was the first week of the semester, campus still humid and overcrowded, and you'd been power-walking across the quad with a garment bag over one shoulder and a stack of sketchbooks under the other arm when a very tall, very loud boy backed directly into you without looking. Your coffee went down his band tee — some faded shirt with a logo you didn't recognize, letters half peeled off — and his drumsticks clattered onto the pavement.

"Oh my god," you'd said, mortified, already fishing napkins out of your bag like you kept a small pharmacy in there. Which, to be fair, you kind of did.

"Don't apologize," he said, grinning down at the stain like it was the best thing that happened to him all week. "This shirt was already ugly. You just gave it character."

You blinked at him. He was obnoxiously tall, silver hair falling messily over startling blue eyes, and there was a confidence radiating off him that didn't match the drumsticks or the Digimon keychain clipped to his backpack. He didn't carry himself like the guys you'd catalogued back home — the shy ones who blushed and stammered over a group project. He looked at you like he already knew the ending of this conversation and thought it was funny.

"I'm Satoru," he said, sticking out a hand like this was a business meeting and not a crime scene of oat milk. "Drummer. Certified genius. Currently drowning in caffeine that isn't mine."

"That's on you for walking backwards."

"I was doing a bit for my friend." He jerked his thumb toward a guy with a long black ponytail standing several feet away, watching the whole thing with the weary patience of someone who had clearly done cleanup duty for Satoru before. "Suguru doesn't think I can walk and talk at the same time. I was proving him wrong."

"You were proving him right."

That got a laugh out of him — a real one, loud and delighted, like you'd said something far funnier than you meant to. "Okay. I like you." He said it so easily, like liking people was a decision he made in real time and didn't think twice about. "What's your major?"

"Fashion design."

"Perfect." He picked his drumsticks up off the ground, twirling one between his fingers with the kind of muscle memory that only came from years of doing it. "You can redesign this shirt. Character and all."

You should've walked away right then. You had a class in eleven minutes and a stained blouse of your own to deal with. Instead you found yourself saying, "I don't do charity work," and watching his grin widen like you'd thrown down a gauntlet instead of an insult.

"We'll see about that, coffee girl."

You didn't expect to see him again. Campus was big, your circles didn't overlap, and you'd mentally filed him under loud, cute, forgettable the second you sat down in your first lecture. Except campus, as it turned out, was smaller than you thought, and Satoru Gojo was apparently everywhere.

He was in your general ed elective, three seats over, doodling little digital monsters in the margins of notes he wasn't taking. He was at the campus coffee shop your roommate dragged you to, holding court at a corner table with three other guys — the ponytail one, a stoic blond who looked like he paid taxes for fun, and someone with tattoos creeping up his forearms who kept flicking Satoru in the back of the head every time he got too loud. He was at the party your friend Utahime insisted you go to, standing on top of someone's coffee table doing an impression of a professor that had half the room in tears.

And every single time, he found you first.

"Coffee girl." He'd taken to calling you that instead of your actual name, which you found insufferable and, somewhere you weren't proud of, kind of charming. "Fate keeps throwing us together. I think the universe wants me to fix my fashion sense."

"The universe wants you to stop backing into people."

"Same thing, honestly."

It became a rhythm you didn't ask for and didn't stop, either — him dropping into the seat beside you before lecture with some ridiculous opener, you rolling your eyes and answering anyway. He asked about your sketches once, actually asked, leaning over your shoulder close enough that you could smell his cologne — something warm, a little spiced, nothing like the Axe body spray you'd assumed a guy like him wore.

"You drew that?" He was looking at a half-finished dress design, all sharp lines and asymmetric draping, like it was something out of a museum instead of the back page of your notebook.

"It's not done."

"It's sick. You're actually insane for this." He said it with none of the performative flirting from before — just plain, unguarded awe, like he'd forgotten to be cocky about it. "I can't draw a stick figure that doesn't look like it's having a medical emergency."

"I find that hard to believe. Aren't you obsessed with Digimon? Don't you have to draw those?"

"I collect them. Different skill set." He tapped the page. "This is actual art. What I do is scream into a headset until Nanami mutes me."

You found out, slowly and against your will, that he wasn't just loud confidence stacked on top of nothing. He knew music theory cold, could break down a chord progression on the spot, had strong and extremely specific opinions about which Digimon partner was objectively the best (Angemon, he'd argue this until sunrise) and an even stronger opinion about video game soundtracks being "criminally underrated as an art form, coffee girl, I will die on this hill." He talked with his whole body, hands flying, volume climbing, and then every so often — rare, unexpected — he'd get quiet. Almost shy. Usually right after he said something too honest.

Like the day he asked if you wanted to come watch his band practice.

"It's just Suguru's garage. It's not glamorous." He rubbed the back of his neck, and for a second the cockiness dropped clean off his face, replaced by something more nervous, more real. "You don't have to. I just — thought you might want to hear it. Since you've never actually heard us play anything."

You said yes before you'd fully decided to.

The garage smelled like reverb and stale energy drinks. Suguru — Suguru Geto, you learned, the guy with the ponytail — was tuning a guitar with the focus of a surgeon, occasionally throwing dry commentary at Satoru that made the whole room laugh. Shoko sat cross-legged on an amp, painting her nails an unbothered black, bass propped against her knee like an afterthought even though she was clearly the best musician in the room. Nanami — tax-paying-energy Nanami — adjusted his keyboard stand with military precision and gave you a polite nod that felt like the most normal interaction you'd had all week. And Sukuna, tattooed and terrifying in a way that made you instinctively step half a foot closer to Satoru, sat behind a second guitar looking like he was personally offended by the concept of being in a band.

"This is coffee girl," Satoru announced, flopping down behind his kit like he owned the room, which, in fairness, he kind of did. "She's here to witness greatness."

"She's here because you wouldn't shut up about her," Suguru said, not looking up from his guitar. "For two weeks."

"Slander."

"Documented slander," Shoko added without looking up from her nails. "He has a note in his phone."

Satoru's ears went pink. It was the single most satisfying thing you'd seen all semester.

"Play the song, Satoru," Sukuna said flatly, "before I lose the will to be here."

They played. And you understood, watching him, why he never took his classes seriously — because this, clearly, was where all of it went. He wasn't just loud behind the kit, he was precise, locked in with Shoko's bass in a way that looked like something they'd built over years, sticks a blur, head bobbing, completely unselfconscious in a way you hadn't seen from him anywhere else. There was no performance in it. No bit. Just him, fully present, grinning like an idiot between songs when he caught you watching.

After, while the others packed up, he sat down next to you on the busted garage couch, sweat-damp and buzzing with adrenaline, close enough that his knee brushed yours.

"So?" He tried for casual. Missed by a mile. "Verdict?"

"You're actually good."

"Actually good, or good-good?"

"Don't push it."

He laughed, and something in his face softened, the cocky mask slipping sideways just enough that you caught the boy underneath it — the one who kept a note in his phone, who got shy about the things he cared about most, who'd apparently been talking about you for two weeks before he worked up the nerve to invite you here.

"Hey," he said, quieter now, no audience left to perform for. "I know I'm — a lot. Loud. Whatever. I don't really do subtle."

"I noticed."

"I'm serious about this, though." He gestured vaguely between the two of you, and for once he wasn't smirking. "I don't want this to be a bit."

You should've had a witty comeback ready. You always did, with him — it was half the fun, the back-and-forth, the way he pushed and you pushed back just as hard. But something about the way he said it, stripped of all his usual bravado, made the words catch in your throat instead.

"It's not a bit," you said instead, quiet. "For me either."

The grin that broke across his face then was different from all the others — not performing, not for the room, not for a bit. Just for you.

"Good," he said. "Because I already told the guys you're my girlfriend. Retroactively. As of two weeks ago."

"Satoru."

"What? I was manifesting."

You shoved his shoulder, and he caught your wrist on the way, lacing his fingers through yours like it was the easiest thing in the world, like he'd been planning exactly this move since the coffee spilled down his shirt. Across the garage, Suguru caught the two of you and rolled his eyes so hard you were fairly sure it hurt.

"Finally," he muttered.

Nobody in that garage was surprised. Apparently you were the last one to figure it out — that the loudest, cockiest, most insufferable nerd on campus had quietly, embarrassingly, been falling for you since the first day you soaked his shirt in oat milk latte and told him he deserved it.

He spent his free time exactly three ways: behind his drum kit in Suguru's garage, buried in a Digimon rewatch he'd already seen four times, or three hours deep into a raid with a headset clamped over messy white hair, screaming at Nanami through the mic to actually heal him this time. His dorm room looked like a Best Buy had a baby with a comic shop — string lights, a wall of figures still in their boxes because "they lose value if you open them," and a corkboard covered in setlists for a band that had, generously, played six shows.

Satoru always knew that if he fell for someone, it would be a nerd. He just never pictured it looking like you.

You met him because of a spilled iced coffee and absolutely nothing more romantic than that.

It was the first week of the semester, campus still humid and overcrowded, and you'd been power-walking across the quad with a garment bag over one shoulder and a stack of sketchbooks under the other arm when a very tall, very loud boy backed directly into you without looking. Your coffee went down his band tee — some faded shirt with a logo you didn't recognize, letters half peeled off — and his drumsticks clattered onto the pavement.

"Oh my god," you'd said, mortified, already fishing napkins out of your bag like you kept a small pharmacy in there. Which, to be fair, you kind of did.

"Don't apologize," he said, grinning down at the stain like it was the best thing that happened to him all week. "This shirt was already ugly. You just gave it character."

You blinked at him. He was obnoxiously tall, silver hair falling messily over startling blue eyes, and there was a confidence radiating off him that didn't match the drumsticks or the Digimon keychain clipped to his backpack. He didn't carry himself like the guys you'd catalogued back home — the shy ones who blushed and stammered over a group project. He looked at you like he already knew the ending of this conversation and thought it was funny.

"I'm Satoru," he said, sticking out a hand like this was a business meeting and not a crime scene of oat milk. "Drummer. Certified genius. Currently drowning in caffeine that isn't mine."

"That's on you for walking backwards."

"I was doing a bit for my friend." He jerked his thumb toward a guy with a long black ponytail standing several feet away, watching the whole thing with the weary patience of someone who had clearly done cleanup duty for Satoru before. "Suguru doesn't think I can walk and talk at the same time. I was proving him wrong."

"You were proving him right."

That got a laugh out of him — a real one, loud and delighted, like you'd said something far funnier than you meant to. "Okay. I like you." He said it so easily, like liking people was a decision he made in real time and didn't think twice about. "What's your major?"

"Fashion design."

"Perfect." He picked his drumsticks up off the ground, twirling one between his fingers with the kind of muscle memory that only came from years of doing it. "You can redesign this shirt. Character and all."

You should've walked away right then. You had a class in eleven minutes and a stained blouse of your own to deal with. Instead you found yourself saying, "I don't do charity work," and watching his grin widen like you'd thrown down a gauntlet instead of an insult.

"We'll see about that, coffee girl."

You didn't expect to see him again. Campus was big, your circles didn't overlap, and you'd mentally filed him under loud, cute, forgettable the second you sat down in your first lecture. Except campus, as it turned out, was smaller than you thought, and Satoru Gojo was apparently everywhere.

He was in your general ed elective, three seats over, doodling little digital monsters in the margins of notes he wasn't taking. He was at the campus coffee shop your roommate dragged you to, holding court at a corner table with three other guys — the ponytail one, a stoic blond who looked like he paid taxes for fun, and someone with tattoos creeping up his forearms who kept flicking Satoru in the back of the head every time he got too loud. He was at the party your friend Utahime insisted you go to, standing on top of someone's coffee table doing an impression of a professor that had half the room in tears.

And every single time, he found you first.

"Coffee girl." He'd taken to calling you that instead of your actual name, which you found insufferable and, somewhere you weren't proud of, kind of charming. "Fate keeps throwing us together. I think the universe wants me to fix my fashion sense."

"The universe wants you to stop backing into people."

"Same thing, honestly."

It became a rhythm you didn't ask for and didn't stop, either — him dropping into the seat beside you before lecture with some ridiculous opener, you rolling your eyes and answering anyway. He asked about your sketches once, actually asked, leaning over your shoulder close enough that you could smell his cologne — something warm, a little spiced, nothing like the Axe body spray you'd assumed a guy like him wore.

"You drew that?" He was looking at a half-finished dress design, all sharp lines and asymmetric draping, like it was something out of a museum instead of the back page of your notebook.

"It's not done."

"It's sick. You're actually insane for this." He said it with none of the performative flirting from before — just plain, unguarded awe, like he'd forgotten to be cocky about it. "I can't draw a stick figure that doesn't look like it's having a medical emergency."

"I find that hard to believe. Aren't you obsessed with Digimon? Don't you have to draw those?"

"I collect them. Different skill set." He tapped the page. "This is actual art. What I do is scream into a headset until Nanami mutes me."

You found out, slowly and against your will, that he wasn't just loud confidence stacked on top of nothing. He knew music theory cold, could break down a chord progression on the spot, had strong and extremely specific opinions about which Digimon partner was objectively the best (Angemon, he'd argue this until sunrise) and an even stronger opinion about video game soundtracks being "criminally underrated as an art form, coffee girl, I will die on this hill." He talked with his whole body, hands flying, volume climbing, and then every so often — rare, unexpected — he'd get quiet. Almost shy. Usually right after he said something too honest.

Like the day he asked if you wanted to come watch his band practice.

"It's just Suguru's garage. It's not glamorous." He rubbed the back of his neck, and for a second the cockiness dropped clean off his face, replaced by something more nervous, more real. "You don't have to. I just — thought you might want to hear it. Since you've never actually heard us play anything."

You said yes before you'd fully decided to.

The garage smelled like reverb and stale energy drinks. Suguru — Suguru Geto, you learned, the guy with the ponytail — was tuning a guitar with the focus of a surgeon, occasionally throwing dry commentary at Satoru that made the whole room laugh. Shoko sat cross-legged on an amp, painting her nails an unbothered black, bass propped against her knee like an afterthought even though she was clearly the best musician in the room. Nanami — tax-paying-energy Nanami — adjusted his keyboard stand with military precision and gave you a polite nod that felt like the most normal interaction you'd had all week. And Sukuna, tattooed and terrifying in a way that made you instinctively step half a foot closer to Satoru, sat behind a second guitar looking like he was personally offended by the concept of being in a band.

"This is coffee girl," Satoru announced, flopping down behind his kit like he owned the room, which, in fairness, he kind of did. "She's here to witness greatness."

"She's here because you wouldn't shut up about her," Suguru said, not looking up from his guitar. "For two weeks."

"Slander."

"Documented slander," Shoko added without looking up from her nails. "He has a note in his phone."

Satoru's ears went pink. It was the single most satisfying thing you'd seen all semester.

"Play the song, Satoru," Sukuna said flatly, "before I lose the will to be here."

They played. And you understood, watching him, why he never took his classes seriously — because this, clearly, was where all of it went. He wasn't just loud behind the kit, he was precise, locked in with Shoko's bass in a way that looked like something they'd built over years, sticks a blur, head bobbing, completely unselfconscious in a way you hadn't seen from him anywhere else. There was no performance in it. No bit. Just him, fully present, grinning like an idiot between songs when he caught you watching.

After, while the others packed up, he sat down next to you on the busted garage couch, sweat-damp and buzzing with adrenaline, close enough that his knee brushed yours.

"So?" He tried for casual. Missed by a mile. "Verdict?"

"You're actually good."

"Actually good, or good-good?"

"Don't push it."

He laughed, and something in his face softened, the cocky mask slipping sideways just enough that you caught the boy underneath it — the one who kept a note in his phone, who got shy about the things he cared about most, who'd apparently been talking about you for two weeks before he worked up the nerve to invite you here.

"Hey," he said, quieter now, no audience left to perform for. "I know I'm — a lot. Loud. Whatever. I don't really do subtle."

"I noticed."

"I'm serious about this, though." He gestured vaguely between the two of you, and for once he wasn't smirking. "I don't want this to be a bit."

You should've had a witty comeback ready. You always did, with him — it was half the fun, the back-and-forth, the way he pushed and you pushed back just as hard. But something about the way he said it, stripped of all his usual bravado, made the words catch in your throat instead.

"It's not a bit," you said instead, quiet. "For me either."

The grin that broke across his face then was different from all the others — not performing, not for the room, not for a bit. Just for you.

"Good," he said. "Because I already told the guys you're my girlfriend. Retroactively. As of two weeks ago."

"Satoru."

"What? I was manifesting."

You shoved his shoulder, and he caught your wrist on the way, lacing his fingers through yours like it was the easiest thing in the world, like he'd been planning exactly this move since the coffee spilled down his shirt. Across the garage, Suguru caught the two of you and rolled his eyes so hard you were fairly sure it hurt.

"Finally," he muttered.

Nobody in that garage was surprised. Apparently you were the last one to figure it out — that the loudest, cockiest, most insufferable nerd on campus had quietly, embarrassingly, been falling for you since the first day you soaked his shirt in oat milk latte and told him he deserved it.

Sukuna found himself in another’s body in his mid-twenties, awakening one morning in complete darkness, even though he’d been certain his eyes were open. It was a strange feeling at first, a resignation to a suspicion he’d held all his life that there was no destined person for him, giving in to the belief that he’d spend a day floating in nothingness with no other half for his soul to cling to.

His assumption was broken swiftly, at the realisation that he still held some manner of awareness even if his sight was impaired. There was a breeze blowing against his body, chatter sounding off in the distance, and soft sheets were pressing up against skin which surely wasn’t his.

This person, whoever they were, had a body that was exhausted. He ached in places he’d never ached before, his shoulders and upper back straining, like their owner had been carrying a weight beyond their capability. He felt desperately weak in that form, suddenly aware that he only had a human number of limbs to control, and lacked the strength and size he was used to commanding.

In the darkness clouding his vision, he was surprised to find that the blackness wasn’t as deep as he’d originally thought, able to make out fuzzy shapes in the dark which he could only assume made up his surroundings. His hand reached for his eyes, setting his lips into a grim line at the confirmation they were open.

His destined lover was blind.

Disappointment settled into his chest. He had never taken much stock in soulmates in the first place, didn’t really believe in love, but this just furthered his confirmation that the whole matter was a farce. He found respect for the strong - strength was the only thing that truly mattered to him, and yet here he was, in the body of a blind woman.

A feeble little thing hardly able to fend for herself.

What good was she to a man like Sukuna?

A knock on the door startled him. “Are you awake? The madam wants me to help you get ready.”

Sukuna said nothing, trying to figure out why it felt like your body wanted to draw in on itself, your pulse quicking in a seemingly innate reaction to the voice at the door.

“Please, I know you’ve been ill but he’s been calling every day for the past week, the madam doesn’t want to keep him waiting any longer. He’s been bringing forth all manner of threat, and if you’re not careful he’ll buy you out. I know that isn’t what you want. Just let me tend to you and allow him a visit. Keep his temper at bay.”

Sukuna frowned, attempting to piece together what was happening. It was hard without the visual clues of his surroundings, but based on the snippet of conversation he concluded that you were likely a courtesan of some form. Once again, his view of you, and the soulmate system in general, dropped through the floor.

Blind and a whore.

Perfect.

“One moment.” He called out, taken aback by the lovely feminine voice that fell from his lips. It was a soft, delicate sound, one which wouldn’t sound out of place accompanied with a harp. He found himself shocked at how much he enjoyed it, considering saying something else just to hear it again.

Finding the door proved to be a more difficult task than he’d been expecting. He’d already stumbled standing up from your bed, thrown off by his lack of vision and by feet that were ridiculously small compared to what he was used to. His centre of gravity felt all wrong, and his body felt generally unbalanced without his lower set of arms.

Moving at a snail's pace, he made it across the room, impressed that he didn’t run into anything on his journey over. He was grateful for the shadowy outlines present in your visionless gaze, certain that the situation would be made harder without even that as a guide.

Fumbling for the handle, he slid open the door. “Morning. Oh honey, you look like a ghost.” A hand pressed against his skin, and he was ushered over to another part of the room, grateful for the guidance. There was the sound of a chair being moved. “Take a seat.”

Sukuna hesitated, not quite sure where the chair was. He reached out nonchalantly with his hand, trying to feel for it while the other woman’s focus was elsewhere, seemingly rifling through a bag of something. Able to just about make out a black splodge in the centre of his vision, Sukuna took a seat, only to thud down onto the floor.

It hurt. It hurt significantly more than pain Sukuna was used to enduring. He’d experienced all manner of injury - he’d had his blood and guts pouring out onto the floor in the midst of a fight, but somehow this was worse. How fragile was this body of yours? He was glad that he wasn’t born as some weak human, grateful that the abominable aspects of his body increased his strength rather than weakened it.

How could you live like this?

“My lady?” The woman seemed immediately panicked, reaching down and easily hoisting you up by the arm, aiding Sukuna onto the chair. “I’m sorry, you usually tell me you don’t need assistance, I wasn’t expecting-” she cut herself off for a moment, leaving Sukuna in silence and struggling to read the room with no visual cues. “You don’t seem like yourself at all this morning. You’re being very quiet.”

Sukuna said nothing, certain that he could hear the hint of a smile in the woman’s tone.

It was said that when soulmates swapped bodies, you could not under any circumstance tell someone that you were a different inhabitant to usual, else the spell would be broken and you’d both be immediately sent home.

It was an option Sukuna had contemplated the moment the woman walked in, eager to return to his own healthy form. However, he was also a man of great curiosity and it wasn’t like he had much going on at his estate that day anyway. So he opted for silence, figuring he’d at least see, or hear, how the day played out.

There was no harm in that.

Regardless, the woman had seemingly sensed it immediately based on her sudden change of demeanor, but being likely as aware of the rules as Sukuna was, she kept her suspicions silent.

“It's Officer Sugawara who’s set to see you today,” she explained, soft hands running through your hair with a comb, giving Sukuna a shiver of pleasure. “You usually play shogi with the guy for a while and let him get drunk. He’s a proud man who’s desperate for a legitimate win, so you always give him your best and he refuses to give up until he’s too pissed to think anymore. So be on your best game, or he might want to pass his time in another way.”

The warning was clear and Sukuna found himself disgusted. If that man tried to lay a single hand on you while he was inhabiting your body, he’d make sure Sugawara wouldn’t walk out of the establishment alive.

Fortunately, Sukuna was an avid shogi player. He held a great love for the game and was self-assured where his skill was concerned. No one in his estate could beat him, so he was certain he could beat some Officer of the Shogun.

Although, he’d never played it blind - a fact that mildly concerned him.

He hoped the pieces were skillfully made with deep indents, else he’d be completely lost.

“Even though you’re usually talkative with me, you’re not all that chatty with regulars, so it’ll be fine if you stay quiet. On account of you not feeling yourself and all,” she said with a knowing giggle.

It took an ungodly amount of time for that woman to get you ready, and Sukuna wondered how you could bear experiencing such a thing day after day. It seemed such a waste to have so much effort devoted to doing your hair and make-up, and dressing you up, when you couldn’t even see the end result.

For all you knew you could look like a clown.

But Sukuna quickly became certain that wasn’t the case when he was led into another room, your helper grasping his arm in a steadying manner and making sure he was settled down on a pillow before introducing him to a man sitting opposite him. Sugawara wasted no time with greetings, letting out a gasp of awe at your radiant appearance and reaching out to kiss your hand.

Sukuna wanted to reel away at the feeling but remained still all the same. He hoped he didn’t have too much of a scowl on his face.

Even if he didn’t have any interest in you, he didn’t really want to ruin the life of some random blind girl. He loved cruelty, but even for him that felt like an unnecessary slight to a person who was supposed to hold the other half of his heart.

“You look gorgeous. Not sickly at all, might I add. I hope the madam hasn’t been telling lies.”

You were sick - outside of the blindness - Sukuna could feel it. At first he’d brushed off your frailty as something normal for puny little humans, but since rising from your bed he’d become aware that your quivering legs, aching bones and hummingbird heart were far from normal.

“I haven’t been well,” he said simply.

“Oh you poor thing, it's always the most beautiful ones who suffer the most.”

Sukuna found himself wondering what you looked like. He had a vague knowledge of Official Sugawara - he wasn’t an ugly man, certainly not one lacking in prospects by any means. He was powerful in his position in the government, and wasn’t the type who would visit some woman out of pity.

You must’ve been genuinely gorgeous to earn such affection from him.

It was a shame Sukuna would never know.

He wouldn’t look for you once he was back in his own body. He’d move on with his life and that would be that, leaving this day as nothing more than some distant dream.

The games of shogi went by quickly, and Sukuna found that it was easy to slip into your body without arousing suspicion. Once he’d gotten over the original barrier of having to feel each piece for their indents as he picked them up, he fell easily into the flow of it all.

This man across from him seeked little conversation once the games had started, and Sukuna was pleased at how well he was playing that afternoon. He didn’t let the man win once and, as your attendant had mentioned, Suguwara filled himself up with more and more drink. It felt nice to play someone outside of his estate, most of his servants were too afraid to face Sukuna in any sort of test.

It was equally nice to completely destroy a government official with his skill. He was certain this man was having the worst game of his entire life, unaccustomed to this treatment from the lovely courtesan he’d frequent.

But it was at the end of the seventh game, when Sukuna was feeling at his highest, that a disastrous hit would come to his ego.

“You’re really off your game today. I see you really aren’t feeling well,” Sugawara said. There was the sound of shuffling fabric, as if the man had leant forward.

“What?” Sukuna asked, the low disbelief coming out strange in your small voice.

“Your plays are much sloppier than usual. It feels like you’re going easy on me, given you usually destroy me before I can even think about what to do next. Today you’ve been giving me proper games. I don’t like it. You know I hate being pitied.”

Sukuna had to stop his mouth from falling agape.

He wasn’t playing bad games by any means, on the contrary, he was certain that he was playing better than he had in a while, happy to have a new opponent for once. Was this man really saying that you, the normal you, was more skilled at shogi than he was? He really found that hard to believe.

What would some blind courtesan know of tactics?

“Perhaps you’ve simply improved,” Sukuna mumbled bitterly, unwilling to accept that your mastery was greater than his.

Sugawara laughed. “How polite of you, my dear. I can assure you that isn’t the case, and we both know it.” There was some shuffling, and Sukuna sensed that the man was climbing to his feet. It was frustrating to have such limited vision, and he was glad to know that he’d wake up the following day able to see the world once more - he couldn’t imagine living like that all the time. “I’ll leave you to rest. When I return in a few days you best have returned to form, or perhaps the nature of our meetings will need to change.”

A heavy hand rested on your shoulder, wet and clammy against the silk you were draped in. Sukuna wasn’t sure if the disgust was born from his own thoughts on the matter, or from an impulsive response from your body. From your attendant’s words it was clear that you would never sleep with the man, likely keeping your shogi skills sharp to ensure he never won.

Once he was gone, Sukuna sat there in silence, thinking on the man’s parting words.

Were you really so talented?

Part of him wanted to convince himself that he’d been playing worse than usual on account of not being able to see the board, making it difficult for him to think out moves in advance, taking more time than normal while he grazed the pieces with his fingers.

But deep in his soul he knew that wasn’t the case.

He’d played expertly, and still that man knew his opponent wasn’t the real you. All on account of how amateur Sukuna’s ability had seemed compared to yours.

And as his day drew to a close in your body, he realised that he had to know. He had to play you, had to see firsthand just how dramatically your skill exceeded his. He wouldn’t believe it until he’d seen it.

The soulmate thing didn’t matter.

But he needed to meet with you all the same.

Just to sate his interest. That was all.

—

Months had passed since the day you’d swapped with your soulmate. Since the morning you’d awoken to a world of light of colour you’d never seen before, and would never see again.

It was a day you’d never be able to forget - the image of the grand estate you’d awoken in seared permanently into your mind, just like the face of your soulmate who had stared back at you in a bronze mirror. You’d gazed upon his body for longer than you should admit to, wondering for a brief moment if you’d misunderstood how humans looked.

That thought didn’t remain for long. It took no expert to understand that the man you’d been paired with was something unique - the very four armed monster who had half of Japan living in fear.

And as such, you wished you could forget your experience in his body, wished you could see anything but his oddly charming face, because your promised beloved was a monster of the highest calibre. But with only one singular day of vision under your belt, what you’d seen wasn’t so easily displaced, and you found yourself thinking of him often with a longing that you knew to be wrong.

You had told no one of the experience, not even your handmaid, who had outright asked what your body swap experience had been like, what your soulmate had been like, claiming that whoever they were had presented themselves as rather reserved when possessing your body. You’d brushed her off with a shrug, claiming him to be some soldier and nothing more.

No one could know the truth. If they knew you to have any link to such a terrible man they might view you as an associate, and someone deserving of death for something you hadn’t asked for.

The workings of fate seemed strange to you. Was it not enough punishment to be born blind? Why would you also be paired with a monster who seemed to view the human race with general disdain? You were certain he cared little for love, his servant had made that clear when you were in his body, so any hopes of having a soulmate had been stolen from you as a result of this pairing.

Part of you wondered if a man so vile as him might even take things a step further and track you down to put an end to your life, insulted by fate to suggest that it could control him in any capacity. Perhaps he would be further insulted to be paired with someone so damaged rather than some untarnished beauty.

You’d always heard he held great hatred for weakness.

Even so, despite your fear and desire to conceal yourself from him, you couldn’t forget him, couldn’t stop the flicker of longing in your chest you were certain all people held for their destined lovers. Because while he was unquestionably a monster, with a throne of skulls you had witnessed through his very eyes, he also seemed to be more than that.

He was a man of great loneliness, living in grand halls with only a handful of servants for company - and all but one of them would scuttle out of the way when he approached. He seemed to hold a great love for art, with his estate packed with paintings and tapestries and great vases, all kept in pristine condition. For a cannibal, he seemed to take great pride in the cleanliness of his surroundings, in the neat nature of his gardens and springs.

Even in his own appearance, he seemed to take great care, for there was no denying him to be a handsome man even with his unique features. He had a voice to match that beauty, one that you could hardly peel from your mind any more than you could forget his image.

His body was hard to maneuver, too big and confusing to control his many hanging limbs. In a way, it felt akin to your blindness, something different to the way humans were built to be, leaving him to struggle with an issue that no one else could relate to. You wondered how it had been for him in childhood - if he’d felt as isolated and scared as you had to know that everyone else was normal in a way you’d never been.

You pitied him, even through all his sins. You felt you could understand at least a piece of him from a day buried within the confines of his skin.

But still, you would never reach for him - wouldn’t poke the bear even if you could understand why it might bite. You were certain that someone like him would be unwilling to hear you out, unwilling to love or reflect on how he became the way he was - he would swipe your head from your shoulders just like everyone else, and that would be that.

So you would stay away, keep your dreams of him locked deep within your chest, and accept that distance was for the best.

There was more to life than soulmates.

Unfortunately, that choice wasn’t yours alone to make.

The madame had knocked on your door early that morning, with the golden light of the sun only just starting to peek in through your window. Lately you’d been having longer lie-ins and taking less clients as the cold of winter gripped the region. Along with the blindness, you’d been born with a particularly feeble body as a result of complications with your mother during her pregnancy, ailments which were always worse for you in the colder months.

Your bones strained as you pushed yourself up to a sitting position, calling for the woman to enter. As much as you longed to slip back into your dream of red eyes peering back at you with fiery desire, you were still beholden to the will of your employer, even in your months of weakness.

“How are you feeling, my dear?” She asked, as she slipped in through the door. You felt her weight dip the bed as she took a seat beside you, a gentle hand coming to rest on your shoulder.

“Mornings are always the worst but I can manage once I’m up and about. Has Sugawara come calling again?” Most regulars were understanding enough of your condition, and those that weren’t would generally be chased off by the madame or unloaded onto another of the courtesans. Sugawara was one of the few that generally wouldn’t accept such treatment, with only eyes for you.

It didn’t matter too much since the man only ever wanted to play shogi, and that was manageable enough even on your worst days. It seemed that he had no intention of laying with you until he’d beat you in a game fair and square, claiming that if that ever happened he’d buy you out and take you home for he would’ve earned your heart.

That talk always made you uncomfortable, for you had little interest in the man, but you were more than certain he had no chance at ever defeating you at shogi, and could therefore never lay claim to you - assuming he kept his word.

“Not Sugawara…” There was hesitation in her voice. “We’ve received a request for our finest shogi player to be sent to the mayor’s home this evening. Apparently the other courtesan houses have received the same request.”

“I didn’t think the mayor cared much for shogi.”

Again, there was a moment of silence. “No, he doesn’t. A rather unwanted guest has taken up residence in his home, and this is the demand that has come of it.” Immediately your blood ran cold, thoughts drifting away from the madame’s continuing chatter to the red eyes that sat so prominently in the darkness of your mind.

There was no question in your mind as to who this guest was.

And to call for shogi players had you certain he was looking for you. Would he execute you when you walked into a room so clearly lacking in vision? Put an immediate end to the one person who could potentially stir his cold heart if fate were to be believed?

It seemed like the only reasonable explanation

The request to send another in your place died on the tip of your tongue as you once again tuned in to what the madame was saying. “...make sure you’re in top form, I’ve heard any who lose to him are immediately disposed of, but I’m sure that man will be no match for you.”

You wouldn’t send another to face their death. You were the only courtesan in the house who was any good at shogi, anyone else would certainly perish. This was a meeting dictated by fate and you had no opportunity to run from it. You would face him head on and deal with your death graciously, greet your end alone in the dark just like everything else you’d ever faced.

“I’ll do my best,” you said to the madame, and that was the final moment you had for yourself, your sacrifice sealed by your words.

The rest of the morning was spent in a frenzied rush, dressing you up and perfecting your makeup, turning you into a sparkling beauty ahead of your presentation to a monster. Based on the quiet nature of your handmaid, the experience felt more like she was dressing your corpse for burial.

Neither of you spoke such a thing aloud, but tears dripped from sightless eyes all the same when she led you out to the carriage, the madam trailing behind her, sending you off with a soft farewell filled with a sense of finality.

—

Sukuna had undergone an annoying few months.

Steadily, he had made his way, region by region, up to the north of Japan in search of a blind shogi player whose skill allegedly eclipsed his own. In each area, he would call upon all shogi-playing courtesans to meet with him and join him in a game, in the hopes that one day it would be you sitting across from him.

So far, he’d been unsuccessful, and had left a growing pile of bodies and burnt villages in his wake, utterly irritated that the thing he was seeking still evaded his grasp. No one had beaten him. A few had come close but none of them had been blind, so he could be certain that they weren’t you.

He was beginning to wonder if you’d gone into hiding somewhere, forsaking your courtesan life entirely in a bid to avoid him. It wouldn’t surprise him - you’d been in his body, you’d seen he was a monster, a fragile little thing like you was probably terrified at the idea of ever crossing his path.

Either way, he’d still persevere. He’d kill every shogi player if that was what it took to get to you.

He’d recently found his way into the mountainous region of Miyagi, where winter was in full spring. Taking up residence in the mayor’s home in one of the more populous towns in the prefecture, he once again started his usual process of gathering the shogi players. Word spread fast and droves of them appeared swiftly, waiting to be called before him.

It went much as usual, with boring girls presenting themselves before him and providing him with equally boring games of shogi. These people were painfully predictable with no appreciation for the art of the game - really it was a gift for him to steal their lives from them, because he couldn’t imagine living while being so pitifully unskilled.

The pool of Miyagi courtesans was gradually running dry and Sukuna was preparing himself for another disappointing journey further north when his luck finally shifted.

He knew he’d found you the moment you walked in through the door.

You’d stumbled in meekly, eyes averted down to the floor as you bowed low and shuffled towards the centre of the room. You were taking care not to raise your head for him to look upon, and he quickly realised you were making your best effort to conceal your blindness from him, like you could keep your identity secret that way.

It was a futile attempt, for the very atmosphere around you felt charged, his heart picking up inexplicably at the very sight of you.

To say you were beautiful was an understatement. Everything about you was gorgeous, from your soft hair to the striking intensity of your unseeing eyes. You wore the finest silks and they hung off you well, complimenting your figure. He found himself eager to touch you, to rid you off your lovely gown and have his fingers against your smooth skin.

But that wasn’t the reason he had come, and he would play you before entertaining any other matter.

“Sit,” he ordered, taking great amusement in the shiver that seemed to run through you at the sound of his voice.

You dropped to your knees on the cushion before the board, hands pressing against the edge of the table. It was the first chance he got to take a proper look at your eyes, expecting them to be clouded over, but taken aback by the lovely colour your irises still held beneath that mist.

“You’re blind.” He observed aloud, taking note of the way your teeth caught your lower lip anxiously.

“I see more than enough,” your response was guarded.

He hummed, a sly grin settling on his face. Idly, he wondered if you could sense it, because you seemed to tense up a little, fidgeting across from him in a way his traitorous brain seemed to register as endearing. “Is that so? Do you see enough to know my strategy before we commence? Or will you disappoint me like the others?”

“You tell me.”

Your words had his heart stirring against his will, impressed by your serenity before him, still sitting up straight and calm despite the fear he could sense within you. You were a woman who held confidence despite it all, harboured strength even in the face of your obvious weaknesses. He wondered what you were thinking, if you believed he was there to execute you for the mere transgression of being his soulmate.

It wasn’t a foolish assumption.

He would kill you without a second thought if you were uninteresting to him.

But he’d reserve that judgement until after you had played. He had been promised someone exceptional and that was what he wished to see, anything less and your blood would stain the floor just like every other woman who had sat before him. Would you still be so calm if you could see the bodies littering the room? He assumed not.

He wondered if you hated him, if you cursed fate itself to be paired with a man like him. Nothing about you gave anything away, all your focus fixed on the board in front of you, your hands moving steadily against the wood of the board, as if centring yourself.

“Shall we begin?” He asked.

“Yes.”

Sukuna couldn’t quite comprehend what had transpired in that first game he played against you.

He had approached things in much the same manner that he always would when playing shogi - opening strong and attempting to completely overwhelm his opponent, and yet somehow he found opportunities snatched from him at every turn.

Nothing seemed to catch you off guard. Any attempted play was greeted with an easy answer from you, as though you were battling a child. You were always three steps ahead of him, never hesitating in the shifting of a piece, moving with a certainty that had him transfixed.

He found that he couldn’t draw his eyes away from you, his struggle on the board forgotten at the realisation he’d been well and truly defeated. There was no point in struggling further - you had swatted him aside in the way that he usually defeated others, and you had done it with no glee or brag, nothing more than passive indifference once the games finally came to an end.

Your shoulders were raised, as if awaiting something you wouldn’t be able to see coming. A strike from him, perhaps? Or the neat removal of your head from your shoulders? The same fate of all others he’d played across the last few months.

But he wasn’t in the position to do anything at that moment, lashes fluttering as he stared at you, his heart hammering against his ribcage.

There had been no lie told about your skill - on the contrary, you had exceeded his expectations spectacularly. He wanted to play you again and again, wanted to witness the beauty of the way you played, wished to spend hours lost deep in thought considering how he could even begin to pick you apart in a match.

He could spend years sitting across you, gazing upon your lovely form while you worked away in silence with such unquestionable mastery.

No wonder Sugawara had been disappointed in Sukuna’s ability. He couldn’t hold a candle to what you were.

“How?” He asked, unable to think of another word to offer.

Your head was still lowered, eyes fixed elsewhere. He wished you’d look at him, allow him a clearer view of your face, but it occurred to him that such a request may not be easily granted with your lack of vision. You would never be able to lock eyes with each other - it would be something entirely meaningless for you.

“You aren’t all that good,” you spoke softly, a smile playing on your lips.

Sukuna disagreed with your sentiment, considering he’d never been beaten before, but perhaps you’d consider all his previous opponents to be genuinely pitiful at the game.

“So, will you take my life now? Or is that reserved for the losers?” You asked.

“To take the life of someone I could not best would be cowardly and pointless,” he said with a snort. “How would I ever grow to be better than you if I extinguished you from the world? Don’t be foolish. We will play again.”

And again you played.

Game after game until the sun began to rise in the sky, and Sukuna could sense exhaustion drifting through your fragile form. You were shivering from the cold, and he had Uraume bring in a robe to wrap around you, keenly aware of how sickly you seemed to look beneath all the beauty. You were setting up the board for your tenth match when Sukuna finally put an end to things.

“Enough. I would take no joy in defeating an exhausted opponent.” He rose to his feet, stretching as he moved. He wasn’t keen on remaining still for long periods of time, but you seemed accustomed to it, staying deathly still upon your cushion, uncertainty evident in your posture.

“Then, you will send me to my home?” You asked.

“No.” The word escaped him before he could stop it.

He did not wish for you to go anywhere, lest you slip from his grasp never to be found again. It was because he wanted to play you more, that’s what he told himself, but there was more to it than that, and in his soul he knew it.

He never wanted the image of you on your knees before him to slip away, never wanted to lose the pleasurable feeling of warmth that swelled in his chest with you there within his gaze.

“You’ll accompany me to my home, and we’ll play until I’m satisfied.”

—

Weeks had passed since you’d arrived at Sukuna’s estate in the Hida Mountains.

You’d been given no time to bid goodbye to the women at the only home you’d ever known, swept off in a carriage down south where you had to relearn your surroundings in a totally new environment.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time you’d been in the estate, but that experience made little impact on the ease of traversing around with no vision. You had to move slowly, fingers brushing on blurry objects shadowed in the darkness, hoping you didn’t trip over something or walk into a screen door.

For the most part, you were left to your own devices. Sukuna had spoken little to you on the journey home, opting to ride on his horse rather than in the carriage with you, and he’d been equally elusive in his own estate, leaving you in isolation for days at a time.

You couldn’t complain, for your days were spent in peace and serenity.

You would take long walks in the breeze of his garden, have his servants read aloud to you, and practice playing the erhu. On days where it was particularly cold and the chill seeped into your bones, you would remain in the grand bed he had provided and find greater comfort than you ever had in the old bed you’d laid upon in the courtesan house.

The only obligation you ever had to fulfill were shogi games. And during the times that he wasn’t absent from the estate, those would take place every evening, in Sukuna’s own private quarters.

It was an odd decision, considering that the servants played shogi out in the garden, where a proper table was set up for that purpose. But it seemed that Sukuna took care in ensuring your meetings were private - a decision you didn’t dare read into too deeply.

You didn’t dare read into any of his behaviour too deeply, lest you rip your own heart from your chest.

That first meeting with him had been like nothing you’d ever experienced - genuine desire overcoming you at the deep tone of his voice. Even knowing that he could cause your death with little effort, you couldn’t bury the lust within you, a fire that only burned stronger with each encounter with him.

It was hard to hold it together, to pretend that you wouldn’t fling yourself into his arms given the chance, but you tried all the same, keeping yourself distant and cold, like you didn’t dream of him between your legs each night, imagining the sound of his voice whispering sweet nothings against your ear.

Whether he felt the effect to the same extent you did, you weren’t sure. You were certain you’d never know. His interest in you was surrounding shogi, and shogi alone.

One evening, you were sitting across from him having played a handful of games, finding victory had fallen into your hands even more easily than normal. Sukuna seemed distracted by something, the sound of fidgeting settling in your ears. He hadn’t moved to start a new game, and based on the shadowy shapes in your vision, you could only assume he was leaning forward upon the table, bringing him close enough for his breath to fan your face.

“I killed today,” he said. Those were the first words he’d spoken to you that evening - you always followed his example with conversation, if he was feeling chatty you would indulge him, if he wished for silence you would give him that too.

You weren’t exactly sure where he was going with that statement, nor were you certain what type of response he was seeking, so you offered him a hum of acknowledgement and little more. You didn’t wish to think of the death that stained his hands, but nor did it build your animosity towards him.

To some extent you could understand lashing out at the world when you were someone so desperately lonely as he was. Part of you believed that if you hadn’t been so frail perhaps you’d lash out at the world for your own condition. His primary servant had told you he’d been despised throughout his life, and when you find only cruelty in humans it's difficult to cling to kindness.

Sukuna wasn’t so simple as a mere monster. You’d understood that in the day you’d spent in his body, and had only further confirmed it by the intelligence he displayed when you’d speak over games of shogi. He had a great admiration for art and skill, and had seemed rather taken when you’d recited poetry, responding with verses of his own.

He was a multi-faceted man, and much of what you saw only seemed to further your attraction to him, even knowing it was wrong, even knowing you’d be hated for it. For once, you felt you’d found someone who understood what it was like to be you, to be cut off from the easy lives lived by most others.

A soul that entwined so perfectly with yours, even if he’d never be aware of such a thing.

“Do you wish to know who I killed?” He asked.

“I know few people, my lord. I doubt a name would mean anything to me.”

“This one might. I’ve heard you’re familiar with Officer Sugawara? He’s one of the Shogun’s men?”

Thoughts of your regular flickered through your mind. If you were being honest with yourself, you were glad to not have to see him anymore - him or any of the other clients you’d been forced to take. Courtesan life had been difficult for you, forced into it thanks to the conditions of your birth and kept there by a disability that made it hard to escape the life for something better.

Life in Sukuna’s estate had been easier, especially as the weeks passed and you grew more comfortable in the belief that Sukuna wasn't going to steal your life from you. You’d lived in fear of Sugawara buying you out, of being forced to live like some doll in the house of a terribly boring man whose voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard to your ears.

“I know him.”

“Knew him, would be more apt. His body lies at the foot of the mountain.” Sukuna spoke matter-of-factly. “He came to claim you from me. I refused and we couldn’t reach an amicable agreement, so I dealt with it another way.”

You weren’t sure how to react, struggling to process the words. That Sugawara would follow you down to Hida already came as a surprise, you hadn’t known how deep his devotion ran. But somehow, you found yourself rather taken by Sukuna’s decision, by the certainty in his choice to keep you.

To kill a man whose death could cause him issues with the Shogun might as well have been an outright confession of love.

Sugawara’s death meant little to you. Men like that died all the time, and they saw women as little more than pretty objects to own. Sugawara had seen you as an impressive party trick, a clever cat rather than a human with depth and desires of her own. You hadn’t wanted to be his, wouldn’t have liked for Sukuna to surrender you to him.

“Are you irritated with me? When I controlled your body you seemed repulsed at his presence. Perhaps you have a heart too soft for blood and death.”

“No- I-” You hesitated. “Did you do this to protect me?”

There was silence for a moment, and you longed to see his facial expression, but were forced to settle for the hint of confusion in his tone. “Of course. I’ve protected you since bringing you here. You can hardly protect yourself.”

You couldn’t find it in you to be offended - he’d been in your body, he knew of your frailty better than anyone.

“Why? Just because you enjoy shogi so much?”

“Somewhat. Though I must confess, lately I have been losing interest in the game. I feel I’ve come up against an insurmountable wall.” Panic filled you immediately, mind running at a million miles a minute as you analysed his statement. If he was growing bored of playing would he cast you aside? What use did he have for you if not shogi?

But then again, why would he kill Sugawara if he was moments from disposing of you?

“Perhaps it is the fault of my own discipline, for I’ve found it hard to focus on the game for quite some time now.” He hesitated, and you found yourself flinching at the feeling of a soft hand caressing your cheek, leaning into it once you overcame the initial shock of touch. “It is difficult when you have a beautiful woman sitting across from you. It’s even harder when my soul calls for you whenever you're near, drowning out any thoughts I might gather of strategy.”

“Oh.” You weren’t sure what to say, wondering if you should pinch yourself, for many of your dreams centred themselves around such a confession. But the touch had never felt so real before, large fingers brushing against the soft skin of your face.

“I wonder if I’d be more focussed if I admitted fate might make some sense after all. I have never denied myself anything before now, and I’m tired of denying myself you. You have captivated me thoroughly, and I believe the hole in my chest was carved out to allow you to one day settle there.”

The words were by far the most romantic statement anyone had ever uttered to you. In your time as a courtesan you’d heard plenty of cheesy and affectionate lines, ones you’d brush off and forget by the time the client was done with you. Sukuna’s words would burrow into your heart and remain there for as long as you drew breath.

Could anyone fault you for loving a monster who would speak such beauty to you? Could you be hated for finding one who had been cursed by the world just like you had?

“I have no care for the Shogun’s men,” Sukuna continued, “in my eyes they are little more than flies most of the time, an annoying thing to be ignored unless they brush too close. Would it amuse you to know I killed Sugawara out of jealousy? To hear that my chest tightened at the idea of you being taken from my side?”

“Because you enjoy having such a capable rival in intelligence?” You asked, a wry smile creeping onto your face.

“Because I enjoy you.”

It was clear he was waiting for you to say something. The words that had poured from his mouth were unlike any he’d spoken before, and although you couldn’t see him, you could feel the sense of restlessness that gripped his body.

You would not leave him in uncertainty.

“I have only ever seen the world through your eyes,” you confessed shyly, “the only face I see in the endless darkness is yours, and I dream of it every night.” Sukuna’s fingers twitched against your face. “If you’ll have me, I am yours.”

“Even though I’m a monster?” He asked. There was no remorse in his tone, nothing to suggest that he was pained over who he was, it was just an honest question for you to answer as you wished. “You were scared of me when we met. I know you hid yourself from me after discovering our connection, eager to ensure our paths would never cross.”

“Because I believed you would kill me. I thought you to be a man who would stamp out any notion of love and eliminate me along with it.”

He hummed in acknowledgement, failing to deny your statement. You knew it to be true - if you had lost your shogi game on that first meeting, he would’ve done exactly that. It was in his nature to love only that which piqued his interest.

“Especially to be paired with someone so weak, I thought you would consider it an insult.”

He scoffed. “You are far from weak, I’ve found it impossible to best you.”

“I meant physically,” your voice went small. “I did not imagine the King of Curses would favour a sightless woman, nor one so easily broken.”

He was silent for a moment, seemingly processing your words. “I was small and frail once. Perhaps frailer than you. I wish someone had valued me then for my other virtues. I’m big enough and sharp enough to make up for your failings and you are clever enough to cover mine.”

Your mind was reeling at the idea of him admitting to having failings. Your heart stirring at his affection, and his easy desire despite your condition.

“I had not imagined a soulmate to be so well suited to me, for my tangles with fate have always been cruel,” he said. “But you’re something different, something I need at my side, and I will be your eyes, your protector, whatever it is you want in order to keep you there.”

“Oh.” You were positively blushing, whole body trembling beneath the weight of lovely words spoken in that deep voice of his.

Your soulmate wanted you.

A man hated by the world and filled with hatred in return had a space carved out for you, a space for love you hadn’t known him capable of.

You’d loved him from the first time you’d met him, drawn to him by an inexplicable force which seemed to grip him just as hard.

Soulmates really were wonderful.

Silence had settled between the two of you, only broken as the table screeched across the floor, the barrier between you removed. Sukuna shifted forward and an arm came to rest around your smaller body, pulling you towards him. His lips pressed against yours in a kiss you could only describe as sweet.

He didn’t dominate you in the manner you believed a man like him would, instead he took his time, mapping out your lips and drawing you closer to him, letting you bathe in the warmth of his body against yours. It was almost like he was trying not to scare you, aware that you couldn’t see anything he was doing and trying to move slowly as a result.

You wouldn’t have minded either way, your fingers clinging to the biceps of his upper arms, desperate for more of a touch you’d only ever dreamed of.

People always said that to finally touch your soulmate was a euphoria like nothing else, and you truly believed them to be right. Your head felt like it was swimming, chest swelling as if Sukuna’s own soul had wriggled beneath your skin to intertwine with your own.

It was a little overwhelming.

“How I long for you,” he murmured against your ear, breaking the kiss. “I was foolish to have not had you the moment I laid eyes on you, I’ve ached for your touch longer than I care to admit.”

His fingers moved down to your robes, and your breath hitched at the touch. You were no stranger to sex, your job had required it, but the feeling as he undressed you wasn’t like any previous encounter you’d had. What regulars thought of your body was insignificant to you, sex was nothing special with them, just something you had to do if you wished to make a living wage.

This was the first time you’d ever been touched for free by someone you desired, and you felt suddenly nervous at your frail body being judged beneath his crimson gaze - especially when you couldn’t look upon him in the same moment. There was no distraction in the darkness to keep you from worrying about how his gaze might burn through you, imagining discontent on his handsome face.

A cold chill caught you once your robes fell, leaving you kneeling and exposed in front of him. A soft breath fell from his lips, fingers moving delicately from your shoulders down to your breasts, as if checking you were truly real and there before him. More heat flooded you as his finger brushed over your peaked nipple.

“Beautiful. If I didn’t despise the idea of sharing you with another I would paint you like this. Your body is worthy of that reverence.”

“I think my mind is probably more splendid.” You confessed. You had no eyes for awareness of your appearance, and had subsequently never really relied on it. People had said you were lovely, but you could never quite believe it, assuming that they were taking pity on you for your blindness.

“Your mind is exceptional. If I cannot beat you at shogi soon I have half a mind to ask you to assist me with real life strategy,” he said with a chuckle, fingers still trailing a slow path down your body. “But it doesn’t make your body any less lovely, and you cannot deny such things since you’ve never seen yourself. Let me be your eyes and tell you that you are breathtaking.”

A shyness overcame you at those words, head angled downwards as if it would hide your blushing state from him. He raised your chin with a finger, his nose bumping yours before capturing your mouth in a kiss once more, bringing you close against his bare chest. You were so lost in the comfort of the kiss, that you found yourself completely caught off guard when something wet swiped against your stomach and breasts.

Flinching in surprise, you drew yourself back in an attempt to understand what was happening. Sukuna laughed, a hand moving into your hair comfortingly. “It's my tongue,” he spoke easily.

Frowning, you found that his answer didn’t make sense, because still the wet appendage explored your breasts, sending your heartrate flying as it flicked against your nipple with impressive accuracy. How could he be speaking but also doing that?

“There’s a mouth on my stomach. Perhaps you didn’t notice when you controlled my body.”

You were ashamed to admit you hadn’t noticed such a thing. Sukuna had been naked when you’d awoken in his body, and you’d been quick to dress him up in robes, feeling rude to intrude upon the body of another without consent. You’d very intentionally not paid too much attention to the workings of his body, not when the first thing you’d seen was the oddity he sported between his legs.

The memory that he had two of what most men only had one, suddenly had you feeling a little nervous in your position. You had no time to voice such nervousness before he was picking you up, allowing his second tongue to continue its onslaught while he carried you over to the bed, depositing you down upon the silk.

His weight moved on top of you, and he swallowed a gasp with his lips as his monstrous tongue shifted its attention from your breasts down to between your legs, dexterously finding a path between your things and lathering your pussy with attention while Sukuna consumed your mouth. Tears pricked in your eyes at the sensation, unaccustomed to a feeling like that.

In all your years as a courtesan, you’d never been eaten out. Men didn’t come to brothels to serve women, they came to have their own needs attended to, and you’d done that in whichever manner they desired. You were grateful to have never experienced that feeling before, because it was a blessing to have Sukuna be your first.

Pressure built in your stomach over a series of minutes, overwhelmed by the way he seemed to be everywhere. A tongue between your lips, another between your thighs, hands squeezing your breasts, tweaking your nipples, more hands gripping your hips, pulling you up onto his secondary tongue to allow it a better angle to overwhelm you.

For the first time, you started to understand how Sukuna must feel whenever he played you at shogi - stumbling blindly in the dark whilst overcome from all angles with no means of knowing what was going to come next. It was pleasure in its highest form, and you were quick to cum with a yelp of his name, tears dripping from the corners of your eyes.

Sukuna broke the kiss, breathing heavily against your ear. It was a sound you enjoyed, one you could listen to all day if he’d allow you. “I have imagined you beneath me like this every night this week,” he mused, “my imagination is hardly as pleasant as having the real thing. You taste much sweeter than my mind could conjure.”

Again, you were flushing red. “Y-you can taste me through…that?”

“Of course.” You were certain he was grinning, “And I’m glad that I can.” His secondary tongue was still moving slowly through your folds, lapping up the remnants of your first orgasm, teasingly flicking against your clit and making your shudder.

The two of you stayed like that for a while, breathing quietly together. You weren’t sure what Sukuna wanted to do next, but for a moment you were happy to savor the warmth of his heavy body, twitching while he lazily continued his attention to your body. How you longed to see him, eager to witness the expression he was wearing while he attended to you.

All you had to go off was the erratic beating of his heart where his chest was pressed against you.

“Let me have you,” he murmured against your ear. “Let me make you mine.”

“I’m already yours.”

“Is that so? Then let me make it official.”

He shifted atop you, withdrawing his secondary tongue. In the absence of that heat between your thighs, you grew suddenly aware of a heavy pressure against your leg. Your mind jumped to the image of his cocks that you’d filed away in the back of your mind, gut twisting at the thought of either one of them pressing into you.

Sukuna chuckled from above you, a hand coming to stroke your hair. “You’ve seen them, haven’t you?”

You nodded.

“I can tell, you’ve got that scared little look on your face. It’s fascinating, when you play shogi you’re unreadable, but outside of that? You’re practically an open book with your emotions always written across your face.”

Pouting, you let humiliation wash over you. Nobody had ever told you that before. It was hard to guard one's emotions when you had no measure of how the faces of others looked. That was something you’d have to work on. At least you had the good sense to give nothing away when you played shogi.

Another laugh echoed from his lips. “Even now I can see your panic. It’s very endearing.”

Any protest or response you had for him faded away into the recesses of your brain as he shuffled on top of you. He maneuvered you carefully into a new position, raising your legs and placing them up atop his broad shoulders. You were grateful for your flexibility in that moment, because the size difference between the two of you made that no easy task.

Sukuna was watching you from above while he positioned one of his cocks between your legs, running it steadily through your wet folds in a way that had you shivering with desire, still not fully recovered from the actions of his tongue. You were quick to discover that his focus was on his lower cock, as the upper one bumped pleasurably against your clit.

“You know,” he mused, stilling his movements. “I’m surprised you struck no deal with me. It is what I had imagined you would do.”

“What?”

“I’d assumed I would ask for more and you would refuse me. I’d thought your respect was tied to shogi, that you would refuse anything from me unless I was capable of beating you.” Your mind moved to Sugawara as you connected the dots. Sukuna believed you’d made that deal before, as if that tiresome Official hadn’t dictated those rules of his own choosing.

Shogi was a game you adored, mainly because it was an activity you could excel at even without sight, unlike many other courtesan pastimes such as painting, which would forever be an impossibility for you. But it was by no means something you made all your decisions on, nor were you particularly interested in the skill of others.

If someone could defeat you, you would congratulate them for their win and move on, it would ultimately mean little.

To you, it was little more than a game. To various men, it seemed to be something held in much higher regard - a true mark of intelligence rather than a game for which one could learn and remember strategies to allow them a win.

It mattered little to you whether Sukuna could defeat you or not. Your affection for him wasn’t tied to it in any manner.

“To make such a demand would be wasting my own time. Why would I turn down a man I desire over something so trivial? Besides, my bet with Sugawara was made to ensure I never had to lay with him, that is not the fate I want for us.”

“So you believe I am incapable of winning?” He asked, with greater disappointment than you’d been expecting.

“I do,” you said with a giggle, “just as I am incapable of emerging victorious in a battle. We all have our strengths.”

A yelp fell from you as he pushed the tip of his cock into you, catching you unawares. “Yeah?” He asked, pressing deeper into you, his fingers tangling tightly into your hair. “Rather sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

You couldn’t help but laugh again - even in the midst of the dull pain of him driving into you, there was something so endearingly pathetic about his words.

“I am. But you’re free to challenge me whenever you like.”

He was silent as he bottomed out inside of you, his face falling to your neck and leaving a trail of kisses and bites along your skin while he allowed you some time to adjust. You were grateful for his consideration of your wellbeing, fingers digging into his skin, your gut aching as he leaned forwards over you, pushing your legs higher on his shoulders.

There was no question that he was the largest man you’d ever had inside you, practically tearing you apart with his intrusion, but after a few minutes of stillness you found yourself able to relax, the panic exhibited by your body slowly dissipating as you accommodated his size.

“I will challenge you whenever I like,” he whispered against your ear. “After this, the cloud of lust you’ve placed in my mind will be thinner, and I will beat you with ease.”

“Oh, I’m sure-”

Your snarky response was promptly cut off as he withdrew himself from you, only to swiftly fill you up once more, pulling a desperate cry of his name from your lips. There was no second adjustment period given, instead you found yourself clinging on for dear life as he filled you over and over again with swift and deep thrusts that had your eyes rolling back.

One of his hands moved to your stomach, pressing down against the bulge where his cock would press up inside you. It was clear he was fascinated by it, finding great enjoyment in you being claimed by him. You were certain he was no virgin, but it seemed that you were the first woman who meant something to him, the first one who was worth something beyond carnal pleasure.

Legs quivering beneath the weight of his thrusts, you appreciated the way two of his hands came to rest on your thighs, keeping you steady with each brutal snap of his hips. You were crying and whining, your hands blindly reaching for him but finding him just out of range in this position. Seemingly to appease you, he leant further forward, really testing the flexibility of your legs as he practically folded you in half.

Lips pressed against your forehead affectionately, and you enjoyed every single second of his attention, mind floating off on a cloud as your gut tightened with each careful stroke, your walls flexing around his cock. Your whole body felt like it was on fire, a feeling only heightened by the erratic contact of his higher cock rubbing up against your clit.

“You feel so good, fuck. I can’t last like this,” he grumbled, never losing pace. It stroked your ego to know of his desire, to understand just how much he’d been holding back since your first meeting. It was everything you imagined the joining of two soulmates would be - desperately euphoric and overflowing with pleasure.

Sex had never felt so good, it had never really felt good at all, and yet you could spend eternity with Sukuna buried inside of you, your bodies and souls joined just as they were always meant to be.

He was yours and you were his. It was just as fate had decreed.

There was nothing stopping the scream that ripped through you as you finally teetered over the edge, your body convulsing in pleasure and clamping down on Sukuna’s thick cock, eager to milk him for all he was worth. You were sobbing his name and writhing against the silk sheets, your hands gripping them desperately in an attempt to anchor yourself to something in the throes of pleasure.

Sukuna couldn’t hold on long after that either, spilling into you with a warmth that only heightened your pleasure. His other cock found its release at the same time, cum dripping down onto your stomach in a manner that you’d usually find disgusting, if it weren’t your soulmate who was doing it to you. He groaned your name quietly, and let your legs fall from his shoulders.

Without the barrier of your thighs, he settled himself down on top of you, pressing kisses all over your face, his cock still twitching inside your exhausted pussy. You let him lather you with affection, still trying to come to terms with this side of Sukuna. It had been what you’d wanted, what you believed he was capable of, but you hadn’t dreamed it would truly happen.

The most you believed you’d get from him was a lifetime of shogi matches, in which the two of you would remain close but never cross the line you’d been so desperate to leap across.

“Has the fog of lust lifted?” You teased. “Do you believe now you can defeat me?”

Sukuna let out a low, rumbling chuckle. “Perhaps we will have to do that a few more times for it to fully ease.”

“Oh is that so?” You giggled, reaching out for his hair. He gripped your wrist and moved it into position, allowing you to play with the soft locks you’d been so eager to touch since the first time you’d seen them upon his head.

You wished you could gaze upon that lovely shade of pink once more, but it was enough to know he was there before you, yours to touch as you pleased.

“Mmm, I think it would help,” he purred.

“I’m sure that can be arranged.”

You’d give him whatever he wanted. You were his and he was yours for as long as he’d have you.

a/n: I had so much fun writing this one! thinking about doing one soulmate au for each of the jjk men because I find them so enjoyable to play with <3

anyway, for any crazy in love fans, the next chapter will be out towards the end of this week!

perma taglist: @calicatzz @suzunu @winkii @sukubusss @bobis-notmylover @tetsuski @torupilled @brattyxackerman @r0vena @chaos-4baby @moonlitreveri3 @feyrinnn @strawberryrosey @creamofsneky-blog @zeeseekay @p1nkfl0wers @apricityn @keiiiluv @dogggggggblog-kaye @duckie3801 @lav4mpira @seellove @cutesytwt @gojodickbig @yuujispinkhair @somos-things @yeagersss @paradisestarfishh @jennilynn63 @tthhaattgguuyy27 @bexxli @being-blue-is-better @tisuruxx @juliarchiv3s @dishs0pe @plutoxxxworld @5kkalara @serenadesvt @00frenchfries00 @warriorofenlightenment @scarlet-issilly @himbosexual @pousivuitton @ksjtozaki @certainfanpoetry @gojoscumslut @ynishalee @nakiich

shoko’s perched at her desk, her posture rigid as she color-codes her notes, not really paying attention to you while utahime is sitting cross-legged on the floor, peering up at you with a mixture of disbelief and disgust, “have some shame, genuinely”

“i wish she would” shoko mutters, not even bothering to look up from her notebook. “she’s supposed to be making him fall in love, not lust but i don’t expect her to know the difference”

( she’s been in a foul mood since you told her about ijichi’s crush on her. which is unfair. because it’s not like you were the one who developed feelings for her. you’re merely the messenger. historically speaking, messengers are not supposed to get shot. )

“are you still mad about the ijichi thing ?” you ask cautiously as you hold the black tank up to your chest again. “because i feel like you’re still mad about the ijichi thing and can i just say that i think it’s really cute that he likes you even though—”

“sleep with one eye open tonight” shoko slowly looks up, her expression sour enough to curdle milk. “or don’t even sleep at all because i think i might actually kill you.”

( you know she’s joking. probably. but there’s an edge to her voice that makes you wonder. shoko’s always been protective of her heart, wrapping it in layers of indifference and sarcasm. maybe ijichi’s crush hit closer to home than you thought. or maybe she’s just tired of being tangled up in your schemes. )

you gulp, instinctively taking a step back.

 “what’s the ijichi thing ?”  utahime asks, brown eyes blazing with morbid curiosity

“well,” you say, deciding on the black tank and tossing the grey one onto the mountain of clothes on your sheets. ”satoru’s roommate, ijichi, has this massive crush on shoko and he asked me to introduce them if he agreed to tutor me. it’s not even that deep i don’t know why she’s so mad at me”

“i’m mad at you because i’m not a fan of getting people’s hopes up or hurting their feelings” shoko grumbles. she finally tears her attention away from her notes long enough to level you with a withering look.

“you don’t even know if he’s gonna ask you out,” you point out. 

“and i'd like to keep it that way.” she takes a long sip of her coffee. “i don’t have time for this. yaga’s on my ass about choosing a topic for my thesis”

“i know” you sigh, “you’re acting like i sold your hand in marriage and your wedding’s tomorrow. satoru never gave me a deadline, so you can talk to ijichi next year for all i care”

“when you die i call dibs on your brain,” shoko mumbles, her brows knitting together as she tries to wrap her head around what you’ve just said. “i need to study it in detail because the way your thought process jumps from point a to point q is genuinely unlike anything i’ve ever seen”

“thank you but. . .” you glance at her over your shoulder and pout, “i’m not sure i’m donating my brain to science . . . sorry !”

“you know damn well that wasn’t a compliment.” she’s practically glaring at you now. 

( if you had a dollar for every time you successfully rage baited shoko, you’d be a millionaire ) 

“i have free will” you quip, “ i’m choosing to receive it as one anyway.”

“see ?” shoko points at you with the end of her highlighter. “that. that’s exactly what i’m talking about.”

you stick your tongue out at her before padding towards the bathroom, black tank top dangling from your fingertips. you slip into the tank top and smooth over the slightly wrinkled fabric. fluorescent lights hum overhead as you catch your reflection in the mirror. it looks good. casual. effortless.

which is ironic considering you’ve spent the better part of twenty minutes trying to look effortless. you tilt your head, adjust a strap, tilt your head the other way. the tank top looks almost identical to the grey one. suguru was right about that. you hate when suguru is right. it unfortunately happens more often than you’d like.

you fish a tube of lip gloss out of your pocket and swipe it across your lips before giving yourself one final once-over. good enough. if you spend any more time staring at yourself, you’ll be late. and showing up late definitely won’t score you any brownie points with satoru.

you leave the bathroom and immediately have to sidestep the pile of clothes you'd abandoned outside the door. future you can deal with that. present you has more important things to worry about. namely the fact that you’re supposed to be at the library in– you check your phone – ten minutes. shit.

“be honest. how do i look ?” you ask, spreading your arms slightly. your phone remains clutched in your hand, the blinking numbers on the lockscreen reminding you that you’re rapidly running out of time.

utahime glances up first. her gaze travels over your outfit before she gives a small shrug and returns her attention to the document on her screen. “good,” she hums. “you always look good.”

finally. somebody in this room is being nice to you “thank you.” your attention shifts towards shoko next. she’s still hunched over her notebook, one hand wrapped around a highlighter while the other cups a mug of coffee. she doesn’t seem remotely interested in participating in this conversation. which means you’re obviously going to drag her into it anyway.

“shoko ?” you prompt hopefully.

“you have clothes on,” she replies , reluctantly looking up from her notes, her voice flat enough to make it clear that this is the extent of the feedback she’s willing to provide. your jaw falls slack in disbelief. “you asked,” 

“yeah but i was hoping for a better answer” 

“that’s the only one you’re getting.” rude. so rude. with shoko proving herself entirely useless, your gaze finally lands on suguru. the second your eyes meet, the corner of his mouth twitches.

“you can still back down y’know,” he pipes up, finally sitting up and running a hand through his messy hair. “save yourself the stress and embarrassment and we can grab some ice cream. my treat. i’ll let you be passenger princess and everything”

you snicker, grabbing your tote bag from where it’s slung over your desk chair. “nice try emo. i’ll have satoru eating out of my palm by the weekend. he’ll be writing my name in his little physics notebook surrounded by tiny hearts. and then you can be passenger princess” 

“over my dead body” suguru scoffs, “have you spoken to your therapist about you and toji breaking up yet ? if you haven’t i think you should.”

“you must be in love with nitta because you bring her up more than i do,” you snap, shoving a pack of nerds gummy clusters – no pun intended – into your bag. you follow it with a cascade of jolly ranchers and warheads. 

suguru raises a brow, and it’s somehow more infuriating than him making a witty comeback. “i’ll be gone for an hour and a half at most,” you say, turning to shoko. “do you want me to grab you some coffee from the cafe on my way back ? i know we’re running low on coffee grounds” it’s a peace offering. an olive branch. a desperate attempt to ensure she doesn’t murder you in your sleep. if there’s one thing she loves just as much as alcohol and cigarettes, it’s coffee.

“you can’t bribe me. . .” shoko narrows her eyes. “but i’ll need energy to kill you so get me an americano from the cafe. three extra shots.”

“consider it done,” you grin. with that settled, you weave through the obstacle course of clothes littering your floor and head for the door before anybody can find another reason to delay you. you’re already cutting it close. eight minutes isn’t a lot of time when the engineering library is practically on the other side of campus.

the walk to the engineering library isn’t too long. a six-minute trudge through the heart of campus that gives you just enough time to mentally prepare yourself for round two with satoru gojo. .

the engineering library is quiet as always when you arrive. the air thick with the scent of old books and academic despair. you spot him almost immediately, he’s wearing a grey hoodie today, the hood pushed back to reveal his snowy hair that seems to glow in the dim light, tucked away in his usual corner behind the stacks, already hunching over his laptop. his fingers moving across the keyboard with a speed that’s almost inhuman, his entire being completely focused on the glowing screen in front of him.

( you shouldn’t find it attractive. you really shouldn’t. it should be boring. it should be intimidating. but there’s something about it, something about the way he’s always completely lost in his own world, that’s oddly compelling. )

you hover for a moment, your hand hovering over his shoulder. you can hear the faint, tinny sound of classical music leaking from his headphones. you clear your throat. nothing. you tap on his shoulder and he jumps slightly before glancing over his shoulder. “oh. you again” he murmurs, his cadence flat. he sighs, a sound of profound irritation, and slowly, as if every movement costs him a precious second of his life, he pulls his headphones down to rest around his neck.

“oh don’t sound so excited to see me,” you say sarcastically, sliding into the chair beside him and dropping your heavy tote bag on the polished floor with a thud that earns you a dirty look from the students at the next table over “i might start to think you enjoy my company.”

“i’m indifferent,” he murmurs, pushing his glasses up his nose. “let’s just get this over with, i’m hoping to move on to quantum physics today”

“eager aren’t we ?” you lean forward, propping your chin in your palm, “can’t wait to spend some quality time with me ? i’m flattered, truly”

he doesn’t even dignify that with a response. without wasting any time, he pulls out a brand new notebook – jet black with a rainbow digimon spiral – and begins to write. his handwriting is infuriatingly, perfect. a clean, blocky print that looks like it was typed up on a computer. he’s written out ‘quantum physics for dummies’ at the top of the page and looks up at you. glasses sliding down his nose ever so slightly, “we’re going to start with wave particle duality and superposition ? how proficient are you with differential equations ?”

“proficient ?” you echo, leaning back in your chair and crossing your arms. “i barely passed the test”

he just stares at you, his expression unchanging. “so, not proficient at all.”

“not even a little bit,” you confirm cheerfully. “you’re going to have to explain this to me like i’ve never taken a physics lecture before” you haven’t obviously. but he doesn’t know that.

a muscle in his jaw twitches, he looks like he wants to scream at you but he just nods, turning back to his notebook. “right. okay. wave-particle duality. think of it like this. light, and matter in general, can behave like a wave, or it can behave like a particle. it’s not one or the other. it’s both, depending on how you look at it. ”

he draws a simple diagram, a wave and a small ball, side by side. “superposition is the idea that a quantum system can exist in multiple states at once. until you measure it. and then it collapses into a single, definitive state. this is represented mathematically by a wave function that encodes the probability of finding a particle in a specific state. the wave function is the solution to the schrödinger equation” 

you just stare at him, the words washing over you. “so you’re telling me. . . that something can be two completely different things at once, and the only reason it’s not one or the other is because we’re not looking at it ? i fear that doesn’t make any sense” 

“it’s the fundamental principle of quantum mechanics. it doesn’t have to ‘make any sense’” he mutters, his voice tight with frustration, “quantum physics, doesn’t make sense to human intuition because it’s theoretical and centered on the subatomic world. i’m well aware that  it sounds absurd because it defies our day-to-day macroscopic experiences but thanks to mathematics we can make extremely accurate predictions regarding the behavior of atoms and light”

you blink, trying to process the mini-lecture. “so, what you’re saying is, it’s a ‘because i said so’ situation . . ?”

he lets out a sound that's half-sigh, half-groan, dropping his head into his hands for a moment. “no. it’s not a ‘because i said so’ situation. it’s a ‘this is how reality works at its most fundamental level, whether you like it or not’ situation. the math isn’t just an explanation, it’s the proof.”

“right. the differential equations,” you say, nodding slowly. “so, if i can’t do the math, then i can’t understand it. is that what you’re saying ?”

he lifts his head from his hands, his expression a mixture of exhaustion and disbelief. he looks at you for a long moment, before murmuring, “not quite, you can understand the concepts, the ideas, without being able to solve the equations. but if you want to pass then you need to be able to do both.” he flips to a fresh page in his notebook, “let’s start with something simple. forget the math for a second.” he pushes the glasses up his nose, a gesture you’re starting to find annoyingly endearing. “we’ll start from the beginning. . okay ? quantum physics is the study of how things behave at the tiniest scales, like atoms and subatomic particles. it’s a strange world where the usual rules of physics don’t always apply.”

you nod, trying to look attentive before he grows tired of tutoring you. “first, quantization,” he says, tapping his pen on the desk. “in our world, energy seems continuous, but in the quantum world, it comes in discrete packets, or ‘quanta.’ think of it like a staircase versus a ramp. on a ramp, you can be at any height, but on a staircase, you can only be on one step or the next, never in between. at the quantum level, energy, works like that staircase.”

“okay, so energy at the quantum level isn’t smooth and straightforward ,” you murmur, trying to wrap your head around the concept. you’re starting to wish you’d picked shiu as your target instead. it would’ve made your life so much easier.

“exactly,” he nods, a flicker of approval sparking in his sapphire eyes. “so back to wave-particle duality. it’s where things get confusing. tiny particles like electrons can act as both solid particles, like a tiny ball, and spread-out waves at the same time. whether you see a particle or a wave depends on how you look at it. it’s like those ambiguous images where you can either see a duck or a rabbit depending on your perspective”

“that actually makes sense” you huff out a sigh of relief

“good” he says, a genuine smile breaking through his usual serious expression. making his blue eyes seem even brighter. “now, superposition. before you measure a quantum particle, it can exist in multiple states at once. a famous example is schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment where a cat in a box is theoretically both alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box to check. quantum particles are like that unobserved cat – they exist in all their possible states at once until you observe them.”

“so it’s only one thing when we look at it,” you say, trying to follow along. your brain is really starting to hurt “but before that it can be anything ?”

“precisely,” he grins “another important thing to know is the observer effect. it encompasses everything we’ve talked about so far. the act of measuring or observing a quantum system forces it to ‘choose’ a state. when you look at an electron in its superposition of multiple places, it instantly ‘collapses’ into one definite location. the very act of looking changes the outcome.”

“the next concept is quantum entanglement. this is what einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance.’ two particles can become linked in such a way that the state of one is instantly connected to the other, no matter how far apart they are. if you measure one and find it’s spinning ‘up,’ you know immediately that the other is spinning ‘down,’ even if it’s on the other side of the universe. and the final principle is quantum tunneling. particles can sometimes pass through barriers they shouldn’t be able to. imagine you throw a tennis ball at a wall and it just appears on the other side without breaking the wall. i know it’s a lot to take in and most of it doesn’t align with the the rules we’re used to but that’s the foundation of quantum mechanics”

“who’s the asshole that came up with all of this ?” you splutter, dropping your head into your hands. your brain feels like it’s been scrambled. it’s no wonder why stem students often look so tortured.

he actually laughs at that, which makes you peek through your fingers. it’s a nice sound. “it wasn’t just one person. it was a collection of some of the most brilliant, and probably most confused, minds of the twentieth century. planck started it with the whole quantization idea, then einstein with the photoelectric effect, bohr with his atomic model, schrödinger with his . . . well, his cat, and heisenberg with his uncertainty principle. they were all basically arguing with each other and stumbled across the truth. they saw things that didn’t make sense, made up concepts and built a new kind of math to explain them. it’s why i said it doesn’t have to ‘make sense’ in the way we’re used to.”

you nod slowly, letting that sink in. it’s a lot. it’s too much. “okay,” you say, leaning back in your chair. “i think my brain just short-circuited. i need a break.”

“that’s fair,” he says, his expression softening. “why don’t you read the textbook and make notes on what you understand ? it’ll help you process it. take your time.” 

“like right now ?” you ask, your eyes widening.

“yes, right now,” he says, his tone leaving no room for argument. “i need to work on my models. but i’ll check your notes when you’re done.” with that, he turns back to his laptop, effectively dismissing you. you pull the heavy textbook out of your bag, opening it to the chapter on quantum mechanics. you try to read, but your eyes keep drifting over to his screen, where he’s working on a complex three-dimensional model of what looks like some kind of medical device. curiosity gets the better of you. “what’s that ?”

he pauses, his fingers hovering over the keys. “it’s a prototype. for an internship i’m applying for. biomedical engineering. it’s a low-cost prosthetic with sensory feedback.” he talks about actuators and neural interfaces and the potential to restore a sense of touch.he talks about synapses and signals, about creating a bridge between machine and mind, and you’re captivated, hanging on his every word. he talks for a solid six minutes before trailing off, suddenly aware of your rapt attention. most people’s eyes glaze over after thirty seconds. most people just nod and smile. but you seem genuinely interested. it’s . . . unnerving. and strangely . . . nice.  

“wow,” you sound genuinely impressed. and surprised by how much you enjoyed listening to him “that’s amazing.”

“it’s still a work in progress,” he says, but you can tell he’s proud of it. “i need to perfect it before the final interview. biomedical engineering is a competitive field.”

“i bet you’ll get it,” you say, and you mean it. “you’re really smart.”

he seems taken aback by your sincerity, his cheeks flushing slightly. “thanks,” he mumbles, turning back to his screen. he clears his throat. “anyway . . . back to your notes.”

“right. . . my notes.” you open your textbook, the dense, intimidating text staring back at you. you take a deep breath and start to read, your pen hovering over a fresh page in your own notebook. you’re not sure how you’re going to do this – make decent notes on quantum physics when you barely understand the basics – but you’re determined to try. for him. for you. for the sake of this bet

you spend the next hour reading and writing, your hand cramping up from time to time. you try to translate the complex scientific jargon into your own words, simplifying the concepts as much as you can. it’s slow going, but you’re making progress. you think . . . 

after what feels like eternity, you finally close your textbook, a sense of accomplishment washing over you. “i’m done," you say, holding your notebook out to him.

satoru looks up from his laptop, his eyes scanning your notes. he’s quiet for a long moment, his expression unreadable. “you’re writing down too much filler” he says, pointing at a paragraph you’d spent at least ten minutes on. “focus on the core principles. most of the information in the textbook is pretty insignificant.”

“filler ?” you gasp, snatching the notebook back. “i spent ten minutes writing that ‘filler’. “maybe you should write these notes yourself if you think mine suck so bad,” it comes out a little more harshly than you intended.

( you’re not sure why it bothers you so much. it’s just criticism. it’s just him being. . . him. for some reason it feels like he’s not just criticizing your notes, it feels like he’s criticizing you. and you hate it. you hate how much his opinion suddenly matters to you. )

he looks up, surprised by your sudden irritation. “i’m just trying to help.”

“sorry,” you say quickly, a wave of guilt washing over you and quelling the heat coursing through your veins “my brain hurts. all this quantum stuff is . . .a lot.”

“mental fatigue is normal after intensive studying. take a break and let your brain recover.” he says, his tone softening.

“if you say so,” you murmur, diving into your tote bag. your fingers close around the familiar shape of a jolly rancher. you pull it out – green-apple – and unwrap it with a crinkle that sounds obscenely loud in the quiet library. you pop the hard candy into your mouth, tucking the wrapper in your pocket like a secret.

he raises a brow. “do you have a whole candy store in there ?”

“maybe,” you say, holding up the bag. “ want one ?”

“if you insist,” he says, and the corner of his mouth ticks up in a way that makes your stomach do a weird little flip-flop. “but anything but green-apple or grape.”

“how can you not like green-apple,” you scoff. “what do you like then . .? blue raspberry ? of course you like the most popular flavor like every other basic person on the planet”

“technically speaking,” he says, leaning back in his chair, “the hershey company’s market research indicates that watermelon is the most popular flavor. it’s a solid choice, but blue raspberry has a superior tang-to-sweet ratio.”

“rank the classic flavors. right now.” you tilt your head ever so slightly

“blue raspberry, cherry, watermelon, green apple, and grape,” he says without missing a beat.

“green-apple being that low is actually criminal ,” you grimace, you deserve to be tried for that opinion.”

“we can at least agree that grape is the worst, right ?” he says, and he’s actually smiling now, a real, genuine smile that transforms his whole face. “but how can you possibly put cherry that low ?”

“i have amazing tastebuds and i’m right about everything,” you say, popping another green apple jolly rancher in your mouth.

“technically, food opinions are subjective.” he counters, leaning back in his chair. 

“they shouldn’t be.” you shake your head. 

“yeah, because we have people like you walking around saying watermelon is better than cherry.

“you’re walking around saying cherry’s better than green apple, that’s blasphemy,” you retort

he can only shake his head and laugh. “i’m scared what’s next. you put milk before cereal?” you look away and he gasps. “there’s no way. there’s actually no way.” he sits up straighter, looking genuinely horrified. “cereal goes first. it has to. the entire bowl is built around the cereal. you pour the cereal, assess the volume, and then add the appropriate amount of milk. if you pour the milk first, you don’t know how much cereal you need, so you end up trapped in an endless cycle of adding cereal, then milk, then cereal again. and don’t even get me started on texture. with cereal first, every piece gets an equal chance to absorb milk. with milk first, some pieces get soggy immediately while others stay dry. society functions because we agree on a few basic rules, and cereal before milk is one of them.”

“in my defense i only use powdered milk” you sigh, “and cereal’s better without milk anyway”

“you know . . . i can’t argue with that” he says after a moment, leaning back in his chair as if the fight has been drained out of him. “but you’re not off the hook yet. . which do you think is better . . . dc or marvel?”

“woah, woah, why am i being interrogated ?” you ask, laughter spilling from your lips

“i’m gauging our compatibility,” he deadpans. “if you give the wrong answer, i might have to drop you as a student.”

( satoru having a sense of humor is. . . unexpected. you were so sure he wasn’t programmed with one because he always seems so strictly academic, like the kind of person who probably spends his free time reading research papers for fun. the version of him you've built in your head doesn’t quite match the guy arguing with you over jolly rancher flavors and threatening to revoke your tutoring sessions over cereal and media preferences. every time you think you’ve got him figured out, he throws you off completely )

“if i say that i love the marvel franchise, especially spider-man and black panther, but i also genuinely enjoy dc movies and series, are you going to revoke my tutoring privileges ?”

“nope,” he says, nodding. “that’s the correct answer. they both have their merits. pretending otherwise is just childish. i’ll keep tutoring you, but i’m watching you. very closely.”

( is he actually suspicious of you ? the thought sends a jolt of panic through your chest. rationally, you know he’s joking, but that doesn’t stop the guilt from creeping in. it’s ridiculous – there’s no way he could know about the bet – but the longer you spend around him, the more you wonder what he’d think if he knew the real reason you were here. )

the rest of the session passes in a blur of equations and easy conversation. you take notes, your handwriting still a mess but more focused this time. you pass him a blue raspberry jolly rancher, and he takes it without comment, his eyes never leaving his work. he explains the concept of schrödinger’s cat and you actually manage to follow along. he’s satisfied.

“okay,” he hums, closing his laptop with a soft click. “let’s call it a day before your brain melts”

“it’s already melted,” you murmur, leaning back in your chair and stretching. “but i appreciate your concern”

“can i have your notebook ?” he holds out his hand. you raise a brow but hand it over anyway. 

“how long are you gonna be here for ?” you query. he sighs, already opening your notebook to a fresh page, “until the librarian kicks me out . . . i’ve got a couple hours until that happens”

“well have fun with your . . . models and stuff,” you say, slinging your tote bag over your shoulder. you turn to leave, but a wide, uncontrollable smile spreads across your face before you even take a step. it’s a stupid, giddy smile, the kind you can’t wipe off, and you’re glad he can’t see it as you walk away.

he watches you retreat through the stacks, shaking his head slightly before turning back to the open notebook. he hadn’t expected this. hadn’t expected to actually enjoy talking to you. he’s so used to being on his own, to being in his own head, that he’d forgotten what it was like to just talk to someone. to share a joke. to argue about something as trivial as cereal. he’s enjoying your company too much and that’s a problem. because he’s not supposed to be enjoying this. he’s supposed to be tutoring you. that’s all. he’s not supposed to get used to being around you. yet, he finds himself looking forward to your next session despite his brain telling him he shouldn’t. 

with a quiet sigh, he pushes the thought aside and picks up his pen, focusing on the clean, empty page. he’s rewriting his physics notes for you so you can use them to study. he doesn’t typically do this for people, not even when they beg him to. but he’s determined to see you succeed even if it means you’ll walk away and no longer need him sooner rather than later.

masterlist day two ⇆ day three ⇆ day four

── ✦ mimi’s notes: green-apple jolly ranchers are superior argue with a wall. also please rmbr the importance of fandom etiquette. i appreciate all the love but rushing me for updates won’t make them come any sooner i’m just a girl 😓