.masterlist under the cut.— taglists.— asks.— nika's bookshelf.
mainly jjk-centric blog. i take requests for oneshots. mdni.
do not steal, reupload, or translate any of my works. most importantly, do not feed my work into any kind of AI.
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Misplaced Lens Cap

tannertan36

roma★
Three Goblin Art

#extradirty
wallacepolsom
Claire Keane
almost home
sheepfilms
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

Andulka
macklin celebrini has autism

titsay

Kaledo Art
Monterey Bay Aquarium
cherry valley forever

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@itsnika
.masterlist under the cut.— taglists.— asks.— nika's bookshelf.
mainly jjk-centric blog. i take requests for oneshots. mdni.
do not steal, reupload, or translate any of my works. most importantly, do not feed my work into any kind of AI.
SERIES:
The Oracle's Burden (Gojo/Reader—ongoing) Playing Favourites (Gojo/Reader—ongoing) A Pretty Excuse (Gojo/Reader/Geto, Sukuna/Reader—ongoing)
ONESHOTS:
Inappropriate Use of Cursed Technique (collection):
No Hands (Gojo/Reader—2,5k) Can't Hide (Sukuna/Reader—2,8k)

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no rush at all and understand if ur busy but YEARNING for chap 3 of Playing Favorites😣😣
I'm gonna be like very honest rn, but playing favourites was supposed to be oneshot, and the second chapter was an accident that happened when I thought it would be fun to write drunk!Gojo. and while I very much want to finish it (but bc it was oneshot that wasn't supposed to be continued) I'm struggling to write the third (and last) chapter that would wrap up everything and end the series 😭
so idek when I'm gonna update it 💔
TOB changes
so, after rereading my draft, there were only two major changes I decided to make.
originally, my timeline was a mess, and I did a poor job establishing the setup in the prequel. it suggested reader left Tokyo six months ago, but also that she ran away shortly after Geto left??? which doesn’t make sense since he defected while they were still students. bc of this, I rewrote some of the prequel scenes.
and, so you wouldn’t need to reread it, here’s what changed (plus some additional context I don’t think I included):
reader, Shoko, Gojo, and Geto studied together for around two years. after Geto defected, reader went into a depressive spiral and transferred to Kyoto without telling Shoko or Gojo, who only found out after she left. she intended to stay only briefly but eventually graduated there (all of this happened between 2007–2010).
between 2011–2016:
Shoko obtained her medical license, Gojo became a teacher, and reader worked as a jujutsu sorcerer, mainly in Kyoto. Shoko still kept in touch with reader, but reader didn’t visit Tokyo often, and most communication happened over the phone, as she was still running away from what happened almost ten years ago. reader and Gojo had little to no contact, and when they did see each other, it was usually bc she was there to see Shoko. in prequel, it’s mentioned that the last time they spoke for more than five minutes was during her last visit for Shoko’s birthday, when she stayed in the city for a few days.
the fic begins in late May 2017, which is also when the prequel takes place.
SPOILERS FOR CH. 2–12. DO NOT CLICK KEEP READING IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THEM YET—IT WILL SPOIL EVERYTHING. like, I’m serious: don’t continue if you haven’t reached ch. 12 yet.
there’s one other major change, and it has to do with Gojo.
while writing, in my mind, I kept going back and forth on whether he should be a teacher like in canon, but after refining the timeline, I decided to keep him as one. of course, that decision created another issue.
now, this may be a teeny tiny spoiler for ch. 13, BUT
reader sees Yuji at school in ch. 13, which doesn’t really make sense bc he doesn’t start attending until 2018, while the fic is set in 2017.
I tried to find a way to include him that still made sense, but with the current outline, where the story is heading and considering what will be revealed later, it doesn’t really work, and I don’t want to add a big timeskip since it wouldn’t fit the fic.
so Yuji, Nobara, and Megumi being friends, attending jujutsu high, and being taught by Gojo—and being essentially one year older than in canon—is a continuity flaw that will remain, and I’m choosing to ignore it for the sake of the plot.
also, if you’re curious, I have an early draft of the timeline I made. I later added more details for myself, but this version is mostly spoiler-free and outlines key events between the prequel and ch. 1–12:
& while I’m yapping about the fic: while rereading it, I realized my english storytelling skills definitely need sharpening, so if anyone would be willing to become a beta reader, I wouldn’t be opposed to it!
Double take | shy!nerdjo x shy!reader
warnings: drabble, pure fluff, meet cute awkward, café au, slow burn, mutual crush, mutual pining, shy!gojo, shy fem!reader word count: 3.8k
You are a simple creature of habit. This was your café. Your corner nook. Your wobbly table by the window where the sunlight hit just right every time you came in.
You have a system, a routine, your sacred order the barista starts making automatically anytime you walk through the front door, noise-canceling headphones, and mild productivity. You do not bother the universe, and the universe does not bother you.
It was your emotional support place, an unassuming little spot where you went to work, study, read, or just exist. Cliché, yes, but you were a coffeehouse loafer, so what.
Until one day the universe decides to intervene. It was raining that day, sudden downpour, and he'd forgotten his umbrella, of course, so when he spotted the café on his frantic walk downtown, he ducked in to just wait it out somewhere dry, somewhere cozy. A cup of coffee sounded good anyway.
He tumbled through the door with a soft, breathless laugh, shaking the rain from his shoulders like a very tall wet dog.
You instinctively looked up from your book. The chapter was dragging like craaazy and you were getting bored. He was at the counter, currently trying to wipe the fog off his glasses.
Oh—
You blinked away, but your eyes betrayed you.
You did a double take.
OH—
Tall. Cute. Pale cheeks flushed from the cold, hair plastered to his forehead, and he was burying his fingers into the sleeves of his sweater just to warm his hands up. Wet and cold from the rain but probably the most attractive man you'd seen in your entire life.
You looked back at your book. Bit your lip. Looked up again. Back at your book. Up again.
Triple take.
You could feel your cheeks involuntarily heating up as you took in his wet hair, his nose, his jaw, the adorable little shiver that ran through him while he waited. God, he was really your type. But you just glanced at him, nothing more. As one does. Casually—
Quadruple take.
Okay. Fine. You were staring.
Internal spiral initiated. Deep breaths, babe. He was just a ridiculously attractive stranger. This was a normal human experience. You were in a public space. Hot people existed. You would survive this.
He turned around, clutching a steaming cup of his americano with both hands, and scanned the room. The moment he turned around, you caught a glimpse of the most absurdly blue eyes you had ever seen. Even his eyes were so, so pretty. It wasn’t really fair.
You looked back at your book. You'd read the same sentence four times now.
You forced your eyes to stay glued to the page, aggressively willing yourself to comprehend the actual freaking words.
Focus. You were reading! It was just a man.
But out of the corner of your eye, you tracked him as he settled into a chair a few tables down. The scrape of the chair. The soft rustle of his wet sweater. He finally gave up on wiping his glasses dry on a damp sleeve and just shoved them back onto his face. God, cute men with glasses really did something to your knees. You were so pathetic.
And for the next twenty minutes, you were super aware of his every movement. The plot of your romance novel be damned, ‘cause you glanced at him every few sentences through your peripheral vision only.
You heard the quiet clink of his cup being set down. You heard him sneeze once, very quietly, which was lowkey a ridiculous sound to come out of a man who was easily six-foot-three.
But you did not look directly anymore. You held your ground as you were the god’s strongest soldier right now.
Eventually the frantic drumming of the rain against the window slowed to only a light drizzle. The storm broke and you heard his chair scrape again.
You risked one final, fleeting glance as he stood up. He grabbed his empty cup, ran a hand through his semi-dry, messy hair, and headed for the exit. And you wondered if his hair was as soft as it looked…
As he pushed the door open, he paused as if hesitating, glancing over his shoulder. For one terrifying, totally heart-stopping millisecond, those bright blue eyes flicked over to your corner. Directly, not directly, you couldn't tell because you ducked your eyes back to your book as quickly, immediately chickening out. So he pushed through the door. The little bell above it chimed and off he went.
The air in the café immediately felt weirdly lighter.
Okay, you thought, finally turning the page. Not that you'd been on this page for the last fifteen minutes or anything. Happens to the best of us, I guess.
He was just a glitch in the matrix. A very tall, very blue-eyed glitch in the matrix. You survived the hot stranger. He got his coffee, he dried off, he left.
The gravitational pull you felt was just what happens when you see the man of your dreams. And in true man-of-your-dreams fashion, he disappeared as quickly as he materialized.
Normal human experience.
Except, a week later, on a perfectly sunny afternoon, the little bell above the door chimed a little more loudly in your perceived little bubble.
Hmm. Weird.
You didn't even mean to look up. It was a reflex at this point. But there he was.
Wearing an aggressively cozy hoodie this time, those big glasses, and that ridiculous height with it.
Your stomach violently dropped to your shoes. Oh no. He wasn't just a figment of your imagination. He was freaking back.
And a few days later, he was back again.
You figured he just really liked the coffee. And to be fair, just your luck perhaps, because the coffee here actually was that good. The Google Maps reviews were damn right about it being the best espresso in town. So it made perfect sense that a guy who stumbled in out of the rain would become a repeat customer after tasting the superb roast.
Perfectly logical. Totally normal. Nothing to do with you. Why would it anyway.
But there was something you didn't know.
He also came back because there was this girl in the corner with a book who looked up when he walked in and then immediately looked away like she hadn't — and something about that was, well. He didn't have exactly a word for it. Because while you were busy having a silent, hyper-fixated meltdown over him on that rainy first day, he had clocked you too.
In fact, the moment he'd turned around from the register with that steaming americano and caught you aggressively chewing your lip while pretending to read, his brain had completely stalled out. White-out.
So on his very second visit, Satoru had stood on the pavement half a block away, pathetically arguing with himself whether you'd even be there — or if he was actually crazy for thinking about it at all. He told himself he just wanted to take a lewk. Just to confirm that a girl that pretty! actually existed and wasn't some kind of fever dream brought on by the rain.
He walked in. There you were. Same corner. And just as cute as the first time, maybe even cuter.
So he kept coming back. And he felt a little pathetic about it, tbh. Showing up like a well-trained dog just because he was crushing on a girl he'd never even spoken to. But he couldn't help it. He was just a man, after all.
Satoru learned quickly. Look your way from his table. Look away. Look back. Realize he was staring, look away again too fast. Rinse and repeat.
He caught you looking, twice, three times, every single time. The first time your eyes actually met properly, you both snapped your heads away so fast it was a miracle neither of you pulled something.
He told himself he wasn't a coward. He just… He figured you'd say something eventually. You kept looking at him. And that meant something, right? You were practically telegraphing your interest! Which — was it interest though? What if you were staring only because he looked weird, hair a mess or some stain on his clothes —
Oh god.
OH GOD.
He wasn't great at reading people. So he decided to simply wait it out. His strategy was simple: exist in your general vicinity, look nice, and eventually you would come over and say something. He was not a coward. He wasn't, I swear!
Except you did not, in fact, say something.
You just kept staring at him like he was a jump scare and then violently burying your face back in your book, or your laptop, or your hands.
Your eyes betrayed you constantly. Do not look at him, you would tell yourself. You would look at him anyway. You would catch him glancing in your direction—chewing on the end of a stir stick, his glasses slipping slightly down his nose—and panic would seize your throat. You would snap your head away just to study the gluten-free muffins in the pastry case.
He would realize you caught him, and he’d immediately pretend to be so so engrossed in a completely blank stretch of the wall. Sometimes he’d accidentally bump his knees against the bottom of the table and the soft thump! followed by his quiet sigh would make you want to literally melt into your chair.
A lot of fleeting glances, a lot of unnecessary throat-clearing, and one very serious pep talk he gave himself in the bathroom mirror. But to no avail.
So once you locked eyes again, you did that awkwardly, very pathetically, very often, he tried to be brave brave. He did this tiny, little nod, like a quick acknowledgment, a gentle, hesitant yes, I see you seeing me, hi hello.
You stared back at him with a blank, wide-eyed face of a person whose brain had simply ceased to operate. What the hell. Affectionately, of course.
His cheeks flushed, turning this soft, pretty pink.
Your cheeks flushed so hot you were surprised you weren't actively steaming.
He held the look for a beat, his expression so painfully hopeful, before you completely gave up, turned away like a loser, and snapped your gaze back to your mug. He deflated a little, pushing his glasses back up his nose with a quiet exhale. And here went his chance. Well, damn...
It was truly agonizing, if you ask me. It was the most physically painful, heart-fluttering, ridiculous thing to endure.
Satoru was too invested now, but entirely out of his depth. He kept coming back, genuinely believing every single day that this would be the day! you finally made the move, because surely you realized how cute he thought you were.
And you believed every single day—every single one—that this would be the day! he finally made the move, because surely he knew he was the most gorgeous man to ever walk into your life.
Yet every day, neither of you did.
The panic just kept growing. Growing. Growing! And the respective crush along with it.
Until a rainy Wednesday, exactly one month after he first walked in.
You were there, you always were.
You didn't even need to look up to know. Your stomach did the thing, the fluttery one, that happened only when a specific six-foot-three man in glasses walked through the door.
Satoru got his order, sat at his usual table.
For the next hour, you fell into the build of your usual dance. You were actually working, doing okay, but your eyes kept drifting, always drifting. He caught you once or twice; you caught him twice or thrice. Your silent language. Settled into something almost comfortable. Something that made you look forward to coming here beside the actual coffee. A quiet, familiar routine noone had balls big enough to break.
And then, he ruined it. By taking the leap again.
You glanced over, expecting him to be snapping his neck sideways. Instead, he was already looking right at you.
He visibly swallowed, sat up a little straighter, and risked to lift a hand off the table, offering a small, hesitant wave, accompanied by a soft, genuine smile that completely transformed his face. Breaking the stalemate, daring you to participate too.
Oh my. Your hand spasmed and in said hand was your mug with your latté. Your wrist ungracefully, unceremoniously jerked and enough espresso and oat milk splashed! over the rim to soak your notes and pool dangerously close to your laptop.
Humiliation hit your face like a freight train.
You couldn't find the courage to look up, if you did right now, you would literally expire on the spot. You grabbed a fistful of dry napkins, slapped them blindly over the puddle, and immediately started shoving your things into your bag.
Book? In. Laptop? Shoved. Dignity? Left in the puddle of dairy. Hotel? Trivago. (And I swear I will stop using this phrase. One day…)
You were packed and out of your chair in record time. The little bell chimed its cheery goodbye, and you noped the fuck out into the downtown crowd before you could actively perish from the secondhand embarrassment.
The air in the café suddenly felt completely different. Heavier. Emptier.
Satoru sat frozen in his chair, his hand still half-raised in that pathetic, brave little wave.
But you were fucking gone.
He lowered his hand, staring blankly at the empty chair you'd left behind. His heart hammered in his chest, but it wasn’t because of the fluttery panic of having a crush. No no. This was faaar more dreadful.
Oh no.
He had spooked you. He had tried to be brave, bravest either of you ever allowed yourselves to be, he had tried to just smile at you, and you had literally rather fled the premises.
Satoru buried his face in his hands, his glasses digging uncomfortably into his palms.
Fuck, fuck. He didn't know your name, for fuck’s sake! He didn't know what you did for a living, or what you were always reading, or anything other than the fact that you had a sacred order and the cutest face he had ever seen.
He sat frozen to his spot with very icy, very ugly realization. What if you stop coming in because of him?
What if you were so so embarrassed that you will never come back to your wobbly little table? What if he had just ruined the one undeniably good thing about his week, all because he had spent a month staring at you like a coward, okay he is a coward he admits it okay?!, instead of just walking over and saying hello?
He furrowed his eyebrows as he eyed the soggy pile of soaked napkins as he sipped his own coffee. Tapped a finger against the ceramics.
Next time.
Next time he was just going to walk over. That was it. That was the whole plan. Simple.
NEXT TIME!
Except, there almost wasn't a next time. And he cursed himself every time you didn’t show up. You didn't show up the day after, nor the day after that.
By the following week, Satoru was practically vibrating out of his skin. He went in every single day, just in case you broke your routine. But every single time he sat in the café alone, he almost convinced himself that he had ruined his own life by smiling too aggressively. Were his parents lying when they taught him to be nice to strangers?
But then you came back. Of course you came back. It’s your freaking café.
Yes, you had been avoiding it for almost a week, surviving on approximately seventeen different bathroom mirror pep talks and five different affirmation YouTube videos about how you were going to be completely, totally normal this time.
You will not stare! You will not spill a single drop of anything! You can drink a caffeinated beverage in the same zip code as a super hot guy in glasses. You can do this! You go girl!
You pushed the door open and he was there. Obviously, he was there. Why was he there.
You ordered your drink. But when you turned around to head to your cozy familiar corner, you froze.
Your table was taken. Some random-ass guy was sitting at your precious wobbly table, aggressively typing on a laptop. What the hell? Just your fucking luck. You stood in the middle of the café, clutching your mug, completely derailed. You scanned the room in a mild panic.
And the only open table left was... oh, God.
It was exactly one table away from Satoru.
It was closer than you had ever sat before. Closer than you would ever choose to sit. But you had no choice, though. You power-walked over like the big girl you were and practically threw yourself into the chair.
You were instantly off balance. You took out your book of the week, but you couldn't focus. You were so close now. Too close now.
You could feel the warmth radiating off him. You could smell his ridiculously good, subtle cologne. Something like cedar and clean laundry mixed with the scent of roasted beans. It was making you so, so pleasantly dizzy, or perhaps it was just him. You couldn’t really tell.
You both fell right back into the unspoken dance, but it was completely different now. More exposed. You looked. He looked. The usual betrayal of your eyes, but with the closeness dialed up to an utterly suffocating, heart-fluttering level. Every time he shifted in his seat, you felt it. Every time you shifted, he felt it. Hyperaware of every movement, of every breath taken, of him.
You decided to look sideways, properly, for the first time today.
And it locked. It held.
It was longer than usual, electric! and absolutely terrifying. You could feel your heartbeat in your throat, yet the warm flutter that spread from your stomach all over your body prevented you from chickening out right away. It felt too good. You were pleasantly stuck. You were curious. And you were maybe testing the waters, too.
His eyes started darting all over your face, as if searching for clues, checking if he would, could, should take it further, if you dared to look even longer. He oh-so-wanted to. Needed to.
But as those absurdly pretty blues softened, melting into something fond and undeniably sweet, your breath hitched. You completely panicked again. You broke the gaze, snapping your eyes down to your novel and bracing for the agonizing silence as a hot, deeply betraying flush spread all over your neck and hiked up all the way to your cheeks.
Then, Satoru sighed.
It wasn't from disappointment, or from being angry. After all, he so proudly said next time, didn't he? And he understood that if anything, you were even more shy than him. He found it impossibly endearing.
It was a definitive, resolute sound, and you froze. You heard his chair being pushed back. Was he leaving because you were being such a coward again?
Then, a few soft footsteps closing the short distance between your respective tables.
A tall shadow fell over your table.
You slowly lifted your eyes and he was standing right there. Up close, he was somehow even taller—not imposing though, more like inviting. And his chest was rising and falling a little too fast.
He reached out with a shaking hand, grabbed the chair across from you, and pulled it out.
The tips of his ears went brilliantly pink. He rubbed the back of his neck, burying his hands into the sleeves of his sweater, but he didn't run away. Now or never, baby. Hail Mary. He sat down. Right across from you.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, looked you right in the eyes, and let out a long, shaky exhale.
"I, uh." A pause. He cleared his throat. Pushed his glasses up again even though he'd just done that. "Caught you staring." His ears somehow got pinker. He wanted to sound more confident, but oh well... "I MEAN—I was also—I've been staring. That's not—" A beat. He ducked his head slightly, peering at you through his long lashes. "Hi. Can I sit with you?"
What. You stared at him.
"...you're already sitting."
"Yeah." He let out a breathless, cute little laugh. "Is that okay?"
You eyed the way his broad shoulders were hunched inward, how he was practically holding his breath while he waited for your permission to stay. He had actually crossed the unspoken line between you, managed to completely fumble his opening line, and was now looking at you with wide, nervous eyes.
"Yeah," you said softly, your voice barely above a whisper. "It's okay."
He smiled. A real one, wide and slightly crooked, and it did the thing to his face that made you always bite your lip, but up close it was somehow so much worse in the best way possible. He had dimples. Of course he had dimples.
"I'm Satoru," he said.
You told him your name. His smile just grew softer at the sound of it.
He reached over and stole the little glass sugar dispenser from the center of the table, turning it over in his hands like he desperately needed something to keep his fingers occupied.
Over the past week, Satoru had been planning, deciding how he would approach you. He had asked friends, scoured Reddit, and practically checked a freaking WikiHow on how to approach a cute girl in a café when you've both been mutually staring at each other.
He hated all the cliché café-adjacent pick-up lines, but perhaps it was the gravity of your doe eyes, or perhaps he was just nervous. Either way, his mouth went on autopilot, asking with terrible casualness:
"You come here often?"
You looked at him.
He looked back, expectant, already cursing himself that his vocal cords had picked the absolute most ass question imaginable, but he tried to play it cool and you genuinely could not tell if he was joking or dead serious.
But this was the next time he had promised himself. And honestly, you had missed him over the week you spent caving at home. You thought about your café. Your corner. Your sacred table by the window that was currently occupied by a stranger who had no idea what he'd just accidentally done. Which you were currently thankful for. To Satoru. And to the stranger, too.
You picked up your coffee.
"Yeah," you said, a tiny, helpless smile finally breaking across your own face. As you decided that he meant it dead serious afterall. "Actually."
He looked unbearably pleased about this. You looked out the window so he wouldn't see just how hard you were blushing.
Then you thought about this table. This one, right here. The one that wasn’t yours, nor his.
But as Satoru stretched his long legs out and his knees accidentally bumped gently against yours under the wood and neither of you pulled away you realized that maybe, just maybe, this table might just become yours. Both of yours.
── Divider from muerdida!
just a heads up regarding updates:
my TOB draft has reached 20 chapters (including the ones already published), and while I wanted to post a few more before doing a biiiiig edit, I realized I can’t really continue with the second half of the fic until I properly sort out the timeline. as you know, I didn’t exactly keep track of everything while writing, and ofc it’s coming back to haunt me now 😭
I don’t think there will be any significant plot changes, but if anything major does change, I’ll post a little note about it so you won’t have to reread everything for a second time!
sooo anyway, there will probably be 1–2 more chapters in the upcoming days before I slow down updates for a bit!
ALSO, thank you so much to everyone who has taken the time to read my story! all the likes, reblogs & comments literally make my day and your support is one of the biggest reasons I’m so excited to keep writing TOB 💖

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ummm ummmm
unckuna
.masterlist.— taglists.
pairing: Satoru Gojo/Reader summary: With your technique, you can see one hour into the future. You've built a career on it—you've kept people alive with it. And then one night, a little drunk and foolish, you look too far. notes: this was probably my new favourite chapter to edit bc wdym that happened, anyway, enojy!
(previous chapter) ༝ Chapter 12. (next chapter)
The ceiling looms above you, pressing down until the room feels starved of space and air.
White paint, cracked with age, stretches above you, but instead of offering something solid to focus on,it seems to creep closer with every breath you take. The room isn't getting smaller. You know it isn't. Yet every inhale catches halfway down your throat, your lungs refusing to fill no matter how desperately you try.
Panic prickles beneath your skin before you're even fully awake.
With a sharp movement, you throw the blanket aside. Cool air washes over your sweat-dampened skin, sending a shiver through you.
You keep staring upward.
A crack snakes across the ceiling, thin and jagged, disappearing somewhere beyond your field of vision. You follow its path slowly with your eyes because tracing the broken line is easier than trying to untangle the thoughts crowding your mind.
Your eyes sting. They've been burning since you woke up. You don't think you've blinked once.
You know you're in the school infirmary.
When you finally force yourself to look around, your gaze catches on the bed across from yours. It sits neatly made, untouched. For reasons you can't explain, your chest tightens.
Nanami.
Why did you think of him?
The question appears just as quickly as it disappears, dissolving before you can reach for an answer.
When you first opened your eyes, the room was dark. Now sunlight spills across the floor.
How long have you been awake?
How long have you been here?
Why are you here?
You search for answers. Nothing. You try harder, reaching deeper into the fog of your thoughts, but every time you tug at the loose thread in your mind, pain follows. It feels as though someone is driving their nails into your brain, squeezing until invisible pressure pushes against your temples from the inside.
You suck in a breath through clenched teeth.
Stop. Don’t think.
The pain eases almost immediately. Your heartbeat doesn't—you don't know why, but something inside you insists you shouldn't be here.
When your eyes finally water enough to force a blink and nothing happens—no darkness swallowing you, no endless void waiting beneath your eyelids—you decide to sit up.
Your entire body protests as you slowly push yourself upright. Your muscles feel heavy and stiff, as though they've forgotten how to move. Your neck aches. Your shoulders burn.
How long have you been lying here?
Another question lingers unanswered.
Beside the bed rests a small wooden table, its edges worn smooth from years of use. A glass pitcher catches the morning light, tiny droplets of condensation clinging to the outside. Your throat tightens painfully. You hadn't realized how thirsty you were until now.
Your hands tremble as you pour yourself a glass. Water spills over the rim, soaking your fingers. The first swallow hurts. The second disappears too quickly. You drain the glass, then pour another. Only when the pitcher is nearly empty do you stop, wiping the corner of your mouth with the back of your hand.
The silence presses against your ears.
You lower your feet onto the floor.
Cold tile meets your bare skin.
Looking down, you realize you're dressed in a hospital gown. The material scratches against your skin in a way that feels oddly grounding.
You stand, and immediately regret it.
Pain shoots through your knees. Your legs threaten to buckle before you even take the first step. Every joint aches as though you've been asleep for far longer than a single night.
One careful step after another brings you to the window, your fingers finding the sill. The moment you look outside, dizziness crashes over you. Your grip tightens around the windowsill. The skin stretches taut over your blanching knuckles as your nails dig into the wood until it hurts.
At first, you don't understand why you're panicking. Why the sight beyond the glass feels so deeply wrong.
The walls. They're gone.
The realization rams into you before your thoughts can fully form around it. For one heartbeat, you expect towering concrete barriers to rise beyond the grounds, stretching impossibly high into the sky.
Confusion floods through you.
Why would anyone build walls towering over the school when it's already protected by Tengen's barrier?
You force yourself to breathe slowly, drawing each breath through your nose. It doesn't help. The feeling returns. Panic coils tighter around your ribs.
You have to get out of here. They can't find you.
They? You don't know who they are, but you know you can't stay in this room. You need to leave before anyone realizes you're awake.
Your body aches with every movement as you make your way toward the door, one hand trailing along the wall to steady yourself. Your vision swims, the hallway blurring, but you keep walking.
You push through the dizziness until, before you even realize it, you're outside.
Gravel bites into the soles of your bare feet. You stop, disoriented. Looking around, you no longer know what brought you here.
The urge to leave returns, accompanied by another strange thought—the grounds feel far too empty. Ridiculous. They've always been like this… Haven't they?
You take one uncertain step. Then another. Your knees suddenly give way. The ground rushes toward you before you can catch yourself. The impact jolts through your entire body as you hit the gravel, catching yourself just before your face meets the ground. Tiny stones dig into your palms, sharp enough to sting.
"What are you doing outside?"
Your head snaps toward the voice so quickly your neck protests, pain flashing down your spine.
Shoko stands several steps away, her brows drawn together, a flicker of concern breaking through her otherwise composed expression. She takes a single step forward. Your entire body reacts before your mind can. You scramble backward across the gravel, one hand flying to the side of your neck. Your fingers press against the skin.
You blink—you're somewhere else. A living room. Rain tapping softly against the windows. You're looking around desperately, searching for Shoko while she keeps repeating your name. You hear her voice, but you can't see her.
"Look at me."
You blink.
The courtyard rushes back all at once.
Warm sunlight. The sting of gravel beneath you. Shoko.
Your hand slips away from your neck. A dull throbbing blooms behind your eyes. Something wet sticks to your fingertips. You look down. Your fingers are... red.
Blood. It coats your palms in uneven streaks, drying in the creases of your skin, packed beneath your fingernails until they almost look black. Tiny flakes cling stubbornly to your fingertips.
No, no, no—
You begin scrubbing your hands against the rough fabric of the hospital gown. Once. Twice. Again. Harder this time, until the material burns against your palms. The blood doesn't smear. It doesn't fade. It clings to you as though it's seeped beneath your skin.
"What are you doing?" Shoko's voice reaches you through the pounding in your ears.
You hadn't realized she'd moved closer.
"My..." The words snag in your throat. You hold your hands out toward her with frantic desperation, your breathing coming too fast, too shallow. "My hands... why... why is there so much..." Your voice cracks. "The blood... I can't..."
Shoko's gaze drops to your hands. Back to your face.
"Your hands are clean."
You shake your head violently. "No! Can't you see it?!" You shove your palms closer to her. "They're covered in—"
The sentence halts.
You blink.
The blood is gone.
Your hands tremble as you slowly turn them over, examining every finger, every knuckle. The skin is pale. Your nails are clean; there's nothing beneath them except dirt.
Your stomach twists. You could have sworn—you felt it. The sticky pull between your fingers. The metallic smell coating the back of your throat.
You know it was there. You know—
Shoko watches you carefully, saying nothing for several long seconds. Finally, she kneels in front of you, slow enough that every movement gives you time to pull away if you want to.
"You've just woken up," she says. "Your brain's trying to make sense of things. You've been unconscious for a while."
You search her face, looking for any sign that she's hiding something, and you think she is. Her lips are pressed into a thin line, like she's holding back words she doesn't want to say yet.
"Come on." She extends a hand toward you. Your gaze fixes on it—such an ordinary gesture, yet something inside you recoils. Your pulse jumps for reasons you can't explain. Every instinct screams that you shouldn't touch her.
Why?
You don't know. Nothing about this fear makes sense. The part of your mind still capable of reason tells you exactly that. It's Shoko. She has never given you a reason to fear her.
But why can't you stop shaking?
Your fingers hover uncertainly above hers before finally settling into her palm. Warm. Warm enough that some invisible knot inside your chest loosens ever so slightly. The panic doesn't disappear, but it retreats just enough for you to breathe again.
She helps you to your feet without rushing you. Her grip is steady but gentle, releasing you the moment you're standing and she's sure you won't fall back down.
"Let's get you back inside," she says.
You nod automatically.
By the time you're sitting on the bed again, your breathing has slowed, though your heart still refuses to settle. You can't stop rubbing your palms together beneath the blanket, searching for blood that isn't there.
"How are you feeling?" she asks.
It should be a simple question, and yet you struggle to answer.
Your thoughts feel scattered, as though someone has emptied them onto the floor and forgotten to put them back together. Every time you reach for one, it slips away. Your skin feels too tight. Your body doesn't quite belong to you. Even the room around you feels strangely distant, like you're looking at it through glass.
She waits.
Only after several minutes do you manage to whisper, "...My head hurts."
She nods, almost as though she'd expected nothing else. "I imagine it does." Her eyes flick briefly toward the empty pitcher beside your bed. "Is your throat still dry?"
You nod.
"Hungry?"
Another nod.
"That all makes sense," Shoko murmurs, more to herself than to you.
She sits down on the edge of the bed, leaving enough space between you that you don't feel cornered. Even so, you instinctively shift farther back until your shoulders meet the wall. You catch yourself doing it. Embarrassment burns hot across your face. Shoko doesn't comment on it.
"I'm going to ask you a few questions," she says. "If you know the answer, tell me. If you don't..." She hesitates, and for the first time since you've woken, something cracks beneath her practiced composure. "Don't force it."
You watch her hand disappear into the pocket of her white coat. A ridiculous thought crosses your mind.
She's reaching for a syringe.
The image flashes through you so quickly you don't even have time to question it. Your shoulders tense, your fingers digging into the blanket, but instead of a needle she pulls out a polaroid. The corners are worn from being handled too many times, one edge held together with a strip of yellowing tape.
She places it on the blanket between you.
You don't need to pick it up to know what it is. You, Shoko, Suguru and Satoru. Four smiles frozen beneath fading colors.
"When was the last time you saw this?" she asks.
The question seems harmless enough. You reach for the photograph almost automatically, your fingertips brushing over the strip of tape holding it together. The instant your skin makes contact, something lurches violently inside your chest, and something inside your mind clicks.
Your fingers tighten around the edge of the photograph until it bends slightly.
"The night…" The words leave your mouth before you realize you're speaking. "The night we cooked dinner together. We had a couple glasses of wine. I... I wasn't feeling great. I just wanted to look at it..."
You keep talking, unsure where any of it is coming from. Yet the more you speak, the more pieces begin falling back into place.
The dinner.
Talking with Shoko afterward.
Drinking wine alone in the kitchen.
Thinking about Suguru.
"I couldn't stop thinking about him. I remember sitting in the kitchen after you'd gone to bed. I was drinking what was left of the wine." Your brow furrows. "I kept wondering if he was…" You swallow. "…alive. I think…" You look back down at the photograph. "I used Senken."
Shoko continues watching you. There is something searching in her expression, as though she's waiting to see how much you'll remember on your own.
When she finally speaks, her voice is almost unnaturally even. "How long ago do you think that was?"
You think about it. The answer feels obvious. "Yesterday. Maybe the day before."
Shoko shakes her head slightly. "No. It was a week ago."
"…What?" you ask. Even though you heard her perfectly, your mind refuses to accept it.
She repeats herself, gentler this time.
"You used Senken a week ago. You've been unconscious ever since." Her voice remains steady. "The morning after dinner, I came to check on you. You were lying in bed." She nods toward the photograph still resting in your hands. "You were holding that. You wouldn't wake up. I thought you were sleeping at first." A pause. "When I couldn't wake you…" Her jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. "…I realized something had gone wrong."
Your heartbeat grows louder. So loud that it drowns out everything else.
"You stayed in a trance for seven days."
Your mouth opens, but she continues before you can interrupt.
"Last night," she says, "you started screaming. You were seizing so violently I couldn't stop it on my own. I had to sedate you."
The room swings. It takes a moment before you realize it isn’t the room at all—you’re shaking your head.
“No.” Your voice comes out thin. “No. My visions… they don’t last that long.”
You squeeze your eyes shut, trying to remember.
If Shoko is telling the truth, then what did you see?
The harder you reach for the memory, the sharper the pain becomes. It starts as a dull throb behind your eyes, then spreads outward, growing hotter and more relentless until it feels as though your skull is being forced apart from the inside.
"Don't." Shoko's hand closes gently around your forearm. "You'll trigger another seizure." Her thumb rubs absentmindedly over your elbow. "I'd really prefer you didn't have another one after finally waking up."
You pull your arm free, pressing the heels of your hands against your temples as though you can physically force the memories loose. The room swims around you. White walls blur together. The edges of the furniture soften until nothing seems entirely solid.
You let out a slow breath and force yourself to stop digging.
The pain eases.
The panic doesn't.
The rest of the day passes with Shoko beside you.
She refuses to let you do anything more strenuous than sit upright, no matter how many times you insist you're fine. Every attempt to stand is met with the same unimpressed look, followed by the same reminder that collapsing barefoot in the middle of the courtyard hardly qualifies as fine.
Eventually, you stop arguing. Not because she's convinced you, but because you're too tired.
Every movement leaves you strangely winded, as though your body is recovering from an illness you don't remember having. Your muscles ache with the dull heaviness of disuse, and no amount of water seems to ease the dryness clinging to the back of your throat.
Even sitting upright for too long becomes a challenge.
Your limbs grow heavier by the minute, exhaustion settling over you until all you want is to lie back down and let sleep pull you under again—you're terrified of doing exactly that because the last time you closed your eyes, you disappeared into something you couldn't escape.
However, whenever the silence stretches too long, your thoughts drift back to the lost memories. You can't help it: it's like worrying at a loose stitch, knowing full well the harder you pull, the more likely everything is to unravel.
Yet every time you begin reaching for those missing memories, the familiar ache blooms behind your eyes, and every time Shoko notices you doing that, she changes the subject with practiced ease, asks whether you're hungry, whether your headache has eased, whether you want another glass of water. Anything to steer you away before you push yourself into another seizure.
It doesn't help.
Not remembering feels worse than remembering something terrible ever could.
The emptiness itself becomes unbearable.
If the vision truly lasted a week, then you must have seen something important. Something significant enough to trap you inside your own technique for seven days. You put yourself through all of that for a reason, and now you have nothing to show for it.
The frustration gnaws at you, slowly twisting into something worse—the realization that the person you're most angry with is yourself.
What sorcerer—especially one as skilled as you, with years of experience behind them—gets reduced to this? Who loses pieces of themselves to the very power they’ve spent a lifetime mastering?
In the evening, you talk more.
Occasionally, fragments surface without warning—a smell, a sound, a feeling that disappears the moment you try to grasp it. Each time it happens, you ask Shoko the same question.
"Was that real?"
Sometimes it's Yaga calling about the mission.
Sometimes it's cooking dinner together.
Sometimes it's sitting in her kitchen long after she'd gone to bed, finishing the last of the wine while thinking about Suguru.
Once, without understanding why, you ask if Satoru came over that evening.
Shoko shakes her head. "No."
You don't know why you're disappointed by her answer.
Every memory from that final day before you used Senken, she confirms without hesitation. It all happened exactly as you remember it. Every moment leading up to the vision. Everything after that simply…stops. Each time you replay that memory, it's like watching a film that cuts halfway through.
"I still don't understand why it lasted so long." Your voice breaks the silence before you realize you've spoken.
You sit curled against the headboard, your knees drawn to your chest. One hand absently picks at a loose thread in the blanket, twisting it around your finger until it nearly cuts off circulation.
"I've never seen more than an hour into the future."
"I know."
A lighter clicks. The familiar sound pulls your attention toward the window. Shoko stands beside it, one shoulder resting against the frame. The window is open just enough for the evening air to carry the cigarette smoke outside before it can settle into the room.
She takes a slow drag, holding it for a moment before letting the smoke escape in a thin stream.
"I've been thinking about it all week, and now that you've told me more…" She doesn't look at you immediately. "I don't think there was just one reason."
You wait.
"We drank almost half a bottle of wine together." A faint smile ghosts across her face before fading. "Then, after I went to bed, you poured yourself another glass." She glance aat you. "Do you remember what happened years ago, when you were still trying to push Senken past thirty minutes?"
You think for a second before nodding.
The memory comes back easily. Yaga had sent you on a mission. Most of the morning had been spent nursing a hangover. You'd expected your technique to perform worse than usual. Instead... "I stayed inside for an hour."
Shoko nods. "You told me afterward that everything felt... thinner. Like whatever normally pulled you back wasn't as strong."
You remember saying exactly that.
The memory is clear enough to make your temples ache.
"I always assumed the alcohol dulled whatever instinct normally told your brain it was time to wake up." She taps ash from the end of her cigarette, watching it disappear into the evening breeze. "Maybe something similar happened this time."
She falls quiet again.
"But honestly... I don't think that's what matters."
You lift your eyes toward her.
"I think it was the anchor."
"You mean what I focus on before using Senken?"
She hums. "You usually anchor yourself to a person, a place, or a specific moment."
You nod along, letting her continue. She crosses one arm over her stomach, absently rubbing at the sleeve of her coat while she thinks.
"I think you intended to anchor yourself to Suguru. But instead…" She pauses, her brow furrowing thoughtfully as she tries to piece everything together. "I think you anchored yourself to the question."
Your fingers stop twisting the thread.
"You told me you used your technique because you wanted to see Suguru. Because you wanted to know if he was still alive." Her voice becomes quieter. "I think there's a very real possibility..." She looks back at you. "...that your vision continued until it found the answer."
A cold shiver runs down your spine despite the evening warmth drifting in through the open window.
“You’re saying,” Your voice barely rises above a whisper. “I could’ve spent years inside a vision, living within it until it answered some question I never even realized I was asking myself.”
She hums softly, neither confirming nor denying it.
Your pulse begins to climb again. You try to picture it. Years. Growing old, living an entire life inside a reality that was nothing more than an illusion.
“But then…” Your gaze lifts to hers. You’re afraid to ask, afraid of the answer waiting on the other side of the question. You don’t want to know, but you have to. Your mind feels too scattered, too exhausted to find the answer on its own. “How did I make it stop?”
Shoko watches the darkening sky before replying. "I think there are two possibilities."
She crushes the cigarette against the ashtray balanced on the windowsill.
“The first is simple.” She turns back toward you. “You found the answer you were looking for. The second possibility is that, at some point, you realized you were inside a vision.”
She gives a small shrug, trying to keep her voice casual. “You’re always aware during your one-hour visions. Maybe eventually you found something—a detail, a feeling, something that reminded you this wasn’t real. And you held onto it long enough to pull yourself back once you realized how much time had passed.”
She grows quiet for a moment, her expression shifting as though another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place.
“And even if you didn’t consciously realize it was a vision…” Her voice lowers. “Your subconscious might have. It could have recognized something was wrong and forced you out of it.”
A tired smile tugs at her lips. “But that’s only a theory. We won’t know for certain until you remember what happened.”
Nausea coils in your stomach again.
You should feel accomplished. For years, you'd chased the impossible. You trained until your body gave out. Pushed Senken further and further, searching for a limit you refused to accept. Every failure convinced you that your technique simply had boundaries that couldn't be crossed. And somehow, after years, without meaning to, you've crossed them.
The realization brings no satisfaction. Only dread. Because what is the point of finally breaking through your own limits if, when you return, you don't remember any of it?
Before she leaves for the night, Shoko retrieves a worn notebook from the drawer beside your bed and places it in your lap. Your polaroid rests between the pages, marking the first blank sheet.
"Don't force yourself to remember," she says. "But if anything comes back…" She taps the cover of the notebook lightly with a pen before placing it on top.. "write it down. Even fragments. Even things that don't make sense, or things you aren't sure are real."
After she leaves, the room falls quiet once more.
Darkness gradually fills the corners, swallowing the last traces of evening until only the pale glow of moonlight spills through the window.
You lie on your side, your cheek pressed against the cool pillow, the polaroid resting between your fingers; the four of you smile back at the camera. You search the faces, hoping they'll stir something inside you.
Eventually, exhaustion outweighs determination. The photograph slips slowly against your chest as your eyelids grow heavy.
Sleep finds you long before any answers do.
The Oracle's Burden TAGLIST
@swthngs, @l1v1ngzomb1e, @fics-tbr, @zanawhois, @isa012486, @theonedayididnt, @echosoftheriver, @superstaargirl, @ironmal, @feyrfly, @strawbscakes, @suniloli, @nunuluxx, @kittymeowxo, @babygirl-panda19, @bleepybl00p, @heeknow, @proudlyperpetualcipher . . .
Live laugh love type shit
only had my work laptop with me and doodled messily in paint

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chilling in the park
my art book cover for Akaboo Doujinshi event in Tokyo! 🫶🏼
bleh :P
Toxic teen father Fratjo
Frat Gojo knocks up the girl he insists on calling his soulmate when he was eighteen. At first, they try to make it work. There’s talk of commitment and half-hearted promises. But reality sets in quickly and she eventually chooses to move on; leaving their child behind knowing the Gojo family has the resources to raise him.
Most of the time, the boy is raised at the Gojo estate, cared for by servants who provide far more structure and consistency than his father ever could. Gojo drifts in and out of his son’s life, stopping by when it’s convenient. Still, every so often, he brings his kid to campus with him; usually when it suits a purpose.
His adorable, wide-eyed toddler who’s basically his identical twin turns out to be incredibly useful.
Professors are more lenient. Missed deadlines become understandable. Slipping out of class early is no longer suspicious…it’s responsible. All it takes is a tired sigh and a casual explanation about childcare, and doors start opening for him.
But the real payoff comes elsewhere.
With his son perched on his hip, Gojo’s reputation shifts. He’s no longer just another reckless frat boy; he’s a young father trying his best. He knows exactly how to play into it.
“Yeah, I gotta stay in school,” he says easily, adjusting his grip on the kid as he flashes that effortless smirk. “Gotta get a good job so I can support him, y’know? He’s the reason I work so hard.”
The group of sorority girls in front of him melt instantly. Sympathetic smiles spread across their faces. Someone coos at the child. Another girl steps closer, her hand brushing Gojo’s arm as she tells him how admirable he is.
The whole routine unfolds just the way he expects it to. Girls are easier when they feel bad for him.
Until he met you…his classmate for a biology project.
He was over the moon when he saw the pairing list. Not only were you cute, you were the girl: top of the class, sharp, and untouchable. The kind of smart that intimidated people. The type he loves to ruin. Naturally, he made sure to bring Junior to your first meeting.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said casually, shifting his son on his hip while juggling a baby bag in his other hand. “Kinda hard to be on time with him.” He offered his best charming laugh.
“Sure, but don’t let it happen again.”
Gojo froze, blinking in disbelief. He had never seen someone—especially a woman, act so coldly toward him. Not with his son right there.
“I’ve already divided up the work,” you continued, unfazed. “You’ve got the last three sections. I want them done by Wednesday next week.”
Now he was irritated. His blood simmered. You hadn’t even looked at him.
“Yeah, I’ll try my best,” he said, pushing again. “You know, with work and the baby—it’s kinda hard.”
Junior cooed softly, big eyes fixed on you.
You gave him nothing.
No smile. No sympathy. Not even a glance.
“I think your baby needs a diaper change,” you said plainly.
“See you next week.” You waved, already walking away, your skirt swaying; taunting him.
“Ew,” Gojo muttered a second later, wrinkling his nose when the smell hit him.
————
On the drive back to the Gojo estate, Satoru was still pissed. How could you not feel even a little bad for him? Everyone else did. And what bothered him even more was that you were pretty, so effortlessly pretty.
Maybe you were playing hard to get.
The thought only made him grin.
He was already looking forward to the next time he’d see you, planning a way to get into your pants.
Dividers by: @pixopix
A/n: I can’t stop writing toxic fratjo help😭
☙ ⸻ HEARTBREAK FEELS SO GOOD¹
sum: You're in Kyoto, finally. You are acclimating to the new teachers, new students, new life away from the one who fucked up your trust like it costed him nothing. Life is... going good, you think. You also think you will be free from Sukuna for a while. Guess what?
tags: angst, true form sukuna, everyone is alive and teaching on jujutsu high, yeah sukuna too, you and sukuna are worse than sukuna and gojo in the bickering, this curse is a damn parasitic piece of shit, some yearning happening right there if you pay attention, figting, blood, mild violence, more fluff because i am legitimally so nice to everyone guys see no one is sad here you can trust me.
Part one: Tainted Love. | Part two: Fake Out. | Part three: Heartbreak Feels So Good art by: @lacquerheadd
Kyoto is… calmer than you expect.
Your first weeks feel like stepping into a stream that runs cooler and steadier than the one you came from.
Not better at first.
Not quiet, exactly. Jujutsu schools are never quiet in any meaningful way. There is always the distant crack of training weapons, the hum of cursed energy being shaped badly by students who think brute force can cover poor control, the dry scrape of paper across faculty desks, the heavy steps of adults who have seen enough to stop rushing unless rushing is useful. There is always the strange pressure in the air that comes from housing too many talented, half-formed sorcerers in one place.
But it is calmer.
The Tokyo school had always felt as if it lived with one hand around the throat of disaster. Every corridor carried memory. Every open yard looked like somewhere someone had bled, shouted, trained until they could no longer stand, or thrown an argument so loud the walls remembered it. Even on ordinary mornings, there had been a kind of restless sharpness beneath the floorboards, as though the whole campus expected something to go wrong and had learned to stay ready.
Kyoto feels older in a different way. Less like a battlefield pretending to be a school, more like an institution that knows it has outlived many people and expects to outlive many more. The buildings sit low and dignified under winter light. The trees hold their branches still in the cold. The stone paths seem less worn by panic.
Kyoto is disciplined.
That would be the best word for it.
The students bow properly, at least most of the time. They listen more readily in theory classes than the Tokyo kids ever did, though that may have more to do with Mei Mei’s staffing standards and the distinct possibility that anyone wasting time here gets looked at like a bad investment.
Even the students move differently, more disciplined at first glance, though you learn quickly that discipline does not erase youth.
Teenagers are teenagers no matter how neatly they bow.
They whisper when they think you are writing on the board and cannot hear them. They make faces behind each other’s backs. They challenge instructions in indirect little ways just to see where the lines are. They pretend not to care about praise, then stand a little taller when you give it. They get competitive over drills, sulky over corrections, brilliant in sudden flashes, and deeply stupid in the exact way only young sorcerers can be when they have survived just enough danger to think they understand it.
You like them.
You try not to show it too quickly.
Utahime is the first person to make the school feel less like a temporary assignment and more like a place that might hold you.
She meets you in the staff room on your first morning, and before you can fully brace for professional introductions, she hugs you. Warmly. Firmly.
Her arms come around you the instant you step fully into the staff room on your first morning, and there is something steady in the gesture that almost makes your throat tighten before the day has even begun.
Like she has already decided you are welcome and intends for your body to understand before your brain has time to argue.
For one strange second, you freeze.
Then your hands lift and settle carefully against her back, and the tension in your shoulders eases without permission.
“I’m glad you made it,” she says when she pulls away, smiling with an openness that makes her face even prettier than it already is. “Yaga said we were lucky to get you.”
“He would say that,” you answer awkwardly, because accepting compliments cleanly still feels like standing unarmed in a field.
“He also said you’re stubborn.”
“That sounds more accurate.”
Utahime laughs, light and bright enough to warm the edge of the room.
“Good. We need stubborn. You’re going to save my sanity.”
You laugh before you can stop yourself.
“That’s a terrible amount of pressure for a transfer.”
“Oh, I mean it,” she says with a seriousness that is immediately undermined by the fond exasperation in her face. “Wait until you meet everyone.”
She introduces you to the others then.
Yuuta is quieter than you expect, though not timid. There is a difference, and you clock it within the first few minutes. He listens carefully, gaze lowered often enough to seem gentle, but when he looks up and asks a question about your field experience, it is precise enough to tell you he has already been rearranging everything you say into useful categories. There is a frightening competence under his mildness, like a blade kept wrapped because it does not need to flash to cut.
Mai gives you a look that could strip paint from a wall.
She is all sharp angles and guarded posture, leaning near the window like she is doing the room a favor by remaining in it. Her greeting is technically polite and spiritually hostile. You respect it immediately. You answer her first dry comment with one of your own, and the faint shift around her eyes tells you that she at least upgrades you from outsider to possible entertainment.
Choso is grave in a way that would seem theatrical on someone else, but on him feels like temperament rather than performance. He bows deeply, speaks with careful respect, and looks at the students passing outside with the watchfulness of someone who has made loyalty into a discipline. Toge watches more than he speaks, for obvious reasons, but his attention is bright and curious, and when he gives you a small nod, you feel oddly honored by it.
Yaga has already put in a good word.
Of course he has. Whatever else you may be feeling about the transfer, he would never send you somewhere unprepared.
Mei Mei receives you later, not with warmth but with efficiency.
You respect that too.
She has already read your reports. She knows your mission history, your teaching evaluations, your technique classification, your strengths, your disciplinary notes, and probably several things no one officially told her but that she acquired anyway because she is Mei Mei. She does not ask why you left Tokyo. Her eyes skim over you once, assessing, and you have the distinct sense that if she wants the details, she already has them or will purchase them later through whatever immoral channel costs the least.
“Yaga speaks highly of you,” she says.
“Yaga is generous.”
“No,” Mei Mei answers pleasantly. “He is practical. If he praises someone, there is usually a reason.”
You do not know what to do with that, so you say nothing.
She has you working shortly after your arrival because of course she does. There is no drawn-out accommodation period, no long ceremony of transition. Teachers move between Tokyo and Kyoto often enough that the process has become familiar. The schools exchange personnel when staffing shifts, emergencies, injuries, politics, or simple necessity demand it. They communicate warnings. They send files. They outline expectations. The receiving school decides how quickly the new person becomes useful.
In your case, quickly.
That suits you.
There is very little ceremony to it.
No one asks too many questions about why you transferred. They all know Tokyo and Kyoto exchange teachers with some regularity. They know warnings are communicated, expectations are clarified, records are sent over. They know enough to understand that if a good teacher comes with solid references and a principal’s approval, the rest is not necessarily their business.
You are grateful for that in a way you do not say aloud.
Because what would you tell them if they asked?
That you almost let yourself fall in love with a delusion?
That a cursed man held you for two days until your body learned the shape of comfort under his weight and then, when the curse broke, he chose mockery instead of honesty because he wanted to see how far your softness would go?
That you could not bear the possibility of the school deciding your usefulness lay less in teaching and more in being the one person able to put the Calamity down when he got too excited?
No.
Better to let them think it was logistics.
Better to let everyone keep their assumptions neat.
For the first weeks you commute by shinkansen.
It is not romantic the way people make it sound. It’s efficient. Fast. Clean. Predictable in a country that values those things like virtues, but after the third morning of standing with a coffee in one hand and your bag strap digging into your shoulder while gray daylight washes over the station platform, predictability loses some of its charm.
You take the train with other workers, with students, with tourists who have no idea how to stand out of the way, with sleepy women fixing lipstick in reflection-dark windows and old men already reading newspapers folded just so.
Work gives shape to days that would otherwise have too much room for memory.
You drink coffee that is too hot from paper cups and watch the country blur past the window.
Some mornings the landscape outside looks silver with cold. Some mornings pale sunlight breaks over roofs and fields and turns the train glass reflective, giving you your own face over the world rushing by. You look tired in those reflections. Not destroyed. Not exactly unhappy. Just stretched thin in the way people look when they have left something behind and keep expecting the distance to feel cleaner than it does.
Eventually, you rent an apartment near the school because you can’t bear to ride two and a half hours to go to work and more two and a half hours to go back home every single day.
It is a small place.
Small enough that when you first step inside with the letting agent and your overnight bag, the quiet seems bigger than the place itself. The kitchen is functional and plain. The bathroom is narrow. The windows are decent but not generous. The bedroom fits a bed and little else. There is no charm to speak of, no worn beauty, no immediately comforting corner that tells you this could become home with no fight at all.
Still, it is close to work. The rent is acceptable. The plumbing does not look cursed. The heater actually functions.
You take it.
It is not cozy at first.
But it is yours.
That matters.
The moving itself is a blur of cardboard, fatigue, and more kindness than you know how to accept gracefully.
Shoko comes to help you move — cigarette smell clinging faintly to her coat and the usual exhaustion in her eyes softened by something more openly fond the moment she sees the state of your half-packed life. She helps without comment, which is her greatest form of tenderness. She folds, lifts, sorts, labels. She complains about your taste in mugs. She silently takes the heavier boxes when she thinks you are not noticing your own bruised shoulders.
“This is small.”
“Thank you for your support.”
“It has walls at least.”
“Also a floor. I got lucky.”
She glances at you sideways, and the corner of her mouth lifts.
“Fine. It works.”
Utahime comes next, armed somehow with practical shoes, snacks, and a level of competence that immediately makes the whole process less miserable. She and Shoko meet over a stack of books and a kettle that does not know which box it belongs in, and within fifteen minutes you can tell you were right to introduce them.
“Shoko, Utahime. Utahime, Shoko.”
Shoko’s eyes flick over Utahime, tired and sharp at once.
Utahime smiles politely, but her gaze lingers just a fraction longer than necessary.
Something in you sits back with interest.
It is not something you can explain logically. Maybe it is instinct. Maybe it is just that Shoko likes beautiful women with sharp minds and a certain grounded elegance, and Utahime is very much that. Maybe it is that Utahime looks at Shoko the way careful people do when they notice someone intelligent and self-destructive and decide not to flinch. Maybe it is simply that the two of them share that rare quality of being competent enough not to need performance.
They hit it off.
Not obvious flirtation, not at first. More a dry, intelligent rhythm that begins over where to place the bookcase and somehow becomes a debate over faculty meeting etiquette, then student excuses, then the moral failings of men who think being powerful absolves them of basic self-awareness.
You keep your mouth shut on that last part.
Mostly.
Whatever it is, they slide into conversation with almost suspicious ease.
By the time the worst of the boxes are in, the shelves are half arranged, and the bed is assembled without anyone killing anyone else, the three of you are sitting on the floor surrounded by the remains of moving chaos, sharing a bottle of white wine and whatever snacks survived the day.
You thank them profusely.
Utahime waves it off with that deceptively mild look she gets when she is being generous and does not want you making a ceremony of it. Shoko only lifts her glass a little and says,
“You’d better not become sentimental just because we carried your terrible lamp.”
“It’s a nice lamp.”
“It’s ugly.”
“It has character.”
“It has stains.”
Utahime laughs so hard at that she nearly spills wine on one of your unpacked books, and then all three of you are talking easily, the kind of easy that sneaks up after labor and shared irritation. Students. Lesson plans. The weird little private disasters of faculty life. Then daily nonsense. Food. Trains. The ridiculousness of administrative forms.
Shoko tells a story about Gojo and an energy drink that nearly killed a copier. Utahime responds with one about a second-year who tried to hide an injured shikigami in a supply closet for three days.
Utahime tells you which Kyoto first-year will pretend not to like you and then become violently loyal if you correct them well. Shoko gives updates on Tokyo’s medical wing, half complaints and half affection disguised as irritation. You talk about class structures, cursed theory, field training, the problem of talented teenagers who think talent means they do not have to read.
You do not ask about Sukuna.
Shoko does not mention him.
The absence of his name is not quite silence. It is more like a closed door in the room, one all of you know exists and simply do not approach. You appreciate her for that more than you can say. Shoko has never been the kind of friend who rips open wounds just to prove she knows where they are.
After they leave, the place is very quiet.
The apartment feels bigger after the door shuts behind them, not because the rooms have changed but because warmth has left them. You stand in the middle of your new living room, wine-soft and tired to the bone, and look around at the open boxes, the folded blankets, the books half shelved, the lamp Shoko hates, the cups drying beside the sink.
The loneliness hits, but lightly, not like a blow. More like a hand testing your shoulder.
Present. Real. Bearable.
The weeks after that become almost pleasant.
You fall into routine with a kind of relieved caution, like someone stepping onto ice and realizing it holds.
You work, practice, teach.
You learn your new students’ techniques not just by reading their files but by watching their bodies interpret power. You see who lifts their shoulder before a projection, who shifts weight too early, who wastes cursed energy trying to make something look impressive, who hesitates because they were hurt once and now pretend caution is strategy.
You learn who understands cursed theory and who only memorizes enough to pass. You learn which ones get arrogant as soon as they land a good hit, which ones crumble after a single mistake, which ones hide fear behind volume, which ones hide brilliance behind indifference.
You make the same thing clear to all of them, one way or another — skill without understanding will get you killed. A technique is not magic because it is yours. A body is not reliable because it is young. If they want to survive long enough to grow dangerous, they need theory as much as practice.
You make them repeat fundamentals until they groan.
You make them explain theory out loud until they stop treating it like dead information.
You tell them that knowing how to hit a curse means nothing if they cannot explain why the hit works. That reaction without understanding is luck wearing a uniform. That the strongest sorcerers are not always the ones with the flashiest techniques, but the ones who understand the battlefield faster than death can adjust.
Some of them hate theory.
That’s fine.
You are not hired to be adored.
Though, inconveniently, they start liking you.
There is one second-year who pretends to despise your correction and then shows up twenty minutes early to ask follow-up questions. A first-year who nearly cries the first time you praise her footwork, then tries to hide it by insulting her own stance. A third-year who thinks he is subtle about pushing himself past safe limits and learns very quickly that you are worse than Utahime when it comes to noticing.
It is good work.
It steadies you.
Then a few of them ask about Sukuna.
The question comes up faster than you expect. Not because they are rude, but because they are young and his name hangs over jujutsu society like weather.
They know he is affiliated with Jujutsu High in Tokyo. They know some of the larger incidents involving him were public enough that footage circulated in distorted ways. They know you were often sent with him. Not everything is secret once a city has nearly been smashed through a live feed and spun by the media before containment teams even arrive.
They circle the question first, as students do when they know a topic is dangerous but curiosity is stronger than self-preservation.
They ask about Tokyo missions. About special grade exorcisms. About televised incidents. About the former King of Curses now working as a sorcerer affiliated with Tokyo Jujutsu High, which still sounds absurd no matter how many times society rearranges itself around it.
Eventually one of them says his name.
The room shifts.
You keep your expression bland.
You answer as briefly as possible.
Mostly techniques. Always techniques.
You discuss the way his cursed energy moves like a blade even before the cut happens, the speed at which he reads terrain, the importance of not mistaking overwhelming force for lack of strategy.
You tell them that if they learn anything from accounts of his battles, it should be environmental awareness. His battle awareness is monstrous and that what they should learn from that is not envy but caution. You tell them anyone fighting a special grade should understand the terrain before they understand their own bravery.
A powerful opponent can turn the city itself into a weapon without intending to. A special grade curse can do the same. Collateral damage is not an unfortunate detail after the fact — it is a condition of battle that must be anticipated from the first breath.
You explain that being paired with him often meant preventing collateral damage as much as exorcism, because once Sukuna found a fight worth enjoying he had a tendency to bulldoze through obstacles under the broad excuse of efficiency.
One student asks if you were really assigned with him that often.
You tap your chalk once against the board, then set it down.
“Yes.”
Another asks why.
You look over the class, at their open faces, their contained excitement, the slight fear disguised as academic interest.
“Because my cursed technique could dull certain excesses in his behavior when necessary,” you say. “If he became too invested in a fight, I could disrupt his perception enough to slow him down before he bulldozed through half a ward under the excuse of exorcising one curse.”
Mai, in the back, snorts softly.
You pretend not to hear.
You move on.
The lesson continues, but the thought stays with you afterward.
You do not have to do that anymore not.
The realization arrives slowly while you erase the board, chalk dust soft under your fingers.
You no longer have to watch him from the corner of your eye during battle.
No longer have to measure the difference between useful violence and indulgent violence in the space of half a second.
No longer have to decide when to intervene, when to let him burn through a curse because it is efficient, when to put your palm to his skin and scramble the world hard enough that even he has to remember limits exist.
Who does it now?
You stand there in the empty classroom, eraser in hand, and frown at nothing.
Sukuna is too useful to keep out of battle. Too good. Too devastating. Yaga could not bench him even if he wanted to, and if a special grade appears near civilians, no one with sense would refuse a weapon that sharp simply because the weapon is an asshole.
The administration would not waste that much destructive potential.
So who goes with him? Who makes sure entire wards are not erased under the pretense of necessary force? Who steadies him when battle starts tasting too good?
You do not like that the question lodges under your ribs.
Who contains him?
Gojo? That seems like solving a fire with fireworks.
Suguru? Perhaps, but Suguru’s patience has limits too, even if he hides them better.
Nanami? You can imagine Nanami submitting one report and then quietly requesting hazard pay, a sabbatical, and possibly a new career.
The thought bothers you enough that after classes, you call Shoko.
You tell yourself it is ordinary. Friendly. You are asking about her day. Checking in. Maintaining relationships because distance should not make you disappear.
She answers on the fourth ring.
“You alive?”
“Unfortunately for my students, yes.”
“Then what happened?”
“I can’t call just to call?”
“You can. You usually don’t.”
You lean against the outside corridor wall, cold air biting faintly through your sleeves where the old building does not hold heat well.
“How’s your day?”
“Annoying.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the category all answers fall under.”
You smile despite yourself.
She tells you about the Tokyo school in pieces. Students adapting to the substitute teacher, not perfectly but without riots at least. Gojo making himself everyone’s problem, as usual. Suguru apparently becoming the designated adult in too many rooms because he has the terrible flaw of seeming calm. Nanami sending emails with subject lines so precise they feel threatening. Yaga pretending not to be exhausted and failing.
Then, after a small pause, she says,
“Sukuna’s been manageable.”
You go quiet.
Shoko notices, of course.
“Weirdly manageable,” she adds.
“What does that mean?”
“Yaga sent him on a curse hunt a week after you left. Sent Satoru with him.”
“That’s a questionable decision.”
“I said that.”
“And?”
“And according to the report, Sukuna found the curse, analyzed the situation, eliminated it, and left.”
You wait for the rest. There has to be more. A collapsed building. A complaint from a city office. A crater.
Shoko exhales smoke away from the phone, or at least you imagine she does from the faint shift in sound.
“That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s why I said weird.”
You push off the wall and start walking without noticing for several steps.
“No collateral?”
“Bare minimum.”
“No dragging it out?”
“Satoru says no.”
“No unnecessary property damage?”
“Apparently not.”
You frown harder.
“That doesn’t sound like him.”
“No,” Shoko says. “Satoru said it was almost like he wasn’t enjoying it anymore.”
“Is he hiding something?”
“I would love to tell you I know.” Her lighter clicks on the other end. “But mostly I think he’s being off-putting in a way no one can diagnose.”
That lands strangely.
Not with satisfaction, though part of you wants it to. Not with pity either. You are not generous enough for that, not when the wound is still only months old and still sensitive if touched carelessly.
It lands with unease.
Because Sukuna and battle enjoyment had always seemed as inseparable as flame and heat. You had hated that about him. Had scolded him for it, fought him over it, used your technique to choke it down when necessary. But it had also been part of the shape you knew. A terrible kind of certainty. Sukuna in battle was vicious, arrogant, alive. Mesmerizing. If that is missing, then something has shifted more deeply than you expected.
You do not say maybe he is brooding.
You think it.
You make yourself ask about something else.
Shoko lets you.
When you hang up later, the campus is getting dark, and you stand for a moment under a winter sky with your phone in your hand, wondering why distance has not made him simpler.
The weeks keep flowing.
Kyoto becomes less a place you occupy and more a place you inhabit. The apartment improves. A rug. Two plants that may or may not survive you. A better blanket. Tea you actually like. Books placed where your hand reaches for them instinctively. Utahime comes by sometimes. Shoko visits once more when she has a weekend to spare and pretends not to inspect whether you are sleeping enough.
The school gives you missions, field trips, training exercises, faculty meetings, small emergencies, student injuries, paperwork that somehow follows every sorcerer across prefectures like a curse of its own. You fight curses. You teach strategy. You take students out under supervision and make them identify escape routes before engaging. You watch them improve and feel the steady satisfaction of it settle under your ribs.
Still, sometimes, you miss action.
Not the danger.
Not the terror of things falling apart.
The edge.
The kind of mission where every nerve in your body sharpens because there is no room for sluggish thought. The kind where you have to trust yourself completely because hesitation becomes expensive. The kind where Sukuna would move beside you with horrible grace, laughing at something with too many eyes and teeth while you shouted at him to stop playing with the curse and finish the damn job.
It had been infuriating.
It had been exhausting.
It had also been fun.
You would rather swallow glass than admit that to anyone.
It is easier to tell yourself that what you miss is intensity. The demand of it. The sharpened state your body enters when you have to watch two dangers at once — the curse in front of you and the man beside you who might become worse if he gets carried away.
Some nights, when your apartment is too quiet and the heater hums like a tired insect, you find yourself thinking about the mechanics of it.
Maybe he went all out because he trusted you to stop him if needed.
Maybe he enjoyed having a leash specifically because he could pull against it.
Maybe he liked pissing you off because your anger gave him something clean to answer with.
Maybe you liked fighting him because it was easier than wanting him.
Maybe he is now adjusting to consequences.
Maybe he is brooding.
Maybe he is fine.
Maybe you should not care.
The less you think about him, the better.
The nightmares, however, disagree.
They come only sometimes, which almost makes them worse because you cannot build a routine around them. You will have a normal day, a good one even, and then sleep will open under you like a trapdoor.
In the dream, Yaga is calling you with urgency stripped of all restraint. Sukuna has gone too far. Sukuna is tearing through a district. Sukuna needs to be stopped now, not in five minutes, not when backup arrives, now.
Yaga is hurrying you nonstop, telling you to put him under now, now, now before there is nothing left to save.
You run.
You always run.
The dream-city is never specific, only smoke and broken glass and concrete dust. You hear things collapsing before you see them. You feel cursed energy thick enough to choke the air.
By the time you reach him, everything is already destroyed. Sometimes he stands in the center of it with blood on his mouth and all four eyes bright with battle.
Sometimes you cannot find him at all, only the path of ruin he left behind.
Sometimes your palm reaches his shoulder and your technique does nothing.
You wake sweating.
Always furious that even in absence he can still ruin your sleep.
Heart pounding, sheets twisted around your legs, the dark room too small and too safe all at once.
You hate those mornings.
You hate that even gone, he can still make your body prepare to stop him.
Winter arrives properly by the time the student festival is announced in Tokyo.
You tell yourself you do not have to go. You are in Kyoto now. You have obligations here. The transfer is still recent enough that returning may stir things you have worked hard to settle.
Then your students find out.
Your Kyoto students beg you to go. Not dramatically at first, but insistently enough that refusal would make you look cruel. They have heard enough of Tokyo through rumor and comparison to be curious. They want to see the festival, the other campus, the presentations, the ridiculous variety of talents gathered under one school’s roof. Some of them want to show off. Some want to spy. All of them want you there.
You promise.
You cannot deny them.
Then you spend days regretting the promise in quiet little ways because months have passed, and that still is not enough for the thought of Tokyo to feel neutral.
You also miss your old students.
That part hurts more cleanly.
So when winter sunlight falls pale over Tokyo’s campus on the day of the festival, you arrive with your scarf wrapped high and your stomach tighter than you would like.
The school looks familiar enough to make your chest ache.
Decorations hang from old beams and temporary stalls. Students run with boxes, props, trays of food, banners. Someone has made a sign that is both crooked and charming. Somewhere nearby, an argument breaks out over extension cords. The smell of takoyaki, fried dough, sweet soy glaze, and cold air creates the exact kind of festival atmosphere that makes teenagers temporarily forget all institutions are built on paperwork and dread.
Your old students spot you almost immediately.
Their delight is loud enough to embarrass you and warm enough to undo part of your armor. They surround you, speaking over each other, accusing you of abandonment with grins, asking whether Kyoto students are weird, whether you are eating properly, whether you have seen their displays, whether you are coming back, whether you met Mei Mei, whether Utahime is as scary as people say, whether—
You laugh despite yourself because they bring you so much joy.
One of them nearly cries and then pretends violently that she is not about to. Another insists his control has improved and demands you watch later. A third says the substitute is fine but not as terrifying as you, which might be the sweetest insult you receive all day.
Then Gojo appears like a curse attracted to attention.
He spends the first twenty minutes of your arrival just complaining.
Loudly.
Dramatically.
With one arm nearly draped over your shoulders until Shoko smacks it away.
“Do you understand what I’ve been suffering?” he asks, hand pressed to his chest. “Do you understand how boring missions are now? I go with him and I think, okay, maybe today we’ll get something fun. Maybe I’ll be useful. Maybe there’ll be tension. But no. He just finds the curse, looks at it like it’s late to an appointment, kills it, and leaves. No theater. No property damage. No insults worth responding to. No joy. It’s like escorting an angry machine. It’s a total waste of my potential.”
Suguru appears over his shoulder with the face of a man who has been forced to hear this complaint repeated too many times. The sympathy in his eyes when they meet yours is almost enough to make you laugh.
“He has told me this six times,” Suguru says. “Today.”
“Because nobody is appreciating the tragedy.”
“The tragedy is that you consider less destruction a problem,” Nanami says from behind you, voice flat enough to slice bread.
Gojo points at him.
“You would say that.”
“I did say that.”
Shoko appears then and hooks a hand around Gojo’s sleeve, dragging him back with casual brutality.
“Let her breathe before you start making her regret visiting.”
“I would never.”
“You already are.”
You smile into your cup to hide how much you have missed them.
For a while, the festival lets you forget the edges.
You watch student performances. Eat too much festival food because every group insists you try theirs. Praise the ones who deserve praise. Correct two first-years on safety because some instincts do not vanish when transferred. Let your Kyoto students tug you toward their display with visible pride while pretending they are above needing approval.
You catch Yaga near the takoyaki stall.
He looks tired.
He always looks tired, but today there is a festival-softness around him, something less severe in the shoulders as he watches students shout over prices and cooking times. When he sees you, his eyes assess you quickly, like he cannot help checking whether you are intact.
“How’s Kyoto?”
“Calm,” you say. Then, because that sounds too faint, “Good. Mei Mei has me working like she paid a premium for me.”
“She says you’re doing very well.”
“Of course she does. I am.”
His mouth twitches.
You eat a piece of takoyaki too quickly and regret the heat instantly. He gives you a look that suggests he saw everything and will not comment only because he is merciful.
“The students like you,” he says.
“Teenagers are fickle.”
“They asked if you’d come back for joint training next term.”
Your chest warms before you can stop it.
“That’s manipulation.”
“That’s teaching.”
You huff.
Then, more carefully,
“I don’t regret going.”
Yaga is quiet for a moment.
“I know.”
You look out over the festival crowd instead of at him.
“I hope you’re keeping things under control here.”
He scoffs.
As if he has ever held anything under control.
It is such a Yaga sound that you almost smile.
“As much as anything here is ever under control.”
“Terrifying answer.”
“Honest one.”
Then he says it, because apparently the day has been kind enough for long enough.
“Sukuna is probably around somewhere. No one has seen him since earlier.”
You keep your face still.
“He’s been behaving,” Yaga adds. “Quiet. Students find it off-putting.”
You look toward a group of students laughing near a stall, focusing on them so you do not have to look at him.
“He’s probably brooding.”
“Probably.”
“He’s not the type to let something affect him for too long.”
The words taste false.
Or maybe not false. Incomplete.
You hear the bitterness in your own voice only after the words leave.
Yaga does too, but he does not press.
You appreciate him for it.
The festival carries on.
You talk. You laugh. You let Gojo drag you to a stall run by his students and then abandon you when one of them threatens to charge him double. You watch Suguru quietly fix a banner using a curse no one notices. You listen to Nanami explain why a game booth is mathematically rigged and then win anyway against all odds. Shoko smokes at the edge of the grounds until Utahime appears near her, and the two of them end up speaking close enough that you store the detail away for later teasing.
You do not see Sukuna.
Not once.
By the time you leave for the station, the sky has gone dark and your feet ache from standing. The shinkansen ride from Tokyo to Kyoto is only two and a half hours, and you are grateful for every minute of sitting.
You read something on your phone without absorbing much of it. You answer the group chat Gojo insisted on creating after your transfer because, according to him, everyone misses you too much and needs to pretend you still live in their pockets, then he said it’s “a digital room where you can continue judging us from afar.”
Gojo sends a selfie with three students photobombing him.
Suguru sends a picture of Gojo being yelled at by a stall owner.
Nanami writes, Please stop encouraging him.
Shoko sends, Bring back the thing I asked for or don’t come back.
You text her a picture of the snack bag in your lap.
She sends a heart, then immediately follows it with, Don’t tell anyone.
You smile down at the screen until the train windows turn dark enough to show your reflection. You look tired. Softer than you did months ago, maybe. Or just better lit.
By the time the train glides into Kyoto Station, the world outside is dark enough that glass reflects you back almost as clearly as it shows the city.
The air is cold enough to sting the inside of your nose. It is the kind of cold that goes straight through the seams of clothing and finds skin. You tuck your scarf higher, bury your hands in your pockets, and start the walk home.
Streetlights paint everything in familiar yellow. You know this route now. The convenience store on the corner. The narrow side street that smells faintly of rain even when it has not rained. The slope near your complex where the pavement is always a little more broken than the city budget seems willing to fix.
Halfway there you feel it.
Something off.

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☙ ⸻ FAKE OUT
sum: Shoko has told you the curse would wear out by the next two days. Forty-Eight hours. So why is it you are still having to deal with Sukuna on the third consecutive day of that bullshit?
tags: angst, true form sukuna, everyone is alive and teaching on jujutsu high, yeah sukuna too, you and sukuna are worse than sukuna and gojo in the bickering, this curse is a damn parasitic piece of shit, some yearning happening right there if you pay attention, then I'll crash it and break it in front of your eyes!, also there will be a third part because I won't be leaving it on this tone AND because Lacqueur keeps doing pink art so it's only natural I keep writing for it.
Part one: Tainted Love | Part two: Fake Out | Part three: Heartbreak Feels So Good art by: @lacquerheadd
By the third night, you know the whole shape of Sukuna’s sleep.
You know the way his weight settles slowly, not all at once, like a mountain lowering itself with deliberate care over the same patch of land until the ground stops protesting and simply accepts it. You know the difference between the moments when he is only dozing and the ones when he has actually dropped into real rest, because the tension leaves him in layers.
First his shoulders. Then the line of his jaw. Then those broad hands that can split concrete like stale bread finally unclench where they rest against you.
You know the rhythm of his breathing now too.
Deep. Quiet. Steady enough to lull you if you let it.
It bothers you, but the problem is that it is also almost midnight on the third day since the curse latched onto him, and you are half trapped under the strongest sorcerer in history on his ridiculous bed, staring at the dark ceiling and counting the beats of your own pulse because you cannot understand why this still has not ended.
It was supposed to last two days.
Forty-eight hours, Shoko said. Maximum.
Now the second night has come and gone, the third has nearly burned itself down into morning, and Sukuna is still very much draped over you as if you belong there. One lower arm heavy over your waist. Another thrown over your thighs to keep you close. One upper hand resting open on your stomach like he placed it there in his sleep to make sure you remained within reach. The other bent above your head, long fingers loose against the pillow.
He is sleeping peacefully.
Peacefully.
That part alone almost annoys you enough to keep you awake for the whole night.
You are the one with a storm churning behind your ribs. You are the one running numbers and possibilities and consequences until your head hurts. He, meanwhile, lies half on top of you in profound, infuriating comfort, all that impossible size and heat turned tame by slumber. Like a princess. His face is angled toward your neck. His breath brushes warm against your skin every few seconds.
If someone had told you a week ago that you would spend three nights like this, tucked under Ryomen Sukuna like something he curls around instinctively, you would have laughed until you choked and then probably kicked this someone’s ass for suggesting such an absurd and borderline insulting situation.
Now you only stare into the dark and wonder what is going to be left of your life if this does not stop.
Shoko does not know what will happen when — if — it breaks. She admitted as much over text that afternoon in the clipped, irritated way she has when facts refuse to behave for her to study. No one knows whether he will remember the last days clearly. No one knows whether the emotions imposed by the curse will peel away cleanly or leave residue. No one knows if he will feel humiliated, enraged, indifferent, or amused.
You do not know which of those possibilities would be worst.
The version where he forgets is its own kind of horror.
The version where he remembers everything is another.
You cannot decide which one makes your stomach sink harder.
He shifts in his sleep. The mattress dips more under his hips, the hand on your stomach flexing once before going still again. Your whole body goes alert on reflex and then softens against your own will when he only presses his face a fraction deeper into the crook of your neck, seeking heat without waking.
You close your eyes for a second.
The two days behind you have been too… soft.
Not just inconveniently gentle, no, that would be manageable, you think. Not merely tolerable either, that’s just the overall definition of your days at the missions you share with him. No, they were soft in a way that has gotten under your skin and stayed there. Soft in ways you let yourself have because you were exhausted and angry and so starved for the absence of vigilance that the minute you realized you did not have to keep your shoulders high and your jaw tight around him, you let go more than you should have.
You let him fix the collar of the yukata he found for you after noticing you kept tugging the borrowed kimono one closed.
You let him fuss.
The memory of that makes your mouth twitch despite yourself.
He had stood behind you that morning by the mirror, all scowl and concentration, muttering about how the fold sat wrong and how you were somehow wearing it like an amateur insult to fabric. One upper pair of hands had redone the collar with sharp, efficient movements while the lower pair kept the robe steady at your shoulders and waist. You had expected smugness. Instead he had been almost offended by the task itself, like cloth daring not to sit well on you was a personal slight to him.
When he finished, he had looked at your reflection over your shoulder and said, with dreadful severity,
“Better.”
You had told him he sounded like an old woman fixing her grandchild for a festival.
He had stared down at you for one long beat and answered,
“If you continue moving like a startled animal every time I touch your sleeve, I will carry you there like one.”
You had laughed. Actually laughed, sudden and helpless, because he had been so grave about it that it broke something loose in you. The expression on his face afterward, faintly affronted and faintly pleased, had nearly made you laugh harder.
That had been the second morning.
Then there had been the market trip.
You had only agreed because there were vegetables he wanted that the small convenience store near his place did not carry, and because you needed air that did not smell like him for at least half an hour before your thoughts turned to paste. You had expected an ordeal. Sukuna in public seemed like a threat to social order on principle.
Instead, he had been strange in an entirely different direction.
He walked beside you with one hand at the small of your back whenever crowds got too close. He carried the basket despite the fact that four arms made him look absurdly overqualified for grocery errands. He argued with a tomato vendor over the quality of produce with the same deadly seriousness he usually reserved for combat analysis. He stole one bite of the sweet bun you bought at the register, declared it mediocre, and then finished the rest of it when you handed it over because, in his words, “You clearly chose poorly. I am fixing the mistake.”
By the time you both got home with bags hanging from three of his hands and one bag hooked over your own wrist, you had already realized something else.
He behaves like a house cat.
A monstrous, spoiled, overgrown house cat with enough power to level a city block, but still.
The signs are all there once you start noticing them.
He appears silently when you are doing something and pretends not to care while hovering a foot too close. He picks the warmest place in any room and takes it as if the concept of permission was invented for lesser beings. He can be insufferably aloof for ten minutes and then abruptly decide your lap, your shoulder, or your general proximity is his now. He resents being ignored. He resents being fussed over. He resents closed doors if you are behind them. He looks at you with open disdain when you make him wait and then acts as if your attention is some rightful due the instant you turn back to him.
And once you notice it, you cannot unsee it.
He had even blinked slowly at you from across the kitchen table after lunch that day when you caught him watching you and asked what the hell his problem was.
You had burst out laughing again then too.
He had narrowed his eyes.
“Explain.”
“You’re a cat.”
He had taken offense to that with such dignified outrage that you had to excuse yourself and lean against the counter until your face stopped hurting.
You rub your own face against the pillow now and breathe out through your nose.
Too soft.
Too easy.
Too dangerous.
Because the longer it drags on, the more the future begins to warp around it in ugly ways. Yaga had been half-joking and half-not when he told you to keep Sukuna contained. You know that tone. The school has always tolerated monstrous arrangements when the alternative is disaster. If this curse persists long enough, if Shoko cannot reverse it, if Sukuna grows volatile whenever he is not allowed near you, people will start making practical suggestions with polite voices and rotten implications.
Can you manage him? Would you be willing to spend more time with him temporarily? Could your schedule be adjusted? Could missions be reassigned? Could housing be reconsidered for the sake of stability?
At what point does babysitting become a job description?
At what point does a joke become policy?
The thought of it makes your chest tighten. You did not claw your way into teaching, did not work through endless paperwork and grief and late nights and battlefields and stubborn children and stubborn adults, just to become some domestication project for the Calamity because the administration finds it more convenient than risk.
You love teaching.
That truth sits in you with the weight of bone.
You love classrooms and chalk dust and the moment a student’s expression changes because something finally clicks. You love dragging intelligence out of kids who thought all brute force and talent were enough. You love teaching them how to survive and think and adapt and not die for stupid reasons. You love watching them become dangerous in the right ways.
You do not want to be reduced to the one person Sukuna behaves for.
You do not want to trade your life for containment.
And worst of all, you do not want to build yourself around feelings that are not real.
That is the part that tastes bitter every time you think too long about how nice the last two days have felt.
If his gentleness is only the curse, then it is nothing you can keep.
If his attention, his quiet hovering, the ridiculous care with your clothes, the food, the bed, the way he has looked at you like you are worth steadying instead of provoking — if all of that belongs to a delusion, then leaning into it is only another kind of self-harm.
You deserve more than counterfeit tenderness.
You know you do.
So why does knowing that not make it easier to pull away?
His thumb shifts in his sleep, a slow drag against your stomach through the thin fabric you changed into hours ago. The touch is accidental. It still sends a small, traitorous wave of warmth through you.
You hate that too.
Morning comes pale and stubborn through the gaps in the curtains.
You wake before he does, which is rare enough now that it feels like a victory. For a little while you lie still and take inventory. One leg numb. Shoulder warm where his chest has leaned against it for most of the night. Hair tangled. Mouth dry. Mind already running.
You reach for your phone carefully, inch by inch, until your fingertips brush it on the bedside table.
Shoko answers almost immediately to your message.
Still on him. Third day. He seems worse if anything.
You stare at the dots appearing and disappearing on the screen.
That shouldn’t be possible, comes her reply after a moment. We’re rerunning everything. Nanami is helping and being annoying about it. Don’t let him out of your sight.
As if that part is difficult.
He rarely lets you out of his anyway.
Another message comes.
If this persists past today, we’ll need to treat it like a new case entirely.
You swallow the knot that has formed inside your throat.
Untangling from him is hard, but it’s manageable, so you do it and pad out of the bedroom.
Kitchen. Coffee. Focus.
You had escaped the bed, showered, changed into the better-fitted yukata he had somehow produced for you from a store run that must have happened before you stirred, and perched yourself on one of the tall stools with your coffee and your phone, trying to build a plan before he started insisting on ruining it.
Your fingers hover above the keyboard. Before you can type back, heat blooms suddenly at your spine and then two strong lower arms slide around your middle from behind.
Apparently you lost the race.
You jolt so hard the mug by your plate clinks against the counter.
Sukuna folds himself against your back as if he has every damn right to do so. His chin settles on your shoulder, warm, heavy. Damp hair brushes your cheek. The smell of clean skin and soap, fresh shower steam, and that faint sandalwood scent you now associate with his clothes slides around you before you can brace for it.
“Who are you speaking to?” he drawls.
His voice is rough from sleep and low enough to slide straight under your skin. It takes all of you not to roll your eyes back under your eyelids and take a deep breath — not from annoyance, though, from something way more humiliating than that.
You glance down and make the mistake of noticing bare skin at the edges of your vision. He is fresh from the shower. Shirtless. A towel wrapped low around his waist and nothing else. His chest presses hot against your back. The tattoos over his arms look darker with beads of water still clinging to some lines. Heat from his body sinks through the fabric at your spine so quickly it makes your breath hitch.
You freeze for one stupid second.
Then you remember words.
“Unlike you,” you say, forcing your voice into something dry and unimpressed, “I am a responsible teacher and actually care about my students’ futures.”
He clicks his tongue beside your ear.
“The substitutes are paid to care about that now.”
“They should not be taking my classes when I am fully capable of doing my job.”
“You are capable of staying still and being fed. That is enough.”
He says it with such maddening conviction that irritation sparks clean through the awkward heat. You try to angle away, but his lower arms tighten around your waist just enough to hold you in place. At the same time his upper hands slide over yours where they still cradle the warm mug on the counter.
His fingers are damp and warm too.
He peels your hands gently from the ceramic and brings them together against your chest, trapping them there with one hand while the other smooths over your knuckles like he is the one soothing you. His cheek drifts along the side of yours, slow and shameless as he is, and then his mouth touches the slope of your shoulder through the open edge of the yukata.
One kiss.
Then another closer to your neck.
The shiver that runs through you is vicious.
He purrs, actually purrs, a low satisfied sound in the back of his throat before murmuring beside your ear,
“The substitutes can manage a little longer. I would rather enjoy my wife.”
You bite your tongue so hard you taste iron.
Every nerve in your body seems to light up at once. Heat floods your face, your throat, lower, everywhere. If you let yourself make a sound it will be a humiliating one, and you hate that you know it.
It is not real, you remind yourself violently.
He is cursed.
This is not real.
You use that thought like a lever, wrenching yourself back into motion. You twist sideways and drop off the stool before his grip can adjust. Your feet hit the floor a little too hard, and it may be a mistake because now you are face to face with the full problem of him.
Fresh from the shower.
Towel low on his hips.
Bare chest.
Tattoos stark on his skin.
Damp strands of pink hair falling over his forehead.
Morning light hitting the planes of muscle and ink over him in pale gold and making every hard line of him look even more unreasonably dramatic.
For one awful second your heart feels like it either stops or starts beating so fast it vanishes altogether.
He lifts a brow at your expression.
You begin talking immediately because silence would kill you.
“I—I need to change,” you stutter, which is not an excuse so much as a panic with a little grammar.
His mouth tips up.
That nearly sends you fleeing faster.
You skirt around him, grab the first shreds of dignity still fluttering in your chest, and march to his bedroom with speed that only barely avoids becoming a run. You can call it powerwalking if it saves you some of that dignity.
Your clothes are where you left them after washing them on the second day — folded in a neat little pile on the chair near the bed. You had kept putting off wearing them again because the yukata was comfortable and because he looked weirdly pleased every time he saw you in it, which had become its own private source of amusement.
That amusement is gone now.
You drag off the robe, shove yourself into your shirt and pants, and are crouched with one sock halfway on when the doorway darkens.
Fucking hell.
Sukuna fills it.
Arms folded now. Towel still on. Head tilted just slightly.
“Where do you think you’re going with such urgency?”
You stand too fast, your leather belt in hand ready to be looped around your pants, and nearly trip over the edge of the rug.
“I need to talk to Yaga.”
“That’s bullshit.”
The bluntness of it makes you bristle.
“Excuse me?”
“You do not need to speak to anyone. You need to stop running in circles and let me take care of you.”
He says it while crossing the room, and before you can angle around him he crowds you back, step by step, until the backs of your knees hit the edge of the bed and buckle. You drop onto the mattress with a soft curse, your belt still looped in your fist.
His smile is immediate.
It is not kind. It is not especially cruel either, but that isn’t really soothing. It is delighted, which is concerning for you. Victorious in that small, smug way that makes you want to throw a shoe at his face.
“Oh, you enjoy this,” you mutter, a bit alarmed.
“Immensely.”
You backpedal on your hands once as he leans closer and towers over you.
He catches your ankle with one lower hand and drags you back exactly where he wants you, slow enough to make it obvious he is toying with you. The mattress shifts under his weight when he climbs up one knee at a time, looming over you with open amusement all over his face.
You should not notice how pretty he is like this.
Unfortunately your eyes work.
The tattoos. The broad chest. The water still tracking from his hair down the side of his throat. The flash of teeth in that terrible grin.
You school your face into a kind of surrender and let him mistake the stillness for giving in.
Then, the instant he lowers himself enough, you move.
Fast.
Your belt whips up and around his throat before the expression on his face can fully change. You jam the strap through the buckle in one practiced motion and yank it into a makeshift collar. His eyes widen — actually widen, not by much but enough to count as astonishment on him — and that tiny sliver of surprise is all you need.
You wrap your legs around his waist, use his own forward momentum against him, and roll.
He lands on his back with a heavy thud into the mattress.
You land astride his abdomen in the same breath, knees braced, belt pulled taut in both hands.
The grin that spreads over his face afterward is so feral it should probably frighten you more than it does.
Instead it mostly infuriates you.
Why is this man such a smug sleek motherfucker?
His upper hands rise slowly, palms open in a parody of surrender. His lower pair settle right on the sides of your thighs as if he cannot be bothered to pretend he is not enjoying this.
You wind the loose end of the belt around your fist for leverage and plant your free hand in the center of his chest to keep yourself steady.
He is hot.
Obscenely hot.
The heat of him blasts through your palm, through your pants where you sit over him, through every point of contact until it becomes a nuisance of its own.
“Behave,” you tell him, out of breath with effort and annoyance both, “or I’m putting you under.”
All four eyes narrow.
He is daring you.
You can tell by the exact angle of his chin, the tilt of his mouth, the challenge coiled in every inch of him. He thinks you will not do it. Or maybe he wants to see if you will.
So you raise your chin back at him and call the bluff.
“Do you really want me to scramble your head,” you say, tightening the belt just enough to prove the point, “until you feel drunk and useless and can’t spend your precious time off with your wife?”
The word works visibly.
Not in shame. Not in softness. In cold calculation.
He goes still for a beat, then sneers lightly as if agreeing costs him something.
That is how you end up standing at the edge of the bed a few minutes later, one hand gripping the improvised leash of your own belt while Sukuna, still smug, still shirtless, digs out clothes from a cabinet as if this is a perfectly normal arrangement.
You fix your gaze on the wall.
Not his back. Not his arms. Not anything lower than his throat.
“You are making this weirder, wife,” he drawls.
“You made this weird three days ago.”
“You are the one holding a leash as if about to walk me out like a dog.”
“You need one. A muzzle too.”
His laugh is low and rich enough to make your stomach do something stupid.
You hate that.
Eventually practicality forces change. He cannot get a shirt on without your belt coming off, and you know perfectly well the restraint only works because he is letting it. He could cut leather faster than you could blink if he chose. The knowledge takes some of the triumph out of it, but not enough to stop you from savoring the absurdity while it lasts.
When he is in pants and shoes and finally a shirt, you loosen the belt and step back.
He does not attack. Does not grab. Does not even move first.
He only looks at you, dressed now and more decent, and says,
“I want to take you out.”
You blink.
“As in a date or murder? Both things seem like common suggestions you’d make, ‘gotta check.”
He glares at you like you’re the least funny person alive but he somehow still likes you.
“A date.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“If you’re already deciding for me, why the fuck you ask?”
“Politeness,” he deadpans.
You massage your temples.
“I need to talk to Yaga about what happens if this curse decides to ignore every precedent in recorded history.”
“That can wait until tomorrow.”
“It is tomorrow.”
“Then later.”
You drop your hands and stare at him.
He stares back.
The silence stretches.
The maddening part is that he means it. Entirely. There is no game-face on him right then, none of the obvious needling. He truly wants to take you out like this is the most reasonable use of a day when both of you are technically supposed to be at work.
You should refuse, right?
Instead you think about the ceiling over his bed in the dark. About the squeeze in your chest every time you picture the school making this arrangement permanent if the curse drags on. About how thin your nerves have been for months even before all this. About the fact that you have not had a single uncomplicated day in longer than you want to count.
Your shoulders sag.
“Fine,” you say. “One day.”
His smile then is smaller than usual.
More satisfied than triumphant.
You would later think that might have been your first clue that the day was not going to play fair.
He takes you to brunch first.
Not somewhere sleek and dramatic like you would have guessed. Not the kind of place a man like Sukuna seems built for. He leads you instead to a narrow little family-run spot tucked between two older buildings, with warm wooden tables, handwritten specials on a board out front, and wind chimes at the door that ring softly when you step inside.
The owner looks up from behind the counter and brightens.
“Ah,” she says, as if Sukuna arriving with you is only mildly surprising. “You came back.”
Came back?
You turn to look at him.
He looks annoyed to have been perceived, which answers nothing.
The woman smiles at you next, warm, and asks if you would like the same set he usually orders because it is very good and he has better taste in breakfast than in conversation.
You cannot help it. You laugh.
Sukuna clicks his tongue.
“You are speaking too much.”
“She’s right?” you guess.
The owner pats your hand as she passes you menus anyway, but you end up ordering what she recommended.
It arrives steaming and fragrant and perfect in that quiet, domestic way that hurts a little because it makes the morning feel so normal. Rice soft and warm. Miso rich without being heavy. Fish cooked just right. Pickles bright enough to cut through everything else. Tea that tastes like comfort.
Sukuna eats with the same concentration he brings to everything worthwhile. He does not make small talk. He does, however, move one dish a little closer to you when he notices you like it, and later without comment he switches cups because yours has cooled too much and his is still hot.
You notice.
He notices you noticing.
Neither of you says anything.
After brunch he walks you by the lake because, as he tells you with the gravity of a man announcing military strategy, there is a small festival and apparently “the children are performing useless but interesting tricks.”
The children in question are young sorcerers no older than twelve, gathered on a temporary little stage with banners tied between poles and lanterns waiting to be lit for evening. They are doing theatrical demonstrations of cursed techniques for parents and older siblings and anyone else willing to clap loudly enough to make them feel like legends.
One little girl makes paper charms bloom into tiny birds of light. A boy barely taller than your hip uses his cursed energy to stack stones in midair with all the concentration of a surgeon. Another child produces such a dramatic plume of sparks that the instructor backstage flinches and yells for him to tone it down.
It is heartwarming in the most dangerous way.
Because you forget for stretches at a time.
You forget that this is Sukuna beside you.
You forget he is cursed.
You forget that this is not a date and start treating it like one.
You forget you should not, for your own sake, enjoy spending time with him.
He makes dry, terrible comments under his breath about posture, timing, showmanship. You laugh at them because they are legitimately funny in an assholeish way. He reaches up when you pause under a flowering tree and stare too long at a bloom caught high overhead, and a second later he is handing you the flower like it is nothing to pluck beauty from above your reach. His fingers brush yours when you take it. You tuck it behind your ear without thinking, and when you look back at him he is already looking.
The warmth that moves through you then is smaller than embarrassment and deeper than simple pleasure — something far more dangerous.
Something with roots.
He keeps close all afternoon.
Sometimes he holds your hand with one of his, enveloping it entirely, your fingers nearly disappearing in his grip. Sometimes one arm rests around your waist while the others hang free or carry whatever stupid little thing he bought you after you lingered too long near a stall. At one point you catch yourself leaning into that arm without realizing it. At another you say something half under your breath and he bends immediately, closer, because he refuses to make you repeat yourself into the air between your heights.
These are little things.
That is why they work so well.
By the time evening gathers properly over the lake and lights come on in strings over the water, you are tired in that pleasant, dissolving way that comes from being cared for just enough to stop fighting yourself.
Dinner is nicer, you admit.
He picks a place with a private little table near a wide window looking over the city, the skyline reflecting in dark glass as the night deepens outside. The room is low-lit and elegant without being stiff or corny. Wine arrives. Then more wine. The meal is expensive enough that you only realize how much when you look at the menu after already ordering, and Sukuna treats your quiet alarm with total indifference.
“You are not paying,” he says and it’s final.
You won’t argue, your salary as a teacher is not the best one and both of you know it.
The red wine is good. Very, very good. It loosens the last knots in your shoulders and paints a soft heat under your skin that has nothing to do with him, except that he watches the effects of it with an expression you cannot decipher.
You both talk more over dinner than you have in any corridor or mission debrief in all the time you have known each other.
Not about the curse.
About food. Teaching. Which students might be dead by thirty if they keep making the same idiotic decisions. The most absurd mission reports you have both ever had to file. Why Nanami’s handwriting somehow looks judgmental. Why Gojo is not allowed to choose restaurant reservations anymore after the incident with the live eel. The fact that Sukuna apparently knows far more about seasoning than you ever imagined and seems personally insulted by bland soup.
He says something so dry about Yaga’s face when first-years improvise that wine almost comes out your nose.
You laugh until your eyes sting.
He watches you do it.
And again, because the day keeps cheating, you forget.
Afterward you end up back by the lake from earlier, the festival quieter now, most families gone home, lanterns burning low and the full moon reflected over the dark water like a second world laid flat beneath the first.
The bench is cool under your thighs.
Sukuna sits beside you, one arm along the back of it behind your shoulders, close but not trapping. The night air carries damp grass, lake water, the faint sweetness of fried batter lingering from the festival stalls, and the clean bite of autumn waiting in the edges.
You are full, warm, a little tipsy, and dangerously relaxed.
When you snort at one of his comments and let your head come to rest on his shoulder, it feels almost inevitable by then.
His shoulder is broad and hard under the fabric of his shirt. Warm. Steady.
He tips his head just enough for his mouth to brush the top of your hair.
You close your eyes.
“This is nice,” you admit quietly. “Would be nicer if it was real.”
There is a pause.
Then his mouth moves again against your hairline, gentler this time.
“What do you mean, if it was real?”
The question threads through you like a pin.
You had not realized you said the second half aloud.
Slowly you lift your head and turn to look at him better.
His face is closer than you expected. Close enough that you can see how the moonlight catches along the bridge of his nose, how the red of his eyes darkens almost toward black at the rims, how his lashes cast faint shadows you hate noticing on a man you would usually rather strangle.
You take a breath.
“You’re cursed, Sukuna,” you say softly.
Nothing in his face changes.
Encouraged by the stillness, by the wine, by the day, by the terrible hope that honesty might be kinder than pretending, you keep going.
“You have been cursed for three days,” you tell him. “You believe I’m your wife. There’s nothing I’ve said that convinces you otherwise. It was supposed to wear off by last night, but apparently it didn’t.”
Still no reaction. Not the one you expect.
Your nerves start to prickle.
You push on anyway because you need to get it out before the softness of the day becomes something you cannot separate from wanting.
“Today was good,” you say and it’s almost painful. “Really good. And it would have been…” You stop, swallow, start again with more effort. “It would have been nice if it were true. But it isn’t. It’s a curse acting through you. It’s not you.”
His gaze lowers a fraction.
To your mouth.
You only notice because the movement is slight enough to make your own breath catch.
Then he leans closer.
His hand comes up and cups your face — you do not know when it moved there.
One second your skin is bare to the night air, the next his palm is warm and broad against your cheek, thumb resting just beneath your lower lip. His lower eyes stay on your mouth. His upper pair fix on your eyes with unnerving steadiness.
He does not kiss you, though, but his lips are close enough to brush yours.
He only says, in a low voice meant for you and you alone,
“I know.”
Your thoughts stumble.
“What?”
“I know I was cursed.” The pad of his thumb drags once, slow, over your lower lip. “I remember it. It burned out last night.”
The world tilts.
You stare at him without understanding.
The moonlight, the bench, the lake, the city lights beyond it — all of it feels suddenly too sharp and too distant at once, as if the scene has pulled away from you.
“What are you talking about?”
“It ended when we slept,” he says, almost idly. “This morning.”
Your face goes cold and hot at the same time. You think you will be sick.
The entire day unwinds in one sickening rush. Bedroom. Kitchen. Brunch. The old woman. The flower. His hand at your waist. The wine. The bench. Every soft thing. Every quiet thing. Every moment you let your guard down because you believed the kindness belonged to something false and therefore could hurt less when it vanished.
He watches the realization spread through you with rapt attention.
And because he is not finished, apparently there is some rotten part of him that finds the blade prettier when it twists, he goes on.
“I wanted to see,” he says, “how far you would go with me.”
You do not move.
Do not blink.
Do not breathe.
Something in your chest has started to crack, and he either does not hear it or does and keeps speaking to turn the crack into broken shards.
“It would be frowned upon, you see,” he continues, voice lightly amused now, but feels like he’s chiding you with a layer of mockery, “if the school learned you were willing to take advantage of a cursed teacher just to spend a pleasant day, and make out with him all night long… then maybe even let him fuck you until morning comes.”
The words slap harder than if he had struck you.
He is grinning when he says it.
Wicked, sick man.
“So I decided to be kind,” he murmurs. “And spare you that embarrassment.”
His thumb moves over your lip again.
You blink.
That is all, at first. Just a blink. The world slows strangely around the motion, as if your body has to relearn how to exist one function at a time.
Blink. Breathe. Hear. Feel.
Then feeling arrives.
Shock first, thin and bright, taut like your skin is too tight suddenly.
Then confusion, trying uselessly to catch up.
Then humiliation.
Then something uglier than hurt because it comes wrapped in grief for a thing that was never real and anger at yourself for selfishly wanting it anyway. Anger at him for offering it consciously and then taking it away in favor of making you look stupid. Anger at the day. Anger at every tiny domestic softness that now curdles in hindsight because he knew.
He knew and let you lean and laugh and hope and soften while he stood there watching you do it.
You had looked at him and thought maybe.
You had looked at him and wondered if some corner of those cursed affections might overlap with a real feeling he would never name otherwise.
You had let yourself believe he could be touched by tenderness instead of only entertained by it.
Monster, something in you says with perfect clarity.
Before the word fully finishes, your cursed technique is already in motion.
The blast of it leaves you in one violent pulse.
It catches him square and hard — full force.
One second he is close enough for you to smell the wine on his breath and sandalwood on his collar. The next he is torn off the bench and flung sideways into the grass with enough force to wrench his hand from your face and jolt the whole bench under you.
He lands badly, body twitching as your technique overruns his senses. You know exactly what it does because you designed it to stop men like him when battle makes them too hungry and too pleased with themselves. It scatters the edges of perception. It turns the mind syrup-thick. Makes coordination lag. Thought blur. The aftereffect feels like the worst hangover in the world dragged through a battlefield.
He will recover.
Of course he will recover.
But not immediately.
You are already on your feet.
He says your name once, slurred just enough by the technique to sound wrong.
You do not stop.
The bench, the moonlit lake, the city, the dinner, the flower tucked behind your ear at some point during the walk — all of it becomes unbearable in the space of a single heartbeat.
You turn and walk away. Then faster. Then faster still until walking cannot contain what is inside you and it breaks open into a run.
You run.
Your shoes slap hard against the pavement. Night air tears cold through your lungs. Your bag bangs against your hip. Your eyes burn and then blur and then the first tears finally spill hot enough that they only make you angrier.
Nothing can hurt him, you tell yourself as if the thought is a railing you can grip.
Nothing can truly hurt Sukuna.
He will wake miserable and furious and completely alive. He will go back to school. He will teach. He will sneer. He will recover because monsters like him always do.
But you—
You have to live through tomorrow.
You have to live through the look he will give you when he sees you next. Through the possibility that he says any of it aloud near the wrong person. Through the idea of sitting across from him in a meeting knowing he remembers your head on his shoulder, your laugh at his jokes, the stupid flower in your hair, the confession in your voice when you told him the day would have been nice if it were true, and the implication of that.
You hate him so fiercely that your chest aches with it and you want to scream.
You hate yourself a little too.
For hoping. For relaxing. For wanting more. For not protecting that want better.
That’s on you.
You knew he was cursed. You knew it wasn’t real — couldn’t be. You knew Sukuna was, is, and will always be that infuriating man that you can’t fully stand more than a few hours a day.
Stupid idiot, you think, still running home, why would you believe it was okay to indulge in a lie?
You try, once again, uselessly, to make sense of the last part of your night.
You do not remember the route home in any sensible order.
Not consciously.
You remember fragments. The hard slap of your shoes against the pavement. The way the night air saws into your lungs until breathing turns sharp and ragged and useless. The city lights smear every time tears flood your eyes again. Your pulse beats so hard it makes your vision feel narrow, tunneled, reduced to whatever stretch of sidewalk is directly in front of you.
You remember clutching your purse against your side like it matters. Like anything matters except putting as much distance as possible between your body and that bench, that park, that awful measured voice in your ear telling you he knew, he had known, he had not been cursed for the whole day, he only wanted to see how far you would go.
How far would you go.
The words keep hitting you in waves, each one worse than the last.
Not because you do not understand them. Because you do.
You understand exactly what he did.
He woke up free.
He looked at you that morning, in his kitchen, with your borrowed yukata sliding over your skin and your coffee between your hands and your guard already thinning from two days of soft reprieve, and he chose not to tell you.
He let you worry.
He let you continue managing him, continue excusing the way he touched you, the way he hovered, the way he folded you into his day and into his house and into his goddamn life as if any of it was necessity when it was only amusement.
And worse than that, worse than the humiliation of being tricked, worse than the fact that he sat through brunch and the lakeside festival and dinner and moonlight and wine and your stupid, stupid moment of honesty at the bench—
worse than all of that—
is that you were happy.
You were happy.
The realization keeps gutting you fresh every few steps.
Not miserable. Not merely tolerating him. Not white-knuckling your way through some obligation because Yaga asked and the school needed peace.
Happy.
You let yourself laugh with him.
You let yourself soften.
You let yourself believe, just a little, just enough to be ruined by it, that perhaps the curse had not invented everything from nothing. That perhaps somewhere under all the arrogance and spite and sharpness there was still a shape of tenderness he would one day mean.
And he knew.
He knew, and he kept going.
You nearly collide with someone turning a corner and do not even apologize, just jerk away and keep moving. By the time you make it into your building your legs are trembling with effort and your face feels raw from crying.
The hallway to your apartment swims in and out of focus. Your keys slip once in your hand. Twice. The third time you manage to get the door open, shove yourself inside, and slam it hard enough that the frame rattles.
Silence.
Not the silence of Sukuna’s house. Not the dense, ancient, watching quiet of a place built around a creature too large for normal life.
This is your silence. Thin walls, old pipes, the faint hum of electricity in the kitchen, the tiny familiar scuff in the entryway where you always drag your shoes too close to the wall. It should comfort you immediately.
Instead you stand there with your back to the door and shake.
Every part of you suddenly feels too full. Your skin. Your chest. Your throat. The back of your eyes burns. There is still sandalwood in your clothes from sitting beside him. There is still red wine on your tongue. There is still the remembered pressure of his hand at your face, warm and careful and false, so false you feel sick.
You make it three stumbling steps before your knees threaten to give out. Your purse drops to the floor with a flat, ugly thud. You brace both hands on the edge of the kitchen counter and bow your head over the sink, breathing through your mouth because if you breathe through your nose you catch him everywhere. On the collar of your shirt. In your hair. In the folds of memory.
Your stomach flips so hard you think you might throw up.
Nothing comes.
Only another wave of tears, hot and humiliating and impossible to stop now that they have started.
You scrub at your face with both hands. It does not help. The crying gets quieter, not better. The kind that hurts more because it goes inward, sinks into your ribs and sits there like a stone.
Then the rage and shame and hurt hit in a wave so strong it folds you half over.
“No,” you say out loud to no one.
No.
No more.
No more babysitting the inconsequential idiot. No more being drafted as the school’s answer every time Sukuna’s temper or interest becomes unmanageable. No more standing in the path of a man who thinks other people’s feelings are toys because he was bored enough.
Your phone is still in your bag.
The thought arrives through the haze and hardens into purpose fast enough to keep you upright.
Yaga.
You need Yaga now, before the night ends, before common sense or shame or exhaustion makes you soften your own demand. If you wait until morning, someone will try to talk you down. Shoko will be careful. Nanami will be reasonable. Gojo will joke first and get serious second. Even Suguru, damn him, will probably tip his head and ask whether you want a transfer or simply distance and make you say it twice.
No.
You grab your phone so quickly you nearly drop it. Your thumb misses Yaga’s contact the first time because your hand is shaking. The call rings. Rings again. Again.
He picks up on the fifth attempt, voice rough with age and interrupted sleep.
“What happened.”
No greeting. Just that.
The question alone almost breaks you once again in a single night.
You press the heel of your free hand against your sternum, trying to force the tightness there into something you can speak through.
“I need a transfer.”
A pause.
Then, sharper, more awake,
“What happened.”
You laugh once, and it sounds wrong even to you. Too small. Too frayed.
“I’m not dealing with him anymore. I’m done, Yaga.”
Yaga does not ask who.
You close your eyes so hard sparks dance behind your lids.
“I’m serious. I want out. I want the paperwork started tonight, tomorrow, I don’t care, but I’m not going back into a classroom next to that man and pretending any of this is workable. I am not his babysitter. I am not whatever fucked-up entertainment he thinks I am. I want a transfer, and if I don’t get one, I fucking quit.”
The apartment is so quiet around you that Yaga’s silence hums through the phone like pressure.
When he finally speaks, his voice has lost all remnants of sleep.
“Did he hurt you?”
The question lands in the center of your chest.
The answer is simple and at the same time is so complicated.
He did not break your bones. He did not trap you in chains. He did not force you into anything your body fought.
What he did is somehow harder to hold and harder to explain, because there was consent in the places that matter most and no honesty underneath it. There was care that felt real and tenderness that maybe was real and mockery laid over all of it like poison.
You sit down hard on the kitchen chair because your legs finally stop asking permission and give out anyway.
“He let me believe it,” you say, staring at nothing. “He let me believe he was still cursed.”
Yaga exhales, very slowly.
You keep going before you can lose your nerve. The words spill uglier now, less controlled.
“He knew. Since this morning. Maybe earlier. He knew and kept the façade, he took me out all day and let me think—” Your voice snaps. You swallow and try again. “He let me think it was the curse. Then he told me he wanted to see how far I’d go.”
Another silence.
You know how you sound— how you look.
Stupid. Naive. Not entitled to any of that turmoil under your ribcage because, once again, you were the one responsible for your actions, for the choice of believing in a lie as if it could have any other outcome than fucking you up emotionally.
You think that it all would have been so much better if he simply had chosen to push you away the instant the curse ran out.
Then… what? Maybe you could have taken a deep breath and go back to your apartment, to your old life, to the school, to your students.
It wouldn’t have hurt you, because you would be able to bury it, lock it inside a little box and shove it deep down yourself and never touch it again. Right?
You could bear the annoyance of missing his cursed self if it came to be just it.
You think the worst that it could have happened would be you telling him you would forever hold all that curse-induced-tenderness over his head if he ever pissed you off.
That is a very comfortable delusion to live in.
Unfortunately, Yaga snaps you out of it.
When Yaga speaks again, his tone is low and measured in the dangerous way it gets when he is angry enough to be careful with it.
“Where are you.”
“At home.”
“Stay there tonight.”
“As if I planned to do anything else,” you scoff.
“You won’t come in tomorrow.”
You laugh again, more bitterly this time.
“Thank you for the permission.”
“I’m not joking.”
Neither are you.
He seems to hear that in your breathing, because the next thing he says is gentler than you expect.
“The paperwork will be started by the end of the week. I’ll handle your classes until then.”
Something in you goes loose at that. Not relief exactly. Relief would be lighter. This feels more like one wall inside you being allowed to collapse without crushing the rest.
You rub at your mouth with your fingertips.
“Good.”
“I’ll need a formal statement.”
“You’ll get one.”
“And I want Shoko to check on you.”
That makes you grimace on instinct.
“I’m not injured.”
“I did not say you were.”
You say nothing.
His voice softens by a hair.
“You are one of my best teachers. I’m not losing you because he doesn’t know how to behave like a human being.”
The words strike somewhere too deep for your current state. Your eyes fill again. You press your thumb hard against the edge of the table until it hurts.
“Thank you,” you say, and hate how small it sounds.
“We’ll talk tomorrow.”
The call ends.
You lower the phone and stare at the dead screen until it dims in your hand.
Then you stand up and head for the bathroom because you cannot bear your own skin for one second longer.
The shower goes scalding hot before you step under it.
You strip in a trail from hallway to tile, all quick, angry movements — shirt turned inside out, belt unthreaded with jerking fingers, pants kicked aside, socks peeled off damp with sweat. The smell of the day rises out of the discarded clothes as soon as they hit the floor.
Wine. Restaurant smoke. Night air. Him.
You shove the pile into the laundry basket like it has been infected by the plague.
The water hits your shoulders hard enough to sting. Good. You tilt your face up into it until it runs over your closed eyes and mouth and nose and down your throat when you accidentally inhale wrong. The heat is almost painful. Still not enough.
You scrub yourself with the rough side of a washcloth until your skin goes pink.
Neck first.
Shoulders.
The curve behind your ear where he kissed you that morning, still half asleep and smug and devastatingly warm. You go over that place again and again until the skin there throbs.
Then your wrists. Your waist. Your sides.
Everywhere his hands rested with unbearable familiarity. Everywhere you let them.
Your throat tightens so badly you have to brace one palm against the wall.
Because that is the true rot under the humiliation, the thing you cannot scrub off no matter how hard you try.
You wanted it.
Not the mockery. Not the trick. Not being tested like some indulgence he could toy with because he had a free day and a monstrous sense of humor.
But the rest of it.
The arm around your shoulders on the bench.
The flower from the tall tree.
The private table by the window.
The ridiculous small family restaurant where the old woman knew what he always ordered and smiled at you like you belonged in the seat across from him.
The cooking. The warm bed. The stupid, infuriating way he bent around you in sleep like it was obvious that was where you should be.
You drop the washcloth and cover your face with both hands.
A broken sound tears itself out of you and disappears under the rush of water.
By the time you shut the shower off, your skin feels over-scrubbed and you are no cleaner where it counts.
You dress in the oldest pajamas you own, the ones stretched soft with years of washing. You braid your damp hair with clumsy fingers. You make tea you do not drink. You sit on your couch and stare at your phone while messages begin to arrive.
First Shoko.
Yaga called. Are you alone?
You type back immediately.
Yes.
A moment later:
Do you want company or not.
You stare at the words.
Shoko is the only person you know who can make comfort sound like a clinical procedure. Something about it steadies you. You type no, then erase it. Type yes, then erase that too. Eventually you settle on:
Not tonight. Tomorrow maybe.
Her response comes almost at once.
Fine. Lock your door.
Then Gojo, predictably several minutes later.
Heard you nuked him into the grass. Kinda proud of you.
Under any other circumstance, you would roll your eyes so hard it hurt. Tonight the message just makes your chest twist.
You set the phone face down on the coffee table and sit there in the dim light until the tea goes cold and your body starts nodding with exhaustion.
Sleep, when it finally takes you, is too thin and too mean.
You dream of the park bench first.
Not the reveal immediately. The few seconds before it, when you are leaning against him under the moon and the day still feels intact. In the dream you can feel the exact warmth of his shoulder under your temple, the easy weight of his arm behind you, the hum of distant festival lanterns being taken down across the lake. Your own voice says this is nice, and in the dream his silence before answering stretches on too long.
Too long.
Too long.
Then he laughs, and the bench gives way beneath you.
The second dream is worse because it is gentle, and it frightens you.
You are back in his bed in the gray edge between night and morning, one of his arms under your pillow, another braced over your waist, your face buried in the broad plane of his chest while he dozes around you like a living wall. It feels so good in the dream that when you wake with a violent jolt, the absence of it is its own fresh wound.
You lie there in darkness, breath ragged, fists knotted in the sheets.
Morning arrives heavy and damp with your own sweat.
Your body feels like you lost a fight.
Your eyes ache. Your throat is sandpaper. Every muscle is tight from sleeping badly. You shuffle to the kitchen for water and stand there in bare feet and old cotton, staring at the pale early light across your counter, trying to remember what normal life is supposed to feel like.
Your phone buzzes again just as you swallow aspirin dry. Shoko.
I’m coming over in an hour. Not optional.
You do not answer because there is no point.
True to form, she arrives fifty-eight minutes later with coffee, cigarettes she does not smoke but somehow always carries, and the face of a woman who is already tired of everyone involved.
You let her in wearing an oversized sweater and no patience. She walks past you like she lives here, sets the coffee on the table, glances once at your face, and says,
“You look horrible.”
“You too.”
“Yeah, but I earned it.”
That almost gets a laugh out of you. Almost.
She looks at your untouched breakfast on the counter and then back at you.
“Eat something before I start being a doctor on purpose.”
“I hate when you use your gifts for evil.”
She hands you the coffee. You take it because refusing Shoko when she is in this mood is a waste of energy.
For a while she lets the quiet stand. You sit at opposite ends of the couch, cups between your hands, the apartment filled with the scent of bitter coffee and the faint medicinal clean smell that always clings to her after long hours in the infirmary.
When she finally speaks, it is without preamble.
“He’s fine.”
Your grip tightens on the mug.
“Good.”
“He woke up with what he described as ‘a pounding skull and everyone around him being irritatingly loud.’”
That one does pull a weak, unwilling huff from you.
Shoko watches your face carefully over the rim of her cup.
“He asked where you were.”
You look away toward the window.
“And?”
“And I told him none of his business.”
“Thank you.”
“He didn’t like that.”
You sip the coffee just to have something to do. It is too hot. You burn your tongue and welcome the pain.
Shoko leans back, one ankle crossing over the other.
“Yaga filled me in enough to know he was an asshole, but not enough to know whether you want to talk about it.”
You stare into the dark surface of the coffee.
“He told me the curse ended on the second night.”
Her expression shifts, something cold sharpening behind her eyes.
“He admitted that?”
“He said he wanted to see how far I’d go.”
Her jaw sets.
You laugh once, quiet and ugly.
“Apparently the answer was far enough to let him take me on a full-day date before he decided to be honest.”
“That is a very generous way to describe emotional sadism.”
You wince and press the mug more firmly into your palms.
Shoko’s voice softens just enough to matter.
“Did you want the date?”
The honesty that rises is immediate and painful.
“Yeah.”
“That doesn’t make you stupid.”
“It feels like it does, actually,” you grimace at the black coffee. “I knew, everyone knew, it was not real since the beginning.”
“It doesn’t. You’re allowed to have feelings, just so you know.”
You look at her then. Really look. Her face is tired but steadier than anything in you right now. Clinical when needed, merciful when it counts.
“I knew he was cursed,” you say. “I knew it wasn’t real, at least not the way he thought it was. I kept telling myself that. Every time he touched me or said something that made my head go light or did one of those terrible little considerate things that made me forget myself for five minutes, I kept telling myself this is a curse, this is a curse, this is a curse.” Your throat tightens again. “And then yesterday was just… good. It was so good, Shoko.”
She says nothing.
The permission in that silence breaks something open.
“I let myself enjoy it,” you whisper. “I let myself think maybe that still counted for something. Maybe if the curse fell away there would still be a little of it left. Maybe he liked me. Maybe he—” You stop before the word means too much. “I don’t know. Something. Anything. And he sat there all day knowing exactly what I believed.”
Shoko sets her cup down with deliberate care.
“Then your anger is appropriate.”
You swallow.
“So is the transfer,” she adds.
You blink at her.
She shrugs one shoulder.
“I like having you at the school. The students like you. But I’m not going to ask you to keep working next to someone who decided your feelings were a toy.”
The bluntness of it hurts. The accuracy hurts more.
You bend forward, elbows on knees, cup hanging loose between your hands.
“I hate that I miss him already.”
That surprises her enough that she actually pauses.
You laugh without humor.
“Not him. Not really him. Not the real him, I guess. I miss the version that made tea without asking how I took it because he already knew. The one that fixed my yukata and cooked and hovered like an overgrown cat and looked at me like I was the center of whatever room we were in.” You press the heels of your hands against your eyes. “I miss something that might not have existed for even two days.”
Shoko’s answer is quiet.
“That’s grief.”
The word lands clean.
Too clean.
You lower your hands slowly.
“Feels dramatic.”
“Grief usually does from the inside.”
She stays for most of the morning. Not hovering, just there. She makes you eat toast. She helps you draft the formal statement for Yaga because your first version reads like a cursed energy discharge in written form and your second dissolves halfway through when you realize you have to put his name next to the phrase intentional deception.
By noon, the statement is sent.
By afternoon, the transfer process is real enough to give you nausea.
Kyoto is the most likely option. Temporary at first, Yaga says in his reply, until they determine whether you want it permanent. He uses too many careful words around Sukuna without naming him directly. Professional conduct. Breakdown of trust. Incompatible assignment conditions.
You read those lines three times and feel colder each time.
Breakdown of trust sounds so clean for what happened.
It sounds like paperwork. Like two adults having a scheduling disagreement.
It does not sound like lying beside a man for two nights and letting him stroke idle shapes into your back while you drift off because you think the need in him is borrowed and temporary and therefore safe to survive.
It does not sound like hearing that same man tell you under the moon that he knows, he remembers, he wanted to see.
By evening you are so tired your bones hurt again.
Gojo calls. You nearly ignore him. Then you answer because if you do not, he will appear at your window somehow — he did before, he would do it again.
“I brought cake,” he announces.
“Okay?”
“You don’t seem excited. It’s cake!”
“What am I supposed to say? You’re not here, I’m not having your cake.”
“I could be.”
“You’re a menace.”
“I’m your favorite menace.”
“Not even close.”
His humor fades a touch.
“How bad is it?”
You close your eyes and sink farther into the couch.
“Bad enough.”
“I can go kill him a little. Would that help?”
Despite yourself, your mouth twitches.
“Yaga would write you up.”
“Worth it.”
You are quiet long enough that he stops trying to be funny.
When he speaks again, he sounds more like Satoru and less like Gojo.
“You don’t have to explain it to me if you don’t want to. But I need you to know nobody in that building thinks this is on you.”
Your throat tightens for the thousandth time since last night.
“Students will talk.”
“They always do.”
“They’ll say I spent three days at his house.”
“They’ll also say I eat three thousand calories of sugar before noon and half of that is true.”
You bark out a laugh before you can stop it.
There is victory in the silence on his end.
Then, softer,
“Let them talk. Anyone who matters will hear the truth from us.”
Us.
You press the heel of your hand into your chest, right over the ache there.
“Thank you.”
“Want me to tell you something annoying?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Nanami threatened to punch Sukuna in the throat if he so much as looked smug this morning.”
That pulls another startled laugh out of you, weak but real. Nanami is not one for threats or casual violence.
“Shoko had to intervene,” he continues, clearly pleased with himself now. “Suguru said very politely that if Sukuna intended to say anything about the situation in public, he should first decide how much dignity he was prepared to lose.”
You rub at your face.
“Why are all of you telling me this like it’s supposed to help.”
“Because it should. You’re not alone in this.”
He lets that settle before adding, deliberately light,
“Also because Nanami furious is a top-tier visual. Really hot. You should have seen.”
You let him talk for another ten minutes. Mostly nonsense. Mostly stories about students setting small fires during training. It helps in the way background music helps when you do not want to hear your own thoughts too clearly.
After the call, the apartment feels less like a sealed jar.
Not better. Just survivable.
The next few days pass in odd, broken segments.
You do not go to campus.
Yaga sends forms. You fill them out. Your handwriting starts neat and gets more vicious with every page.
Shoko drops by twice more. Once with clothes she had left in the staff room. Once with grading from your substitute because the woman assigned your classes has no idea how to read your shorthand notes. You end up marking essays at your kitchen table in borrowed quiet, red pen stabbing into paper harder than necessary while Shoko smokes out the window and occasionally says things like “this kid has no sense of paragraph structure” and “if you transfer permanently I’m stealing your good stapler.”
Suguru sends tea with no note.
Nanami sends a bottle of expensive headache medicine with the message “For the next time he decides to be insufferable within your vicinity.” Which is either dry humor or a threat, and from him it could honestly be both.
Sukuna sends nothing.
That should comfort you a bit, but all it does is make you bitter.
Because your mind, traitorous thing that it is, starts filling the silence with possibilities.
Is he laughing about it? Has he already moved on because to him it was a single entertaining day and you are the only fool still carrying it? Is he angry? Amused? Annoyed by the paperwork? Indifferent?
Indifferent is the one that hurts most.
On the fourth morning Yaga asks you to come in after hours to clear your office before the transfer is officially logged.
You stare at the message for a long time.
Part of you wants to refuse. Have someone else box your books. Let your desk sit untouched until moss grows over it.
But the thought of strangers touching your lecture notes, your annotated copies of technique manuals, the mug one of the third-years painted for you as a joke last winter, your little stack of confiscated novelty charms and ridiculous stress toys taken from students during exams—
No.
Those are yours.
So you go.
The school in late afternoon feels wrong with summer light turning long across the grounds and you arriving like a visitor.
Your shoes know the paths anyway. Up the stone steps. Past the side corridor. Across the courtyard where the younger students usually gather with too much energy and nowhere to put it.
You see none of them now. Classes are done. Training mostly over. The buildings hold that strange between-time hush where a school is still full of people but no longer loud.
Your office door sticks the same way it always has.
You push it open and stop on the threshold.
Everything is exactly where you left it.
The stack of papers angled wrong on your desk. The scarf over the back of your chair. Your chalk tin open by the window. Half a pack of throat lozenges in the top drawer. The sight of it all squeezes your chest so hard you nearly step back out again.
This was your place.
Not just employment. Not just a room. A small square of order you built inside a hectic life. Lessons planned here. Students encouraged here. Failures absorbed here and turned into strategies for next time.
You set the empty box Yaga gave you on the desk and stand there, breathing through your nose, until the urge to cry passes.
Then you start.
Books first.
Files.
Desk drawer.
The silly mug gets wrapped in old worksheets because you did not bring newspaper.
You are halfway through your bottom cabinet when a knock lands lightly against the doorframe.
You look up too fast and pain flashes behind your eyes.
It is not him.
Just one of your second-years, hovering uncertainly with two others behind him. Their faces shift from surprise to embarrassment the second they see the box.
“Sensei,” the boy says, voice smaller than usual. “We heard you were here.”
You straighten slowly.
“You’re supposed to be gone.”
One of the girls fidgets with the hem of her sleeve.
“We wanted to say goodbye.”
The sentence hits hard enough that you have to look away for a second.
“It’s not forever.”
Which is true in the bureaucratic sense and maybe false in every other one.
The three of them shuffle inside anyway. Awkward. Earnest. Too young to know how to make loss graceful and therefore doing it honestly, which is worse.
The tallest one sets a paper bag on your desk.
“We got pastries.”
“We are bribing you not to forget us,” the girl says, attempting sternness and failing because her eyes are already shining.
Your throat closes.
You end up sitting on the edge of your desk while they talk in overlapping bursts about stupid class moments from the year. About the time you made them redo an entire exercise because their formations were sloppy and one of them cried from frustration and you sat with her after until she got it right. About the first-years who are terrified of Nanami. About whether Kyoto students are snobs. About whether you will come back for the joint training event in winter.
You answer what you can. You smile where it does not hurt too much. When they finally leave, the pastry bag sits warm in your hands from where one of them nearly forced it on you.
The silence after them is unbearable for a full minute.
Then footsteps sound again in the corridor.
Heavy. Familiar. Unhurried.
Your body knows before your mind lets the knowledge form.
Every muscle in you goes rigid.
He fills the doorway a second later.
There is no curse in him now. No dream-sick fixation. No fevered certainty disguised as domestic calm.
Just Sukuna.
Tall enough to make the frame around him look insufficient. Broad shoulders catching the last amber light from the hall. Tattoos stark against visible skin above the collar of his uniform. All four eyes fixed on you with an intensity that makes your stomach clench in instant, furious memory.
He looks annoyingly fine.
You hate that first.
Then you hate that the next thought is relief.
Because he is fine. Because your technique did not do lasting damage. Because the part of you that still cares reaches for confirmation before anger can cut it down.
His gaze flicks once to the box on your desk.
“Leaving.”
Not a question.
You set the pastry bag down with deliberate care.
“Congratulations. You still know how to identify obvious things.”
The corner of his mouth tilts in a way that would have wrecked your composure a week ago.
Not now.
Not now.
He steps inside and closes the door behind him.
“No.”
He stops.
The quiet that follows is knife-thin.
You keep your voice level through force alone.
“You don’t get to close doors around me anymore.”
For the first time since he entered, something shifts in his face. Not enough to be guilt. That would be too human, too easy. But something. A recognition, maybe, that the room is not his to shape.
He opens the door again.
Better.
You turn back to your cabinet because looking at him directly right now might make you either shake or throw something, and you refuse to grant him either.
“If you’re here to gloat, do it quickly. I have work,” you say flat, refusing any feeling to bleed into your voice.
His voice, when it comes, is lower than usual.
“I did not come to gloat.”
You let out a small, disbelieving breath through your nose.
“Then your self-awareness has improved with the concussion I hope I gave you.”
He says your name.
Just that.
No title. No taunt. No wife in that maddening dark voice that had gotten under your skin so badly you still wake hearing echoes of it.
Your hands still.
You close the cabinet harder than necessary and straighten.
“Stop.”
He goes quiet again.
The hurt of it surprises you.
That he listened.
That he can listen when he wants to, and chose not to when it really mattered.
You turn to face him fully at last.
The distance between you is not much. Far too little for how much space you feel you need.
“What do you want?”
His eyes move over your face with that same terrible attentiveness from his house, only cleaner now, stripped of the curse’s haze. You can see the calculation in it. The restraint. He is choosing his words for once.
It almost makes you angrier.
“I wanted to know whether you meant it.”
You stare.
He continues, voice even.
“The transfer.”
The shock of the question is so absurd it turns instantly into fury.
“You thought I was bluffing?”
“I thought you were angry.”
“I am angry.”
“I can see.”
The agreement is so calm it feels like insult.
Your laugh comes out sharp as broken glass.
“You thought this was something I’d cool down from in a few days and what? Go back to cleaning your bullshit and babysitting you?”
He does not answer fast enough.
That is answer enough.
Something in you surges up hard and hot and final.
You step toward him before you can decide not to, jamming a finger into the center of his chest.
“You do not get to stand there and look confused, Sukuna. You do not get to act like this outcome appeared from the sky. You lied to me! You did it deliberately because you’re a sick fuck.”
His gaze drops briefly to your hand against him. He does not move it.
“You knew the curse was gone.”
“Yes.”
“You let me believe—”
“Yes.”
The clean, unashamed honesty of it nearly blinds you with rage.
“You let me think all of it was because you were infected with some ridiculous fixation out of your control! You let me keep managing my own behavior around you on false information and for what? You let me speak to you honestly while you knew exactly what I believed!” Your voice is rising now. You do not care. “And then you told me you wanted to see how far I’d go with you because you thought it would be funny to toy with my feelings? Fuck you!”
His jaw tightens.
Good.
You want some part of this to reach him beneath all that stone and appetite and ego.
“You want to know if I meant the transfer?” you say. “Yes. Because I can deal with you being cruel on a daily basis. I can deal with you being arrogant. I can deal with you being the most insufferable bastard in any room you walk into. That is normal. That is Tuesday. What I cannot do is let you make a spectacle out of my trust and some stupid vulnerability and then expect me to walk back into work beside you like nothing happened. I’m transferring because I can’t fucking stand you anymore.”
The last words come out rougher than you intended. Emotion finally catches on the edges.
You hate that too.
Sukuna’s face changes almost imperceptibly.
Not softer, but the satisfaction you expected is absent. The smug amusement. The sharp, pleased cruelty.
In its place is something more complicated and therefore less bearable.
“I did not make a spectacle of it,” he says but it does nothing for you.
The understatement is so monstrous you almost laugh again. Instead you just look at him.
At the man who carried you out of a broken hallway because a curse told him you were his. At the man who cooked for you and fixed your clothes and let you fall asleep wrapped around him. At the same man who sat across from you at dinner, wine in hand, already free, and watched you bloom under something he knew you believed to be false.
“You don’t even hear yourself,” you say quietly.
He is silent.
The anger does not drain. It cools. Settles. Becomes something steadier and more lethal than shouting.
“I liked that day,” you tell him coolly, and the admission hurts enough that your eyes sting instantly. “That is the part you don’t understand because… I don’t even know why you don’t understand. If I’d hated it, this would be so simple. I liked it. I liked the brunch and the park and the dinner and the stupid flower and sitting there by the lake thinking for a few hours that maybe I could have something easy for once before it maybe disappeared and we went back to the same bullshit. I liked you.”
The last word hangs there between you, bare and ugly and true.
All four of his eyes narrow, not in anger but in concentration so intense it makes your skin prickle.
You keep going because if you stop now you will never get it all out.
“And you took that knowing it rested on a lie for fun instead of just coming clean. So no, this is not me being dramatic. This is me refusing to keep working next to someone who can see my trust and think the best use for it is to test how much more he can get off on stepping over it again and again.”
For the first time since you started, Sukuna looks wrong-footed.
It would almost be satisfying if you were not suddenly so tired.
He says your name again, slower.
You step back before he can decide what to do with that.
“Fuck off.”
“I did not lie about all of it.”
You go very still.
There it is.
The thing you dreaded almost more than mockery.
Not denial. Not dismissal. Not him laughing in your face and calling you a fool.
Something worse.
A partial truth.
A hand reaching back toward the wound as if clarification might help.
You feel your expression close all at once.
“That is not your choice to salvage.”
His mouth sets hard.
“You think I would spend my day like that with someone I did not want.”
The words slam into you with enough force to make your breath hitch.
Not because you want to hear them.
Because you do. Gods, you do.
Because some starving, humiliated part of you has been waiting since the bench for exactly this cruelty — the possibility that the affection was real, that he was real, that only the context was false, and that somehow makes it better.
It does not.
It makes it worse.
You straighten your spine until it hurts.
“That would have been useful information before you decided to play with me.”
Something sharp flashes across his face then, quick as steel catching sun. Anger, maybe. Or the wounded pride of being told no in a language he cannot parry.
“I was not playing with you.”
“No?” Your voice goes cold. “Then what do you call it when a man keeps a woman in the dark on purpose to see how much tenderness he can pull out of her before she notices he’s just messing with her?”
He says nothing.
You nod once.
“Exactly.”
The silence expands. Outside in the corridor someone laughs far away, unaware that the air in this room could cut.
When Sukuna speaks again, his tone is lower, stripped back in a way you have heard only rarely, usually in battle just before violence.
“I misjudged.”
You almost laugh at the poverty of that.
“Yes,” you say. “You did.”
He looks at the box again. At the books. At the visible proof that consequences have mass.
“You would leave the school for this?”
The phrasing does it. Not the content. The phrasing.
For this.
As if the injury is abstract. As if the cost is unfortunate but puzzling. As if your leaving is the extreme variable rather than his choice.
Your hands start to shake again, this time from anger alone.
“I would leave the school because I can’t teach well while flinching every time I hear your footsteps in the corridor,” you say. “I would leave because I refuse to stand in a staff room beside someone who knows exactly how badly he humiliated me. I would leave because I worked too hard to build a life I respect just to let you turn me into your private joke.”
That lands.
You see it land.
He goes still in the dangerous way he does when something finally pierces the armor enough to matter.
“You were not—” he pauses, recalculates. “You are not a joke to me.”
You believe him.
You believe he means that exactly as spoken, and that the gap between his meaning and the damage is vast enough to swallow cities.
You look at him for a long moment, this impossible man with too many eyes and too much power and too little understanding of what other people’s tenderness costs them, and something in you finally gives up trying to bridge the distance.
“It doesn’t matter,” you mutter.
His jaw tightens again.
“It matters to me.”
There is no point pretending that does not hit.
It does. It hits because it is too late, because it may be honest, because you wanted something like that from him so badly without ever letting yourself name it.
You close your eyes once, briefly, then open them again.
“If it mattered to you,” you say carefully, “you should have acted like it before.”
He has no answer for that.
At last.
No answer. No clever cruelty. No smug turn of phrase. Nothing.
Just a man built like a disaster standing in the doorway of your office while the reality of his own behavior sits between you too heavy for either of you to step around.
You turn away first.
Not because you are yielding.
Because you are done.
You pick up another stack of papers and lower them into the box with painstaking care. Your fingers are clumsy now, adrenaline wearing off too fast. The room feels colder.
Behind you, he does not move for so long that when he finally does, the sound of fabric shifting makes your whole body tense.
“I will not stop the transfer,” he says.
You nod once without looking at him.
“Good.”
Another pause.
Then, quieter,
“I do not want you to go.”
Your hands stop on the edge of the box.
The words slice too cleanly through everything.
You stare down at your own knuckles whitening against cardboard and refuse to turn around. Refuse to let your face be seen with that fresh ache opening under your ribs.
Because there it is.
The thing you wanted.
Too late.
Too badly timed.
Too compromised to touch.
Tainted.
If he had said it at the bench before the cruelty. If he had said it in the kitchen that morning instead of pressing kisses behind your ear and hiding behind the remains of a curse. If he had said it on the second day when you were half asleep against him and still foolish enough to think softness might survive daylight.
Now it is almost unbearable.
You swallow until your throat works again.
“Then next time you want something,” you say without turning, “try treating it like it matters before you break it, yeah?”
When he leaves, he does it without another word.
You hear the retreat of his steps down the corridor. Heavy. Measured. Then gone.
Only then do you let your forehead rest against the edge of the open cabinet and breathe through the hurt until it passes enough for you to keep packing.
By the time you leave campus, the sky is deep blue and the air smells like rain.
The box is heavier than it should be. Your arms ache carrying it to your car.
You set it in the passenger seat and stand there a moment with the driver’s door open, watching the dark windows of the school reflect the last smear of twilight. Somewhere inside those walls is your classroom, your desk, your students’ half-finished projects. Somewhere inside them is Sukuna too, alive and infuriating and maybe more sincere than you want to know now that sincerity costs you this much.
You grip the top of the car door until the metal bites your palm.
Then you get in and drive home.
The transfer paperwork is finalized on Friday.
You sign where told.
Kyoto wants you Monday.
That night your apartment is full of boxes only half packed because you keep stopping to stare at things. Lecture notes. Old student gifts. The scarf from your office chair. The pastry bag from your second-years, now folded flat and tucked inside a book because you could not bring yourself to throw it away.
Rain taps softly at the window.
Your phone lies silent on the table.
You sit cross-legged on the floor amid the pieces of the life you are dismantling and let the ache in your chest settle into something more honest than fury.
Not smaller in any sense, cleaner.
You are hurt.
You are proud enough to leave.
You are angry enough to keep leaving.
And underneath all that, humiliatingly, tenderly, you are mourning something that came into your hands half real and half rotten, something you would have nurtured if only it had been given to you clean.
You rest your head back against the couch and close your eyes.
By morning you will finish packing. By afternoon you will be on the road. By Monday you will stand in a new classroom and introduce yourself to new students and build something useful again because that is what you do. You teach. You steady. You make the next generation stronger than the last. No one, not even Sukuna, gets to take that from you.
But tonight, alone with the rain and the boxes and the ghost of sandalwood finally fading from everything you own, you let yourself grieve the day by the lake, the flower from the tree, the warmth of a body too large to fit comfortably in any ordinary life, and the terrible, impossible fact that if he had only chosen honesty one day sooner, you might have stayed.
☙ ⸻ TAINTED LOVE
sum: you get sent into a mission with Sukuna once again, because Yaga is a son of a bitch. Things go as they usually do, but when you both leave the battle grounds, something has changed. Not something, someone. Sukuna is acting even weirder than his usual unbearable self.
tags: fluff, true form sukuna, everyone is alive and teaching on jujutsu high, yeah sukuna too, you and sukuna are worse than sukuna and gojo in the bickering, this curse is a damn parasitic piece of shit, some yearning happening right there if you pay attention.
Part One: Tainted Love | Part two: Fake Out. | Part Three: Heartbreak Feels So Good
art by: @lacquerheadd
You are starting to think Yaga actively enjoys making your life harder.
There is no other explanation for why, out of every capable sorcerer on staff, he keeps pairing you with Sukuna.
Not Gojo, who would at least turn the whole thing into a joke and buy you coffee after. Not Nanami, who would be quiet and efficient and get the job done with minimal nonsense. Not Shoko, who would smoke through the paperwork and call the whole thing stupid with enough honesty to make it tolerable. Not even Suguru, who has the patience to stand there looking disappointed until people correct themselves.
No. It is always you and Sukuna.
You and the strongest sorcerer in history.
You and the most insufferable bastard currently breathing.
You and the man who looks like a calamity given shape — two meters of muscle and old violence, four arms, four eyes, black markings cutting over his skin like deliberate blasphemy, a mouth in his stomach, arrogance in every movement like the world itself should be grateful he has not split it open.
You hate how he talks to people. You hate the way he looks at colleagues like they are barely worth acknowledging. You hate how he acts like being right excuses being unbearable. You hate how he can do almost anything better than anyone else and never lets anybody forget it.
Most of all, you hate that Yaga keeps looking at both of you like this arrangement is somehow useful.
“He responds to you,” Yaga had said once, standing in his office with his hands folded behind his back while you stared at him in disbelief.
“He responds to me because I tell him to go fuck himself.”
“Yes,” Yaga had answered, completely serious. “That.”
You had looked at him for a long moment, then pointed towards the window, towards the rest of the school grounds as if the answer might be outside.
“There are students here. Children. Young people trying to learn. Why would you keep sending me as if I’m his goddamn handler?”
“Because,” Yaga had said, calm as stone, “when Sukuna gets excited in the field, collateral damage rises.”
“And that’s my problem...?”
“It becomes everyone’s problem.”
You had wanted to strangle him.
Instead you had left with your mission file and a headache already forming, knowing exactly how the day would go. Sukuna would be waiting somewhere he had no business standing, probably with that bored look that made it seem like he found all of this beneath him. He would say something cutting within the first thirty seconds. You would snap back. He would smirk, because apparently pissing you off counts as entertainment. Then you would head out, do the job, and try not to kill each other before the curse did.
That is exactly how it goes.
The abandoned lot lies on the edge of the city, boxed in by half-demolished warehouses and rusting chain-link fences. Wild grass pushes through broken concrete. There are whole stretches where the ground has caved in, exposing older foundations below, damp and black and threaded with cursed residue so thick it prickles over your skin before you even step past the police tape.
The reports say several missing persons over the last three weeks. Homeless people mostly. Two thrill-seeking teenagers. One contractor who ignored every warning and came in after dark because he thought urban legends were good fun until one of them bit him in half.
You stand with your hands in your pockets while the veil settles over the property and mutter,
“This place smells like shit.”
Beside you, Sukuna tilts his head slightly, scenting the air with that infuriatingly calm expression.
“Special-grade adjacent.”
“Glad the mighty king of curses can identify the obvious.”
His upper right hand flexes once, like he considers swatting the comment away and decides against it.
“You should be grateful I am here at all.”
You snort.
“I was doing fine before you decided to become faculty.”
His gaze cuts to you, all four eyes narrowing just enough to say he has noticed the wording.
“Doing fine.”
“Mm.”
“You sound unconvinced by your own lie.”
“And you sound exactly like why I hate staff meetings.”
One of the corners of his mouth lifts. It is the expression of someone amused in a way that promises trouble.
“Stay out of my way,” he says.
“You first.”
Then the ground ahead bursts open.
Concrete erupts in a spray of dust and jagged chunks. A shape drags itself up from the collapsed trench beneath the lot, huge and slick and wrong, all fused mouths and jointed limbs, too many eyes opening across its torso as though a dozen separate curses have been forced together and told to breathe with the same lungs.
It lets out a wet howl that vibrates through the air and into your teeth.
Sukuna steps forward like he has just been offered dessert.
You grab the back of his uniform before he can launch fully into it.
“Hey.”
He glances back over one shoulder.
“Remember,” you say flatly, “the job is exorcism. Not redecorating half the district.”
His sneer deepens.
“You insult me.”
“I babysit you.”
That earns you a low, ugly chuckle, and then he moves.
Watching Sukuna fight is always an ugly kind of miracle.
You hate admitting it, even in the privacy of your own mind, but the truth of him in battle is impossible to deny.
He does not simply engage a curse. He dominates space around it. The entire field shifts to him, bends around his presence, becomes his terrain. It’s mesmerizing to watch how mercurial he becomes as he fights.
The thing lunges and he slips aside with contemptuous ease, lower right hand catching one limb, upper left hand tearing another off at the joint.
Black blood sprays.
The curse shrieks.
He laughs.
Actually laughs.
You swear under your breath and move in before he can get too carried away, cursed technique flaring hot and bright along your arms as you carve through the mass splitting away from the main body. Smaller appendages skitter over the broken concrete, each with snapping teeth, trying to circle behind him and burrow into the blind spots he barely has.
You destroy three in quick succession, pivot under another, and shout,
“Left!”
“I have eyes,” Sukuna says, but one of his hands snaps out anyway and crushes the crawler before it reaches him.
“Use all of them, then.”
You hate him a little more every time you have to watch him enjoy himself.
“Are you done fucking around yet?” you shout, voice carrying over the crash of rubble.
All four of his eyes cut up toward you for a second. The upper pair narrows. The lower pair looks almost amused.
“Come down and do it yourself, then.”
You grit your teeth so hard your jaw pops.
The central body of the curse rears back. One of the mouths in its chest stretches open far wider than anatomy should allow, cursed energy building at its core.
You feel the surge a heartbeat before it fires.
“Sukuna!”
He does not dodge.
Of course he does not dodge.
He plants his feet and meets the blast with a grin that makes your stomach drop, as though the worst thing about him is not his strength but the way he enjoys using it. The impact tears a trench through the lot, pulverizing a warehouse wall behind him, and smoke blooms upward in a thick black cloud.
When it clears, he is still standing there.
Mostly.
His uniform hangs in scorched strips off one shoulder. Burned skin peels back along his side, already knitting itself together under reversed cursed technique, steam curling off him in ghostly streams. One of his eyes blinks through blood. His stomach mouth stretches in something like delight.
You stare for half a second too long.
Then he launches himself into the curse’s open chest.
The lot becomes carnage.
You do not know how many minutes pass, only that your lungs burn by the end of it, your forearms ache with the recoil of your technique, and the entire property looks like a bomb testing site.
The giant curse lies in sections. One piece still twitches. Sukuna stamps his heel through it with almost lazy finality.
Silence comes back in ragged pieces.
Dust drifts through the low evening light. The veil trembles and begins to dissolve. Somewhere beyond the lot, traffic resumes its distant hum, indifferent as ever.
You push sweaty hair out of your face and glare at the destruction.
“Yaga is going to have an aneurysm.”
Sukuna rolls one shoulder. Fresh skin has already replaced the worst of the burns. His eyes remain on the remains of the curse like he is still listening for another round.
“Then he should have sent me alone.”
You give him a look.
“So you could level the entire neighborhood?”
“It would have been faster.”
“It is always ‘faster’ with you. Then someone has to explain to the authorities why half the block vanished.”
He says nothing to that. He only stands there, breathing slow, steam fading from his skin.
That is when you notice something is off.
Not because he is quiet. Sukuna can be quiet, but it's the sort of quiet that makes people nervous because it is never truly absence, only restraint.
This is different.
The fight is over. He should either be needling you or insulting the curse for not being worth the trouble or looking half a second from demanding another hunt just to work the restlessness out of his system.
Instead he is staring.
Not at the remains.
At you.
You frown.
“What.”
His gaze does not move.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
His upper hands flex once at his sides, and for a strange, disjointed second he looks like a man listening to a conversation happening very far away. Then he clicks his tongue and turns from you.
You stare after him.
“What,” you repeat, more to yourself this time.
He does not answer. He only starts walking toward the exit gate.
You tell yourself it is nothing.
You tell yourself he is always odd. That trying to parse Sukuna’s moods is a guaranteed way to ruin an evening. That you are tired, sweaty, and already late getting back to campus, and the last thing you need is to start inventing new ways the king of curses can be bizarre.
By the time you both return to Jujutsu High, night has settled properly.
The school buildings sit under warm exterior lights, calm and orderly in a way that feels almost insulting after the wreck you just left behind. Students move through the corridors in pairs and clusters, some heading back from training, others from evening study. There is the usual mix of chatter and half-suppressed teenage chaos that clings to a boarding school no matter how many cursed objects or monsters exist around it.
You want one shower, one hot drink, and several hours where no one says the name Sukuna anywhere near you.
Instead, you stop by one of the halls because Suguru catches sight of you through an open classroom door and waves you in.
You lean on the frame, arms crossed.
“You look too relaxed. That means either your class went well or Gojo is somebody else’s problem tonight.”
Suguru smiles in that infuriatingly composed way of his.
“Both, actually.”
“Disgusting.”
Three of his students snicker. He ignores them.
“How was the mission?”
“Awful. Filthy lot, ugly curse, Sukuna in a fantastic mood which, as you know, is the worst possible mood for him.”
Suguru’s mouth tilts.
“And yet you are intact.”
“Barely.”
You start to step in fully, already reaching for the back of a chair, when the room shifts.
No. Not the room.
Your awareness of it.
Like someone large has entered your orbit without making a sound.
You turn.
Sukuna stands in the corridor behind you.
Not speaking. Not moving. Just there.
Weirdo.
Four eyes fixed on you.
You stare at him.
“Can I help you.”
“No.”
“Then why are you looming.”
“I am standing.”
“You are being weird.”
One of Suguru’s students abruptly remembers they have somewhere else to be and bolts. Another follows. Suguru watches the exchange with the kind of calm interest usually reserved for storms visible through safe windows.
Sukuna says nothing.
You wait.
He keeps looking at you.
A slow crease forms between your brows.
“What the fuck do you want.”
His expression shifts, faintly, like annoyance at the question itself.
“Nothing.”
“Then leave?” you feel yourself almost snapping from how infuriating this man is.
He does not.
Suguru coughs into one hand, definitely hiding amusement.
“Maybe,” he offers mildly, “he has something to discuss.”
“Then he can discuss it like a person and not like a haunted wardrobe.”
Sukuna’s gaze flicks to Suguru, then back to you.
“You speak too much.”
“You are welcome to fix that by walking away.”
He still does not leave.
You end up standing there another ten seconds just staring at him before you realize this will go nowhere. You ignore him, then, and keep talking to Suguru. Sukuna is still there, not speaking, not leaving, just occupying the space at your side like some huge, unsettling piece of furniture that breathes.
You turn again, already irritated.
“What, Sukuna?”
He looks at you in that same strange way he did at the lot. Intent and still. All four eyes fixed on your face and he seems to be fighting an internal battle you don't wanna know about.
Suguru shifts beside you.
Sukuna’s mouth curls just slightly, not quite a smile.
“Nothing.”
The answer lands wrong once again and you want to rip his face off for it. Instead, you stare at him.
“Then fuck off.”
He stays there another few seconds, then opens the door to the building when you move toward it.
Holds it. Actually holds it.
You stop short.
He lifts his chin, impatient now, as if you are the one making this weird.
You go through because standing there arguing about a door would somehow be even more humiliating. Suguru follows behind you, and you hear him exhale through his nose in quiet disbelief.
Later, when you pass the teachers’ lounge, there is a cup of coffee on the desk you usually steal from.
Black, no sugar. Exactly how you take it.
You look around the room.
Nanami looks up from grading. Shoko is half-asleep in a chair. Gojo is sprawled across the couch in a way that should not be physically possible.
“Did one of you—”
“Not me,” Shoko says without opening her eyes.
Gojo grins, too quick, too wide.
“You’ve got an admirer.”
“Shut up.”
Nanami adjusts his glasses.
“It was Sukuna.”
You stare at the coffee like it might be poisonous.
“He sneered the whole time,” Gojo adds helpfully. “Which somehow made it worse and funnier.”
You do not drink it immediately. You spend almost a full minute glaring at it first, eyebrows pinched so tight your forehead hurts. Then you drink it anyway because you are tired and the coffee smells good and you refuse to let him ruin caffeine for you too.
That evening in the cafeteria he corners you near the drinks machine.
There is no better word for it.
He does not touch you, he is simply too large, too close, too solidly there.
One second you are reaching for a canned tea, the next he is in front of you, broad shoulders blocking the aisle.
Students scatter without being told.
You keep your expression flat through effort and sigh.
“What.” you ask again, flat, thinking of how many times you're gonna have to ask him what the fuck is he doing in a single day.
He tilts his head, studying you.
“Come with me tonight on a date.”
You bark a laugh before you can stop it because what the actual everloving fuck.
“No.”
His upper right eyes narrow.
“You declined too quickly.”
“I’d rather eat a brick than going out with you.”
There is a beat of silence. Then, incredibly, he tries again.
“Tomorrow, then.”
You actually look behind you, just to check if Gojo is hiding somewhere filming this for blackmail.
When you turn back, Sukuna is exactly where he was, waiting.
You feel your eyebrows drawing together again, and now you are actually feeling yourself worry a bit.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He does not answer that either. He only watches you, gaze tracking every tiny shift in your face like he is memorizing it.
You step around him and leave.
It gets harder after that.
Every hallway seems to have him in it. Every room. Every conversation.
You are talking to Shoko in the infirmary and he appears in the doorway, says nothing, leaves only when you do. You are reviewing lesson plans with Nanami and he passes by three times in ten minutes despite having no reason to be in that wing at all.
By the time you find Gojo leaning against the training field fence after class, you are already keyed up and meaner than usual.
“There’s something wrong with him,” you say.
Gojo, for once, does not joke immediately. He watches Sukuna across the field, where he is standing utterly still while first-years pretend not to stare.
“Yeah,” he says. “I noticed.”
“He keeps following me.”
“Mhm.”
“He asked me out, Gojo.”
Gojo’s grin flashes, then fades when he sees your face.
“Okay, yeah. That part’s new.”
You fold your arms hard over your chest.
“Whatever happened in that lot, it didn’t end there.”
Gojo grows a little more serious then, eyes hidden behind his blindfold but attention unmistakably sharp.
“Suguru thought so too.”
“Is it possession?”
“Maybe.” He tips his head. “He’s less murderous than usual.”
“That’s not really comforting.”
“No, I know.” He pauses. “He’s focused, though. Weirdly focused.”
“On me,” you say flatly.
“On you,” he agrees.
Your stomach sinks a little at hearing it aloud.
The day keeps going. You teach. Or try to.
The students are restless, the evening humid, the classroom too warm. Chalk dust clings to your fingers. You are in the middle of explaining the structure of a barrier technique when the door slams open hard enough to hit the wall.
Suguru stands there, breathing a little fast.
Every head in the room turns.
“Come with me,” he says.
You blink and stare at him, wide eyed.
“What?”
“Now.”
Something in his face empties your lungs.
You hand the chalk to the nearest student without even looking.
“Read the next section. Quietly.”
No one argues. Suguru is already crossing the room, already grabbing your arm, not hard enough to hurt but firm enough that it is clear you are moving whether you agree or not.
The corridor outside is too loud.
Banging. Splintering wood. The sharp, ugly sound of impact from somewhere deeper in the building. Another crash follows, heavier this time, and the floor trembles under your shoes.
You wrench your arm back just enough to keep pace beside Suguru instead of behind him.
“What happened?”
He keeps moving.
“Don’t stop.”
“What happened, Suguru?” you try again, hating the suspense.
Another impact. Closer.
Students are being herded the opposite way by other teachers, pale and wide-eyed. The fluorescent lights overhead shiver.
Suguru finally answers, voice clipped.
“Sukuna lost his mind. He thinks we want to keep him from his wife.”
Your blood runs cold.
A roar of ruined plaster tears through the hall ahead. Then a body comes through the wall to your left in a burst of dust and broken concrete.
You jerk back so hard your shoulder smacks the lockers.
Gojo rolls with it, hits the ground, comes up on one knee already grinning like a lunatic even with blood at the corner of his mouth.
“Oh, that’s fun,” he says, wiping his lip with the back of his hand.
You stare at the ragged hole in the wall, heart pounding high in your throat.
Heavy footsteps.
Not hurried. Not wild.
Heavy and deliberate, each one shaking dust from the ceiling.
Suguru moves half a step in front of you without seeming to.
“Satoru,” you call, because your voice is the only thing you can hear clearly.
He stands, brushing concrete grit off his shoulder.
“We think something latched onto him during the mission.”
Your head whips toward him.
“What kind of something?”
“The annoying kind.”
Another step.
The outline filling the ruined classroom beyond is too big to be anyone else.
Four arms. Too many eyes reflecting in the powdery light.
Tattoos cutting dark over skin and bared muscle where his uniform top has torn at the shoulder.
He looks at no one else.
Only you.
Your mouth goes dry.
Suguru answers the question you have not yet managed to ask.
“It seems to have rooted itself in a fixation. And that would be his wife.”
You hear your own voice, thin with disbelief.
“What wife?”
Sukuna steps through the broken wall.
Concrete snaps beneath his feet. Dust clings to his shoulders and hair. There is a shallow cut across one cheek that is already closing.
Suguru responds with something you refuse to believe,
“You.”
“What?” You laugh once, breathless. “What the fuck do you mean, me?”
Gojo cracks his neck to one side.
“We think the curse hit the first person he properly focused on after the fight.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
Sukuna keeps walking.
His face is wrong in a way you cannot fully explain.
Controlled, but stretched over something feverish and absolute, like a man having a dream with his eyes open.
The hallway suddenly feels too narrow, too bright, too full of dust.
Gojo lowers his voice a fraction.
“We need time.”
You tear your eyes off Sukuna long enough to glare at him.
“You’re joking.”
“I wish I were.”
“How much time?”
Another step. Closer now. Sukuna’s gaze does not waver.
Suguru says,
“Not much.”
You hate both of them for making you understand before they say anything else.
Your tongue feels thick.
“So I’m bait.”
“No,” Gojo says, "I mean..."
“Yes, I am.”
Neither of them answers.
That is answer enough.
You inhale once, too sharp, lungs burning with plaster dust and adrenaline. Your whole body is telling you to run, but that would be worse. You know it. They know it. Sukuna would tear through half the school to catch up, and then you would still end up here except with more blood in the hall.
So you step around Suguru.
Behind you, both men tense.
Ahead of you, Sukuna stops.
The silence that falls is almost worse than the noise.
You have to tilt your head back, craning your neck to look at him fully.
Up close he is ridiculous, monstrous in scale and presence, all brutal strength and heat. Your pulse is beating so hard you can feel it in your gums. He smells like dust, sweat, iron, the sharp ozone tang of cursed energy.
His eyes drag over your face like he is checking for injuries.
When he speaks, his voice is low and rough and terribly certain.
“Will you stop avoiding me now?”
Your eye twitches.
Of all the possible things he could have said, that one nearly makes you laugh from sheer disbelief.
“You are destroying a school hallway,” you say. Your voice comes out steadier than you feel. “And throwing teachers through walls.”
His expression does not change.
You force yourself to keep going.
“If you want me anywhere near you, you stop doing that first.”
For a second you think it works. He goes stiller, somehow. Listening.
Then you add, because someone has to try,
“You are cursed, Sukuna. There is something wrong with you.”
He scoffs.
Then, something happens so fast your body does not understand it at first.
One moment you are standing in front of him, furious and shaking and holding your ground on principle alone.
The next the floor is gone.
His hands are on you, one pair lifting, another securing, and suddenly your stomach drops as your body is hauled clean off the ground.
You hit his shoulder with a hard jolt that knocks the air out of you.
“What the fu— put me down!”
The world swings sickeningly. One of his arms braces the backs of your thighs to keep you from slipping while another settles heavy across your back. You can feel the heat of him through your uniform, the impossible solidity of muscle under skin.
You twist enough to glare back over his broad shoulder.
Gojo and Suguru are both staring.
Dust drifts lazily through the hall between all of you.
You do not dare say don’t fight him.
Do not dare say wait.
Do not dare say I am fine, because you are very much not.
So you settle for a look sharp enough to cut with.
Hurry the fuck up.
Suguru’s face hardens in understanding. Gojo’s grin is gone now, replaced by something colder.
Sukuna turns and starts walking.
You slam a palm against his back once, more insult than actual resistance.
“This is kidnapping, you know?”
“You were leaving.”
“I was not.”
“You were going to.”
“I teach here, asshole!”
“So do I.”
The absurdity of it all almost makes you choke.
The half-destroyed hallway lurches past beneath you as he carries you through it like your protesting means nothing at all. Broken plaster crunches under his feet. Teachers and students vanish from doorways the second he looks their way.
Night air spills in from somewhere ahead, cooler now, carrying the smell of rain and pine from the grounds.
You hate how helpless this feels.
You hate how your body is learning the shape of being carried by him against your will, cataloguing every hard line and shift of motion because it has no choice.
Hate the helpless bounce of each step.
Hate the strain in your stomach from trying not to panic.
Hate that you cannot tell if the shaking in your hands is fear or anger.
Probably both.
By the time he crosses the threshold out of the school building, the sky has deepened to indigo.
Campus lights are beginning to flicker on, pale and sterile against the trees.
You look back once over his shoulder.
The ruined corridor is now only a bright wound in the darkened building. You cannot see Gojo or Suguru anymore. You can only trust they are moving, searching, doing something useful while you are hauled farther and farther from where anyone can intervene quickly.
Sukuna does not head toward the staff wing. He does not head toward the road either.
He takes the stone path that leads toward his place.
Your mouth goes dry all over again.
He adjusts his grip on you, not gentle, not cruel either, just certain, and keeps walking as if this was always going to end with you in his arms and the whole school behind you.
The night feels suddenly huge.
You stare at the dark line of rooftops ahead, pulse hammering, every possible outcome crowding your head at once, and realize with a fresh stab of dread that whatever happens next, you are going to have to face it alone with him before anyone finds a way to stop this.
And Sukuna, maddened and resolute and carrying you like something already his, does not slow down once. You can’t do much, so you start thinking.
Thinking in that situation, unfortunately, is not helping much.
You had assumed the worst. Some locked room. Some insane display of territoriality. Maybe chains. Maybe Sukuna sitting outside a door like a living threat. Maybe a version of his fixation that becomes monstrous the moment there are no witnesses.
His home is large in the way that makes modern luxury seem almost embarrassed by itself. Not ostentatious, not cluttered, but it is expansive, high-ceilinged, clean-lined, expensive enough that you can tell every object in it was chosen and nothing was accidental.
Dark wood. Stone. Low lighting. Wide windows now reflecting the last of evening back at the room.
He still does not put you down until the front door has closed behind him.
When your feet finally hit the floor, you stagger. He steadies you at the waist automatically.
You slap both his wrists away.
“Hands off.”
Every one of his eyes fixes on your face.
Then, unexpectedly, he lifts all four hands and steps back half a pace.
The gesture should make you feel safer.
Instead it makes the room somehow stranger.
Because he is looking at you like restraint itself is painful.
His expression still carries its usual contempt at the edges, the natural sharpness of his face, the habitual sneer of someone made to rule through force. Yet underneath it there is something else working hard to surface. An almost restless pull in his body. His hands twitch once at his sides. Twice. Like he wants to reach and is stopping himself.
You swallow the lump in your throat.
The silence stretches until it becomes unbearable.
So you ask the first thing that comes out, voice low and somehow with real curiosity.
“What the hell is wrong with you.”
He stares.
“You are being impossible.”
“You abducted me from work.”
“They tried to keep me from you.”
“What,” you say, voice hoarse with secondhand embarrassment, “is wrong with your fucking brain.”
His mouth hardens.
“You are being difficult,” he goes on, voice low and rough with that peculiar certainty that only makes this worse. “Skittish. Avoidant. For no reason I can see. It is tiresome.”
You fold your arms, partly defensive, partly because you do not know what else to do with them.
“No reason?”
“You are my wife.” He says it like it is the simplest truth in the world. “You should let me embrace you. You should let me have you beside me as I wish.”
Half of you dies on the spot.
The other half goes up in flames so hot you swear your face could light the room.
You stare at him, unable to decide whether you want to laugh, scream, or throw something. The problem is that none of those responses would help. Not with the curse. Not with the school. Not with Satoru and Suguru buying time back there, trusting you to keep this disaster contained.
So you swallow the first ten things you want to say and force something else out instead.
“I am tired after the mission,” you say carefully, because this is still a game you are playing to keep him contained. “That’s all.”
His eyes hold yours for one long second.
Then he decides, with the ruthless simplicity that is very much still Sukuna, that this has a solution.
You know what he is doing a beat too late.
One moment you are standing.
The next you are in his arms.
Not hauled over his shoulder this time — scooped cleanly up, one set of arms under your knees, another at your back, as if carrying you like this is self-evident.
Your hands fly to his chest on instinct.
“Sukuna.”
“You are tired,” he says.
“That does not mean you can just keep picking me up.”
He looks down at you like the objection itself is irrelevant.
“I can.”
You open your mouth.
Close it again.
Because there is no point, and because he is already walking deeper into the house, and because some traitorous part of your body has noticed how warm he is.
Not warm. Hot.
He carries heat the way furnaces do, deep and constant, a living banked blaze under skin and muscle. It rolls into you through every point of contact.
You hate that you notice. You hate more that it feels good after the tension of the day.
He takes you to his bedroom.
Of course he does.
It is larger than your entire apartment had been in graduate housing.
Wide low bed. Dark sheets. Minimal furniture. Everything precise. The room of a man who does not need excess to prove anything. The curtains are half open, letting in city light in smeared bands.
You tense the moment he lowers you, but he does not trap you against the mattress.
He lies back first.
Then he settles you on top of him.
You freeze.
Completely, absurdly freeze.
Your cheek is pressed against the broad plane of his chest before you can decide where else it should go. One of his upper hands spreads over the middle of your back, heavy and steady. Another rests at your waist. The third braces lightly at your hip, not gripping, just holding your balance. The fourth lifts, pauses near your face, and then tucks a strand of hair carefully behind your ear.
The tenderness of it startles you harder than the kidnapping itself.
You do not know what to do with your face, your hands, your breathing, any of it. Your cheek grows hotter by the second where it is pressed to him, and you are suddenly grateful he cannot see all of it from this angle because if he does you might actually pass out.
He sounds almost practical when he speaks.
“Rest.”
That is all.
Just that.
Rest.
You stay rigid for nearly a minute, every muscle waiting for the catch.
There is none.
His hand on your back begins tracing idle shapes, broad slow passes that do not ask anything from you. The one at your waist only keeps you from sliding when his breathing shifts. Beneath your ear, his heart beats strong and even. No hurry to it. No escalation. No hidden demand.
You stare at the dark fold of his robe and think, in a stunned detached way, that you did not know this existed in him.
Not kindness exactly. Sukuna would spit on the word if someone used it about him.
But care, perhaps. Possessive care. Practical care.
The kind of thing that might surface only under very particular circumstances and then pretend afterward it had never been there at all.
You are so tired.
You do not know whether this tenderness belongs entirely to the curse or if it is only dragging something real out into the open and warping it beyond reason. The thought itself is dangerous. You shove it away.
You should not be wondering what Sukuna would be like with feelings. You should not be wondering whether there was ever a version of reality where he would touch someone like this without madness involved.
That is the problem.
Or maybe it is not the problem at all. Maybe the problem is that you have spent enough time around him over the last years to know the angles of his temper, the cadence of his contempt, the way he stands in a room and dares the world to be worth his effort.
Maybe the problem is that your relationship with him has always existed in clean familiar lines — professional, adversarial, sharp — and now every one of those lines is blurring because he has laid you on his chest like something precious and told you to sleep.
Your phone vibrates against your pocket.
You jolt like you have been caught.
Sukuna’s hand on your back stills.
“Ignore it.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“It might be important.”
“It is not more important than your state.”
A pause.
Then, to your surprise, he does not stop you. He only grunts and lets you squirm one arm free enough to fish your phone out. The angle is awkward. You keep your cheek where it is because lifting your whole face feels impossible somehow.
The message is from Gojo.
managed to figure things out w shoko. curse should burn out on its own. keep him contained.
You squint at the screen, then type one-handed with ferocious irritation.
how long
There is a stretch where only Sukuna’s breathing and the faint city noise beyond the glass fill the room. He notices the device again after a minute and makes a dissatisfied sound.
“It distracts you from resting.”
“It is communication.”
“It is annoying.”
“You are annoying.”
That earns the smallest low chuckle, felt more than heard through his chest.
Then the reply comes.
around two days. yaga says do NOT bring him back unless u want the rest of the campus remodeled. sorry <3
You close your eyes.
Two days.
Two whole fucking days.
A fresh message follows before you can even process the first.
seriously though, are u okay?
You stare at it.
Then type back: no
delete it.
Type again: alive
Send.
The phone vanishes from your hand a second later.
You make a startled sound and lift your head just enough to glare. Sukuna has taken it with one of his upper hands and set it on the nightstand far beyond your reach.
“It was keeping you awake.”
You stare at him.
“You cannot just confiscate my phone.”
“I just did.”
“You are a twat.”
His thumb, the one resting between your shoulder blades, resumes its slow path.
“Sleep.”
And maybe it is the day finally catching up to you. Maybe it is the heat of him under you, the steady weight, the way his body is impossibly firm and yet more comfortable than any mattress has a right to be. Maybe it is the bone-deep exhaustion of adrenaline wearing off all at once.
Sukuna makes a quiet sound of satisfaction at your silence. His hand resumes its slow path along your back, tracing idle shapes that have no purpose except to soothe. The effect is immediate and humiliating. You can feel sleep creeping in through the cracks of your exhaustion no matter how hard you try to resist it.
After a while, one of his free hands finds one of yours. His fingers curl around it, big and callused and terribly warm, and that is what nearly undoes you.
You feel it happening and resent it instantly because this is absurd, because you should not be able to drift off draped over the most dangerous man alive, because some part of your mind is still screaming about every level on which this is wrong—
But his hand keeps moving. Slow. Measured. Thoughtless.
Your own body, traitorous bastard that it is, takes that as permission.
You fall asleep.
When you wake, the room is darker.
Not full night-dark. More the strange almost-blue hour before dawn or after it, where shapes exist in softness and the city outside has not fully committed itself yet. For a few hazy seconds you do not remember where you are.
Then you realize you are in a bed that is not yours, wrapped in warmth that is definitely not blankets alone. It takes you a moment to understand that you are no longer on top of Sukuna.
You are on the bed, curled toward him instead, one arm trapped between your chest and the mattress, your face almost buried in the broad wall of his chest. Sukuna is wrapped around you from both sides, his arms forming an inescapable cage.
His body is at your front, at your back, everywhere. You are boxed in by heat and muscle and the steady rise and fall of him breathing.
One arm heavy over your waist. Another tucked beneath the pillows behind your shoulders. A third resting over your thighs to keep you close. The fourth somewhere beneath your head, bent in a way that has caged you in without discomfort.
You lie there and breathe once.
Twice.
The peace of it is almost unbearable.
It feels nice.
That is the part that hurts, because for one dangerous second, you forget.
You forget the curse. The school. The fact that this is not normal, cannot be normal, should not make your chest feel this unbearably full.
All you know in that second is peace. Warmth. The strange, heavy comfort of being held like your place is meant to be exactly there.
If you let yourself stay in this feeling too long, if you let yourself believe the quiet and the warmth and the impossible steadiness of him mean something you are allowed to keep, you will be an idiot. Worse than an idiot.
You will be someone building softness out of a curse.
Out of a mistake lodged in a monster’s head.
Then you move.
Only a little. Just enough to test if you can untangle yourself.
His arms tighten at once.
“Stop wiggling, woman.” he murmurs, voice still thick with sleep.
You go still on instinct, then scowl at yourself for it.
“I need to get up.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“You do not.”
You angle your head back enough to glare at the underside of his jaw.
“I need to go home. I need a shower. I need clean clothes. I’m not spending the whole night covered in dust and sweat.”
That gets one eye to peel open. Then another. And another. Then all of them are on you again.
His face, when he finally looks down at you properly, is rumpled with sleep in a way you did not know he could be. It lasts only a second before that familiar disdainful look settles back into place.
“You can shower here.”
You close your eyes.
Sometimes you truly believe he is a moron.
“What would I wear, genius?”
He scoffs, offended by the question itself.
“I have infinite options for you.”
You drag a hand down your face.
At this point, what are your options? You are here. The curse needs time. Yaga wants him contained. Satoru and Shoko need these forty-eight hours to pass without bloodshed. You can either keep fighting every step of it and risk setting him off again, or you can endure it.
So you exhale and sit up at last, helped rather than hindered by the fact that Sukuna immediately releases you the moment he realizes you are not trying to leave the room entirely.
His bathroom is larger than your whole apartment kitchen.
Hot water pounds down over your shoulders and back, washing away the grime of the mission in long, steaming streams. Dust lifts. Sweat goes with it. The ache in your muscles sharpens first under the heat, then loosens bit by bit until you can finally breathe without feeling every bruise and strain from the day.
You stay in there too long on purpose.
Partly because you need it. Partly because you are delaying whatever awkwardness waits outside.
By the time you step out with damp hair and flushed skin, wrapped in a towel, Sukuna is waiting in the bedroom with a folded bundle in one of his hands.
He hands it over without ceremony.
It is one of his kimonos. Light fabric, soft, expensive in a quiet way, and much too large. You put it on anyway because there is nothing else to do. The hem drags. The sleeves swallow your hands. The collar slips wide enough at the neck that you have to tug it back into place.
When you emerge from behind the divider, he looks up.
And grins.
That wicked, knowing grin that makes you instantly suspicious.
“What?”
He looks you over once, slowly.
“It suits you.”
The compliment strikes clean through your guard.
You feel it happen. That awful, helpless rush of heat from throat to cheeks.
Sukuna’s grin widens.
You consider throwing something at his head. Instead you just glare and look away, which only gets you a low chuckle in response, deep and pleased and so uncharacteristically unguarded that you almost trip over your own thoughts.
He takes you to the kitchen next.
You expect arrogance there too, maybe uselessness, maybe the kind of man who has a beautiful kitchen he never touches because someone else does it for him.
Instead he cooks.
Quickly, efficiently, with the ease of someone who knows where everything is and uses it often.
Steam curls up from the pan. Oil hisses softly. Aromatics hit the heat and bloom into something that fills the whole room and makes your stomach tighten painfully with sudden hunger. He moves with the same economy he uses in battle, no wasted gestures, no hesitation, just one precise action flowing into the next.
You sit at the counter and watch despite yourself.
“You cook?”
He cuts you a glance.
“Do you believe I live on air?”
“I believed you lived on spite.”
That earns a low scoff that might almost be amusement.
When he sets the bowl in front of you, it looks simple. It tastes anything but.
The first bite makes a helpless little sound leave your throat before you can stop it.
He notices immediately.
The corner of his mouth lifts.
“Good?”
You hate how easy honesty is when the food is this good.
“Annoyingly.”
He hums, satisfied with that.
You eat. You keep eating because it tastes incredible and because your body is still trying to catch up with the fact that you are clean and warm and no longer actively panicking.
By the time you finish, your limbs feel heavier in a different way. Rested, but only partly. The kind of tired that comes after a deep sleep taken too early, when the body has been tricked into thinking it is healed more than it is.
A yawn catches you by surprise.
You cover it with the back of your sleeve and stare down into the empty bowl, weighing what is left of the day. Or night. Time feels oddly meaningless in here.
The light outside the kitchen windows is pale and uncertain, somewhere between dawn and a cloudy morning.
You consider your options.
You could ask for your things from home. Message Shoko to bring clothes. Ask Yaga how classes are being covered. Try to impose some kind of schedule on this madness so you do not lose your mind first.
You could also admit, at least to yourself, that another hour of sleep would not be the worst thing in the world.
Sukuna watches you from across the counter, having finished his own portion long ago. He has that look again, attentive in a way that feels nearly predatory if not for the strange care threaded through it.
“You are still tired,” he says.
It is not a question.
You rub at one temple.
“That tends to happen after a mission, a kidnapping, a cursed delusion, and several identity crises in the span of one day.”
His expression does not change.
“Then sleep more.”
You let out a dry laugh.
“You know,” you mutter, “most people would ask what I want to do.”
“You are deciding,” he says, almost dismissive. “I am only stating the correct answer.”
There he is.
That pedantic, unbearable certainty settles over you so neatly that, absurdly, it is reassuring.
You lean your elbows on the counter and look at him through damp lashes and the remnants of your exhaustion.
“If I stay awake, you hover. If I sleep, you turn into a weighted blanket. If I leave the room, you follow me like an overgrown guard dog. So really my options are terrible.”
A pause.
Then, unexpectedly, his mouth twitches.
“Correct.”
You snort despite yourself.
The sound surprises both of you.
Something loosens in the room after that, not fully, not safely, but enough for the tension to shift shape. Still dangerous. Still bizarre. But no longer poised right at the edge of breaking.
You know, instantly and viscerally, that the decision has been made without you.
“Do not,” you say, pointing your chopsticks at him in warning. “Do not pick me up again.”
His gaze drops to the chopsticks, then lifts back to your face.
And sure enough, a minute later you are back in his room.
This time at least you walk there on your own.
A victory. A tiny, humiliating victory.
The borrowed kimono brushes your ankles as you sit, then sink, then let yourself lean back into the bedding with a slow exhale. The fabric smells faintly like him too, which is not helping. Neither is the way he watches you do it, standing at the edge of the bed for only a heartbeat before climbing up after you.
And then he is over you.
For a second your thoughts blank entirely.
The movement is smooth, controlled, almost lazy in its certainty, yet the sight of it sends a sharp nervous thrill all the way through you.
Four arms bracket you in an instant, two planted beside your head, another pair settling lower near your sides and hips, his whole body a towering wall of heat and weight above you. He does not crush you. He only hems you in so completely that the rest of the room seems to vanish around the edges.
Your breath catches.
You try to keep your face composed, you really do, but the strain of it breaks all at once when his head dips and his nose brushes the long column of your neck.
A small, bright, utterly traitorous giggle bubbles up and bursts out of you.
It surprises you so badly your eyes widen right after, but it is too late to swallow back. It leaves you in a breathless little rush, nervous and euphoric all at once, and the second it is gone you feel every hair on your body stand on end.
Sukuna stills.
Not much. Just enough for you to feel it.
The tip of his nose drifts once more against your throat, slower this time, as if he is testing the reaction again. Your whole body shivers beneath him. Not from fear. Not from tension. From something warmer and far more humiliating.
That is when the truth hits you in a way you cannot sidestep.
Maybe you do feel something for him.
Maybe you have for longer than you let yourself think about, and all the irritation, the bickering, the professional distance, the snapping at each other in hallways and training grounds has been covering something else. Something softer. Something much more dangerous because it would have required honesty, and honesty with Sukuna has never once felt safe.
Your body gives you away before your mind can catch up.
It does not tense under his. It eases.
It yields to his warmth like it was waiting for a reason.
You realize, dimly, that your hands have closed around the front of his kimono at some point. You do not remember doing it. You only know that your fingers are twisted in the fabric near his chest, holding on like you might drift away if you let go.
The knowledge makes your face burn hotter.
Sukuna says nothing about it.
He lowers his mouth to the curve where your neck meets your shoulder, where the collar of his borrowed kimono has slipped wide enough to bare skin, and presses a kiss there. You feel like the touch, tender as it is, scorches your skin. Then he presses another. Then another, each one unhurried and gentle in a way that does not suit him at all and yet somehow suits him perfectly in this terrible, secret place inside your chest you have not wanted to name.
There is no greed in it, no taking, no forceful urgency. Only a kind of reverence that seems impossible on him, as though he has found something he wants to handle carefully even if he does not quite understand why.
Your thoughts scatter for a moment.
You feel ridiculous.
You feel warm all over.
You feel like your bones have gone loose under your skin.
Why are you melting into this?
Why are you sinking into his touch like something half-starved finally given warmth?
Are you really this touch deprived? This affection-starved? This vulnerable to one man pressing his mouth to your shoulder like you are something precious instead of the colleague he bickers with until both of you are ready to bite?
The answer comes easy enough that you almost laugh at yourself.
Probably yes.
And what is worse, if someone offered you another version of this moment — cleaner, saner, not born from a curse and a crisis and two exhausted days trapped in the same house — you suspect you would choose it too.
Because now you know.
Not about the curse. Not about whatever is rotting sweetly through his mind and telling him wife and mine and come here.
You know something about yourself.
About why bickering with him has always come too easily. About why his attention burns in ways other people’s never do. About why even at your angriest with him there is still some fierce bright wire of awareness underneath. About why being held by him, absurd as it is, feels less like revulsion and more like the world narrowing into something dangerously simple.
You like him.
God help you, you like him.
Maybe you have for a while.
Maybe all that friction had been hiding sparks you never let yourself name because naming them would have been stupid, and risky, and deeply inconvenient.
Maybe the realization should come later, in saner circumstances, under any sky other than this one.
That thought only survives a second before his hands slide down and close around your hips.
The breath leaves you in a quiet rush as he shifts forward and lets more of his weight settle over you. The mattress dips deeper. His body presses you into it, broad and hot and so heavy it wrings a helpless groan right out of you.
Your arms move on instinct, lifting from where they had fisted his clothes and winding around his neck instead.
He exhales against your skin at the feel of it.
His face lowers, rests, nuzzles almost absently against the upper swell of your chest where the borrowed kimono has fallen a little farther open under the pressure. The sensation is so unexpectedly intimate that your mouth curves before you can help it, not quite into a smile, not quite into anything you have worn before.
It feels strange on your face. Soft. Open. A little dazed.
He breathes you in.
Deeply.
Like he is memorizing you through scent alone.
The heat of it against your skin turns your stomach over in the gentlest possible way. You do not know what to do with the feeling it gives you.
It is too mixed up, too warm and embarrassing and oddly tender to sort through quickly. So you do the only thing your body seems capable of doing.
Your fingers slip into his hair.
At first it is cautious. Just the pads of your fingers easing into those unruly pink strands, feeling how thick and slightly coarse they are beneath your hand, the warmth of his scalp underneath. Then it becomes a slow caress, your hand moving on its own, combing back through the mess of his hair with careful strokes.
Sukuna goes still again.
A low sound leaves him, almost too quiet to hear, more vibration than voice where his cheek is pressed to your skin.
You feel it everywhere.
For one long second you are acutely aware of everything at once. The solid drag of his weight over your body. The stretch in your shoulders from the way your arms hold around his neck. The soft whisper of the kimono fabric open at your chest. The warmth of his breath as he turns his face a fraction and brushes another kiss there, just below your collarbone this time. The callus of one thumb moving in a slow circle against your hip through the fabric.
Your pulse beats so hard you think he has to feel it.
You stare at the ceiling because looking down at him would probably finish you off in some new and mortifying way.
“This is insane,” you whisper.
His mouth shifts against your skin, not quite a smile, not quite not.
“Hm.”
You let out a breath that almost turns into another laugh.
“You are infuriating even now.”
“And yet,” he murmurs.
And yet.
The words settle heavily between your ribs.
You tug lightly at his hair before you can think better of it, just enough to make him lift his head. His face rises from your chest, and you finally look at him properly from this distance, close enough to count every line of ink on his skin, every lash shadowing those too-watchful eyes, every small shift in the hard shape of his mouth.
He looks different like this.
Not softer — Sukuna does not become soft. But there is less distance in him. Less iron. Less of that endless guarded contempt he wears around everyone and everything.
Beneath it, you catch something intent and raw and almost boyishly stubborn, something that makes your heart hurt in a way you do not appreciate.
Hunger dressed in gentleness.
He studies your face like he does not understand why you are letting him stay there.
The thought lands harder than it should.
Because maybe he does not understand. Maybe neither of you does.
You are the first one to look away.
Your pulse is far too loud in your ears. The room smells like soap from your shower, like warm rice and broth from the food he made, like clean linen and the faint iron scent that always seems to cling to him under everything else. His heat cages you in. So does the bed. So do his arms.
This should be impossible to enjoy.
It is not.
That realization makes you feel a little sick and a little giddy in equal measure.
You clear your throat and aim for dry, unimpressed, normal.
“You’re staring.”
“I am looking at my wife.”
Your whole body jolts with mortification so abrupt it nearly turns into a laugh.
“That is still... odd.”
“So are you,” he says, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. “You keep insulting me while touching me like this.”
You open your mouth, close it, open it again.
There is no argument available to you that does not sound pathetic.
Because he is right in the most infuriating way possible. You are touching him like this.
Worse, you do not want to stop.
You settle on glaring at the side of his face, which would probably be more effective if your hand were not still buried in his hair.
He looks maddeningly satisfied.
“Don’t smirk,” you say.
“It displeases you?”
“Yes.”
He smirks more.
You hate him. You really, truly do.
You hate how easy he makes it look to pin you here with four arms and a single look. You hate how his voice drops into that low register whenever he speaks to you like this and your stupid body listens to it. You hate that he cooks well and runs hot and apparently has a hidden talent for being unbearably attentive.
You hate that under this curse, with his mind bent sideways and all his edges turned toward you, he is showing you a shape of himself you had never been allowed to know existed.
You hate, most of all, how badly some soft and neglected part of you wants this to mean something after it ends.
He lowers his head again, slower this time, until his forehead rests near your shoulder. One of the hands at your hips slides to your side, spanning your ribs. Another remains firm at your waist. The upper pair shifts only enough to ease some of his weight from his arms and let it settle more fully across you.
You should feel trapped.
Instead you feel held.
Your fingers resume their slow pass through his hair, no longer even pretending it is accidental. The strands slip between your fingers as you smooth them back, over and over, until his breathing changes.
It deepens. Slows.
A tension you had not even fully registered in him starts to ease little by little under your touch.
The realization makes something in you ache.
So much of him is made of resistance. Teeth. Pride. Violence held on a short, vicious leash.
To feel him quiet under your hand like this, even a little, feels like being trusted with something you should not have access to.
You swallow against a throat that suddenly feels tight.
His hand on your side spreads wider, fingertips grazing the bare strip of skin where the kimono has slipped apart. The contact is light, almost absentminded, yet it sends another tremor through you.
Not because it is too much. Because it is not. Because he is touching you like he already knows the exact line where your body will welcome it rather than flinch.
Maybe the curse helps with that.
Maybe the curse has nothing to do with it.
That thought is too large to face right now, so you turn your head slightly and press your cheek against his hair instead.
He gives a low hum of approval.
For a while, neither of you speaks.
The room holds around you, quiet and warm, the outside world reduced to faint sounds beyond the walls. Your body loosens by degrees beneath his. The hand in his hair slows, then lingers, your fingers idly combing the same path again and again. His thumb keeps tracing small circles against your side as if he has forgotten to stop.
Sleep starts circling the edges of you again, soft and inevitable.
You are not ready to examine what it means that you feel safest with four arms caging you in.
You are not ready to decide whether this softness is yours, his, or something the curse merely dragged into the light before either of you could stop it.
Right now all you know is sensation.
The press of him over you.
The heat.
The impossible comfort.
The way your chest feels too full to contain itself.
And the awful, tender fact that when he buries his face closer and your fingers sink a little deeper into his hair, you do not want him to move at all.


