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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.

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.

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.

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