hi baby

Flat.

You flatten yourself to the cabinets and slip by, pulse banging in your ears.

His hands stay braced — palms spread on oak, tendons up — like he’s giving himself something to hold that isn’t you.

You don’t see that part until later, replaying it, wondering why you didn’t collide.

Oil pops. You yelp. He’s there, jerking the pan from your hand with a scalded sound.

“You trying to brand yourself?” he bites out, angling his shoulder between you and the heat. “Out.”

You step back, stung.

You hate how the word works — how you go.

He kills the flame, rotates the handle inward, flicks the vent.

“Watch what the fuck you’re doing.” You nod like you’re eight.

You spend the next hour angry at your own hands.

You reach for the biggest knife in the drawer.

His tattooed fingers clamp the handle before you can touch it.

“Don’t,” he says, bored and cruel. “They’re not toys.”

The sneer skims your skin like a cold wind.

You sleep on it wrong and wake up to a mid-size knife on the counter, a cheap plastic sheath on the blade, a sticky note in his blocky hand, Use this. Guard stays on. — S.

You tell yourself it’s control.

You tell yourself he doesn’t want you touching his things.

You climb the step stool to reach a jar on the top shelf.

He’s suddenly behind you, voice right by your ear.

“Get down.” The tone is filth-soft, like smoke dragged across velvet. “You fall, I’m not patching drywall.”

You climb down because your body obeys that voice before your brain decides to.

When your feet hit tile, something shifts — the warm presence of his forearm hovering at your waist and then withdrawing, like a hand you imagined.

He reaches above you, grabs the jar, sets it in your hands without looking at you.

“Ask,” he says, already walking away.

Like a rule.

Like he hates that you tried.

You clean to a happy playlist.

He crosses the living room and kills the speaker with one jab.

“Enough,” he says without glancing up.

Your apology is automatic and you want to bite your tongue off for it. Later you hear him in the kitchen humming the same chorus, low, off-key, like he pocketed the noise so you wouldn’t spin out on it.

The balcony door is open for air, he plants a palm and slides it shut with a hard click.

“Inside,” he says, eyes on the night-dark lot. “Door stays closed at night.”

You feel stupid and scolded.

Two days later the neighbor with the too-long smile tries a conversation that lasts one second longer than polite. When you get home, you can’t stop seeing the way Sukuna had stood that night — shoulders squared to the lot, body a wall, attention on the dark instead of on you.

The AC dies and your fingers won’t warm.

A dryer-hot hoodie hits your chest as he passes.

“Put it on,” he snaps. “You sound like teeth chattering.”

It smells like him. It helps. You tell yourself it’s a territorial thing, his name written on you in fabric.

You don’t let yourself think about the heat already in it, like he knew you would pretend you weren’t cold and planned around your pride.

The pipes bang while you shower.

His knock has the force of a cop.

“You’re flooding the place,” he says through the door, gravel and impatience. “Finish up.”

Shame rips through you like a pulled muscle, you rush, ten minutes after, there’s a rubber bath mat leaning against the tub.

No note. No comment.

Just fewer ways to crack your skull open on tile.

Crossing the living room in shorts, you feel it — the slow, dead-eyed inventory as his gaze rakes over you and back, unapologetic. Your stomach drops. You translate it as disgust, judgment, rude boredom.

You don’t clock the way his jaw flexes once and then stills, or how his hands stay buried in his pockets like he’s holding them there on purpose.

You lug four grocery bags up the stairs. He opens the door and rips two away.

“You take too long,” he says, like you failed a test he didn’t announce. You seethe. Later you notice your greek yogurt, your tea, your brand of honey in the fridge, resting on the second shelf you can actually reach.

You tell yourself someone like him remembers everything so he can hold it over you later.

You chain the door wrong.

He flicks it open, shuts it, flicks it again.

“Don’t do that.” The look he gives you is mean enough to sting. “Top chain, bottom deadbolt. Leave the knob unlocked.”

You bristle, say you’re not an idiot.

He repeats the sequence without commentary and then leans his shoulder, testing the frame.

“If you scream,” he says, flat, “I’m coming through it.”

It takes you a day to realize he showed you the way he could shoulder the door because he was imagining needing to.

You host a silly apartment date because you’re tired of being alone and tired of feeling hunted in your own kitchen. The guy is harmless, loud, and brings cheap rosé because he thinks it’s whimsical.

Sukuna passes through like a storm front — silent, big, eyes acidic.

“Feet off my table,” he says to the room, never quite looking at your guest.

It lands like a threat.

Your cheeks heat, you want to crawl under the couch.

When the bottle opener skitters toward your fingers, Sukuna’s hand appears, big and fast, and plucks it out of the air, then sets it by your elbow so the metal edge doesn’t slice you.

He slices limes with surgical calm you don’t deserve and leaves a plate of wedges by your glass because once — weeks ago — you cut yourself trying to garnish something you didn’t need to garnish.

Your date tries a joke at Sukuna’s tattoos.

Sukuna stares through him like the man is furniture and says, “Yes,” when asked if the ink hurt. The conversation dies.

The thermostat ticks, colder. A hoodie you did not wear to dinner appears on the back of your chair as he passes.

It goes off the rails when the guy calls you “kiddo.”

You freeze, small and furious.

From the kitchen,

“Don’t,” Sukuna says without looking. “She’s not your anything.”

There’s no heat in it, only patience sharpened into a knife. Your date laughs too loud and tries again with “babe,” and Sukuna’s mouth pulls into something that isn’t a smile.

“Don’t ‘babe’ her."

Your crush blinks.

“Excuse me?”

Sukuna lifts his eyes, finally. There’s nothing theatrical in his stare — just the kind of patience that makes people reconsider their choices.

“You heard me.”

Your crush tries on a laugh and finds it doesn’t fit.

“My bad,” he says to you, all forced charm.

“It is,” Sukuna agrees mildly, and goes back to slicing.

Nobody enjoys the rest of the movie.

When the door finally closes on the silly date, Sukuna stacks plates with quiet hands. You dry glasses. Your fingers brush and you both pretend they didn’t.

“He seemed… nice,” you say, because you hate the silence.

“He seemed loud,” he says, jaw ticking. “You like loud?”

“I like kind.”

Something shifts in his expression, a small retreat you can’t name.

He rinses, passes, rinses.

“He call you kiddo again, I’m throwing him off the balcony.”

“We’re on the second floor.”

“He’ll live.”

He says it like a promise to himself to keep it verbal.

You slip in late another night and he’s at the counter, arms folded over his chest.

“Who dropped you,” he says, not a question.

You flare.

“You my parole officer?”

He just waits until you mutter a first name.

“Next time,” he says, “text you’re alive.”

It feels like a leash.

Later, when rage cools, you notice the lamp in the living room is on a timer — clicks on at ten, off at two.

You notice the scuffed track his boots make from the door to the window.

You notice the idle of his truck you didn’t hear over your date’s laugh.

In the hallway, you brush too close. He inhales, sharp, almost a growl.

“Watch it,” he says, stepping aside late, forcing you to reroute around him like you’re avoiding a boot. His hand curls and uncurls against his thigh, tendons jumping, as if stopping itself from settling on your waist.

He smells like mint and smoke and heat.

You walk away on shaking legs and tell yourself you hate him.

Rain threatens, you reach for the knob without an umbrella, he flips you the spare and says,

“Don’t be stupid.”

You take it because you’re cold and stubborn.

Inside the sleeve is a folded bill and a metro card with rides left.

You find it waiting for you after the storm.

You never mention it.

Neither does he.

You laugh on the phone at midnight because if you don’t laugh you’ll cry. He appears in your doorway like a shadow.

“Quiet,” he says, low and edged enough to cut off your breath, “I’m sleeping.”

You apologize. He leaves.

Ten minutes later there’s a glass of water outside your door with ice clinking like punctuation.

The apartment is silent so you can breathe.

This is the rhythm — his voice like a weapon, your spine learning its shape, the hard click of doors, the snap of rules, you reading every look as a sneer, every order as contempt.

The house learns your flinch.

You learn the circumference of his temper and pretend you don’t notice how it never actually lands on you.

One night, late, you catch him at the sink.

The kitchen light is off, only the hood lamp is on.

Water runs, steam climbs his forearms and softens the ink.

He doesn’t turn when you enter, he doesn’t acknowledge you, you can feel him see you anyway — the way the air charges, the way the room holds its breath.

“I can be quiet,” you say, because you think maybe that’s all you are to him, a noise to manage, a problem to compress.

He shuts the tap.

He stands there a second, hands braced on the counter like they’ve been everywhere else he’s needed them to be — on cabinets, on doorframes, on anything that isn’t the small of your back.

“Yeah,” he says finally, voice rougher than usual, like gravel under a tire. “I know.”

He turns, and the look he gives you is the same one that has had you thinking wolf, knife, red eyes.

It still looks like that.

It’s still a lot of hunger, none of it polite.

But there’s something else leashed under it that you recognize now that you’ve learned the edges of this place, the way he stands between you and heat, between you and dark, between you and anything with teeth. The way his meanness is grammar, not content. The way every order lands like a safety.

You look at his hands on the counter. You look at the space he leaves between you and himself, a precise, stubborn inch of restraint that keeps not closing.

Only later will you name the pattern. In the moment, all you can do is breathe and try on a different translation.

Maybe he doesn’t hate you.

Maybe he’s surviving you.

Maybe you’re the thing he doesn’t trust himself with.

He pushes off the counter, gives you that inch and a little more, and nods at the hallway.

“Door stays closed,” he says, voice quiet, mean on the edges out of habit. “Sleep.”

You go.

You lock your door, then unlock it, then lock it again because you don’t trust yourself either.

On the bedside table, you set your phone face-down on a sticky note you’ve been pretending isn’t there — the one with a license plate scribbled on it from the night your date left.

No signature. No lecture. Just numbers.

You live like prey in your own apartment until you realize the predator has been hunting with the safeties on.

And by then your heart is a problem you don’t want to fix.

Next morning you wake up mean with it — raw throat, wet cough, cramps dragging like an anchor. The apartment is too bright, your skin too loud.

You shuffle to the kitchen in his oversized hoodie because everything else on your body feels like sandpaper.

He’s already there, back to you, rinsing a mug. The smell of mint and soap, the low noise of the hood fan. You keep your distance, open the cabinet, and reach for the painkillers.

The bottle rattles like a threat, your hands are clumsy.

“Two,” he says without turning. “Not four.”

It lands like a slap.

You swallow a dozen answers and pick the worst.

“Thank you, Officer.”

He flicks a look over his shoulder, unreadable.

“I don’t need you faceplanting in the hallway.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“Didn’t say you were.”

“You don’t have to,” you bite.

The words come hot, a flare you can’t leash.

“Every day it’s, move, don’t, stop, quiet. Like I’m fucking five! Or your dog. Or a problem you’re stuck with.”

The faucet shudders off, he turns fully.

Mean eyes. Flat mouth.

“You done?”

You hate the way your eyes burn.

You hate that you keep going.

“I’m sick, I’m— ” you gesture uselessly at your stomach “ —I’m not sleeping, and you just— ” Your voice frays. “I can’t do the drill-sergeant act today.”

Something tightens in his jaw, then releases. He doesn’t bark back. He doesn’t roll his eyes. He sets the mug down carefully, like careful is a language, and says,

“Okay.”

That’s it. No lecture. No sneer.

It makes you cry anyway. Not big sobs — stupid, quiet overflow you swipe away with your sleeve while humiliation crawls up your neck.

“Forget it,” you mutter, retreating, heart banging. “I’m sorry, I just— forget it.”

You escape to your room and sit on the floor beside the bed because sitting on the bed feels like a commitment.

The cramps gnaw.

Your head throbs in time with the pipes.

Shame curdles everything.

Five minutes later, you get up and go back.

You stand in the doorway, hoodie sleeves swallowed over your hands, and force your throat to work.

“Sukuna. I’m sorry,” you say, steady as you can make it. “I’m… on my period. And this cold is making me cranky. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

He watches you with that stillness that reads like disdain until you learn it means don’t spook.

Then he nods once.

“You’re sick,” he says, voice rough but quieter than usual, as if rough is habit, volume is choice. “Sit.”

You do because your legs feel borrowed.

He turns back to the counter, you hear the drawer, the knife, the hard thunk of ginger coins against the board.

Kettle. Steam. Honey. Lemon.

He doesn’t look up while he works, like looking would make it something else.

When he comes back, he sets the mug near your hands, handle turned to your dominant side.

The steam hits your face with a rush of ginger that clears a corridor through your skull.

“Drink.”

“I was shitty.” you say, small.

He shakes his head once.

“You’re sick,” he repeats, like it’s a verdict, not a pass.

A beat.

“You wanna put something on the TV?”

For a second you truly wonder if the fever cracked something.

“What?”

“TV,” he says, like he’s reminding you English exists. “Noise helps when your head won’t shut up.”

You blink.

“Like… a movie?”

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t make you choose. He pads into the living room, grabs the remote, and sinks into the couch like it owes him rent. He leaves a lane between him and the corner — space you can take or not.

You wrap your hands around the mug and follow, because the idea of your room feels mean suddenly, like a place where your breath will catch on your bones.

He scrolls past too-serious options and lands on something dumb and loud with big colors and no stakes.

“That okay?” he asks, already pressing play like he expects you to say yes.

“Yeah,” you breathe, surprised to mean it.

He doesn’t sprawl. He sits like he’s making himself small, which is ridiculous given the acreage of his shoulders. He keeps his hands on his thighs and his attention forward.

The ginger burns a path down your throat and warms the pit of you where anger used to sit. Your nose runs, you swipe with your sleeve, he says nothing.

The hood fan clicks off in the kitchen. The apartment softens.

Onscreen, people run from explosions as if cardio is a personality trait.

You try to track it and fail. The rhythm of the action settles into white noise. Your head tips, then jerks, then tips again. You tell yourself you’re just shifting the mug. At some point the mug is on the table and your cheek is against heat that doesn’t feel like a pillow.

You realize too late it’s his shoulder.

Everything in you goes rigid.

You start to sit up.

“Relax,” he says, not looking away from the TV. “You’re fine.”

“I didn’t— I didn’t mean to— ”

“I know.”

His shoulder is a broad, stubborn thing, and it doesn’t move when you test it. His T-shirt is warm and soft with too many washes. You concentrate on breathing like a person and not a trapped animal.

His smell — smoke, cedar, mint — threads through the ginger and settles you faster than you want to admit.

He doesn’t take advantage. He doesn’t shift you closer. He doesn’t do the theatrical arm-over-the-back-of-the-couch move.

He sits there, a ridiculous block of heat, and lets your weight be what it is.

Onscreen someone yells “Go!” like it’s profound.

You huff a laugh that’s almost a cough. He snorts, barely.

“You hate these,” you murmur, eyes closing without permission. “You always turn off my music.”

“Your music tries to run a red light,” he says. “This is just… dumb. Dumb is good when your head hurts.”

You hum, sleepy.

“You’re not… mean right now.”

“I’m not mean,” he says, and it should come out defensive. It doesn’t. “I’m loud. Scary, even.”

“You’re… controlling”

“Better than mopping blood,” he says, like he’s listing groceries.

You want to argue and don’t have the energy. The movie blurs. Your body does that soft drop it does when it decides without you.

You feel him reach — not to you, past you. A blanket unfurls, drops over your knees and up to your hips like a quiet tide.

He moves slow, careful not to jostle the place where your forehead meets his shoulder, careful like he is with knives and doors and every stupid thing you misread as contempt.

“You’re hallucinating,” you mumble to yourself thinking you're just talking in your head, because it’s easier than saying thank you out loud.

“Yeah,” he says, dry. “Ginger tea’s a hallucinogen.”

You drift.

Somewhere in the middle distance, digital cities burn prettily. Your breaths even. His do, too, big and steady, a metronome under your ear. He lowers the volume half a notch. You don’t see his eyes track your face, the tiny frown he gets when you sniffle, the way his hand hovers once over your shoulder and then falls to the couch cushion like he’s reminding himself of a rule.

You come back up from sleep because your neck twinges.

The credits are slow-rolling names you don’t care about. The lamp is low. The ginger is a memory in your chest.

“Hey,” he says, voice close and quiet. “Bed.”

You blink, embarrassed.

“I didn’t mean to— ”

“You say that a lot,” he says, almost amused. “You can. It’s allowed.”

You push up.

The blanket slides. He catches it before it hits the floor.

“Thanks for the— ” you gesture at the whole scene — mug, TV, shoulder, mercy.

He shrugs like it’s nothing and meant everything.

“Next time you’re sick, you say so. Don’t try to soldier through and then bite me.”

“I didn’t bite you.”

He lifts an eyebrow.

“You tried.”

Heat flickers under your skin, this time not from fever.

“Sorry,” you say again, but it lands differently now — less apology, more acknowledgment.

He nods.

“Text if you feel dizzy,” he says, back to basic. “I’ll be here.”

You stand there an extra second, halfway convinced the cold cooked your brain. He looks like himself — mean eyes, foul mouth, rough lines — and somehow the edges don’t cut.

They fence you in.

“Goodnight,” you say, voice gone soft without permission.

“Sleep, rabbit,” he says, just as soft.

You pad to your room. You don’t lock the door. You think you should and don’t.

In bed, under your own blanket, you can still feel the ghost weight of his shoulder under your cheek and taste ginger where the apology used to burn.

Maybe you’re hallucinating.

Or maybe not.

On the coffee table, your mug sits with the handle turned just so, waiting where he left it.

You don’t make it to work the next day.

Alarms happen to somebody else.

Your phone buzzes until it gives up.

The room tilts if you turn your head. At some point you decide the air is heavy and crack the window, damp morning heat spills in, then a draft that feels like knives.

You sweat, then shiver, then sweat again.

Brilliant.

A knock, two short, one long.

“You didn’t leave,” he says through the door. “You alive?”

“Mm,” you croak, which is not a language.

The knob turns. He steps in, fills the doorway, scowl already forming.

His gaze strips the scene fast — open window, heap of blankets, you blinking like a stunned animal.

He crosses to you, sets the back of his fingers to your forehead.

“Fuck,” he mutters. “You’re boiling.”

“It’s fine,” you lie, trying to roll away.

Your body disagrees.

He shuts the window with a click that feels like judgment. Curtains down. Thermostat up a hair. He swears at the room in general and then at you, softly,

“You open a window with a fever? You trying to die on laminate?”

You try to glare, it comes out damp.

“Too warm.”

“Yeah,” he says, all gravel. “Your brain’s cooking.”

He holds the digital thermometer to your temple, it beeps high.

His mouth goes flatter.

“Up.”

“Don’t wanna."

You sound five and hate it.

He ignores that and gets an arm behind your shoulders, forearm braced like he’s practiced lifting broken things.

“C’mon. Tub. Before I call a clinic.”

“I can— ”

“You can’t.” He hauls you gently, efficiently.

The room swims, the hallway’s too bright. In the bathroom he already has a towel on the floor, the rubber mat in the tub, the water running just on the cool side of lukewarm.

He checks it with his wrist, not trusting the dial.

“Sit.”

You sit on the edge because he said it like gravity.

He peels the blanket off your shoulders and drops it outside your reach.

“No.”

“I’m cold.”

“Yeah.” He guides you in, steady hand at your elbow, keeping his palm broad and impersonal. “That’s the point.”

Water climbs your shins, your thighs, your spine.

Your breath stutters, your teeth chatter. He crouches, big man made small, and dunks a washcloth, wrings it, lays it over the back of your neck, then your wrists, then your forehead.

He works the cloth across pulse points with ruthless competence, refreshing it the second it warms. Every now and then he glances at the thermometer like it insulted him personally.

“Breathe,” he says when you start to pant. “Slow.”

“You’re mean,” you whisper, which is unhinged and true.

“Yup.” He brings the cloth back to your throat, thumb careful at your jawline like he’s trying not to touch more than he has to. “Stay with me.”

Time kinks. The vent hums.

He times five minutes on his watch, resets, does another five with your ankles propped on the tub edge to catch the cold better.

When you try to curl for warmth, his palm lands flat between your shoulder blades and pins you lightly.

“Uh-uh. No hiding. Fever breaks first.”

You hate him.

You adore him.

You might be hallucinating both.

When the thermometer finally chirps a number he can live with, he exhales like a door unlatching.

“Okay.” He helps you up, towels you fast, friction and heat.

He doesn’t let you grab the blanket yet, he drapes a the towel over your damp t-shirt and steers you back to the bedroom.

Your fingers find the hem of your wet clothes and you're too cooked to make sense of not changing in front of him.

He sighs and steers back to the door, leaving you to it.

“Soup,” he says. “Bed. Don’t move.”

“I’m fine,” you protest, already sinking in the mattress once you replace damp with dry and warm.

“You’re nonsense,” he corrects, gone before you can answer.

He returns with actual soup — steam, spoon, a wedge of bread. He sets it on a tray, nudges your pillow higher, and sits on the edge of the bed.

He feeds you the first spoon because your hands are stupid and you hate that you let him.

You also hate how good the salt tastes. He watches your throat when you swallow like he’s checking how much effort it takes.

“Slow,” he says. “You aspirate, I’m not explaining that to triage.”

“You’re being… nice,” you tell him, woozy and sentimental, “for someone who hates me.”

He looks at you like you just said the moon is inside the microwave — sharp, cutting, unreadable.

You’ll forget the look later, write it off like a fever glitch.

Right now, it lands in your chest and burns there.

“Eat,” he says finally, voice rough. “Then meds.”

You drink, you slurp, you do as ordered. The soup dwindles. The room softens.

He presses two pills into your palm, thumbs the ginger-ale can open with a hiss.

When you try to burrow under the comforter he flips it back with a single irritated hand.

“Nope.”

“Please,” you whine.

“You drop back under ninety-nine, you get a blanket. Until then? Suffer.”

“You’re impossible.” but you don't try again.

“Accurate.” He takes your empty bowl, sets it aside, and then stupidly, carelessly rests his hand on the mattress near your hip — close enough that your fingers brush when you shift.

You grab him.

It’s pure fever-brain.

You tell yourself that as you latch your hand around two of his fingers like a child catching a coat hem.

He goes very still.

You expect the jerk-away and the snarl.

He doesn’t pull.

He doesn’t move at all for one long breath.

Then his knuckles turn, slow, like a tide rolling palm-up under yours so you can hold properly if you’re going to.

You do.

Your fingers barely span half his hand.

His palm is hot, heartbeat steady under callus.

“Look at me,” he says after a while, and you do.

He leans in enough that his red eyes fill your vision.

You feel your skin flush with heat.

He lifts one finger of his free hand and traces left-right, up-down.

“Follow.”

You track like a drunk moth.

He checks your pupils, nods to himself, clicks the thermometer again.

It chirps a better number. He huffs.

“Good. Keep doing that.”

“Breathing?”

“Existing.”

You hum, heavy. Sleep drags at your lashes. You fight it and lose in small waves.

You surface to the cool weight of a fresh cloth on your forehead, to his thumb pressing the pulse at your wrist, counting.

You surface to him cursing the kettle for boiling too slow and the bottle cap for being glued on and your stubborn thermostat for existing.

You surface to his voice at the doorway — “Yeah, she called in sick,” — flat, final, probably to your work if they rang, and you cannot process how he would know the number.

Once, you wake because the room is too bright. He’s there immediately, dimmer in hand, light down.

“Eyes,” he says, soft.

You open them. He checks the time, your face, the slick at your hairline.

“You hungry?”

“No.”

“Water.”

You sip.

He adjusts the fan angle so air skims your skin without chilling you. When your teeth start to click, he waits it out, then tucks the sheet to your hips and, after another thermometer beep shows a cool, reasonable number, finally lets the blanket cover you.

It feels like permission.

“Stop being nice,” you mumble into the pillow.

“I’m not nice,” he says, automatic, like you accused him of tax fraud. “I’m efficient.”

“You hate me.”

He makes a low noise that could break glass.

“Go to sleep.”

You do, because he said it and because your body is heavy water.

The day loops, sleep, wake, check, drift.

Once, your grip on his hand loosens and he starts to pull away, you make a small, miserable sound you’ll deny forever, and he settles right back into the same spot, palm up, as if you’re an IV that can’t be jostled.

Another time, he puts the back of his hand to your cheek and swears happy under his breath at the cooler skin.

He doesn’t smile.

He doesn’t say good job.

He just leans back in the chair and lets his eyes close like someone flipped a switch for thirty blessed seconds.

Dusk comes violet at the edges of the curtains. Your head’s a dull ache instead of a furnace. You roll toward him, still holding his hand, and find him watching your face like a patrol — bored expression, eyebrows mean, attention total.

“Hi,” you rasp.

His mouth twitches.

“Hi.”

“Sorry about… earlier.”

You gesture at everything with little effort, the snap, the tears, the open window, your entire tragic body.

He shakes his head once.

“You were sick, you know it. I know it.” A beat. “Text next time. Before you try to fix it alone.”

You’re too tired to argue.

You squeeze his hand.

He lets you.

For a long, quiet minute, that’s the whole conversation — your pulse learning his, his thumb idly pressing the back of your knuckles like a metronome.

When sleep comes again, it’s easier.

He’s a big, rude shape in a chair, an ugly blanket folded near, a glass of water within reach, the room the exact temperature he decided. You drift with the dull certainty that you’ll wake and he’ll still be there, scowling at a thermometer like it owes him money.

In the morning you might file this under fever dream.

For now, with your fingers curled around his, you know exactly what it is, a giant predator running every safety he’s got and still refusing to leave the den.

You wake up feeling better.

The days pass, the same routine repeats.

Bare feet, soft steps around the house. Mug tucked to your chest as if ceramic could ward off a six-foot-plus problem with red eyes and a jaw that could cut glass. You clock the boots by the door, the keys in the dish, the way the air smells faintly like smoke and cedar when he’s home.

You reroute down hallways like a rat in a maze.

Your head is back at it because of the routine — as if he didn't nurse you back to health even when you snapped at him and then dozed off like a sick victorian child.

He hates you. Obviously. You didn't change your mind about it.

He grunts when you say hi, ignores when you ask if the shower’s free, reaches past you without a word for the top shelf you can’t reach.

He's your best friend’s older brother and sharing an apartment with him has a lot of pros, money-wise.

Living with him is… manageable if you treat him like a cyclone — track it, give it space, survive.

Tonight you miscalculate.

You come around the corner toward the kitchen and walk into a wall of muscle and heat and black T-shirt.

Your mug taps his chest and you jolt like you’ve touched a socket.

“Whoa.”

He catches the mug with one big hand and steadies it, steadying you with the other at your waist. His palm is hot. You freeze. He looks down. The red of his eyes flicks to your mouth, back up.

“Relax. I’m not gonna bite.”

“Okay,” you whisper, which is dumb because everything about him says bite.

You step sideways to slip past, he doesn’t move.

“Why are you always walking like I’m the landlord and you’re late on rent?” he asks, lazy and rough. He smells like soap and smoke, fresh ink and clean sweat. “I live here too. You don’t have to sneak.”

“I wasn’t— ”

“Lying,” he says, cocking a brow. “Try again.”

You open your mouth. Close it. You hate how your pulse hammers, how your throat goes tight when he stares like that — flat, unblinking, cutting through pretense.

“I don’t want to… bother you,” you manage.

He huffs a laugh, it edges on a scoff.

“If you were bothering me, you’d know.”

Your fingers go clammy around the mug.

“Right.”

He leans his hip to the counter, caging you without quite touching again.

“You’re scared of me.”

“No.”

He tilts his head, considering.

The ink on his neck shifts with the movement, the light picks out the line of his throat, the scar through his eyebrow, the ring in his lip he worries with his tongue when he thinks.

“You look like a rabbit when you see me,” he says. “Big eyes. Freeze, bolt. Cute.”

Your cheeks burn so fast it’s embarrassing.

“I’m not— you can’t just call people rabbits.” your brows knit together.

“Why not? Fits.”

His gaze drops to your bare legs, the hem of your sleep shorts.

“Soft,” he adds, voice lower. “Skittish.”

“I’m not skittish,” you mutter, which sounds skittish.

He pushes off the counter and crowds a step closer.

You smell the mint on his breath.

He bends until his mouth is near your ear.

You can feel every single hair of your body standing and you need to kill a soft sound as it crawls up your throat.

“You think I hate you?” he asks, tone gone velvet and dangerous. “You really that bad at reading people?”

Your spine stiffens.

“You don’t exactly scream friendly.”

“Don’t need friends,” he says.

He drags knuckles down the outside of your arm, barely there, a static-soft graze that lights up every nerve.

“Don’t hate you either.”

“What do you— ” you go tense with the heat of his body so close to yours. Closer. Almost touching.

“If I hated you,” he murmurs, and you feel the curl of his smile against your cheek, “you wouldn’t be in my apartment.”

Your apartment, technically, but you’re not stupid enough to argue that with his mouth this close.

He straightens and looks at you like he’s been trying not to.

Direct and greedy. No flinch, no hiding.

“I don’t hate you,” he repeats, blunt, like a verdict. “I want to fuck you.”

The word lands low, hot, flipping your stomach like a coin.

You blink, aghast.

The mug in your hands suddenly weighs a ton.

You set it down before you drop it.

“You— you can’t say that.” Your voice comes out thinner than you want. “I’m— your brother's friend.” as if this would stop anyone, honestly.

“He’s not my keeper.” He studies your face. “You’re an adult. I’m an adult. We’re both sober. I’m saying it out loud so you don’t have to keep inventing stories where I hate you, rabbit.” His tongue touches his canine, the faintest flash of fang. “I don’t.”

"You can't say things like this— out loud."

You hate the wobble in your voice. You hate that you mean please don’t be mean and please be careful and please say it again.

“Why not.” He doesn’t reach for you

He doesn’t soften the line of his jaw. He keeps his hands flat where you can see them like a cop at a traffic stop.

“I’ve been decent. I’ve been loud instead of touching. I’ve been letting you spook. You’re not spooked anymore.”

“I’m spooked,” you say, wobbly laugh. “I’m—” You gesture at him. At the hoodie. At the sum of a week where a man like him ran a cold bath and timed your pulse points. “You scare me.”

“Yeah,” he says, like water is wet. “I’m scary.”

He tips his chin, gives you the full, unblinking red of his eyes.

“And I’m telling you so you stop inventing stories where I hate you. I don’t. I wanted you the second you put my knife back crooked and pretended you hadn’t.” The corner of his mouth pulls, wicked and fond. “Been running safeties ever since.”

“Safeties,” you echo, stupid with heat.

He nods once.

“Doors. Knobs. Knives. Voice.” He taps his throat, lazy. “This is me being polite, rabbit.”

The nickname shouldn’t make your stomach drop.

It does. It always has.

This time it doesn’t feel like a collar, it feels like a hand outstretched that could close, if you let it.

“I thought I was a nuisance,” you say, because the narrative you’ve been living in doesn’t know where to go.

“You’re annoying,” he says, without mercy and somehow with warmth. “I like annoying.”

He leans in a whisper of an inch, and the world narrows the way it does before a bad decision.

“I like you.”

You swallow. The kitchen feels smaller. Your silence stretches, he lets it, patient in a way you didn’t know he was capable of.

Finally, you breathe,

“What— what do you want me to say?”

“‘Yes’ if you want it,” he says simply. “Or ‘no’ and I’ll step back and stop crowding you. I won’t bring it up again. You can go back to tiptoeing and I’ll pretend I don’t hear you do those little gasps when you open a jar.”

“You do not hear—” your face is a furnace and your eyes go wide.

He grins, sharp and delighted.

“Every time.”

Your face is lava. You glance at his mouth. At his throat. At the veins in his forearms where black lines wrap muscle.

You have spent weeks dodging him like he’s a fault line.

You have also spent weeks not thinking about the way his shirt rides up when he reaches high shelves, not thinking about the soft grunt he makes when he drops a heavy pan, not thinking about what his hand would feel like at your throat—

“Close the fridge,” he says, gentle.

You blink, you had backed into it and left it cracked.

You nudge it shut with your hip.

“Okay,” you say.

Your voice is small but steady now.

“Okay.”

“Okay yes,” he clarifies, heat flaring.

You meet his eyes and nod once.

“Yes.”

The change is immediate.

The tension that always coils in him loosens into something focused and hungry. He steps in and cups your jaw carefully, thumb gliding under your cheekbone as if he’s making sure you stay exactly where you want to be.

“Knew it,” he murmurs, then kisses you.

It’s not gentle. It’s not cruel either. It’s thorough — like he’s been cataloging the idea and now he’s checking every line against the original.

His mouth is hot, peppermint-bitter. You brace on his chest and feel him, solid, heat thrumming under cotton. He groans when you open for him, it punches through you like lightning.

“Fuck,” he says against your lips, the word a growl. “You taste sweet.”

“Tea,” you manage. “Honey.”

He licks into your mouth like that’s an answer he likes.

Big hands bracket your hips and lift, easy as breathing, setting you on the counter.

The cool stone against your thighs shocks a small sound out of you.

His eyes go darker at that sound, his smile turns feral.

“Pretty,” he says. “Knew you’d be.”

“You act like you planned this.” you say as if you didn't imagine it a thousand times.

“Thought about it,” he admits, shameless. “Wanted to be decent about it.”

He noses along your jaw, finds the spot below your ear that makes your knees restless even with nowhere to go.

“Still can be. You stop me anytime, rabbit. Say the word.” He meets your gaze, waits. “You hear me?”

“I hear you.” like hell you're stopping him.

“Good girl.”

Heat runs through you like a fuse.

He drags his mouth down your throat, teeth scraping just enough to make your breath hitch, and you tip your head back and give him the length of your neck without thinking.

He laughs low, pleased.

“See? Not skittish.”

“I could run,” you say, breathless.

“You won’t.”

He sucks a mark into the tender skin above your collarbone, slow and proprietorial.

“You’re shaking, but you won’t.”

“I don’t— ” Your protest becomes a gasp when his hand slides under your shirt, rough palm over the softness of your stomach, up, up. He pauses at the band of your bra, eyes on yours. You nod. He slips his hand in and groans when he finds your breast, thumb circling once, twice, until your back arches to his palm.

“Pretty sounds,” he says, pleased and mean, like he’s proud he’s extracting them. “Been imagining what you’d sound like for weeks.”

“You— god— heard me open jars but not— ”

Your words dissolve when he mouths at your nipple through the thin fabric.

“Oh, I hear everything,” he says, wicked. “Like how you breathe when you’re alone in the shower.”

He smirks against your skin when you make a scandalized noise.

“I’m not a saint. I left the apartment for a reason some nights.”

“You’re filthy.” you feel your heart thundering and still you're too aroused to care about his wicked ways.

“I’m considerate,” he counters, amused. Then, softer, honest, “And I was trying to give you room to decide.”

Something tender tugs under your ribs. It’s swallowed quick by the way his hand drifts under the hem of your shorts, fingers squeezing the curve of your thigh before sliding inward. He pauses again, patient.

You nod too fast.

He drags the pad of his middle finger over the damp cotton between your legs like he has all the time in the world.

Your stomach drops, heat flashes, your hips tip forward without your permission and his mouth goes back to your throat, humming, satisfied.

“Warm,” he murmurs. “So fucking soft.”

The words are filthy but his tone is reverent. He presses his forehead to your shoulder, fingers teasing slow until you’re clutching his shoulders and making little helpless sounds you will deny later.

“Hold on to me,” he says, and you do, wrapping your arms around his neck, feeling the flex of corded muscle as he works you with lazy precision.

“Sukuna— ”

“Yeah?” He kisses the corner of your mouth, smirking when you chase him.

“Bedroom,” you say, surprising yourself.

The kitchen feels suddenly too bright, too open, too like a decision you cannot walk back from in the place you both cook eggs.

His eyes flare at the word.

He leans in and kisses you again, slower this time, like a promise.

“Bedroom,” he agrees. He steps back, palms lingering on your hips before he slides you down. Your knees wobble and he steadies you, pleased. “Can you walk?”

You glare.

“Yes.”

“Prove it.” He takes your hand anyway.

Your room is only a dozen steps, but they feel like a ritual. His hand is big around yours, warm and sure.

In the doorway he stops you with a tug, makes you face him.

“Last chance to change your mind,” he says. “You say ‘stop’ and I stop.”

You breathe, look at him — at the ink at his throat, the red in his eyes, the stubborn set of his mouth that somehow means he’ll keep that promise.

The fear you carried around like a talisman loosens, slips. Something else settles in its place, a greedy, giddy relief you don’t try to hide.

“I don’t want to stop,” you tell him.

“Good,” he says, and for the first time since you moved in, he smiles without teeth, without edge, heat softening the hard lines of his face. “Then come here.”

You do.

You're in his arms, and then in your bed. Clothes get lost in the process of him getting you breathless with his kisses and touches. He relishes in every single sound he drags from you and is shameless about enjoying them too much.

You learn he lied earlier, he does bite.

He bites your inner thigh, he bites your belly and your neck and even your hip. He also soothes you with his tongue and lips, but he's mean, nonetheless. He circles your clit, presses with the flat of his tongue and edges you but doesn't let you come — you don't know how he knows so accurately when you're close.

He plays with you, lets his huge frame cage you from above as he fingers your needy cunt with one hand and keep his forehead against yours because he won't have you looking anywhere else besides his eyes as he undoes you prettily.

He chuckles in your mouth when you urge to kiss him, arms around his neck and chest pressing against his own as he finally lets you ride your orgasm while pumping his perfectly curled fingers in and out of you.

You don't remember the last time you came so hard, but he let's you know this won't be the last time of the day.

You ask him to choke you when he's already inside you and he stills for a whole second before opening a wicked grin, satisfied you decided to ask for what you want instead of burying it in your creative little mind.

And his hand around your throat is everything you thought and more.

Borderline obscene.

You moan louder, even with raspy voice you feel like the pleasure suddenly enhanced.

He lets himself enjoy you as much as you enjoy him, he places kisses and more bitemarks on your skin, he thrusts inside you with steady, strong pace that has your body shaking under his frame, he bites your lips, moans and groans against them and let you drink his lust as his crimson eyes sear their way through your glinting orbs.

Why did you take so long to— talk.

The brief regret of taking a long time to have this melts the instant he flips you and lets you ride him, big hand still encasing your throat and pulling you down so your chest lays on top of his, other big hand firm on your hipbone, settling you down so he bottoms out inside of you — gravity is a bitch sometimes.

You roll your eyes back when you feel the heat wave uncoiling in your stomach, his eyes bright with mirth as he sees how easily he rips another orgasm out of you, and he guides your body to grind against his. Swollen nub rubbing against his pelvis as his length twists and stroke in a lazy pace your inner walls. Your body shakes and muscles spasm — his mouth clashes on yours and he seems to feed on your whiny undone little sounds.

And as you ride your orgasm he chases his, fucking into you and making your body bounce on top of him, keeping your face close to his, chest to chest, hand now splayed at one of your ass cheeks before he grabs it so tight you yelp and he chuckles for a second and a wrecked moan escapes his lips in the other.

He finishes inside and oh god what is that sensation.

The heat increases and you feel him twitching, then a deeper thrust has him shooting thick hot ropes of cum inside you. You can't define it as other than strangely soothing, and of course, filling.

Later — sweat cooling, his breath slow against your neck, your sheets a mess — you’ll hear him say it again, rough and almost shy into your hair.

“I don’t hate you.”

“I got that,” you say, smiling in the dark, chest matching his. "You fucked the hate out."

He snorts, kisses your shoulder, pulls you closer with an easy, owning strength that makes your heart do stupid tricks.

“Good,” he repeats, and you feel the curve of his grin where his mouth rests on your skin. “So stop sneaking around our place, rabbit. If you need something, you ask.”

You pretend to think about it.

“What if what I need is on the top shelf?”

“Then I’ll reach.”

“What if what I need is you?” you feel sappy but you can allow yourself this one time.

He hums, pleased, and the sound goes through you like a warm hand.

“Then you won’t have to tiptoe for it.”

Yuji shows up like he always does, door flung with too much enthusiasm, a chorus of “hellooo!” and the smell of takeout preceding him down the hall.

He’s got a six-pack hooked in his fingers, a paper bag of gyoza clenched in his teeth, and exactly zero respect for doorframes.

“Peace was an option,” Sukuna says from the kitchen, deadpan, not looking up from the skillet.

“Peace is boring,” Yuji says around dumplings. He kicks off his shoes and beelines for you. “You look alive again! Did Bro stop waterboarding you with soup?”

You try to glare. It probably reads as fond.

“He did not waterboard me.”

“He would if it worked,” Sukuna says, flipping fried rice like the pan is an extension of his wrist. “Sit.”

You drift to the counter, meaning to help, and end up stealing a crispy bit from the pan. Sukuna’s eyes cut sideways — red and amused — and he taps the counter once, wait.

You do, because your survival instinct learned that tap.

Yuji bustles, sets down the bags, talks at a speed that defies physics.

“I brought gyoza, karaage, and those little sesame balls you pretend you don’t like.”

He leans in, stage-whispers,

“He eats them when you’re asleep.”

“I do not,” Sukuna says, already plating exactly three sesame balls on the far side like they’re under witness protection.

You reach for a plate, Sukuna slides it out of your hand with two fingers and jerks his chin toward the living room.

“Go sit.”

“I can carry—”

“Go sit,” he repeats, like gravity.

You go, muttering something about tyrants.

The couch sighs as you sink into it. The TV is on a streaming menu, the volume low.

You scroll, not really looking, Yuji follows with napkins and chopsticks and that big brother energy he has despite being the younger Itadori — “I will take care of you, and also I will drink your soda.” kind of vibe.

Sukuna arrives last, loaded like an efficient warlord — plates, bottles, extra sauce. He drops one plate on the coffee table and, without ceremony, drops himself onto the couch.

He hooks an arm around your waist and tugs you in, easy as breathing.

There’s no question.

One second you’re sitting next to him, the next, you’re sitting on him — across his thighs, your knees bracketing his, your plate balanced on the broad shelf of his quad. He nudges your ankle with his knee to angle you just right. His chin finds the notch of your shoulder like it was measured for him.

Yuji blinks.

Once.

Twice.

You can see the math happen behind his eyes.

“Ah, fuck,” he says, not exactly quietly.

Your stomach drops.

“Yuji— I was going to tell you,” you blurt, heat climbing your neck. “I just— I didn’t want it to be weird and I—”

He’s already grinning, palms up in surrender.

“No, no. I owe Megumi ten bucks.”

You short-circuit.

“I— what?”

Yuji thumbs out a text like he’s filing a claim.

“He said there was no universe where my brother would let you stay untouched and unkissed. Knowing you. Knowing him.”

He points his chin at Sukuna’s arm locked around your waist.

“Honestly? We’re late. I thought this would be, like, week two.”

Your cheeks go atomic.

Sukuna barks a laugh, chest shaking under your spine, and squeezes you closer until you can feel the smug roll of his hum against your nape.

“She thought I hated her,” he tells Yuji, delighted, like he’s reporting a crime.

Yuji cackles so hard he has to plant his hands on his knees.

“She’s always like this when people flirt— bold as hell and somehow blind.”

“I am not blind,” you say, attempting dignity from the worst possible vantage point —his lap. “He’s rough and mean.”

“Compliments,” Sukuna murmurs into your skin, teeth grazing your shoulder just to be an ass.

Yuji, gleeful,

“Bold. Blind.”

You stab a gyoza, refusing to be flustered.

You last three chews.

Sukuna, absolutely not helping, adds in that ruinous, lazy tone,

“You didn’t complain about rough and mean while I was fucking you.”

The noise that escapes you is not recognized by science.

Yuji facepalms so fast he might sprain something.

“BRO. I am present. I am a witness.”

“Be grateful I’m being polite,” Sukuna says, and steals half your karaage with audacious eye contact.

“Polite,” you echo, elbowing him in the ribs. It’s like elbowing a wall. “This is your polite setting?”

“Mm.” His breath warms the tiny hairs at your neck. “Figure you like me better out of prison.”

Yuji points two chopsticks like tiny accusing swords.

“New house rules. One, no filthy metaphors within three feet of the rice. Two, if you sit in his lap you forfeit food taxes. Three, I was right.”

“Megumi was right,” you correct weakly.

Yuji makes a show of texting.

“Pay up, Fushiguro. 😌”

Your phone buzzes a second later.

Megumi,

I won. Another, Also tell him to stop stealing sesame balls.

Sukuna snorts, mouth already full of a stolen sesame ball.

You try to regroup.

“For the record,” you say to Yuji, chin up, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know if it was— if he—”

You gesture vaguely at the man-shaped problem you’re sitting on.

“He’s not exactly… obvious.”

Yuji barks a laugh.

“He is the most obvious man alive. He moved the top-shelf stuff to the second shelf and pretended it was gravity. He washed your hoodie, that he gave you, and warmed it in the dryer like a cat.”

Sukuna grunts.

“Shut up.”

Yuji grins wider.

“He installed the rubber bath mat.”

You whirl.

“You told him that?”

“Didn’t have to,” Yuji says. “Bro’s been doing silent acts of service since we were kids. He thinks if he uses verbs it makes him weak.”

Sukuna flicks a dumpling at him.

Yuji catches it with the reflexes of a raccoon and eats it triumphantly.

You… soften.

It’s ridiculous, how fast the embarrassment drains into something buoyant.

The room feels bigger. Your shoulders slide down.

From this close, Sukuna’s “rough and mean” is just… texture. Heat.

The absurd safety of being bodily anchored to someone who blocks doors and fixes thermostats and snarls at gyoza.

Yuji leans back, satisfied, and opens a beer.

“Anyway, congrats, lovebirds. When’s the wedding.”

“Eat glass,” Sukuna says calmly.

“Bring a plus-one,” you add, and Yuji wheezes.

The movie you didn’t pick plays in the background — something loud and unserious.

Yuji heckles the physics, you laugh, Sukuna hums, that low pleased sound that vibrates where your spine meets his sternum, and presses a kiss to the hinge of your jaw like he’s checking it fits there.

You swat at him with your chopsticks, useless.

“Yuji is right there.”

“I know,” he says, utterly unbothered, and nips your nape on pure principle.

Yuji throws a napkin.

“Two feet rule! Two feet!”

“Three feet,” you say primly, trying not to melt.

Sukuna’s mouth curls against your skin.

“I’ll allow it,” he says, like a king bestowing mercy, and slides one big palm over your thigh to anchor your plate. “Eat.”

You eat. He steals. Yuji steals from both of you like a happy goblin and gives running commentary about how Megumi is sending him a ten with a skull emoji.

Somewhere in there, your phone buzzes again — Nobara, tell him if he breaks your heart I’ll break his kneecaps — and you show Yuji and everybody laughs, including the alleged kneecap owner, who says,

“Get in line.”

At some point you lean back without thinking.

Sukuna’s arm tightens, automatic, the way seatbelts do in old cars. You pretend not to notice how good “automatic” feels, and he pretends not to notice you noticing.

Yuji finishes his beer, wipes his mouth, and eyes the two of you like an anthropologist closing a field notebook.

“Well,” he says, smug, “this turned out wholesome. Disgusting.”

“Get out,” Sukuna says without heat.

“In a minute.” Yuji snaps his fingers. “One more rule, if you’re going to be gross, at least admit you’re happy.”

You make a face.

Sukuna doesn’t.

He just hums against your shoulder again, low and obscene and somehow soft, and says,

“Happy she thought I hated her?”

“Yeah, and she still climbed you like a tree,” Yuji fires back.

Your face combusts again. You bury it in your hands. Both brothers laugh — Sukuna’s a bass rumble under your palms, Yuji’s a bright crackle that fills the room.

It should be mortifying. It is. It’s also easy. It’s loud and dumb and perfect.

You peek through your fingers.

Yuji is texting terrible memes. Sukuna is licking sauce off his thumb like a menace.

You are sitting on a man who used to terrify you and now feels like a gravity you got to choose.

“Hey,” Yuji says, half out the door later with leftovers dangling. “For real. If he’s too mean, I’ll steal you.”

“You can try,” Sukuna says, amused, hand heavy and warm at your waist.

You stick your tongue out at Yuji.

“Megumi still gets the ten?”

Yuji groans.

“I’m never betting against that man again.”

The door shuts. Silence returns like a friendly cat. You let your head tip back onto Sukuna’s shoulder.

He nudges the plate away and folds you in both arms like it’s his job.

“Bold and blind, huh,” you murmur.

“Bold,” he corrects, mouth at your pulse. “Not blind anymore.”

You smile, helpless.

“Rough and mean.”

“Mm.” He kisses your neck, unhurried. “You didn’t complain.”

You let your kimono pool around your feet and your hakama goes next, bunched up, a problem for the future you.

You step in.

The first sting is just heat finding the cuts, you sit, muscles unwinding in increments as if someone is picking pins out of you. He kneels behind the tub, sleeves pushed to the elbow.

Four hands settle like a ritual — one on the rim to brace, one at the base of your throat to steady you, two to work. He peels a Sugawara talisman from your arm with a look of offended disgust and flicks it into the brazier, the paper shrivels to nothing.

“They tag you with scraps,” he sneers. “Like fishmongers at the market.”

“I tagged them back,” you say, and he huffs a sound that means good.

His fingers comb through your hair, slow, patient strokes that find all the tangles battle never remembers. A claw pricks you once — sharp breath, a tiny flinch. He goes still as a hunting cat, then adjusts, trying again, slower.

“Hold still, wife.”

He says it like a scold, but wife lands soft as silk on the back of your neck.

He works the grime from your shoulders, rubs warmth into the knots that set up camp along your spine. Every time he finds a bruise his mouth flattens.

“Sloppy.”

He says it three times, each softer than the last, until it’s just breath. He takes your hand, turns it palm up, considers the split across your knuckles. He bends and kisses it, quick and unguarded, then immediately pretends he didn’t — thumb already pressing salve, a narrow strip of cloth drawn tight.

“Those needle curses,” you rasp and complain. “He threw them like rain.”

“Sugar-work,” he mutters. “Pretty. Brittle.”

The pads of his fingers skim the welt along your ribs, and you feel his temper bank and glow.

“If you’d waited half a breath—”

“I didn’t have half.”

“You had me.”

He says it without heat, which makes it land heavier. He rinses you with a bowl, pouring careful arcs that avoid the gash over your collarbone. When he finally inspects that one he makes a low sound as if some small, unimportant thing inside him cracked.

“Sugawara,” he says like a curse. “They cut lines and call them sutras.”

“Didn’t take.” You tip your head against his arm. “I cut back.”

“I saw.” There’s pride there, hidden like a blade in the sleeve. “But you dragged their filth home.”

He lifts his hand, and thin threads of cursed energy gather at his fingertips — clear as water, fine as spider silk.

“Hold your breath.”

You do.

He draws the edges of the collarbone wound together with a neat, almost invisible line. It feels like cool fire, a tug from the inside that doesn’t hurt so much as rearrange.

He ties off the stitch only he can see, the knot finishing with a whisper against your skin.

“There,” he says, almost satisfied. “Try not to split it proving a point.”

“Which point?”

“The one that always needs proving.”

He cups water and pours it down your shoulder, washing away residue you couldn’t have reached alone. He uses the edge of his sleeve to blot your temple, patient, exact.

Not because you’re fragile — he will never lie to himself like that — but because you’re his.

He oils your hair with a single palmful, works it through to the ends. He takes his time. The world can wait while he catalogs the inventory of you — the new bruise under your ribs, the scrape on your knee, the heat in your cheeks that is not fever.

When you shiver he warms the water again, easy as exhaling.

“Tell me what he looked like,” he says.

“Tall. Too many talismans. Smiled before he threw.”

“Smiled?” He snorts. “I’ll take it off him next time.”

When your breath evens out and your hands stop buzzing, he brings you up out of the tub, drying you with slow, methodical passes as if you were something lacquered that his touch will either mar or perfect.

He wraps you in his robe — the heavy one — because “your things are ruined.”

The robe swallows you whole. It smells like incense and danger and your husband.

He lifts you because you let him, not because you can’t walk. The futon is already laid. He’s unrolled the winter quilts though it isn’t winter, arranged them with his usual precision — weight where you need weight, space where you need air.

He lowers you and the bedding remembers your shape.

“Cold?” he asks.

“Not with you,” you say in a smug way, and he gives you a considering look as if measuring whether that counts as insolence or truth.

He decides it’s both.

He slides in behind you without ceremony, gathers you with all four arms in a hold that would be a trap in any other mouth. One forearm tucks under your head to make a better pillow, one crosses your waist and anchors you at the hip, one drapes heavy over your ribs to keep your breath deep, the last finds your wrist under the blanket and circles it, thumb finding your pulse.

He draws the heat out of himself and into the futon until the quilts go warm all the way through — steady, even warmth, like bathing in a hearth.

“Too hot?” he asks, though he already knows.

“Perfect.” you purr.

He grunts, which means good, and sets his chin on the crown of your head. Silence settles, the kind that has a nice, comfortable weight.

Outside, a night bird tries a call and thinks better of it.

You let him hold you the way he likes to hold prizes and boundaries. He is all corners and knives to the world — to you he is weight and wall and a steady metronome counting your life back to a slower tempo.

Each exhale brushes your ear. The hand at your wrist is not exactly gentle — he’s measuring your pulse like a ledger — but the thumb strokes once, twice, when it drops.

Accident, then not.

“Next time,” he says into your hair, “you wait.”

You make a noise that is not agreement. He tightens the arm over your ribs, a warning wrapped in comfort.

“You will wait,” he repeats, and there’s no iron in it, only certainty. “I am patient with nothing. Except you.”

“You’re not patient with me,” you murmur.

“Mm.” The sound is amused. “Then call it obsession.”

“You admit it?”

“I cultivate it.” He nuzzles the hinge of your jaw the way an animal might mark a favorite tree, entirely unbothered by dignity. “Sleep.”

You don’t. Not yet. Your body remembers the rhythm of the fight and tries to dance again — twitches in your calves, the urge to sit up and re-run the exchange until you find the place you could have cut faster.

He feels it. His hand at your hip tightens, the weight of his arm like a commandment.

“No,” he says softly. “Enough. You’re home.”

The word settles deeper than the blankets. You breathe. He listens.

The Sugawara name drifts across your mind and you see the smirk again, the talismans, the needle curses that sang as they flew. Your heart picks up, his thumb presses your pulse, warning, then eases when you ease.

“If he had touched your throat,” he says, voice almost asleep, “I would have opened him from ear to ear and hung his words out to dry.”

“Poet.” you say, and he huffs a laugh that is more vibration than sound.

“Sleep,” he says again, and this time it’s the kind of order he gives himself when his temper wants to walk. He tucks the quilt under your knees with a deftness that says he practiced on corpses and learned to prefer the living.

He kisses the nape of your neck — the scar there, the one that always runs cold in rain — and you feel heat pool there as if he poured it out of his mouth. The quilt grows warmer. Your bones stop ringing.

After a while he speaks, so low you feel it more than hear it.

“When you were late, I counted to a hundred twice. Then I went looking.” A pause. “You don’t make me do that again.”

“Or what?” you ask, because it’s your reflex to touch the blade and see how sharp it is.

“I’ll drag you back,” he says, calm as weather. “And then I’ll kill you for making me worry.”

He kisses your shoulder where he stitched you.

“After.”

“How reassuring.”

“My wife does not require reassurance,” he says, a thread of pride through the grumble. “She requires sleep.”

You make a quiet, involuntary sound. His hand at your wrist answers with a slow stroke of thumb.

“There,” he murmurs, more to himself than to you. “There you are.”

You slide at last, your thoughts losing their edges, the Sugawara smirk dissolving into the quilt’s warmth.

You float.

His weight doesn’t let you drift too far, each breath you take he takes with you, synced like you agreed beforehand. When your muscles finally accept truce, he shifts just enough to own your sleep completely — chin tucked closer to your crown, one hand migrating to your ankle under the covers to hold you at both ends, as if he were keeping a map from folding wrong.

“Don’t do that again,” he says into your hair, the words ride your last waking breath down.

It’s not a warning.

It’s a lullaby he doesn’t know how to sing any other way.

You sleep. He keeps count.

“I’m fine,” you lie, the way people say I don’t mind while holding their breath underwater.

“Tch.” He doesn’t argue.

He disappears into the bathroom.

You hear water run, the small metallic clatter of his rings on the rim of the sink, the rough hiss of soap — he always scrubs his hands before he comes near when he’s been out — bar fights, cigarettes, the way the city sticks.

When he returns, his hands are clean and warm and he’s carrying your cup from the counter without making a show of it.

“Drink,” he says.

You do, because you always do when he says it like that — gentle disguised as an order.

He takes the cup back and sets it down where you won’t kick it. The couch dips beneath his weight. He spreads one arm across the backrest, the other hooks around your knee, and he tugs you in until your shoulder fits under his collarbone like it was cut to measure.

“Say it.” he murmurs.

“Say what?”

“The thing gnawing holes in your head.”

You stare at the dark TV screen and see your face doubled, washed out and small.

“Sometimes I… I don’t understand why you’re with me.”

His thumb stills on the seam of your jeans.

“Because you think you’re not good enough.”

You laugh too quickly.

“It’s not — I mean, look at you.”

You gesture, helpless — at the mess of him, at the stories that trail him like smoke, at the way everything about him is too much.

“You could be with someone who fits. I’m not — I’m not the kind of girl people expect next to you.”

He snorts.

“People expect a lot of things from me.” He tips your chin with a knuckle. “I don’t live for their expectations.”

You try for a smile and fail.

“I know. But today someone said—” The sentence snags. “That I’m charity. Or a phase. Or… that I make you small.”

Silence settles like a open palm.

Then he exhales through his nose, slow enough you feel his chest move under your cheek.

His temper flashes in the tendons of his hand but the heat doesn’t aim at you — it banks, contained.

“Look at me,” he says lowly, and you do, because when he asks like that, it feels less like a command and more like a door he holds open for you.

His eyes are a dark, steady thing.

“I don’t do charity,” he says, flat as concrete. “And I don’t do phases. I don’t do placeholders. I don’t do easy.”

“You do fights in parking lots,” you mutter, because deflection is a habit.

“Yeah,” he says. “And yet.” His mouth twitches. “Listen.”

He shifts closer, knees bracketing your leg, his palm spreading warm over your ribs like he’s counting your breaths.

He speaks the way he fights — precise, economical, every strike chosen.

“I’m with you because you tell me no and mean it. Because you don’t flinch at what I am, you make me choose how I use it. Because when I forget to eat, you put food in my hands and roll your eyes like it’s the stupidest thing in the world, and I eat. Because you knock once and wait, even when you could pick the lock. Because when I’m late, you leave the porch light on and the door cracked just enough — it never slams on me here.”

His thumb moves, a slow stroke at your sternum.

“Because you make me want to keep promises I never made anyone else.”

Your throat gets tight.

“Anyone could— ”

“No,” he cuts you, final. “They couldn’t. They didn’t. I’ve met everyone.”

You choke on a laugh that’s too wet to be a laugh.

He hums, disapproval rumbling against your temple, and wipes your tears with the inside of his wrist like you’re something delicate and he’s pretending he doesn’t know it.

“Don’t do that,” he says. “Don’t make what we are into something small because it’ll fit better in your pocket.”

He leans in until his forehead rests against yours, the pierce of his gaze gone soft with proximity.

“You think I’d let you near me if you were almost? I don’t do almost, woman.”

You swallow.

“You’re… not exactly nice.”

“I’m not nice,” he agrees, unapologetic. “I’m yours.”

He watches the words settle in you, as if he’s checking they take.

“That’s better.”

Your mouth trembles into a smile you don’t mean to show.

He looks disgusted with himself and kissed-proud at once — it’s ridiculous how much you love him in that face.

He shifts again, gathering you more completely, a knit of limbs and heat.

For anyone else he’s a wall, for you he’s a room with the lights left on. His hands know their map, one anchoring your thigh, one at your nape under your hair, fingers spread where your pulse beats hard.

“You are not small,” he says. “You cut through noise I thought was permanent.”

“It doesn’t feel like that.”

He grunts.

“Then feel this.”

He takes your hand and guides it to his chest, presses it flat. The thud under your palm is steady and a little too fast.

“You hear that? That’s mine. It gets stupid around you.”

“Stupid,” you echo.

“Yeah.” A faint smile. “Infuriating.”

His thumb draws idle circles at the base of your skull.

“I hate crowds. I’d stand in the middle of ten thousand people if you wanted to see a band. I hate mornings. I buy your bread fresh so you can eat it warm. I hate talking. I still tell you things I’ve never said out loud. That’s not charity. That’s worship, downgraded so you won’t argue.”

You snort.

He looks pleased with himself for having found the word that makes you breathe again.

“I’m not good at this,” he says after a beat, firm in his honesty. “I’m sharp in the wrong places. I break easy things. But I don’t break you. I don’t want to. You’re the one place I set every blade down.”

The world tilts, just a little, like the exact moment a lock finally clicks.

“That’s why?” you ask, too quiet.

“That’s why,” he says.

Then, because he’s him,

“And because you steal my hoodies.”

“They’re comfortable.”

“They’re mine.”

“So am I,” you say with a little smile, and it isn’t a question.

His mouth softens.

“Yeah,” he says, as if it’s the easiest truth in the world. “You are.”

Outside, a siren bleeds into the night and fades.

Inside, the apartment holds its breath around the two of you and then releases it.

He shifts again, easing you sideways, dragging his jacket off the chair with a careless hook of fingers and throwing it over both your legs like a blanket.

His phone buzzes on the counter — he ignores it. When your stomach makes a small, embarrassed sound, he rolls his eyes and reaches for the takeout app without letting go of you.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“Not to be a phase.”

He huffs.

“Pick noodles, smartass.”

Then, softer,

“You’re not a phase. You’re the address I keep coming back to.”

You rest your head beneath his jaw and listen to that stupid heartbeat do its stupid thing. He holds you like he means it, like he’s practiced meaning it, like he’s willing to be gentle all night if that’s what it takes to bruise the doubt out of your ribs.

“You’ll forget and ask me again,” he says into your hair, equal parts promise and prediction. “I’ll tell you again.”

“Every time?”

“Every time.”

You close your eyes.

His breath warms your crown. His hand at your nape is a steady weight, grounding like a lighthouse is a steady light.

He doesn’t ask if you feel better.

He just stays.

—and the street empties.

Silence settles over the fire and shouting like cloth dropped over a cage. Ash drifts. A burning roof beam collapses down the road with a hiss and a cough of sparks.

The first time you see him, the sky is the color of slaughter.

Smoke crawls along the hillside, clinging to your throat. The field reeks of blood, sweat, burning rice straw. Bodies lie in piles where his shikigami and men tore through them, armor split like cheap lacquer, bones snapped like twigs.

You stand in the middle of it, sword still dripping, armor streaked with red that isn’t yours.

And then the air goes heavy.

You look up.

He stands at the crest of the hill, framed by the ruin he made.

Power presses along your skin, heavy and wrong, like the air before lightning. Your instinct is to brace, to set your stance, to bare your teeth at whatever comes. You do exactly that, because instinct has kept you alive this far.

Then, he steps through the curtain of smoke, and for a second your mind simply refuses to make sense of what you’re seeing.

He’s tall. Taller than any man in this country, taller than anyone you grew up with. His shoulders look carved out of stone and malice. Four arms, each corded with muscle, hang relaxed at his sides, two of them idly flexing as if they’re already impatient to be used. A heavy rope belt knots around his waist, the cloth falling over thighs that would be obscene if they weren’t so terrifying.

Four eyes rake over you — two in his usual face, two narrow and watchful beneath them. The crest on the right side of his face curves like something inked there on a dare to the gods. And below his chest, where any other body would be smooth muscle and skin, his abdomen splits into a vertical, lipless maw full of teeth.

You’ve seen gut wounds. You’ve never seen a stomach that looks hungry.

Blood paints his forearms, dries on his claws. There’s a faint smudge of it at the corner of his mouth, like he didn’t bother to wipe after tasting.

You stand your ground.

You can’t understand a lot of what the people in this country mutter about curses, but you understand hierarchy. This is a predator standing in front of you. Everything else in the burning village is prey.

His gaze passes over the corpses at your feet, the spear still half-caught under your arm, your sword raised. His top right hand lifts, lazy, and he crooks two fingers at you.

“Interesting,” he remarks, in a voice like rough stone sliding together. “My men died entertained.”

You catch enough words to follow the shape of his meaning. Your tongue is always clumsy with their language, but you manage.

“They died careless.”

His brows twitch up. The corner of his mouth cuts into something that’s almost amusement.

“You’re foreign,” he says. “I can smell the distance on you.”

You don’t know how to answer that, so you don’t. You shift your weight. If he charges, you don’t stand a chance, but your body insists on readiness anyway.

He notices. Of course he does.

The lower set of arms fold over his stomach maw. It moves beneath them, teeth flexing, tasting the air. His upper hands rest on his hips — casual, the way a noblewoman would stand in the painted scrolls your lord once showed you, bored behind her fan.

“I have no quarrel with you,” you tell him, words broken but firm. “You’re not paid to kill me. I’m not paid to try you.”

He huffs.

“Paid.” The word seems to amuse him more than anything else tonight. “Little blade-for-hire. You cut through trained men as if they’re reeds, and you think I won’t bother because no one coins your worth?”

You swallow back the flash of irritation. It’s not the time.

“You’re not my enemy.” you grit through your teeth.

He takes a few steps closer. The ground does not shake beneath his feet, but it feels like it should.

“Everyone is my enemy,” he says softly. “They simply realize it at different speeds.”

His hand — top right — lifts, a single finger extending. You tense, ready for some unseen attack.

Instead, he traces a small, neat circle in the smoky air.

Around you, the burning village twists.

One blink, the corpses, the fire, the broken beams. The next, a wide stone courtyard under a night sky freckled with stars, smoke shadows clinging to your eyes as if you brought them with you. There’s a distant cliff edge and a darker drop beyond it, the smell of blood far, far more concentrated.

You turn once, checking corners, rescanning. Your fingers tighten on your sword hilt out of habit.

His interest sharpens.

“You adapt quickly,” he notes. “Good. The last warrior I brought here vomited on my tiles.”

You think of some of the men you’ve seen since arriving in this land, the ones whose armor shone but whose eyes shook. It doesn’t surprise you.

“What do you want?” you ask.

His four eyes narrow slightly, not in irritation, but as if you’ve spoken slightly out of order in a dance you don’t know.

“I watched you,” he says, ignoring the question for a moment. “On that battlefield a fortnight ago. When your lord’s army brushed against my territory. You split a man’s helmet with a single stroke, then turned your back on him before he hit the ground. No hesitation.”

You remember the moment, faintly. There have been so many.

“You are exquisite,” he concludes. “For a human.”

There is a weight to that word that makes you straighter despite yourself. Praise, this sharp from a creature like this, sits strangely in your chest.

“You want me to fight for you,” you assume. It’s the only logic you know. Men see skill, men want to buy it. “You offer more pay.”

He stares at you, then laughs — abrupt and loud, with all four arms briefly folding so he can lean on himself. The stomach maw edges open as he does, teeth exposed in a grin that doesn’t match the one on his face.

“I don’t pay,” he says when he recovers. “People crawl on their bellies for the right to die under my gaze. You think I would soil that with… coin?”

You bristle. The words come out before you can crush them.

“Then I will continue as I am. I don’t crawl.”

Silence again, but this time it’s thick with something else.

He turns his head slightly, regarding you sideways. It’s almost coy, in a way that would be absurd if it weren’t attached to so much horror.

“You refuse?” he says at last.

You nod.

“I refuse.”

He considers, then inclines his head, the slightest shift.

“Very well,” he replies. “I decline you.”

You blink at him.

That’s not how refusals work where you’re from, but the meaning is clear enough — no.

“Decline what?” you ask warily.

“I will not take what is not begged for properly.”

Your grip loosens marginally on your sword. There’s a wash of relief, unexpected and frustrating. You tell your shoulders not to slump.

You braced for a strike, for his rage, for… anything else. That — a refusal, his declining — was the best case scenario.

“Then we are done,” you say carefully. “You return me. I return to my employer. We do not cross blades.”

He inhales once as if smelling something bitter. His upper hands go behind his back, posture suddenly very composed, as if he’s seated behind a screen and you are simply a visitor fumbling at poetry.

“If you wish,” he says. “For now.”

You clamp onto that clause.

“For now is good enough for me.”

He clicks his tongue.

“You have much to learn about speaking to your betters in this country.”

You almost tell him that where you come from, you’ve bled enough for your right to speak plainly. You don’t. You’re not an idiot.

You only meet his four eyes, ignore the stomach that watches you separately, and hold his gaze until he looks away first.

You don’t realize that, for him, that choice means something entirely different.

You find the first gift three days later.

You are alone, sharpening your blades at the edge of camp. The men give you space, they always do, not only because of your status as foreign steel, but because you make them uneasy. You’re not surprised. You’d be uneasy around yourself, if you saw you from the outside.

Your hands move in automatic, careful strokes along the whetstone. The evening hum is low. It’s peaceful, in a way that feels like a lie.

The hair on the back of your neck stands up a breath before you hear it — the soft scrape of something heavy placed just behind you.

Your hand goes to your sword. You turn.

A head stares back.

The man it once belonged to is no one you recognize. His hair is tied in the local fashion, still glossy despite the pallor of his face. His eyes are shut. The cut is clean — the blood has been wiped from his neck. His lips are parted just enough that you can see the faint glimpse of teeth.

Your first thought is that someone wants to frighten you.

Your second is that you are, actually, tired of being threatened.

You look up. Nothing moves between the trees. The campfires behind you crackle, unaware.

You step closer to the head and crouch, studying it. There’s a faint smell of incense under the copper. A scrap of folded paper sits neatly beneath its chin, pinned there with a hairpin shaped like twin blades.

You tug the paper free.

The brush strokes on it are impeccable. You struggle through the characters, brow furrowing.

It’s a poem.

A death poem, you think, but not for the man who is dead. The words, once you piece them together, read something like:

Even steel-grown reeds look beautiful in red dusk. Who could fault the hand that cuts the chaff away clean, if the blade itself is art?

You realize halfway through that you’re being complimented.

There’s no signature, but there doesn’t need to be one. You can feel the echo of that oppressive presence clinging to the air, like a storm waiting for its name to be spoken.

Sukuna.

You straighten slowly, the paper still between your fingers. You think about the first time a boy tried to court you, back in the fishing town where you grew up. He brought you flowers, hands shaking, you thanked him, then sparred him bloody a week later when he grabbed at your arm in the street.

Your mother said you were cruel.

You didn’t see it that way.

If a man touches you without consent, you break the wrist that tried to claim you. Simple.

This — this is something else entirely.

In your homeland, this reads like a threat. A head dropped at your back, a poem praising your violence. It’s the sort of thing a rival might send before further trouble.

You fold the paper neatly and slip it into your belt. The head, you bury outside camp. The men don’t question you when you take a shovel, they never question anything you do when your jaw is set like that.

You don’t respond.

The second gift is silk.

Rich, layered robes in a style that is unmistakably Heian noble. The colors are carefully chosen — dark, deep red underlayers, pale ash over them, a hint of violet at the outer edge. There is embroidery at the hems — stylized lotus, curling flame, lines that remind you of teeth.

A slip of paper lies atop the stack. This time you recognize one of the words immediately, because you’ve heard it shouted with terror and reverence in equal measure.

Sukuna.

The rest takes longer.

So ill-bred, this land, that steel outshines silk and ink. Wear this. Remember even the sharpest of blades may be wrapped for careful hands.

Your lip curls before you can stop it.

You are many things — awkward with feelings, blunt, more comfortable with weapons than words.

You are not a doll to be dressed.

“And I am certainly not yours.” you mutter.

The robe is exquisite. Any court lady in this land would swoon to see it. You run your fingers over the embroidery, grudgingly impressed despite yourself. The cloth is cool and heavy, weight meant for closed rooms and poetry battles, not for a hand calloused from sword work.

The rational part of your mind says this is still a threat. A way of saying — I can put my hands on you without touching. I can dress you how I please. I can decide what you are.

Your temper says otherwise.

You march straight to the main house where your lord holds council, skirt the servants, and find his steward hovering in a side room.

“Sell this,” you tell the man, in your broken, accented version of their tongue. You drop the robes on the table between you. “Coin. Good coin.”

He gapes, hands fluttering over the cloth.

“This— this is court silk. My lady, this is—”

“I don’t care,” you cut in, voice flat. “I want pay. Supplies. Armor repair.”

“T-this is worth—”

“Then you can buy a better set of armor for the next woman who replaces me when I die,” you say. “Use it wisely.”

You walk out before he can stammer a reply.

You don’t see the way the shadows near the rafters twitch, momentary and furious.

If you understood Heian court customs, you might know this — noblewomen do not hand out direct encouragement. They demur. They refuse. They say no with their lips and yes with their sleeves, with the five strokes they add to a poem or the scent they choose for their letters.

A man writes. A man sends gifts. A man courts.

The woman, behind her screen, declines and declines and declines, until he has proved he will break himself on the door long enough to matter.

Sukuna, for all his monstrosity, has lived in that pattern for centuries. He destroyed it, eventually, but it baked into the way he thinks of wanting.

He sends a head, a poem. You bury it.

He sends robes that would make any court lady his for life. You sell them.

In his world, this is not the end. This is the beginning of a more interesting game.

For you, it is a very clear message — stay away. I am not yours.

You do.

You stay clear of the villages near his cliffs. You avoid patrols that wander too close to the places where the air feels too heavy. You tell your lord that some coin is not worth the attention of certain monsters. He laughs nervously and doesn’t argue.

You go on fighting, because that is what you know. You clean your blades. You sleep lightly. You ignore the faint, constant prickle at the edge of your awareness that feels like someone irritated watching you from very far away.

He comes for you on a night when the rain has been falling for hours.

The camp is quiet, men hunched under their travel shelters, grumbling about damp bedding and bad rations. You sit just beyond the ring of their fires, cloak up, watching water bead on the edge of your sword.

You are thinking about home, in that vague way you allow yourself sometimes. Not about faces — those blurred long ago — but about the sea, the way the wind tasted there, salt and old stories. You miss the simplicity of knowing only one language you didn’t fit in.

The raindrops in front of you pause mid-air.

You frown.

The sound of the camp dulls, muffled, as if someone has cupped their hands over the world’s ears. You rise to your feet slowly.

He is standing at the edge of the light, just beyond where the fire’s glow fades into black. For one heartbeat you almost mistake him for a woman in layered robes, his posture is that measured, the tilt of his head that perfectly dismissive.

Then your eyes adjust, and he is once again all sharp lines and too many eyes and the obscene split of his stomach.

“Sukuna.” you say, because pretending not to know him would be stupid.

He steps into the firelight. The flames bend away from him like they’re trying not to be rude.

“You have been ignoring me.” he says.

His tone is flat, but there’s a thread of something under it. Offense, maybe. Petulance.

“I have been working,” you reply. “And living. As you said, we were… done.”

You use the word you remember from that night — finished, complete.

He grimaces faintly, as if you’ve picked the wrong nuance.

“I declined you.” he corrects.

“Yes.” You spread your hands a little. “So I accepted.”

He stares.

Rain hangs in the air around you like beads on invisible strings. The world beyond your little circle may as well not exist.

“Do you know,” he says very slowly, “that in this land, a woman who yields too quickly is considered… cheap?”

You blink.

“I am not from this land.”

He makes a frustrated sound low in his throat.

One of his lower hands lifts, dragging claws over his face in a gesture you’ve seen exasperated commanders make.

“I sent you a head,” he says. “A man who insulted your skill in his last breath. I bled him for you and gave you his death to bury.”

“You left a corpse at my back without warning,” you counter, heat creeping into your voice. “Where I come from, that means someone is going to try to kill you next.”

His lips press into a thin line.

“I dressed you in silk.”

“You tried to wrap me in clothes that would get in the way of my sword arm,” you snap. “In my country, that’s a way of saying ‘I like you better if you’re not yourself.’”

He goes very still.

The stomach maw shifts under his folded lower arms, teeth parting. It almost looks like it’s tasting your words.

“So when I denied you unless you crawled and you refused to do so—”

“You made yourself as clear as I did,” you cut in. “Where I’m from, no is no.”

For a moment, you think he’s going to lunge at you. All four sets of fingers flex at once, claws catching what little firelight dares cling to them. The pressure of his cursed energy tightens, instinct trying to make you bend, kneel, break.

You have bowed to men you did not respect for the sake of coin and survival. You have also stabbed men you did not bow to for the same reasons.

You stand your ground now, not because you think you can win, but because dignity is a habit you’ve grown attached to.

Something in his gaze changes.

You don’t have the words for it. Softer is not right. Neither is kinder. Maybe more focused, like a spear tipping from one target to another.

“You truly did not know.” he murmurs.

“I truly do not care for games I don’t understand.” you answer.

His bottom right hand moves, almost without thought, fingers pressing against his stomach maw as if to hush it. The mouth snaps at them, annoyed. He ignores it.

“In these lands,” he says, more measured now, “a woman behind the screen is expected to turn lovers away. Three times, five, ten. If she opens the door on the first knock, they say she has no worth. So she says no. She burns poems. She sends gifts back.”

He looks at you, waiting for the thread to catch.

You frown, replaying the last weeks’ events in that new light.

The head. The poem. The robes.

Your refusal.

Your lack of begging.

Your deliberate distance.

“Oh,” you say, slowly.

His jaw tightens.

“Oh,” he mimics, with a little acid. “Yes. ‘Oh.’ I, Ryōmen Sukuna, scourge of your weak little lords, have been pining like a provincial poet while you blithely ignore me like a stone in your sandal.”

You stare at him.

“You have been… courting me?” you say, making sure you’ve got the word right.

He snarls, eye twitching.

“Do not make me repeat myself, foreigner. It wounds my pride enough to say it once.”

You almost laugh, except it would probably get you killed.

The absurdity of it hits you in a slow wave. The severed head, the robes, the way he had said “I decline you” with such chilly satisfaction.

You thought it was a dismissal.

It was, apparently, flirting.

“You could have just said.” you point out, careful.

“In what world,” he demands, “does the strongest curse in existence say ‘I like you’ like a lovestruck pageboy? Do you want my reputation to rot in its grave?”

You roll that around in your mind.

The idea of this creature trying to preserve his… reputation strikes you as a proper Heian noblewoman wanting to be courted correctly, not the behemoth of a sorcerer standing in front of you.

It’s so at odds with the rumors of him carving clans apart that you almost get dizzy.

“You act like… like a lady of the court,” you say, realizing as you speak. “Behind the screen. Making men prove themselves. Just like you said—”

“I act,” he replies through his teeth, “like someone who has standards.”

You can’t help it. A short, sharp bark of a laugh escapes you.

The rain starts to fall again at that, heavy and sudden, splattering against your face. The world rushes back in — the snore from a nearby tent, the hiss of water on banked coals.

His top left hand lifts.

The drops over you and him hang, suspended.

He is looking at you with all four eyes, and for the first time since you met him, there is something naked there. Not vulnerability — he is incapable of that in any way you understand — but hunger of a different sort.

“You are not like the others,” he says. “They fear me, and then they abase themselves, and then they die. You feared me and still argued. You saw my teeth and did not kneel.”

“I didn’t understand your rules.” you correct.

“You refused to play them,” he counters. “Which is better.”

You breathe in, slow. The power humming in the air tastes sharp, like bitten iron.

“So what now?” you ask.

He considers you. His lower arms unfold, stomach maw opening a little wider as if it, too, wants to see. The upper pair of hands move behind his back again, posture settling into that strange court-lady stillness.

“Now,” he says, “if you wish to continue insulting me by treating my intentions like a threat, you may do so and walk away. I will find another distraction. Eventually.”

You hear the unspoken if in the way his claws tap against his own wrist.

“And if I don’t?” you ask.

“Then you will learn,” he says, “how to romance properly.”

You blink.

“You expect me to court you?” you say, just to be sure.

His chin lifts a fraction.

“Of course.”

“You are—” You gesture at his entire… everything. “You are this.”

“I am also,” he replies, with grave offense, “a very eligible prospect.”

You stare at each other for a long, strange moment.

Where you come from, men chase. Women may or may not let themselves be caught, but they certainly don’t court. You’ve never fit that template, though. Too blunt, too willing to pick up a sword instead of a fan. The idea of courting anyone has always felt like someone else’s story, written in a script your hands weren’t made to hold.

Now here you are, in a foreign land, being told that if you want this — whatever this is, this sharp attention, this recognition of your skill from something older than most kingdoms — you’ll have to be the one at the door, knocking, again and again.

It is backwards. It is ridiculous.

It feels, in a sideways way, like something that might actually be yours.

You exhale.

“I don’t know your poems,” you warn him. “Your flowers. Your… sleeves.” You grope for the right word, he snorts softly. “I’m more likely to bring you a broken spear than a lyric.”

His mouth curves, slow and pleased and sharp.

“I like broken things,” he says. “They make better art.”

You roll your eyes.

“And you demand I pursue you.”

“I demand,” he corrects, “that you try. That you come to my domain of your own will. That you bring me something that costs you effort, not coin. That you do not flee the first time I feel like clawing at your pride.”

He leans in, and the stomach maw parts, breath ghosting hot against your chest even from that distance.

“Can you do that, little foreign blade?” he murmurs. “Can you admit you want me badly enough to come knocking on my door after I tell you no?”

Your throat works.

The honest answer is that you are not sure.

Wanting has never been simple for you.

You want battle, you want survival, you want the clean lines of technique.

You have never known how to want people, not without complication.

But you know this — his gaze on you feels like a challenge.

You’ve never turned down a challenge that set your blood humming like this.

“I can try.” you say.

He bares his teeth, delighted. All of them. Even the ones in his stomach.

“Then start,” he says, voice low. “Tomorrow night. Come to the cliff. Bring me something better than a dead man’s head or I’ll throw you back to your lord like the dull blade he thinks you are.”

Your eyes narrow.

“That’s not how courting is supposed to sound.”

“With me,” he says, “it is.”

You huff.

“I will decide what to bring.”

“You had better,” he replies. “I tire of guessing at your barbarian culture.”

The rain around you slams down all at once, as if something let go of it. He steps back into the darkness beyond the fire’s reach. For a heartbeat, you see only the white slash of his grin, the gleam of four eyes, the red curve of the crest on his face.

“Do not be late,” he adds. “I have eaten men for less.”

Then he is gone, and the night is only rain and the distant, oblivious snores of soldiers who have no idea what just shifted in their world.

You stand there for a long moment, cloak soaked through, hair plastered to your forehead, heart thudding an unsteady beat against your ribs.

You have, you realize, just agreed to court the most feared curse in this country.

In a style entirely alien to you — as the pursuer, not the pursued.

As something that is neither quite man nor woman, neither quite guest nor native.

You snort softly to yourself.

“Fine,” you mutter, wiping rain from your eyes. “If he wants to be the noblewoman behind the screen, he can learn what kind of suitor I am.”

You already know the first thing you’ll bring him.

Not silk, not a poem.

A blade, forged in your homeland, wrapped not in brocade but in the cloth your mother used to bind your chest when you were too tall for the girls and too soft for the boys.

The last piece of that life you never knew what to do with.

It will hurt, handing it over.

He wanted effort. He wanted something that costs.

You can do that.

Tomorrow night, you’ll go to the cliff.

Tomorrow night, you’ll knock on the door of a monster who expects to be wooed like a lady of the court — and you’ll see if your kind of romance, sharp-edged and genderless and stubborn, is something he can learn to bleed for in return.

You go to the cliff the next night with your first offering strapped to your back like extra weight you can’t forget.

The air is cold enough to bite the skin of your cheeks. Frost grips the grass at the edge of the path, your breath clouds in front of you. Below, the dark land spreads out, thin lines of smoke where people huddle around their small lives, unaware of the thing sitting above them on the stone.

Sukuna’s domain waits ahead, carved into the cliff like someone took a shrine and fed it flesh and blood until it grew bones and teeth.

Stone steps climb up into the rock, a torii gate stands at the base, old and splintered, rope sagging and paper charms fluttering in a wind that does not touch you. You feel the border as you cross beneath it — a weight on your shoulders, a pressure on your tongue.

You don’t turn back.

Your boots click softly on the stone. Talismans hang from the eaves of the low buildings dug into the rock, their ink long since drunk by whatever lives here. There is an engawa that runs along one side, a wooden veranda looking out over the drop, but it’s empty.

You get three steps closer and his presence rolls over you like a hand pushing down on your head.

You stop, palm settling instinctively on your sword hilt.

“So you came.” he drawls.

His voice comes from above and to the side. You look up.

He lounges on the roof of the shrine like a lazy cat that weighs as much as a warhorse. One leg is bent, the other hanging over the edge. Two of his arms prop him up, the other pair drape over his bent knee, claws loose. His hair, darker in the night, shifts a little in the wind. Four eyes fix on you, bright and sharp.

“Not very subtle.” you answer.

“A suitor should announce themself,” he replies. “Consider this my answer to your knock.”

You take a breath, let it out. Your heart is steady the way it always is before a fight. You’re not fighting, but your body does not see much difference between confronting a monster and courting one.

You step into the open courtyard until there’s nothing between you and him but air and intent.

“I brought you something.” you state and raise your brows.

He tilts his head. The stomach maw splits a little, as if it’s sniffing.

“So soon?” His tone is lazy, but there’s a thread of interest. “Most men take three weeks to find a rhyme they think worthy of my notice.”

“I’m not most men.” you say.

He smirks.

“No. You’re not.”

You shrug off your pack, kneel, and lay it gently on the flagstones. The cloth-wrapped bundle is longer than your forearm, narrow, heavy.

You unwrap it with more care than you’ve given most things in your life.

First the deep-blue outer cloth of this country — newer, practical, something you picked up in a market. Beneath it, the older layer, faded fabric from home, worn soft by years of use, the weave slightly uneven, the edges frayed where you once worried them between your teeth.

It still smells faintly of salt when you press your fingers into it.

You tell yourself that’s memory, not truth.

Under that is the blade.

Your first real sword.

Not the one your father lent you as a child — that rusted, snapped, was thrown into the sea after his death.

This one you earned yourself as payment the first time you fought for someone else’s war. The steel is darker than the blades here, the lines of the forging visible like ripples. The hilt is simple, worn to the shape of your grip.

You oiled it last night until it gleamed.

You set it on your palms, hold it up.

“This is from my land,” you say, words slow but clear. “I fought my way out of home with it. Fought my way into this country with it. It has taken every blow my ribs should have taken instead.”

His eyes drop to the sword. One of his lower hands tightens faintly on the tiles, claws clicking.

“And the cloth?” he asks.

You swallow. Your tongue tastes of iron, even though you haven’t bitten it.

“In my country,” you say, “girls are supposed to be soft in certain places. Boys are supposed to be straight lines. I was neither. Too tall, too broad in the shoulders, too—” You gesture at your chest with a short, annoyed movement, as if you can wave the memory away. “They wrapped me. Tight. To hide what did not fit. To make me thin enough. Straight enough.”

You smooth a thumb over the old weave.

“It never worked,” you add. “But with this, I could breathe. I could fight. I could walk into a room and not have them choke on me so much.”

You don’t say —I have carried this cloth for years and never found a way to throw it away.

It’s the record of a fight that never really ended.

You hold the sword higher.

“I offer them,” you say, “to you.”

Sukuna is very quiet.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think the world itself is holding its breath with him. The air around you doesn’t move. Your own exhale sounds too loud.

He drops from the roof without warning.

You flinch — your body is too used to violence to stay still — but you do not rise, do not reach for other steel. You force yourself to stay on your knees with the blade in your hands as he lands in front of you, stone cracking slightly under the impact.

He towers over you. Up close, he smells like iron and incense, like something burned clean and then splashed with blood. His four arms shift, restless. The stomach mouth leans forward a little, teeth clicking once.

He ignores it.

His top right hand reaches out, fingers curving under your chin, tipping your face up. His claws are sharp enough that they could cut with the smallest flex, but they only press, testing the give of your skin.

“Look at me.” he says quietly.

You do. You refuse to let your gaze dart away from the two sets of eyes, from the red crest on his cheek, from the hunger watching you.

“You give up the blade that made you,” he says. “And the cloth that hid what people did not want to see. For me.”

“It seemed… appropriate,” you answer. “You want effort. Cost. This cost.”

His lower left hand lifts, carefully, and takes the sword from you. His upper fingers still hold your chin.

He tests the weight of the blade, swings it once. The steel sings in the cold air, smooth and familiar, and some part of you aches like you’ve cut off a piece of bone.

“Crude,” he says, but the word is thoughtful, not dismissive. “The forging lacks subtlety. The balance is harsher than the blades they make here.”

You feel your jaw tighten.

Then he smiles, slow.

“I like it,” he adds. “It feels honest.”

The stomach maw leans toward the sword, teeth gnashing with interest. He smacks it lightly with one finger.

“Not food,” he tells it. “Gift.”

The mouth snaps at his hand, annoyed. He snorts.

He looks back down at you, fingers still on your chin.

“You are ridiculous,” he informs you. “You cross half the world, spit in the face of two cultures, and your idea of romance is to hand over your last tether to the place that spat you out.”

You bare your teeth.

“You told me to come with something that cost me,” you remind him. “You can choke on it if that’s not good enough.”

His thumb presses slightly harder against your jaw.

“You don’t bow properly. You don’t recite. You don’t wear silk unless I force it onto you.” His gaze travels over your worn armor, your calloused hands. “And yet here you are.”

“Here I am,” you agree. “If you don’t want it, say so. I’ll take myself and my barbarian gift back down the mountain.”

You expect that to trigger his temper.

Instead, something in his expression eases.

“I will not return this.” he says simply.

Your chest loosens around a breath you hadn’t realized you were holding.

“Do not look pleased,” he snaps, catching the flicker in your face. “Accepting your offering does not mean I am satisfied. One sword and a sad story do not make a proper courtship. You’ve given me flesh, now I want persistence.”

Your mouth curves despite yourself.

“You want me to keep coming back.”

“You will keep coming back,” he corrects. “If you are serious. Offer once, anyone can do that. Offer again after being bitten—” He bares his teeth. “That is worth tasting.”

You raise your brows.

“You haven’t bitten me yet.”

“Not in the way you’re thinking,” he says, tone dry.

Heat prickles at the tips of your ears. You clear your throat.

“Very well,” you say. “I will bring something again.”

He lets go of your chin as if offering a small mercy. With one of his lower hands, he touches the folded old cloth, thumb brushing the worn weave.

“This,” he says, softer, “I will keep where I see it.”

You nod once, almost a bow, but not quite.

He notices the distinction. Of course he does.

“Get off my mountain,” he says, with no actual venom. “You stink of wet horse.”

“You stink of dead men.” you answer.

He smiles, sharp and satisfied, as if you’ve finally said something in the correct register.

You go.

The second offering comes five days later.

You spend four of them waiting for an opportunity and one of them watching a sorcerer bleed into the snow.

He’s not one of Sukuna’s — he belongs to a rival clan, one that has been circling your lord’s lands like a dog that thinks it smells weakness. You meet him on the road by chance, your patrol running into his quiet slaughter of some poor farmer’s family.

You don’t know who cast the first technique. You know who finishes it.

He’s skilled, but he underestimates you. You’ve seen too much, fought too many kinds of fighters across two countries. You bait him into a narrow bend in the path, let his energy shred the trees, then move through the openings, bone and steel and habit.

He ends on his knees, hands bound behind his back, mouth gagged with his own sash. Blood drips from a cut over one eye.

His cursed energy thrums ragged, useless now that you know the timing of it.

He glares at you, hatred strong enough that you almost admire it.

“You’re lucky,” you tell him in your choppy version of his language. “You get an honored death.”

He tries to spit around the gag, it just makes him cough.

You get permission, later, with the right phrasing. Your lord would rather see this man paraded through town, but even he understands that sometimes it is wiser to offer a dangerous captive to something even worse than to feed the rumors of your own weakness.

You bring the sorcerer up the mountain bound, dragging occasionally when he stumbles. He curses you in words you only half understand — the tone is clear enough.

The torii gate is the same. The talismans flutter the same.

You step into the courtyard with a different offering behind you.

Sukuna is already there this time, standing in the center, four arms loose, eyes bright.

“You learn,” he says. “A proper visitor does not keep her host waiting.”

“I don’t want you wandering my camp because you’re bored.” you reply.

He gives a short, amused snort.

His gaze drops to the man at your feet. The sorcerer freezes, every instinct screaming at him to run, even with rope on his ankles.

“You brought me a gift that breathes,” Sukuna notes. “Thoughtful.”

You nod.

“You eat men,” you say plainly. “And take favor in sorcerers. I know this now.”

“And you approve.” he says.

You think about that for a moment.

“I accept,” you answer. “I wouldn’t… want you different.”

One of his upper hands goes to his hip. The other gestures lazily.

“Untie him.” he says.

You do. The sorcerer’s legs tremble as he staggers free. He looks at you like you’re the monster, like you’ve betrayed something sacred by not killing him clean.

Maybe you have.

Sukuna doesn’t give him time to decide what to do.

He moves — fast, faster than your eye can track, a blur of red and white and claws. One hand snaps around the sorcerer’s throat. Another clamps on his shoulder. The stomach mouth opens wide, wider, a wet, eager sound coming from it.

You watch.

You have always been good at watching violence without flinching. This is no different, just… more.

He doesn’t torture. He devours.

Neck, shoulder, half the torso in one obscene bite, blood spraying across the stone. The head falls, eyes still open. One of Sukuna’s lower hands plucks it up by the hair, lifts it, and for a strange, quiet second his eyes and the dead man’s meet.

“He will not trouble your lord again.” Sukuna says, conversational.

You wipe a fleck of blood from your cheek with the back of your hand.

“I assumed.”

He takes another bite, slower. Bone cracks loudly.

“Stand closer,” he tells you, stomach maw full, voice thick with food. “You brought dinner. Don’t skulk by the door like a thief.”

You step in until you are three paces away. The smell of blood hits harder here, warm and copper-sweet. For a heartbeat, you are back on those early battlefields, knee-deep in men and horses, hands numb from swinging steel.

You don’t look away. You let him see that.

He notices. Of course he does.

“You really do accept it,” he says a little later, when the courtyard is marked with red and most of the man is gone. He licks a smear from his fingers with an ordinary mouth, the stomach maw is busy licking its teeth.

“What?” you ask.

“This,” he gestures vaguely at himself. “The eating. The fear. The way the land rots when I sit in one place too long. You are not pretending not to see.”

You shrug one shoulder.

“Why should I?”

“Because men pretend,” he says. “They recite verses about flowers while standing on corpses. They talk of purity while drowning in blood. They tell me to hide teeth when I go among them.”

You snort.

“Your teeth don’t hide.”

He laughs, sudden and sharp.

“No,” he agrees. “They don’t.”

You shift your weight.

“I thought,” you admit slowly, “that if I bring you something you like… as you are… it means I see you. That is… courting, yes?”

He stares at you for a long moment.

Then he looks away, as if annoyed with himself.

“With you,” he mutters, “apparently it is.”

You catch that.

He pretends you don’t.

The third offering is not blood.

You steal it.

You do not particularly enjoy stealing from people who have not wronged you personally, but you have decided to take this whole courtship thing seriously, and that means gifts that are not just corpses.

Your lord’s wife keeps a small garden in the inner courtyard — careful shrubs, winter camellias, a single plum tree growing in a pot. You have seen her look at that tree more than once with a softness she does not show to her husband.

Plum trees in this land mean waiting, you’ve been told. They bloom early, in cold, when everything else still sleeps.

They are the first promise that winter will end.

You take it at night, when the house is quiet. You feel a sliver of guilt, but you think of Sukuna’s half-complaint about men hiding what they are, and your own dislike of pretty lies. You are stealing a symbol from a woman who values surfaces, to give to a monster who shows his insides on the outside.

It feels, in a twisted way, like balance.

The tree is heavier than it looks. You carry it on one shoulder up the cliff, fingers numb around the rough ceramic of the pot.

Dirt flakes against your armor.

The cold air burns your lungs.

You reach the courtyard, set it down with a grunt, and straighten.

Sukuna emerges from the shadow of the shrine with the slow uncoiling of a creature that has never had to hurry for anyone. He wears more cloth today, layered robes draped over his monstrous torso in a compromise between court fashion and the reality of his body. The crest on his face stands out like fresh blood against pale skin.

“You persist.” he notes.

“You ordered me to.” you remind him.

His mouth twitches, betraying amusement.

His eyes drop to the tree.

He goes still.

It’s subtle. A small deepening around his eyes, a tightening at the corners of his mouth. His lower hands flex, claws half-curled.

“You stole this?”

“Yes,” you answer. “From my lord’s wife. She loves it.”

He bares a tooth, that canine that points out when he sneers often.

“Good.”

You blink before raising a brow.

“You approve?”

“She will scream when she notices,” he says. “She will blame servants, perhaps accuse them of selling to a rival. Your lord will rage over a plant he never truly looked at. It will rot their peace for weeks.” His smile is sharp. “That pleases me.”

You shrug.

“I brought it because it blooms in cold,” you say. “I thought…well, you sit here, always winter. You might like a thing that defies it.”

His gaze flicks from the tight buds on the branches to your face.

“You think there is always winter here?” he says softly.

You gesture around. The stone. The frost. The way the air never quite feels like it belongs to any season.

“You are not wrong.” he allows.

You nudge the pot with your foot until it rests closer to the edge, where it will catch what little sunlight the cliff allows.

“I don’t know which flowers your court likes,” you admit. “But this one, I like. So I bring it.”

“Not for yourself,” he notes. “You could have kept it.”

“I don’t keep things that need gentle hands,” you say. “I break those on accident.”

“All the more reason to give it to someone worse.” he murmurs.

You huff a small laugh.

“Maybe.”

He steps closer, robe whispering against the stone. All four of his hands reach for the pot at once — two steadying the base, one brushing soil from the rim, the last lightly touching the rough bark.

His fingers are careful — too careful for a monster that just tore a man apart like wet paper a few days ago.

“You bring me weapons,” he says, almost to himself. “Food. Living symbols. You stand while I eat. You do not flinch when I insult you. You keep coming.”

“You asked me to pursue,” you remark. “I pursue.”

His mouth curves, slow.

“Then,” he says, “it is time I offer something in return.”

You straighten.

“Such as?”

He clicks his tongue.

“Impatient. A proper suitor would swoon for a month over the idea of being invited into the inner garden.”

“You have an inner garden.”

He gives you a flat look.

“Do you think I sit on this stone all day gnawing bone? I have taste.”

You think of the way he touched the plum tree, the way he has arranged his domain so the cliff frames the land like a painting.

“Show me.” you say.

He narrows his eyes at your lack of hesitation.

“A noblewoman,” he says, “would make a suitor wait three more visits.”

“You are not a noblewoman, are you?” you answer, without thinking.

He stares.

Then he laughs, low and pleased, shaking his head as if you’re too much trouble and exactly the right kind.

“Come, then.” he says.

He turns, gesturing with one hand while the others pick up the plum tree like it weighs nothing. You follow him along the side of the shrine, around a wall of rock that hides the view from the courtyard.

The air shifts. The oppressive weight of his cursed energy doesn’t lighten, but it changes flavor, less battlefield, more… held.

He leads you to a long strip of engawa that runs along the back of the shrine, looking out over a garden that makes you stop where you stand.

You expected something wild.

Broken statues, bone piles, scorched earth.

This is not that.

The garden is stone and winter. A wide bed of raked gravel, the lines drawn in long, even arcs that curve around three tall rocks. The rocks rise like a frozen wave, each one placed with irritating care. A small stand of pines leans slightly at the far end, branches dusted with snow. Moss clings to them in thick patches, deep green against the pale.

To one side, there’s a low maple tree, bare now, its branches like fingers against the sky. At its base, half-hidden by stone, something glints bone-white — not a skull, exactly, but a shape you recognize as once human, cleaned and arranged so neatly it almost passes for another rock.

There are other little hints like that the longer you look. A rib used as a bridge over a careful trickle of water. A femur set upright like a marker stone, worn smooth by years of wind. It is beautiful and wrong in a way that fits him perfectly.

Snow falls in slow flakes, catching on your lashes. Your breath curls out into the cold air.

He sets the plum tree down near the engawa, where it will be visible from the veranda.

“This is where I sit when I am not tearing people in half.” he says.

You move to the edge of the engawa, boots stopping just before the polished wood.

“You keep it neat.” you say.

He snorts.

“Chaos is for men who don’t know they are strong. I have nothing to prove with mess. Unless it entertains me.”

You step up onto the engawa when he nods permission. The wood is cold through your soles. It creaks just a little under your weight and his.

He lowers himself with a fluid ease that makes you think of a creature coiling up, not a man sitting. Two of his arms brace behind him, the others resting on his thighs. The stomach mouth settles, jaw slack, like a dog lying at his feet.

He gestures to the space beside him.

“Sit.”

You sit.

The two of you look out at the winter garden in silence for a while. The only sounds are the faint drip of water, the soft whisper of snow landing, the far-off cry of some bird that hasn’t moved on yet.

You realize, slowly, that this is the first time you’ve sat with him without bracing for impact.

“You invited me here,” you say at last. “This means something in your court rules.”

He hums.

“It means I have decided you are worth showing the parts of myself that are not immediately useful,” he says. “Men see my garden and forget the skulls. They only see ground they can’t turn into rice fields. You see both.”

“I like both.” you agree.

He glances at you, four eyes sliding to take you in.

“You are a strange suitor,” he observes. “You bring me blood, then you bring me a stolen symbol of hope, and when I offer you my private space, you do not blush or stammer or ask if this means we are bound.”

You shrug.

“If I start thinking about what it means, I will make myself sick. I am here, I bring what I can, I see what you show. That is enough.”

“Practical,” he says. “Ugly men always are.”

You snort.

“Are you calling me an ugly man?”

He doesn’t answer directly.

“Your face is too honest to be the delicate pretty preached in these lands,” he says instead. “It is direct. That has its own appeal. Its own beauty.”

Your ears grow warm again. You take a breath to steady yourself.

“Where I come from,” you say, “this would be reversed. I would be behind the screen. A man would sit here, trying to make me laugh through poems. He would show me his garden and hope I ignore the rot under the stones.”

“And you?” he asks. “What would you do?”

“Climb his wall,” you say. “Steal his sword. Test its weight while he’s still talking.”

He huffs a quiet laugh.

“Yes. That sounds like you.”

You tilt your head, look at him sideways.

“And you?” you ask. “In your own court, before all this. Did people come to you like this? Bring you gifts? Poems?”

He lifts one shoulder.

“They tried,” he says. “They wanted my favor, my clan’s influence. They wrote long verses about the curve of my wrist, the black of my ink, the tragic beauty of a man doomed to carry too much power.”

You can hear the disgust in his voice.

“What did you want?” you ask.

He is quiet for a moment.

“Someone who did not lie,” he says at last. “Someone who would not pretend to love the part of me that fit their idea while ignoring the rest. Someone who would look at my hunger and not say it was just a poetic metaphor.”

You let that sit between you.

Snow gathers on the rocks. A flake lands on the back of his hand and melts immediately on his skin.

The stomach maw yawns quietly, teeth glinting.

“You ask a lot.” you say.

“Yes,” he says. “I do.”

You look at the plum tree, still bare, its buds tight and dark against the cold.

“I don’t know how to be soft the way your poems like,” you say. “I don’t know how to write or paint or wrap my feelings in incense. I know how to show up, how to stand, how to put my body somewhere and keep it there.”

He shifts slightly. One of his lower hands moves, almost idly, and lands on your knee.

His claws are careful. The weight is warm, steady.

“That,” he offers, “is already more honest than a hundred verses.”

You stare at his hand, then at his profile.

“This is also court custom?” you ask, voice dry.

“This,” he says, “is Sukuna custom.”

You huff out a small breath that might be a laugh.

He watches the garden again, as if he didn’t just place his hand in your space and claim something.

“Tea.” he says suddenly, as if remembering something.

You blink. “What?”

“A suitor should be received with tea,” he explains, as if you are very slow and he is patient only because he is entertained. “Even a barbarian one.”

He doesn’t move his hand from your knee as he lifts his upper pair of arms and snaps his fingers.

A pot appears from the shadow of the doorway behind you, lacquered black, steam curling from its spout. Two cups sit on a small tray beside it. You have no idea whether it’s summoned, carried by some unseen servant, or simply there because you were too focused on the garden to notice.

He reaches back with one hand, pours with the other. His movements are precise, practiced. Tea glows pale in the winter light as it fills the cups.

He hands one to you with his top left hand. His bottom right still rests on your leg, fingers curved lightly, thumb tracing once over the worn cloth of your trousers.

You take the cup with both hands, because you have seen enough of these people to know that’s respectful. The ceramic is warm.

You raise it to your mouth.

It tastes… different from the bitter brews you steal on campaign. There’s an edge of smoke, a depth of something like roasted grain. It spreads heat down your throat, into your chest.

“This is good.” you murmur, delighted.

“Of course it is,” he answers. “Do you think I drink swill?”

You roll your eyes.

You sit there, the two of you, drinking tea and looking at bones dressed up as stones and a tree that will bloom too early.

Snow falls.

His hand stays on your knee, unmoving now, like he’s planted a flag and forgotten it needs guarding.

“Do not mistake this for surrender,” he says eventually, as if compelled by some internal rulebook. “I am not easy to keep.”

You swallow your last mouthful of tea.

“I am not easy to get rid of.” you offer.

He makes a small, satisfied sound in his throat.

The stomach mouth sighs, strangely content.

You look out at his winter garden and feel, for the first time in a long time, that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be — on the wrong side of normal, courting a monster who expects to be wooed like a lady and taking it as seriously as you’ve ever taken war.

Later, you will bring him other things — a foreign song hummed badly, a broken charm that still holds a little warmth, stories of your homeland’s storms.

He will toss insults at you like petals and expect you to step through them without flinching.

For now, you sit on his engawa in the cold, shoulder to monstrous shoulder, his hand heavy on your leg, and watch snow gather on the plum tree you stole for him.

The buds stay closed.

They will open when they’re ready.

You think you understand that.

➵ Sukuna lets you sit beside his throne. Sukuna’s throne is something everyone fears. It represents his power, and nobody dares approach it without permission. Yet you can walk right up and sit beside him like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The first time it happens, everyone expects him to remove you immediately. Instead, Sukuna simply allows it, silently showing everyone that your place is beside him.

➵ Sukuna doesn’t let anyone to speak badly about you. Sukuna couldn’t care less when people insult him. Their opinions mean nothing to someone like him. But the moment someone speaks badly about you, his entire attitude changes. The room becomes silent, his expression darkens, and everyone immediately understands that disrespecting you is a mistake they won’t get away with. You are the one person he refuses to let others look down on.

➵ Sukuna protects you without hesitation. Sukuna has never been someone who worries about others. Danger never mattered to him, but when you’re involved, he gets serious. Before anyone can even realize you’re in danger, he’s already there, making sure nothing gets close to you. He’ll act like it was nothing afterwards, claiming he simply “didn’t want you getting in the way,” but everyone knows the truth.

➵ Sukuna remembers the little things about you. Sukuna isn’t someone who pays attention to meaningless details. He doesn’t care about people’s favorite foods, habits, or birthday. Yet somehow, he remembers yours. The drink you like, the things that annoy you, the little comments you made weeks ago. If you point it out, he’ll deny caring and say he simply “remembers everything anyone says,” but everyone knows that isn’t true.

➵ Sukuna lets you see his softer side. Everyone only knows Sukuna as cruel and ruthless. Nobody sees him as anything other than the King of Curses. But you get to see the rare moments he doesn’t show anyone else. The quiet moments, the small acts of care, and the way he lowers his guard around you. He would never admit that you’re different, but everyone else can see it.

“i know, but we’ll be home tomorrow,” you sympathise. you get it. you really do. “you can have me all to yourself then.”

you shift your lower body to get comfortable, you swear it’s only because your leg is going dead laying on your side for so long. you twist into bakugou, your crotch bumping right over his. just at the feeling of him, hard and thick against your soft thigh, you eat your words. you don’t want tomorrow, you want him now.

bakugou had been on a two week long mission across the world, solving crime and fighting villains. he’s barely been able to call you during the weeks. a few texts littered in and definitely no photos due to the top secret nature of the mission. only to then arrive in your home country to meet you at the airport to fly to japan to meet his parents. it was the only time he could fit them in on his busy schedule and in an attempt to spend as much time with you as possible, you came along also.

which leads you about to hump your boyfriend like a teenager in his family living room. you were surrounded by family photos and cute baby photos. even a drawing he made of all-might when he was seven next to a photo of him with all-might at seventeen. you even see the baby photos his mother has already text to you, she knows to send every one she finds for your collection. 

but face to face with the grown katsuki, large hand spread over your lower back to press your hips into his. you can practically taste his breath, minty toothpaste that freshens your nose also. even in the dark you can see the lovesick way he stares at you, a sad pitiful gaze on your lips then your eyes. it even makes you laugh because despite how hot you are, trapped in his sleepy cuddle, you refuse to wear your usual pyjamas in his living room. your usual little boy shorts and a tank top for bed time. big tshirt and underwear. you’re in a long sleeve plaid set, just in case anyone wakes up for a glass of water in the night. 

bakugou can work around all the fabric. placing his hand on your bare back. pinging your elastic waistband against your hip. he doesn’t give a fuck, still counting this as his home despite the lack of bedroom. he’s shirtless, just a pair of shorts on.

“i haven’t seen you in weeks, doesn’t even feel like i had you today and the only alone time we get is on my fuckin’ sofa,” he huffs, stuffing his big head in the crook of your neck. bakugou inhales harshly, nose brushing against your silk bonnet, chest pressed right into yours.

you’re already whining, gripping on a semblance of control. “tomorrow, kats. tomorrow.”

you feel his stubble against your cheek, prickly but makes him look so fine. a few years older, a little rougher. bakugou pulls out your neck at your tone. he can predict you from a mile away.

“y’need me, baby? i haven’t been takin’ care of you, have i?”

always the first to read the room, always the first to read you. sugar sweet words from him have you falling apart like a dandelion, using your hooked leg around his waist to hump your hips against his cock.

it has been weeks. you’re used to being dicked down at least four times a week by him with multiple rounds but now, nothing. you could drool at the memory of being filled to the brim, your knees by your ears as he thrusts as an alternate way to show his love. honestly, you’d love to be pounded by him right now, pressed into a mattress with your beautiful man above you.

“b-but we can’t. your parents are across the hall. i’m not waking them. a-nd all your baby photos are out, this is your living room,” you reply, chewing on your bottom lip. you can feel your clit pulse, a hot tightness that gets you moving without meaning to, “we don’t have space either a-and you’re loud.”

bakugou narrows his eyes, pursing his lips, “you’re louder than me.”

“kats,” you warn, “remember in april, for your birthday?”

“that’s ‘cause you fuckin’ touched my—,”

you peck his lips to shut him up but it only draws out the palpable need between you both. your hand flies to his cheek as he pulls you back in. he rests on his forearm slightly to get the best angle on your lips, sliding his tongue into your mouth.

your kisses are louder than the words you just spoke. 

everything happens all at once with a rush you didn’t know you both felt. on the same equilibrium, you clutch a tuft of bakugou’s blonde locks to keep his open mouth, his tongue licking after yours. but every time he tries, you smile or grin or touch his tongue for a second before pulling back.

“stop playin’ with me, baby,” he whines against your lips, “gimme a taste.”

it’s always done something to you, your boyfriend just yesterday was shouting at his sidekicks and team in a foreign country, strategising a plan and being the voice everybody listens to. to now, him listening to you, begging you to give him more.

you don’t need to speak, you just slot your mouth over his in a wet kiss that is all tongue. you lick yours over his, circle it with the tip before letting him suck completely.

your moans bubble up, your thigh tenses around his waist and bakugou’s hand under your shirt is hot. 

“you’re gonna have to fuck me, kats. i can’t sleep like this,” you whisper, laying kisses across his jaw as he catches his heaving breaths. 

you lick over his earlobe, complete with a nibble to make him fall apart. “fuck. i know, i know. turn around f’me.”

you pout, “why? i wanna see your face.”

he grins, he’s exactly the same, “just for now. it’ll be easier for me. i’ll still be here.”

you huff dramatically, awkwardly shifting around so your back is to his chest. you lock eyes with three year old katsuki in the cutest red dungarees you’ve ever seen. though the actual katsuki behind you already has his massive hand under your shirt and on your stomach, fingers passing your elasticated waistband.

your hand flies to his, “not in front of your baby photos. look how cute you were.”

bakugou scoffs behind you, instead opting to unbutton your pyjama shirt, “the fuck? were? i still am.”

you look back, letting him reveal your breasts. you shove down the blanket to your knees. “you hate me calling you cute?”

bakugou kisses your neck then presses his cock into your ass without meaning to, “i’m still the cutest man you know.”

“you’re so stupid,” you giggle softly, eyes fluttering shut as his hands finally sneak past your waistband, over your tuft of hair and onto your soft clit. “oh shit.”

bakugou knows you better than he knows himself. he knew you wouldn’t be wearing underwear, he knew you’d already be wet and he knew you’d give in.

with two flat pads of his fingers, katsuki rubs firm clockwise circles into you, letting you shove and kick your pyjama bottoms to the ground. he lets you adjust to him, opening your legs wider and resting your leg on his hip behind you. 

you moan open mouthed, head falling back onto his bicep as he lifts himself upon his elbow.

“quiet, baby. feels good, though?” he asks, completely captivated by you.

it looks like you’re from a sexy christmas calendar despite it being mid july. your red and green plaid pyjama shirt is completely unbuttoned, naked body stretched around his and rolling your hips into his hand. 

“so good. so good, gorgeous,” you mumble, running your hand over his thick arm between your legs. you kiss his bicep by your cheek, “missed this with you. being—,” you inhale sharply, then soften into a whine, “being this close to you.”

“i know, baby. i get it. didn’t see your pretty face for two weeks. was going insane, staring at photos of you. fisted my cock over them one night,” he grunts into your ear and he feels your breathing hitch, your head roll back to look at him already looking down at you.

“kats, oh god,” you mewl as the sounds between your legs get louder, squelching and wet. “w-which picture, baby?”

katsuki stops the circles on your clit, instead choosing to sink his two fingers inside of you. you reach your hand behind you, fingers crawling into his hair and gripping. it only riles him up, a deep growl into your neck.

“those mirror selfies you sent before i left. on your bed, ass up in those tiny ass yellow panties you’ve got. and that one i took of you in my bed half naked in my old tee, so fuckin’ sexy baby.”

he curls his fingers inside, rubbing at your wet ribbed walls over and over again, pressing against your softest spots.

“oh fuck. oh fuck, kats,” you chant, your hips jolting without thought, your lower half burning up with the influx of pleasure, “right there. please.”

“you’re so beautiful, baby,” your boyfriend coos. he feels your stomach tense on his arm and he knows exactly what that means, “come for me, all over my hand. c’mon, darlin’.”

sliding your hand between your thighs, you only rub your clit a few times as bakugou keeps up pistoning inside you. despite your brewing orgasm, you’re only excited about being completely and utterly full by him afterwards.

you let your orgasm wash over you with ease. clenching your eyes shut as you’re mindful to keep quiet. honey and delight ripples over your body, a warming heat spreading under your skin starting right at your core.

“kats… kats… fuck,” you mumble and when you’re about to do one of your typical high pitched screams, bakugou smushes his face over yours to swallow them. he’s feels your vocal chords vibrate in the kiss and only when he’s sure you’re going to be quiet, he pulls off you.

you stop touching at your clit and bakugou slowly pulls his fingers out of you to stuff in his mouth.

you’re panting heavy, eyes closed and laying back on him with all your weight. still, you manage to laugh “you’re so… you really missed me?”

with your heaving chest, you look back at katsuki, shirtless in the dark with his tongue between his two fingers. “a fuckin’ stupid amount.”

you eye his tattoo of your name on his collarbone, then your eyes on his inner bicep amongst his tattoo sleeve. katsuki hasn’t seen his parents in months, you only a few weeks ago yet he still flew you across the world to spend time with him. it all hits you differently now, his love spreading through you at a rate you can’t measure.

“i love you. thanks for bringing me here.”

bakugou smirks, pecking your forehead, “one orgasm and you’re getting sappy on me?”

you scrunch your eyebrows together, “katsuki. say it back now.”

“‘course i goddamn love you.” he hums, watching as you twist around to face him again.

you’re back to being nose to nose with your lover, bare chest against bare chest. “your koibito.”

this is your second visit to japan with katsuki meeting his parents. you’ve heard him speak japanese over the phone and chatting with his friends. he’s taught you a few words and sentences, often helpful when he’s watching his japanese dramas with the english subtitles on for you.

but one word his father taught you was koibito. it was the first thing he said when you stepped out of the taxi with the same smile as your boyfriend and his arms out to embrace you.

“you brought your koibito!” katsuki’s father says to him, in a mix of both languages so you understand also. his arms wrap around you in greeting.

you don’t miss bakugou’s blush but you do miss when he says something very fast to his father in japanese.

“what’s koibito?” you ask, as his father brings your suitcase inside and you watch katsuki take his out the car boot.

he’s still flushed, cute red cheeks as he glances up at you. “lover. like my partner. my person.”

“oh!” you say, “why didn’t he just say girlfriend?”

you know the word for girlfriend.

bakugou sighs under his breath, placing his suitcase on the floor, “i think ‘cause it’s my second time bringing you ‘round. koibito is more serious, a committed relationship.”

you grin, hugging his arm, “i’m your koibito!”

bakugou says the same thing he said then but more solemnly. with a soft nod, “you are and i’m yours.”

you can’t help but pout at him, lifting your face to press your lips into his. it’s starts off slow, controlled but all too soon, bakugou is shoving his shorts below his ass and you’re wrapping your fingers around his cock.

“gonna love you properly when we—,”

“shh, it’s okay. just want you now,” you speak into his mouth, obsessed with how quickly he begins panting. you flick your wrist over him a few times. he’s already as big as he can get, stiff and curved, slapped against his lower stomach.

“put me in, baby,” katsuki drawls, his lips over your cheek.

again, you cock your leg over his hip. you just need to lift up a little, press his cockhead between your legs and let him do the rest but—

“we need to use a condom. can’t make a mess on the sofa, kats,” you whine.

half lidded eyes look back at you. you can tell he’s strategising, adding up ratios to likelihoods and where the hell his wallet is and if he even stocked it with condoms.

you feel him pulse, hot and heavy in your hand.

“no clue where they are, baby. we can put the blanket under us and i’ll wash it in the mornin’. yeah?” he brushes his nose over yours.

honestly, bakugou could have said anything and you would have said sure.

after a rushed shuffle of stuffing the blanket underneath your hips, you fist bakugou’s tip and press him against your opening.

“move kats,” you whisper and in one push, bakugou slides into you utterly and completely.

in unison, a moan ripples out of you both, one of pure relief. even though you’re across the world from yours, slotted like a final puzzle piece with your lover feels like home. 

you slide a hand under bakugou’s cheek between the pillow and wrap your other arm around his back in a cuddle. bakugou’s the same, with a hand spread over your lower back and his other arm under your side to keep you close.

“you are so perfect,” bakugou whispers to you, pressing a kiss to your lips. you’re warm and slippery, an easy glide from your orgasm before. he almost doesn’t want to move, wanting you to cockwarm him until the morning.

“so are you,” you smile, breathing a little shaky because despite not moving, he still manages to press against your sensitive spots. you bite down on your bottom lip to suppress a groan. “f-fuck.”

“i used to sit here as a kid, wonderin’ when i’d get a girl. what she’d look like, if i’d even like her,” he chuckles to himself. he taps your ass softly.

“w-why wouldn’t you like your girlfriend?” you reply, blinking slowly.

“i was a dick. girls would ask me out at school and i never liked ‘em back. thought my first relationship would be completely one sided.” he breathes a half hearted laugh. “how wrong was i?”

you giggle softly, brushing his locks off his forehead. “so wrong. i’d love to tell teen katsuki how many times you begged to take me out.” 

he kisses your cheek, “he’d say you’re a fuckin’ liar.”

“flying me here to meet your parents twice. you love me so much. it actually might be one sided.” you cheese and bakugou playfully rolls his eyes.

“won’t even be fuckin’ surprised with how much i think about you.”

bakugou punctuates his comment with a thrust, an easy bounce of his hips as you lay tangled side by side.

he sees your eyes roll back in real time, a swear falling past your lips.

“oh shit. oh shit, i missed this,” you warble as bakugou keeps up his thrusts, every one keeping him deep and full inside of you. 

“shh, baby,” he says over your lips, “fuck, i love you.”

“i love you too.”

every slap of bakugou’s hips causes your chest to bounce, has you inching up the sofa but he keeps you in place. he feels incredible, everywhere. his lips on your neck, nibbling your shoulder. you don’t mean to scratch down his back but when the sweet gets sweeter you need a release somewhere. 

it’s only when bakugou speeds up his thrusts, thighs slapping against thighs, heavy breaths transferred from mouth to mouth that the sofa starts to creak. loudly.

“we’re… we’re too loud,” you moan in pleasure, practically hugging bakugou’s big head to your shoulder.

“old ass fuckin’—,” bakugou bites on your shoulder to stop his moan waking up the whole house, he can’t stop now. if it’s not the squelching of you and him, the sofa is groaning too.

there’s nothing you can do about it but stop though you both refuse to. he’s hitting all your best spots at this pace. it’s as if fireworks are being lit all over your skin, your next orgasm rumbling.

“p-please don’t stop,” you cry into him, “i’m so close.”

“not stoppin’ for shit, baby,” 

having not seen each other in two weeks, means you’re both closer quicker than usual. bakugou notes your cute little gasp, you’re about to come.

“all for me,” he coos, “lemme have it all.”

amongst the slaps, the creaks and bakugou’s accidental loud grunts, you come all over his cock.

again, he envelops you in a kiss, swallowing everything you release. you tremble and shake in his arms, tensing tight around him which only sets him off.

he tries to keep up his pace for your orgasm but his own makes him jolty and stuttered. instead he goes for slow and deep, keeping you still with his arm locked around you.

“my beautiful baby,” he’s completely fucked out as he spills inside of you, the added friction of his come making him slide even deeper. 

your hand flies to his hip, “t-too much.”

bakugou gets you, mumbling an apology in your temple and opting to pull out. but once he does, dribbles of his come does too. 

“oh fuck.”

with the original plan completely forgotten, bakugou grabs your pyjama bottoms and wipes you up.

“katsuki!” you whisper-whine.

“didn’t wanna make a mess. don’t want my mum on my case,” he speaks to between your legs, lightly dabbing you down. 

“i hope we weren’t loud” you say, blinking up at him. then embarrassment washes over you, “acting like horny teenagers. we should have waited katsuki. we were so loud.”

bakugou kisses you quiet, “they’re both old as fuck, nothin’ is wakin’ them up. you’re good, baby. we’re good.”

“still don’t even know if your mother likes me—,”

“fuck off with that shit. you both text all the time.”

it’s true, that’s how you grow your folder of bakugou fun facts and baby stories.

“okay,” you mumble and you feel cosy when he kisses you on the tip of the nose. “i really liked this.”

bakugou grins cutely, stuffing your dirty pyjama bottoms on the floor. he’ll remember to wash them tomorrow. “yeah? next time i’ll eat you and—,”

“shh, i said i enjoyed this now with you,” you emphasise and bakugou understands.

“me too. missed you.”

breakfast with the bakugou’s is a mixture of japanese and english. you forced katsuki into a t-shirt because your scratches down his back look like hes been attacked by a cat in his sleep. he’s also in a new pair of shorts since he gave the ones he wore last night to you. your pyjama bottoms stained with him are currently what you’re staring at, swirling around the washing machine.

you refuse to talk, completely convinced your boyfriend’s parents heard you fucking their son in their living room the night before. you stuff your scrambled egg in your mouth and katsuki can feel the anxiety dripping from you.

he sighs to himself, “did you guys hear anythin’ last night?”

you gasp, kicking katsuki’s foot under the table. what the fuck?

“what do you mean? was it the matsumo’s sprinklers again? they’re always fucking going off at night.” his mother replies in japanese and you blink at her, “our stupid neighbours sprinklers are broken. sorry if they woke you up, honey.”

you sit up straight, shocked at how you weren’t caught, “oh uh, no! it was only for five minutes and it stopped.”

you look over at katsuki who grins sadistically.

“i heard dad snoring. still haven’t got that checked out, huh?”

“snoring?” his dad frowns, with accented english.

“snoring, dad.” katsuki translates.

“i’ve been tellin’ him!” his mother chips in, “he still refuses to go!”

“there is nothing wrong with a little snoring,” his father defends, “sorry if you heard it though, yn.”

you shake your head, “not a thing! i must have been asleep.”

for the rest of breakfast, you watch as the bakugous laugh, eat and bicker amongst themselves. every booming laugh from katsuki has him looking at you, checking if you’re okay, feeling safe and included. 

as katsuki’s mum shows his dad something on her phone, katsuki squeezes your thigh.

“told ya they didn’t hear shit.”

but katsuki’s mum has ears of an eagle, her head robotically turning to look at you both.

“hear what?”

you almost choke on your spit.

katsuki rolls his eyes, “nothin’ mum. mind your business.”

“don’t smart me. i will still slap your head.”

he’s aware of how pathetic this is.

he’s aware that he, ryomen sukuna, who has a reputation for being the most terrifying person on campus, who once made a guy cry simply by looking at him, is currently sitting here like a lovesick teenager in a bad rom-com. he knows damn well that if anyone — really, anyone — caught him staring at you like this, his entire carefully constructed image would crumble into dust. but he can’t stop; he’s never been able to stop.

you’re just so . . . so you.

composed and unflappable and impossibly graceful, even when you’re stressed out of your mind. sukuna has seen you handle a student council meeting where half the members were at each other’s throats, he has seen you smooth over a crisis when the spring festival almost got cancelled, he has seen you calmly talk down a furious professor who was threatening to fail an entire class. you don’t raise your voice. you never panic, you just . . . handle things, and sukuna thinks that’s the most attractive thing he’s ever witnessed.

he’s been in love with you since day one, and he’s been too much of a coward to do anything about it.

it’s not that he’s scared of rejection — okay, fine, maybe sukuna is terrified of rejection, but that’s not the main issue! the main issue is that he has absolutely no idea how to approach you; you’re the student council president, busy and important and constantly surrounded by people. you don’t go to parties, you don’t hang out in the quad, you don’t do anything that would give him a natural opportunity to strike up a conversation. and even if you did, what would he even say? hey, i’m the guy who’s been pining over you for two years, want to get coffee? no. absolutely not.

so he’s settled for something more subtle; something that, in his mind, is a grand romantic gesture but in reality is just deeply, deeply nerdy.

sukuna has been leaving you paper flowers.

it started last semester, when sukuna found himself in the art building for a general ed class he was barely passing. he’d wandered into the sculpture studio while waiting for his professor, and there’d been a stack of origami paper sitting on one of the tables. he’d picked up a sheet without thinking, his fingers moving on autopilot, folding and creasing until a small paper rose sat in his palm; it was clumsy and lopsided and missing a petal, but something about it made him think of you, so he’d left it on your usual table in the student union, tucked under the corner of your laptop, and he’d practically sprinted out of the building before you could see him.

the next day, the flower was gone, and sukuna’s heart had nearly stopped on the spot.

he’d stared at the empty spot on the table for a solid minute, wondering if you’d thrown it away, wondering if you’d even noticed it, wondering if he was the biggest idiot on the planet. but then you’d walked in, and there it was — the paper rose, sitting next to your coffee cup, carefully propped up so it wouldn’t get crushed. you’d touched it gently when you sat down, a small, soft smile flickering across your face before you turned back to your paperwork.

and sukuna had felt like he was floating.

that was three months ago.

he’s left you a paper flower almost every day since, each one slightly better than the last. sukuna has gotten embarrassingly good at origami, spending hours in his small apartment folding and folding until his fingers ache. he’s made you roses and lilies and tulips, each one carefully crafted from sheets of paper he buys in bulk from the craft store. he never leaves a note — that would be too obvious and too direct — and he always makes sure to leave before you arrive, so he can watch from a distance as you find his little offering and smile that soft, private smile that makes his chest ache.

it’s the closest sukuna has ever gotten to you, and it’s simultaneously the most wonderful and most torturous thing he’s ever experienced.

today, he’s got a new flower in his bag, a delicate paper camellia he spent two hours on last night. his fingers are twitching with the urge to go place it on your table, but you’re already sitting there, which means he’s going to have to wait a little until you leave for your next class. sukuna checks his watch — you usually head to the library around ten, so he’s got about twenty minutes.

twenty minutes of sitting here, pretending to drink his coffee, trying not to stare too obviously.

well . . . sukuna fails miserably.

you’re wearing a sweater today, something soft and cream-colored that makes you look impossibly cozy. your hair is a little messier than usual, like you ran out the door without checking a mirror, and there’s a tiny smudge of ink on your cheek. sukuna’s fingers itch with the urge to reach out and wipe it away. he wants to touch you so badly it’s almost painful. he wants to know what you feel like, if you’re as warm as you look, if your skin is soft under his calloused fingertips. he wants to hear your voice directed at him, not at some other student or professor, he wants to see those calm, steady eyes looking at him for once.

sukuna is so lost in his thoughts that he almost misses it when you start packing up your things. he jerks upright, nearly knocking over his coffee, and watches as you slip your laptop into your bag and stand up. you pause for a moment, glancing around the room, and sukuna ducks his head so fast he nearly gives himself whiplash.

he can feel his face burning, he can feel the heat creeping down his neck, and he presses his palms against his thighs to stop them from shaking.

when sukuna dares to look up again, you’re gone, and the table is empty.

sukuna moves before he can think about it, crossing the room in a few long strides and finally dropping the paper camellia onto your table. it lands perfectly, right in the spot where your laptop was, and he’s about to turn and flee when he hears a soft voice behind him.

“you know, i’ve been wondering who’s been leaving these.”

sukuna freezes as his blood turns to ice.

his heart stops, then starts again at double speed, hammering against his ribs like it’s trying to escape. he turns around slowly, painfully, and there you are, standing a few feet away with your bag slung over your shoulder and an expression on your face that he can’t quite read.

you’re looking at him. at him. your eyes are steady and calm, just like he always imagined, and they’re focused entirely on his face. sukuna’s mouth goes dry. he opens it, closes it, opens it again, and absolutely no sound comes out.

you tilt your head slightly, and there’s a little hint of something — amusement? curiosity? — in your gaze.

“you’re ryomen sukuna, right? the guy who made a freshman cry last week for stealing his seat in the lecture hall?”

sukuna winces.

“that was—he was being an asshole,” sukuna manages, his voice coming out rough and strained. “he sat in my seat and then he laughed about it. i just—i looked at him. that’s it. i didn’t even say anything.”

“and yet he cried,” you say, and there’s definitely amusement in your voice now. a tiny quirk at the corner of your mouth. “you must have a very intimidating look.”

“i don’t—i mean, i’m not—that’s not—”

sukuna is aware that he’s babbling. he’s aware that his ears are probably bright red, that his hands are shaking like crazy, that he looks like a complete and utter idiot. he’s also aware that you’re still looking at him, and you haven’t run away screaming, which feels like a minor miracle.

“that’s not who i am,” he finally manages. “i mean, i’m not—i don’t go around making people cry. that was a one-time thing. he just—he really pissed me off.”

“i believe you,” you say, and sukuna’s poor heart does a triple axel. “so . . . the flowers.”

“the flowers,” sukuna echoes weakly.

“they’re yours, aren’t they?”

you step closer, and sukuna’s breath catches in his throat. you’re close enough now that he can smell your shampoo, something floral and warm, and he has to resist the urge to lean in like a complete creep.

“i’ve been getting them for a few months now. every time i come to this table, there’s a new one. i thought it was someone in the art club at first, but they said they didn’t know anything about it.”

sukuna is trying very hard not to pass out.

“it’s—yeah. they’re from me.”

“why?”

the question is simple, direct, and utterly devastating.

sukuna opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. his brain is screaming at him to say something smooth, something charming, something that won’t make him look like a complete fool. what comes out instead is;

“i wanted to give you flowers, but i didn’t know if you were allergic to real ones, so i made them out of paper. because paper flowers don’t cause allergies. and they last forever. so you can keep them as long as you want, and they won’t die, and—and i just thought they might make you smile.”

sukuna is not really sure when exactly he started rambling, but he can’t seem to stop. you’re still looking at him with that unreadable expression, and his face is so hot he’s surprised his skin hasn’t melted off.

“i didn’t want to be too obvious,” sukuna continues, his voice getting higher with every word. “i didn’t want to make you uncomfortable. and i didn’t know what to say, or how to say it, so i just—i kept making them. i didn’t think you’d notice. i mean, i hoped you’d notice, but i didn’t think you’d—you’re always so busy, and you’re the student council president, and you have all these important things to do, and i didn’t want to bother you, and—”

“sukuna.”

he stops, his mouth still open mid-sentence.

you’ve said his name . . . you’ve said his name! the world feels tilted, slightly off-kilter, like he’s standing on a ship in a storm.

“you don’t bother me,” you say, and there’s something soft in your voice now, something that makes his chest ache. “i’ve been looking forward to these flowers every day. i have all of them. i keep them in a box under my bed.”

sukuna’s brain short-circuits. “you—you keep them?”

“of course i do.”

you reach out and pick up the paper camellia he just placed on the table, turning it over in your fingers. your touch is gentle, almost reverent, and sukuna feels like he’s going to combust.

“they’re beautiful. i’ve never seen anyone make flowers like this. the detail is incredible.”

“i practice a lot,” sukuna says, and immediately wants to sink into the floor. “i mean—i just—i like making them. for you. i like making them for you.”

you look up at him, and there’s a smile on your face now, a real one, soft and warm and absolutely devastating. sukuna feels his heart stop for the second time in five minutes.

“do you want to sit down?” you ask, gesturing to the table. “i have some time before my next class. i’d like to talk to you.”

sukuna is going to die.

he’s absolutely going to die, right here in the student union, and his last thought will be about how pretty your smile is.

“yeah,” he manages, his voice barely above a whisper. “yeah, okay. i’d like that.”

you sit down, and sukuna sits across from you, his long legs folding awkwardly under the table. his heart is pounding so loud he’s sure you can hear it, and his palms are sweating, and he’s pretty sure he’s making the most pathetic expression known to man. but you don’t seem to mind. you just look at him, that soft smile still playing on your lips, and sukuna feels like the luckiest person on earth.

“so,” you say, leaning forward slightly. “tell me about yourself, ryomen sukuna. other than your impressive origami skills.”

sukuna swallows.

his throat feels tight, and his huge hands are still trembling, and he’s never been more nervous in his entire existence. but you’re looking at him like you actually want to hear what he has to say, like sukuna is not just some scary-looking guy with a reputation, and that gives him the courage to open his mouth and start talking.

he tells you about his major — history, because he likes the stories — and about his shitty apartment off-campus, and about the stray cat he feeds even though he claims he’s not a cat person. he tells you about his tattoos, the meanings behind them, the way the ink felt on his skin. he tells you about his family, or lack thereof, and the way he’s always felt like he had to be tough to survive.

and you listen.

you actually listen, nodding along, asking questions, offering small hums of acknowledgment. you don’t flinch when he talks about the harder parts of his life. you don’t look at him like he’s a monster. you just sit there, patient and warm, and sukuna feels something crack open in his chest.

“what about you?” sukuna finally asks, when he’s run out of words. “tell me about yourself. the real stuff, not the student council president stuff.”

you blink, and for a moment, your composure wavers. it’s the first time he’s seen you look anything less than perfectly put-together, and it makes his heart squeeze.

“i don’t know,” you say, and there’s a hint of something vulnerable in your voice. “i feel like i’m always the one people come to with their problems. i don’t get a lot of chances to just, you know . . . talk.”

“then talk,” sukuna says, and he sincerely means it. “i’m here. i’m listening.”

you look at him for a long moment, and then you smile, small and shy, and sukuna’s heart melts into a puddle.

you tell him about the pressure you feel, the weight of everyone’s expectations, the loneliness that comes with being in charge. you tell him about your love for old movies and the way you stay up too late reading, and about the dreams you have that you’re too scared to chase.

and sukuna listens.

he listens like it’s the most important thing he’s ever done, because it is. he watches the way your hands move when you talk, the way your eyes light up when you describe something you love, the way your shoulders relax just a little bit, like you’re finally letting yourself breathe.

“i’m glad you’re the one who’s been leaving those paper flowers,” you say, and sukuna’s breath catches once again. “i always wondered what kind of person would go to so much effort for a stranger.”

“you’re not a stranger,” sukuna says, and his voice comes out rough and earnest. “you’ve never been a stranger. i’ve—i’ve been watching you for two years. not in a creepy way,” he adds quickly, when your eyebrows raise. “i just—i see you. i see how hard you work, how much you care. i’ve always wanted to tell you that. i just didn’t know how.”

your cheeks flush; it’s a tiny, barely-there pink, but sukuna notices it. he notices everything about you.

“well,” you say, and your voice is slightly breathless. “you’re telling me now.”

“yeah,” sukuna says, and he’s smiling, a real smile, one that crinkles the corners of his eyes. “i guess i am.”

the silence between them is comfortable, warm, filled with something that feels a lot like possibility. and when you reach out and touch his hand, just a brief, feather-light brush of your fingers against his, sukuna feels like he’s flying.

“the camellia,” you say softly, looking down at the paper flower. “do you know what it means?”

sukuna shakes his head, his throat too tight for words.

“it means gratitude,” you say, and you look up at him, your eyes shining. “thank you for letting me see the real you, sukuna. and thank you for the flowers. i think this is the best gift anyone’s ever given me.”

sukuna’s heart is so full it feels like it’s going to burst.

he doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t know how to express the way he’s feeling, so he just squeezes your hand and deeply hopes you understand.

and when you smile at him, soft and bright, he knows you do.