⋆ ʚ 𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢 ɞ ⋆

Tonight, the diner smells like heat and coffee gone a little bitter at the edges.

He orders without asking, cuts your steak first because your hands are doing that barely-there shake he hates and misses and feeds off.

Masha’s across from you, doing her bored saint impression, cataloging without blinking.

Nina’s not here, Raj isn’t either.

He wanted it smaller.

He wanted you pressed under his arm, his shoulder to your cheek, your breath learning his timing.

If anyone notices, they’re smart enough to keep their eyes in their heads.

You do that thing again — small, unconscious, obscene — thumb to the corner of your mouth, swipe the glisten off, tongue to skin, gone before you think about it.

His spine tightens like a pulled line.

Fuck you for that.

Fuck him for being the one who taught your body what to do when his hand talks to it, and now you’re doing it to yourself like you’re testing whether he’s paying attention.

He is.

He’s paying attention to all the stupid little things he swore he’d never waste attention on.

The way you work the straw even though you hate straws, the way you look at the window when you want to look at his mouth, the way you tuck his lanyard under your shirt because he told you to and then forget it’s a leash until he hooks two fingers in the chain when you pass him the salt and drags you an inch without moving his arm.

You go, quiet.

He files it under useful and deranged in equal measure.

Masha says something under her breath about a loader who thinks forks are a personality.

You laugh again, softer, head tipped just enough to bare your throat, and he hears himself think it without permission, I want to put my mouth on that.

Not to be sweet. To brand.

To end an argument he didn’t admit he’s having.

He keeps his face bored. He feeds you water.

He lets you breathe in his pace.

“Eyes.” he says when you stare at your hands like they’re going to save you from whatever is happening to the room, and you give him your eyes because your body is finally smarter than your self-respect.

Good girl.

Hate that. Love that.

Masha clocks it. She hums and looks away because she’s worked for him long enough to enjoy a disaster only when it pays.

He leaves too much cash under the mug because quiet is something you buy and keep buying, then he’s up, dragging you with a hand at your wrist like he always does when he’s decided you’re done pretending to sit, and he puts you in the car because he’s a controlling prick and because control works.

You don’t ask where, the city presents him its neck and he takes the shortest line.

He doesn’t talk for the first five turns.

He lets the engine do the part of conversation that keeps other men from saying brave things. The ring road bleeds into blocks that know him, you check the mirror for ghosts and he lets you, it’s efficient to watch you reassure yourself with his method.

“You keep doing that with your mouth,” he says finally, once again conversational like weather. “I’m going to wreck your week.”

“Wh— I’m not doing anything.” you start, and he laughs once, low, disgusted.

“You are,” he says. “Don’t play dumb. It doesn’t fit.”

He slides his palm across the console and clamps your knee. Firm. Instruction, not comfort.

“You want me to be polite about this? You picked the wrong fucking church.”

You stay quiet.

Good.

He’s sick to death of men who demand explanations for their own appetites, he will not become a man who begs for permission to have his.

His building is nowhere anyone you grew up with would guess — not the high better neighborhoods that sell safety on the view, not the ground floors that trade convenience for being easy to burn.

Third floor above a machine shop that owes him, stairs that smell like oil and wet stone, a door with a deadbolt that learned his hand.

Inside, clean, minimal, expensive only in the ways he enjoys — knife block that could take a thumb, speakers that never play music, a couch that exists to be landed on, windows that cut the night into panels and show him the yard if he wants it.

The rest is private the way a blade in a pocket is private.

He doesn’t “decorate.”

He occupies. It shows.

He pushes you back against the closed door because he likes writing sentences in your nerves first thing.

Forearm sets at your collarbones, the same way he holds you at the kingpin when he’s making the world shut up, the other hand at your jaw, thumb finding that hinge like it lives there, which it does, because he said so.

Heat off him replaces whatever the room had in it before you walked in.

He doesn’t crowd your air, he owns it.

“You want a tour?” he asks, mock-gentle, mouth not smiling. “There’s the part you don’t touch, the part you don’t ask about, and you, right here.”

“Cozy.” you say, breath shortening, stubborn under it, and he wants to shake it out of you and keep it both.

He settles for being filthy, which is his default setting anyway.

“I told you not to do that shit with your tongue,” he says, absurd, mean, correct. “You think I’m going to sit there and watch you lick your fucking thumb like a kid who doesn’t understand what that does to a man who already decided you’re his?”

You blink, insulted, turned on, angry, it’s all the same color on your face.

He hates how much he likes reading you.

“I wasn’t—” you stutter.

“You were,” he snaps. “And now we’re here.”

He drops his mouth near your ear and lets his voice go animal, the way he knows goes straight through your ribs into whatever part of your head does obedience.

“You have ten seconds again to tell me to stop and mean it. After that, we stop when I say we stop, and you keep up.”

You swallow. He hears it. He waits.

He hates waiting. He’s got patience because it pays.

He’ll spend ten seconds on this because he wants what comes after this to have no complaints attached.

“Do you want this,” he says, even, irritated with the necessity.

“Yes,” you say.

Too soft.

“Again.”

“Yes,” you say, firmer, chin up even with his palm closing the distance.

“Good.” he says, and that is all the ceremony he’s entitled to.

He takes your mouth.

Not sweet. He isn’t wired for sweet. Heat and pressure and claim.

He sets the pace and your lungs learn it instantly, of course they do. His thumb anchors your jaw, fingers braced along your cheek, the other hand sliding to your nape to steer your head because steering is what he does, it’s what your body likes when it’s honest.

He respects nothing except the yes he just took at the door and the rule inside him that says he doesn’t play like your ex.

He’s rough — not because he’s blind, because he knows exactly where rough becomes breaking and he’s not in the business of breaking tools he intends to use for a long time.

You meet him with that mix he’s been cultivating for weeks, precision and tremor. 

You try to be quiet and fail, moaning inside his mouth and letting him drink it all.

Let the room hear something useful for once.

He drags back an inch, breath still on your mouth.

“Eyes,” he says. Yours snap to his. Red to wide. “Keep them open.”

You do.

It kills him a little how good that looks on you — obedience without slackness, stubborn threaded through it like reinforcement.

He goes back in, angling, testing, mapping.

You taste like diner coffee and a week of following orders and the salt of your own laughing he didn’t give you permission to do and he’s going to hold that against you later and give it back more.

He swears into your mouth, a low fuck that is more satisfaction than complaint, and you gasp in a way that feels like the first useful truth you’ve told yourself all month.

He doesn’t tell himself this is about the ex.

It started there, it isn’t there now.

This is about wanting.

His, not yours, though yours is handy right now and pretty as hell when it shows up behind your eyes.

He’s a man built for yes-by-default, he’s also a man who enjoys the shape of you when it isn’t begging, when it’s saying finally, stupidly, bravely.

He rewards that.

He puts his hand at your waist and feels the way you fit there like he ordered the part to spec. He squeezes hard enough to make your breath reconsider its schedule.

He likes the sound you make when it fixes itself.

He breaks off before sweetness can pretend it exists. He hates sweetness. He doesn’t mind tenderness when it looks like a man who can kill with his hands choosing not to squeeze.

That’s not tenderness, that’s control. He can live there.

“Open,” he says, just to see if you’ll take orders with your mouth like you do with your mind.

You do, eyes on his, obedient and insolent at once.

He wants to ruin you. He wants to ruin himself.

He takes the middle path, ruin the evening and build a better machine.

He steps back too soon on purpose, hand at your throat to mark the distance. Your knees threaten to be a problem, he solves it by putting his thigh between yours so the wall doesn’t have to do all the work.

“Don’t slide,” he says, mocking, mean. “Upright. Show me you can be useful when you’re dumb with it.”

“Don’t—” you start, offended.

“Don’t what,” he murmurs, amused, his mouth right there again because he decided to be cruel with pleasure tonight and he’s sticking to the plan.

“Name it. You don’t like how I talk to you? You can go find a man who cries on your bruises and calls it love. I’ll be right here doing this right.”

“Fuck you.” you say, tiny, furious, perfect.

“Later.” he says, deadpan, and lets you see the promise.

He’s not a liar, he’s not gentle, he’s not confused.

He’s also not sorry.

He drags you off the door and down the short hall because he’s done teaching the entryway the same lesson twice.

His place is cool, controlled, built around a few anchors, a counter he can brace you against, a couch that can take weight and orders, a bedroom with a door that locks from his side because of course it does.

He lets you see none of it as sanctuary.

It’s a workshop.

You’re a project.

He’s a craftsman and a bastard.

At the kitchen island he stops and puts you where he wants you with the same economy he uses to set a pallet, hips to edge, palms flat, shoulders down.

He steps between your knees again, not crowding for crowding’s sake — this is measurement.

“Look at me,” he says. “Tell me you’re not thinking about buses.”

You aren’t. He can see it.

The old loop is quiet.

The new one is loud and simple, him, rules, breath.

He likes himself too much in this moment, he knows it, he doesn’t care.

“I’m not,” you say.

“Good,” he says, and then he decides to be a menace about it. “Because if you were, I’d make you say please for an hour and then send you home with your mouth empty.”

“Stop.” you say, shocked, red high on your cheekbones like a light he can read in the dark.

“You want me to,” he says, lazy. “Say no. Mean it.”

You don’t.

You stare at him with that horrible gorgeous honesty he’s been forcing into you, and he feels something like victory and hunger shake hands under his skin.

He kisses you again because self-control is a virtue for meetings, not this.

Harder. Slower.

He controls the pace like he controls lanes — no rush, no mercy.

He lets you pull against his grip once and then punishes you by going softer until you groan, then takes what the groan opened. You curse into his mouth and he smiles like a thief counting someone else’s money.

He wants, and he’s used to getting what he wants, and wanting you isn’t a problem as long as he doesn’t let it make him stupid.

He grows greedy, impatient, he presses his body against yours so you feed him more of your soft noises. He imagines what noises you’ll make when he’s fucking the life out of you.

Fuck.

He forces himself to stop where he planned to stop tonight.

He will not fuck this up by giving you everything in a single snarl and then pretending he isn’t the kind of man who will need it again tomorrow.

He’s mean. He’s patient when it comes to this. To you.

He will make the hunger serve the plan.

He peels back, hand at your nape turning into hand at your cheek, thumb dragging your lower lip because he can and because he saw you do it to yourself and hated that he wasn’t the one doing it.

“You listen to me,” he says, voice back to even, though it costs him. “Tomorrow you work like this didn’t happen. You answer on the first ring. You don’t look at me like a story, you look at me like a job. If you can do that, you get more. If you can’t, I starve you until you remember what feeds you.”

“Cruel.” you say, breathless and rapt and insolent.

“Correct,” he says. “And generous.”

He taps your lanyard through your shirt with two fingers.

“Wear that tomorrow too. Don’t touch it unless I touch it. It belongs to me.”

You belong to me.

You nod, because that’s what you do when you’ve learned that arguing is a luxury you can’t afford.

He feels the nod under his hand, the way your throat cooperates, and it’s obscene how much it satisfies him.

He steps back whole inches, forces space, forces breath to be ugly and useful again.

He hates himself a little for the self-discipline and loves himself more.

He controls, that’s the point.

He gives you water, and you drink because he told you to and because your mouth is a desert he made.

He takes the glass back and sets it in the exact corner of the counter he always uses because order soothes him when desire tries to make him waste time.

“Go,” he says, pointing you to the hall. “Bathroom. Fix your face. If your mother asks about those red eyes, onions.”

You stand there, stubbornness creasing your mouth like you’re deciding whether you want to bite the hand that feeds you just to see if it bleeds.

He lets you look, he lets you decide.

You move.

Good girl.

Fuck him for liking that too.

At the door, he crowds you one last time because he’s a bastard and because closing arguments matter.

Palm to sternum, quick press to set the breath right, mouth at your ear.

“You’re mine.” he says, low.

“Not a poem, not a promise. A fact. If you need to say no, say it now, before I make a liar out of you by teaching you how to need what I give.” he doesn’t understand why he’s giving you so many chances to say no — it feels like he’s trying to deny himself something he already established as his property.

“Yes.” you whisper, ragged.

“Good.” 

He drops his mouth to yours one more time, quick, searing, proprietary, then opens the door and pushes you into the stairwell before you can build a shrine to the moment.

“Seven-thirty. Gray. Don’t be cute.”

You walk the stairs like a person who just learned a word you can’t say out loud yet. He knows what you expected and he’s giving you only what he wants, and when he wants to.

Because he’s the one making the rules, no matter how much he wanted to break this one in the moment you moaned inside his mouth.

He watches you go until your steps hit the landing, until the building swallows you, until the night is just steel and oil and the faint echo of your breath remembering what to do without his hand.

He locks the door.

He stands there with his forehead against the wood and laughs once, mean at himself.

“Pathetic,” he tells the empty apartment, amused. “You’re fucked.”

He pours water, because he’s not an idiot.

He texts Masha.

7:30. keep her busy.

She sends back a single dot, which is as close as she gets to I saw, I’ll maneuver around it, don’t be sloppy.

He respects her for that more than he respects half the men he’s broken.

He looks at his hands. Still steady. Good. He’ll need them.

He’s filthy and his hands are clean.

He’s mean, and he’s right.

He wants you, and that isn’t going to change.

He’s entitled to the way the world moves when he speaks, you’re entitled to the breath he lets you keep.

Tomorrow he’ll make you say policy like it never had teeth and guest 1 like it isn’t strange that your life uses that phrase. Tomorrow he’ll stand behind your chair too long and you’ll hate him for it and hold still anyway. Tomorrow he’ll decide whether you get reward or famine based on whether you keep your eyes on the screen when he walks past.

Tonight he let himself take your mouth.

He’s not apologizing nor explaining.

The corridors of Rasetsu Academy are hushed as a shrine at this hour; every shadow stretched long and watchful, dusk leaking in watery blue through the high windows, pooling in slick reflections on the waxed floors. A storm has been raging steadily for hours, hammering the roof—enough that, when you pause by the laundry room door, you can’t hear your own heartbeat for the rain.

You’re here for towels, nothing more. But as you step inside, something black, soft, and unmistakably not yours catches your eye, carelessly abandoned atop the half-shut dryer.

You recognise it before you even touch it: plain black cotton, clean lines, the faintest crispness of starch at the collar. Naito Mudano’s shirt. The one he wore to this morning’s staff meeting, before vanishing to train the first-years in the rain. You can picture it instantly—damp across his shoulders, moulding to the sharp geometry of him as he moved through drills, his mouth a thin line, eyes scanning for weakness.

He never forgets things. Never. If this is here, it’s because he wants it to be. That's what you tell yourself, anyway, as you run your fingertips over the fabric. It’s still warm from the dryer, holding a trace of clean soap and something indefinably him—rainwater, discipline, the faintest ghost of citrus. You hesitate, glancing at the doorway, and then—unable to help yourself—gather it up, pressing your nose to the collar just once.

It feels like blasphemy, the softest sort.

You mean to leave it folded neatly on the counter, but your hands don’t obey. Instead, you clutch it close and sneak back to your room, guilt and anticipation coiling through you. It sits in your bag through dinner. It sits on your bed through midnight lesson plans. In the early hours of the morning, you slip it over your naked body, the sleeves drooping, the scent of him impossibly vivid. You tell yourself it’s only for tonight.

But by the time the sun claws back through the storm clouds, you’re still wearing it.

You don’t bump into him the next day. Nor the next. Guilt and nerves settle between your ribs, a strange ache every time you spot students giggling outside the staff room. Did he notice? Will he say something? Or worse—will he say nothing at all?

You and Mudano have always orbited each other at a careful distance, colleagues by title but something less definable smouldering quietly beneath. He’s impossibly formal, always direct, but there’s a patience in the way he watches you—an attentiveness that leaves your thoughts frayed and your sentences unfinished. If there’s a line between professional and personal, he’s the one who draws it with razor precision, and the one who flinches most if it’s crossed.

You tell yourself you’re imagining things. That he’s just meticulous, just careful, just… Mudano. But it doesn’t explain the glances that last a second too long, or the moments after meetings when conversation drifts into silence, heavy with all the things neither of you are willing to admit.

It’s a stalemate—him, too stubborn; you, too shy. So the tension lingers, patient as rainclouds, waiting for someone to finally speak.

He catches you one late afternoon, just as you’re leaving your empty classroom, the shirt still folded at the bottom of your bag, your pulse frantic as a trapped sparrow.

Mudano leans in the doorway, posture as unreadable as ever. The dying sunlight cuts across his face, carving shadow into the hollow of his cheek, turning his black eyes molten. He’s in a fresh shirt, blood red tie knotted with mathematical precision, hair still slightly damp from a shower. There’s an ease to his stance that you’ve come to recognise—his guard lowered only the barest fraction, a sign reserved for after-hours.

He looks at you for a moment, then: “You’re hard to find these days.” There’s no reproach in it, only a hint of curiosity, as if he’s searching for your answer between the words. “Busy?”

Your cheeks burn. You shake your head, too quick.

A sudden heat prickles at the back of your neck—not just embarrassment, but the memory of last night rising. Alone in the hush of your room, his shirt over bare skin, too big, swallowing you whole, the scent of him an ache at the back of your throat. Your hands had wandered, quivering beneath borrowed cotton, chasing the shape of him in fabric and air, desperate for something you’d never let yourself name. The shirt had clung to your skin long after, damp with sweat and yearning, a secret pressed close through the rest of the night.

You’re still wearing the echo of it now, the memory raw and electric beneath your clothes, impossible to hide from him.

He pushes off the doorframe, crossing to you in three long, silent steps. The click of his rollerblades is muffled on the carpet. His gaze flicks, just once, to your bag.

“I believe you have something of mine,” he says, not quite a question.

You search his face for any hint of annoyance or amusement, but his expression is as calm as always, his eyes giving nothing away. Still, something in the set of his jaw makes your stomach flutter—does he really know? Or is he only guessing?

“I—” The words stick in your throat, mortifying. There's no point in lying. Not to him. “I was going to return it.”

“Were you?”

His face is all angles in the fading light, but there's something gentle, if you know how to look—something soft around the edges, something that says he’s not angry, only quietly curious. You fumble for the shirt, offering it out with both hands, fingers trembling.

He takes it with a careful, deliberate slowness, his fingertips brushing yours. The contact, simple as it is, steals your breath—a heat that stills every other thought.

“Did you wear it?” he asks, voice low, almost a secret.

You nod, unable to meet his gaze. You’re sure he can hear your heart.

His lips curl at one corner, a smile so faint you could almost call it a trick of the rain-streaked window. “Next time, ask.”

You blink, looking up. He’s watching you with that same inscrutable calm, but his stance has softened at the edges—a silent offer in the way he stands.

“Sorry,” you murmur. “I just—I don’t know why I—”

“You do,” he says. “You just don’t want to say it.”

You swallow, nerves knotting. “Do you?”

For a second, you’re sure he’ll deflect. Instead, he reaches out, tugs you a fraction closer by the sleeve. His touch is sure, but there’s a hesitation there too—an unspoken question. Your mind goes blank with wanting. You don’t trust yourself to speak—only to close the distance and hope he can’t feel how much you're shaking.

You let your forehead rest against his chest, the steady thump of his heart beneath crisp black cotton. Up close, the warmth of him surrounds you, and you draw in a deep breath, finally catching his scent unfiltered—deeper, alive and impossible to fake. Nothing like the faded memory from his discarded shirt. It fills your lungs, dizzying, and for a moment, you’re not sure where you end, and he begins.

He lets out a slow, careful exhale, and his hand comes up, settling between your shoulder blades. You linger there, savouring his body heat, the realness of his presence.

After a moment, you tip your head up, searching his face. He meets your gaze, and in that long, unguarded silence, everything you’ve been dancing around passes between you—longing, nerves, the hungry ache of something finally, quietly breaking open. There’s no need for words. It’s all there, in the way his dark eyes soften around the edges, the smallest tilt of his mouth, the way neither of you steps back.

When he takes your hand and heads down the hallway, you follow him without thinking, heart in your throat.

His dorm room is neat, almost spartan. Rain beads the windows, thunder rolling distant and slow. He sets the shirt on the back of his chair, then bends to unstrap his rollerblades, slipping them off with efficient, practised motions before setting them neatly by the door. Only then does he straighten and turn to face you, his features schooled to stillness, as if he’s weighing every word that might come next.

“You’re nervous,” he says, voice soft now, almost intimate.

You nod, lost for words, unsure whether to move closer or stay where you are. He steps forward, careful, closing the distance with quiet intent. His hands find your waist, feather-light, waiting.

“Tell me what you want,” he says, his thumb stroking a gentle arc where it's settled, grounding you.

You swallow hard, pulse thrumming in your throat. Your mind is suddenly a blur of images: his hands on your skin, his mouth trailing slow heat along your neck, the press of his body against yours in this quiet, rain-wrapped room. It’s too much, all at once—too much wanting, too much opportunity, and you can barely catch your breath.

Your voice is soft, unsteady, but you force the words out anyway. “I… I want you. I want—” You break off, biting your lip, cheeks burning. But he doesn’t look away, and you find the courage to meet his eyes. “I want you to touch me,” you finish, almost a whisper.

His hands glide up your sides, tracing the line of your ribs. He studies you, searching your face for doubt. Whatever he finds there, it reassures him—he leans in, pressing his lips to your forehead, then your cheek, then, achingly slow, your mouth.

His kisses are measured, hesitant at first. You’re acutely aware of every brush of his thumb, every shift of his weight, how easy it would be to lose yourself in the breadth of him. He towers over you—tall and impossibly solid—so that when he gathers you closer, you feel surrounded, sheltered.

Something in you sparks—desire flaring into boldness. Your hands find their way beneath his shirt, fingertips gliding along the hard planes of his stomach, feeling the play of muscle beneath smooth skin. He makes a low sound against your mouth, approving, and deepens the kiss—his tongue sweeping into your mouth, slow and sure, tasting, claiming.

For a dizzy moment, you surrender to it—his body pressing you gently back, his hands bracketing your hips, the room shrinking to heat and the sound of rain and the impossible closeness of him.

When you finally pull away for breath, your eye catches on something unexpected—tattoos, bold against pale skin, revealed just above the waist of his trousers. Your fingers linger there, curiosity winning out, tracing the shapes as you look up at him.

He sees you looking. For a heartbeat, his composure falters.

“I... didn't know you had these,” you murmur, tentative.

He glances down, mouth twitching. “Not finished. I add to them… when necessary.”

“When someone...” You can’t bring yourself to say it. The moment feels too tender to let grief in.

A long silence. His gaze is distant, but not cold. “It’s... a reminder. That’s all.”

You run your fingertips over the black shapes, gentle. He lets you, watching with a strange, open vulnerability. Then, softly, he tugs you in, guiding your hand further up his chest—where the tattoo vanishes beneath his shirt.

“Come here,” he murmurs, voice a touch lower, command threaded with comfort.

He leads you to his bunk and undresses you with reverence, as if each button is something sacred. His hands are steady, but his breath hitches when you touch bare skin—each new inch revealed a study in contrasts: ink and scars, strength and trembling restraint.

You’re nervous, shy, but he is impossibly patient—guiding, never pushing. When you falter, he whispers encouragement, his mouth at your ear, voice a low rumble: “You’re beautiful. Let me take care of you.”

He lays you back against the sheets, and suddenly nothing exists beyond this narrow bed; the heat radiating from his skin, the sound of his breath mingling with yours. Naito’s touch is careful but commanding, palms warm and certain as he trails them down your sides, skimming the soft dip of your waist, the quiver in your thighs. He kisses you again—deeper this time, coaxing your lips apart, swallowing every trembling breath.

When he pulls away, it’s only to map a path down your body with his mouth: your throat, your collarbone, the flutter of your pulse. He’s thorough, deliberate, hands bracing your hips as he presses wet, open-mouthed kisses along your stomach. When he reaches the edge of you—where your need burns the brightest—he pauses just long enough to meet your eyes.

“I’ve thought about this more than I should,” he murmurs, eyes burning with want. “So stay still. Let me.”

And then he’s everywhere—tongue, lips, the press of his hands holding you open, keeping you grounded. His mouth is both devoted and relentless, his tongue slow at first, coaxing gasps from your lips, then firmer as you arch and writhe beneath him. He watches you the entire time—hungry, focused, savouring every sound you make, every tremor. When you start to shudder, he only holds you steadier, mouth never leaving you, until the tension you’ve held for months—years—tears free inside you, leaving you gasping, hollowed out and whole all at once.

He doesn’t stop, not until you’ve shattered and stilled and caught your breath, boneless and shivering with the aftershocks. Only then does he rise, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, quietly satisfied. He leans over you, pressing a kiss to your forehead, letting you settle beneath his weight, sheltered and spent.

You can feel the hard length of him against your thigh—undeniable, insistent, the ache of his own wanting barely contained. A desperate need claws through you; you want him, all of him, now. You try to say something—how good he made you feel, how you never want this to end—but the words tangle uselessly in your mouth.

He doesn’t give you the chance to find them. His lips find yours again, wild now, and you taste yourself on his tongue, hot and bitter. His hand fumbles at his shirt buttons—uncharacteristically rough—every movement betraying just how tightly he’s held himself in check. He breaks the kiss only long enough to pull his shirt open, breath ragged against your skin, before he claims your mouth again, and you arch up, reaching for him, needy for the heat and weight of him, finally, finally pressing into you.

He shoves his trousers down just far enough, freeing himself, and you whine at the sudden heat of him—huge and flushed, pressing against the slick ache of your centre. For a breathless moment, he pauses, head bowed, letting the head of his cock slide through your wetness, staking his place.

Then he looks up, locking onto your gaze—eyes dark, voice rougher than you’ve ever heard it. “Look at me,” he murmurs, his hips just barely held in check. “I want to remember the look on your face...”

You do.

He pushes forward, patient but unyielding, the thick heat of him stretching you open, and for a dizzying second, you can’t think, can’t breathe—can only cling to his shoulders and let the feeling crash over you. It’s too much and not enough, every inch sinking deeper until he’s fully sheathed inside you, the fullness of him stealing the last of your breath.

You’ve imagined this for so long, craved it in quiet, aching moments, but nothing could have prepared you for the reality—how completely he fills you, how perfectly your body yields for him, how the world seems to vanish as he settles his weight over you. You melt beneath him, every muscle going liquid, every thought dissolving into need. He holds still for a heartbeat, eyes locked on yours, committing every detail to memory—your parted lips, the tremor in your voice, the way you shudder around him, already so close to falling apart again.

He takes you apart with exquisite care, rocking into you with a rhythm as steady as the rain against the glass. Each thrust sends a jolt through your body—controlled and so deep you feel yourself unravelling around him.

You barely have time to brace yourself; it’s overwhelming, the friction and fullness, the look in his eyes, the soft grunts against your neck, the weight of how long you've been yearning. You shatter almost instantly. Your body clenches around him, pleasure crashing over you so hard you can only gasp his name, your body catching fire in a dozen places at once.

He doesn’t falter, doesn’t let you go—his hands find yours, fingers entwined, anchoring you as the sensation rips through you in waves. He watches every flicker of your expression, breath coming harsh as he chases your release with his own, still in perfect control until the very last second.

You feel him throb inside you, his movements turning ragged. His grip tightens on your hands, knuckles white, and his eyes never leave yours. You watch the strain etched across his face—the way his mouth falls open, the tremor in his jaw as he finally lets go.

“God, you feel…” he groans, voice raw and rough, the rest lost in a broken gasp as he buries himself deep and spills into you. The heat of it floods you, sending a fresh shock through your body; you arch up to meet him, the sounds he makes resonating deep within your core.

Then, you’re both suspended in the aftermath—his body heavy and shaking over yours, breath mingling, sweat and rain and relief tangling in the air between you. He stays there for a moment, propped on his hands, his face so close you can see the wet shine at the edges of his lashes. He leans down and kisses you again—slow, lingering, with none of the urgency from before. It’s softer, impossibly tender, as if he’s telling you something in a language only your bodies understand.

When he finally pulls back, you find your voice, your fingers tracing lazy shapes along his jaw.

“I’ve wanted this...” You whisper, almost laughing at yourself for how small and true the words sound. “I think I’ve wanted you since the first week.”

His lips twitch into something like a smile, rare and unguarded. “You’re not the only one,” he murmurs. “I kept hoping you’d want me back.”

He shifts, rolling to your side, and pulls you close, tucking you beneath his chin. You listen to the rain together, breath evening out, all of those nerves dissolving into something sweeter—trust, and the new, unshakable knowledge that this complicated, stubborn man will hold you through whatever comes next.

You are back at your parent’s house by the end of a hellish week, probably the worst of your life.

No job, no fiancee, no nothing — just a suitcase with a few things you managed to gather, a backpack and the rest of your dignity tucked in your front pocket.

It’s not a nice neighborhood. You grew up here, sure, and that’s precisely how you know that it has never been safe.

Freight tracks, self-storage rows, chop shops behind roll-ups, a clinic that looks legal until midnight.

News helicopters don’t come here unless it’s a fire. A big one.

Your parents’ house sits two streets off the tracks with a service alley behind it.

Good sightlines.

People mind their business more often than not.

You catch him by accident.

You’re cutting through back alleys because your suitcase is heavier than you remembered and the main street is clogged with a delivery truck and a drunk who wants to talk about your “face like a movie star.”

The alley smells like old oil and hot metal. There’s a band of light where a security lamp dies against brick.

You clock the shape on the ground first — someone on their knees, hands up — and then the man standing over him.

The first hit is a wrong sound.

A wet thud, a crack, a breath rattling out of a throat that can’t hold it.

You don’t mean to look, but you do.

You can’t not look.

Knuckles come down again.

A wet thud.

Again.

He pins the guy by the collarbone with his boot and breaks his face like he’s done it before, like it’s boring him.

Skin opens. Teeth spray the concrete.

He doesn’t stop until the body stops being a body and turns into a mess you can’t give a name to.

You make a sound you’ve never made. It’s quiet and high and it leaves you lightheaded.

The man turns his head, his eyes are bright and wrong in the lamp-glare — red like a hazard light — then you see the right-side scar, a slashed crescent that runs from cheekbone to jaw, and the brainless part of you thinks of your brother’s life — and how the story your mother tells you always starts with this man’s hands on his bleeding chest.

He sees you see him.

He takes you in like inventory, tilts his head by a fraction.

A predator calculating his next kill.

Boots, the scuffed suitcase, your useless open mouth, trembling lower lip, your big doe eyes.

You move before he does, your legs argue with the ground and lose, your knees try to buckle, you run anyway, scared, pathetic.

You don’t know how you make it to the end of the block, only that you do, palms scraped, luggage abandoned, lungs ripping and your heart hitting hard enough to feel in your teeth. 

You don’t look back. You don’t stop until the street has other people on it and the light is bright and stupid and you can pretend it never happened because no one else is screaming.

Your luggage shows up later on the porch of the house, a single knock and your father scoops it in and tells you that the neighborhood has gotten better and people are kinder nowadays.

Denial.

You don’t sleep the next two nights.

Every time your eyes close it’s red, bone, breath.

When you doze, your body yanks itself awake, certain you’re being watched.

By morning three your hands shake so badly you spill coffee on your wrist and tell your mother it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s just the jet lag.

She pats your cheek and tells you to change out of that “sad little shirt” because a guest is coming over who helped your brother after all that ugliness, the man who saved his life, what a blessing, what a good man.

You hear the front latch before you’re ready and your father is out of his chair already.

Your brother stands without thinking. When the door opens, the room changes temperature.

He looks different in a doorway than in an alley.

Clean sleeveless sweatshirt, clean jeans, hair buzzed tight in the back, longer up.

The scar is the same.

The eyes are the same.

The tattoos you’re only seeing now.

The smile is for your parents, and it’s the kind that never touches anything above the mouth.

“Ryomen,” your mother says, breathless, pressing a plate of cookies into his hands like an offering. “You remember my daughter? I told you about her! She’s back with us now. See, she is engaged — well, she was — but she’s home. Isn’t that good?”

Your face is probably devoid of any color because why would she tell this man about your life? Why would she tell this man about your engagement? Why would—

He looks at you like a coin he’s already decided the value of.

“It is,” he says, curt, and you feel it in your legs again, the loose, unreliable feeling.

You nod because your throat closes on anything more.

“Show her around later,” your father suggests, already grateful. “She doesn’t know the new spots. It’s been too long since she last visited us.”

“If she’s got time.” He doesn’t look away from you when he says it. He barely blinks.

Something about him feels unnerving.

No.

Everything about him is unnerving.

He catalogues you like your mother catalogued him — your shoes by the mat, the two mugs in the sink, the ring-mark on your finger you still haven’t gotten rid of.

He doesn’t need the information as much as he enjoys taking it.

You try, because you’re trying to be a functioning adult, because the floor is spinning a little. 

“Thank you,” you tell him and your voice is a little hoarse. “For—” You gesture at your brother. “For what you did.”

His eyes slide to your brother like he forgot he was there.

“Cost me nothing I needed.”

Your mother laughs as if he made a joke and turns to you

“Go on, take a drive with him. He knows all the shortcuts, right? He’s always helping us. Don’t be rude, keep him company.”

You shake your head once, small.

“I should— help you here.”

“Go,” your father says, final.

That’s that.

In his car the air smells like cold leather and something clean with an edge that makes you uncomfortable.

He doesn’t put on music. He doesn’t ask where you want to go.

He drives like he’s testing the street for weaknesses.

You strap yourself in with hands that won’t hold still and keep your eyes on the glovebox, on the vents, anywhere but his profile.

You are in a car with the stranger you saw beating the life out of someone a few days ago. Your parents trust him with their lives because he apparently saved your brother’s. They send you to take a ride with a man that’s capable to fold you in half with his bare hands if he wants. 

That’s good parenting, you think.

You are terrified of him and maybe that feeling makes you the only sane person in that household.

“I don’t—” you start, and stop, because he swings the wheel with one hand and runs a yellow neither of you had any business making.

Your body takes a second to catch up to what the car is doing.

Your palms sweat. You feel sweat under your hairline that has nothing to do with heat.

“You don’t,” he repeats, mockingly. “You do a lot of shaking for someone who doesn’t.”

He cuts through streets you thought you knew, then slides the car into an empty structure half-built on the edge of the old industrial park.

No other cars, just poured slabs, bare columns, the echo of tires on concrete.

He parks where the light doesn’t reach.

Your breath sounds like it doesn’t belong to you.

Your heart is trying to dig a hole through your ribcage and chest and jump out — you can’t hear properly, blood is roaring too loud in your ears.

He doesn’t speak for a while.

He reaches for your phone where it sits stupidly in your lap like a problem you brought with you, tips his fingers, and you give it to him because your brain is still catching up to the wordless instruction in his hand.

He flips it, wakes the screen, glances down, flips the screen to you so your face unlocks it.

The draft you typed at two a.m. is the first thing to open. — hey, can we talk — glows up at both of you over your ex’s name with an emoji of a heart and a ring.

Your heart skips a beat.

He smiles. It isn’t kind.

With his thumb, slow enough to make you watch, he drags your draft to trash, opens the contact, slides to “Block this caller.” He hits it. 

The little red button confirms.

Then he taps the edge of the phone against his thigh, finds the SIM tray with a fingernail, pops it loose.

The small metal sliver lands on his palm. He rolls down his window, holds your eyes, and flicks it into the dark.

No words.

You don’t breathe for three counts.

Four.

“Why would you—” Your voice is thin and wrong and your eyes sting. You swallow, try again like you have a spine. “Give it back.”

He sets the phone on the dash. Doesn’t touch it.

You don’t reach for it.

He turns toward you and the space gets smaller.

He leans over the console until you can’t pretend his body doesn’t take up the whole car.

Oh no.

His hand comes up and you flinch before he even reaches you, he laughs under his breath, then palms your jaw and tilts your face up like he’s checking work.

His thumb presses into your cheek until your mouth parts.

He’s close enough that your mouths are sharing the same breath, his tastes like coffee and something coppery, but he stops before his face meets yours.

“You’re going to keep your mouth shut about things you don’t understand,” he says, voice low, even, like he’s reading terms out of a ledger. “Not because I can make you, though I can. Because you like your brother breathing. Because you like your parents sleeping at night.”

“I didn’t say— I wouldn’t—” you are not sure the words escape your mouth or if you only whined and thought to be forming something coherent.

He squeezes, just enough to make your eyes water.

“I know. That’s not what I said.”

The panic is a clean, blinding white now. Your hands tremble in your lap so hard your nails chatter.

You try to make yourself smaller without moving, like a rabbit thinking the shadow will move on if it pretends to be dirt.

He watches your throat work, and he enjoys it too much. You hate that you can feel heat under the fear, something you don’t understand blooming mean and unwanted low in your belly.

You want to peel your skin off and step out of it.

“Say it.” he prompts, and when you hesitate he rewards you by leaning in closer, his breath hot and patient against your lips, his thumb dragging lazily along the line of your lower lip. “Promise me, brat.”

“O—kay,” you manage, hardly a sound. You pull enough air to try again. “I promise.”

He lets go.

Your jaw aches.

He sits back like nothing happened, like you didn’t just hand him a piece of yourself.

He taps the steering wheel with two fingers, bored again, then he drops the car into gear and guns it straight toward the wall at the far end of the level like he decided that he’s had enough of living and will now kill you both.

The engine roars, the column rushes up, you brace for pain without thinking, hands thrown to the dash, eyes closed shut, a thin sound ripped out of you that’s both a prayer and an apology encased in crying and fear.

He brakes with inches to spare, the seat belt punches your chest, your eyes go black around the edges and you gasp.

He laughs like you’ve been entertaining.

“Of course you’d apologize.”

“Please” you whisper, and hate how small it comes out.

“Didn’t touch you.” He’s pleased with that, perversely. “Didn’t have to.”

He idles there, one hand hanging off the top of the wheel, the other relaxed on his thigh. You look at the SIM tray slot like you could will it whole.

“Why?” it escapes your lips, low and breathy and without your consent. It feels like you’re questioning every single thing up until now.

He follows your gaze, then looks at your face again, patient, like he wants to see whether you cry or hold it.

“You ask a lot of questions for someone who can’t take an answer,” he says finally, conversational, as if the two of you are at your kitchen table and not in a concrete mausoleum that smells like dust and cold metal. “Curiosity gets you chewed up where I work. Don’t pry.”

You can’t help it, the words jump out of you anyway.

“Why do you keep coming to my parent’s house?” you really should stop being so stupid sometimes. Sadly, your mouth is faster than your brain.

His mouth tilts. A warning that looks like a smile.

“Business,” he says, and when you open your mouth he gives you nothing else.

“You want to be useful? You keep a pen in that pretty hand when I bring the ledger. You keep quiet when grown men talk. You don’t run your mouth about alleys that aren’t your alleys.”

Your stomach drops out.

He never says I know you saw me.

The knowledge sits between you, heavy and certain.

He drives you home as if the last ten minutes didn’t happen, smooth and within the lines, turn signal used like a law-abiding citizen.

By the time he stops in front of your parents’ place, your hands have stopped shaking enough that you can pick up the phone from the dash without dropping it.

He watches you reach for the handle.

“Be nice to me inside,” he says, voice mild. “Makes your mother happy.”

You stare at him like he had just punched you.

“If I tell them I don’t want to go out with you again—”

“You won’t,” he says, simple, and there’s no need for volume. “You’ll be exactly what you already are.”

He looks at your mouth, at your hands, at your eyes. He looks satisfied.

“A good girl.”

Inside, your mother smiles like the evening was a dream, your father claps Sukuna on the shoulder and asks if you were any help with directions, your brother watches your face and doesn’t ask anything at all.

Sukuna accepts a second serving of stew and listens to your mother recount your move — other state, the fiancé, the ring that’s back in a box in your nightstand because you can’t throw it away — and he files each piece away without writing.

Your phone sits in your pocket with its empty mouth, and you think about buses out of town, about the ring, about leaving before your few things are even fully unpacked.

You think about running.

Then you feel the bruised place on your jaw bloom when you chew, and the thought breaks apart like wet paper.

When he stands to go, your mother touches his arm and says something foolish about how nice it would be to have a man like him in the family and you almost choke on your breath. 

He grins, lazy, like he’s already planning it.

On his way out he passes behind you and speaks only to the back of your neck.

“Thursday,” he says, like a schedule you didn’t know you had. “I’ll text an hour before.”

You nod before you remember to hate yourself for it. You nod before you even think of how the hell he will do it if you have no SIM card.

Later, alone, you open your dresser drawer, find the ring, and close the drawer again. You lie on your bed with your shoes still on and let the panic come in waves until it wears you down to something numb.

You tell yourself you’ll learn the schedule, you’ll keep out of alleys, you’ll keep your head down, you’ll be nice to the man your family adores.

You also know yourself.

Curiosity is a bad habit you’ve never kicked. You pull your laptop closer, type his name, delete it, type it again, your fingers hover.

The floor creaks outside your door.

You freeze, throat closed, heart kicking.

Silence. No footsteps. Nobody there.

You shut the screen.

You stare at the dark.

You breathe as quiet as you can and count the seconds until Thursday like they’re being taken from you one by one.

Morning finds you at the sink trying to make the glass not slip from your hands, knuckles white around it, breath kept shallow so your mother won’t ask what’s wrong.

She chatters about errands because she likes the sound of a plan, your father hums at the table over bills he’s already decided not to argue with, your brother stares somewhere just past the window with the careful stillness he learned in hospitals, and you tell yourself you’ll get through today by counting the quiet things — rinse, rack, towel, drawer — until tires hush against the curb and the room straightens without anyone telling it to.

He walks in with the same clean hoodie and the same unkindly handsome face, the scar on the right side a pale ladder that refuses to blend, the eyes red enough to look lit from inside.

Your mother says his name like she’s offering it something sweet, you don’t like that they are on the first name basis but you have no say in that.

Your father stands so fast his chair bumps the wall and he pretends it didn’t. Your brother tries not to touch his own scar and fails.

It’s all a little too theatrical for you.

They treat him like he’s a god walking among mortals.

Sukuna sets a canvas bag on the table, tips its contents into neat columns — bottles, gauze, something folded in triplicate, the sound of paper against wood — and then, as if he remembered you only after he’d accomplished what mattered, he turns and holds out an object between two fingers.

A SIM card, still half in its blister.

“Open.” he says, almost pleasant.

You don’t move. Your body is busy holding itself together, but he steps into your space and the closeness pulls your hands up on its own to bring your phone from your pocket.

He takes your phone, thumbs the case loose, presses the little metal tray with a nail, and when the sliver slides out he glances at your face to enjoy the way you flinch.

The card seats with a soft click, so he pushes the tray home, powers the phone, waits while it wakes, then types with the casual intimacy of a man using his own device.

The number on the screen isn’t yours, it’s a new one, a different city code, he saves a contact you don’t recognize until he holds the screen where only you can see and you catch the name he chose for himself: R.

“Now you can answer me when I ask for you.” he says, and the evenness of his tone makes the words heavier.

He sends a test text — hi — watches it appear, deletes it, slides the phone into your palm like a weapon he’s lent you with the safety off.

“Don’t make me go looking.”

Your mother sees only the generosity.

“He’s so thoughtful, isn’t he? All that tech stuff,” she says to your father, voice warm with relief. “People think he’s scary because of the scar, the tattoos, the muscles, but appearances deceive. An angel, really.”

Angel.

You have to set the phone on the counter and flatten both hands beside it to stop the shake from traveling up your wrists.

Your father folds the triplicate paper.

“We’re blessed,” he says, meaning it exactly.

He looks at you as if urging agreement will make everything easy.

“Tell him thank you.”

“Thank you,” you manage, and it comes out thin, a thread dragged by a hook past your teeth.

Sukuna watches your mouth shape the words, amused.

“Use your mouth more often.” he says, and the small command lands like a palm at the base of your skull.

He turns back to your brother, checks pupils, counts a pulse, asks a question he expects answered without noise. Your brother does his best.

Your mother talks about a sale on decent meat at the market, your father tries a joke that loses its way, you work on being furniture.

It doesn’t matter.

Sukuna finishes the necessary acts with the precise economy you’ve learned to read as patience, then tips his head toward the door with the sort of politeness that sounds like we’re done here and your father, helpful, says,

“Take her with you— show her the new lot by the tracks, maybe she finds somewhere looking… She needs a new job to start over…”

You shake your head once, small, terrified of stepping into his car again.

“Yesterday was eno—”

“Go, darling,” your mother cuts in, already rinsing a plate that doesn’t need it. “Be grateful.” 

The word lands heavy when she says it, they always do.

Your brother doesn’t look at you, it’s like he knows something he refuses to let your parents know.

He must feel like he’s protecting them by not saying it.

He’s the favorite child, the perfect son, of course he would keep quiet and oblige.

Outside, the air holds that thin chemical smell that hangs over freight lines.

He doesn’t wait for you to find the passenger handle, he opens it, watches how long it takes your hand to do what he wants, smiles when it’s sooner than yesterday.

You click the belt because that is one thing you can control.

He drives like he’s testing the world’s reflexes once again — smooth until he isn’t, turns taken a shade too late for courtesy, each gap threaded for what it does to your stomach,and not what it does to travel time.

A sheen of cold sweats over your back, you press your shoulder into the seat and tell your legs they are not allowed to twitch.

On the straightaway he pushes the speed without comment, rolls yellows like the light and the street belongs to him, and only looks at you when your breath stumbles.

And only because he enjoys your fear.

He says nothing, you’re getting used to it still, the nothing is the part that loosens your throat into something like a whimper and he hears it, which pleases him openly.

He takes you past the lot your father mentioned and keeps going until the buildings give out and a freight yard opens like a gray sea, the back half of the old warehouse district where construction paused and forgot to start again.

You feel your body trying to shut off and you don’t let it.

Once again you feel some talk you don’t want to have arriving inside the same car.

He pulls into an unmarked cutout, kills the engine, and lets the cavernous quiet rise up around the car, concrete and distance and the faint metallic clank of a switch far off.

You don’t know where to look.

The windshield is a mirror for your own face and you hate the color in your cheeks, hate the shine in your eyes that feels like glass about to crack.

He reaches for your phone again, flips it in his palm, swipes without asking.

A new message arrives before your brain catches up — five — from R, test, proof, collar, and he deletes it, sends it again, leaves it this time so you can watch the leash tighten on its own.

“Say hello,” he coaxes.

“Hello,” you say to the screen, and the humiliation of talking to a text makes your voice wobble.

He likes that too.

You clutch at that same question because you need words to stop your body from shaking apart.

“Why—” it catches, you push through, “why do you keep coming here, taking me to— wherever we are, if you hate questions?”

“I like your parents,” he says, and the way he says like means what they give me. “I like your brother when he listens.”

He shifts, closes the distance until his breath is in your mouth again, his palm warm and uninvited against your throat.

Your eyes glitter and you swallow a yelp because he could strangle you right here and no one would be able to help. 

You realize you’re dealing with someone who enjoys proximity when it makes others uncomfortable.

When it’s used as a weapon.

“And I like you scared.”

The touch around your neck isn’t violent, it’s steady, controlling, a weigh-in.

Heat shoots under your skin, treacherous, wrong, your eyes jump and won’t settle and he follows the flickers like a man reading a heart rate monitor.

“There,” he says, low and pleased with a grin that belongs to a demon. “That’s the look.”

“Please,” comes out before you know what you’re asking for, nothing but a whisper. “Don’t—” and you feel like those are the only words you tell him in the past two days.

“Don’t what.” He leans closer, his mouth an inch off yours, his thumb pushing up under your chin to open you so you have to feel exactly where he is. “Don’t make you tell me what you already decided you’ll do? Don’t make you behave? Don’t make you cry?” He tilts his head, red eyes steady and bright, you feel the tip of his nose brushing yours. “You’re going to anyway.”

Tears come hot and instant because your body is a traitor, you bite your lip to kill the sound and he laughs, actual laughter, quiet and delighted like you’ve given him a gift.

He doesn’t wipe them, he watches them move over your skin and lets them be.

Your hands shake so hard your nails click against your phone and you set it down because dropping it would be worse.

“I’m not—” you start, uselessly, and he tightens the hand on your throat just enough that your next word arrives ragged. “I’m not going to say anything to anyone. T—to them.”

“I know that.” The hand releases your throat, then returns to your face, fingers along your jaw, thumb across your lower lip as if measuring how much pressure it would take to bruise. “I didn’t bring you here to negotiate. I brought you to hear you breathe when no one can help you.”

You make a noise you don’t recognize, like a wounded animal trying to survive a vicious attack by praying for its life how it knows.

You hate him for causing it and yourself for making it more.

He’s a sick bastard, an unhinged man.

He sits back at his own pace, puts the car in gear, and shoots the empty exit with a quick, mean flash of speed that slams you back into the seat, you bite the inside of your cheek and taste iron, which helps.

You should have stayed there.

You should have endured it.

You’d be safer than you are now.

Except maybe you wouldn’t.

He drives you home like nothing happened, the picture of a careful man in a careful neighborhood, blinker on, full stop at the sign because the point has already been made. Twice.

Inside, your mother folds you into a hug that smells like soap and says,

“He’s so gentle, isn’t he? The second day he takes you for a ride and doesn’t complain. People don’t understand him, but he’s a good man, Ryoumen.” in a tone that could make a lie lay down and never get up.

Your father says,

 “Appearances deceive, now you know.”

Your brother smiles that tired smile that tries to be grateful and lands on sorry.

You stare at the table until it stops tipping.

Sukuna sits where your father asks him to, eats what your mother sets in front of him as if he’s doing her a favor, answers questions with short, correct sentences that keep the room warm.

Passing behind your chair, he lets two fingers settle at the back of your neck for a heartbeat, heat and weight, and the tiny, involuntary shiver that runs down your spine is all the acknowledgment he needs.

He removes his hand before anyone sees, and in the next breath he’s talking politely about garbage pickup schedules because somehow he knows them better than the people who live here.

You try not to think about the drawer upstairs again, the ring inside it, the message you typed last night to a man you almost married and didn’t send because courage is a thing you pretend to have until it has to be used.

The SIM is gone regardless, the number burned, and now the new one sits under his thumb.

The thought of leaving startles you like a step into space, the floor doesn’t return where it should, you glance at your mother, who is saying how thankful you all are, and at your father, who is nodding like a man at prayer, and you know with a cold clarity that they would sell you out smiling if it smoothed your brother’s path for a week.

After dishes, Sukuna waits in the hall where the light doesn’t reach, that same place where the air narrows in the house.

“Phone,” he says, and you pass it up because it’s easier than his fingers on your wrist or on your face.

He opens settings, toggles something you don’t catch, opens your messages, pins his thread to the top, changes the name to Work, then looks up at you to savor the way your breath catches when you realize what he’s done.

He turns the screen, shows you the bland word where his initial was, and grins.

“Answer me,” he says, almost affectionate. “Immediately.”

You nod because your voice is lost somewhere in your chest, and he takes the yes like he takes everything — calmly, as if it were the most reasonable outcome — and slides the phone back into your palm with a little press that makes you aware of how your skin wants to twitch.

On his way out he pauses where your mother can see him and says,

“She’s settling in, got her a job” as if he’s responsible for that, and your mother gives you a look that says see, see, and you want to say I see too much but you swallow it and keep your hands still. 

Your father says,

“We’re lucky to have you, son.”

And Sukuna says,

“You are.” without flinching, and something like heat curls low in your belly again because there’s no room in this house for the truth except the parts he chooses to speak.

He leaves with a small nod and the door closes and the engine smooths the block.

You stand at the sink with a dry glass in wet hands and try to breathe like a person who belongs to herself.

Your phone buzzes against your palm.

five

From Work.

No hello, no question, just the time that belongs to him.

Your throat tightens and loosens uselessly, your eyes sting, and for a long minute you think you are going to cry right there while your mother hums and your father writes numbers and your brother scratches at a scar he can’t feel anymore.

You don’t. Not here.

Upstairs you lock the bathroom door, turn on the tap to make a sound to drown yourself in, and you let it happen, shaking so hard your knees knock, breath sawing, tears hot and fast and humiliating until the edge rounds and your hands come back to you.

By the time you face yourself in the mirror the color has gone from your cheeks but not from your eyes, and you hate that you recognize curiosity moving under the fear like a bad decision.

You think about typing his name into a search box again, you think about the way he said don’t pry, you think about the red eyes in the alley, you think about how quickly he put his smile on for your mother.

You close the laptop without opening it.

You sit on the edge of your bed and stare at your phone until five looks like it might mean nothing.

It doesn’t.

You know it won’t.

You know you’ll answer when it comes again.

You know he’ll show you more of the neighborhood no one else sees, and you’ll tremble, and he’ll enjoy it, and then he’ll come inside and make you behave, and your parents will tell you how lucky you are.

This is your life now.

You lay down and stare at the ceiling and will your hands to stop shaking because you can’t do this with hands that won’t obey, and when at last they quiet you hear your breath even out, and you wish for sleep, and you do not get it.

Your phone wakes you at 06:11 with a vibration that feels like a hand on your throat.

clean. hair up. 30 minutes. 1849 riverside. ask for masha.

No greeting. From Work.

Your stomach flips so hard you taste metal. You dress with hands that won’t obey — black jeans because they don’t show sweat, a plain navy top that won’t be accused of anything — and you pin your hair with three clips because the first two feel like they’ll give.

At the kitchen doorway your mother lights up like a bulb.

“He said he’d help,” she says, delighted. “See? He helps you and asks for nothing in return— he’s an angel, isn’t he?”

Your father looks proud in a way that makes your ribs hurt.

Your brother says nothing and stares at his coffee.

Coward.

Riverside is brick and corrugated metal and the sound of trains moving somewhere you can’t see.

He’s at the red door with the keypad, hands in his hoodie pocket, eyes bright and pinning you.

You realize too late that you wanted him to be late, he looks like he never is.

“Turn.” He loops a wristband around you, tightens it, and the lock clicks. “Inside.”

The air in the warehouse is colder than outside, busy with forklifts and the beep of something reversing.

A woman with a shaved head and a pencil behind her ear — MASHA on a plastic tag — looks you up and down without malice. She doesn’t need it, whatever this is, it isn’t a favor you earned.

“She’s yours,” he tells Masha, like he’s dropping a package. “Front desk. Dispatch line. She answers when I call.”

“You train her or I do?” Masha asks.

“Both,” he says. “Different subjects.”

He steers you into a caged office with glass on three sides and a rolling chair that sticks on one wheel.

There’s a ledger-sized clipboard and a headset and a computer whose background is a live camera of the yard.

He leans over your shoulder, so close you feel heat through fabric, and points.

“When trucks nose in, you log plate and time. When they nose out, same. If anyone asks for a discount, you say policy and hang up. If I call, you pick up on the first ring. If it’s not me, second. Never third.”

You put the headset on because he’ll force it onto you if you don’t.

“I—” Your voice catches. You try again. “What are we dispatching?”

“Whatever I tell you we are.” he says, friendly, and the friendliness is worse.

He drags the mic down to the right angle with two fingers and watches the way your breath hits the foam windscreen.

“Inhale through your nose. Out through your mouth. Don’t fog up when you’re scared.”

You nod.

He smiles without teeth.

“Say ‘yes, Sukuna.’” he purrs.

“Yes, Sukuna.” The name feels like swallowing something sharp.

You’re not on a first name basis with him, at least.

Masha slides a clipboard into the pass-through and tests you without looking like a test.

“Plate nine-lima-seven-two, arriving. Put it in.”

You type with fingers that remember how, the numbers land clean. She grunts, satisfied. 

“She’ll do.”

Sukuna stays, he doesn’t sit, he watches you take three calls, log two arrivals, tell a man named Charlie there are no cash discounts.

The third call is a driver who starts swearing, you start apologizing because that’s what your body does when someone raises a voice, and Sukuna’s hand is on your jaw before you finish the second sorry, his thumb pressing your cheek until your mouth stops forming the word.

“No apologies,” he growls, eyes on your lips. “If you say sorry again, I’ll teach you here with an audience.”

You shake your head as much as his grip allows, tears hit your lash line in an instant, hot and humiliating.

He watches one break and go. He lets your face go like he never marked it.

“Again. Tell him policy.”

“Policy,” you say into the line, and your voice arrives lower and steadier than you expected because fear has weight and now it’s sitting exactly where he put it.

The driver hangs up.

You breathe, too loud.

Sukuna enjoys the sound.

He takes your phone from the desk without asking, adds a four-digit extension to your favorites, labels it Line 4, then calls it from his own.

The desk phone shrills. You jump.

He raises his eyebrows, well?

You answer.

“Dispatch.”

“Better,” he says, and hangs up to watch the way your hands tremble while you put the handset down. “You’re trainable.”

He talks about you like you’re a dog he intends to potty train.

When Masha steps out to yell at a forklift, he closes the office door and the warehouse noise muffles to a low sea.

He is suddenly close, the glass reflecting both of you, his scar pale and uncompromising in the strip light.

He reaches past you to flip the PRIVACY switch, the blinds hum and tilt.

You don’t know this switch existed until it erases everyone else.

“I told you yesterday — don’t pry,” he says, conversational once again. “You type my name into anything and I will know before the page loads.”

“I wasn’t—” you remember thinking about it. You remember almost doing it.

You feel a little breath of relief you didn’t but the relief melts and dies in a second.

He laughs, soft, amused at how fast you are to get your walls up.

“You will. And then I’ll show you how fast curiosity hurts.”

“I… need to work. A job.” you murmur, because that’s the only thing that feels like yours and it’s the thing that will keep your head busy and money coming so you can think about leaving again and never coming back. “I need this.”

“You need what I give you,” he corrects, voice pleasant, eyes steady. “This place is safe because I say so. And unsafe if I feel like it.” He watches panic travel your throat and adds, idly, “You’ll get paid Fridays. Masha will hand you an envelope. If anyone bothers you on the way out, you use my name like a blade.”

Your mouth opens and closes.

He tilts his head, interested.

“What,” he says, as if you’re a small entertainment.

“You—” You hate the quake in your voice. You steady it with both hands flat on the desk. “Why did you throw my number away?”

You even sound a little less afraid than you actually are.

“You were going to call a man who didn’t keep you, brat.” he says, bored. “I’m keeping you. Get used to it.”

Heat hits your face so fast you have to look away.

He steps in so you can’t.

“Eyes.” he demands, and you give them because the alternative is his fingers on your jaw again.

He studies them like he’s reading something to himself and not sharing.

“Stand up.” he orders, and when you do he crowds you back into the corner between filing cabinet and glass.

You should have seen that coming, that one is on you.

He doesn’t touch, not for a beat that lasts too long, and then he plants one palm on the cabinet beside your head and the other on the glass over your shoulder so the only air you have is his.

You feel yourself start to fold in small ways — breath shallow, knees not to be trusted, hands going useless — and he waits, pleased, until your eyes gloss and your mouth trembles once.

“You cry pretty,” he muses, low, cruel. “I could make crying your job if I wanted.”

“Please don’t.” falls out on a breath you don’t control.

“Ask prettier,” he whispers, leaning close enough that your lip brushes his stubble when you flinch. “You’ll get there.”

His grin is large, baring teeth. You can almost feel the warmth of his lips from how close he is now—

A fist raps the glass.

Masha, eyebrow up.

Sukuna steps back as if none of that just happened, switches the blinds back, and you watch the warehouse reappear like air after a held breath.

Your hands don’t know how to be hands. 

He notices and grins wider even.

The office you are sits inside the warehouse like a glass throat.

Three sides are windows, the fourth is a chain-link wall with a lock and a pass-through slot.

Your chair faces the gate camera and the line of angled bays, to your left, a monitor shows plates as they nose in, to your right, the desk phone with four hard lines — 1. yard, 2. clinic, 3. vendors, 4. dispatch.

Above the pass-through are two speaker grilles and a red PRIVACY rocker that tilts the blinds with a hum and turns the windows into dull mirrors.

When that switch is up, anyone on the floor has you — your mouth, your hands, the way your shoulders give you away.

When it’s down, they get their own faces back and a blank pane where you just were.

Drivers walk the lane directly in front of you to sign manifests, argue bay times, or ask for “two minutes” that always mean ten.

If the blinds are open they can see you take a call, look at the clock, type a plate.

They can see when you’re learning.

Some try to use it.

A wink through glass, a palm on the ledge like they’re at a counter.

You learn not to lean close.

When Sukuna steps into that line-of-sight, they stop seeing anything but him.

The cage keeps bodies out, not eyes.

The office door is keyed, Masha has one fob, Sukuna has the other. Clipboards slide through the slot, envelopes in, envelopes out.

Your headset mic lives two fingers from your mouth, he adjusts it until your breath hits the foam the way he wants.

A scale sits twenty feet from your window, every “damaged in transit” pallet gets weighed where you can watch the number climb.

The gate camera catches the plate before the driver catches himself, you enter the string while the truck still rolls.

Forklifts swing past close enough to feel it in your wrists.

You work at ground level — no raised catwalk, no glass cube above the floor — so, unfortunately everyone sees you, and you see them.

That’s the point.

You are the visible place where rules live.

Sukuna is all economy when he moves — a step and plant, shoulder held easy, one hand interfering with space when he wants a path to exist and seeing it exist, a twist of his wrist to turn something off that thought it was on.

He goes to the yard and it folds around him.

You watch through glass as he reaches the bay where a driver is standing too close to a loader, shouting with dirty heat, Sukuna doesn’t raise his voice, he stands in the lane, says something you can’t hear, waits a second, and then moves — one hand at the back of the man’s neck, a simple drop that puts him on his knees without a fight, the other hand a suggestion hovering by the waistband where a weapon would be if anybody here wanted to ruin their day, the loader backs a foot because nobody intends to die before ten.

He leans, says another quiet thing, and the kneeling man’s anger breaks along a line you recognize — a public apology in a voice that has all its teeth and none of its pride.

Sukuna lifts two fingers, the man stands, the lane unclogs, he doesn’t look back at the office because he knows you saw and he knows how it sits under your skin.

The phone rings, you jump, he’s already at your shoulder again, the blinds still half tilted so the yard is a gray wash and he is the most visible thing in the room.

“Line two,” he says. “Clinic.”

You pick up and your mouth goes dry and you remind it there will be consequences if it stays that way.

“Dispatch.”

A voice you don’t know but understand immediately by tone — the night manager who wants to be day — asks if “the extra box” will be received today.

Sukuna watches your eyes as you repeat,

“Arrival at eleven,” and the man says something about stamps and supplies and the refrigeration unit that coughed last night, and you write numbers you think will mean something to someone later.

Sukuna takes the handset from your fingers with a look that says don’t move and tells the man he’ll send a driver and if the unit coughs again they will cough too, then hangs up and drops the phone back to the cradle like he hasn’t raised his voice in days and doesn’t need to.

“Write eleven-oh-eight,” he says, you write it. “Write clinic. Don’t write the extra word. You only write other people’s crimes when you hate them.”

His mouth edges, pleased by the way your breath tries to climb and fails.

“Good. Again.”

Masha brings you paper without being asked because she has decided you’re hers to train with the things he can’t be bothered to call by their names.

She shows you where the clipboard lands and when and why, she lets you get a plate wrong and makes you fix it without letting the don’t cry rise past your teeth.

She says “policy” as if it’s a religion and makes you repeat it like a prayer you don’t believe yet.

It’s the little moments he reaches for when your steadiness slips.

Your hand shakes when the radio flares and he sets two fingers on your wrist until your body remembers the count he likes.

Your voice thins when a driver comes in hot and he sets his thumb against the side of your throat — not choking, measuring — and your words arrive whole because the alternative is his disappointment.

You glance at the yard when you should be watching the gate and he plants his palm on the glass beside your head and tells you to look where he tells you to look, and when you say “sorry” out of reflex he says, “Don’t,” and the no is not for the mistake, it’s for the apology, you learn that, you keep it.

At 10:12 the gate camera catches a plate that makes Masha swear under her breath through her nose, a silver sedan you’ve seen in the neighborhood twice too many times, and in the space it takes for your throat to do the wrong thing twice, Sukuna is already in the lane, already opening the driver’s door with two fingers and putting a man who thought the yard would forgive him face down on the asphalt with one hand and a knee.

Glass office silence is strange, it makes your ribs feel like they aren’t attached right.

He says nothing you can read, he waits longer than you thought patience could be, he peels the man up, pushes him toward the exit with a gentleness that is humiliation with a bow on it, and when the sedan stutters he taps the hood with open palm, twice, a sound that means go, and the car obeys like a trained dog.

“Log it,” he says when he steps back into your air. “Incident ten-twelve.”

You write the numbers and your hand trembles so hard the one looks like two and your brain says fix it now and your body says you’ll make it worse, and he says,

“Stop,” and your body stops because it understands that word in his mouth. 

He doesn’t soften.

“Look at me.” he says, and your eyes drag up like weights.

“Count five. In through your nose. Out through your mouth. If you mess it up, we start again. Don’t waste my time.”

You count, ragged, not pretty, and he waits because he likes making the waiting his, and on the fourth exhale your hands remember where they go on the desk.

On the fifth your throat unpins enough that your voice could do a job again if asked.

He watches it, he approves with the smallest tilt, then says,

“Good girl.” in a way that isn’t praise, it’s a ledger line, it’s a receipt.

It telescopes you between humiliated and useful so fast your mouth doesn’t know which word to choose, and he grins because it did something to your face that he will definitely use later.

When he moves through the space his ownership isn’t loud, it’s functional.

He adjusts a strap, straightens a stack, lifts a raft of paperwork with two fingers and gestures for Masha to redo the labels, she rolls her eyes where he can see it and does it anyway because she likes her bones unbroken.

He takes a call that makes his posture sharpen — voice without breath on the other end saying something about a missed drop, a half-empty van, a cousin who saw a cousin who heard — and he doesn’t look at you for that one, he looks at the floor as if it owes him an answer and tells whoever is dying on the other end that they already had one chance and this was it.

He brings you coffee you didn’t ask for and holds the lid while you drink because the heat is wrong for your hands.

He takes the cup away before you’re done and you say nothing because you understand that your throat will be asked for something else before noon and you don’t know what yet.

When a driver tries to wink at you through the glass, Sukuna steps into the line of sight and asks him with his mouth closed if there’s anything to see, and the man finds something fascinating about his shoes and leaves with his head intact.

The clinic delivers exactly at eleven-oh-eight, a man with a wheeled cart and a jacket that says SECURITY on the back — even though he clearly isn’t, — and Sukuna takes the sign-off with two fingers and makes the man put the boxes on the scale because he isn’t paying for air, you write the number down and nod when he looks up to see if you can do something basic under pressure.

He has you sign under your father’s name, you do, because you are asked to, the man with the cart leaves lighter and more afraid than he entered, and the private ledger in your pocket fills with another line you didn’t draw but will answer for anyway.

At noon he says “walk,” and the word pulls you out of the chair like a leash.

He doesn’t lead you toward food, he leads you along the row of angled bays and into the steel stairwell that runs up to a dark mezzanine, and on the third landing he turns without warning and you stop because he is there — arm planted on the railing beside your head, the other finding the wall near your shoulder, his body a door he can open or not.

He doesn’t touch you at first, the not touching — much like his not talking — is the part that shakes your knees, and he waits because he enjoys using the cheapest tool in the room.

“Stop thinking about leaving, brat.” he says, a low instruction that doesn’t ask you to agree. “Stop thinking about exes. Stop thinking about what I do when you’re not here, if I wanted you to know, I’d hand it to you and make you carry it.” The red in his eyes finds everything jumpy in yours. “You have three jobs, answer me, write clean, shut up.”

You open your mouth because there’s a sentence you want to risk and you don’t even know which one it is yet, he slides his hand up under your jaw again, thumb on your throat, not decent.

“Ah ah.” he stops you and cocks a brow. “You’re going to tell me you’re afraid. Scared. I like you afraid. It makes you quick.”

“I am.” you breathe, because language is sometimes a lever you can use to move your own body. “Terrified.”

Maybe telling someone that relishes on your fear you’re terrified isn’t very cash money of you, but you allow yourself to be stupid sometimes near the biggest menace you know.

“Good,” he says, and the word lands like a weight pressed into your sternum until your breath picks a cleaner path. “Use your fear.”

He steps closer until his chest almost touches yours and the heat coming off him convinces your skin to forget the stairwell is cold.

He smells like soap you can’t name and the edge of metal and the first breath of an engine, his mouth is close enough that if you flinch wrong the worst thing you can imagine gets simpler.

You don’t appreciate his hobby of getting too close.

You don’t appreciate his lack of regard for your boundaries.

You don’t appreciate breathing the exact same air as him.

You definitely don’t appreciate the way your body reacts when his eyes are inches from yours and you can see the pattern of his red irises.

He doesn’t do anything with that advantage.

“Policy,” he says, and you say it.

“No cash,” he says, and you say it.

“Arrivals at, departures at,” and you slip on the first number and he pushes his thumb a degree deeper on your throat and says, evenly,

“Don’t waste what I’m giving you,” and you say it right the second time.

How can you feel anchored and terrified at the same time?

“Eyes.” he says when yours try to slide toward the shadow moving below, you hold his and it feels like a decision you will be living with for months.

He looks at your mouth like it’s a fault he has measured and notes for later.

He looks at your palms where they’ve flattened themselves against the railing because you needed somewhere to put your hands.

He looks at the tear that finally makes it out of your eye and down your cheek and he watches it like a timepiece and says, soft and pleased.

“There it is.”

“Please,” you say because you need him to move so your legs will remember whose they are.

“Please what?” he asks, curious.

The word you want is stop and your throat refuses it — because stop means you don’t want the instruction, and your body does want the instruction,  because you want to not be useless, you want him to not decide you’re a bad investment, you want to stop shaking in public long enough to understand the rules, you want out and you understand out isn’t available.

“Please let me work for you.” you say, and the sentence surprises both of you with how true it is when your mouth holds it.

He steps back the width of a breath and the world rights a degree.

“Learn faster,” he says, rough praise that warms where you don’t want anything warmed. “Keep your panic tidy and you’ll last.”

The afternoon builds you into someone you can use.

The sequence locks into place, ring, answer, policy, log, write the plate before the driver finishes their name, pick the voice out of the static that matters, hang up while they’re still complaining, don’t apologize, keep your posture like a person who isn’t about to slide out of her chair.

Twice he drifts in behind you to put his fingers at the base of your skull and tap once so your jaw remembers how to unclench, once he sets your elbow where it belongs so the line you write has weight, he says “good” so quietly you could pretend it didn’t happen and your body refuses to let you.

He disciplines without theatrics.

A loader bangs the forks against the bay, Sukuna is there before the second clang, takes him by the upper arm, walks him three steps where the camera can see, tells him something you’ll never be allowed to repeat, and the loader spends the next two hours moving like a penitent.

A driver tries to push two extra pallets into a manifest, Sukuna lifts one with his bare hands and drops it on the scale so the number hurts their margin and their feelings, says,

“Pay it or go,” and waits with the steadiness of a blade lying flat on a table.

They pay.

At four he hands you a yellow envelope that is heavier than it looks and tells you to put it in the bottom drawer and lock it and not ask, and when your eyes ask anyway against orders he says,

“No,” and the word is a wall, you run into it and do nothing intelligent with the impact. He is bored by that and pleased you learned.

Near closing a man comes in looking like he owns somebody else’s time — watch too clean, shoes too light for this floor, mouth that’s too comfortable talking to women — and he tries to ask you for a favor like it’s a thing that can be taken with a smile.

Sukuna finds the space between you and the window and occupies it so completely the man can’t see you anymore, then asks the man to repeat the request and makes him chew it and swallow it and apologize to his own shoes before he leaves.

After, Sukuna doesn’t turn to you, he doesn’t announce that he did you a courtesy, he takes the ledger from the top of your desk, flips to a blank line that isn’t a line, sets his pen where he wants your hand to be, and says, “Sign,” in a tone that makes your name honest.

You do, because you understand this is how he plants alibis.

Your breath quickens because you understand it and still can’t stop your hand from completing the task.

He watches the way your throat moves and the way your lip wants to tremble and the way you don’t let it and he says,

“That’s better,” and it is, monstrously.

After your shift he takes you to eat.

You have no choice in the matter, of course.

The diner sits where the ring road drops its last light and the trucks make a slow turn onto nothing.

Neon that says EATS with the T half-dead. A pie case that hums like it’s trying to hide the sound of tires sighing on gravel, three booths, one counter, a waitress with a name tag worn down to TA—something.

The kind of place that doesn’t bother pretending it isn’t a place for men who live in their cabs.

He takes the space like it owes him heat, not the booth across from the door — too obvious. 

The one under the window near the side exit, sightline on the lot, on your reflection.

You start to sit opposite out of habit.

He pats the vinyl beside him once and looks at you like you’ve misunderstood a very simple instruction.

“Here.”

You slide in. He slides closer. Both hands find your waist and you swallow a yelp as he raises your body to almost bend over the table, then he slides you to his other side — between him and the wall.

He angles his leg outside yours and nudges until your hip touches the wall,so  getting out would mean climbing over him.

That seems about right.

TA—, the waitress, comes over with two mugs before she’s finished a hello.

“Same?”

“Two coffees,” he says. “No sugar.”

She places the mugs on the table.

Two coffees, no sugar.

Then to you, without looking,

“Drink it.”

The first mouthful burns and steadies.

The cup shakes against the saucer when you set it down, you put your hand around it and pretend that’s why.

Sukuna settles an arm along the top of the booth and lets it drop until his palm sits at the point where your shoulder meets your neck, weight more than touch, proprietary without performance.

People who know him have learned to keep their glances short, the man at the counter folded into a high-vis jacket looks once and discovers something interesting in his eggs.

“You wanted answers,” he says, voice even, pitched for you and no one else. “You’ll get the ones you can use.”

You nod because your mouth doesn’t trust itself yet.

“Say it.” he prompts.

“I—want the ones I can use.”

“Better.” His arm tightens a fraction, approval with pressure. “What you do at the yard is simple. You are my clock and my scribe. You write plates and times and bays. You pick up on the first ring if it’s me, the second ring if it’s not. You do not let a call crawl to three. ‘Policy’ is your spine. ‘No cash’ is your teeth.”

You repeat it, stumbling on nothing, voice catching because his thumb lifts once and grazes the tendon at your throat like a metronome he enjoys owning.

“If the clinic calls,” he goes on, “you write the time and the word ‘clinic.’ You do not write any other word. If someone says ‘extra box,’ you don’t hear it. You confirm, you hang up, you log eleven-oh-eight or twelve-fifteen and the rest of your mouth stays closed.”

You stare at the steam coming off the cup because looking at your hands tells on you.

“And if someone asks what’s in the boxes?”

“You say ‘I don’t open cargo.’” His mouth edges up. “Which is true.”

A plate arrives that you didn’t order. Patty melt, fries, a pickle that smells like the back of a walk-in.

He doesn’t ask what you want, he moves the plate to the middle and turns the knife so the handle points at you.

“Eat,” he says, not because he’s kind, because he needs you functioning.

You pick up the knife because not obeying means finding out what disobedience costs in public.

Your stomach is a tight fist, the bite still lands.

You chew like you’re trying not to make sound, he watches you remember how to swallow and keeps going.

“If a driver asks for a discount,” he says, “you say ‘policy’ and you’re done. If they yell, you hang up and log their plate when it noses in anyway. If a badge shows up at the glass, you text me ‘guest 1’ and answer the phone when it rings. You don’t be brave. You buy me minutes and I pay you back with years.”

“Years,” you repeat, you blink, and the word isn’t a word, it’s a weight.

“The only names you say are first names you hear in the open,” he says. “You’re new. You’ll always be new. You don’t search mine. You don’t ask Masha things she has to live with after you go home. If you need to know, I will put it in your hand. If I don’t, it’s because you don’t.”

You risk it, voice thin, careful. “Is it—”

“Don’t finish that sentence.” He doesn’t raise his volume, the warning lives in stillness. “If a thing is legal enough for your mouth, I’ll name it. If I don’t name it, it stays behind your teeth.”

You nod. Your spine tries to fold and you stop it.

He notices the attempt and rewards it with the smallest stroke of his thumb along the edge of your collarbone — the kind of touch that reads as ownership because he doesn’t bother hiding that it is.

It sends shockwaves through your whole body, nonetheless.

“Good.” he says.

Rough praise. It lands where heat already sits.

TA— reappears with a pot.

“Top off?”

He tips his cup toward her by a centimeter.

“Thanks, Talia.”

You feel the flick in your gut at how sure he is of people.

You feel how she doesn’t ask for money up front, how the cook doesn’t pretend not to watch, how someone in a jean jacket in the back corner nods once toward him like a prayer.

The city knows him the way a dog knows the shape of the boot that feeds it and kicks it.

“Everyone knows you.” you say lowly, and hate the sound of it coming out like awe.

“Everyone knows who not to waste time with,” he corrects, amused. “Eat the pickle.”

You don’t like pickles. You eat the pickle anyway.

The vinegar wakes a sting under your tongue and you think of how much your life has changed since you decided to leave your ex.

You should have endured.

He waits while you finish half the sandwich and then leans in, closing the last honest inch until he’s breathing your air again, until his red eyes are the only fixed point in the mirror.

You hold still because movement feels like the wrong answer on a test you didn’t study for.

“You’re still thinking about him.” he muses, tone conversational, subject out of nowhere as if he was suddenly reading your mind. Not a question, just the truth laid out like a bill. “You typed that shit at two in the morning and stared at it until the screen asked if you were sure. And now you can’t stop thinking about it.”

You open and close your mouth.

You don’t risk a glance.

He watches the little failure with interest and grins, baring teeth.

“He let you go.” he says. “I would not have.”

“I’m—” You wince and catch your breath because your lungs remind you they need air. “I’m not lookin—” you start, because panic is a clutch that grabs the wrong gear.

“I’m not offering. I’m keeping.” he says, and the smile is pure knife.

Your breath trips, the cup clicks on the saucer again when you set it down. He notices, of course he does, he shifts his hand so his arm is firmly around your shoulders now, palm heavy at the top of your arm.

If you stood, he’d come with you. If you slid, he’d catch your hip with a knee. He pins you without force, the way a weight pins paper.

“You keep your curiosity in a pocket.” he says, tone almost gentle in the way a step down can be gentle before the next stair hits, “and I’ll make sure the windows upstairs stay latched and nobody who isn’t me knocks at your door. You start prying, I teach you why people stop.”

“I won’t—” you try again.

“You will,” he says, enjoying himself. “You’re the kind who does.”

Patronize me harder, you think.

The fry tastes like oil that’s already lived a long life.

You take it anyway because chewing is a job your mouth can manage while your brain spins. 

The neon outside buzzes on the downbeat. A truck pulls in, headlights washing the counter with white for a breath, retreating. Somewhere, cutlery clatters.

Your hands remember shaking and do it. He squeezes the top of your arm once, firm, a command back down into your muscles.

“Snap out of it,” he says, and the words fit his mouth like they’ve lived there for years. “Give me the rules back.”

“First ring if it’s you,” you say. Your voice steadies on the rails he laid. “Second if it’s not. ‘Policy’ and ‘no cash.’ Plates and times and bays.”

“And clinic.”

“Time and ‘clinic.’ Nothing else.”

“If a badge shows.”

“Text ‘guest 1’ and answer the phone.”

“If someone asks for names.”

“First names only. If I don’t hear them, I don’t know them.”

He looks at your face like it’s finally doing the thing he wants, brain engaged, fear harnessed, mouth making the correct shapes.

The praise he gives is a hum under his breath and the line,

“There you go.” which shouldn’t ring in your chest the way it does.

“You have a good mouth” he says, quiet enough to be for you alone. “Following rules helps you keep it.”

You swallow. Your throat loosens.

Your eyes sting and don’t spill because you don’t want to give him that twice in one day.

He tastes the almost-cry in the air anyway and sets it aside for later.

“Money,” he says, as if you were the one who needed clarification again, but you let him repeat because how would you stop him anyway. “You get it Fridays. Cash. You put it in a drawer and you don’t brag about it to anyone who eats at your mother’s table. If anyone asks, you say you do paperwork for a transfer yard and you hate answering phones. You’ll roll your eyes. It reads true.”

“I do hate it,” you say, and he almost laughs.

“I know.” 

A couple at the end booth — two men in matching jackets — whisper over their plates and throw a look that glances off him and skitters away. Talia refills your cup without asking and sets a slice of pie down that you did not order, Sukuna pushes the plate closer with a finger against porcelain, a quiet scrape that sounds like the rules moving.

“Eat that too.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

You take a forkful because he’ll count it as obedience, and obedience has been buying you minutes all day.

Sugar sits wrong in your stomach and then right, your hands stop threatening to float away. 

He waits until the fork lands on the plate again before he leans back a fraction, not actually giving you space, just shifting the angle so he can see your mouth in profile when he asks the next thing.

“What do you think you’re doing for me,” he asks. “Say it so I can hear if you know.”

You breathe once, in and out.

“I’m your clock and scribe,” you say. “I make the yard look neat. I give you an alibi when you need a kitchen and a signature. I keep people off your time. I keep my questions to myself.”

“And?”

“I don’t write crimes,” you add, because your brain has already drawn the line even if your mouth hates saying it. “Unless they belong to someone else and you tell me to.”

He smiles, small, pleased, the way a man does when a tool fits his hand with no adjustment. 

“There’s the head I hired.”

“I thought you just— helped,” you say, and you hear in your own mouth how childish the word is.

“I do,” he says, amused at the shape of that lie, “when it suits me.”

He drops his hand from your shoulder and the sudden absence of weight makes your body do a stupid little sway.

He uses the gap to stand without sliding out.

He leaves too much cash under the mug, the kind of tip that is a leash and a warning and a hello.

Talia’s “Thank you, baby,” isn’t for you. He nods like he accepts tribute.

Outside, the night hangs heavy and thin at once.

He holds the door for you in a way that would look like courtesy from a distance, and when you pass he says,

“You’re not going to leave,” like he’s correcting a typo, not deciding your month. “You’ll be at the cage at seven-thirty. I’ll text five minutes before we need to talk.”

You think about buses, about the way the SIM tray flashed in his palm, about the draft you typed at dawn and the way his thumb erased it. You think about your mother calling him an angel over stew and meaning it. You think about your brother’s quiet and your father’s folded bills and how everyone in that diner put their eyes away when he walked past.

“I’m not leaving right now—” you start again, because the panic loops, because the brain does echolalia when it doesn’t have better tools.

“I’m not asking. I’m telling.” he says, slipping the car key into the lock with one hand and resting the other on the roof to lean toward you, red eyes steady, mouth pleased and mean.

He watches your throat work once, twice.

The engine turns over low and smooth. He waits a beat longer than is polite, to feel the tremor he built carry through into the seat when you sit.

“what are you doing?”

he freezes and slowly turns his head to the side until he’s met the sight of you wide awake, waiting at the top of the stairs, just standing there like a sleep paralysis demon. there are many questions that go through his mind, like, “how is she awake right now?” and “how did i not fucking hear her?” all of which die on his tongue because he is admittedly afraid at the moment.

“bring that pot back inside, now,” you demand.

“i’ll get you a new one,” he says in a pathetic attempt to bargain with you.

“I don’t want a new one.”

and with that, he doesn’t try to argue any further and walks back in defeat.

you yank the pot of his grip once he reaches the top of the steps. for a moment, he braces himself, thinking you’re about to add another dent to it. luckily, you just scold him. “i can’t believe the lengths you’d go through to get rid of something that i love.”

he scoffs, you say that as if he were trying to sabotage you or something. “i was getting rid of something that was barely functional.”

you let out a little laugh. “right, right. barely functional yet i’ve been able to do more than just cook with it.” you nudge him forward with the pot. “now get back in bed.”

The official post has already passed numbers he used to consider impossible. People are posting screenshots from streaming services, photographs of vinyl held in careful hands, the first lines of lyrics translated into languages he cannot read. A fan account has uploaded a video of someone crying in their parked car during “Dangerous.” Another person is arguing that the sequence from “Past Self” into “Caramel” confirms a piece of lore that does not exist. Somewhere in Europe, despite the hour, a group is listening together and recording their first reactions.

It should feel like arrival. Like a breath of fresh air and success.

For several minutes, it does.

Satoru scrolls with his cheek pressed against the pillow, smiling despite the ache behind his eyes. He reads praise for your writing, for Suguru’s guitar, for the low, controlled weight of Toji’s bass. He watches a clip of Sukuna’s isolated drum track circulate before the album has been public for half an hour and thinks the bastard will pretend not to care while saving every competent analysis he finds. Espera’s parts are already being mapped by listeners who recognize Yuki’s fuller center, Shoko’s lower steadiness and Utahime’s clearer upper line.

His name does not appear because his name is not supposed to appear.

Vessel does.

Vessel’s voice. Vessel’s range. Vessel’s phrasing on the last refrain of “Caramel.” Vessel’s breath breaking at the end of a word that was not intended to break during the final take but had sounded true enough that you insisted on keeping it.

He loves all of it.

He loves the attention and the anonymity, loves being discussed as something larger than himself.

Under the mask, no one asks whether he will attend the family’s New Year gathering or whether he has reviewed the preliminary materials for the meetings his father wants him to observe next quarter. No one tells Vessel that his life is impressive but unsustainable. No one asks what he plans to leave his children or how long he thinks a voice can remain useful.

Vessel is allowed to sing.

Satoru is expected to come home.

His phone vibrates, and his smile disappears before he looks at the name.

It is not his mother.

His older sister has sent a photograph of the album page open on her laptop.

I pre-ordered it too, but I wanted to listen now. Good luck tonight. I’m watching every clip I can find. Don’t tell them I said this, but you sound incredible.

He reads it twice.

Then a third time, slower.

His sister does not often defy the family directly. She works within it, occupies her place with an ease he once mistook for devotion and now recognizes as discipline. She attends the meetings he avoids, learns the names of investors, remembers which relatives require formal greetings and which will forgive a careless joke. When they were children, she used to correct his posture before dinners because their mother’s corrections hurt worse. Later, she taught him how to tie a proper knot and then helped him loosen it in the car once they were out of sight.

She went to one of his shows without telling anyone. She stood in the crowd and cried during the third song. She still has not told him which one.

Satoru types three replies and deletes each of them.

He settles on:

Knew you had taste. Love you.

The response comes quickly.

Love you too. Eat something before the show.

His eyes sting.

He places the phone against his chest and stares at the ceiling, letting the warmth of the message remain for as long as it can.

Another vibration breaks it.

This one is his mother.

The preview on the lock screen is enough.

Your father has confirmed the New Year arrangements. We expect you to attend the full evening. Please do not make travel plans that conflict. You should also review—

He turns the phone facedown.

His pulse has already changed. He feels it in his throat before he feels it anywhere else, a quick, unpleasant knocking beneath the skin. The hotel room becomes too quiet. The silent people on television continue opening their mouths in laughter he cannot hear.

Satoru sits up. His fingers have gone cold.

He knows where the small packet is. He hates how immediately he knows. It rests behind the loose inner lining of his toiletries bag, enclosed in another pouch so nothing shifts or spills while they travel. He placed it there himself after telling himself he would not bring any on tour. Then he told himself bringing it was not the same as using it. After that, he told himself using it once before the first show was better than falling apart in front of everyone.

There is always another sentence available when he needs one.

He goes into the bathroom and locks the door although he is alone.

The light above the mirror is harsh. It shows the faint gray beneath his eyes, the irritated skin around one nostril, the tension in his jaw. He looks thinner than he did at the beginning of autumn. Under stage paint, lights and fabric, it reads as deliberate severity. Here, in a hotel bathroom with a robe hanging unused behind the door, it looks less elegant.

He tells himself that it is the schedule.

He tells himself everyone has lost weight.

He tells himself the tour begins tonight and he needs to be alert.

The relief is not happiness. It is a temporary narrowing of the world. His mother’s message remains real, but it is farther away. The dining room, his father’s silence, the meetings and the name waiting for him like a uniform all recede enough that he can breathe without feeling every possible future press against his chest.

He washes his face carefully. He checks the counter twice. He changes shirts because the first one suddenly feels dirty, though it is not.

When he returns to the bed, his phone has accumulated more messages.

The group chat is loud. Nobara has posted sales figures followed by a row of threatening emojis aimed at anyone who mentions work before breakfast. Yuki wants champagne. Shoko says champagne before a show is idiotic. Utahime agrees with Shoko, then adds that half a glass would not kill anyone. Yuji has sent a photograph of Megumi holding the vinyl with the same solemn expression he would use for legal evidence. You have sent only five words.

We made it. Eat breakfast.

Satoru lets out a quiet, genuine laugh.

He types:

Everyone obsessed with feeding me. Fame is cruel.

Your reply is immediate.

Breakfast. Now. Photo evidence.

He considers lying. Instead, he orders enough food to photograph and knows he will manage some of it because disappointing you over something so small feels worse than eating while his stomach is tight.

He does not tell you why he is awake.

He does not tell Suguru either.

Suguru has sent nothing to the group chat. A private message waits beneath the others.

You sleeping?

Satoru stares at it until the letters seem too dark.

Suguru has known him too long. He notices changes in breathing, timing, humor, the exact pressure Satoru uses when closing a door. During rehearsals, he notices when Satoru’s confidence is performance rather than mood. He noticed the relapse before anyone else and confronted him on the rooftop, back when the tour was still six days away and there was time to stop.

Satoru had hurt him for trying.

The memory arrives with humiliating clarity — Suguru’s face going still; the slight recoil when Satoru accused him of using other people because he did not have the courage to admit what he truly wanted; the quiet way Suguru said he came upstairs because he was worried.

Satoru knows Suguru means well.

He knows Suguru’s concern is not control, no matter how quickly panic translates it into that. He knows Suguru has already seen him unconscious twice and that some part of him remains trapped beside that old bathroom floor, listening for a breath that might not come. He knows Suguru cannot survive another scene like that unchanged.

Satoru does not think he can either.

He certainly does not want you to endure it again.

You have carried enough people through enough emergencies. You have built this record while managing your own fear, your mother’s betrayal, your stepfather’s attempts to drag your identity into daylight, Sukuna’s injured hand and insane ex, Satoru’s family pressure, Suguru’s silences and every logistical problem Mei Mei refused to solve without dragging you into the solution. You made room for him inside the thing you created. You gave him lyrics that allowed him to say what he could not explain in ordinary conversation.

He wants to make you proud.

He wants the tour to be remembered as the moment Even in Arcadia became real.

So he types back to Suguru:

Barely. Album adrenaline. You?

Three dots appear. Vanish. Return.

Come eat with us downstairs.

Satoru looks toward the room-service menu lying open on the desk.

Already ordered. See you at call.

Suguru reacts with a thumbs-up.

Nothing else.

That restraint feels worse than an argument.

Tokyo begins in concrete corridors, temporary signs and the constant movement of crew members who know where they are going.

Satoru arrives exactly on time so no one can accuse him of being frantic. His clothes are loose, his sunglasses unnecessary inside, his energy pitched high enough to read as excitement. He greets everyone. He lets Nobara complain about the way he carried his stage garment. He holds still while she checks the fastening at his shoulder and swats his hand when he tries to assist.

You cross the room with three schedules tucked against your chest. Sukuna follows behind you carrying two equipment cases despite the fact that at least four people are paid to do that now. Toji is already near the stage access, speaking with a technician. Suguru stands apart with his guitar, testing something quietly through headphones.

Satoru has become good at moving before anyone can study him for long.

He gives you a quick embrace, makes a joke about your laminate and reaches for one of the schedules. You pull it out of range.

“You aren’t touching these,” you tell him. “Last time you drew a face over every meal break.”

“The faces improved readability.”

“They were obscene.”

“They were… anatomically ambitious.”

Your mouth curves despite your attempt to remain stern. He feels a small, sharp burst of affection. It is followed immediately by fear — you are looking at him. Not simply seeing him, but looking.

He releases you before your hands can rest long enough to notice his pulse.

“Soundcheck?” he asks.

“Five minutes. You ate?”

“Everything ordered by the hotel kitchen. I may never recover.”

It is not entirely a lie. He ate half the rice, some egg and a piece of fruit. He photographed all of it before touching anything.

You search his face, and Satoru widens his smile just enough.

Then Sukuna arrives at your shoulder and shifts your attention by taking the schedules from you without permission. You object. He ignores you. Their familiar argument begins, warm beneath the irritation, and Satoru uses the opening to cross the room.

He feels watched anyway.

Not by you specifically. By everyone.

The sensation has grown over the last week. It remains when he locks a bathroom door. It follows him into elevators and empty hotel rooms. Sometimes he turns abruptly, convinced someone has entered, and finds only a jacket over a chair. In transit, he catches reflections moving in dark windows and takes several seconds to understand they are his own.

He knows paranoia is not evidence.

Knowing does not make it stop.

At soundcheck, he hears a brief distortion through his monitor and becomes convinced the audio engineer is recording private channel chatter. When the issue clears after a cable change, embarrassment floods him so quickly that he talks through it, making jokes until no one can ask why he went rigid.

Toji watches from stage right.

Satoru looks away.

He has learned that Toji sees more when people attempt to charm him. Sukuna is similar, though Sukuna reacts more openly when something irritates his instincts. Avoiding them has become part of Satoru’s private schedule. He speaks when required, keeps moving, never remains alone with either one in a small room.

He avoids you for a different reason.

With you, the danger is not being caught. It is confessing.

You ask questions as if answers are ordinary things people can give. You touch his wrist or the back of his neck and wait. You do not accept brightness as proof of health, but you respect a refusal enough that he could use it against you. He knows exactly how to make you step back — mention your workload, insist he is protecting your focus, remind you that the tour matters.

He hates himself for knowing.

When the house lights go down, none of it matters.

The stage opens inside him before he reaches the first mark.

Vessel does not enter gently. He arrives with a controlled violence that clears Satoru’s head more effectively than anything else. The mask presses against his face. The in-ears seal the audience into a single enormous sound. The first lighting cue catches on the edge of his costume and turns his body into a silhouette that belongs to the work rather than his family.

Sukuna counts them in.

The first strike hits Satoru through the floor.

He sings.

Tokyo takes everything he offers and asks for more. The album is less than a day old, yet people already recognize openings, already shout the title of “Dangerous” before he announces it. Some know pieces of the choruses from previews and recordings. Others listen with the alert stillness of people trying to memorize something during its first breath.

Satoru gives them all of himself.

He moves until sweat gathers under the mask and runs down his neck. He finds Suguru during the second song, catches the front of his costume and pulls him toward center stage. Suguru goes with him, because Suguru always goes with him onstage even when he has spent the last week keeping an emotional distance everywhere else.

Their shoulders collide. Suguru’s guitar continues without a break.

For a fraction of a second, their eyes meet.

Satoru sees the rooftop in Suguru’s expression. He sees concern held behind discipline, hurt still present but filed away for the show. He turns it into performance, leaning closer, letting the crowd interpret intimacy where there is actually an apology he cannot say through the music.

Suguru’s mouth tightens.

Then he answers with a sharper phrase on the guitar, crowding Satoru back in return. The audience erupts.

Toji buys into it from stage right. He steps closer when Satoru gestures, allows himself to be pulled into the shape they are making and remains steady when Satoru throws his weight against him. Toji’s bass is relentless, each note planted with enough certainty that Satoru can be as unstable as Vessel requires without losing the song.

Behind them, Sukuna is merciless.

He makes every transition sound inevitable. He plays the new material as if it has lived in his body for years, controls the older songs without flattening them and watches everyone from behind the kit. Occasionally the camera finds him and he gives it something small — a slow turn of the head, a brief wave with the stick, a hint of softness that would look absurd on him anywhere else.

The crowd loves it because II is allowed to be playful. II can be a contradiction. II does not have to explain why.

Satoru understands the appeal.

Vessel can fall to his knees beneath the lights and make suffering beautiful.

Satoru cannot sit at his parents’ table without being told to straighten his back.

The first Tokyo show ends with the room chanting for a song they have heard only once.

Backstage, everyone is exhilarated.

Satoru lets that energy carry him through the first ten minutes. He hugs Espera, praises Utahime for the harmony she thought had gone wrong, lets Yuki wipe a streak of paint off his jaw with her thumb. Shoko pushes water at him and watches until he drinks. Nobara is already talking about a loose seam and a camera angle.

You reach him last because you have been checking on everyone else.

Your face is bright with exhaustion and pride.

“You were incredible,” you tell him.

The words enter him without resistance. For a moment, he is only happy.

Then you touch his chest lightly, just below his collarbone, and frown.

“Your heart is going too fast.”

He laughs before the fear can show.

“I was just onstage.”

“I know what post-show adrenaline feels like.”

There it is. Not accusation. Observation.

Satoru takes your hand and kisses the back of it with exaggerated ceremony, making you roll your eyes.

“Sleep, I have survived your first inspection. Allow me the dignity of collapsing privately.”

“You aren’t collapsing anywhere.”

“See? No dignity.”

Sukuna turns from the kit case at the sound of the word collapsing. His gaze lands first on Satoru, then on your hand still held between Satoru’s fingers.

Satoru releases it immediately, turning the movement into a flourish.

“I’m showering before Nobara removes my skin with a cleaning wipe.”

Nobara, from across the room, calls, “I heard that.”

He escapes under cover of laughter.

In the bathroom, his hands shake so badly that the packet slips from his grip.

He catches it before it hits the floor.

For several seconds he crouches there, staring at his own fingers and listening to the muffled celebration beyond the door. You are out there, probably arguing with Sukuna over the condition of his hand. Suguru will be coiling cables he does not need to coil. Toji will stand near the exit, making sure no one unfamiliar crosses too far into the room.

They are close enough to help.

He uses anyway.

The second Tokyo show is tighter.

The audience is different even though the city is the same. Satoru can feel it before the first song — more people who have spent the last several days studying the album, more coordinated chants, handmade symbols held high. Someone near the front has painted a line from “Past Self” across both forearms.

Satoru reads it during a quiet section and nearly loses his place.

He recovers so smoothly that only Suguru notices.

Suguru’s head turns sharply. His hands continue the part, but his eyes remain on Satoru for several measures. Satoru does not look back.

Before the show, his sister sends another message.

I watched the first clips. You looked happy. I hope you were.

He begins typing:

I am when I’m up there.

He does not send it.

His mother writes beneath it ten minutes later.

The New Year dinner begins at six. Your brother will be presenting his academic plans, and your sister will give an update on her department. It would be appropriate for you to share concrete plans beyond the tour. Your father also expects you at the March governance meetings.

Satoru reads the message in the wardrobe area while Nobara is arguing with a supplier on the phone.

Concrete plans beyond the tour.

He imagines standing at the end of the dining table and telling them the truth — he plans to write another album. He plans to tour until his body forces him to stop. He plans to keep the mask. He plans to sing words you give him and spend his life among people his family would consider undignified, unstable or useful only as employees.

He imagines his father asking how that becomes legacy.

His thumb presses hard against the side of the phone.

The craving comes with such speed that he briefly feels betrayed by his own body. It is not a thought. It is a physical demand — numb this, sharpen that, move the pain somewhere else.

He uses in a locked supply room, convinced every footstep outside belongs to someone searching for him.

When he emerges, a young crew member startles at the sight of him and apologizes although she has done nothing. Satoru apologizes back so effusively that she laughs, relieved.

For the rest of the evening, he cannot stop thinking she knows.

Onstage, that fear becomes energy.

He is almost too fast during the first number. Sukuna reins him in from behind the kit, changing the force of a cue so Satoru feels the correction in his spine. Toji positions himself closer during a section where Satoru tends to move backward without looking. Suguru keeps appearing at his shoulder.

They cover him without making it visible.

The knowledge fills Satoru with love and resentment in equal measure.

He does not want to need covering.

He does not want them to stop.

After the show, Suguru corners him near the freight elevator, not physically but with timing. There is nowhere to turn without making the avoidance obvious.

“You rushed the first verse,” Suguru says.

“The crowd was fast.”

“The crowd wasn’t wearing your in-ears.”

Satoru smiles.

“You’ve become very authoritative since changing guitar strings.”

Suguru does not return it.

The elevator doors open behind them. Crew members wheel cases through, forcing them closer to the wall. Suguru lowers his voice.

“Did you sleep?”

“Some.”

“Did you use before the set?”

The directness wipes the smile from Satoru’s face.

For a moment, the corridor is too bright. Every scrape of a wheel sounds deliberate. He becomes intensely aware of the camera mounted near the ceiling, though it points toward the loading area rather than them.

“You said you weren’t doing this here,” Satoru mutters.

“I said I wouldn’t humiliate you in front of everyone.”

“That’s generous.”

“Satoru.”

He hates the way Suguru says his name when he is scared.

Not angry. Not pleading. Those would be better.

Satoru looks toward the elevator and sees Toji on the other side of the moving equipment, attention apparently fixed on a strap. He cannot tell whether Toji hears them.

Paranoia insists that he does.

“I’m managing,” Satoru says.

“You look worse.”

“I just finished two Tokyo shows, don’t know if you heard.”

“You looked worse before either one.”

The words strike harder because they are delivered quietly.

Satoru steps closer, smile gone, eyes cold.

“What do you want me to say? That I’m tired? Fine. I’m tired. The album launched, the tour started, my family is preparing a performance review disguised as a holiday. I’m still singing. I’m still hitting every note you need. What part of that requires a hallway intervention?”

Suguru’s eyes narrow, not in anger but concentration.

“I don’t care if you hit the notes.”

“That’s convenient from the guitarist.”

“You know what I mean.”

Satoru does.

That makes him crueler.

“Then stop watching me like I’m about to fucking die.”

Suguru’s expression changes.

Only slightly. A small withdrawal around the mouth, the memory of exactly that possibility.

Satoru regrets it immediately. He can’t take it back.

Before he can repair the damage, Toji appears beside them.

“Van,” he says.

Nothing else.

His gaze rests on Satoru for one measured second. It is unreadable, which is worse than suspicion.

Suguru steps away.

The conversation ends without resolution. It follows Satoru all the way to Osaka.

The train is easier than the airport would have been.

Mei Mei arranged a private section, controlled boarding and enough staff that the equipment travels separately. Everyone should be able to rest. Satoru sits by the window with a cap low over his eyes and watches the landscape change.

You occupy the seat across the aisle, laptop open, headphones around your neck. Sukuna sleeps beside you with his arms folded, taking up too much space and somehow keeping you contained within it. Every so often, you stop typing and look at him, checking his hand or his face without touching either.

Further down, Toji reads something on his phone with the brightness turned almost all the way down. Satoru briefly sees a message from someone named Reika before Toji angles the screen away. The small shift in Toji’s expression is so unexpected that Satoru almost laughs.

Suguru sits beside Satoru.

Neither of them planned it. The seats were assigned by Mei Mei, who may have planned it for them.

For the first hour, they do not discuss the hallway.

Suguru listens through the show recordings, making notes. Satoru pretends to sleep. His body is exhausted, but his mind refuses to slow. Each time his breathing begins to deepen, he has the sensation that someone is standing over him. He opens his eyes and finds only the blurred reflection of the carriage.

Eventually Suguru removes one earbud.

“You’re grinding your teeth.”

Satoru keeps his eyes closed.

“Stop monitoring my mouth.”

“I can hear it through the music.”

“Turn the music up.”

Suguru studies him. Satoru feels it without looking.

The train shifts gently beneath them.

“I’m sorry about the rooftop,” Satoru says.

The apology escapes before he decides to offer it.

Suguru does not answer at once.

Satoru opens his eyes.

Outside, buildings move past and disappear.

“I shouldn’t have said those things,” he continues. “Not like that.”

“Were they untrue?”

The question makes him turn.

Suguru’s face remains calm, but his fingers have tightened around the phone.

“That isn’t what I’m apologizing for.”

“Then what are you apologizing for?”

“For using whatever I know hurts you because you were close enough to hit.”

Suguru looks down at the dark screen in his hand.

“That’s… more honest,” he says.

Satoru waits.

He wants absolution. He wants Suguru to tell him it is fine, to restore the old ease between them without requiring anything further. Suguru does not give it.

Instead he says,

“I know you’re suffering. I’m not asking you to pretend otherwise. But I can’t be the place you put everything you refuse to feel.”

The sentence is careful. It has clearly been prepared.

Satoru feels shame move through him in a slow, nauseating wave.

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” His voice catches with irritation at his own weakness. “I know.”

Suguru finally looks at him.

There is still love there. Satoru does not know which kind, or he knows and cannot bear to define it. The pool at Halloween returns in fragments — Suguru wet-haired and drunk, saying he feared losing Satoru if the truth ever became known. Satoru had looked at him and felt the world shift, then left the moment unresolved because there was always another crisis available.

Perhaps he knows.

Perhaps he only knows enough to be dangerous.

Suguru places the earbud back in.

“We get through the tour,” he says. “Then you stop hiding.”

Satoru turns to the window.

He does not promise.

Osaka’s venue presses the audience close enough that Satoru can distinguish individual expressions beneath the lights.

It should be claustrophobic. Instead, it comforts him.

The people in front of him want Vessel, and Vessel is easy to give. He can look directly into a stranger’s face and receive uncomplicated devotion.

They do not know him well enough to withhold affection strategically. They do not believe praise will make him lazy or softness will weaken his discipline. They want the performance and offer love in exchange.

Satoru knows the arrangement is not entirely healthy. It is still warmer than home.

He uses before soundcheck, then again before doors because the first amount seems to have worn off too quickly. His mouth goes dry. He drinks water until his stomach feels loose and unpleasant. Shoko asks why he keeps swallowing, and he tells her the hotel air irritated his throat.

She accepts it because she is preparing with Espera and does not have time to examine him closely.

Onstage, he becomes reckless.

The low ceiling reflects heat back onto them. Satoru climbs the barrier during “The Summoning,” holds himself above reaching hands and feels security tense below. He knows you are in the wing watching. He knows Mei Mei will scold him. He knows Toji has moved closer in case he falls.

He leans farther anyway.

The crowd’s noise enters him until there is no space left for his mother’s messages.

Suguru follows, playing near enough that Satoru can feel the guitar’s body brush his side. Toji anchors the other direction. Sukuna controls the tempo with brutal clarity, refusing to chase Satoru when he rushes the phrasing.

It is the only kind of refusal that feels safe.

During “Caramel,” Satoru nearly laughs at the cruelty of performing it while chemically holding himself together.

The lyrics began in a hotel room after the first live preview of “Dangerous.” They came from the family’s careful sweetness, from the way approval sticks to obligation until he cannot separate reward from restraint. Now thousands of people sing pieces of it back, unaware that the song is not a metaphor to him.

It is a record of appetite trained into shame.

At the bridge, Suguru steps into the light opposite him.

Satoru sings toward him.

The line concerns wanting love from the place that taught him hunger. Suguru’s face remains hidden behind the mask, but his posture changes. He knows exactly who the words address.

For the rest of the song, Suguru does not come closer.

After the show, Satoru locks himself in a restroom and cannot remember whether he has already used since coming offstage.

He takes out the packet, then stops.

His heart is racing too hard. Not the satisfying post-show force, but an uneven, aggressive rhythm that makes his fingers numb. Sweat cools along his back. He sits on the closed toilet lid and tries to count.

Four in. Six out.

A breathing method you taught him during a panic attack months ago.

It does not work. He becomes convinced the pause between two beats is too long. He presses two fingers against his neck, loses the count, starts again.

Someone tries the handle.

Satoru freezes.

“Satoru?” Shoko’s voice.

He cannot answer immediately.

The silence becomes suspicious.

“Occup—” His voice cracks. He clears it. “Occupied. Unless this is an emergency consultation.”

“You’ve been in there fifteen minutes.”

He looks at the packet in his hand.

“Wardrobe problem.”

“In a bathroom?”

“Privacy is essential to fashion.”

Shoko says nothing for a moment.

He imagines her looking toward the others. He imagines her summoning Sukuna. He imagines the door opening and every lie collapsing at once.

Then she says,

“You have five minutes before the van.”

Her footsteps recede.

Satoru remains seated until his legs stop tingling.

He puts the packet away without using.

That restraint should reassure him.

Instead, he spends the drive convinced Shoko knows.

Nagoya is quieter between songs.

The attention feels more concentrated, and concentration is difficult to survive when Satoru is already convinced every face contains judgment.

He studies the audience from behind the curtain before the show. People hold notebooks, carefully painted masks and sigils copied with almost academic precision. One person near the front is speaking to a friend while pointing at details in the stage design. Satoru cannot hear them, but for several seconds he believes they are discussing his identity.

He knows it is irrational.

He also knows people have been trying to identify them for months. Paparazzi followed Sukuna because of his tattoos. Uraume was targeted. Your family’s local column almost connected you publicly to the band. Irrational fear and legitimate risk have begun sharing the same room in his mind, and he can no longer tell which one entered first.

He uses less before the Nagoya show because the Osaka episode frightened him.

The smaller amount leaves him anxious rather than focused.

During “Are You Really Okay?” the audience becomes so quiet that he hears the subtle movement of clothing in the first rows. His own voice returns through the monitors with unbearable clarity. The lyrics ask questions he refuses to answer.

He sits on the monitor as planned, head lowered, one hand around the mic.

For several lines, Satoru feels himself approaching honesty.

Not performance or the controlled exposure Vessel offers. Actual admission.

His throat tightens.

He looks toward stage left and finds Suguru watching him. Not performing toward him. Simply watching.

Satoru nearly stops singing.

Then Espera enters behind him. Yuki’s voice supports the center, Shoko steadies the lower harmony, Utahime lifts above them. The sound surrounds him without swallowing him. He closes his eyes and lets it carry the section forward.

The crowd sings the final refrain.

Satoru listens to thousands of people ask if he is really okay and thinks how easy it would be to answer into the microphone.

No.

The word remains behind his teeth.

Backstage, Utahime hugs him without warning.

He goes rigid before returning it.

“That one was beautiful,” she says. “You sounded…”

She searches for the word.

Satoru supplies one with a smile.

“Expensive?”

“Exhausted.”

The answer unsettles him.

Utahime’s hand remains on his arm.

“In a good performance way,” she adds, though her face says she is not certain.

“I contain multitudes and several poor decisions.”

She rolls her eyes, but the concern stays.

He moves away before she can ask anything else.

His sister has sent a voice message.

Satoru waits until he is alone in the hotel stairwell to play it.

Her voice is quiet, likely recorded from inside a car.

“I listened to the entire album. I know you’ll make fun of me for saying this, but I’m proud of you. Not because it’s successful! It is, obviously. I’m proud because it sounds like you, Toru. More than the others did. I know Mother and Father don’t understand that distinction, but I do.”

There is a pause.

“You don’t have to answer now. I only wanted you to hear someone say it.”

The message ends.

Satoru sits on the stair and presses the phone against his forehead.

He wants to call her. He wants to ask why her love cannot teach their parents how. He wants to ask whether she ever feels starved at the same table or whether she learned to survive on smaller portions. He wants to tell her he is using again and hears himself becoming less predictable by the day.

Instead, he saves the voice message to a separate folder.

His mother’s messages arrive twenty minutes later.

Your father has asked whether you have reviewed the documents.

Please acknowledge receipt.

You cannot avoid your responsibilities indefinitely.

Satoru goes back to his room and uses until the sting in his nose is easier to focus on than the pressure in his chest.

Then he takes out a guitar and plays until the pads of his fingers become sore.

The pain is simple. He trusts it.

Fukuoka gives them a smaller room and almost no distance from the crowd.

Satoru is grateful. Proximity leaves less space for thoughts.

He has slept perhaps three hours. His body feels light in the wrong way, as though the floor is a suggestion rather than support. He eats because Toji sits across from him at breakfast and does not leave until Satoru finishes enough to be plausible.

They barely speak.

Toji drinks coffee and reads messages. Satoru catches Reika’s name again, followed by a photograph Toji angles away too late. It appears to be a plant, which is unexpectedly ordinary.

“You’re smiling,” Satoru says, desperate to direct attention elsewhere.

Toji’s face returns to neutral.

“No.”

“I saw it. Should I call a medic?”

“Eat quietly.”

“This new relationship has made you cruel, To~ji.”

Toji’s eyes rise.

Satoru realizes the word relationship was a guess.

Toji neither confirms nor denies it. He only taps the edge of Satoru’s plate once.

“Three more bites.”

The instruction is so familiar — Sukuna’s influence, or yours — that affection and anger strike Satoru together. He obeys because refusing would invite more observation.

At rehearsal, Sukuna adjusts a transition and asks Satoru to repeat a section twice. On the third run, Satoru snaps that the issue is the drum cue rather than his entrance.

The room stills.

Sukuna lowers the sticks.

His face beneath the partial paint is not angry, — that would be easier — it’s interested.

“You missed it,” he says.

“I followed what you played.”

“No. You followed what you expected.”

Satoru’s skin prickles.

“You want to debate perception or run the section?”

Sukuna rises from the stool.

The movement is unhurried. Toji stops touching the bass strings. Suguru looks between them. You are near the console, one hand resting on the lyric sheets.

Satoru understands that he has fucked up.

He smiles, attempting to soften it.

“Run it again. I’m charming when corrected.”

Sukuna does not sit immediately.

His gaze passes over Satoru’s face, pupils, hands. Satoru feels every sign the man might collect. He forces himself not to shift.

Then you speak from the console.

“From the bridge. We’re losing time.”

Sukuna looks toward you. The interruption is practical enough to accept. He returns to the kit.

Satoru avoids you for the rest of soundcheck.

Onstage, the confrontation feeds him.

He flirts with danger more openly, using the narrow stage to crowd Suguru and Toji, dropping his body into positions he knows they will accommodate. Toji catches his shoulder once when he turns too quickly. Suguru pushes him upright during a transition without breaking rhythm.

Sukuna plays harder than the room requires.

It feels like a warning delivered through structure — stay inside the count.

Satoru does.

The Fukuoka audience is hot, loud and close enough that he sees a young man crying during “Rain.” The sight catches him unexpectedly. The man is singing every word while tears run freely down his face, no attempt to hide them.

Satoru envies him.

After the song, he kneels at the edge of the stage and reaches down. Their fingers do not quite touch because security keeps the distance, but the man looks at him as if they have exchanged something real.

Perhaps they have.

For the rest of the show, Satoru sings to that one face whenever the room becomes too large.

Back at the hotel, he finds a message from his younger sister, Rina.

Mother says you’re coming for New Year. Will you sit near me? Souma keeps saying he doesn’t care but he does. Also I showed my friend your album and she likes Dangerous best.

He answers her immediately.

I’ll sit near you. Tell Sou-kun his taste remains woeful.

A heart appears.

Satoru stares at it and thinks about how carefully he tried to give his younger siblings what he did not receive.

When Rina performed badly at a school recital and came home shaking, Satoru told her he loved how brave she had been. When Souma failed an exam, Satoru took him out for ramen before their father could turn the mistake into character evidence. He praised them loudly, excessively, whenever he could. He told himself attention could be smuggled into the house in small amounts.

There is more than one way to starve a child.

The Gojos are skilled at doing it without leaving evidence.

No missed meals. No dirty uniforms. No forgotten tuition. Their children receive everything material before they know how to ask. They learn languages, instruments and etiquette. Their schedules are full. Their futures are discussed as certainty.

Love, however, is distributed as reward.

Praise comes after perfection and is immediately followed by correction. Affection is offered in public because it reflects well. Attention is given when a child’s accomplishments become useful to the family narrative.

Satoru grew tall on it anyway.

He learned to perform hunger as charm.

He learned to make people laugh before they noticed he was asking to be held.

He gives himself another line and lies on the hotel carpet, staring at the underside of the bed frame while his heart races.

He thinks about his siblings.

He thinks about the promise to sit beside Rina at New Year.

He wonders whether he will survive the tour without someone finding out.

For the first time, the thought is not dramatic.

It is just… practical.

That frightens him enough that he gets up, showers and throws away what remains in the packet.

Twenty minutes later, he retrieves it from the bin.

Sapporo is white beyond the hotel windows.

Snow dulls the city’s edges and makes the interior heat feel oppressive. Everyone moves slower on arrival, burdened with layers and travel fatigue. Satoru likes the cold outside because it sharpens his face and gives him a reason for the tremor in his hands.

He walks alone before call time, hood up, mask covering the lower half of his face. Security follows at a distance. He pretends not to know.

The streets are clean and quiet. Snow gathers in places untouched by shoes. For ten minutes, he imagines disappearing into the city under another name. He could enter a small restaurant, work somewhere no one expects charm, rent a room with no family portraits and sing only when he wants.

The fantasy fails because he cannot imagine life without the others.

You appear in every version, sitting at a table covered in paper. Suguru leans against a doorway with a guitar. Toji complains about an appliance. Sukuna occupies the kitchen as if he was born annoyed beside a stove. Espera arrive loudly. Nobara criticizes the curtains. Yuji brings Megumi. Uraume chooses the tea.

Even his escape becomes a house full of them. Full of you.

Satoru returns to the hotel.

Suguru is waiting in the lobby.

Not in a way it looks obvious. He sits with a cup in front of him and his phone in hand, but his eyes lift the instant Satoru enters.

“You went outside.”

“Excellent observation.”

“You didn’t answer the phone.”

“My phone was on silent.”

Suguru looks toward the security person entering behind him and understands Satoru was not truly alone.

That should reassure him.

“You look frozen, you need more layers here.”

“I’m cultivating mystery, otherwise it melts away.”

“Satoru.”

The name again.

He stops.

People move through the lobby around them. No one looks closely — everyone assumes they are part of some touring staff in winter clothes.

Suguru stands and offers him the warm cup.

Satoru takes it. Tea, lightly sweetened. Prepared the way he likes when his throat is tired.

Guilt almost makes him confess.

Then his phone vibrates.

His mother.

The preview mentions the meetings again, she doesn’t rest, reminding him every show day as if to make sure he’ll have a terrible time.

Satoru’s hand tightens around the cup.

Suguru sees.

“Don’t read it,” he says.

The instruction produces immediate misdirected anger.

“It’s my phone.”

“I know.”

“My family.”

“I know.”

“Then stop acting like I need your permission.”

Suguru’s expression closes, but he does not retreat.

“I said don’t read it now. Not never.”

“You don’t decide when I deal with them.”

“No. Apparently they do.”

The remark lands cleanly.

Satoru’s anger becomes shame, then returns sharper.

“You’ve been waiting to say that?”

“I’ve been waiting for you to notice.”

For a moment they stand too close in the hotel lobby, the tea between them, everything unresolved from the rooftop and train pressing beneath the conversation.

Satoru lowers his voice.

“I can’t cut them off.”

Suguru’s face softens.

“I’m not asking you to do it today.”

“I can’t do it at all.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

He hears the desperation in his own answer.

Suguru hears it too.

Satoru looks away. Through the big glass doors, snow continues to fall.

“I want them to be proud of me,” he says. The admission is humiliating in its simplicity. “That’s all.”

Suguru does not tell him they should be. He does not offer the easy comfort that everyone else’s pride ought to be enough.

Instead he asks,

“What would make them proud?”

Satoru laughs softly.

“That’s the trick.”

Because there is no answer. Not one that leaves Satoru intact.

Suguru reaches for his arm, then pauses before contact. Satoru notices the hesitation. Once, Suguru would have touched him without considering whether it was welcome.

Satoru caused that.

He closes the distance himself, catching Suguru’s wrist and placing the hand against his sleeve.

Suguru’s fingers tighten.

Neither of them names the gesture.

That evening, Satoru uses before the show but less than usual.

Onstage, Sapporo feels almost merciful. The audience knows the album now. “Past Self” rises from them with confidence. “Caramel” produces a response so loud that Satoru briefly loses the monitor mix beneath it.

He looks at Suguru during the final chorus.

Suguru looks back.

For one song, they are not fighting.

Afterward, while everyone changes and the corridor fills with post-show noise, Satoru hears Suguru laugh at something Toji says. The sound loosens a pressure inside him.

He does not use again that night.

He also does not sleep.

Sendai catches him at the wrong point in the cycle.

His body is tired. His tolerance has changed. The amount that once made him feel clear now makes him restless, and using less leaves him irritable and afraid. He begins calculating doses and timing in the same mental space where he should keep lyrics and stage cues.

He hates that the drug has become another member of the touring party.

Always packed. Always considered. Always demanding accommodation.

The venue staff are kind, which makes his paranoia grow worse. A production assistant remembers his preferred water temperature from the advance notes and brings it without asking. Satoru becomes convinced someone has been discussing him in detail.

He asks Mei Mei who had access to the preference sheet.

She looks up from her phone.

“The venue hospitality lead. Why?”

“No reason.”

“You asked for a reason.”

“I was impressed.”

Mei Mei studies him over the top of the screen.

Satoru smiles.

Her eyes remain cool.

“Get dressed,” she says finally. “Doors in forty.”

He leaves too quickly.

During the first song, he forgets a lyric.

Only one word. The audience supplies it, and he turns the omission into participation by holding out the microphone. No one outside the band knows.

Sukuna knows.

Suguru knows.

Toji knows.

You know.

Satoru feels all realizations separately.

Sukuna changes nothing. That is his mercy. He keeps the song stable and does not look toward Satoru until the transition.

Suguru moves closer, singing the next phrase near enough to cue him if necessary.

From the wing, you lower the tablet in your hand.

Satoru wants to stop the show and explain.

He also wants to run.

Instead, he performs harder.

By the end of the set, he is soaked, hoarse and operating on a kind of frantic instinct.

The audience gives him everything.

He gives more than he has.

Backstage, he cannot tolerate touch.

Yuki reaches for him and he recoils before catching himself. Her face changes. He covers it by claiming the costume fastening pinched his shoulder.

Shoko asks to look.

“No need.”

“If it broke skin—”

“It didn’t.”

His tone is too sharp.

Utahime glances over.

Satoru forces a laugh and reaches for a towel.

“Sorry. Everything’s loud.”

That explanation works because everything is loud after a show.

You approach from the hall, worry already visible.

He cannot face it.

“Five minutes,” he says before you ask. “I need quiet.”

You stop immediately.

The respect in that hurts worse than pursuit.

“Okay,” you answer. “I’ll be outside.”

Satoru locks himself in the dressing room.

He stands with his back against the door and listens to your footsteps move only a short distance away.

You remain nearby.

He can tell from the absence.

The packet is in his pocket. His fingers close around it. He wants relief so badly that his mouth fills with saliva.

Then he imagines opening the door afterward and seeing your face.

He takes his hand out of the pocket.

For five minutes he does nothing but stand there, shaking.

When he finally emerges, you are seated on an equipment case, reviewing a document as if that is the reason you stayed.

You look up.

He speaks first.

“I’m tired.”

It is the smallest truth available.

You set the document aside.

“Then we go back. No group dinner. No review tonight.”

“I should listen to the playback.”

“Sukuna and Toji can do first pass.”

“They’ll hate that.”

“They volunteered.”

He knows that means they noticed.

Fear moves through him.

You stand, keeping a careful distance.

“Satoru.”

He cannot bear the softness.

“I’m fine.”

Your expression does not harden. It becomes sadder.

“I didn’t ask.”

He looks away.

On the drive back, he sits alone in the last row and feels every glance that may or may not be directed toward him.

At the hotel, he uses before even taking off his shoes.

Yokohama is where the high begins to turn hostile.

The venue is large, open and already vibrating during soundcheck. Satoru should love it. Instead he keeps looking toward the rafters, convinced there is movement above the lighting grid.

A technician tells him no one is there.

Satoru had not realized he asked aloud.

He jokes about ghosts.

The technician laughs uncertainly.

His phone has become intolerable. He keeps it on silent but checks it anyway, compelled by the fear that something terrible will happen if he does not. His sister sends encouragement. Rina asks whether she can have a tour shirt. Souma sends a brief message pretending not to care:

Album’s good. Track 5 is best.

His mother sends three reminders.

His father sends nothing.

That silence has always possessed more power than anyone else’s words.

As a child, Satoru could tolerate correction better than withdrawal. If his father criticized him, at least he was looking. When the man became quiet, Satoru would perform harder, speak more cleverly, achieve something new. He learned early that attention could be recovered through excellence.

The lesson never left.

Now his father’s silence turns every sold-out room into an audition.

Satoru wants to be a Gojo. Not in the way they mean it. He does not want the business, the seat, the meetings, the documents or the carefully managed influence. He does not want to become Head of the family and spend the rest of his life preserving a structure that treats children as succession plans.

He wants the name without the sentence attached to it.

He wants to return home after a tour and have his father ask what city he liked best. He wants his mother to complain about travel food and then listen to his answer with interest. He wants his siblings to talk over each other. He wants laughter at the table that is not aimed at someone’s mistake.

He wants the kind of dinner he has with you.

Everyone bringing too much food. Sukuna insulting the preparation while serving second portions. Toji paying despite objections. Suguru noticing who needs water. Espera turning one story into six. Nobara correcting details. Yuji laughing before anyone reaches the end. Megumi pretending he does not enjoy it. Uraume setting tea in front of people without asking and then listening to Choso talk about his new music sheet for the side project he has with Suguru.

Satoru wants that warmth from his blood family.

The desire makes him feel ungrateful.

He loves the people he has chosen more fiercely than he knows how to express. They have given him what his family refuses. Why is it not enough? Why does one message from his mother still rearrange his pulse? Why does his father’s silence outweigh an arena shouting Vessel’s name?

Blood clings to him with a persistence he cannot reason away.

He is always injuring himself for approval he has never received.

Before Yokohama, he uses too much.

He knows it almost immediately.

His heart pounds before he has finished preparing. His thoughts separate and multiply. The room seems unusually sharp — every fiber in the carpet, every hum from the lights, every distant voice. He becomes convinced someone will smell it on him, though he knows the fear is irrational.

You can’t smell coke on someone.

Right?

He washes his hands three times.

When he reaches the stage, the opening noise nearly knocks him backward.

For the first half, the excess reads as brilliance.

Satoru is everywhere. He throws himself into the performance, crosses the stage faster than the camera operators anticipate, falls to his knees and rises without using his hands. He crowds Suguru, spins away, lets Toji catch him around the upper body during a transition. The audience responds to every reckless choice.

Vessel looks possessed.

Satoru feels hunted.

At one point, he sees his father in the crowd.

Impossible.

The man would never stand in general admission, never wear black among masked fans, never look up at him with that unreadable face.

Still, Satoru sees him.

The shape disappears when the lights change.

He misses half a breath.

Suguru is there immediately, guitar angled, body blocking the sightline. Toji moves closer from the other side. Their formation looks theatrical to the audience.

It is containment.

During “Take Me Back to Eden,” Satoru looks toward the wing and sees you with both hands clasped around the tablet.

Your posture is wrong.

Too still.

You know something.

Panic rises.

He turns away and nearly collides with a monitor.

Sukuna slams a cue behind him, hard enough to pull his attention back into the count. Satoru follows it.

One measure, then another. The song finishes.

The moment they clear the stage, Sukuna catches the back of his costume.

Not violently, merely firm enough that Satoru cannot continue walking.

“Sit.”

The single word makes his stomach drop.

“I need to change.”

“Sit first.”

People move around them. Nobara is occupied with a garment emergency. Espera are heading toward their room. You are still speaking to Mei Mei near the wing. Toji and Suguru remain close.

Satoru laughs.

“Are we holding court?”

Sukuna’s eyes narrow.

“Your pupils are fucked.”

The corridor goes silent inside Satoru’s head.

Suguru closes his eyes briefly.

Toji looks toward the nearest crew member and says,

“Clear the hall.”

The instruction is obeyed without question.

Satoru feels cornered.

Every instinct he has developed over the tour activates at once.

Deny. Joke. Attack. Leave.

He chooses charm.

“Lighting. You know how dramatic they make me.”

Sukuna’s grip tightens.

“Don’t.”

That tone has stopped fights, panic attacks and people attempting to lie to him. Satoru hates that it works.

Suguru steps closer.

“Satoru,” he says.

Satoru turns on him because Suguru is the safest target.

“You told him?”

Suguru’s face shows hurt, then anger.

“I didn’t need to.”

“So you’ve all been comparing notes?”

Toji answers before Suguru can.

“You’re not subtle.”

Humiliation burns through Satoru.

He looks toward the end of the corridor.

You are coming.

“No,” he says.

Sukuna understands at once.

“She already knows something’s wrong.”

“No.” The word comes louder. “Don’t bring her into this here.”

You stop several steps away.

Your face loses color as you take in the scene — Sukuna holding him, Suguru rigid, Toji positioned near the exit.

Satoru sees the exact moment you understand enough.

He cannot survive your disappointment.

So he tears his costume free from Sukuna’s hand and says, too quickly,

“I need a shower. We have an encore review in twenty. I’m not doing this in a corridor.”

Sukuna could stop him.

Toji could.

Neither moves, perhaps because you are there and the show has ended and Satoru has not yet collapsed.

He walks away with your gaze scorching him between his shoulder blades.

In the dressing room, he locks the door and slides down against it.

No one knocks for several minutes.

When the knock comes, it is Suguru.

Satoru knows by the rhythm.

He presses both hands over his face.

“Go away.”

Suguru does not.

“I’m sitting outside.”

“That’s pathetic.”

“Probably.”

“I don’t need a guard.”

“No. You need a friend, and you’ve made that difficult, so this is what you get.”

Satoru’s throat closes.

He rests his head back against the door.

They remain separated by a few centimeters of wood for almost half an hour.

Neither speaks again.

The distance between Yokohama and Hiroshima is filled with consequences that no one names directly.

Mei Mei changes the travel arrangement. Satoru is no longer alone in a room. She presents it as a booking issue so the wider crew will not know. Suguru’s suitcase appears beside the second bed without discussion.

Satoru wants to object but does not have the energy.

Sukuna takes possession of his toiletries bag during transfer.

That causes the real fight.

They are in a secured airport lounge, away from the public but not entirely private. Sukuna lifts the bag from Satoru’s carry-on and hands it to Toji.

Satoru stands so quickly the chair shifts.

“Give me that.”

“No.”

“You can’t take my things!”

“I just did.”

His skin becomes hot.

“You’re not my damn keeper.”

Sukuna’s expression remains flat.

“Good. I’d return you.”

You are across the lounge with Nobara, pretending to review the Hiroshima entrance details while listening to every word.

Satoru sees your fingers tighten around the paper.

He lowers his voice.

“This is so fucking humiliating.”

Toji answers,

“Then stop making us choose between your pride and your pulse.”

Satoru looks toward Suguru.

Suguru does not rescue him. He looks exhausted, eyes shadowed, jaw tense.

That absence of defense feels like abandonment even though Satoru knows it is not.

“I can manage the last show.”

Suguru’s answer is quiet.

“You… haven’t been managing.”

Something breaks loose in Satoru’s chest.

“You think I don’t know that?”

The lounge stills.

You look up now.

He cannot stop.

“You think I’m enjoying this? You think I like checking my heartbeat on hotel floors or wondering whether every person who looks at me knows? I am trying to finish the tour. I’m trying to get her to Hiroshima without making this another disaster she has to survive.”

Your face changes at the mention.

Satoru regrets it.

You rise slowly.

“This isn’t something you do for me,” you say. “Don’t turn it into that.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“You don’t get to hurt yourself and call it protection.”

The sentence is not loud. It still silences him.

You approach until you stand directly in front of him.

He expects anger. He wants anger. Anger is easier to deal with, claner.

Instead, you look devastated.

Oh, this is hell.

“I’m proud of you,” you say. “I was already proud. You didn’t need to sing yourself sick to earn it from me.”

Satoru looks down because he cannot hold your gaze.

His hands are shaking in full view now.

You take one of them.

He almost pulls away. He does not.

“I need to finish,” he whispers.

“We’re finishing,” you answer. “Together. But you’re not disappearing into a bathroom before Hiroshima.”

He laughs weakly.

“That’s a very specific rule.”

“It has become necessary.”

Sukuna takes the seat across from him. Toji remains standing. Suguru lowers himself beside Satoru but leaves space.

No one makes a speech.

The bag stays with Toji.

Satoru spends the flight to Hiroshima sweating, irritated, frightened and unable to sleep. His body aches in ways he had been postponing. He alternates between wanting to crawl out of his skin and wanting everyone to leave him alone.

Suguru stays beside him.

At one point, when Satoru’s leg will not stop moving, Suguru places a hand over his knee. Not pressing. Not restraining.

The contact steadies the motion.

Satoru looks at him.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Suguru’s eyes remain forward.

“I know.”

It is not forgiveness yet.

It is enough to survive the flight.

Hiroshima is the final show and your first appearance as Sleep in the new attire.

That fact becomes the only useful center Satoru has left.

He turns his attention toward you because looking at himself is unbearable. He checks your entrance timing, asks whether you can see through the mask, makes Nobara adjust one fastening twice. He talks too much, but everyone allows it because the energy now has a direction.

He has not used since Yokohama — couldn’t.

His body resents him.

His nose aches. His muscles feel heavy. His thoughts are dull in some moments and painfully sharp in others. He cannot regulate temperature. Food has taste again, which is almost offensive now considering it all. His anxiety sits fully exposed without the false clarity he relied on.

Sukuna keeps water near him.

Toji remains within sight.

Suguru says little but does not leave.

You are frightened.

Satoru recognizes it in the precise way you handle your gloves, smoothing the fabric repeatedly. Your mask rests on the table. The robe Nobara made catches the dressing-room light, metallic thread woven through the darker material.

For the first time in weeks, someone else’s fear feels larger than his own.

He sits beside you.

“You know they already love you,” he says.

You make a face without looking up.

“That makes it scarier.”

“Correct. Admiration is disgusting,” he nods.

“You’re very helpful,” you pout at him.

“I’ve been told.”

Your hands stop moving.

“Satoru.”

He braces.

You turn toward him. There is no accusation in your face, only fatigue and care.

“Stay near me tonight.”

The request enters him cleanly.

He nods.

“I will.”

“You don’t have to perform being okay.”

“That’s unfortunate. It’s my strongest skill.”

You do not laugh.

Satoru lets the joke fall.

Then, because the room is private and the others are occupied, he leans his forehead against your shoulder. You hold still for a second before bringing one hand to the back of his head.

The touch is gentle, it has always been.

He thinks of his mother arranging his hair before formal photographs, correcting rather than comforting. He thinks of his father’s hand on his shoulder after achievements, pressure delivered for the camera. He thinks of you holding him now with no audience, no condition and no demand that he improve first.

His eyes burn.

“I’m so sorry,” he mutters against the fabric of your robe.

“I know.”

“I wanted it to be perfect.”

“It never needed to be.”

“For you.”

“For all of us,” you correct. “Including you.”

He breathes.

Across the room, Suguru looks away to give you both privacy.

Satoru notices.

He always notices Suguru.

The house opens.

Hiroshima’s noise rises through the venue, enormous and expectant. Satoru stands behind the curtain in full Vessel form, mask in place, his body exhausted and strangely clear.

There is no chemical barrier between him and the stage tonight.

The fear is immediate. So is the joy.

When Sukuna counts them in, Satoru feels every strike. Toji’s bass enters through his feet. Suguru’s guitar cuts across the room. Espera’s voices lift behind him.

He sings the first line and almost breaks from the sensation.

Everything is present. His dry throat, sore muscles, the pressure of the mask, the heat building beneath the costume, the audience’s response. Nothing is softened. Nothing is narrowed.

He had forgotten music could hurt this honestly.

He had also forgotten how alive that pain makes him feel.

Satoru moves more carefully than in Yokohama. The frantic unpredictability is gone, replaced by intention. He remains energetic because Vessel is energy, but each gesture has shape now. He finds Toji at stage right and lets the man support a lean without throwing his full weight unexpectedly. He approaches Sukuna’s riser during an instrumental section and receives a tiny wave from one drumstick, playful for the cameras and reassuring for Satoru.

Suguru stays close.

During “Past Self,” they meet near center stage. The song carries too much history tonight. Satoru looks at him through the mask and remembers the rooftop, every cruel word, the hand resting on his knee during the flight.

He cannot apologize in front of thousands of people.

He can make space.

Satoru steps aside during Suguru’s part, turns toward him fully and lets the guitar take focus. The cameras follow. Suguru realizes what he is doing.

For one measure, he hesitates.

Then he plays into it.

The sound is fierce, controlled and aching. Satoru watches without intruding. When the phrase ends, Suguru approaches of his own choice and presses their shoulders together.

The crowd interprets it as theater.

Satoru receives it as grace.

“Caramel” comes later.

He fears the song without cocaine in his system. He worries the lyrics will strip too much away. The opening begins, slower live than on the album, and the stage lights narrow.

Count me out like sovereigns, payback for the good times Right foot in the roses, left foot on a landmine I'm not gonna be there tripping on the grapevine They can sing the words while I cry into the bassline Wear me out like Prada, devil in my detail I swear it's getting harder even just to exhale Backed up into corners, bitter in the lens I'm sick of tryna hide it every time thеy take mine

Satoru sings about sweetness used as restraint, about feeling dehumanized, about being paid with scrutiny upon giving himself fully. He sings about emotionally unraveling beneath it all. Hh sings about the loneliness of performing pain for others’ consumption, and how easily people can miss the weight behind all of it. It’s a haunting image of being heard but not truly seen.

So stick to me Stick to mе like caramel Walk beside me till you feel nothing as well

He sings about gratitude demanded as payment. He sings about wanting people to stick to him and don’t simply leave after enjoying his performance. He sings about loneliness.

They ask me Is it going good in the garden? Say: I'm lost, but I beg no pardon Up on the dice, but low on the cards I try not to talk about how it's harder now Can I get a mirror side-stage? Looking sideways at my own visage, getting worse Every time they try to shout my real name just to get a rise from me Acting like I'm never stressed out by the hearsay

He sings about a mouth trained to smile while it cannot open. He sings about being fortunate enough to find himself in this position of great fame. He sings about how it brought his personal life terrible consequences and how fate is constantly playing him with good rolls and bad hands.

I guess that's what I get for tryna hide in the limelight Guess that's what I get for having 20/20 hindsight Everybody wants eyes on 'em I just wanna hear you sing that top line

His mother’s messages exist in the pocket of a phone locked backstage. His father remains silent. The family name is still his. None of that changes. No one shows sympathy for him choosing the stage.

And if you don't think I mean it, then I understand But I'm still glad you came, so let me see those hands

But the audience sings with him.

So stick to me Stick to me like caramel Walk beside me Till you feel nothing as well

Not at him.

I'm falling free Of the final parallel The sweetest dreams are bitter, but there's no one left to tell

With him.

And Suguru is there, perfect in his cue, screaming with full chest along with him.

(In these days of days) Tell me, did I give you what you came for? (I wish it all away) Terrified to answer my own front door (I thought things had changed) Missing my wings in a realm of angels (But everything's the same)

Suguru’s guitar answers each line. Toji keeps the low end steady. Sukuna’s rhythm refuses to let the song collapse into self-pity. Espera enter at the point where one voice should no longer have to carry it alone.

So I'll keep dancing along to the rhythm This stage is a prison, a beautiful nightmare A war of attrition, I'll take what I'm given The deepest incisions, I thought I got better But maybe I didn't

Satoru finishes the final refrain without closing his eyes.

They sting.

His throat aches, closing.

He gets breathless as the outro rolls, and he falls on his knees, bursting out crying as quietly as he can possibly manage, but it bleeds out even with the music still rolling.

For once, he lets everyone see Vessel endure rather than transcend.

The response is overwhelming.

He feels loved. He feels like he’s dying.

Backstage between sections, Shoko checks him quickly because he’s no longer crying and he has no time to lose — no one has, so he allows it.

Water. Pulse. Breathing.

“High,” she says.

“Stage.”

“Regular high.”

The distinction nearly makes him smile.

Then the lights go down for your entrance.

Satoru moves to his mark in darkness. His heart is still too fast, but not dangerously so. He hears your recorded voice spread through the arena, altered into the language of Sleep. The audience quiets, then recognizes what is happening.

You step onto the stage.

Satoru watches from the dark.

He knows how frightened you are. He knows every count you rehearsed, every point where you asked whether the robe moved correctly, every possibility you planned because planning is how you keep fear from ruling you.

The first light finds the totem.

The second finds you.

The crowd’s reaction rises with such force that Satoru’s eyes fill immediately.

There you are.

Not the exhausted woman at a kitchen table, not the girl taught to apologize for existing, not the person whose own family tried to call her work demonic because they could not control it.

Sleep walks.

Satoru lifts the microphone.

“And now,” he says, his voice rough but steady, “for all of us — Sleep walks.”

The arena erupts.

The band enters “Even in Arcadia,” and for several minutes Satoru forgets everything else.

He sings at your side. Suguru circles into position. Toji holds your other flank. Sukuna drives the song from the riser with a force that feels protective without becoming restrictive. Espera stand behind, voices widening the space around you.

Satoru watches you become the thing you invented.

He is proud enough that it hurts.

This is what he wanted the tour to be.

Perfect, but it was not.

Clean, but he couldn’t keep himself like that.

Memorable.

A room full of people witnessing someone he loves claim the shape of her own work.

During the bridge, you look back at Sukuna. Satoru sees the exchange between you even through masks and distance. Trust, pride, the private language of two people who have learned each other carefully.

He thinks of Suguru.

The thought does not frighten him as much as it did before.

It will later.

Tonight, he lets it exist.

The song ends. Darkness closes around you. Backstage, Satoru reaches you first and wraps both arms around the heavy robe, laughing because crying would be too honest in front of everyone.

“You killed them,” he says. “You absolutely killed them.”

You are shaking.

“So did you,” you answer.

The words stop his laugh.

You are not referring to the audience.

For one second, the backstage noise recedes.

Then Suguru reaches them, one arm around both, and the moment widens enough that Satoru can breathe again.

There is still an encore.

There is still work.

He returns to the stage without using.

They finish the tour together.

The last song is “Infinite Baths.”

Satoru stands at the front of the stage with his voice scraped raw, every muscle protesting and his mind clearer than it has been in weeks. The crowd carries sections when he cannot. He lets them. He no longer treats assistance as failure.

At the final bow, he calls each member forward.

II. III. IV. Espera. Token.

Then Sleep.

You take his hand and step into the light.

The arena chants.

Satoru bows with everyone beside him and thinks of the Gojo dining room.

He thinks of the polished table, careful voices and approval rationed into crumbs.

He thinks of what waits at New Year.

The meetings. The expectations. The family seat.

The name is still branded into him. He cannot discard it tonight. Perhaps he never will. Love, even badly given, has shaped him too thoroughly.

There is no curse more twisted than love because love does not have to be kind to remain powerful.

His blood family still owns a piece of his hunger.

But they do not own the stage.

They do not own his voice.

They do not own the hands holding his now.

Suguru stands on one side, fingers closed firmly around Satoru’s. You stand on the other. Toji’s shoulder presses near. Sukuna remains close enough that Satoru can feel the heat of him through the costumes. Espera bow beside them. The crew gathers behind.

For several seconds, Satoru is held inside a family that does not require him to become smaller before it loves him.

It does not cure the hunger.

It gives him something to eat.

When they finally leave the stage, his legs nearly fail on the stairs. Toji catches one arm. Suguru gets the other.

Satoru laughs weakly.

“Very dignified.”

“Keep moving,” Toji says.

Suguru does not speak. His grip remains steady.

In the corridor, you wait with your mask lifted, face wet and exhausted. Sukuna stands behind you, one hand at your waist.

Everyone is talking. Nobara is crying and pretending she is furious. Yuki wants drinks. Shoko says no one gets alcohol until they hydrate. Utahime has lost her voice enough to make every complaint sound threatening.

Satoru stands among them and feels the craving return.

Not as violently as before. Still present. A suggestion from the part of him that wants every difficult feeling removed before it can speak.

He closes his eyes.

Suguru’s hand remains around his arm.

Satoru says, very quietly,

“Don’t let me be alone tonight.”

Suguru goes still.

Then his hold changes, less like support and more like a promise.

“I won’t.”

Satoru opens his eyes.

Across the corridor, Sukuna hears. Toji does too. You look at him, relief and fear mingling in your face.

No one congratulates him for asking.

That helps.

They simply rearrange the night around the truth.

The tour ends before Christmas Eve. The album is alive. Sleep has walked. Satoru has sung every city into memory and nearly disappeared while doing it.

Tokyo. Osaka. Nagoya. Fukuoka. Sapporo. Sendai. Yokohama. Hiroshima.

He carries each one in his body — hotel ceilings, locked doors, bright stages, Suguru’s watchful eyes, your pride, Toji’s quiet corrections, Sukuna’s unyielding count. He carries his sister’s voice message and his mother’s reminders. He carries his father’s silence.

He does not know what happens next.

New Year waits.

His family waits like a gaping maw with sharp teeth.

So does recovery, though he does not yet know whether he is brave enough to call it that.

For tonight, he lets Suguru walk him down the corridor. He lets Toji take his bag. He lets Sukuna choose the car. He lets you sit beside him and hold his cold hand between both of yours.

Hiroshima glows through the tinted windows. Christmas lights hang along streets Satoru is too tired to study. His reflection appears faintly in the glass, stripped of the mask, stage paint still clinging near his hairline.

He looks ruined.

He looks alive, barely.

You squeeze his hand.

Satoru turns away from the window and looks at the people filling the car.

The love he wanted from home is not here in the form he imagined as a child. Nothing can make his father become warm or his mother stop attaching conditions to concern. He cannot return to the beginning and feed the boy he used to be.

He can stop starving the man he is now.

Not alone.

Not tonight.

The thought frightens him.

But he keeps holding on.

“Breathe, girl.” she says without looking at you, one hand flicking through yet another email about yet another sold-out city. “This is the easy part.”

Easy.

Right.

Around you the room is a slow storm. Nobara kneels among open cases and garment bags, ticking off items on a clipboard. Yuki and Shoko go over Espera harmonies under their breath, leaning into the same phone to listen back to a memo. Utahime sits on the couch checking her set of in-ears, shoulders relaxed in that fake way she does when she’s nervous. The Sign Language Interpreter, Toge, is fixing his costume with earbuds playing tonight’s playlist and sometimes you grab a glimpse of him training for the nth time the lyrics he already knows by heart. Hell, you have shown him even your sketches, he helped you come up with a few ideas himself — he’s practicing out of nervousness, but he had never even stumbled on live shows.

Accessibility addition was a boom, really good for PR — but better yet for you all as a band. Toge is an angel sent from the heavens, biggest fan turned into a friend turned into the sign technician turned into official interpreter for the band on the shows. He has been named baby Token by the fans in the forums because he’s significantly smaller than the entire band, but you all just agreed to call him Token from now on.

Satoru paces.

You can feel him, his nervous energy, his constant buzzing, before you even see him in the room — the air bending around his restlessness. When he cuts past the doorway you catch the gleam of silver hair under a hood, his hands fluttering as he talks at Suguru in a low rush — something about another way to come out of “Dangerous” and into “Caramel” if the crowd’s energy spikes too high.

Suguru listens like he always does, arms folded, head tipped, the corners of his mouth turned up. He’s fading the edges of his own anxiety with focus, you recognize the way his eyes are too bright, how his leg bounces even while he looks calm.

Toji sits on an amp case, bass across his lap, fingers walking lazy shapes up and down the neck.

He looks like he’s waiting for a train, not for the first night of a tour that will eat most of the next month of your life. Every now and then his gaze flicks up to follow someone moving across the room — Satoru, Suguru, Sukuna pushing past with a drum key between his teeth — and then settles back on the strings.

Sukuna is the only one who manages to look like he’s not impressed and not bothered.

He’s stripped down to black sweatpants and a loose tee, paint only half-mapped on his arms, hair tied back for soundcheck — with your elastic, mind you. He moves with purpose, checking cases, inspecting hardware, re-taping one of his fingers.

His right hand still doesn’t like him.

You cross to him as Nobara zips up another bag. The laminate on your chest knocks lightly against your sternum with every step — CENOTAPH / SLEEP / ALL ACCESS — and that still feels insane, but you’ve learned to pretend you’re used to it.

“How bad is it?” you ask quietly, nodding toward his hand.

He glances down, then up at you.

“It’s fine.”

You raise both brows.

He exhales through his nose.

“Annoying,” he amends. “Not bad.”

“Annoying as in ‘I will drum on it for two hours and pretend it doesn’t hurt’, or annoying as in ‘I will let you tape it and listen to reason’?”

“Do you ever get tired of nagging me?” he asks, but there’s a faint tug at his mouth that you count as a smile.

“Not when your hands are literally my job security,” you say. “Let me tape it before soundcheck. You still need it, even if you think you don’t.”

He huffs, but he holds the hand out.

You wrap the knuckles carefully, tight enough to stabilize, not so tight he loses feel. You’ve done this enough times now that the motion is automatic, the part that isn’t automatic is how close you are, how he smells like your soap and metal, a hint of sandalwood and something warm that’s just him, how he watches your face more than he watches your hands.

You’ve been together for a while now and he still makes you nervous when he stares.

“Don’t baby it,” he mutters. “I still need to hit things.”

“You always need to hit things,” you reply. “That’s the job. I am trying to keep you in one piece until Christmas, not wrap you in bubble wrap.”

He snorts, flexes his fingers, decides he can live with it.

“Good girl,” he says, low enough that only you hear, and presses his lips on the crown of your head in a brief kiss.

Heat crawls up your neck. You grimace at him on principle, he grins on principle.

Mei Mei claps once, sharp, from the table.

“Soundcheck in ten. Paint after. Remember the order — Tokyo twice, Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka, Sapporo, Sendai, Yokohama, Hiroshima. Two shows a week. No one dies, no one collapses, no one tweets. Questions?”

Satoru raises his hand.

“If I technically die on stage but come back for the encore, does that count as collapse or as a bit?”

“Depends if I can still sell tickets off it.” Mei Mei says.

The room laughs. The tension doesn’t leave, but it shifts. It becomes something you can stretch with, like a muscle before a sprint.

You head toward the stage.

Tokyo feels like stepping into your own chest, hard.

You stand in the wing as house lights drop, the murmur of the crowd rising into a roar. From here you see the sea of black shirts and homemade masks, painted sigils on cardboard and skin, banners raised — WE TRUST SLEEP, WE TRUST VESSEL, WE TRUST II // III // IV.

Someone holds up a hand-painted banner that’s almost exactly like the one you made for the center of the stage, black and gold and pale pink mashed with deep pink catching the last of the daylight.

The intro tape for Even in Arcadia rolls out across the room — low choral hum, distant static, the sound of a heartbeat that might also be a kick drum. Your chest vibrates with it.

You’ve been here for weeks in your head — mapping lights, sketching stage plots, counting out when pyro hits, when haze rolls. None of that prepared you for the way the crowd inhales in unison when the first strobe hits the curtain and the band walks out.

Vessel hits the downstage center mark like gravity has been waiting for him.

Vessel, tonight, is all black paint and white teeth, cloak trailing behind him, mask hiding most of his face and still you can feel his grin.

He lifts the mic, tilts his head, and the auditorium detonates.

Behind him, IV slips into position on stage left, guitar slung low. He moves like water, deliberate and smooth, hair tied back in a low tail, mask flash-painted with the IV sigil over it.

III takes stage right, bass hanging heavy, shoulders loose, mask set, his sigil painted bright white over it. He doesn’t need to do much, his presence does most of the talking.

II climbs the riser and sits at the kit. The noise goes up another notch.

He’s stripped to the sleeveless Arcadia vest by now, arms a map of black ink and bandage, mask sharp and simple, the II sigil painted bold on his mask. He twirls a stick once, lazy, lets the camera catch the arc, and then counts them in with his teeth bared.

Dangerous hits like a truck.

From the first downbeat the room is theirs.

Yours.

Vessel’s voice slices clean through the mix, honey and blade, as he prowls the front of the stage. IV finds his shoulder in the pre-chorus, leans into him, their bodies moving in sync like they practiced and like they never practiced at all. III stalks up behind them, pushes the low end so hard you feel it in the soles of your feet. II drives them all with ruthless precision, right hand solid despite the tape, left hand a blur.

You watch the crowd as much as you watch them. How people sing along to a song that has been out for just four days, how their eyes shine when the chorus drops and the lights flare up in time with the drums. How some of them freeze in that stunned way you used to freeze, the moment you realize this is live, this is real, these are actual humans making these sounds right here in front of you.

The set flows the way you planned it on paper and then rebuilt three times in rehearsals.

Arcadia tracks first — “Dangerous”, “Past Self”, “Even in Arcadia” — stitched with the old gods of Eden. “Chokehold” halfway in, to let people breathe and scream at the same time. “The Summoning” at the top of the second half, Vessel laughing into the mic as the riff hits and the entire room loses its mind. “Granite” because you insisted and they pretended to argue.

Espera thread through it all, Yuki and Shoko and Utahime sliding in and out of the mix, their harmonies turning choruses into choirs. They move with the music, never drawing focus away from Vessel but adding shape behind him, like constellations behind a moon.

IV looks better than he did in the last week of pre-production. On stage he’s incandescent, all focus and joy, his hands flying over the fretboard. When Vessel backs into him in one bridge he laughs, audible even from the wing, shoulders shaking as he still nails every note.

III… is III. Solid, immovable, a wall of sound and muscle. But he buys into the theater more now. Lets Vessel shove him, lets IV pull him into three-way collisions at the front of the stage. At one point Vessel hooks an arm around his neck and drags him to the mic, thrusting it at him. III grunts a single low line in the middle of “Vore” and the crowd screams like it’s the second coming.

II, though.

II becomes something else when he plays.

You always know he’s good. You watch him practice, you hear him in headphones, you’ve seen him at his most controlled in rehearsal rooms.

That doesn’t touch what he is live.

From this angle you see the way his whole body locks into the song, shoulders rolling with every crash, jaw set, eyes half-lidded. Camera operators know to find him now, they swing up behind the kit and he gives them just enough — sticks spinning, a small flick of his fingers, a slow exaggerated wink when Satoru turns to him in the middle of “Infinite Baths”.

Every time the crowd screams for II your chest goes tight in the best way.

He doesn’t overplay the soft stuff, but it’s there. Between songs he tosses a bottle of water to the front row, points lazily at someone’s homemade II sign and gives them a tiny salute with one stick. When a girl near the front looks like she’s about to pass out in the crush he slams a cymbal to get crew attention, doesn’t play another note until he sees her hauled over the barrier and handed off to security.

Tokyo gets both extremes — relentless and gentle. It feels like the only way to do it right.

By the time the last notes of “Take Me Back To Eden” ring out and Vessel drags the mic stand to the very edge of the stage, sweat dripping, voice hoarse and perfect, the room is a single organism.

When he thanks them — thanks you, thanks Sleep, thanks II, III, IV, Espera, the unseen deities — your throat burns.

Backstage afterwards is noise. Damp clothes, adrenaline, Nobara yelling at Satoru to stop hugging people before the paint sets, Mei Mei barking into a phone in two languages. Yuki presses a bottle of water into your hands and squeezes your shoulder. Suguru leans against the wall beside you, breathing hard, hair plastered to his neck.

“That was insane,” you exclaim.

“Was it?” he answers, and he’s smiling in that soft, private way he doesn’t give to cameras.

“You know it was,” you say.

Across the room Satoru climbs onto a chair and declares,

“Tokyo, you have been devoured,” in his Vessel voice.

The others groan, someone throws a towel at him. He catches it without looking and bows.

You laugh. You are so proud you could burst.

You are also terrified, because this is only the first city.

Osaka is louder.

Smaller venue, lower ceiling, sweat that clings to your skin even before the first chord. Crowd right up against the stage, no pit. You have a brief argument with security about barriers until Mei Mei appears at your shoulder and the argument ends.

The band adjust.

They always do.

Osaka gets “Gethsemane” and “Provider” early, and when Vessel sees how close people are he spends half of “Damocles” on the barrier, one foot on a monitor, one hand fisted in someone’s outstretched fingers to keep from falling. IV shadows him, bodyguard and instigator in one, playing with his back to the crowd at times just to feel how they push against the stage.

You watch II’s hand more here. Smaller stage means more vibration, more risk. He does not complain once. When you catch his eye during line check he wiggles his taped fingers at you and then flips you off with the same hand, just to prove he can.

Later, in the tiny corridor that counts as backstage, he lets you ice it. You sit on a flight case with a bag of ice pressed gently to the back of his knuckles while he scrolls through the setlist on his phone.

“Osaka likes it dirty,” he mutters. “We can probably move ‘Emergence’ earlier tomorrow.”

“Osaka likes you trying to break yourself,” you say, softly. “And you like giving them what they want.”

He shrugs.

“That’s the job.”

You could argue. You don’t.

You know the look in his eyes when he says it.

You’ve seen it in the mirror.

Nagoya is a different creature.

The crowd here feels more watchful. Still intense, still devoted, but quieter between songs, as if they’re taking notes. You see more people with notebooks, with cameras dangling unused around their necks, with sigils drawn carefully, perfectly.

Here the set leans more into atmosphere. “Look To Windward” stretches long, the middle section breathing and building, IV’s guitar filling every corner of the hall. “Caramel” lands like a confession, Vessel sitting on the monitor with the mic stand pulled close, head bowed.

For a moment there is no noise at all but his voice and the soft hum of the PA.

When he reaches the last chorus and the crowd take over, your eyes sting.

Espera shine here.

Yuki’s voice wraps around Satoru’s in “Past Self” until you can’t tell who’s leading and who’s supporting. Utahime’s harsher tone cuts through the sweetness at the exact right moments. Shoko hits a high harmony in “Provider” that pulls goosebumps up along your arms.

After the show a girl hands you a folded piece of paper at the stage door.

You open it in the van. It’s full of sigil sketches, little notes in the margins:

sleep watches over the ruin we are even in arcadia thank you for making a home for people like me.

Your throat closes and you bite the inside of your cheeks because your eyes sting.

Sukuna sees you fold it carefully and tuck it into your sketchbook. He doesn’t comment.

Later, on the train to Fukuoka, he rests his hand on your knee under the shared blanket and squeezes once.

You love him deeply.

Fukuoka is heat and proximity. Low stage, minimal backstage, a bar that smells like spilled beer and thirty years of cigarette smoke.

Here everything feels stripped down.

They open with “Aqua Regia” in almost complete darkness, only a single spot on Vessel’s face.

You watch from the side as sweat glints on his jaw, the tendons in his neck tight with the effort of holding back. When the band hits, the room explodes.

III is in his element here.

Small stage means he looms over the first rows, boots planted wide, bass a weapon. He moves less, but every step matters more. When Vessel throws himself against him in “Infinite Baths” he barely shifts as he screams along with IV, he just hooks one arm around Vessel’s neck and lets him hang there, singing into his shoulder.

During “Damocles” you see three separate people in the front row crying.

Ugly crying, the kind you can’t fake.

You add that to the ever-growing list in your head of reasons to keep doing this even when everything else feels like a storm.

Sapporo brings snow.

You wake up to soft white on the hotel window, the city muted, sky heavy. The venue here is bigger than Fukuoka, smaller than Tokyo, somewhere in between in ways that feel right for you. The cold makes everyone a little slower, a little more hunched, until you get inside and the lights are up and the soundcheck roar warms your bones.

Backstage between songs, while lighting techs fiddle with cues for “Even in Arcadia”, you catch Satoru leaning into Suguru’s shoulder, talking quietly. You can’t hear the words, but you can see the shape of them in the way Suguru nods, in the way Satoru’s fingers twitch like he wants to grab on and doesn’t.

He’s been better on the road than he was in that last week. Busy, occupied, full of noise that isn’t the kind in his head. You still see the thinness around his eyes sometimes, the way his hands shake when he thinks no one is looking. But up there, on stage, he’s alive in a way nothing else touches.

Sapporo gets a set heavy on the new album.

“Dangerous”, “Past Self”, “Provider”, “Look to Windward”. You stand in the wing and feel people reacting in real time to things that were only lines on a page in your room months ago.

It’s intoxicating and terrifying.

Afterward, when you all fall back into the corridor, breathless and half-frozen from the post-show temperature drop, Suguru claps his hand on Satoru’s back and says,

“See? This is worth it.”

Satoru laughs, genuinely, head tipping back.

“Yeah,” he says, then quieter. “Yeah, it is.”

You tuck that sound away for later, for the nights when the weight comes back.

Sendai blurs around the edges.

By now the routine is inside your bones.

Travel, drop bags, soundcheck, paint, stage, collapse, repeat.

You’re good at this dance. You’re also tired. Everyone is.

The places start to bleed into each other, but the crowds don’t.

Sendai surprises you.

From the first note it’s clear they’ve done homework. They sing along to “Past Self” like it’s been out for years. They know the pauses in “Even in Arcadia”, the inhales in the bridges, the spots where you thought maybe they’d be too new.

Espera lean into the joy of it.

Yuki spins in one break, hair flying, Shoko grins at Utahime mid-line and almost throws herself off time laughing. She doesn’t — you trained them well. III shakes his head at them fondly when he thinks no one is looking.

II throws in small little flourishes tonight he hasn’t done before — extra ghost notes in “Chokehold”, a cheeky kick pattern in “DYWTYLM” that makes Vessel almost miss an entrance because he turns to give him a look.

He loves doing that.

Poking at him.

Poking at all of you.

Between songs, while Vessel talks to the crowd about being grateful, about being nothing without them, about being in service to the Work, you catch II’s gaze through the stage wash.

He tips his chin at you, just once.

It feels like a thread pulling tight between you, even with thousands of people in between.

Yokohama is big.

Not Tokyo-big, but tall and open, rafters disappearing into dark. You’re close to the sea here, you can smell it when you step outside to breathe before doors. The audience feels coastal too — rowdy edges, chants starting before the intro tape even rolls.

Here you test the outer limits of the set.

Mei Mei let you add one more Arcadia track tonight, a deep cut you weren’t sure would make sense live.

It works. God, it works.

The middle stretch of the show feels like one long rising wave, each song clipping into the next.

On stage, Vessel is chaos.

He prowls, shakes, drops to his knees at one point and screams into the mic on the floor.

IV chases him with guitar lines that sound like they’re trying to climb out of his chest. III headbangs for the first time this leg, Nobara loses her mind about it side-stage, hitting you on the arm until you look.

II plays the cameras harder here. There’s a screen rigged behind the stage, huge and hungry, and every time it cuts to him the noise spikes. He knows it. He lets his mouth pull into a slow, sharp smile under the mask when the camera sits on him too long.

He flicks sweat off his hair in one smooth motion that the camera catches in absurd high definition.

You’re going to be clipping that with Toge and Nobara for fan edits later, and you hate how much you look forward to it.

By the time they stagger off stage, Yokohama screaming for one more, you can taste the end of the run in the air.

One city left.

One show.

Hiroshima.

One more thing you have to do that terrifies you more than anything you’ve done so far.

Hiroshima feels like a dream you had a long time ago and forgot on purpose.

The arena isn’t the biggest you’ve played, but it might be the one that makes your hands sweat the most.

It’s the last show of the year, or so you think — Mei Mei will surprise you later.

It’s the last show of this leg. It’s the first time Sleep steps into the light for this album.

You’ve been building to this.

The stage looks different tonight. The Arcadia banner sits dead center, that black lacquer pillar with gold and green sigils you carved and sanded until your fingers ached.

Around it the set is dressed in the new era colors — pale pink, bruised red, gold like a wound.

Lighting has been tweaked to leave one space empty until the right moment.

You dress with shaking hands.

The Sleep outfit feels like wearing someone else’s skin and like coming home.

Nobara helped design it, she and the boys refused to let you undersell yourself.

The robe is heavy, embroidered with sigils in metallic thread that catch every hint of light. The mask is simple and terrifying — blank where the others are sharp, with only the Sleep rune etched into the forehead.

Under it, you are just you, heartbeat loud in your ears.

Sukuna finds you in the small dressing room they gave you as a compromise between privacy and proximity. He leans against the doorframe, already half-painted, mask dangling from his fingers.

“You’re pale,” he says. “Paler.”

“Good,” you deadpan. “Goes with the aesthetic.”

He snorts and steps in, closing the door with his foot. Up close you can see the fine tremor in your own hands reflected in his eyes.

“Last chance to run away,” he murmurs.

Teasing — maybe not quite teasing.

“Where would I go?” you ask. “We’re already in Hiroshima.”

He just looks at you. You hold his gaze, because if you look away you might actually bolt.

“I’m scared.” you admit, because you’ve learned that you’re allowed to do that around him. “But I want to do it.”

He nods once.

“Then do it.”

You swallow.

“What if I fuck up?”

“You will,” he says, deadpan and you blink in a tiny shock. “Eventually. Not tonight. But some night. That’s how it works.”

You make a face at him. He steps closer, crowding you against the makeup table.

“You’ve been building this shit for years,” he says, low, for you alone. “The sigils, the poems, the lore, the fucking totems, banners, puzzles — this is yours. They already believe in you and they’ve only seen you, barely, once. Imagine what happens when they see you like this.”

“That’s the part I’m afraid of.” you say.

He huffs out something that’s almost a laugh. His hand comes up, careful, calloused fingers brushing your cheek, then the edge of the mask where it rests pushed up on your head for now.

“Welcome to being worshipped,” he says. “It’s disgusting. You’ll hate it. You’ll love it. You’ll deal.”

You breathe out, shaky, and nod.

“Stay where I can see you.”

“Always,” he says, like it’s obvious. He drops a kiss on your forehead, right at the hairline, then pulls your mask down over your face. “Let’s go, deity. Time to work.”

“And the Work speaks louder.” you add.

The first half of the show runs like a ritual you’ve rehearsed a hundred times and also like it’s happening for the first time ever.

Hiroshima’s crowd is wild. From the intro tape you feel it — pressure and devotion and something electric that hums up through the stage. You watch from the wing again initially, body already wrapped in Sleep’s robes, mask pushed up so you don’t pass out.

You can’t see their faces in detail from here, but you see the movement. Hands in the air. Sigils glowing in phone lock screens. Someone has a banner that reads WE SLEEP IN ARCADIA.

Satoru is on another level tonight.

Vessel bleeds joy and something manic, spinning and leaping and kicking his legs out at the edge of the stage. He jokes with the crowd using his body language, voice rough from the run but holding, one hand on his chest during “Chokehold” like he’s literally keeping his heart inside.

IV sticks close, matching his energy, sliding behind him when he threatens to topple. In one break they lean forehead to forehead for a heartbeat, laughing at some private joke, the crowd’s scream swallowing the words.

III prowls more than he usually does, moving to every corner of the stage like he’s taking inventory of the entire room. When Vessel launches himself at him during “Even In Arcadia” he just catches him and spins them both in a circle, bass never faltering.

The cameras grab it, you know it’ll be clipped into fan edits by morning.

II is mercurial and godly. Furious precision, every hit like conviction.

His taped hand has held up the whole tour, thanks to your nagging and his stubbornness. Tonight he plays like he has something to prove to himself as much as to anyone else. Between songs he twirls sticks, points one at the farthest nosebleed and gives a tiny, almost mocking wave.

When the camera zooms in he lets his mouth quirk under the mask in that way that makes the crowd shriek.

You can see he’s tracking you even when you’re in the dark. Every now and then his gaze flicks to the wing where you stand. It steadies you more than you’d admit out loud.

Setlist is built to peak right before your moment.

“Dangerous” early, “Look to Windward” mid, “Caramel” with the stage bathed in that strange Arcadia palette. “Take Me Back To Eden” reworked, as promised, into something that bridges the old era to the new.

Then the house goes black.

Your heart tries to leave your body.

You pull the mask down, feeling the world narrow to the small slice of vision it gives you. Nobara squeezes your hand once in the dark and then lets go. Somewhere to your right, you hear Mei Mei’s voice in the in-ears, “Remember, we built the rig for this. No one improvises. Lights on Sleep only when she hits the mark.”

The Arcadia intro tape starts again, but this time it’s different. You added a spoken piece, buried and distorted, a poem that’s been in your bones for months.

Your own voice, modulated, washes over the arena.

if it isn’t sung it isn’t true hush, little ruin— we only wake for you.

The crowd roars.

You step.

The stage feels different from this angle.

Bigger. Brighter, even in the dark.

You move by memory — ten paces from the wing, three from the monitor, two to center.

Your boots find the downstage mark where the tape was placed in the afternoon.

You stop there, hands at your sides, head bowed.

The first light hits the totem.

Soft gold like candle-flame, climbing up the black lacquer, catching the carved sigils in it. The crowd hushes in a wave, like they’re all sharing a breath.

Then a second light, paler, comes up slowly and lands on you.

You feel thousands of eyes land on the silhouette you make — the robe, the mask, the Sleep sigil glowing faintly on your forehead.

For a moment, nothing else exists.

No past, no stepfather, no mother, no professors, no deadlines, no nights with Satoru shaking, no hospital corridors in Glasgow.

Just this — you, and them, and the sound of your own heartbeat in your ears, synced with the sub-bass hum.

Behind you, you hear Vessel’s voice.

“We are here to devour the air together. Let Sleep in.” no one else makes a noise. “Worship.”

The noise is indescribable.

You don’t move for the length of four counts.

Then you lift your hands, palms outward, and the band slam into “Infinite Baths”.

It feels like stepping into a body you’ve been building out of words and lines and late nights.

You don’t sing, that’s not your role tonight.

You exist.

You stand where the banner was and become another pillar, another point of focus.

People reach toward you like you’re a lighthouse in a storm.

The guys play like they’re possessed.

Vessel stands at your shoulder in the first verse, singing to you and through you, eyes bright behind his mask. IV circles you both in the chorus, guitar soaring. III plants himself at your flank like a guard. II’s drums roll underfoot, steady and punishing and sure.

You feel the power shift in the room, the moment the lore stops being just symbol and becomes flesh. You also feel the weight of it settle across your shoulders like a familiar cloak.

Heavy. Warm. Right.

Yours.

For a brief, clear second in the bridge you look back over your shoulder. Through the slit in your mask you see Sukuna watching you, sweat streaming down his temples, chest heaving.

His eyes meet yours, and even from here you can read the message.

See?

You did it.

You stay standing until the last note dies and the lights snap to black again. Only then do you let yourself exhale.

When you make it offstage, hands shaky inside your sleeves, they’re waiting.

Satoru barrels into you first, arms crushing, laughter wet.

“You killed them,” he yells into your hood. “You absolutely killed them.”

Suguru wraps an arm around both of you, head pressed briefly to yours through the mask.

“You were terrifying,” he says fondly.

Toji claps you on the back so hard you almost fall.

“Good entrance,” he grunts. “Very dramatic.”

Yuki and Shoko and Utahime orbit you with bright eyes and questions. Nobara is already crying, mascara halfway down her cheeks, yelling about how pretty you looked.

Sukuna comes last.

He doesn’t say anything at first. He just steps into your space, all big, solid and hot, one hand coming up to hold the side of your mask. He tips it up gently, giving you air, giving himself your face.

Your cheeks are wet. You hadn’t realized.

“Told you.” he says lowly, that small, proud curl at the corner of his mouth.

You laugh, breath hitching, and then you’re all moving again, because there’s still an encore, still a final “Look to Windward” to play, still a stage to walk back onto together.

The tour ends two hours later in a shower of light and chants and exhaustion so deep your bones buzz. You stand at the back of the stage for the last bow, hacked voice chanting the count under your breath as Vessel pulls everyone to the front — II, III, IV, Espera, Token, the crew — and then turns, extending a hand to you.

“Sleep.” he beams into the mic, raw and reverent.

You take his hand.

Step up.

Bow with them.

Somewhere above the ringing in your ears and the pounding in your chest, Christmas lights are already going up in some quiet street you’ll be too tired to walk down for a while.

Somewhere in the near future there will be more rumors, more family dinners, more rehabbed habits, more fights, more nights like this that make all of it feel survivable, you think.

Right now, all you can feel is this — their hands in yours, the stage beneath your boots, Sukuna’s shoulder pressed solidly against yours as the crowd chants your names like a prayer.

Even in Arcadia, there is ruin.

Even in ruin, you have this.

a/n: HEY GUYS LOOK AT THIS!

It's our boys from Cenotaph, reader is taking the pic, that's why you can't see her 🙂‍↕️ this is a gift from my beloved @antisociablewallflower, who is the one behind Love Letter, a re-tell of The Shape of Ruin through the eyes of a Day 1 fan of the band, who also was mentioned on the last chapter and on this one as well~ ♥

This gift has been sitting with me for a long time now, it's my screen protector, I literally look at it everyday and I love it so much, it means so fucking much to me 😭 I didn't post it before because I really wanted to upload with the chapter that Toge is properly named, who would say I'd take so long because of life + because reviewing the tour chapter hurts me and the ending closing in also hurts me 🥺 I'll update the masterlist with the image as a banner, and maybe some day I'll post the unedited version, because I'm protective of it like a fucking gollum, but it's the header of my ko-fi since day 1 so maybe you've seen it 👁️👄👁️

I took a very brief break from my requests to review the chapters already written for TSOR. Yeah, they are written, but not reviewed or edited properly, and I couldn't do it without kinda crying so… uh 🥹 I'll update it slowly, breaking the hiatus of my firstborn longfic, then I go back to the request and after that is cannibalistic festival time in TttM. Cannibal dystopia breaks me less than band fic, that's my life. Thnak you for the patience! ♥

Come now, swing wide those gates 'Cause I have paid my penance kindly, well in time for judgment day Somehow I knew my fate Turns out the gods we thought were dying were just sharpening their blades Have you been waiting long For me? I am the final dawn, I am the flood And what was missing from those scriptures will be written in my blood Dig down into the mud What good is all this talk of wings when there is nothing left above? Have you been waiting long For me? Have you been waiting long? No matter how we feel We've got a taste for one another and a few good years to kill No matter what is real It seems that even in Arcadia you walk beside me still Have you been waiting long For me? Have you been waiting long For me?

The quiet certainty that in their heads he’s playing at clowns in face paint until he grows up and behaves.

He dug out the little baggie he’d told himself he was keeping “just in case.”

Just in case what, exactly?

Now he’s on the rooftop again, five, six, seven nights out of the last ten, pulse wired, jaw tight, the tail-end of a line burning in his sinuses. The city glows around him in a thousand tiny points of light. Tokyo is loud even when it’s quiet, trains humming beneath, cars on the bigger avenues, some late salaryman laughing too loudly down by the corner, the condo is quiet already, it’s late — past sleeping hours.

Up here the air tastes colder. Cleaner. He thought it could help disinfecting his brain and lungs from bad ideas. It doesn’t.

The rush is still sharp and hollow at the same time.

His phone sits beside him on the low wall, screen dark. If he taps it on, he’ll see a list of messages — you, sending him some dumb meme and then a thought about a bridge, Suguru with three variations of “are you alive?” disguised as rehearsal reminders, Mei Mei with schedules and venue confirmations, Higuruma with an answer about paperwork.

He’ll see his mother’s name, too.

The last message from her — We’ll expect you on the 25th, Satoru. It will mean so much to your father. Don’t let us down again.

He hasn’t answered that one.

Right now his hands shake if he looks at them too long, so he doesn’t. He stares straight ahead instead, at the way the horizon is still bleeding out the last of sunset. Orange slipping into muted blue, then dark. The city eating the sky.

It’s November’s end and Arcadia drops in three days.

Local tour starts in less than a week. Their first full Even in Arcadia run. The singles are out, numbers are stupid, fan accounts are rabid with theories, everything he begged for is happening.

And every time he closes his eyes he sees two futures and they both look like failure.

In one, he drops everything, cuts his hair, puts on a suit, goes home. Becomes the good son. Learns how to read contracts his father approves of instead of the ones Mei Mei throws in front of them. Stops singing. Stops breathing. Lives a long, respectable life and dies with his picture in a paper his family reads.

As if.

In the other, he keeps doing this. Keeps walking on stage, keeps screaming his lungs out, keeps letting himself be eaten by the thing they built together. He stays Vessel, beloved and strange and worshipped. He gets more fame, more money, more pressure, more eyes on him, more vultures waiting for a crack. He watches his parents age and keeps seeing that disappointment no matter how many festivals he headlines.

He doesn’t know which one kills him first.

He laughs once, a dry breath that doesn’t feel like anything. The coke smooths the sharp edges just enough that he can sit here and not dig his fingers into his scalp until he bleeds. It’s the only time lately when the noise quiets down enough for him to think without wanting to scream.

He hates that. He craves that. He hates that he craves that.

The door to the rooftop opens with a soft metallic thud.

He doesn’t turn at first. Most nights, this late, it’s just him. If anyone else comes up, it’s usually Yuji with his headphones or Nobara on a call, and they take one look at his face and back away.

Tonight the footsteps are light but careful. Measured.

He knows who it is before Suguru says his name.

“Satoru.”

He closes his eyes briefly. Counts half a beat. Then looks over his shoulder, past the collar of his hoodie, past the edge of his hair.

Suguru stands a few steps back from the doorway, hands in the pockets of his jacket, lustrous, raven hair loose around his shoulders. The wind pulls a few strands across his face and he doesn’t bother to move them. His eyes go from Satoru’s face to the little pile of objects at his side — the phone, the lighter, the gum, nothing else visible — and then back up.

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. The silence is its own kind of question.

“What?” Satoru asks, more bite in it than he intends.

Suguru doesn’t flinch. He rarely does, with him.

“You missed dinner.”

“I wasn’t hungry.” Satoru mentions.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Ask better, then.” he snaps.

Suguru’s mouth does that small, resigned twist that means he’s choosing his words instead of saying the first thing that comes.

“Toji brought food,” he says. “You like that place he orders from.”

“I’ll eat later.”

“You said that yesterday. And the day before.”

Satoru huffs.

“You keeping a chart?”

“If I thought you’d respect a chart, I’d print one,” Suguru says dryly. He takes a few steps closer, not crowding, just cutting the distance down. “You want me to pretend I don’t see it?”

“See what?” Satoru asks.

Suguru’s gaze shifts, once, to the faint white smear near the seam of Satoru’s sleeve where he brushed his nose earlier and didn’t notice. Then back to his eyes.

Satoru feels something cold, slimy kind of feeling slipping under his ribs.

“Fuck off,” he says, turning his head away. “I’m fine.”

“Sure,” Suguru says, tone flat. “That’s why you’re up here alone every night instead of sleeping. Or eating. Or answering messages.”

“You messaged me?”

“Several times,” Suguru notes.

“I’ve been busy.”

“With what?” The question isn’t attacking. It’s soft. Which is somehow worse. “We did our parts for ‘Caramel’ this afternoon. Mei Mei signed off on the label notes. Nobara’s on schedule. There’s nowhere for you to be but here or with us.”

Satoru’s jaw tightens.

“Why are you talking like that’s a crime?”

“Because you’re not just up here enjoying the view,” Suguru says, voice still steady. “You’re using again.”

The words hang between them like a wire.

He could lie.

He’s done it before.

He could laugh and say, don’t be dramatic, he could make a joke, he could deflect, he could turn it into a bit.

He doesn’t.

He doesn’t know if that’s progress or just exhaustion.

Instead he says, all sharp edges,

“So what if I am?”

The frustration that flickers across Suguru’s face isn’t surprise. It’s confirmation of something he already knew. Something he’s been waiting for Satoru to admit out loud.

“I thought we were past this.” Suguru says quietly.

“We were,” Satoru answers, just as soft. Then louder, sharper: “And then life happened again.”

Suguru takes another step closer. The sunset is almost gone now, leaving the city in deepening bruised purpleish blue, the neon rising stronger to take over. His silhouette cuts across that line of color — tall, familiar, a shape Satoru could pick out in any crowd.

His best friend in the entire world.

“Talk to me,” Suguru pleas, softly. “Don’t snap at me from a rooftop and expect me to go away. You know I won’t.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“You’re lying.”

Satoru laughs, harsh.

“You’re very sure of yourself.”

“I know you.”

That hits a nerve in a way it shouldn’t. He feels it like a spark at his teeth.

“Do you?” he says. “Do you really?”

Suguru doesn’t back down.

“Yes.”

Satoru looks back out at the city, because looking at Suguru’s face right now makes something inside him want to crack and pour.

“It’s not that complicated,” he says. “My parents think this is a phase, you know. They’ll tolerate it as long as it makes money and doesn’t embarrass them, and then they expect me to come crawling back and play the good heir. Every time I see them, it’s the same conversation over and over again with different words. Every time we get bigger, it gets worse, because they smile and clap and then ask when I’m done playing dress-up.”

Suguru listens, quiet.

He doesn’t interrupt.

He never does when Satoru actually starts talking.

“And?” he prompts, when the silence stretches.

“And what?” Satoru snaps. “Isn’t that enough?”

“It’s not new,” Suguru says. “It’s been like that since we started.”

“Yeah, well, it’s heavier now,” Satoru says, anger firing in his chest. “Back then it was a hypothetical. Now we’re about to do another tour, another album, another year of… this.” He gestures vaguely, encompassing the band, the rehearsals, the fans, the whole circus. “And they’re still looking at me like I’m temporary. Like I’ll grow out of it.”

“You won’t,” Suguru says, simple and sure.

“They don’t know that.”

“They don’t want to know that.”

“Exactly,” Satoru says, laugh bursting out, sharp and joyless. “And I can’t— I can’t cut them off.” his voice errs breaking but he gets his shit together and continues. “I can’t just decide I don’t have parents anymore. What kind of person does that?”

“Someone who needs to protect themselves.” Suguru says.

“It’s not that simple.”

“I know it isn’t,” Suguru says. “But hurting yourself isn’t simple either, and you’re doing that instead.”

Satoru bristles.

“I’m not—”

“You’re using.” Suguru says, finally letting some steel into his voice. “Again. After you promised yourself you wouldn’t. After you promised us you wouldn’t. After we almost lost you twice.” then, quieter, a whisper. “I almost lost you twice.”

The word sits heavy between them.

Us.

Satoru’s chest twists.

“I didn’t promise—”

“You didn’t use the word,” Suguru says, cutting him off. “But we both know what we meant when we flushed it last time. You looked me in the eye and said you wanted to stay. To be present. To remember the shows. That you’d rather shake on stage from adrenaline than from withdrawal. That you wanted us to be able to trust you not to crash in a bathroom before a set.”

Satoru feels his teeth grinding, his skin buzzing too tight. The coke makes his thoughts move fast, but they’re all circling the same drain.

“And what if I changed my mind,” he says, words coming out colder than he intended. “What if I want to forget again?”

Suguru’s jaw clenches and he looks, for once, a mix of surprised and hurt.

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not? It’s true.”

“Because it sounds like you’d rather disappear.” Suguru says.

Satoru bares his teeth, tired of being seen.

“Well, fuck, maybe I would!”

Silence. Heavy. The wind cuts across the rooftop, pulling at their clothes.

Suguru moves closer still, until he’s within arm’s reach. His voice drops.

“Satoru,” he starts. “You’re not alone in this. You don’t have to deal with your family and the band and everything else by yourself. You have me. You have them. You have—”

“You don’t get it.” Satoru snaps once again, brows knit tight, nose creasing.

“Then make me get it,” Suguru bursts back. “Explain it instead of wrecking yourself.”

Satoru whips his head around to glare at him. The frustration has been building for days, weeks, months — years.

The coke strips away the last layer of patience.

“How am I supposed to explain feeling like I’m falling all the time?” he asks, voice rising. “How do I explain that it feels like there’s no floor? That whichever way I choose to land will hurt somebody? If I stay with the band, I’m a disappointment to them. If I quit, I destroy everything we built. Every route is a car crash, Suguru. I just get to pick who’s in the passenger seat.”

Suguru’s throat works as he swallows.

“Then we share it. We brace for impact together. That’s what this is supposed to be. Not you white-knuckling it alone.”

He reaches out like he might touch Satoru’s shoulder, then stops himself.

“You’re allowed to be scared,” he offers. “You’re allowed to be angry. You’re allowed to be exhausted. But you don’t get to burn yourself down and call it a solution.”

Satoru laughs, high and brittle.

“You really think it’s that easy to choose what’s allowed?”

“No,” Suguru says. “If it were, you wouldn’t be up here shaking.”

That hits a nerve.

Satoru looks down at his hands despite himself.

They’re trembling, small involuntary movements he can’t control.

He wants to be angry at Suguru for pointing it out.

He wants to be angry at himself for needing the reminder.

Instead the anger twists, finds a different target, closer and safer.

“You talk like you’d be any better in my place,” he says, words sharp now, laced in poison because it’s better to hurt than to accept. “Like you’d just cut them off and sleep soundly.”

Suguru’s brows draw together, confused.

“That’s not what I mean—”

“You stand there and tell me to protect myself like it’s a switch I can flip,” Satoru pushes, stepping toward him now, crowding. “You have no idea what it’s like to sit at that table and see your father look through you. To know everything you’ve done, everything you are, is a fucking embarrassment to the name on the door.”

“Satoru—”

“And don’t you dare pretend you’d have the balls to do it,” Satoru bites out. “You’re lecturing me about honesty while you keep living like you’re not tearing yourself in half too.”

Suguru goes very still, his eyes widen.

Satoru is close enough to see the violet speckles that adorn Suguru’s irises.

The rooftop feels smaller all of a sudden, like the walls have moved in closer.

“What is that supposed to mean?” he asks, voice low.

Satoru laughs without humor.

“You think I don’t see you? You think I don’t notice you pushing everything down and smiling until your face cracks? You’re so busy numbing yourself you could give me lessons.”

“That’s…”

“You sleep with people you don’t care about so you can pretend you’re wanted,” Satoru says, words coming faster now, nastier. “You let them worship you because it’s easy. Fast. Clean. They don’t ask you for anything real. Like that girl Angel. Like the happy-hour hookups. Damn, like our own band’s sign-technician. And you like that, don’t you? You like that you don’t have to say what you actually want.”

Suguru’s hands curl at his sides.

“Stop.”

“Why?” Satoru demands. “Because I’m right? Because it’s easier to watch me spiral than admit you’re doing your own slow-motion suicide?”

His heart is pounding, mouth dry, the coke making everything sharper and more distorted at once.

He knows he’s crossing lines and it feels… good, in a sick way.

Like scratching at a scab.

“You could cut me off and I’d still see you,” Satoru says. “I’d still know you’re lying. To me. To them. To yourself.”

Suguru’s eyes are very dark now, pupils blown wide, whether from anger or hurt Satoru can’t tell.

“You don’t know what I want.” Suguru says, quiet and steady.

“Don’t I?” Satoru says, leaning in. “You think I’ve never noticed how you look at—”

He stops himself, abruptly. The name catches behind his teeth. His own eyes widening, as if he just shocked himself into reality.

The air between them goes electric.

Suguru’s shoulders tense.

“Finish the sentence.”

Satoru swallows.

For a second, the coke haze clears just enough for him to see what he’s doing.

To see the drop at the edge of his words.

He could say it.

He could throw it in Suguru’s face and watch every single thing shatter right in front of him.

It would be one less thing to worry about when he meets his unavoidable doom.

He could shove that truth out into the open where it can’t be ignored anymore.

He doesn’t.

Maybe because he’s the real a coward.

Maybe because he’s not.

Instead he twists the knife a different way.

“You don’t even have the balls to admit it to yourself,” he says. “So don’t stand there and tell me what I should do with my family when you won’t even look your own shit in the eye.”

Suguru flinches like he’s been hit.

It’s subtle. Just a small jerk of his head, the tightening of his jaw, the way his mouth presses into a thin line. But Satoru sees it. He feels it in his own chest, a mirror ache.

For a moment, neither of them speaks. The city hums quieter below, unaffected by their issues.

When Suguru finally answers, his voice is very quiet.

“I came up here because I was worried about you,” he says. “Because you’re my best friend. Because I love you. Not to win a moral high ground.”

The words land too heavy after all that. They’re not the kind of love Satoru’s family uses at the table.

They’re the messy kind. The real kind. The kind that makes his ribs feel too tight.

“And yeah,” Suguru goes on, still steady, still too gentle for how much Satoru’s just hurt him. “I’m a mess too. I know that. I know I run from things I should face. I know I use people. I know I avoid looking in certain directions because I’m scared of what I’ll see.”

He takes a breath. The wind lifts his hair again, pulling it away from his face. His eyes don’t leave Satoru’s.

“But I don’t get high and pretend I’m the only one bleeding,” Suguru says. “I don’t throw grenades at the people trying to keep me from jumping.”

Satoru’s stomach twists.

“You think coke is the problem?” he bristles, defensive. “You think if I stop, everything else gets easy?”

“No,” Suguru says. “I think if you stop, you’ll at least be here when we try to figure the rest out.”

Satoru looks away, because he can’t stand the look in his eyes.

It’s too much. Too honest. It feels like standing in front of a mirror he didn’t ask for.

“Get off my back,” he mutters, voice coming out thinner than he wants. “I don’t need you hovering.”

“Yes,” Suguru says quietly. “You do.”

Satoru’s hands clench on the edge of the wall. His vision blurs for a second and he doesn’t know if it’s the wind or the coke or something else rising up, hot and painful. Nauseating.

“Go away,” he says. “Please.”

The last word slips out before he can stop it. Small. Raw.

Suguru’s breath catches. He doesn’t move for a long moment.

Then he nods, once.

“I’ll go,” he says. “But I’m not done.”

Satoru doesn’t answer.

“I’m not giving up on you,” Suguru adds. “You can hate me for that if you want.”

Satoru stares straight ahead at the city until Suguru’s footsteps retreat.

Until the rooftop door closes again with a soft metallic click.

Only then does he let himself sag against the wall, elbows on his knees, hands pressed over his face.

His pulse is racing. His nose burns. His head is full of static.

He thinks of your face when you look at him on stage, proud and bright. He thinks of Suguru’s voice in the studio, soft and certain when he picks harmonies. He thinks of Sukuna’s flat stare when he promised last time — Don’t make her watch you die.

He thinks of his parents saying, It will mean so much if you behave.

He thinks of the void inside him.

The one that’s been there since before the band, before the tours, before the paint.

The one coke fills for a moment and then leaves bigger when it drains away.

He laughs to himself, a broken sound.

Tour in six days.

He’s falling.

He doesn’t know how to stop.

And down below, in someone else’s apartment, Suguru is probably sitting on a couch trying not to bleed out from words Satoru threw at him like knives.

He hopes Suguru went to you.

He hopes you can be a better help, a better friend for him.

The worst part is — even now, even knowing that, the craving is still there. Sharp. Insistent. Demanding.

Just one more line.

Just one more moment of quiet.

Just one more step closer to the edge.

Stand under the stained glass and I will know it's you The whites of your eyes burn from across the room And I'm not here to be the saviour you long for Only the one you don't Are you watching me with eyes of a predator As you move towards the door? Show me those pretty white jaws Show me where the delicate stops Show me what you've lost And why you're always taking it slow Show me what wounds you've got Show me love Show me those pretty white jaws Show me where the delicate stops Show me what you've lost And why you're always taking it slow Show me what wounds you've got Show me love, oh Oh, and I, I believe We are locked Caged and always provoked By prey left unattended And I'm not here to be the saviour you long for Only the one you don't Are you watching me with eyes of a predator As you move towards the door? Oh, oh, oh Show me those pretty white jaws Show me where the delicate stops Show me what you've lost And why you're always taking it slow Show me what wounds you've got Show me love Show me those pretty white jaws Show me where the delicate stops Show me what you've lost And why you're always taking it slow Show me what wounds you've got Show me love Show me those pretty white jaws Show me where the delicate stops Show me what you've lost And why you're always taking it slow Show me what wounds you've got Show me love, oh

You stop in front of his door and you don’t even get to knock. It opens like the apartment itself is impatient.

Satoru stands there barefoot, hair a mess, cheeks a little flushed from laughing, wearing something soft and oversized that hangs off his shoulder in a way that makes him look younger than he is.

His grin is bright and mean in equal measure.

“You’re late.” he chirps, like he’s been waiting all day just to accuse you.

You lift the bag in your hand.

“I’m carrying tribute.”

He leans out, eyes immediately scanning the plastic like a creature looking for prey.

“Bribery? Is it the sour gummy worms or did you disappoint me again?”

You push past him because you know he’ll keep you in the doorway until you answer every one of his questions and you’re not doing this tonight.

Your shoulders are already sore from being on for weeks.

You want decompression.

You want to be held by other people’s noise.

His living room has been turned into a nest.

The couches have been dragged closer to the TV, pillows are everywhere, blankets are stacked like Satoru expects someone to declare a full winter hibernation and never leave.

The coffee table is already crowded — a half-empty bowl of popcorn, unopened chips, napkins, soda cans, an entire chocolate bar snapped into uneven pieces, the remote control like a sacred object in the middle of the chaos.

There are shoes by the entrance in a messy, familiar pile.

Someone’s — probably Suguru’s — hoodie is slung over the arm of the couch.

Someone — Noritoshi, you think — left a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen counter like a bookmark.

And you realize, with that sudden soft twist in your chest, that this is what a home looks like when you’re building it out of people instead of walls.

Suguru is on the couch, already wrapped in a blanket like it’s armor.

He’s sitting upright, tense, pretending he’s not tense, his eyes flick to you the second you enter — he looks relieved in the way he’ll deny later.

Nobara is on the floor near the coffee table, cross-legged, tearing open snacks with her teeth because she has no patience for packaging. She looks up at you with a grin that says she’s been waiting for the movie like it’s Christmas morning.

Toji is in the armchair, legs spread, posture relaxed but awake.

He has a beer in his hand, he doesn’t greet you with words, he just tilts his chin once, and you feel seen. Toji’s acknowledgment always feels like that — like a weight being placed on your shoulder.

Megumi and Yuji are on the floor, bundled under a blanket together. Yuji is sitting with his knees up, arms looped loosely around them, trying to look casual. Megumi is beside him, back against the couch, expression flat and calm in that way that always makes you think he has a private inner room where panic simply doesn’t get to enter.

Yuji’s foot is bouncing, though.

Not fast enough to be obvious to strangers — fast enough that you clock it immediately.

He’s anxious.

He’s excited.

He’s trying to be brave in front of people he trusts so deeply he doesn’t want to disappoint them.

Uraume is sitting on a cushion near the edge of the rug, hands folded neatly in their lap like they’re waiting for tea service, not a gore horror movie. Their posture is immaculate, their face is unreadable, eyes on the TV, not interested, not bothered, simply… there, taking scene after scene in of the random thing pllaying before Satoru decides to start.

Yuki is half in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with her beer, talking quietly with Choso. Choso’s voice is low and steady, his body angled toward her in that careful way he has when he’s listening.

They aren’t watching the movie tonight, they’re watching the room, the people in it, the way everyone’s shoulders drop just a little because they’re together.

Utahime and Noritoshi are out on the balcony with the sliding door cracked open, smoke drifting in in thin ribbons

You can hear their voices now and then, the soft click of a lighter, the low murmur of conversation that doesn’t demand to be heard.

Shoko is perched near the kitchen island, drink in hand, phone in the other, her attention split between whatever she’s reading and the room.

She looks up, sees you, and her mouth twists into a smirk like she’s already planning how to bully you later.

And then there’s Sukuna.

You always feel him before you see him, since the beginning, since before you were anything to each other, as if your nervous system is tuned to his presence.

He’s on the main couch, sprawled like he has the right to take up space. One arm on the backrest, the other resting on his thigh.

His eyes track you when you enter, slow and sharp, taking inventory.

He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t greet you.

He just lifts his chin slightly, gaze pinning you.

“Come here.” he says, voice low.

It’s not a command the way it would’ve been two years ago

It’s just his sole preference. He wants you close. He isn’t shy about it anymore.

You roll your eyes because you can’t help yourself, but you move anyway. You set the bag of snacks down, toe off your shoes, and slide into the space between his knees.

He catches you immediately — hand at your waist, fingers spreading against your side through your shirt, warmth sinking into you.

He shifts so you can settle properly.

You’re not delicate, but Sukuna treats you like you’re something he doesn’t want to drop — you know very well he never will.

You ease back into him, your spine fitting against his chest like it knows the shape. His other arm comes around you, not tight, just snug. It’s enough to make your brain unclench. Enough to make you feel like the room has edges again, like you’re not floating out into anxiety and deadlines with the national tour approaching.

Satoru shuts the door behind you, exaggeratedly dramatic.

“Okay,” he says, clapping once. “Everyone. It’s time. Shut up.”

Suguru’s head snaps toward him, offended.

“No.”

“Yes.” Satoru’s eyes glint, wicked.

“No.” Suguru repeats, but there is no hope left.

“Absolutely.”

Nobara throws a piece of popcorn at Satoru’s head. It bounces off his hair. He doesn’t even flinch, which is annoying, because it means he’s used to being assaulted by snacks.

“You’re both insufferable, but we are doing this.” Nobara says, disgustingly delighted.

Satoru points the remote at the TV.

“This is a new release,” he announces like he’s giving a lecture. “It’s supposed to be disgusting.”

“That’s not a selling point.” Suguru mutters, pulling his blanket tighter.

“It is for me!” Satoru says cheerfully.

You glance at Suguru and you see it — the nervous energy under his usual smoothness, the way he’s trying to play cool and failing.

It hits you in the chest, because it’s so familiar.

The three of you used to be like this all the time. You and Suguru hiding from horror movies, Satoru tormenting you both because he thought it was funny. Then, the cartoon watching to ease the anxiety and fear before falling asleep.

You were younger then.

Two years don’t seem like a lot, but you have got so far!

More tired in some ways, less in other.

The fear was only on screens most times.

Now you’re a bit older, and fear has taken forms you don’t like naming out loud, and yet you’re still here, about to watch something that will make you flinch like a child.

It’s absurd. It’s comforting. It’s a relief.

Sukuna’s hand shifts on your waist, thumb pressing lightly into your skin now lodged under your shirt like he knows your thoughts are spiraling and he’s pulling them back by force.

You breathe. You let the room do its job.

The studio logo appears on the TV.

A24.

The sound design starts immediately — low rumble, high thin tension, the kind of audio that makes your skin tighten before anything happens. You hate it. Your shoulders draw up automatically.

Satoru grins like he’s been waiting for you to react.

“Don’t.” you warn him.

“I didn’t do anything.” he says, already guilty.

The movie begins with a slow shot of a dark house, rain on windows, a person walking down a hallway with a flashlight.

You already know what’s coming.

That’s the worst part.

Your brain anticipates the jump scare.

Your body braces.

You start to feel stupid because you’re bracing for something fictional after so many real horrors that have found you in the past.

The first jump scare hits anyway.

You jerk so hard your breath catches. A small sound escapes you, embarrassing, sharp.

You immediately shove your face into Sukuna’s neck because his skin is warm and steady and he offered you his throat like a shield.

Sukuna’s chest moves with a slow, quiet laugh that you like even though he’s being mean.

“Pathetic.”

You mumble into his skin.

“Shut up. It’s scary.”

His hand tightens at your waist, fingers digging in just enough to make you aware of them, hot, calloused, big.

“Watch.” he says, and his voice is too calm for someone watching a human body get torn apart on screen.

“I don’t want to.” you whisper, stubborn.

“Then why are you here?” he’s teasing you because he knows why you’re there.

Because you need this, you think. Because you need to remember what it’s like to be afraid of something harmless. Because you need to feel normal fear so the abnormal ones don’t swallow you.

You don’t say any of that.

You just lift your head, cheeks warm, and glare at him. Brows knit together, the little crease between them forming as you frown.

He looks pleased, like he enjoys getting a reaction out of you no matter what it is.

Suguru makes a sound on the couch, a choked inhale. You glance at him and he’s staring at the screen with wide eyes, blanket up near his chin.

Satoru immediately turns toward him, delighted.

“Oh? Was that a squeak?”

“It was not,” Suguru snaps.

Nobara points at Suguru.

“It was.”

Uraume speaks without looking away from the screen, voice flat.

“It was.”

Suguru looks betrayed by the universe.

You laugh — soft, surprised — and it feels like a crack of light in your chest.

Sukuna’s mouth brushes your temple, quick and casual, like he’s marking you. The contact makes you flush anyway because your body is still stupid around him, even now, even after all the times he’s held you in rooms like this and made you feel safe.

The movie keeps going. It doesn’t let up. It gets worse the way horror movies do when they’re trying to prove how far they can push you. This studio — the movies it releases are always some kind of psychological horror that you have to try your best to understand, but this one is looking a little bit too explicit.

Blood. Screams.

The wet sound of something being dragged.

The camera lingering on gore like it wants an applause.

Satoru is thrilled.

He leans forward on the couch, eyes shining, like he’s watching a concert.

“This is sick!” he says happily.

“You’re sick,” Suguru replies, voice strained.

“I know.” Satoru says, like it’s a compliment.

Yuji tries to act like none of this affects him. He sits up straighter, shoulders squared, jaw set. But every time the music shifts, every time the screen goes quiet in that ominous way, his fingers tighten around the blanket.

Megumi watches the TV with a calm that almost irritates you.

Not because you want him to be scared, but because he looks like he’s built for this kind of chaos.

He’s steady, quiet and present, a person who doesn’t flinch unless it matters.

Reminds you a little bit of Toji.

Yuji flinches anyway at the next jump scare, and this time he actually makes a noise.

It’s quick. Small. A startled sound.

Nobara’s head snaps toward him like a predator sensing weakness.

“I heard that.”

Yuji immediately says, too loudly,

“You didn’t! Shush!”

Megumi turns his head slightly, eyes half-lidded.

“You screamed a little.”

“I did not scream.” Yuji insists, cheeks flushing.

“You did.” Megumi says, deadpan.

Yuji’s whole face goes red.

“Shut up.”

Megumi’s mouth twitches. Not a full smile. Almost.

It’s enough to make Yuji look even more flustered.

You watch them and feel that ache again, gratitude and nostalgia mixing together in a way that makes your throat tighten

They’re young. They’re stupid. They’re sweet.

They’re building something without realizing it.

Sukuna’s hand slides up your side to your ribs, thumb pressing gently as if he’s reminding you to breathe again, thumb absentmindedly rubbing circles against your skin on a sweet caress.

You breathe, you smile inwardly.

Then, the movie hits a scene so gory your stomach flips and your eyes widen. You bury your face into Sukuna again without thinking.

He doesn’t stop you, doesn’t mock you this time either. He just shifts slightly, offering you more of his neck. His jawline presses against your forehead, his warmth surrounds you like a wall.

Suguru notices and makes a noise of outrage.

“Oh, of course,” Suguru says, voice sharp with accusation. “Of course you’re hiding in him.”

You lift your head just enough to glare at him.

“I’m allowed!”

“You used to hide with me!” Suguru complains.

“You used to let me! Now you hog the covers!” you shoot back.

Suguru’s eyes narrow.

“Traitor.”

Satoru laughs so hard he almost spills his drink.

“Oh my god, this is my favorite subplot.”

Nobara smirks.

“You deserve it.”

Suguru points at her.

“Don’t encourage him.”

“I will do whatever I want,” Nobara says, and somehow it’s both a joke and a threat.

Yuki’s laughter drifts in from the kitchen, warm and bright

“You two are adorable,” she calls toward you and Suguru, like she’s watching an old sitcom.

Choso murmurs something to Yuki that makes her laugh harder, and you glance toward them just in time to see her elbow him lightly, affectionate.

Choso’s expression softens in that quiet way he has when he’s comfortable enough to let it show.

Utahime’s voice floats in from the balcony.

“Stop screaming in there, Mei Mei will text us threats.” she says, exasperated.

“We’re not screaming!” Satoru yells back immediately, which is, of course, yelling.

Noritoshi adds, calmer,

“It’s the movie, Utahime.”

“It’s their stupidity.” Utahime corrects.

You shift slightly on Sukuna’s lap, trying to get comfortable, and his hands immediately adjust, holding you steady, sliding down to settle on the divot of your waist.

It’s possessive as much as it’s caring.

And the most important thing, it’s yours.

You think about how strange it is that this is your normal now.

That you can sit in a room full of people who know many parts of you and still choose you.

That you can flinch at fake horror while real horror sits behind you in memory, sometimes threatening to come forward and make themselves known, but they are quieter lately, not gone, you think, but in control.

It makes you want to cry, but you refuse. Not tonight. Not when Nobara would weaponize it as evidence you’re soft. Not when Satoru would dramatize it. Not when Suguru would look at you like he wants to hug you and pretend he doesn’t.

So you just breathe and let Sukuna hold you and let the movie keep being disgusting.

Halfway through, the film goes into a stretch of slow dread — long shots, footsteps, silence punctured by small sounds.

This is a bit worse for you than the gore.

Gore is concrete.

Dread is your brain inventing monsters.

You feel your body tense again, your hands clench.

Sukuna’s fingers slide into your hair, not stroking, just holding.

It’s grounding.

It’s a reminder that his hand is there, that he’s solid, that you’re safe.

“You’re doing that thing again, saint.” he murmurs near your ear.

“What thing?” you whisper back, aware people can hear you.

“Thinking too much.”

You huff a quiet laugh, despite yourself.

“You hate me thinking this much?”

“I hate stupid thinking,” he corrects, and there’s that sharp edge to him even when he’s being gentle. You tilt your head slightly to look up at him — his eyes are on the screen, but you know he’s aware of you.

He always is.

It’s unsettling sometimes, comforting others.

“You’re okay.” he says, as if it’s fact.

Not a question, not reassurance.

A statement he expects your body to obey.

You swallow.

“Yeah.”

He pinches your side lightly, the smallest punishment that will make your skin redden just a tad. Your hand flies to his wrist under the hem of your shirt and you pout at him.

“Good.”

Your cheeks warm.

You hate how easily he makes you feel things.

On the couch, Suguru suddenly reaches across and tries to cover Satoru’s eyes in a reflexive move when something vile flashes on screen. You think it’s some kind of reminiscent reflex from when you three used to watch these movies at Satoru’s.

It’s so instinctive and familiar that you feel your chest pinch.

Satoru catches his wrist mid-motion and laughs.

“Don’t touch me!”

Suguru yanks his hand back like he’s been burned.

“I’m trying to save you from this horror.”

“I don’t need saving.”

“You’re sick, gore-lover.” Suguru jeers but there is no heat.

Satoru’s grin softens just for a second, like something real flickers through.

“I know.”

It’s brief.

Suguru misses it because he’s still annoyed.

You see it anyway, and it sits in your throat like something you don’t want to name.

You glance away, because you promised yourself decompression.

You promised yourself not to spiral into worry about everything and everyone.

You’ve been doing better. Sukuna has been doing better.

The entire point of this night is to be stupid and safe and loud together.

The movie ends in a mess of screams and blood and a final shot that makes you grimace.

Then the credits roll.

The sound shifts into calmer music.

You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.

Satoru stretches like he just finished an exercise routine.

“That was incredible.”

Suguru looks like he aged five years.

“That was horrible.”

Nobara looks delighted.

“That was art.”

Yuji sits up straighter, trying to reclaim his dignity.

“That wasn’t even scary.”

Megumi doesn’t look at him.

“You screamed three times.”

Yuji’s ears go red.

“I did not scream. I reacted.”

Nobara points at him.

“You squealed. Like a piglet.”

Uraume, still calm, adds to it.

“He squealed.”

Yuji groans and pulls the blanket over his face like a shield.

Shoko snorts.

“I’ve seen people handle surgery better than this.”

Utahime comes in from the balcony, shaking her head.

“You’re all ridiculous.”

Noritoshi follows, flicking ash away and closing the balcony door more firmly. The room warms slightly without the draft.

Yuki wanders in from the kitchen with her beer, leaning her hip against the counter.

Choso is near her shoulder, quiet and steady, his gaze drifting over the group like he’s taking mental notes of who’s laughing, who’s tense, who’s paying attention.

Toji sets his bottle down and stands, stretching his shoulders like he’s about to lift something heavy.

“Movie’s over,” he says. “No one died.”

Satoru points at Suguru dramatically.

“Speak for yourself.”

Suguru flips him off without looking.

You laugh, softer this time, and it feels like your body remembers how.

The room settles into that familiar afterglow of shared time.

Everyone talks at once, overlapping comments about the movie — plot holes, stupid decisions, ridiculous gore.

Nobara critiques special effects like she’s reviewing couture.

Satoru tries to explain why it was genius. Suguru argues and complains and looks secretly relieved it’s over.

Yuji finally emerges from under the blanket, cheeks still pink, still pretending he wasn’t scared. Megumi stays close, shoulder touching his, unbothered.

You remain on Sukuna’s lap because you can and because you want to. Your legs have fallen asleep slightly, and you shift and writhe just a little, trying to adjust.

Sukuna’s hands immediately tighten, fingers pressing and denting your skin for a second, not letting you slide away. He doesn’t speak, but you feel the message.

Stay.

You stay.

It’s still strange sometimes, how openly affectionate you both are now around friends now. It used to feel like something private, something you hid out of habit, out of fear that it wasn’t as good as it seemed to be — that it would be over before you could start to enjoy it.

Now Sukuna will kiss your temple in front of everyone like it’s nothing. You’ll rest your hand on his jaw, thumb brushing his cheekbone, and no one looks shocked.

They tease you, sure, but they don’t look surprised, they don’t make you feel inappropriate.

It makes you feel safe in a way that’s hard to explain.

Like the relationship has been accepted into the group in a smooth way, as if they were somehow braced for that back then, like it has a seat at the table instead of being something that happens in the shadows.

You don’t often dwell about how things have changed and yet, some of them remain the same. It’s been aa while since you felt this calm, this relaxed — surrounded by yours, letting their love, noise and warmth seep into you to the marrow of your bones.

Eventually, without anyone announcing it, the conversation drifts toward the tour.

It always does.

It’s the shared gravity right now. Everything is orbiting around it.

Satoru’s energy shifts first.

He leans forward, elbows on knees, remote forgotten on the table. His voice is still playful, but there’s something more grounded under it.

“So,” he says. “It starts.”

Suguru hums, blanket still around his shoulders like he doesn’t trust the world not to throw gore at him again.

“It starts.”

Nobara tosses a chip into her mouth and chews thoughtfully.

“Hotels,” she says. “Load-ins. Wardrobe. Makeup. Masks. Security.”

Shoko lifts her drink.

“Vomit bags.”

Utahime looks offended.

“Shoko.”

Shoko shrugs.

“It’s realistic.”

Yuki’s grin is bright.

“Espera’s ready,” she says, like she’s proud.

Choso nods once, small, supportive.

Noritoshi folds his arms, posture composed.

“It’ll be intense.” he says quietly.

Toji nods once.

“But doable if we follow schedule.”

You feel your chest tighten, not with fear exactly, but with anticipation.

The tour is always a mix of excitement and strain. It’s movement, performance, adrenaline.

It’s also exhaustion and logistics and the constant need to stay hidden even while you’re being seen by thousands of people.

You glance around the room and you feel the nostalgia hit you again, but not in a way that hurts. In a way that makes you grateful.

Because you’ve done this before, in different forms.

You’ve survived different versions of intensity with these people.

You’ve watched them grow and change and hurt and heal and still show up.

You look at Satoru, how alive he gets when he talks about stage.

You look at Suguru, how he smiles even when he’s tired.

You look at Toji, a wall with a beer.

You look at Nobara, bright and sharp, always ready.

You look at Yuji and Megumi, tangled together on the floor like they don’t even realize how much they’ve become each other’s comfort.

You look at Uraume, calm and certain.

You look at Yuki and Shoko and Utahime and Noritoshi and Choso, each of them threaded into this group in ways that make the room feel bigger than the space it sits in.

And then you feel Sukuna under you, solid, warm, steady.

His hand on your waist, his breath near your hair, his presence like a wall between you and the world.

You swallow the lump in your throat because your emotions are too close to your skin lately.

It’s not a bad thing.

It’s just… new.

You’re not used to feeling safe enough to be soft.

Satoru points at you suddenly.

“You,” he lilts. “You cryin’?”

You glare at him, immediately defensive.

“No.”

Suguru adds, smug,

“She’s going to cry.”

Nobara leans in, delighted.

“She’s absolutely going to cry.”

You look around, offended.

“All of you are horrible. I’m just a little tired.”

Sukuna murmurs, near your ear,

“You’re obvious.”

You elbow him lightly. He doesn’t even flinch.

Shoko smirks

“We should bottle your tears and sell them as merch. Sleep’s blessing.”

Utahime groans.

“Stop. Mei Mei might hear.”

Satoru laughs, then his grin softens just a fraction, and his voice drops slightly, enough to make the teasing feel less sharp.

“It’s fine,” he says, more gently. “We’re here.”

The simplicity of it hits you harder than anything else tonight.

You nod once, because your throat feels too tight to speak.

Sukuna’s lips brush your temple again, quick and sure, he lays a soft kiss there and lets his hand roam and rest on your hipbone, warm, big.

It’s his version of comfort.

Toji speaks again, voice calm.

“Tour will be intense,” he says. “But it’ll also be good. We will end it, we will drop the album, then we breathe.”

“You don’t breathe.” Shoko says immediately. “Robot.”

Before Toji retorts after a light twitch of his brow, Yuji is already talking

“I definitely will breathe when they are back.”

Megumi’s voice is flat.

“No, you won’t. You’ll be bouncing around.”

Yuji points at him, outraged.

“I’m going to breathe so hard.”

Nobara laughs.

“That’s not a sentence.”

Suguru finally loosens a little, blanket dropping slightly from around his shoulders.

“I just want to get through it,” he says, and his tone is honest. “I want to do it well. I want to finish strong. It’s the last album for a while.”

Satoru nods.

“We will.”

Uraume’s voice is quiet but absolute.

“You will endure.”

Yuki lifts her beer in a small salute.

“To enduring.,” she says.

Choso taps his bottle lightly against hers.

“To enduring.”

The room clinks and murmurs and laughs, and you feel something settle in you.

Not the absence of fear.

Not the absence of stress, just a comforting steadiness.

The knowledge that you’re not doing this alone.

You glance down at your hands and realize you’re holding Sukuna’s wrist lightly still, thumb tracing the edge of his skin absentmindedly.

You’re touching him without asking, you’re comforted by the fact that he lets you.

He notices, of course. He always notices.

“You’re fidgeting.” he muses not louder than a whisper.

“I’m not.” you lie.

He pinches your belly this time, lightly, a quick punishment.

You gasp, elbow him again, but you press a soft kiss on the hinge of his jaw.

Suguru watches you and Sukuna for a second, then groans dramatically.

“This is disgusting.”

Satoru immediately says,

“You’re jealous.”

Suguru glares.

“I’m just traumatized. Thanks to you.”

Nobara smirks.

“You’re both.”

Suguru throws a napkin at her. It misses. It lands on Yuji’s head instead.

Yuji flails, offended, and Megumi calmly plucks it off and tosses it aside like it’s nothing.

Everyone laughs again, and it’s loud enough that you almost forget you’re in a safe condo because of threats and fame and vultures.

While Yuji’s stretched out on the floor with the blanket half on his legs, half on Megumi’s, cheeks still a little pink from pretending he wasn’t scared, and he’s doing that thing where he tries to reclaim dignity by becoming loud and opinionated.

“You’re seriously not freaked out at all from the movie?” he asks Megumi, jabbing a thumb at the TV like the gore might leap back out of it. “That was… that was so much. Like— so much.”

Megumi blinks at him slowly.

His posture hasn’t changed, his face hasn’t changed — he looks like he could watch a documentary about paint drying and keep the same expression.

“It’s a movie. It’s kinda obvious.” he says.

“That’s not the point,” Yuji insists, voice rising with that warm indignation that always makes him sound like he’s arguing for justice even when he’s arguing about horror films. “There were intestines. There was— there was that sound. Like wet shoes in mud. You didn’t even wince.”

Megumi shrugs, one shoulder lifting, lazy.

“It’s probably genetics.”

Yuji pauses.

“Genetics?”

Megumi nods once like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

“Yeah.”

Yuji squints at him.

“How would genetics help you with gore?”

Megumi’s mouth twitches, almost amused, like Yuji is adorable and exhausting.

“I inherited the lack of reaction from my dad.”

The room does that collective shift where the air changes without anyone touching it.

It’s subtle at first.

It’s Shoko’s eyes lifting from her phone and narrowing.

It’s Nobara’s head turning, slow and sharp, like a dog hearing a sound it recognizes.

It’s Yuki pausing mid-sip in the kitchen.

It’s Utahime and Noritoshi, still near the balcony, turning their attention back inside.

It’s you, feeling it like a ripple up your spine, because your brain is built for pattern recognition and anxiety and filling in gaps before anyone else says a word.

Toji doesn’t move.

He’s still in the armchair, beer in hand, posture relaxed in a way that’s never actually relaxed.

His gaze has been drifting across the room this whole time, observing without looking like he’s observing.

Then he says, in the same tone he uses to comment on weather,

“He did.”

Yuji turns his head so fast you can almost hear his neck crack.

“Huh?”

Toji doesn’t bother repeating himself. He just takes a sip from his bottle.

Yuji laughs once, because he thinks this is a joke — because Yuji thinks most things are jokes until reality grabs him by the collar.

“How would you know?” Yuji asks, grin still on his face. “You don’t even—”

He trails off, because the room is getting too quiet in that very specific way that makes even Yuji’s big brain go, oh.

Your eyes flick from Megumi to Toji before you can stop yourself.

Megumi has the same green eyes.

The same calm, flat stare.

The same economy of movement.

That particular kind of annoyance, too — the one that isn’t loud, just… present, like a weight.

He even has the same way of looking like he could walk out of a room without saying goodbye and still somehow be polite about it.

And Toji—

Toji is older, obviously. Bigger. Sharper.

But the bones of the expression are similar when he’s not smiling.

The shape of the attention.

The way he holds still like he’s waiting for a moment to act.

You never put it together because you weren’t told to put it together.

That’s the thing about secrets — your brain can’t solve puzzles it doesn’t know exist.

Yuji’s grin fades as he looks between them again, slower this time.

“Wait.”

Nobara’s voice cuts through, amused and wicked.

“Oh my god!!”

Shoko leans back on her stool, eyebrows raised.

“No. Way.”

Yuki’s mouth spreads into a grin like she just got handed a gift.

“Oh, this is good.”

Utahime sighs, like she’s already tired of men.

“Of course.”

Noritoshi’s eyes go a little wider, but he stays composed, like he’s filing it away as information instead of reacting.

Uraume’s expression doesn’t change at all. It’s just the slightest tilt of their gaze toward Toji, like they already knew or like nothing surprises them anymore.

Suguru sits up straighter, blanket slipping from his shoulders.

His eyes flick to Satoru, then back, because of course the drama finds you even during decompression.

Satoru, unhelpful and delighted, whispers, “I knew something was weird,” even though you’re pretty sure he didn’t know anything and he just likes to sound omniscient.

Yuji points at Megumi like he’s accusing him in court.

“Stop playing.”

Megumi looks at him, calm as a lake.

“I’m not.”

Yuji turns to Toji, frantic now.

“Stop playing.”

Toji finally sets his beer down, slow, and looks at Yuji with a stare that could sandpaper wood.

“I’m his dad, kid.” he says.

Yuji barks a laugh, high and disbelieving.

“No you’re not.”

Toji doesn’t blink.

Yuji looks to Megumi like he’s begging for backup.

“Tell him to stop.”

Megumi sighs, the smallest exhale like he’s been waiting for this and he’s already tired.

“It’s true.”

There’s a beat where Yuji’s brain tries to catch up, and you can see it happening in real time —the way his eyes widen, the way his mouth opens slightly, then closes, then opens again.

“You’re—” Yuji starts, then stops, then starts again. “You’re his—”

Megumi nods once.

Yuji’s voice goes up an octave.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Megumi’s eyes shift away, barely.

“You didn’t ask.”

Yuji splutters.

“That’s not— how would I— why would I—”

Nobara laughs so hard she has to put a hand on her stomach.

“This is the best night of my life.”

Shoko, dry as ever, says,

“Get used to it. People only tell the truth when cornered.”

Satoru makes a sound like he’s trying not to laugh and failing.

“Megumi, you’re evil.”

Megumi blinks.

“I’m fine.”

Yuji looks betrayed by the entire concept of family trees.

Toji watches them like he’s watching a slow-motion car crash.

There’s no guilt on his face, no apology, no awkwardness.

Just that same steady, silent gravity he always carries.

Which is what makes your irritation bloom so cleanly it surprises you.

Because it isn’t just this.

It’s the other thing too — how Toji let you find out, casually, that he’s Maki’s cousin, like it was a detail he forgot to mention rather than a whole thread in the tapestry of who everyone is to each other.

And now this.

And you don’t even care that he has a son.

You care that you’re the kind of person who collects people with both hands and tries to keep them safe, and he keeps deciding what you don’t need to know.

Your eyes flick to him, brows knitting before you can stop it.

Your mouth opens.

Toji’s gaze lands on you.

He reads you immediately.

He always does.

He lifts his chin like, say it.

You don’t, because the room is still reacting and you don’t want to turn this into a fight.

You don’t want Yuji to have to mediate between shock and your personal grudge.

You don’t want Megumi to look even more tired than he already does.

So you do the thing you’ve learned to do when anger is sharp and you need to turn it into something that won’t destroy the room.

You look at Sukuna.

He’s been watching it all with that calm predatory interest he gets when people reveal themselves. His arm is still around you, hand resting at your waist.

His eyes flick to you the second he feels your attention shift.

You stare at him, brows still knit, and you ask, very sweetly.

“Can you take me to your gym so I can have boxing lessons?”

The room goes quiet for a different reason.

Sukuna’s mouth twitches first.

Then his chest moves with a laugh that’s too low and too pleased.

He doesn’t even try to pretend he doesn’t understand what you mean.

You don’t have to say, I want to punch Toji in the throat the next time he decides to omit a whole piece of reality.

The message is clear in the way you ask it like it’s casual.

In the way your eyes don’t leave Toji’s face.

Toji’s mouth curves, the smallest hint of a grin.

He looks almost amused, like he respects you more for being mad instead of swallowing it.

“Pretty,” Sukuna murmurs near your ear, voice thick with amusement. “You want to hit him.”

You smile without warmth.

“I want to learn.”

Sukuna’s hand tightens at your waist, fingers digging in gently, grounding and possessive.

“I’ll teach you,” he says. “You’ll cry.”

“I won’t.” you shoot back automatically.

Sukuna hums.

“You always say that.”

Nobara’s eyes glitter.

“Oh my god, yes! Violence as communication.”

Utahime pinches the bridge of her nose.

“No.”

Shoko lifts her drink.

“I support it.”

Yuki laughs, leaning on the counter.

“Toji, you’ve finally met someone who’s going to hold you accountable.”

Choso’s gaze shifts to Toji, assessing, like he’s quietly curious how this will play out. Noritoshi watches too, still composed, but there’s a flicker of interest there — like he’s thinking about family secrets and how they rot when you keep them too long.

Yuji is still stuck on the main shock, voice small and wounded.

“Megumi. Why.”

Megumi looks at him like he doesn’t have the words for something he didn’t choose.

“It didn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” Yuji says immediately, as if he can’t help it.

His voice is too honest. Too raw.

Megumi’s eyes soften just a fraction, like he hears that and doesn’t know what to do with it.

“Okay.”

It’s not an apology. It’s not a dramatic confession. It’s just acceptance.

Megumi’s version of I’ll try.

Satoru claps his hands once, like he’s wrapping up a seminar.

“Alright! Family trauma reveal done. Next agenda item — snacks.”

Suguru huffs.

“That’s not how agendas work.”

“It is in my house.” Satoru says, smug.

You stay where you are, still on Sukuna’s lap, but your body is buzzing with that restless edge that comes from caring too much and being surprised by people you love.

Sukuna tilts his head slightly, lips brushing your ear again, and his voice drops.

“You’re not wrong,” he says, quiet enough that only you hear. “He should’ve told you.”

You freeze, just for a second, because Sukuna agreeing with you is rare in matters that don’t involve violence or logistics.

You whisper back,

“He keeps deciding what I can handle.”

Sukuna’s mouth curves, sharp and affectionate.

“You can handle anything. That’s the problem.”

You swallow.

It hits something deep in you — the truth of it, the way you keep proving you can carry things until people start handing you heavier and heavier weights because you never drop them.

Sukuna’s thumb presses into your side, grounding further.

“I’ll take you to the gym,” he murmurs. “You’ll learn. You’ll feel it in your bones.”

You glance at Toji again.

He’s watching you with that same steady gaze, unbothered, and somehow that makes you even grumpier.

But it also makes you oddly comforted, because Toji doesn’t look scared of your anger.

He looks like he respects it.

He will definitely give you a fair fight once you throw hands at him for keeping another secret he absolutely doesn’t need to.

He’d rather you swing than stay quiet and resentful.

Which is… annoying.

Lovingly so.

Your eyes flick to Megumi, then to Yuji.

Yuji’s expression is still wounded, but he’s leaning toward Megumi without realizing it, like the truth didn’t push him away.

It pulled him closer.

Like he wants to know all of him, even the parts that complicate.

And Megumi, for all his stoic calm, doesn’t move away either.

You breathe out slowly. You let the room settle again.

Because this is what happens in families — chosen or blood.

People reveal things when the time is wrong.

People get angry. People laugh. People stay.

And you stay too, even when you want to punch someone.

Sukuna’s hand slides up your side to your ribs under your shirt again, and he squeezes gently, you squirm just a little.

“Later.” he says, like a promise.

You lean your head back against his shoulder, eyes still on Toji.

“Later.” you agree.