#ko-fi request

—and the street empties.

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

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

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

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

And then the air goes heavy.

You look up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You stand your ground.

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

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

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

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

“They died careless.”

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

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

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

He notices. Of course he does.

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

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

He huffs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around you, the burning village twists.

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

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

His interest sharpens.

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

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

“What do you want?” you ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You refuse?” he says at last.

You nod.

“I refuse.”

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

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

You blink at him.

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

“Decline what?” you ask warily.

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

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

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

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

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

“If you wish,” he says. “For now.”

You clamp onto that clause.

“For now is good enough for me.”

He clicks his tongue.

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

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

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

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

You find the first gift three days later.

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

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

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

Your hand goes to your sword. You turn.

A head stares back.

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

Your first thought is that someone wants to frighten you.

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

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

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

You tug the paper free.

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

It’s a poem.

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

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

You realize halfway through that you’re being complimented.

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

Sukuna.

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

Your mother said you were cruel.

You didn’t see it that way.

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

This — this is something else entirely.

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

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

You don’t respond.

The second gift is silk.

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

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

Sukuna.

The rest takes longer.

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

Your lip curls before you can stop it.

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

You are not a doll to be dressed.

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

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

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

Your temper says otherwise.

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

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

He gapes, hands fluttering over the cloth.

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

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

“T-this is worth—”

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

You walk out before he can stammer a reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You do.

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

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

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

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

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

The raindrops in front of you pause mid-air.

You frown.

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

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

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

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

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

“You have been ignoring me.” he says.

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

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

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

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

“I declined you.” he corrects.

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

He stares.

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

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

You blink.

“I am not from this land.”

He makes a frustrated sound low in his throat.

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

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

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

His lips press into a thin line.

“I dressed you in silk.”

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

He goes very still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something in his gaze changes.

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

“You truly did not know.” he murmurs.

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

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

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

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

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

The head. The poem. The robes.

Your refusal.

Your lack of begging.

Your deliberate distance.

“Oh,” you say, slowly.

His jaw tightens.

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

You stare at him.

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

He snarls, eye twitching.

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

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

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

You thought it was a dismissal.

It was, apparently, flirting.

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

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

You roll that around in your mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

His top left hand lifts.

The drops over you and him hang, suspended.

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

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

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

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

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

“So what now?” you ask.

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

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

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

“And if I don’t?” you ask.

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

You blink.

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

His chin lifts a fraction.

“Of course.”

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

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

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

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

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

It is backwards. It is ridiculous.

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

You exhale.

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

His mouth curves, slow and pleased and sharp.

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

You roll your eyes.

“And you demand I pursue you.”

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

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

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

Your throat works.

The honest answer is that you are not sure.

Wanting has never been simple for you.

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

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

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

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

“I can try.” you say.

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

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

Your eyes narrow.

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

“With me,” he says, “it is.”

You huff.

“I will decide what to bring.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You snort softly to yourself.

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

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

Not silk, not a poem.

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

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

It will hurt, handing it over.

He wanted effort. He wanted something that costs.

You can do that.

Tomorrow night, you’ll go to the cliff.

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

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

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

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

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

You don’t turn back.

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

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

You stop, palm settling instinctively on your sword hilt.

“So you came.” he drawls.

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

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

“Not very subtle.” you answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not most men.” you say.

He smirks.

“No. You’re not.”

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

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

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

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

You tell yourself that’s memory, not truth.

Under that is the blade.

Your first real sword.

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

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

You oiled it last night until it gleamed.

You set it on your palms, hold it up.

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

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

“And the cloth?” he asks.

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

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

You smooth a thumb over the old weave.

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

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

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

You hold the sword higher.

“I offer them,” you say, “to you.”

Sukuna is very quiet.

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

He drops from the roof without warning.

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

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

He ignores it.

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

“Look at me.” he says quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You feel your jaw tighten.

Then he smiles, slow.

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

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

“Not food,” he tells it. “Gift.”

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

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

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

You bare your teeth.

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

His thumb presses slightly harder against your jaw.

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

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

You expect that to trigger his temper.

Instead, something in his expression eases.

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

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

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

Your mouth curves despite yourself.

“You want me to keep coming back.”

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

You raise your brows.

“You haven’t bitten me yet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He notices the distinction. Of course he does.

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

“You stink of dead men.” you answer.

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

You go.

The second offering comes five days later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He gives a short, amused snort.

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

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

You nod.

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

“And you approve.” he says.

You think about that for a moment.

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

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

“Untie him.” he says.

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

Maybe you have.

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

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

You watch.

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

He doesn’t torture. He devours.

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

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

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

“I assumed.”

He takes another bite, slower. Bone cracks loudly.

“Stand closer,” he tells you, stomach maw full, voice thick with food. “You brought dinner. Don’t skulk by the door like a thief.”

You step in until you are three paces away. The smell of blood hits harder here, warm and copper-sweet. For a heartbeat, you are back on those early battlefields, knee-deep in men and horses, hands numb from swinging steel.

You don’t look away. You let him see that.

He notices. Of course he does.

“You really do accept it,” he says a little later, when the courtyard is marked with red and most of the man is gone. He licks a smear from his fingers with an ordinary mouth, the stomach maw is busy licking its teeth.

“What?” you ask.

“This,” he gestures vaguely at himself. “The eating. The fear. The way the land rots when I sit in one place too long. You are not pretending not to see.”

You shrug one shoulder.

“Why should I?”

“Because men pretend,” he says. “They recite verses about flowers while standing on corpses. They talk of purity while drowning in blood. They tell me to hide teeth when I go among them.”

You snort.

“Your teeth don’t hide.”

He laughs, sudden and sharp.

“No,” he agrees. “They don’t.”

You shift your weight.

“I thought,” you admit slowly, “that if I bring you something you like… as you are… it means I see you. That is… courting, yes?”

He stares at you for a long moment.

Then he looks away, as if annoyed with himself.

“With you,” he mutters, “apparently it is.”

You catch that.

He pretends you don’t.

The third offering is not blood.

You steal it.

You do not particularly enjoy stealing from people who have not wronged you personally, but you have decided to take this whole courtship thing seriously, and that means gifts that are not just corpses.

Your lord’s wife keeps a small garden in the inner courtyard — careful shrubs, winter camellias, a single plum tree growing in a pot. You have seen her look at that tree more than once with a softness she does not show to her husband.

Plum trees in this land mean waiting, you’ve been told. They bloom early, in cold, when everything else still sleeps.

They are the first promise that winter will end.

You take it at night, when the house is quiet. You feel a sliver of guilt, but you think of Sukuna’s half-complaint about men hiding what they are, and your own dislike of pretty lies. You are stealing a symbol from a woman who values surfaces, to give to a monster who shows his insides on the outside.

It feels, in a twisted way, like balance.

The tree is heavier than it looks. You carry it on one shoulder up the cliff, fingers numb around the rough ceramic of the pot.

Dirt flakes against your armor.

The cold air burns your lungs.

You reach the courtyard, set it down with a grunt, and straighten.

Sukuna emerges from the shadow of the shrine with the slow uncoiling of a creature that has never had to hurry for anyone. He wears more cloth today, layered robes draped over his monstrous torso in a compromise between court fashion and the reality of his body. The crest on his face stands out like fresh blood against pale skin.

“You persist.” he notes.

“You ordered me to.” you remind him.

His mouth twitches, betraying amusement.

His eyes drop to the tree.

He goes still.

It’s subtle. A small deepening around his eyes, a tightening at the corners of his mouth. His lower hands flex, claws half-curled.

“You stole this?”

“Yes,” you answer. “From my lord’s wife. She loves it.”

He bares a tooth, that canine that points out when he sneers often.

“Good.”

You blink before raising a brow.

“You approve?”

“She will scream when she notices,” he says. “She will blame servants, perhaps accuse them of selling to a rival. Your lord will rage over a plant he never truly looked at. It will rot their peace for weeks.” His smile is sharp. “That pleases me.”

You shrug.

“I brought it because it blooms in cold,” you say. “I thought…well, you sit here, always winter. You might like a thing that defies it.”

His gaze flicks from the tight buds on the branches to your face.

“You think there is always winter here?” he says softly.

You gesture around. The stone. The frost. The way the air never quite feels like it belongs to any season.

“You are not wrong.” he allows.

You nudge the pot with your foot until it rests closer to the edge, where it will catch what little sunlight the cliff allows.

“I don’t know which flowers your court likes,” you admit. “But this one, I like. So I bring it.”

“Not for yourself,” he notes. “You could have kept it.”

“I don’t keep things that need gentle hands,” you say. “I break those on accident.”

“All the more reason to give it to someone worse.” he murmurs.

You huff a small laugh.

“Maybe.”

He steps closer, robe whispering against the stone. All four of his hands reach for the pot at once — two steadying the base, one brushing soil from the rim, the last lightly touching the rough bark.

His fingers are careful — too careful for a monster that just tore a man apart like wet paper a few days ago.

“You bring me weapons,” he says, almost to himself. “Food. Living symbols. You stand while I eat. You do not flinch when I insult you. You keep coming.”

“You asked me to pursue,” you remark. “I pursue.”

His mouth curves, slow.

“Then,” he says, “it is time I offer something in return.”

You straighten.

“Such as?”

He clicks his tongue.

“Impatient. A proper suitor would swoon for a month over the idea of being invited into the inner garden.”

“You have an inner garden.”

He gives you a flat look.

“Do you think I sit on this stone all day gnawing bone? I have taste.”

You think of the way he touched the plum tree, the way he has arranged his domain so the cliff frames the land like a painting.

“Show me.” you say.

He narrows his eyes at your lack of hesitation.

“A noblewoman,” he says, “would make a suitor wait three more visits.”

“You are not a noblewoman, are you?” you answer, without thinking.

He stares.

Then he laughs, low and pleased, shaking his head as if you’re too much trouble and exactly the right kind.

“Come, then.” he says.

He turns, gesturing with one hand while the others pick up the plum tree like it weighs nothing. You follow him along the side of the shrine, around a wall of rock that hides the view from the courtyard.

The air shifts. The oppressive weight of his cursed energy doesn’t lighten, but it changes flavor, less battlefield, more… held.

He leads you to a long strip of engawa that runs along the back of the shrine, looking out over a garden that makes you stop where you stand.

You expected something wild.

Broken statues, bone piles, scorched earth.

This is not that.

The garden is stone and winter. A wide bed of raked gravel, the lines drawn in long, even arcs that curve around three tall rocks. The rocks rise like a frozen wave, each one placed with irritating care. A small stand of pines leans slightly at the far end, branches dusted with snow. Moss clings to them in thick patches, deep green against the pale.

To one side, there’s a low maple tree, bare now, its branches like fingers against the sky. At its base, half-hidden by stone, something glints bone-white — not a skull, exactly, but a shape you recognize as once human, cleaned and arranged so neatly it almost passes for another rock.

There are other little hints like that the longer you look. A rib used as a bridge over a careful trickle of water. A femur set upright like a marker stone, worn smooth by years of wind. It is beautiful and wrong in a way that fits him perfectly.

Snow falls in slow flakes, catching on your lashes. Your breath curls out into the cold air.

He sets the plum tree down near the engawa, where it will be visible from the veranda.

“This is where I sit when I am not tearing people in half.” he says.

You move to the edge of the engawa, boots stopping just before the polished wood.

“You keep it neat.” you say.

He snorts.

“Chaos is for men who don’t know they are strong. I have nothing to prove with mess. Unless it entertains me.”

You step up onto the engawa when he nods permission. The wood is cold through your soles. It creaks just a little under your weight and his.

He lowers himself with a fluid ease that makes you think of a creature coiling up, not a man sitting. Two of his arms brace behind him, the others resting on his thighs. The stomach mouth settles, jaw slack, like a dog lying at his feet.

He gestures to the space beside him.

“Sit.”

You sit.

The two of you look out at the winter garden in silence for a while. The only sounds are the faint drip of water, the soft whisper of snow landing, the far-off cry of some bird that hasn’t moved on yet.

You realize, slowly, that this is the first time you’ve sat with him without bracing for impact.

“You invited me here,” you say at last. “This means something in your court rules.”

He hums.

“It means I have decided you are worth showing the parts of myself that are not immediately useful,” he says. “Men see my garden and forget the skulls. They only see ground they can’t turn into rice fields. You see both.”

“I like both.” you agree.

He glances at you, four eyes sliding to take you in.

“You are a strange suitor,” he observes. “You bring me blood, then you bring me a stolen symbol of hope, and when I offer you my private space, you do not blush or stammer or ask if this means we are bound.”

You shrug.

“If I start thinking about what it means, I will make myself sick. I am here, I bring what I can, I see what you show. That is enough.”

“Practical,” he says. “Ugly men always are.”

You snort.

“Are you calling me an ugly man?”

He doesn’t answer directly.

“Your face is too honest to be the delicate pretty preached in these lands,” he says instead. “It is direct. That has its own appeal. Its own beauty.”

Your ears grow warm again. You take a breath to steady yourself.

“Where I come from,” you say, “this would be reversed. I would be behind the screen. A man would sit here, trying to make me laugh through poems. He would show me his garden and hope I ignore the rot under the stones.”

“And you?” he asks. “What would you do?”

“Climb his wall,” you say. “Steal his sword. Test its weight while he’s still talking.”

He huffs a quiet laugh.

“Yes. That sounds like you.”

You tilt your head, look at him sideways.

“And you?” you ask. “In your own court, before all this. Did people come to you like this? Bring you gifts? Poems?”

He lifts one shoulder.

“They tried,” he says. “They wanted my favor, my clan’s influence. They wrote long verses about the curve of my wrist, the black of my ink, the tragic beauty of a man doomed to carry too much power.”

You can hear the disgust in his voice.

“What did you want?” you ask.

He is quiet for a moment.

“Someone who did not lie,” he says at last. “Someone who would not pretend to love the part of me that fit their idea while ignoring the rest. Someone who would look at my hunger and not say it was just a poetic metaphor.”

You let that sit between you.

Snow gathers on the rocks. A flake lands on the back of his hand and melts immediately on his skin.

The stomach maw yawns quietly, teeth glinting.

“You ask a lot.” you say.

“Yes,” he says. “I do.”

You look at the plum tree, still bare, its buds tight and dark against the cold.

“I don’t know how to be soft the way your poems like,” you say. “I don’t know how to write or paint or wrap my feelings in incense. I know how to show up, how to stand, how to put my body somewhere and keep it there.”

He shifts slightly. One of his lower hands moves, almost idly, and lands on your knee.

His claws are careful. The weight is warm, steady.

“That,” he offers, “is already more honest than a hundred verses.”

You stare at his hand, then at his profile.

“This is also court custom?” you ask, voice dry.

“This,” he says, “is Sukuna custom.”

You huff out a small breath that might be a laugh.

He watches the garden again, as if he didn’t just place his hand in your space and claim something.

“Tea.” he says suddenly, as if remembering something.

You blink. “What?”

“A suitor should be received with tea,” he explains, as if you are very slow and he is patient only because he is entertained. “Even a barbarian one.”

He doesn’t move his hand from your knee as he lifts his upper pair of arms and snaps his fingers.

A pot appears from the shadow of the doorway behind you, lacquered black, steam curling from its spout. Two cups sit on a small tray beside it. You have no idea whether it’s summoned, carried by some unseen servant, or simply there because you were too focused on the garden to notice.

He reaches back with one hand, pours with the other. His movements are precise, practiced. Tea glows pale in the winter light as it fills the cups.

He hands one to you with his top left hand. His bottom right still rests on your leg, fingers curved lightly, thumb tracing once over the worn cloth of your trousers.

You take the cup with both hands, because you have seen enough of these people to know that’s respectful. The ceramic is warm.

You raise it to your mouth.

It tastes… different from the bitter brews you steal on campaign. There’s an edge of smoke, a depth of something like roasted grain. It spreads heat down your throat, into your chest.

“This is good.” you murmur, delighted.

“Of course it is,” he answers. “Do you think I drink swill?”

You roll your eyes.

You sit there, the two of you, drinking tea and looking at bones dressed up as stones and a tree that will bloom too early.

Snow falls.

His hand stays on your knee, unmoving now, like he’s planted a flag and forgotten it needs guarding.

“Do not mistake this for surrender,” he says eventually, as if compelled by some internal rulebook. “I am not easy to keep.”

You swallow your last mouthful of tea.

“I am not easy to get rid of.” you offer.

He makes a small, satisfied sound in his throat.

The stomach mouth sighs, strangely content.

You look out at his winter garden and feel, for the first time in a long time, that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be — on the wrong side of normal, courting a monster who expects to be wooed like a lady and taking it as seriously as you’ve ever taken war.

Later, you will bring him other things — a foreign song hummed badly, a broken charm that still holds a little warmth, stories of your homeland’s storms.

He will toss insults at you like petals and expect you to step through them without flinching.

For now, you sit on his engawa in the cold, shoulder to monstrous shoulder, his hand heavy on your leg, and watch snow gather on the plum tree you stole for him.

The buds stay closed.

They will open when they’re ready.

You think you understand that.