#technically applicable...........but not quite...........

Spencer Reid is an exception. He’s the exception, really; you can’t think of anyone else you’d do this for. Nobody else has burrowed deep into your brain the way he has. Nobody else would make you peel back layers of protection, shed every boundary the way a snake sheds its skin, the way you have for him.

Maybe he’s managed to reach in and sink his fingers into the only softer parts of you that remain. Or maybe you, as a whole, softened for him.

Maybe it’s just a fault. A flaw in your proverbial programming. Your feelings for him aren’t rational, your fixation on him doesn’t make any sense—but what does? 

You’re human, animal, driven by instinct. What is rational is subjective, the definition of sense ever-changing. Logic and reason are little more than facades, costumes worn to make people feel better about themselves, to keep the animal at bay. They ought to realise that life gets a hell of a lot more interesting when they stop following rules, scriptures, telling them what’s right, and instead follow what feels right.

That’s your philosophy, anyway. You’re sure you’d be hard-pressed to find many people that agree with you. 

Not even Spencer agrees with you, but you aren’t sure you can trust the moral rulings of a man who’ll happily fall to his knees at the feet of a serial killer. He’s a hypocrite, forever condemning your actions, calling you sick, all while going along with whatever twisted game you decide to play like a dog on a leash. He’ll bend to your every whim, mould his morals to better suit your desires, but he’ll roll his eyes and moan about it first—like that somehow cleanses him of sin.

Spencer sleeps with his door open—why, you’ll never understand—and you’re grateful, because it means you can waltz right into his bedroom without needing to worry about any squeaky hinges. And you wouldn’t want to wake him. No, that would ruin the fun.

He’s lying on his back, blankets kicked off, all leaden limbs and deep, slow breaths. Tousled hair and parted lips. A true sleeping beauty. It is, perhaps, the most at peace you’ve ever seen him, unblemished by the chaos of his conscious mind, by your presence. You could quite happily linger in this doorway, watch him sleep until the sun rises, treat him as you would an art exhibit; look, don’t touch.

You take your time crossing the room, as though any sudden movement, however silent, may disturb him. Spencer’s a light sleeper, easily stirred, never able to let himself go. It’s no wonder he’s so tired all the time; even in his sleep, he can’t truly rest.

The mattress sinks slightly under your weight as you crawl onto the bed. Your breathing is so quiet, so shallow, that you may as well be holding your breath as you carefully shuffle closer.

A streetlamp bleeds into the room through the blinds. Diffused streaks of pale light stretch across the bed, his face, like half a dozen halos. You tilt your head, taking a moment to admire his face. The sharp angle of his jaw; his brows, relaxed; the undeniable softness that replaces the tension you are so used to observing, and that, to you, seems almost alien.

You trail your fingers, touch awfully light, along his thigh. His pyjama pants are soft, freshly washed, covered in a purple plaid pattern that is just so Spencer. You’d consider stealing them if they were more your colour. Your hand dips to his inner thigh, drawing lazy patterns before grazing his crotch. The contact is so brief, so mild, he probably doesn’t even feel it.

You watch him closely, studying him for any sign of a reaction, before you grow bolder. You cup his cock through his pants, relishing the warmth under your palm, the way it sends a rush of heat straight to your core.

His body responds to your touch without protest. Like it knows you, trusts you. His cock stirs, presses against your hand.

Now you’re actually holding your breath. Biting your lip. Clenching your thighs. Fighting to contain the adrenaline that’s coursing through you as it increases by the second, pushing you to act faster, to lead with a heavier hand. You have to remind yourself to breathe, to take it slow, to control yourself before you wind up waking him.

You palm him through his pyjamas, steadily, movements so languid it’s almost annoying. His breathing shifts. His brows crease. He shifts against your hand, just barely. Yielding to your touch, asking for more.

Precious. That’s what he is. He’s fragile, like this. Delicate in ways he’d never allow himself to be when awake, when with you. When there’s always a game to play, a façade to keep up.

You struggle with his pants, with finding the balance between eagerness and prudence, as you try to get what you want without shattering this moment. His pretty cock springs free, already half-hard, and impatience has you abandoning his pants at his thighs so you can grasp it gently, listening to the way he sighs under your touch.

It’s maddening, almost, the way his erection realises itself in your hand, the way his body reacts, even when unconscious, to your gentleness. He groans, and it’s one of the softest sounds you’ve heard as you work his cock, keeping your gaze on his face, watching the slight twitches in his sleepy expression, manipulated by tender hand. 

Your mouth has run dry. You lick your lips, chew on the plush, as you exhaust the last of your restraint.

You lean down, drag your tongue across the head of his cock, and almost moan at the taste of him—do moan at the little noise he makes when you take him into your mouth. Can something be maddening, if you’re already mad? Is there a limit to insanity? Do you breathe the surplus into him? Every time you fall into bed together, it seems he breaks that little bit more, and you heal. Piece yourself back together with all that you’ve taken from him.

His cock twitches against your tongue. This is another thing you’re taking. Another line you’re crossing. Another thing he’ll hate you for, and love you for. He’s a masochist that way. You wouldn’t take so much if he weren’t so willing to give it. If he didn’t kneel at your altar, present his neck for your knife. You’re both damned.

But doesn’t every relationship consist of rotten priest and innocent lamb? Sinner and saint? Corruption and consecration? That’s how it’s supposed to be, no? You trade places every now and then, wear each other’s skin like shitty Halloween masks, pretend that the sacrifice holds any semblance of power. That’s all the sex is: Spencer, desperately imitating control; and you, holding the knife behind your back, pretending it isn’t there, pressed so deep into your skin you’d never be able to let it go, even if you wanted to.

A jerk of his hips, and his cock hits the spongy back of your throat. You just about hear him gasp over the sound of your own gagging, and then his fingers are in your hair, tearing you from him so fast you’d think you’d bitten him.

You meet Spencer’s awake, wide-eyed gaze with your own deer-in-headlights stare. He’s half-sitting, propped up on one elbow. Mouth slightly agape. Cheeks flushed the same shade as his spit-coated cock.

“How did you get in here?”

And the game’s up. Shame, you were just starting to enjoy it.

“I used a key,” you say simply.

Spencer blinks at you. His grip on your hair starts to loosen, like what you’re saying might, for a moment, make sense in his sleep-clouded mind, but then he returns to his senses. “You don’t have a key.”

“I, uh—” you clear your throat, wiping your mouth with the back of your hand before flashing him a smile. “I copied yours.”

“You—” he releases your hair, retracts his hand like you’re something filthy. “You what?”

“Just in case you…” Smoothing out your hair, you sit up. “…needed help, or something. I was looking out for you, really—”

“No.” Spencer cuts you off, shaking his head as he rubs his eyes. “This is— do you have any idea how out of line this is? How on earth could you possibly think this was appropriate?”

You shrug, opting to play dumb as you straddle him. He doesn’t try to stop you. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

“You broke into my apartment.”

“I used a key,” you repeat.

“That’s still illegal,” he hisses. “Copying someone’s key for the purpose of entering their home without their knowledge, and with criminal intent, is a crime.”

“Criminal intent?” you scoff, biting back a grin. “I didn’t come here to rob you—”

“No, you just came here to touch me in my sleep.”

You nod eagerly. “And you have a problem with that?”

Instead of answering your (very simple) question, Spencer just leans his head back against his pillow, muttering under his breath. You think you hear “God” slip between his lips. Typical.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” he grumbles, returning his hands to his face.

You click your tongue, trailing your fingers across the front of his shirt. “I can go back out and knock, if that’ll make you feel better—”

“Don’t,” he warns, voice firm. “You are just…so…”

He never finishes that thought. Instead, he reaches over to the bedside table. At first you figure he’s reaching for his glasses, but then his fingers graze the handle of the drawer, just barely out of his reach.

He taps your thigh. “Get off of me.”

“Oh, come on,” you whine.

“I’m not asking.”

“Can’t we just—”

His hands are on your waist and, before you can finish complaining, he’s pushing you away. You land on the mattress with a petulant huff, resigning yourself to staring at the ceiling as he rummages through his drawer. You hear the familiar rustle of his condom box, followed by the softer, quieter sound of his pyjama pants being thrown aside.

“You’re no fun,” you mutter, “you know that?”

Spencer doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even give you a huff, or a sigh. He just rolls the condom on.

He’s sick of you, or claims to be, yet he still yields to you every time. He still plays the game, still entertains your desires even when he knows that he shouldn’t—that doing so is only reinforcing your behaviour.

He’ll complain about you breaking in, but he’ll still fuck you, even though you haven’t asked him to, because the truth is that he needs this just as badly as you do—if not more so. Spencer needs to give just as badly as you need to take, and he’ll pretend it’s the other way around. Utter subservience masquerading as dominance; it’s his drug.

Fingers close around your wrist, and he pulls you back up to meet his lips. He kisses you like he’s starved, one hand tangled in your hair as the other slips up your thigh. He tugs at your panties, tears them off when you lift your hips. Tosses them into the dark before pulling you down on top of him.

You straddle him like it’s second nature, and the two of you slot together like pieces of a puzzle. Him on his back, and you above him. Half cast in shadow, half painted in the subtle glow of the streetlight, whispering curses into his mouth as his fingers find your dripping cunt.

“God,” he breathes, almost groans. He sets his hands on your hips, gives you a gentle nudge so you pull back. “You really were enjoying that, weren’t you?”

You smirk as you sit up, adjusting yourself so you’re lined up with his cock. Grasping the base, you drag the tip along your slick folds, relishing the way you can feel him pulsing under your palm. “We both did,” you tease. “Actually, I think you might’ve been enjoying it more—”

A sharp gasp cuts through your words, followed by a poorly muffled cry as Spencer forces your hips down. His cock pushes into you without warning, and the pain—the pleasure—has tears pricking in your eyes before you can think to stop them.

He throws his head back with a hiss, fingers digging into your soft skin as he sinks you onto his cock, guiding you to take every too-big inch of him, until you’re sat flush against his hips. A choked whimper is all you can muster as your tight walls flutter around his length.

“Fuck—”

“I’ve got you.”

And he has got you. He’s holding you there, keeping you stuffed full of him until your body gives in.

He only lets go once you’ve relaxed around him, once your whining has stopped and you’re making subtle movements of your hips, desperate to keep going now that the discomfort has subsided—and he lets you.

You settle into a rhythm quickly, and Spencer’s even quicker to sink into the mattress, letting his hands roam the plush of your thighs as you take the lead. Your name leaves his lips in a whisper, and you swear the sound is more intoxicating, more addicting than any drug out there. His touch, his voice, the little hitches in his breath every time you roll your hips—it’s enough to drive you fucking crazy.

And when he meets your gaze, you almost come undone on the spot. Because what you find plastered across his pretty face is worship. The kind you can make out even in the dark; broken, but perfect.

Is this something you’re taking, or something he’s giving? Is there a difference? If there is, does it even matter?

His thumb brushes your clit, and your thoughts turn to static. Debating the ethical nuances of such a sinful relationship becomes difficult when you’re like this. Pleasure is pleasure, no matter how rotten.

Spencer could be your sacrificial lamb, the moth to your cursed flame, or just a sick flagellant—you don’t care.  Not when he’s beneath you, biting back moans and telling you just how good you are at taking his cock, acting as the votary to your twisted godhead.

Tension builds in your core, compounded by the attention on your clit. The effortless workings of his hands have you inching closer and closer to the edge, and he isn’t even looking at what he’s doing. He’s watching your face, transfixed. His hand, so perfectly tuned to the needs of your body, is the last thing on his mind; pleasing you is second nature. Like breathing, it doesn’t require thought.

Curses tumble from your lips as your hips stutter. You reach for the headboard to steady yourself, but as soon as you lean forward Spencer’s bending a knee, setting his foot on the bed so he can thrust up into you at a faster, harder pace. His hands grasp your hips, press indents into your skin that are bound to leave a mark, and hold you in place as he fucks you.

You’ve no choice but to surrender yourself, at that point. Back arched, both hands on the headboard, head thrown back as static crackles in your veins, mounts to something that is so dangerously close to catching fire.

“…’m close—”

Spencer mumbles something the same time you do. Equally as breathless. Words laced with an equally depraved amount of need. He’s echoing the sentiment, fingernails cutting into your skin as his leg starts to tremble.

You come undone first. The orgasm hits your hard, and you clamp a hand over your mouth to stifle the sound as you come on his cock. Spencer groans as your cunt clenches around him, hugging his length tighter with each thrust as he fucks you through your release, and his follows close behind.

In the breathless space between moments, your mind moves slower than your body. You allow yourself to collapse on top of him, burying your face in the crook of his neck as you try to tame your ragged breathing. And he lets you.

His hand cups the back of your head. The other rests on the small of your back. He keeps you close. Presses his nose to your hair, lips following shortly after. 

Seconds pass before you finally gather the strength to raise your head, to check if he’s lost his mind, but Spencer’s face betrays nothing. His brows are set in his usual frown, but the dark softens his features, and you can infer warmth where there shouldn't be any.

"Do you, um—" You clear your throat, lips curling into that signature sly smile. "Do you want my key, or should I keep it? Save it for a rainy day—"

You hiss as spencer pushes you off him. Instead of complaining, you curl up at his side, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest before he decides it’s time to get up. He doesn't answer your question, and you don't push him to.

He rises to his feet, takes care of the condom, the wrapper—any evidence of what just happened. You think he's going to take care of you, too; drag you out of his bed, throw you out on the street, but he doesn't. 

He glances back at you as he picks your panties up from his floor. He tosses them to you, but not without asking, in a quiet tone, "Are you going home?"

The question gives you pause. It's the inflection, the way his words are weaved to obstruct something else, spoken with a stiffness he knows you'll pick up on.

You narrow your eyes, tilting your head to one side. "Do you want me to go home?"

He grabs his pyjama pants, ignores another loaded question. Because the day Spencer Reid is ever open with you will be the day Hell freezes over.

"There's nothing to do here," you add, seeing right through his silence. "I’m not gonna be able to sleep just because you fucked me. You—"

"I know, but—"

"—aren't that good."

Spencer still doesn't share in your humour, despite how much time you've spent together. He'll break every rule, bend every moral, but he'll never laugh at your jokes. He doesn't even crack a smile, just sighs and pulls his pants on.

"I was going to suggest you read a book," he says, voice flat.

He gets back into bed without another word. Faces away from you. Holds his breath in the silence that follows.

He wants you to stay.

"…okay," you answer, quietly. "I’ll go…peruse your reading material."

All he gives you in response is a low hum.

—

Spencer wakes hours later to the sun streaming through his blinds, head resting on something that isn’t a pillow; pillows don’t have heartbeats. 

His arm is draped over your waist, fingers loosely curled into the fabric of your nightgown the same way yours are curled into his hair. 

Memories return in quick succession, each one adding to the discomfort simmering in his stomach, visceral. His skin crawls at the thought of you spending the night.

So, he raises his head. In the light of day, he sees you clearly: the book lying open across your face, shielding your eyes; your slow, deep breathing; your arm lying limp at your side.

The world goes quiet. He blinks, and the discomfort fades into a memory, the way it always does.

He brings his head back down to rest against your chest, and he closes his eyes.

He has all of these only at one remove, mediated, filtered through Infinity. Near but never quite landing. And the part of him that's animal, the part of him that's simply human, the part of him that needed to be held as a baby and got it but only sometimes, only when the clan elders permitted it, only carefully, that part of him has been screaming low in the background for so long he doesn't even hear it anymore, has mistaken the scream for silence.

He has to consciously let you touch him, has to make the decision, it isn't passive. Every brush of your fingers against his wrist is a small deliberate act of disarmament on his part, a tiny lowering of the only defence his body has ever known.

You don't realise at first what it means when he reaches for your hand or leans his head against your shoulder. You think it's casual the way it would be casual with anyone else. Then one night you catch him doing it and you see the way his eye flickers shut for half a second when your skin meets his. The way his breath catches almost imperceptibly, the way his whole body subtly leans into the contact like a plant turning toward light, and you understand with a kind of slow horror that this is the only place in his entire life where he's touched. That he's starving. That he's been starving for as long as he can remember, and that the person who gets to feed him is, by some impossible accident of the universe, you.

So he hoards it, he hoards you, hoards your time, hoards the contact, in a way he doesn't hoard anything else in his life.

He's famously, almost ostentatiously generous with money, with food, with attention to his students, with the violence he hands out on behalf of strangers, he gives and gives because giving costs him nothing and proves he is who they say he is.

But your time, your touch, the hours when he gets to sit on your kitchen floor with his head against your knee and not be Gojo Satoru for a little while, those he holds with both hands, those he counts.

He'll rearrange his entire week, lie to the elders, dodge three different missions to protect. Because they're the only currency in his life that is actually scarce. The only thing he's not been given freely and at scale, the only thing he's poor in, and a man who's been rich in everything he doesn't want and poor in the one thing he does will guard that one thing like his life depends on it, because in some sense it does.

You'll notice, after a while, that he's started to count, in small ways. The number of hours you have together before his next mission, the number of nights in a row he gets to come home to your apartment, the number of mornings he gets to wake up with his face in your hair.

He'll never say any of this aloud, will not admit even to himself that he's keeping a tally, but you'll catch him standing at the window at five a.m. before a long deployment with that particular stillness, that not-quite-smile, and you'll understand he's memorising this, banking the look of you in low light against the days, weeks, he won't have it.

And there's cruelty to Satoru we can't ignore, don't romanticise it away.

He laughs at his enemies and threatens elders with a smile. He flicks people out of existence the way you'd flick lint off a sleeve and doesn't think about it for longer than the gesture takes.

He loves selectively, narrowly, and the people outside that narrow circle barely register as real to him. It's not a tsundere thing and not a misunderstood-softie thing, it's a him thing. The consequence of being raised by people who treated him as a vessel rather than a child and a world that has confirmed for him over and over that most lives are not equivalent to his.

So why should he act as if they are, when nobody else does, when the entire structure of his existence is built on the premise that they aren't?

And yet—Suguru. The never healing wound.

The friend he loved more than he loved anyone before or perhaps since, the only person who ever stood on the floor with him even briefly. Who walked away from that floor into atrocity, who built a life around the proposition that non-sorcerers were cattle, and who Satoru ultimately had to kill, and then couldn't even bury, and then couldn't even mourn properly because Kenjaku stole the corpse and wore it like a coat.

Satoru carries that loss like a second spine, doesn't talk about it, just moves differently when it comes up, the joke arrives a half-second late, the smile thins by a few millimetres, but if you know him well enough you can see it and if you don't you'll miss it entirely. Which is exactly how he wants it, and you'll live for a long time in a relationship with a person whose central grief you're not invited to share.

You'll have to learn that the not-being-invited is not a rejection, it's the closest he can come to protecting you from a wound that he himself doesn't believe can be healed.

Occasionally, very occasionally, he'll mention Suguru in passing, in a sentence that ends a sentence too soon, we used to, or he would have laughed at, or simply yeah, well, trailing off, and the right thing to do in those moments is nothing, no follow-up question, no soft inquiring look, just keep your hand where it is on his back and let the sentence die in the air.

Over time he'll give you more, in his way, in fragments, never a story, never a confession, just shards, and you'll assemble them into something private that lives between you and that he'll never quite acknowledge you have.

The first time he notices you it's almost an accident.

You're a curiosity, the way a cat notices a thing that moves wrong, something about you registers. Maybe you didn't flinch when he walked in, maybe you said something acidic to him and meant it, or maybe you simply didn't look at him with that mixture of fear and worship he's catalogued in everyone since he was a child.

So he files you under interesting and then he starts poking. That's the opening move, relentless, low-stakes provocation.

He stands too close, he steals your drink, he says something outrageous to watch your face, and if you laugh he files that, and if you snap back he files it harder, and if you do the rarest thing of all (meet his eyes and not perform anything in particular, just look at him like he's a person) he goes briefly quiet and changes the subject, because that one he doesn't know what to do with, that one his mind doesn't have an entry for.

He'll think about it for days afterwards in idle moments and pretend he isn't.

The teasing is constant and surgically tuned to whatever insecurity he picks up on within forty-eight hours of meeting you. He's monstrously perceptive. He reads people the way other people read traffic signs, automatically and without effort, he'll find the exact thing you don't want named and name it grinning, sunglasses on, while you choke on your coffee.

Then ten minutes later he'll buy you something stupidly expensive without comment, and you'll start to understand that the cruelty and the tenderness come from the same place in him. That Satoru doesn't really separate them, that being seen by him is going to involve being seen all the way through and there's no version where you only get the soft parts. No version where he agrees to look at you only in the flattering light, the deal is the whole gaze or nothing, and most people, in practice, take nothing.

He will not, at this stage, tell you he likes you. He barely tells himself. He tells himself he's bored and you're entertaining, which is the lie he's been telling about every meaningful relationship in his life since he was a child.

The not dating but dating phase can last months, plural, with no internal acknowledgment of what it is. He shows up at your apartment at eleven p.m. with bags from three different cities because he was in Kyoto for a mission and remembered you mentioned a sweet shop.

He eats half your food, he sleeps on your couch, he leaves a hoodie behind that you don't know is deliberate. He starts referring to your address as home in passing and then catches himself and redirects. Gives the cashier at your local market a tip that the cashier remembers for a year (because it's obscene) because Satoru went there exactly once to buy you a thing and decided everyone connected to your daily life was now retroactively important.

You ask what this is and he says aw, don't be weird about it, with that slight enigmatic smile (that runs the danger of coming off as dismissive so it's always a balance to read it), and you let it go because the alternative is losing whatever this is, and you've already, without quite noticing, begun to organise parts of your life around his unpredictable orbit.

He's also obnoxious about your attention. Obnoxious.

If you're on your phone he'll lie across your lap to block the screen. If you're talking to someone else at a gathering he'll drape an arm around your shoulders and announce something embarrassing about you. If you don't text back fast enough you'll get fifteen messages, three voice notes, and a selfie of him pouting at his own reflection.

He's a six-foot-three nuisance who's also the strongest sorcerer alive and he'll use every inch of both facts to make sure your eyes land on him and stay there. And the moment you give him your full attention, undivided, looking right at him, he goes shy in a way he'd never name, looks away, changes the subject, asks you something offhand that's actually the most sincere question he's asked in weeks.

Because he wants your attention the way a man dying of thirst wants water and now that he has it he doesn't quite know what to do with it, doesn't have the muscle memory for being looked at the way you look at him. Has spent his entire life being looked at as something rather than seen as someone, and the difference is everything, and he's bad at receiving it.

It tips eventually because of something small. It always does with Satoru. He doesn't have the language for grand declarations, he's never needed them, never been asked for them, so the moment something shifts it's quiet.

He stops by after a mission and maybe there's blood under his nails and his hair is damp and he sits down on your floor and leans his head against your knee and doesn't say anything for a long time. And you, against your better judgment, put a hand in his hair, and he closes his eye behind the blindfold and exhales like he's been holding his breath for a decade.

Somewhere in the next sixty seconds, without a word being spoken about it, the shape of what you are to each other has changed permanently (and the thing is, the thing is, you've put your hand in his hair before, plenty of times, that isn't what's new) what's new is that this time he didn't make a joke about it. Didn't tilt his head away with a smirk, didn't deflect. He just let it happen. Let himself receive it, let himself be a person being touched on the floor of your apartment by someone who loves him, and that's the act of trust that closes the door behind you both.

He doesn't ask you out, he just starts treating the thing like it's already real, that's his version of commitment.

One morning you wake up and there's a toothbrush, then a drawer, then he's giving the higher-ups your name as his emergency contact, which is functionally insane given his life, and when you ask him about it he shrugs and says who else? i'll kill them if they hurt you

And you have to sit with the fact that this is, by his standards, a declaration of love so vast and total it would be embarrassing if he knew how to say it out loud. Which he doesn't, might never, and which you will, over time, learn to translate from. To read his language of moved-in objects and undeclared decisions and the small adjustments he makes to the architecture of his life to fit you into it.

You'll learn that who else is the closest thing he has to I love you and that it is, in its way, more total than any conventional confession could be. Because Satoru genuinely means it. There is no one else, there has not been anyone else for a long time, and there is unlikely to be anyone else again, and the who else contains all of that without spending a word on it.

Once you're his, he's terrifyingly possessive in a way he frames as joking but isn't joking at all.

It's not jealousy in the petty sense, he genuinely doesn't feel threatened by other people because no one is a threat to him on any axis he understands. It's something far deeper, a quiet total refusal to share the thing he loves with the world that has spent his entire life trying to take pieces of him.

You are his and the door closes on that, and people who don't understand this about him will mistake the lightness of his voice for the lightness of his meaning, and they'll be wrong. They'll only be wrong once, because Satoru Gojo does not need to make a point twice for the point to be understood.

He's all laughs until something touches you and then he isn't. When he isn't he's the scariest thing in any room. Because he doesn't raise his voice, he doesn't even change his posture much, he just goes still. That smile thins, the blindfold tips down a quarter-inch so whoever's standing in front of him can see one eye, and that's usually all it takes.

The people he loves have a very, very short list of enemies, and the enemies don't tend to stay enemies for long, and the first time you see this happen, the first time you watch him decide that someone has done something unforgivable in his vicinity, you'll understand viscerally and forever that the man who steals your snacks and complains about your coffee is also a creature of almost unbearable lethality.

Those two facts about him are not in tension, they live in the same person and have always lived in the same person, and loving him means loving both, and finding, somewhere in yourself, that you're not horrified by the second one. That you are, in some quiet shameful corner of yourself, relieved by it. Glad that the thing standing between you and the world is that.

But the protectiveness has a flipside that's harder.

Sometimes he genuinely forgets that you don't operate at his level. Not just power-wise but emotionally.

He'll keep things from you because he's decided you can't handle them, will make decisions about your safety without consulting you because he's already run every scenario and arrived at the answer before you've finished asking the question.

When you call him on it he gets that look. The one that says he knows you're right and he's going to do it again anyway, because protecting you matters more in his internal calculation than your autonomy. He's not yet figured out, possibly never will figure out, that those two things are not actually separable. That taking your choice from you in the name of keeping you alive is its own kind of small theft, and the fights you'll have about this are some of the worst fights you'll ever have. Because you're both right, in your own ways, and neither of you knows how to give ground without feeling like the giving will cost you the other person entirely.

Satoru is, frankly, bluntly, a difficult partner.

He disappears for a week and comes back like he was gone four hours. He forgets birthdays unless he's set six different reminders. He eats your leftovers and lies about it with a face so straight you almost believe him. He'll be in the middle of a conversation about something important to you and his phone rings and he's gone and you don't see him for three days. When he comes back he's edgy and dark but grinning. For you. Doesn't want to talk about it.

There'll be times you sit on the edge of your bed at two in the morning wondering whether you can actually do this. Whether anyone can actually do this. Whether loving him is sustainable as a long-term proposition or whether it's just an extended exercise in being slowly hollowed out by absence. You will not always know the answer, and the not-knowing will sit in your chest like a stone for weeks at a time. You'll not be able to talk to anyone about it because nobody else's relationship looks anything like this and the comparisons don't help.

And then he'll come home, and he'll walk through the door and look at you and his whole face will change.

The public face drops off like a coat slid from his shoulders, and he'll cross the room and wrap his arms around you and bury his face in your hair and just breathe, and you'll feel in the slight tremor through his ribs exactly how much it costs him to be away from you. Exactly how much of him has been holding itself together by force for however many days. How much of his nervous system has been waiting to come back into a place where it could let go, and you'll be reminded that whatever this is, it's not nothing.

It is, in fact, possibly, the most something either of you has ever had, and the stone in your chest will dissolve a little, and you'll get through another stretch, and another, and another, and that's the rhythm of it. The rhythm of loving him. You take the absences and the homecomings and you live in the gap between them.

You have to learn to steer him back, too. That's the part no one will tell you. When he's deflecting too hard, when the grin is too wide, with too many teeth. When he's started narrating the conversation in third person because he can't bear to be in it. You have to say his name, just Satoru, quietly, without performance, and watch him land back in his own body like a kid who'd forgotten he had one.

That's the work, and you have to learn the difference between the moments when he wants to be steered back and the moments when he genuinely needs the deflection. When the deflection is the only thing keeping him functional, and you have to develop an ear for which one is which.

You'll get it wrong sometimes, you'll reach for him at the wrong moment and he'll shut the door in your face, politely, with a smile. You'll have to not take it personally, will have to remember that the shutting is a survival mechanism older than you, older than this relationship, older than his ability to choose otherwise.

The work is also recognising when he's being cruel and not letting it slide.

He tests people, not consciously, not maliciously, but he tests. He'll say something cutting just to see if you'll flinch, and if you do he'll mark it and never quite trust you again, and if you don't, if you look at him steadily and say that was mean and I'd like you to not, he goes quiet and apologises in his own roundabout way. Usually with food, sometimes with an extravagant gift, occasionally with a real plain sorry that sounds half-coughed up but sincere, and the trust deepens by a millimetre that'll matter for years. Over time the tests get rarer. Not strictly because he stops needing to know, but because he stops needing to ask. Because the answer has been written into the structure of you by then.

His indifference is real too and you have to make peace with it.

He'll not care about things you care about. He'll not pretend to care because he despises performance in his private life. He already performs enough in public, the whole rest of his life is a performance, and what he wants from you is the place where he doesn't have to.

He'll tune out during your work stories, he'll forget the names of your friends, you'll mention something that happened to a person he doesn't know and his face will do that thing where it goes politely blank and you'll realise he genuinely doesn't register them as real people.

You have two choices: take it personally, or accept that the narrowness of his caring is the price of how completely he cares about you when he's actually looking at you, and that for someone who has spent his whole life forced to be important to everyone in a generalised and meaningless way, this fierce specific narrowness is the closest thing to honesty he can offer. Once you understand it as honesty rather than as withholding, it gets easier, not easy, but easier.

Without the blindfold, in low light, in your apartment, his eyes are the most beautiful thing you'll ever see.

He'll look at you with them and you'll feel briefly like you understand what infinity means. He knows what they do, he doesn't take the blindfold off often and never carelessly. So when he does, with you, it's a gift he won't name.

The first few times it happens you'll find yourself going still under that gaze, because it isn't only that the eyes are beautiful, it's that he is looking at you with them, which is to say he's choosing to use the full devastating bandwidth of his perception on you. You'll feel seen in a way that is somewhere between being loved and being read, and you'll not know which you prefer.

Eventually you'll stop trying to know, will accept that with him those two things are not really separate, that being read by Satoru Gojo and being loved by him are the same action performed at the same time and there's no version where you get one without the other.

He sleeps with his face pressed into your shoulder or the crook of your neck, always. He steals the blanket. He talks in his sleep occasionally, usually nonsense, occasionally names (Suguru is one of them, and you learn early not to ask, you learn to put your hand on the back of his neck when it happens and feel him settle again, and you learn that the privilege of being the person he sleeps next to is also the responsibility of being the person who holds him through the dreams he won't acknowledge in daylight) and you also notice, after a while, that he sleeps deeper with you than he does anywhere else.

That the man who's hyperaware in every other context goes completely under when his face is in your neck, that his Limitless does something different when he's asleep next to you. You don't fully understand what, but the air around him in your bed feels less guarded, feels permeable, feels like he's decided, in some pre-verbal way, that this is the one place he can stop running the defence, and you carry that knowledge with you everywhere afterwards.

He eats sweets like a child. You'll find empty wrappers in every pocket of every jacket he owns. He buys you absurd desserts and watches you eat them with this soft unguarded look that he immediately replaces with something dumb when he notices you've caught him.

He's intensely physical in low-key ways once he trusts you, constantly touching, a hand at the small of your back, a leg over yours on the couch, fingers in your hair while he's reading something on his phone. Now you understand why.

Now you understand the hunger underneath each touch, the way his hand drifts to your wrist like a magnet when you're in the same room not even talking, the way he'll pass through a doorway behind you and let his palm trail across your hip just to feel something land where his body is used to nothing landing.

The way he will sit pressed against your side on a couch that has plenty of room as if he doesn't quite understand that the configuration is unusual, and the way he will, in public, in front of people who fear him, slip his hand into yours with a casualness that's itself the most extravagant possible declaration. Because his hand is the part of him that touches nothing, and he's letting it touch you, and he doesn't care who sees.

He gives you things, not flowers, weird specific things.

A ring he saw in a window in Istanbul, a knife that belonged to someone he killed (he thinks this is romantic somehow 💀), a stupid keychain from a vending machine in a service station, a single perfect peach from a market in a city you can't pronounce.

The expensive ones and the trash ones come from the same place, he saw it, he thought of you, that was the whole transaction in his head, and over time you learn that the thinking of you is the gift. The object is just the receipt, and you also learn that the volume of objects accumulating in your apartment is itself a kind of secret census. A record of all the moments his mind drifted to you while he was supposed to be doing something else, all the moments he was killing or eating or sitting in a meeting and an image of you crossed his attention and he reached into the world and grabbed the nearest thing and carried it home.

There's a specific way he touches you in public that is different from how he touches you at home. At home it's constant, tactile and greedy.

In public it's more restrained but somehow heavier, a hand at the small of your back that presses just slightly too hard, a thumb brushing the inside of your wrist in a way that recalls what that hand was doing six hours ago, an arm slung over your shoulders that positions your body against his in a way that is, if you're paying attention, absolutely a territorial claim.

The first time you notice it, the first time you realise he's performing I have someone for an audience that may or may not be paying attention, you feel something complicated, because the displaying is obnoxious and possessive and also, underneath that, it's the closest he can come in daylight to saying mine, I have a person, I'm not untethered, someone chose me, and that part is so vulnerable you almost can't look at it directly.

He is, predictably and unbearably, a menace in bed.

The teasing doesn't stop, if anything it gets worse. He'll work you up for an hour with hands and mouth, that low laugh against your skin and every time you try to push things forward he'll pull back and grin and say something insufferable like aw, what's the rush? and you'll want to kill him. You'll also never wanted him more in your life, which is precisely the effect he's after.

But the teasing is also doing something else, something he wouldn't articulate if you asked him. It's stretching the time. It's making the encounter longer, because every minute his skin is on your skin is a minute he's not in the bubble of not-touch, and the part of him that has been starving since he was boy is in no hurry whatsoever to be done.

The leisureliness is the hunger, the leisureliness is the entire point. The man who could end any fight in a quarter of a second is, here, deliberately taking the long way through everything. Because he can, because no one is going to take it from him, because for the duration of this his entire body is being touched and nothing else has ever been worth slowing down for.

He has no shame. Zero. Nada. Zilch. He's never in his life been embarrassed in a bedroom and he never will be.

He'll say things that make you cover your face, he'll narrate in that bright drawl exactly what he's doing and exactly what he's going to do next. He wants to watch you come apart and he wants you to know he's watching.

The eyes (those impossible, beautiful eyes) fixed on you with the same focus he turns on enemies in combat, except now it's all you, all of it, every inch of that perception aimed at your face and your body and the small involuntary sounds you make.

The experience of being the sole object of Satoru Gojo's attention is something the average human nervous system was not designed to absorb, and you will feel, more than once, like you might come apart from the looking alone, before he's even properly touched you.

And underneath the showmanship, he's attentive in a way that borders on uncanny. That perceptiveness he uses to hurt people, that catalogue of every micro-expression, he turns it the other way here.

He learns you like a language. Inside two weeks he knows exactly what makes you gasp, what makes you go quiet, what makes you grab his wrist, what you don't like and haven't said, and what you do like and demand more of without a word.

He files all of it and he uses all of it, and there'll come a point where you realise he's better at being in your body, at appreciating your body, than you are. Which is humiliating, and which also means that there is, in his head, a Satoru-shaped map of you that nobody else has ever made and nobody else will ever make, and the existence of that map is, in its own way, another form of declaration. Another way he's keeping you, another piece of you he's quietly taken into the private hoard.

The teasing finally breaks at some point, it always does, he'll have been playing for too long and you'll do something (say his name in a particular way, or just stop laughing, or reach up and put your hand on his face and look at him) and the temperature in the room changes.

He goes quiet, the joke dies in his throat, his eyes go dark and his hand goes still in your hair, and what comes after the break is intensity. That's the word, the same focus he uses in combat, the same focus that makes him the strongest, except now it's all turned on you and there's nothing else in his world in those minutes.

You'll never have been looked at like that before and after him no one will look at you like that again, and a small frightened part of you will register that this level of attention is probably not survivable as a permanent condition. Which is fine, because it's also not survivable to live without it once you've had it, and somewhere in the negotiation between those two unlivable conditions is what people mean when they talk about being ruined for anyone else.

He's rough when you want him rough, gentle when you want him gentle. Satoru reads it in your breathing.

He'll hold you down with one hand like it's nothing because for him it is nothing, the strongest man alive applying a fraction of a fraction of his strength, and the wrongness of the math of that (the absolute power held in such restraint, just enough pressure to make a point) does something to you.

Then five minutes later he'll be brushing your hair off your forehead with a tenderness that'll undo you, the same hand, the same man, the same impossible bandwidth of control directed now at the most delicate possible task. And you'll understand, again, that loving him means containing two facts about him that other people would prefer to keep separate.

He likes you on top because he likes watching your body move, he likes you under him because he likes the way you reach for him. He likes you against a wall because he's dramatic and he likes how you hold onto him. There's no position he won't enjoy and he has opinions about all of them which he will tell you, at length, while you're trying to catch your breath.

But the one position he keeps coming back to, the one he doesn't make jokes about, the one that you start to suspect is his actual favourite, is the one where he's wrapped around you completely. His chest against your back, his face in your hair, every possible square centimetre of his skin in contact with yours. Because that one is the one that delivers the most touch per second, that one is the one that delivers him to the place his body has been trying to reach his whole life. He'll hold you like that and sigh into your neck and you'll feel him become, for a few minutes, a different kind of creature than the one the world sees.

The frequency is, frankly, ridiculous, and you should make peace with this early.

Satoru wants you constantly. Mornings before missions when he's pulling on his uniform and changes his mind and crawls back into bed because the look of you half-asleep is more than he can walk away from. Afternoons in the kitchen when you're making tea and he comes up behind you and sets his hands on your hips and the tea goes cold. Nights when he's just gotten home and is bleeding from a shallow cut on his temple and the first thing he wants (before food, before a shower, before sleep) is you. Your hands on him, your mouth, the proof of being alive that arrives most reliably through your body.

The stamina is, predictably, unreal, because cursed energy is in some sense life-force and his is bottomless. He can genuinely go for hours. He can do it twice in an hour and then a third time after a nap. He'll keep going long after you've lost the ability to form coherent words, and the only thing that ever actually stops him is you reaching up and putting your hand on his face and saying Satoru, enough. At which point he immediately collapses on top of you and laughs into your collarbone like a kid.

He has a very specific thing he does with his mouth that you're convinced could be classified as a war crime in several countries.

Starts with his tongue flat and broad, almost lazy, and then narrows the focus incrementally over the course of what feels like fifteen years until the attention is so precise and unrelenting that you forget how to speak in full sentences.

The entire time he's doing this he's watching, eyes flicking up to your face to monitor every reaction, every hitch in your breathing, and he will adjust in real-time based on what he sees, will speed up or slow down or change the angle by millimetres, and the realisation that he is essentially conducting your nervous system, that he's turned your pleasure into a project he's solving in real-time with his mouth and his horrible perfect attention, is almost worse than the physical sensation.

Except the physical sensation is also destroying you, and at some point you'll try to push his head away because it's too much and he will grab your wrist and pin it to your hip and keep going, and the combination of the restraint plus the relentlessness plus the looking at you will take you apart so thoroughly that you'll briefly forget your own name.

The first time you go down on him he tries very, very hard to stay in control. The teasing is still running, he's making comments, he's got one hand in your hair but loosely, he's performing the whole yeah, that's good, you look so pretty like this routine. And then you do something with your tongue, or maybe it's the suction, or maybe it's just the accumulation of sensation and the fact that your eyes are on him, but whatever it is, the performance cracks.

His hand tightens in your hair and his hips jerk forward before he can stop them and he makes this sound, this completely unguarded ah fuck that comes from somewhere deep in his chest, and for about thirty seconds he's not Gojo Satoru, just a man getting his soul sucked out through his dick, and his head tips back and his eyes close and his breathing goes ragged.

You'll file this away as maybe the most erotic thing you've ever witnessed.

Then he catches himself, opens his eyes, tries to get the grin back, but it's too late. You've seen it. You know what's under there now, and every subsequent time you'll chase that crack, will try to widen it, and he knows you're doing it and it becomes this silent game between you. Him trying to keep the mask up and you trying to fuck it off his face with your mouth, and it's unclear who's winning but it's very clear that you're both enjoying the game.

He uses his hands the way some people use a violin. Fingers that know exactly how much pressure, exactly what speed, exactly when to slow down, and the way he watches your face the whole time he's working you up with them is unbearable. That intensity again, that focus. He'll keep his hand between your thighs and his other hand braced beside your head and just look at you, will drink in every twitch of your eyelids and every involuntary sound, will say there, right? right there, when he feels you tense and he's always (always) right.

Because he's been mapping you since the first night and his memory when it comes to you almost photographic, and the first time Satoru gets you off with just his fingers and that low patient voice telling you how good you're being, you'll understand viscerally that this man is dangerous in a category you had not previously had a word for.

He gives head like he's apologising for something, like it's an offering, like he's discovered that this is one of the only contexts in his life where he gets to put his actual face (not the public face, not the smirk, the bare unguarded thing under it) against another person's skin for an extended period of time and have it be welcome. Have it be wanted, have it be received with gratitude, and so he takes his time, takes a humiliating amount of time. He'll spend an hour between your thighs and emerge looking pleased with himself and slightly drunk, and the psychology of it is that this is the closest he gets in the entire repertoire of physical intimacy to being able to give without performing strength. Without performing wit, without performing anything but devotion.

It turns out the strongest sorcerer in the world is, behind closed doors, almost embarrassingly devoted, and you'll have to learn to take it without flinching, will have to learn to keep your hand in his hair and your eyes on him and let him do the thing he so badly wants to do, because trying to redirect him out of generosity will read to him as rejection and the resulting sulk will last days.

Which brings us to: he loves having his hair pulled. Loves it.

You'll discover this the first time you do it by accident, will feel the sound that comes out of his throat and store the information forever (and it's not just the sensation, though that's part of it, it's the relinquishment, it's the fact that he's spent his entire life as the person no one can put hands on, and the experience of someone closing a fist in his hair and directing him is, for a man whose body has been autonomous and unreachable since he was a boy, a kind of erotic release he didn't know was possible until you stumbled into giving it to him) and once you know, you can undo him almost at will. Can grab a handful and pull and watch his eyes go dark and his whole posture change.

Use it to slow him down when he's being insufferable, can use it to make him beg, which he will, eventually, if you're very, very patient, in a low ruined voice that sounds nothing like the public Satoru and will live in your head for the rest of your life.

The dirty talk is foul, by the way, just so you're prepared.

He has no filter, no embarrassment, no concept of going too far. He;ll narrate exactly what he's doing to you and exactly what he wants to do next and exactly how good you look while he's doing it.

He has a running commentary habit that should be annoying but is instead devastatingly hot. Will narrate exactly what he's doing to you with clinical precision, gonna put two fingers in now, okay? yeah, you can take it, I know you can, fuck you're tight, relax for me, that's it, good, so good, and the constant stream of words does something to you. Keeps you anchored in the moment, keeps you present in your own body, and there's something about the way he phrases things as statements of fact rather than questions that makes your brain short-circuit.

He's not asking permission, exactly, but he's also not not asking, he's narrating the thing right before he does it which gives you a half-second to object if you wanted to but also presumes you won't, and the presumption is correct, you never do, and the combination of the warning plus the confidence plus the good, I knew you could praise immediately after makes you feel simultaneously taken-apart and taken-care-of, will find that just the tone of it, that particular low register he drops into, can make you wet before he's even touched you.

He has a particular thing about your mouth and it borders on a obsession.

He loves kissing you, will kiss you for twenty minutes, will interrupt himself mid-sentence to lean over and kiss you because the proximity of your mouth has overridden whatever he was saying, will, during sex, slow everything down so he can press his forehead against yours and just breathe you in and kiss you like he's trying to memorise the inside of your mouth.

The psychology with this one is straightforward and kinda devastating: kissing is the form of touch where the most square inches of skin are in motion, where two faces meet with no defences up, where Infinity has to come all the way down for it to work at all, and so kissing you is one of the most undefended things he ever does. And he wants more of it, always more, and you'll find that your jaw aches sometimes from the sheer duration of his attention and you will not mind.

There's a specific thing that happens sometimes when he's inside you where he just... stops. Fully seated, not moving, just looking at you with an expression you can't quite parse. The first time it happens you think something's wrong, you start to ask if he's okay, and he puts a hand over your mouth (gently, not to silence you but to pause the question) and says just let me feel you for a second.

You understand he's savouring the sensation of being inside another person which is, for someone whose body has been a closed system for decades, about as intimate as it's possible to get. He'll stay like that for thirty, forty seconds, barely breathing, just feeling it, the heat and the pressure and the aliveness of it, and then he'll move again and the sex resumes, but you'll carry that pause with you. That moment of him needing to just experience the fact of connection.

He likes you in his lap because he likes the height parity. He likes you pinned beneath him with your wrists held in one of his hands because he likes feeling you strain against the grip just enough to know he's holding you.

He likes you facedown with your hips pulled up because the angle is filthy and because it gives him an unobstructed view of his hand on the small of your back.

He likes you bent over the kitchen counter because he's a menace and because he thinks it's funny. He likes you against the wall in the hallway because he came home and couldn't wait the eight steps to the bedroom, and he likes you riding him slow with his hands on your hips guiding the pace because then he gets to watch, and watching you fall apart on top of him is one of his very favourite things in the world, possibly the favourite, certainly in the top five.

He likes to be bitten, which you discover by accident when you're kissing his neck and you scrape your teeth against the tendon there without thinking. Satoru makes a sound you've never heard before and his hand comes up to the back of your head and holds you there, and when you pull back to look at him his eyes are unfocused and his breathing is uneven. He says do that again, so you do, harder this time, and he shudders, full-body, and you realise that this is another version of the marking thing but inverted.

He can't keep marks, his body won't allow it, the bruise from your teeth will be gone in an hour, but for that hour he gets to carry the evidence of you on his skin, and more than that, biting is one of the only kinds of pain that actually registers for him, his tolerance is so high and his healing is so fast that most sensation just... slides off, but teeth in his skin, that gets through, that makes it past the Infinity, and he wants it, wants to be hurt in the small specific way that confirms he has a body at all, and you'll bite him often after this.

His neck, his shoulder, once the tendon between his thumb and forefinger just to watch his eyes go dark, and he'll never ask for it out loud but he'll angle himself toward your mouth, and you'll know what he needs without him having to say it.

The sounds you make apparently do something to him that borders on medical.

You learn this because he tells you, in that running-commentary voice, fuck, the sounds you make, I could come just from listening to you, and you think it's hyperbole until the night when you're louder than usual and he legitimately almost finishes before he means to, has to stop moving entirely and breathe through it, and afterwards he tells you, in a sheepish voice you've heard maybe twice, that he wasn't joking. That the audio of you falling apart does something to his brain he doesn't totally understand, lights up some reward pathway that's usually reserved for combat victory or successful technique execution, and the fact that your pleasure registers in his nervous system the same way winning a fight does tells you more about how he's wired than any conversation you've ever had.

It tells you that he has somehow neurologically linked making you feel good with the thing I was put on earth to do, and once you know this you'll feel a strange responsibility, will understand that you are, in some sense, feeding something in him that has been hungry for decades.

He has exactly one position he'll almost never initiate but will melt into if you start it.

Which is you on top facing away from him, reverse cowgirl, and the reason he won't ask for it is because it's the one position where he can't see your face, can't monitor your reactions, has to rely entirely on sound and touch. Which means he can't manage the situation the way he manages everything else, has to just receive whatever you're giving him.

When you figure this out and put him there deliberately, take his hands and pin them to his own chest (or yours) and tell him to keep them there, and then set a pace that's slower than he'd ever choose, he comes apart in a way that's almost alarming. Makes sounds like he's being pulled apart at the seams, and his hands will come up to your hips eventually because he can't help it, but he won't direct you, won't try to speed you up, will just hold on like he's drowning, and afterwards he won't make eye contact for like ten minutes, will just pull you down against his chest and hide his face in your hair.

There's a very specific sequence that happens sometimes in the early morning.

You'll wake up to him already hard against your back, his hand already sliding between your thighs, and he's still half-asleep himself, moving on instinct, and his voice when he speaks is rough and unguarded, need you, can I, please, which is the only time he says please without sarcasm, and if you say yes he'll slide in from behind without preamble, no teasing, no buildup. Just the blunt animal need of a man who woke up wanting, and the sex is slow and messy and graceless, nothing like his usual performance, he's just moving in you with his face pressed between your shoulder blades, one arm locked around your waist, and he'll finish fast, too fast, with a sound that's more relief than pleasure.

Then he'll soften inside you and not pull out, will just stay there while his breathing evens out, and half the time he falls back asleep like that, still inside you, like even unconscious his body doesn't want to give up the connection, and you'll lie there feeling him slip out eventually as he softens, feeling the mess between your thighs, and you'll not move, will not disturb him, because this morning creature is the version of Satoru that no one else will ever meet, and you guard it the way he guards you.

He has a thing for marking but not in a possessive-bruise way, exactly, though there's an element of that. But in a more specific sense.

He likes leaving evidence on your skin that he was here, hickeys low on your neck where a collar won't quite hide them, fingertip bruises on your hips the morning after, a bite mark on your shoulder he'll trace with his thumb at breakfast looking insufferably pleased, and the psychology is, of course, that he himself can't be marked easily.

His skin doesn't register injury at all under normal circumstances, no scar of his is older than five years. No bruise lasts beyond a few hours of activated Reverse Curse Technique, so his body is annoyingly, inhumanly pristine, and so the visible evidence of intimacy is something only your body can hold longer term, and he's fascinated by the marks the way a man who's never seen colour might be fascinated by a sunset. He'll trace them with something close to reverence when he thinks you aren't paying attention.

He's loud.

You'd think a man who controls his image so carefully would be controlled here too, but no, when it's good, when it's very good, when you've found the rhythm or the angle or the particular thing that he can't talk through, Satoru makes the most beautiful unguarded sounds you've ever heard.

Low and broken. Your name and a string of curses and sometimes just a sound that isn't a word at all, and the first time you hear it you'll understand that you're getting a version of him no one else on earth has ever heard, will ever hear, and the asymmetry of that (the fact that you and only you carry this audio file of Satoru Gojo coming undone) will live in you for the rest of your life as a kind of secret you can't tell anyone, not because he asked you not to, but because it would feel like theft.

He also likes overstimulation, on either side. He likes pushing you past the point you thought you could go and watching what happens when your body keeps responding past your conscious permission.

The way you shake, the way you grab at his wrist and don't actually push it away, the way you say Satoru in a voice that sounds like you don't recognise yourself, and he likes being on the receiving end of it too.

Will let you take him apart in slow stages and will not tap out, will let you keep going until he is, at the very end, actually begging, in a voice you've heard maybe four times in the entire relationship and will spend years trying to coax back out.

On both ends, It's about being driven past the point of self-control, about losing the management he's been maintaining since he was a child, about being delivered, even briefly, to a state in which he's not running the world or himself. In which something happens to him that he's not pre-calculated, and you're the only person who gets to deliver him there.

He has a specific tell when he's about to come that you learn to recognise within a month.

His breathing goes shallow and his hand, wherever it is on your body, tightens incrementally, and his eyes, if they're visible, flutter shut for just a second before snapping back open like he's refusing to miss a single frame of what's happening, and in that last stretch right before he tips over he gets quiet.

The dirty talk stops mid-sentence, the teasing dies, and what's left is just a man holding on by his fingernails to the last shred of composure, and then he says your name, just once, like a question, and that's it, that's the whole sequence, and once you know it you can time it, can push him right to that edge and hold him there, and the first time you do it deliberately he looks at you afterwards like you've performed a magic trick.

There are nights when the sex is fast and rough and plausibly selfish.

Where he takes what he needs without much preamble and you take what you need from being taken, and those nights usually follow the missions where something went badly, where he had to do something he doesn't want to carry into a conversation, and you learn not to ask, learn to just be the place where he can discharge the voltage.

He's never actually selfish even when he's pretending to be, his hand still finds its way between your legs, he still makes sure you get there, but the veneer of selfishness is important to him in those moments, the fiction that he's simply using you rather than the more complicated truth that he needs you to absorb something he can't process on his own, and you let him have the fiction because the alternative is watching him go somewhere unreachable inside himself, and you would rather be fucked like an outlet for excess energy than watch him disappear.

He is, despite all of the above, capable of being unbearably tender. The same man who an hour ago had your wrists pinned over your head while he said something filthy into your ear is now propped up on one elbow looking down at you in the half-light with an expression so soft it doesn't seem to belong to his face.

Brushing his thumb across your lower lip, not saying anything, just looking, and when he does this he'll sometimes slide back inside you slowly with the same intention with which he was watching, will move in long unhurried strokes with his forehead against yours, will let you feel every inch of it while he keeps your eyes locked to his, and the experience is not really about sex anymore at that point. It's about being witnessed by Satoru Gojo with the entirety of his attention, and you'll not be the same person on the other side of it, and he'll not say a word the whole time.

That silence will be the loudest thing he's ever offered you.

He'll also fuck you to apologise when he doesn't have the words for an apology, which is most of the time.

You'll learn to read it, will learn the difference between the cocky-Satoru sex and the I-was-an-asshole-and-I-know-it Satoru sex, the second one is quieter and more attentive and involves him doing things he would normally tease you for asking for.

It involves him taking your hand and putting it in his hair himself, will involve him saying tell me what you want and meaning it without sarcasm, and afterwards he'll lie there with his head on your chest and you'll run your fingers along his spine and neither of you will say what just happened or what it was for, but the apology will be received and the thing he did will be, if not forgiven, at least set down for now.

This is how a lot of arguments end with him, in a language he never had to learn because his body already knew it.

He'll also fuck you the night before he has to do something dangerous.

You'll learn to read this one too, will feel it in the way his hands move slower than usual, in the way he keeps pulling back to look at your face, the way he's paying attention not to the act but to you. Specific you, the version of you that exists in this room on this night, as if he's taking a photograph he can carry with him.

You'll know, on those nights, not to ask where he's going in the morning, will know to let him have whatever shape of you he needs to take. You'll know to be still and present and here, because in the morning he'll be gone and the version of you he carries into the field is the one he assembled from the night before, and you want it to be a good version.

You want him to come home, and so you'll give him every part of yourself that he asks for and a few he doesn't, and he'll leave without waking you, and there'll be a hoodie on the pillow where his head was, and you'll not see him for ten days, and when he comes back the first thing he does is press his face into the side of your neck and breathe.

And the thing about all of this (the menace, the stamina, the filth, the devotion, the foul mouth, the long slow worship sessions, the apology-fucks, the goodbye-fucks, the way he hoards the contact like a man who has been freezing his whole life finally finding fire) the thing about all of it is that it is all, every part of it, the same thing, the same hunger expressing itself in different registers. The same starvation reaching for the same food, the same impossible undefended boy finally, finally being allowed to put his hands on another human being and have them not slide off.

You'll lie next to him in the dark afterwards and you'll understand that what just happened was, on its surface, sex, and underneath the surface was something older and stranger and closer to a religious rite. A man being touched, and not many people in the history of the world have been loved like that, and you're one of them, and whatever else happens, whatever else this relationship costs you or gives you, that fact will not stop being true.

The praise is constant (look at you, just like that, good, fuck, that's good, you're doing so well for me) he says it casually, almost lazily, like it's just a fact he's observing. That's somehow more devastating than if he were being intense about it, because it means he thinks these things about you all the time and is only sharing a small sample of them with you out loud.

But he likes being praised too, he won't ask, he'd rather die than ask, but the first time you tell him breathless that he's incredible, that no one has ever done this to you, he gets this look. A flicker. The mask slips for half a second and you see something hungry underneath, something almost grateful, and then it's gone and he's smirking again and telling you of course he is, he's Gojo Satoru, what did you expect?

You let him have the bit, but you know what you saw, and you'll say it again, more, every time, because no one in his entire life has thought to tell him he was good at anything other than killing, and that's a wrong that you can begin, slowly, to correct.

The correcting will be one of the most important things you ever do for another person, and he'll never quite let you know how much it matters, but it does, and you will see, over months and years, the small ways it has remade him. The way the deflections come slightly less automatically, the way he will, occasionally, just say thanks, without irony, before he can stop himself.

Aftercare from him is strange and lovely. Satoru doesn't have a script for it, he didn't grow up with a script for any of this, but he'll get you water without being asked. He'll pull a blanket over you, lie next to you with one arm slung across your waist and trace patterns on your skin with a fingertip while he talks about something completely unrelated (a mission, a student, a snack he wants) and you'll realise slowly that this is him being soft. Him decompressing.

This is him letting you in, and the touch never stops, his hand never leaves your skin for the entire conversation. He's banking the contact, storing it, he's making sure his body remembers as much of yours as it can before he has to walk back out the door tomorrow and be untouchable again.

Once you understand this you will never again interrupt him when he's doing it, will never again roll away to get up too early, will lie there and let him have all the minutes he can take, because you understand now what the minutes cost him to come by and what they'll have to last him through.

And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, afterward, in the dark, with the blindfold on the nightstand and his face hidden in your shoulder, he'll say something (something small) I'm glad you're here, or don't go anywhere, okay? or, once, very quietly, thank you.

You'll know this is hard and you'll hold him a little tighter, not make a thing of it. Because making a thing of it would close the door, and the door has been closed for so long in his life that you've learned to walk through every opening softly, without comment, without celebration, just in, the way smoke moves through a window.

You'll lie there listening to him breathe and you'll think about how this man, this impossible, terrible, beloved man, has just told you something true, and how the world will never know he's capable of it, and how you're the only person alive who gets to.

In the morning he'll be insufferable again, of course he will, he'll be eating your breakfast and stealing your shower and complaining loudly about your coffee. But he'll catch your eye across the kitchen and the smile he gives you won't be the one he gives the world, it'll be a smaller one, a realer one, one that for a moment looks like a man and not a myth.

You'll understand that this (the kitchen, the bad coffee, the man who's just stolen your food and is now grinning at you like he's gotten away with it) is the only piece of his life that actually belongs to him.

That everything else has been claimed by other people, by the clan, the elders, the higher-ups, the public, his students and the dead. That he's hoarding this slow, ordinary morning the way a dragon hoards gold, fiercely, secretly.

Loving Satoru Gojo means loving a person who's been told his entire life that he's more important than the people around him and who's come to believe it in some ways and despise it in others and who's no idea how to be loved as a person rather than as a weapon.

You'll be one of the first people in his life to try. You'll fail sometimes, he'll fail more.

The failure will sometimes be cruel, but when he gets it right, when he lets you in, when the mask falls, when he reaches for you in his sleep, when he kills for you without flinching and then comes home and makes a stupid joke about dinner, when he hoards an afternoon with you the way other men hoard treasure, when his hand finds your wrist for the hundredth time that day because his body simply will not stop seeking yours out, when you understand that you are, in the entire impossible structure of his existence, the one thing he chose and the one thing that chooses him back... you'll understand that nothing in his life prepared him to be loved and he's trying anyway, badly and brilliantly, with everything he has left.

I have unfortunately not made the kind of progress I wanted to this month due to just being hit with a truck of life things (and a new family emergency, fun! (not) (I'm okay, so don't worry! But it's a lot right now.))

Overall, I've been left without much time or energy... I did a lot of work in the first week of March, but after that, it's been rough goings. BUT! There's STILL progress.

That being said, there might be a delay based on my previous prediction... I'm hoping no later than June for a release date. IDEALLY, I'd like to be able to release the next Act to Flirt update by the 6th anniversary of its first demo release (May 14th.)

Speaking of, a decent chunk of my working time this past month was also taken up by me working on an update for Act to Flirt! But I don't want to detail all of that progress here-- it's actually a decently chunky update despite it mostly being small revisions and reorganization. And one other new thing :) ... but I'm not quite done with that, either.

Back to I Love TV!, though. Let me detail some of the progress:

Despite not initially planning to, I implemented an "HP" and "Heartbreak" system, akin to that in Act to Flirt. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THERE WILL BE A HEARTBREAK ROUTE. Before this, though, there was little gameplay involved past Tenna's Route. It was very boring to "play" by just clicking buttons without any risk involved (especially since the "Secret" date is supposed to be more difficult, akin to the "Secret" / Shadow Crystal bosses). This has not impacted Tenna's Route at all, though! So I don't need to re-write anything and it has not significantly added to development time in that regard.

I'm making an effort to include alt text during the cutscenes and make the existing alt text less insufferable to listen to (before, the TTS would read out every * as "asterisk" and it was... annoying.) I've never worked with this so intentionally, so do bare with me if I miss something!

(That being said, one character is making this a nightmare... I apologize if I'm not properly able to implement things correctly because of this.)

Implemented a setting to turn off glitches/shaking imagery. This has to be done manually for every place where it would show up, so again, I might miss something, but I am trying my best to be thorough!

Implemented the final Legend of Tenna-style section, although I have done none of the writing for it yet.

Speaking of that, I also cleaned up the existing Legend of Tenna-style sections, which I mentioned wanting to do before. I have a couple parts to one of them yet, but these two should otherwise be done.

Made a handful of new "funny text"s for Tenna, as well as re-made the "Technical Difficulties" screen from Deltarune to be upscaled and feature a new chibi Tenna.

Finished the Secret date, as well as the CG for its date ending!

The first date for the [Weird] Route is ALMOST done! I just want to add another "Act" option. Other than that, it's completely playable, just needs some fine-tuning.

Connected all the separated pieces! This includes connecting all the cutscenes to the main story, connecting the Secret date to the rest of the game (and its post-date dialogue), connecting in the "Aside Story," adding access to the endings... The main hurdle is that I haven't made anything for the "Universal End" (or credits) so there's nothing to connect here.

ONLY ONE MORE CUTSCENE IS LEFT!! 8/9 of them are DONE AND IMPLEMENTED!! :D

10/12 of the endings are COMPLETE (aside from CG's and their connection to the "Universal End," if applicable), and the remaining 2 are WIP's. But I also haven't started the "Universal End" yet.

ALL of the CG's for Tenna's Route / endings should be completed. Started work for other the ending CG's, but only otherwise finished the one for the "Good" End of the Secret Date and have started the set for the "Universal End."

To frame that into the outline I've been using--

Tenna’s Route [COMPLETE]: ⭐ Route Introduction [COMPLETE] ⭐ Quiz Date [COMPLETE] ⭐ Point-n-Click section [COMPLETE] ⭐ Shop Intermission [COMPLETE] ⭐ “Park” Date [COMPLETE] ⭐ Route “Ending” [COMPLETE] [Weird] Route: 💚 Route Introduction [COMPLETE] 💚 Point-n-Click section 1 [COMPLETE] 💚 Shop Interactions [COMPLETE] 💚 First Date [Nearly complete] 💚 Point-n-Click section 2 [Nearly complete] 💚 Second Date [not started] Secret Date [COMPLETE]: 🔷 Actual Date [COMPLETE] 🔷 Date Ending [COMPLETE] 🔷 “Bad” Ending [COMPLETE] Endings: ⭐ Good Ending [COMPLETE] ⭐ “Bad” Ending [COMPLETE] ⭐ Ending alone [COMPLETE] 💚 Good Ending [COMPLETE] 💚 “Bad” Ending [COMPLETE] 🔷 Good Ending [Started, not yet complete] ⭐🔷 Combo Ending [COMPLETE] 💚🔷 Combo Ending [Started, not yet complete] ⭐💚 Combo Ending [COMPLETE] ⭐💚🔷 Triple Ending [COMPLETE] 💗 “Actual”/Universal Ending [not started] Other Things: 💗 Cutscenes [8/9 completed] 💗 “Aside Story”(?) [COMPLETE, aside from a small part]

DO NOTE: All of these things marked as complete, I haven't necessarily actually "completed" in the sense that all of the image assets, alt text, and polishing is done. The biggest hurdle for me is writing the dialogue and code and making sure it functions. Once I finish that part, the rest doesn't feel so much like "work" to me anymore... So, this list isn't IMMENSELY accurate, but the main aspect to me is that it's playable and readable all the way through even if it doesn't look pretty yet.

I've also been setting up the couple of Tumblr-blog-oriented things designed for AtF's new update and then the subsequent ILTV release in the background... Hopefully, even if Tumblr tries to implement a dumb update again, I'll still be able to do things. It'll revolve around your guys' input and asks!! :D