#trans gojo

Usually she lingers. Not in ways anyone could call indiscreet, not unless they know where to look. She waits for others to gather their things, drags out the end of her packing, glances at him when nobody else is paying attention. Sometimes she finds a reason to ask a question she already knows the answer to. Sometimes she says nothing at all and only stands near enough to make him feel her there while the room empties.

She likes testing how long it takes for his patience to fray. She likes watching it happen.

Then she stops.

Class ends and she is already on her feet. Her bag is over her shoulder before the last student near the aisle has finished standing. She leaves with the others instead of after them. Her gaze stays on the door or on her phone or on the girl walking next to her. Never him.

The first time it happens, Sukuna thinks nothing of it. She is a student. She has a schedule. She is allowed other priorities. He is not so pathetic that he requires a performance after every lecture.

The fifth time, he notices.

By the second week, he notices enough to become annoyed.

She no longer shows up at office hours just to lean against the frame of his doorway and say something aggravating in a pretty voice. She no longer sends him messages from the library demanding he buy her coffee if he expects her to survive his workload. She no longer appears near his car at the end of the day and acts as if it is his job to know she needs a ride. When she does message him, which is rare now, it is brief and almost impersonal. Fine. Busy. Later. She has never used language with him so sparingly before.

The lack of trouble changes the shape of his days in stupid, noticeable ways.

He hates that he notices.

Sukuna sits through faculty meetings with one leg crossed over the other and his phone facedown on the table, and still some part of him keeps expecting it to light up with her name and some demand that pretends not to be an invitation. He walks into his office between lectures and catches himself glancing at the spare chair because she has a bad habit of appearing in it with her legs crossed and his pen in her fingers. He leaves campus in the evening and half expects to find her outside the building, tapping her heel and rolling her eyes because he took too long.

Nothing.

He tells himself the silence should be a relief.

Instead it crawls under his skin.

Like rumors crawl.

He hears some of it in the teachers’ room before he pieces together that it matters.

Not much. Not direct. Faculty gossip never arrives whole. It comes shredded by disinterest and cowardice, shaped into things people can repeat without having to own them.

Somebody says there is been nonsense spreading among the students again. Another says young people live for petty cruelty and boredom. A woman from another department mentions, with the lazy distance of somebody commenting on weather, that one of Professor Nanami’s girls has had rumors going around. Someone else asks which one. The answer is vague. Tall one. Pretty one. Blue eyes. Then somebody says, oh, the clever one.

Satomi.

Sukuna hears her name and lifts his eyes from the stack of exams in front of him.

The conversation does not stop, but it shifts under his attention the way rooms often do when he bothers to let people feel he is listening.

The details are not particularly clear. A rumor, apparently. Something personal. Something about identity. Students being nasty. Girls in the restrooms. Boys acting like rejected idiots. The usual.

One older lecturer tuts in false sympathy and says that generation is obsessed with labels. Another mutters that privacy does not exist anymore. Somebody says it is probably exaggerated. Another says no, I heard there was something to it.

Sukuna thinks, briefly and without much heat, that if people know Satomi is trans then they know. So what.

In his head, it ends there.

What is there to piece together? She is a woman. She is his. Neither fact should be open for debate by strangers with too much spare time. It does not occur to him, not then, that others might not let it sit with the same indifference. It does not occur to him that Satomi may not feel the same hard contempt he would. He knows she hides certain things. Knows she keeps her personal life guarded with almost everyone. Knows she likes control over how she is perceived. But knowing facts about her and understanding the shape of her fear are two different things, and fear is not something she has ever handed him plainly.

So he dismisses the chatter.

He should not.

Later, when he thinks back on those days, what irritates him most is not that others were stupid. That is expected. It is that he was not paying close enough attention to how stupidity lands differently when it is aimed at someone already living inside scrutiny.

He notices the rest in retrospect. The details gather once he knows where to place them.

Satomi does not eat with the same group anymore. Not properly.

There used to be a small orbit around her at lunch, fluid but consistent. Maki when schedules aligned. Miwa more often than not. Sometimes Momo, sometimes another girl or two from a different seminar. Satomi at the center without seeming to force it, because people like looking at her and listening to her and provoking her. She makes a table feel chosen simply by sitting there.

Then that changes too.

He sees her only occasionally in the courtyard during the break period. Sometimes she is with one girl. Sometimes two. Never the larger loose group that used to gather around her. On some days she is alone, eating nothing, pretending to read.

Other times he does not see her at all.

Once, from the faculty window that overlooks the side path between the language building and the humanities wing, he watches her turn the corner too sharply and nearly collide with a cluster of students. Three girls, two boys. One of the girls says something. Sukuna cannot hear it through the glass. Satomi’s shoulders go rigid for exactly one breath, then she walks on without stopping. The students look after her. One of the boys laughs. One girl smacks his arm. The whole thing lasts no more than a few seconds.

It irritates him all afternoon.

By then he is already aware that her attention in class has shifted.

Not her performance. Never that. Satomi is still sharp enough to answer before most students finish thinking. She still knows the material better than half the room. If anything, her answers get cleaner. More stripped down. Less playful. She no longer uses wit as garnish. She gives him the exact thing he asks for and then looks back down at her notes, as if she resents the air between them.

She also stops looking at him when he is not speaking to her.

That is the detail that finally settles into him as wrong.

Satomi is vain enough to enjoy being watched and bold enough to do some watching of her own. Not crudely. Not often enough to be caught by people who do not know what to look for. But he knows. He knows the particular weight of her attention, the quiet insistence of it. He knows when she is tracking him through a room out of defiance or fondness or need. He knows how she looks when she wants something and is deciding whether or not to make him work for the privilege of giving it to her.

Now she keeps her eyes away.

Sukuna begins to test it.

He says her name in class more often than necessary. Calls on her for material he could easily extract from someone else. Asks follow-up questions he knows she can answer. Waits for the moment she must look at him to respond.

Each time, her gaze rises, fixes on him, gives him what he wants, and drops away again the second she is allowed.

No challenge in it. No spark.

He starts hating the room when it happens.

By the time she misses a first class, he is already in a bad mood.

He does not look for her immediately. That would be absurd. Students miss lectures all the time. They get sick, oversleep, lose track of deadlines, decide on temporary stupidity, then return with excuses and visible regret.

Still, as he takes attendance with his eyes rather than the roster, the empty seat lands too sharply in his mind.

He teaches anyway.

The next lecture she attends, she says nothing after class and leaves before he reaches the second sentence of what should have been a correction on her paper. He watches the door shut behind her and decides he will let her have whatever sulk this is.

Then she misses another.

Then another.

By the time he checks his phone between lectures and sees that she has not answered the message he sent the previous evening, something ugly has already begun to collect low in his gut.

Where are you.

A simple question. No reply.

He sends another hours later.

You miss again and you explain.

Nothing.

He could call. He does not. Not yet. Something in him resists the shape of chasing her when he still does not know if there is anything to chase.

He asks nobody at first. Pride, perhaps. Or caution. He has no interest in making her absence into a public inquiry that invites curiosity. Whatever exists between them functions because it is contained. He will not be the one to loosen the lid.

Then she misses office hours she herself had asked about three days earlier.

That is when the edge of concern finally cuts clean through annoyance.

Sukuna sits in his chair after the last waiting student leaves, glances at the clock, then at the half-open door. Satomi would usually have entered without knocking by now, full of some bad attitude and a question she could have asked by email. The room stays empty. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. The evening on campus deepens outside his window. Nothing.

He takes out his phone.

You’re testing my patience.

Sent. Delivered. Not read.

He stares at the screen longer than he should, then locks it and slips it back into his pocket with all the restraint of a man who would rather crush something.

The first useful answer comes from Miwa.

Not because he seeks her out in any dramatic way. He simply catches her by the vending machines after one of his classes, small shoulders tucked in, hands wrapped around a canned tea she has not opened yet. She startles when he says her name. Most students do. He has that effect. Miwa more than most.

“Professor,” she says, standing straighter at once.

Sukuna studies her face for a second. She is quiet, observant, the sort who notices more than she advertises. Satomi tolerates very few people closely. Miwa is one of the rare ones. That alone makes her useful.

“Where is she,” he asks.

Miwa blinks once.

“Who.”

He gives her a look.

She folds immediately, not out of fear exactly, but because pretending otherwise would be insulting both of them.

“Satomi?” Miwa grips the can a little tighter. “I don’t know.”

“Try harder.”

She wets her lips, glancing down the hall and then back to him.

“She’s been ignoring us.”

Us.

Good.

That means she has not singled him out for avoidance. The conclusion should soothe him. It does not.

“How long.”

“A few days.”

“A few,” he repeats flatly.

Miwa lifts her eyes again. There is worry in them, plain enough to make him stop pressing quite so hard.

“I messaged her. Maki did too. She said she was fine, then stopped answering.”

The answer lands badly.

Sukuna says nothing for a beat.

Miwa, perhaps because she mistakes his silence for openness, adds quietly,

“She’s not acting like herself.”

No. He has gathered that much.

“Did something happen?”

Miwa hesitates.

That hesitation tells him enough that his whole attention narrows.

“What.”

She lowers her voice.

“There were rumors.”

He says nothing.

“People were talking about her. About… personal things.” Miwa swallows. “I think someone may have told her something.”

His face does not change. He is practiced enough that it never has to. But something under his sternum turns hard and cold.

“What did they say?”

“I don’t know exactly.” Miwa looks miserable for not knowing. “Satomi didn’t tell me.”

He nods once. That is all. No thanks, no dismissal.

Just a gesture that ends the exchange.

Miwa lingers.

“Professor.”

He looks at her again.

“She’s really not okay.”

Sukuna lets that settle. Then he says,

“I heard you.”

Miwa nods and leaves with her tea still unopened.

From that point on, the days sharpen.

He messages Satomi again that night.

Answer me.

No reply.

The next morning she misses class.

So does the following afternoon.

He gives her five days.

Not because he enjoys generosity, but because five days is enough time to determine whether this is retreat or collapse. Enough time for fever to break, for panic to dull, for stubborn girls to stop licking their wounds in private and come back swinging. Enough time for her to make contact if she intends to remain in command of herself.

Five days and every class missed.

Five days and every message unanswered.

Five days and no appearance anywhere on campus except the briefest recorded exit from her dorm building for food and then back again. Five days and she ignores her friends too. Maki messages him once, a rare and unpleasant overlap of their separate concern, only to ask if he has heard from her. He does not answer Maki, because he does not care to start whatever line of questioning would follow.

By the third day he has already set people on it.

Sukuna’s money does not come from teaching.

The university salary is useful only in that it gives him routine, access, a legitimate face to wear over other operations, and a reason to keep certain worlds overlapping just enough. His real income comes from channels far older and more dangerous than academia. Men answer him because he owns too much of what feeds them. Information arrives because he expects it to.

Access exists because he pays for it, built it, or took it.

He does not need much.

Dorm entry records. Camera timestamps. Confirmation she is inside. Confirmation she is not alone. Confirmation there has been no hospital call, no ambulance, no obvious emergency. Confirmation that, yes, she has barely left and no, she has not had visitors except a girl once, likely Maki, carrying a convenience store bag.

He tells himself this is precaution.

It is also the only thing that keeps him from ripping the door off her room on the fourth day, but he knows the girls visited her with food and drinks, and left at night empty handed.

By the fifth, his restraint is gone.

He leaves campus later than usual, after a meeting he does not remember hearing through. He goes home only long enough to change out of the charcoal suit he wore to lecture and into black trousers and a black turtleneck under a dark cardigan, something that reads less like professor and more like the man he becomes once formal obligations end. The clothes sit cleanly on him. Expensive. Simple. Controlled. He would look overdone at most dormitories. He does not care.

The drive is quiet and too short.

He parks, cuts the engine, and sits for one breath with both hands resting on the wheel. He listens to the silence of the car. Measures the pulse at his throat. Lets the anger settle into a useable shape.

Then he gets out.

The campus housing building is bright in the ugly institutional way all student living is bright. Fluorescent hallways. Bad flooring. Doors too thin. Young people passing with wet hair, textbooks, half-empty laundry baskets, faces that register him and then look away fast. He moves through it untouched, each step precise, the building’s cameras catching his image from corners he already knows.

He knocks once on her door.

Nothing.

He knows she is inside. He checked before coming. More than that, he can hear the shower running beyond the wall, a steady rush of water behind wood and tile. He imagines her in there and the first image his mind offers is so dark it sours the inside of his mouth — blood diluted at a drain, pills on the sink, wrists, heat, collapse. Satomi is dramatic, proud, and fragile in places she guards with claws. He has never thought her foolish enough to hurt herself that way, but five days of silence peel certainty apart.

He does not knock again.

His hand goes to his pocket and closes around the copy of her key.

She gave it to him in a mood halfway between teasing and affection sometime during the second month of whatever this arrangement is. He remembers the look on her face, chin raised as if daring him to make fun of her for the gesture. For emergencies, she had said. Or for when you finally stop pretending you don’t like when I’m in your space.

He had taken the key, slipped it onto a separate ring, and never once used it.

Until now.

The lock turns easily.

He opens the door and steps inside.

Her dorm room is warmer than the hallway and smells faintly of steam, soap, and something sweet that has long gone stale. The curtains are mostly drawn. One lamp on near the desk. The room is neat in the surfaces that matter and chaotic in the details that reveal strain — clothes folded but not put away, half-finished cups, skincare on the sink counter visible through the cracked bathroom door, papers stacked too precisely to be genuine tidiness. Her bag lies by the bed as if dropped there days ago.

The shower is still running.

He crosses the room in three steps and pushes the bathroom door open.

Steam hits him first, dense and hot enough to make the air feel thick. The mirror is fully fogged. The tiles shine wet. The water comes down in a punishing stream from above, far hotter than it should be. Through the blur of it he sees her shape.

Satomi is folded into herself under the showerhead, arms wrapped tight around her own body as if she is trying to keep it from falling apart. Her back is to him at first, narrow shoulders shaking. Pale skin flushed bright from the heat. Long wet hair plastered pale against her spine and chest. She is crying hard enough that he can hear the breaks in her breath even over the water.

He freezes for exactly half a second.

Not because of her body. He has seen her in too many states for that to matter. Not because of nakedness. That is irrelevant beside the sight of her curled inward this completely, reduced to trembling and heat and effort just to keep standing.

She senses him a second later. Turns her head. Sees him.

Her blue eyes go wide with horror, shock, and something so raw it looks like pain caught in the act of trying to hide.

“Sukuna—”

He reaches past her and turns the shower off.

The sudden quiet is violent. Water still trickles from her hair, from her shoulders, down the lines of her body. The room fills with the sound of her breathing instead, ragged and wet.

“Don’t,” she says immediately, voice shredded. “Don’t look at me.”

She tries to cover herself more tightly, wrists crossing over chest and stomach, chin turning away, shoulders caving in with shame that arrives so fast it feels rehearsed. The motion slices straight through what is left of his restraint.

Sukuna catches both her wrists before she can hide behind them.

Not harshly. Firm enough to stop the movement, gentle enough not to startle her worse.

She jerks once against his grip, more from panic than resistance. He lowers her hands slowly, carefully, moving them out of the way not because he cares about seeing but because he refuses to let her turn herself into something that must be hidden from him.

Her face stays angled away.

“Look at me,” he says.

“No.”

Her voice cracks on the word.

He does not repeat himself. Instead he eases forward and wraps both arms around her.

The effect is immediate.

Satomi is soaking wet. The heat of the room clings to her skin, and the water soaks through his cardigan and shirt in seconds, spreads cold along his chest and stomach beneath the remaining warmth of her body. She is all tremor and breath and damp hair against him. He pulls her in until there is no distance left, until her forehead brushes his collarbone and her knees stop that small shaking attempt to hold themselves rigid.

She makes a broken sound at first, offended by the contact and relieved by it in the same breath.

“You’re getting wet,” she mutters, as if that is the part of this he should mind.

The sentence is so absurd in this moment that something almost like tenderness cuts clean through his anger.

“I noticed.”

She still refuses to lift her face. He lets her have that much.

One of his hands slides to the back of her head, fingers threading through the heavy wet strands there, holding without forcing. The other settles low at her back, palm broad and warm against skin heated too far by the water. He rubs once, slow and steady.

Her breathing stutters again. Then, just as quickly, shifts.

The resistance goes out of her with painful speed.

Both her arms come around his torso, tentative only for an instant before they tighten. She clings. Not delicately. Not seductively. Not like the teasing thing she usually is with him. She latches on with the humiliating urgency of someone who has been hurting alone long enough that touch becomes an answer before pride can interfere.

Her face presses into his chest. Through the soaked fabric he can feel the shape of her mouth against him, the warm exhale there, the way she breathes him in with desperate, exhausted greed. He knows his cologne. Knows the brand because he chose it for the fact it stays subtle even after a long day, dark and clean and expensive without being cloying. Satomi has teased him about it before, calling it unfair that a man like him should smell that good. Now she inhales it like she has been deprived.

He tightens his arms.

There is nothing hurried in the hold after that. Nothing performative. He simply keeps her there. Lets her cry into him until the worst edge burns itself down.

Time stretches strangely in the steamy bathroom. He does not count minutes. He counts the smaller things instead. How her grip changes. How the sobs stop tearing through her and become shaky breaths. How the tension in her shoulders eases by degrees. How the frantic heat of panic leaves her muscles and something more fragile takes its place.

By the time she speaks again, her voice is low and rough from crying.

“I’m sorry.”

He looks down at the crown of her head.

“For what.”

“For this.”

He gives the answer no softness because softness would insult the weight of it.

“Stupid thing to apologize for.”

Her fingers curl once in his wet shirt. That is all. But he feels it.

After another minute, when he is certain she can stand without swaying, he says,

“You intend to tell me what happened.”

It is not phrased as a question. He does not care to pretend.

Satomi only makes a small sound against his chest, something too muffled to parse.

He glances toward the counter, toward the towel hanging there, then back down at her bent head.

“You’re spending the weekend at my apartment.”

She stiffens just slightly, enough to show she heard.

“You can pack,” he says. “Or I’ll do it for you.”

Another beat. Then a weak nod against his chest.

Good.

He does not move yet. Neither does she.

It becomes clear, in the stillness after decision, just how badly she has missed contact. Not sex, not flirtation, not the sharp pull-and-push they usually perform around each other. Simpler than that. More humiliating. She has missed being held by someone who does not ask anything from her first. He can feel it in how completely she settles. In how quickly her body chooses his as the place to stop fighting.

That realization makes something cold sharpen behind his ribs.

Someone did this.

Not in some grand tragic way. Not a single catastrophic act. Cruelty is rarely that clean. But someone, likely several someones, drove her into five days of silence and locked doors and scalding showers hot enough to redden her skin. Someone got inside the precise places where her pride and fear are knotted together and pulled until they tore.

He thinks of Yorozu.

Miwa had not known details, but she had known enough to look sick when looking at the girl during those days. That is enough for now.

Sukuna keeps one hand at the nape of Satomi’s neck and the other spread against the damp curve of her lower back and allows himself exactly one private thought about Yorozu and what fear can be taught to a careless mouth.

Then Satomi speaks again, so quietly he barely catches it.

“Sukuna.”

He hums once.

When she lifts her face at last, it is only partway. Enough for him to see her eyes, swollen and bright from crying, lashes wet and clumped, mouth soft and miserable. The sight punches harder than it should. Satomi is used to assembling herself into beauty before anyone gets a chance to see her unravel. Right now she is giving him what the rest of the world does not get.

“Do you think,” she begins, then stops.

He waits.

Her eyes flick away. Shame moves across her face so plainly that he already knows he is going to hate the question before she finishes it.

“Do you think I need surgery,” she asks, each word small and scraped raw, “to be a real woman?”

The entire room goes still inside him.

Anger arrives first, immediate and blinding, because the question itself is evidence. Somebody has been inside her head with filthy hands. Somebody has taken one of the oldest cruelties in the world and pushed it between her ribs until she believed it worth asking aloud. There are answers he could give in anger. There are names he could demand right now. There are vicious promises lining up behind his teeth.

He does not let a single one of them out.

Sukuna knows enough, if not always gracefully, to understand that this is not the moment for his rage. Rage would only make the question heavier. Would make her feel foolish for voicing it.

Right now she needs certainty so steady it does not shake even when his anger does.

He slides one hand up and under her chin, lifts her face fully.

Her eyes try to evade his and fail.

“No,” he says.

One word. Calm. Flat. Certain.

She just stares at him.

He keeps his voice level.

“You are a real woman.”

Her breath catches.

“You have always been.”

The tears well again instantly. He sees them gather in those too-bright blue eyes, held there by the force of her trying not to lose control all over him again.

He goes on before doubt can interrupt.

“You don’t need to carve yourself open for other people’s comfort. You don’t need permission. You don’t need proof.” His thumb rests still against her jaw. “The only thing you need is to know it and stop letting idiots tell you otherwise.”

Her mouth trembles.

He should probably stop there.

Instead he leans down and kisses her.

Softly, because anything else would be cruelty. Gently, because her face is still wrecked from crying and the room still smells of salt and hot water. His mouth meets hers with no hunger in it, only the deliberate pressure of reassurance made physical. A brief touch. Warm. Firm.

Enough to settle something without asking for more.

When he pulls back, she looks stunned.

Good.

He would rather leave her stunned than spiraling.

“Dry off,” he says.

It takes her a second to move. When she does, it is with the strange carefulness of someone returning to her body piece by piece. She reaches for the towel on the rack. Wraps it around herself. Pats at her face, then her hair, then stops halfway through as if remembering he is drenched too.

Her eyes widen in sudden practical concern that would almost be funny under any other circumstances.

“You’re soaked.”

“Nothing gets past you.”

She makes a face, faint but real. Better than crying.

Then she starts fussing.

It is the most Satomi thing she has done in days, he suspects. Dragged out of a breakdown only to turn immediately toward the fact his cardigan is clinging wetly to him. She tells him he cannot stay in those clothes or he will catch something, which is nonsense on multiple levels, but he lets her say it because the cadence of complaint sounds more like her than the broken whisper from before.

She ushers him out of the bathroom with the towel clenched around her and directs him to the chair by the desk. He pulls off the cardigan first, drops it over the back. Then the turtleneck, wet fabric peeling from skin with mild annoyance. Satomi, now in an oversized sleep shirt and shorts dug out from a drawer, goes rummaging until she produces one of her hoodies and hands it to him with a look that dares comment.

It is pale pink and clearly hers. Smaller through the shoulders than anything he would choose for himself, but large enough to fit because she likes things oversized. There’s a stamp on the back that reads ‘Babygirl.’ with some glitter and curvy font.

He takes it.

She watches while he pulls it over his head, then seems satisfied in a way that makes the room feel less wrecked.

By then she has begun packing.

Not much. Just enough for two days, maybe three if he decides she is not stable enough to return sooner. She moves with mechanical efficiency at first, opening drawers, choosing clothes, toiletries, chargers. Sukuna stays seated and watches. Not because he doubts she can handle the task, but because if he stands too soon he might start doing it for her, and she already looks close to humiliated enough.

The room is quiet except for zippers and fabric.

At one point she pauses with a folded sweater in her hands, staring at nothing. Sukuna says her name once. She blinks, nods, and keeps moving.

When she is nearly done, he says,

“Phone.”

She looks over.

“What.”

“Take it.”

She glances toward the nightstand where it lies face down.

“I know where it is.”

“That wasn’t the instruction.”

A faint, exhausted irritation crosses her face. Good. He still prefers irritation to vacancy.

She retrieves the phone and tucks it into her bag.

Then she hesitates.

Sukuna reads the hesitation before she speaks.

“What.”

“My friends.”

The words are small again, uncertain in a different way now. Concern instead of shame.

He leans back slightly, considering her.

“Which ones.”

“Maki. Miwa. Momo. They’ve been messaging.”

“Then you send a message.”

She holds his gaze.

“You tell the good ones you’re not home,” he says, “but you’re safe and you’re eating.”

A strange look passes over her face. Half gratitude, half disbelief. As if she expected him to dismiss the matter entirely or sneer at her concern for them.

He nearly does sneer then, but only because she is underestimating him, which offends his pride.

“They worry,” he adds, flat enough to keep it from sounding kind. “No reason to make them do it more.”

That gets the ghost of a smile.

She types while perched on the edge of the bed, thumbs slower than usual from fatigue. He does not ask to read what she sends. He only watches the shape of her calm return in small increments as three brief messages go out. One to Maki. One to Miwa. One to Momo after a pause, perhaps because she knows Momo will make a whole event out of any news. Her phone starts vibrating almost immediately with replies.

She looks at the screen, exhales through her nose, then turns it facedown again.

“Done.”

“Good.”

He stands then, takes her bag before she can reach for it, and gives the room one last glance. Laptop closed. Curtains drawn. Bathroom door open to let the steam out. Wet towel slung over the chair. All the signs of a life temporarily paused. He locks the door behind them.

The walk back through the dorm feels easier only because she is beside him now and not hidden behind wood and silence.

She says nothing until they reach the car.

Once she is in the passenger seat, belted in and staring out through the windshield, he can see the exhaustion catching up to her in full. She holds herself upright by force. The crash after panic always comes like that. Sudden. Absolute. Her face, stripped of makeup and freshness, looks younger than it does on campus. Not childish. Only unguarded. More obviously tired.

He starts the engine and drives.

Traffic is light. The city after dark blurs past in clean lines of storefronts, signals, reflected lights on damp pavement. Inside the car the air is warm and quiet. Sukuna keeps one hand on the wheel, the other loose by the console. Satomi sits curled slightly toward the door at first, hugging one arm with the other as if habit still has not fully released her from the shower.

He lets the silence sit.

About ten minutes in, she shifts and turns her face toward the window more fully. The streetlights moving over her features reveal that she is not crying now. Only thinking. The kind of thinking that can become dangerous if left too long in the dark.

“Did Yorozu touch you,” he asks.

Satomi goes still.

He keeps his eyes on the road.

“No,” she says after a moment.

“Did she talk to you.”

A pause.

“Yes.”

His fingers tighten once on the wheel.

“What did she say.”

Another pause. Longer.

Then Satomi says, in a voice too controlled,

“You don’t need the whole thing right now.”

He could demand it. Could pin the details down, one by one, until he has enough to build a response out of them. But he hears the strain in her answer. Hears the edge of collapse still waiting there if pushed wrong.

So he says only,

“I’ll get it anyway.”

She lets out a tired breath that is almost a laugh and not quite amused.

“You are terrifying.”

“Yes.”

That, finally, earns a real sound from her.

Brief. Dry. Better.

He drives the rest of the way with one part of his mind on the road and another on names and possibilities. Yorozu first. The rejected boy rumor Miwa mentioned second. Whatever faculty heard and repeated in fragments third. He does not need to explode publicly.

Public consequences are rarely satisfying enough. He only needs facts, leverage, timing.

By the time they reach his building, he already knows whom he will call after Satomi is asleep.

His apartment is quiet when they enter.

It is the kind of quiet money buys properly. Thick doors, high enough ceilings, no neighbors stomping above, no hallway chatter seeping in. Clean lines. Dark wood. Controlled lighting. Everything in its place because he likes it that way and because nobody else lives there often enough to disrupt the order unless he allows it.

Satomi has disrupted it before in small ways.

Hair ties left on the sink. Books stacked by the couch. Face cream beside his shaving kit. A mug abandoned on his counter and retrieved only after he sent her a photograph of it with the caption take responsibility for your crimes.

Tonight he is grateful for the traces.

They make the space less severe when she needs that.

Satomi toes off her shoes at the entry without being asked. He sets her bag down by the bedroom door she usually uses and turns on the warmer lights rather than the overheads. She stands in the middle of the living room for a moment, barefaced and slight in her sleep clothes and one of his hoodies over them now, looking as if she is not fully certain she is allowed to occupy the air here again.

Ridiculous.

Sukuna gestures toward the kitchen.

“Sit.”

She obeys this time with no smart remark, choosing one of the stools at the island and curling her hands around the edge of the counter. He opens the refrigerator, starts pulling together the fastest useful meal available. Rice reheated properly, not microwaved to death. Salmon from the previous night. Pickled vegetables. Miso soup he keeps portioned because routine matters. He moves through the kitchen on habit and control, listening behind him to make sure she stays there.

She does.

Halfway through plating the food he glances back and finds her watching him.

Not with flirtation. Not with the slow heat she usually likes to build when he is using his hands for something else.

Just watching.

Quiet. Tired. A little dazed by being taken care of against her will and then not minding it.

“Stop staring,” he says.

“You’re cooking.”

“Yes.”

Her mouth shifts faintly.

“I like when you cook.”

He gives her a look over his shoulder.

“That obvious.”

“You’re bossier in the kitchen.”

“Eat the food and keep your opinions to yourself.”

That earns another small smile. He would like more of those before the night ends.

He sets the plate in front of her and watches until she takes the first bite. Only then does he move to make himself something separate. Not because he needs dinner — he already ate badly between obligations hours ago — but because sitting across from her with a drink while she picks at food will only make her more self-conscious. Better to normalize the table by doing something with his own hands.

At first she eats slowly, as if her body has forgotten the point. Then hunger remembers itself. Not greedily. Satomi is too well mannered even exhausted for that. But steadily. Enough to loosen the line between his shoulders.

When the soup is done he sets it beside her. She murmurs thanks without looking up, the word soft and automatic. He does not answer. He does not need to.

After a few minutes he says,

“You’ll tell me when you stop wanting this to be private.”

She looks up.

“The rumors,” he says. “The girl.”

Satomi lowers her chopsticks. The appetite fades from her face and becomes caution again.

“You mean when I let you go ruin people’s lives.”

“I mean when you stop pretending silence helps.”

The correction lands. She looks down at the soup, then back to him.

“I know it doesn’t help,” she says quietly. “I just… couldn’t handle people looking.”

Sukuna leans one hip against the counter opposite her.

“They already look, you like the attention, and you produce yourself for it.”

“I know.” A humorless laugh escapes her. “That’s part of the problem.”

He studies her for a long second.

“Then we fix where it matters.”

She absorbs that without responding, perhaps because she is too tired to challenge the we.

Good.

When she is done eating, he sends her to shower again — properly this time, not skin-boiling and folded in on herself. She starts to protest that she already showered. He informs her that standing under scalding water while crying is not hygiene, it is self-punishment, and she should learn the difference. She glares weakly at him from the hallway and goes anyway.

While the water runs, but gentler now, he makes two calls.

The first goes to a man who handles student records and petty leverage when asked. The instructions are simple — everything on Yorozu by morning. Academic standing, family, complaints, finances if there is anything stupid enough to use, names of who she talks to, and confirmation of where she was and with whom the day Miwa mentioned.

The second call goes elsewhere. Broader. Less legal. The rejected boy rumor too. He wants the name. Wants to know who has been spreading what and how far it has traveled. He wants details not because he enjoys them, though he does enjoy knowing the shape of prey, but because once he acts he does not like loose ends.

By the time he ends the second call, the anger in him has gone colder, cleaner.

The bathroom door opens.

Satomi steps out in fresh clothes and damp hair, skin no longer reddened by abuse. She still looks tired enough to sleep standing, but the wildness is gone from her face. She notices his shirt discarded over the arm of the couch and frowns.

“You’re not wearing the hoodie.”

“I changed.”

He did. Back into one of his own shirts once the wet things were dealt with. She seems to approve of this, though she only nods and walks closer.

The moment she reaches the living room, he sees the hesitation again. The pause before deciding where to put herself.

Bedroom. Couch. Distance. Nearness.

Sukuna makes the decision for her.

“Come here.”

She goes.

When she is close enough, he lifts a hand to the side of her neck, fingertips at the damp line where hair meets skin. Her pulse is steadier now. Still fast. Not panicked. He lets his thumb rest there, grounding them both to the fact she is here, upright, and no longer alone.

“You sleep here tonight,” he says.

Satomi’s mouth softens in a tired, crooked little smile.

“I figured.”

“Genius even after missing so many classes.”

She glances toward the bedroom, then back at him.

“Can I ask you something without you getting mean about it.”

“No.”

Her eyes narrow.

“That defeats the point.”

“Ask.”

She sighs, but the sound lacks heat.

“Were you worried?”

He looks at her.

It is a stupid question. Not because the answer is no, but because worry is too small a word for the black thoughts that arrived when the door did not open and the shower ran too long and he imagined a body behind it.

He does not give her any of that.

“Yes,” he says.

Her gaze shifts down, then up again. The answer seems to do something to her, though she does not comment on it. She only leans the smallest fraction closer into his hand at her neck, as if she cannot help it.

He lets her.

When they finally go to bed, he expects distance at first. Some stubborn attempt on her part to reclaim dignity after the bathroom, after the tears, after the question she asked him in a voice barely louder than breath.

He is wrong.

The second the lights go down and the room settles, Satomi turns toward him and presses herself along his side like she has done this a hundred times and never once with as much need. One arm over his waist. One knee hooked half over his thigh. Face buried against his shoulder. Her whole body asks not to be sent away.

He wraps an arm around her and that is the end of it.

It does not take long for her to start drifting. Exhaustion has teeth. It pulls her under fast once safety finally exists around her. He feels it in the way her grip loosens, then tightens once in sleep reflex before easing fully. Her breathing evens. Her body grows heavy and warm against his.

Sukuna stays awake.

He lies there in the dark of his own room with Satomi asleep against him and listens to the city under the windows and the steady quiet of the apartment. His hand remains on her back. Every so often he drags it once, slowly, from shoulder blade to waist. She settles deeper each time without waking.

His mind does not soften with the room.

It sharpens.

He thinks of her in the shower, arms crossed over herself, unable to bear being seen. Thinks of the question about surgery. Thinks of five days of her alone with whatever those girls and boys and whispering idiots shoved into her head. Thinks of faculty chatter and his own mistake in dismissing it. Thinks of Miwa saying she is not acting like herself. Thinks of how quickly Satomi gave in once held, which means the isolation had gone on too long already.

Then he thinks of Yorozu.

The next morning will come. Information will arrive. Facts will replace guesswork. He will act from there. Perhaps not dramatically. Perhaps not visibly. But thoroughly.

He is too old and too practiced to confuse rage with efficiency.

Still, in the dark, with Satomi breathing against him, he allows himself one simple conclusion.

Anyone who made her ask whether she is real has made a very stupid choice.

Sometime after midnight she stirs.

Not fully awake. Just enough to shift, to make a soft unhappy sound, to press closer. He feels her hand spread against his chest, searching in sleep for proof of something solid.

He covers it with his own.

She quiets immediately.

By morning, when the sun edges pale through the curtains, she is still there, soft, face resting against his chest, cuddling against him as he keeps holding her tight.