divine violence; @belimah - Tumblr Blog

47m

14. Hold Me Like a Grudge art by mblydez

The first thing Sukuna learns after the dinner is that silence can have weight.

He knows noise. Noise is easy. Noise is useful. Engines coughing awake in the garage before the doors are fully open. Tires biting into packed dirt. Crowds turning a rider’s name into something less like language and more like pressure. Reporters calling for his face, photographers snapping his blind side until Nanami quietly shifts position and Mei Mei’s smile goes so thin it becomes a threat. Shoko’s medical instructions. Choso’s careful, low explanations about suspension and torque and why Sukuna can't bully physics into changing just because he is tired of being told no. Naoya’s mouth, unfortunately still attached to his skull. Kenny’s laugh when they know they have found a nerve and intend to press until it bruises.

Noise can be fought. Noise can be answered with a look, a growl, a machine, a win.

Silence just stays.

It sits in his apartment after the dinner like something placed deliberately in the middle of the floor, impossible to ignore and too heavy to move. It's in the kitchen, where you are not sitting at the counter with one knee hooked on the chair rung and papers spread out beside a half-empty mug. It's in the bathroom, where there is a bare patch where your toothbrush used to lean beside his, stupid, domestic, too bright against the gray stone sink. It's in the drawer he gave you because he hated seeing you live out of a backpack like you were trespassing through his life instead of becoming one of the few people allowed inside it.

The drawer is still closed.

He doesn't open it the night he comes home from the restaurant.

He doesn't remember choosing to walk back into the restaurant. One moment he’s in the parking lot, palm still cold from the roof of his car, Choso’s quiet fury behind him, the place where you disappeared still holding the shape of your absence. The next, he’s pushing the restaurant door open with enough force that a host looks up and immediately looks down again.

Inside the private room, Naoya is no longer smiling.

That’s something.

Mei Mei stands near him, one hand resting on the back of a chair, posture elegant enough to look casual to a stranger. Nanami has not moved much, but his attention is fixed on Naoya with a level of controlled contempt Sukuna usually only sees when someone says something unforgivably stupid in a professional setting. Shoko has a cigarette unlit between two fingers, probably because she is too angry to remember she can’t smoke inside.

Naoya looks toward Sukuna as if expecting alliance. Sukuna gives him nothing.

The whole room seems to understand, then, that there won’t be no recovery of the evening. No awkward joke patched over the wound. No team dinner continuing after one man turned another man’s ugliest beginning into entertainment. Mei Mei says something about the bill being handled. Nanami speaks to the staff. Choso remains close without touching him, which is good, because if anyone touches him, Sukuna doesn't know whether he will swing or leave.

He takes his coat. He doesn’t look at the chair you abandoned. Then he does.

Your napkin is still folded near the plate. The wine glass is untouched after the first sip. Your cutlery is aligned neatly because of course it is, because even when hurt you leave a table as if order can save something. Beneath the table, where your hand had been on his thigh, there is nothing.

A stupid place for pain to live. His thigh should not feel cold.

On the drive home, the city lights distort through the windshield. He drives himself because he has clearance and because sitting in the back of a car like cargo will make the night more intolerable. He is good enough now. Not perfect, not the old effortless precision, but controlled. His left eye tracks mirrors, road edges, headlights, the depth of cars in adjacent lanes. He has adapted to driving with the kind of vicious attention he gives to anything that dares imply he can't master it.

Still, the right side of the world is forever gone.

Every lane change reminds him. Every turn demands calculation that once lived in instinct. Even the restaurant disappearing behind him doesn't happen evenly. It leaves from one side of his vision first, swallowed by the absence, and he feels a fresh rush of anger at the missing eye, at the year, at Naoya, at you walking away, at himself most of all.

He doesn’t call you, though he could.

The phone sits in the console. He knows exactly where your name is. Not saved as something romantic. Never that. He had refused to make it easy for anyone looking at his screen to understand what you are— what you were to him, as if secrecy could protect the thing and not also starve it. Your name is still there, plain and ordinary, and somehow worse for it.

He doesn’t call because he has nothing ready that would not sound like excuse. He doesn’t text because text is too thin for what he ruined. He doesn’t go to your apartment because Maki would probably break a bottle over his head before calling it self-defense, and, more importantly, because you told him enough by walking away without turning back.

He gets inside and doesn't turn on the living room light for a while. The city pushes pale lines through the glass. His reflection is broken across the windows, one eye, scar tissue, a face that has become too familiar and not familiar enough. The right side pulls slightly with the cold, tight under healed burn and treatment, the kind of discomfort he doesn't consider pain because pain has to do more than exist to earn the name. His body is full of old warnings. His shoulder aches because he drove too tense. His knee feels stiff from sitting through dinner. His ribs remember things no longer there.

None of it matters.

He stands in the entryway with his keys in his hand and your words still sitting behind his teeth.

He is precious.

It's such an irritating word. Such a useless, soft thing to call a man whose whole life is built around being hard to kill, hard to beat, hard to pity. He has been valuable. He has been profitable. He has been frightening, desirable, irritating, marketable, impossible, a beast, a champion, an investment worth preserving as long as preserving him leads back to performance. Precious is something people handle carefully because it can't be replaced.

He hates that you said it like you knew.

He hates worse that he wanted to believe you.

His phone stays dead in his pocket now, not because the battery has gone out but because he has not looked at it since the parking lot. He already knows what won't be there. He knows there will be no message from you calling him an asshole, no careful paragraph about why you are hurt, no furious demand for an explanation, no fragile opening he can shove his hand into and make worse. You are not stupid enough to give him another chance to cut you just because he is bleeding in a different place.

He takes the phone out.

Nothing from you.

Maki has sent one message.

Don’t contact her tonight.

Sukuna stares at it long enough for the screen to dim.

He almost laughs. It dies in his throat before it becomes sound. He can imagine Maki standing somewhere with your phone in her hand, jaw set, eyes cold, body angled like she is ready to fight him with a car key between her fingers if he gets close enough. Maki has never been afraid of him, not in any useful way. She is sensible enough to know he is dangerous and disrespectful enough not to care when someone she loves has been hurt.

He can respect that. He still wants to break something.

There is plenty in the apartment that can be broken. A glass. A chair. The polished black table that costs more than some people’s entire month and has never once meant anything to him. The mirror in the hallway, especially the mirror in the hallway, because it catches him when he moves and gives him back the face Mei Mei learned how to sell, the face the doctor told him was healing well as if healing and being restored are the same thing.

He breaks nothing.

It feels like weakness to break something in an empty room where no one will flinch and no one will answer. So he puts the phone on the counter and walks past the drawer. He doesn't sleep.

The next morning, he finds out you removed him from Instagram because his hand reaches for the phone before his mind properly wakes, the old habit surviving humiliation with insulting ease. He opens the account he rarely posts from and looks for your profile without deciding to do it. There is nothing there. Not a block, not a dramatic disappearance, just the clean absence of access. The little locked account with flowers, event shots, dead leaves and stray cats and rain on windows is gone from his reach as if he was never allowed there in the first place. It had amused him before, seeing the world through your quiet little compositions. It had irritated him too, sometimes, how carefully you refused to perform. No thirst for being known. No clumsy hints. No hand in frame with his tattoo visible enough to make people talk.

He checks again like the app might have glitched. No glitch. His thumb hovers uselessly over the search bar.

The scar along the right side of his face feels too tight. He presses his tongue against the back of his teeth and tastes the stale anger of waking after no sleep.

Fair, he thinks.

The word is useless. It doesn't make anything easier.

A few hours later, he learns you removed Choso too.

Choso doesn't tell him immediately. Choso has never been the type to walk into a room and throw his own hurt on the table like a tantrum. He works with it tucked close, quiet hands moving through familiar tasks, expression steady unless someone knows where to look. Sukuna does know. He knows because Choso’s face changes by not changing at all. He knows because Choso checks a bolt three times and still doesn't seem satisfied. He knows because when Naoya makes one low comment about “teachers and their grudges,” Choso turns his head so slowly the room goes flat around him.

Nanami steps between them before Choso moves.

“Enough,” Nanami says, and It's not loud. It doesn't need to be.

Naoya lifts both hands with that smile that has survived too many deserved beatings.

“I didn’t even say anything.”

“That’s exactly what I am advising you to continue doing.”

Sukuna watches from the bench near the half-rebuilt bike, his right hand curled around a bottle of water he has forgotten to drink. His shoulder is warmed up from therapy, forearm thick with the dull fatigue of controlled exercises. He should be thinking about the way his body is improving. He should be thinking about the next checkup, the next medical clearance, the way his balance work is finally getting less infuriating. Instead he looks at Choso and knows before anyone says it.

It makes sense. It’s fair. Choso knew. Choso didn’t warn you. Choso liked you, respected you, called you Sensei, accepted your coffee, stood beside you in hospital hallways. And Choso knew enough of the stupid game to understand what Naoya meant before everyone else did.

You cut him off too.

Fair.

The word keeps appearing in Sukuna’s head with no mercy attached.

Fair.

Fair that you don’t call.

Fair that your account vanishes from his reach.

Fair that the apartment is now full of things that no longer belong to the present.

Fair is useless.

He wants unfair. He wants anger he can argue with. He wants you at his door telling him he is a bastard so he can say something back, even if it’s wrong, even if it cuts, because at least then there would be contact. At least then your voice would be in the room.

“You got cut off too,” he comments and Choso’s eyes shift to him.

A smaller man would apologize for noticing. Sukuna doesn't. Choso returns his attention to the bike, fingers settling over the handlebar.

“She did what she needed to do.”

It's not accusation. That makes it worse. Choso doesn't make himself the victim of something he understands. He doesn't ask Sukuna to fix it for him. He doesn't say that it hurts, even though it does. He simply accepts the consequence because, unlike Sukuna, Choso seems capable of recognizing a wound without immediately turning it into a weapon.

Sukuna wants to tell him you will come back around. He doesn't say it because he doesn't know if it's true, and because wanting to comfort Choso with your future forgiveness is an ugly thing. It would make you into medicine again, something passed around to soothe what his stupidity has damaged.

So he says nothing.

That becomes his life too.

People saying less around him because there are things his presence ruins.

A week later Shoko comes to his apartment.

She doesn't ask if she can come. She sends him a message that says she is stopping by after her shift and he should have your things packed unless he wants Shoko to do it herself, which will involve less care and more judgment. He considers ignoring it. He considers telling her to get fucked. He considers, with a strange, sharp exhaustion, that if he makes this difficult she will have to spend longer in his apartment, touch more things, see more proof that you used to sleep here and have been erased badly and not enough.

He does what he is told. That irritates him enough that he almost changes his mind halfway through.

The plastic box is clear with a gray lid. He buys it because cardboard feels too disposable and a bag feels too careless. The cashier doesn't recognize him. Or maybe she does and has enough sense not to stare at the scar, the eye, the black cap pulled low, the broad body moving through a store too ordinary for someone whose face has been turned into public property.

At home, he opens the drawer.

The smell hits him first, faint but present because fabric remembers things better than people deserve. Laundry detergent. Something softer from your apartment, not his. The little ghost of your skin where a shirt collar has kept the shape of your nights.

His body reacts before thought. His throat closes in a small, brutal way. His hand flexes on the drawer handle until the wood complains.

Ridiculous.

They are clothes.

He takes them out carefully anyway.

Shirts, panties, shorts, socks, one pair of pants folded the way you fold things, neater than he ever bothers unless he is packing gear. A small pouch with amenities you kept for mornings before work. A hair tie caught at the bottom of the drawer. A receipt from the corner bakery near your street, folded in half, because you must have shoved it there with a pocketful of loose things and forgotten about it. He holds that one between two fingers for too long.

There are also his shirts. The ones you used to steal for sleep, though steal is not the right word when he used to throw them at you after showers or leave them on the edge of the bed like he had not chosen them because the cotton was softer. Black, gray, one old team shirt with the collar stretched, one long-sleeved thing from a sponsor he never liked until you wore it around his apartment with bare legs and sleep-dazed annoyance when his morning alarm went off too early.

He should keep them. They are his.

He puts them all in the box because they became yours the first time he saw you curled in one, hair messy, mouth soft with sleep, hand still resting over an ice pack on his shoulder like care could continue after consciousness gave out.

Because if you are collecting your life from his, take the pieces that touched you. Take the proof he let you inside. Take the small domestic humiliations. Take the thing he cannot look at without remembering you sleeping beside him, face soft in a way you rarely allowed during the day, one hand under your cheek, his shirt twisted around your thighs as if his home had become yours by accident.

The toothbrush goes in last.

That is stupidly hard.

It has no right to be hard.

He almost throws it in too roughly, then hates himself for caring how a toothbrush lands on folded fabric.

When Shoko arrives, she looks tired in the specific way she gets when she has been healing men who think their bodies are arguments. Like him, but maybe less destructive. She has a cigarette tucked behind one ear and a plastic bag hooked over two fingers. She doesn't step inside until he moves out of the doorway.

Her eyes go to the box.

“Is that everything?”

“Yes.”

“Did you check the bathroom?”

“Yeah.”

“The drawer?”

His jaw works once. Shoko’s gaze stays flat.

“I’m not asking because I think you’re incompetent at finding laundry. I’m asking because you have a long and documented history of being emotionally stupid enough to miss obvious things.”

Sukuna could tell her to leave. He doesn't. He tilts his head toward the hallway instead, letting her look if she wants. Shoko does. She moves through his apartment with the casual confidence of someone who has already seen him unconscious, bleeding, furious, drugged and more helpless than he wanted to be. His apartment has no mystery for her. She checks the bathroom, the drawer, the side of the bed. She finds nothing because he has already found everything except what is not a thing.

When she returns, she closes the box with a quiet click. He watches the lid seal.

There is a part of him that expects something to happen. Not something dramatic or big. Just some small shift in the air, a finality he can identify and therefore fight. But the box remains a box. Shoko remains Shoko. The apartment remains full of your absence.

Shoko picks it up.

“She asked me not to make this a conversation,” she says. “So I won’t.”

His mouth twists.

“Since when do you follow instructions?”

“Since the instruction is for her benefit and not yours.”

The cigarette behind her ear has slipped slightly. She fixes it with her free hand. Her fingers are steady, nails short, knuckles faintly marked from work. He remembers those hands on his bandages, on burns, on swelling, on his pulse while machines beeped and you sat in a chair pretending you were not terrified. Shoko had seen all of it. Shoko had seen you stay.

That makes what comes next colder.

“I think the bet was disgusting,” she says. “Not stupid, immature. Disgusting. I want you to understand the distinction before you decide to hide behind calling yourself an idiot.”

He looks at the box instead of her face.

Shoko continues, voice even enough to hurt more than shouting would.

“If I had known about it then, I would have made every treatment worse. Every dressing change. Every mobility test. Every injection. I would have found a medically plausible reason to be exactly as gentle as you deserved.”

“That would be malpractice.”

“You could complain.”

“I could prove it.”

“No, you couldn’t.”

For the first time in days, something almost like amusement moves under his ribs. It's not enough to lift. It's not even warm. But it exists. He exhales through his nose.

“You’re an awful doctor.”

“I’m a great doctor. I’m an awful friend to men who hurt women I like.”

Despite himself, his mouth moves without heat. Not quite a smile. Not even close. Something uglier, tired enough to almost be amusement.

“That’s my life now, apparently.”

“You built it.”

There it is. No scalpel is as clean as Shoko when she chooses the place to cut.

He does look at her then. Shoko doesn't soften. There is pity somewhere in her, probably — she is too observant not to see the condition of him, the sleeplessness, the way the apartment feels staged for a life that has already left. But pity is not what she gives him. She has never made the mistake of assuming pity would help.

“She loved you,” Shoko says, not as revelation, not as comfort, but as a charge read aloud. “She loved you in a hospital room when you were scared and mean and half-conscious. She loved you when you looked different. She loved you when you couldn’t ride. She loved you while you were useless by your own ridiculous standards. And you took the ugliest thing you could have hidden from her, let another man turn it into a toast, followed her outside, and somehow made your shame into an accusation against her.”

He hates the cold, pointed accuracy of it. Hates the clean cut. Hates that there is no exaggeration in it for him to attack. His shoulder tenses. Pain pulls through the joint.

“Done?”

“No,” She continues. “But I’m stopping because she asked me not to make it a conversation, and because anything I say now will be for my satisfaction. You already know enough.”

You would not send Shoko to speak for you. Not about this. If you want to say something, you say it yourself. If you choose silence, no one gets to translate it into softer language. The thought irritates him and wounds him because he respects it. Shoko lifts the box.

“If you have anything at her place, I’ll bring it. Maybe. I’ll consider. If you piss me off more, I may decide to throw your shit out of a window.”

“Make sure it’s open.”

“I never said I cared about the glass.”

“Of course not.”

She leaves with the box. He stands in the living room after the door closes, listening to the elevator take your things down.

Three days later Shoko returns only the shirts.

She catches him at the garage this time, not the apartment. He is in the middle of a balance drill, one foot on a platform, knee bent, head turning through controlled angles while Nanami watches with a stopwatch and Choso watches the line of his shoulders. It's tedious work. Humiliating work. Important work. He hates it and does it anyway because the alternative is being worse on the bike, and nothing is more unacceptable than being worse and doing nothing about it.

Shoko waits until he steps down. She has a paper bag in one hand. He knows before she speaks.

“She didn’t want these,” Shoko says.

The garage sound thins around him. Someone is running a bike near the far bay. Tools click. Naoya laughs at something too far away to matter, as if anything he says ever mattered. The world doesn't stop because a few old shirts come back.

Sukuna wipes sweat from his jaw with the back of his wrist.

“She said they weren’t hers,” Shoko says.

That is such a you thing that, for one second, he hates you with enough force to keep from missing you.

Not yours. As if any of this has obeyed ownership correctly. As if he did not give them to you without saying it. As if sleeping in something enough times does not change the fabric. As if a shirt can return to being his simply because you refuse to keep what was never formally handed over.

“She said that?” he asks before he can stop himself.

Shoko’s eyes flick to his face.

“Not in those exact words.”

“Don’t translate.”

“I’m not your messenger.”

“Then stop standing here.”

Shoko holds the bag out. He doesn't take it immediately. For a second he can feel the shape of the shirts inside without touching them. The old team one. The sponsor one. The soft black cotton. Things that had become intimate by use, then returned by principle. You don’t want something that is not yours. You will take the toothbrush, the clothes, the small amenities, the socks that belonged to your body and your mornings. You won't take his shirts because accepting them now would mean accepting a tenderness he ruined and can't offer cleanly.

He takes the bag. Shoko takes a breath through her nose, patience visibly thinned.

“I offered to throw them away for you.”

“Fuck off.”

There is no heat in it. Not enough to make the words move the way they should. Shoko notices. Her mouth tightens, but she lets it pass.

“You’re welcome,” she says dryly.

He looks down at the bag. The paper is folded once at the top. Neat. Shoko’s doing, likely, not yours. He wants to ask how you looked when you gave them back. He wants to ask if you cried, if you were angry, if you said his name, if you hesitated over any of them. He wants to ask if you are eating. Sleeping. If you have taken the poster down. If the helmet mark still means anything to you. Every question is a hand reaching through a door you closed.

So he says,

“Thanks.”

It costs more than it should. Shoko hears that too. She always hears the inconvenient things.

Her expression changes just slightly, not soft enough to forgive him, not cruel enough to deny he is hurting.

“Do something useful with the pain, Ryomen. For once.”

He snorts.

“That advice come with a prescription?”

“No. The prescription is still scar treatment twice daily and not being a reckless piece of shit because your girlfriend left you.”

“She’s not—”

The word catches.

Girlfriend.

The correction used to be automatic because the title never fit cleanly around what you two were and because he had always treated definition like a trap someone else might use. Now the correction has nowhere to land. You are not his girlfriend. You are not his anything. That is the technical truth. It tastes like metal.

Shoko raises an eyebrow. He shuts his mouth.

“Exactly,” she says.

He looks into the bag again. The black shirt sits on top.

He remembers your bare legs in it, your sleep-heavy complaint when he moved too early, your fingers curling into the hem while you cooked eggs in his kitchen. He remembers tugging it over your head later and the sound you made when his mouth found the side of your neck, soft and annoyed because the pan was still on.

He closes the bag.

“Tell her—”

Shoko’s eyes sharpen.

He stops.

There is nothing he can send that would not be cowardice.

Shoko waits long enough to make sure he knows that she knows.

Then she leaves.

He does not throw the shirts away. He does not put them back in the closet either.

For three weeks, the paper bag sits on a chair in the bedroom like an accusation with handles.

Then he moves it to the closet floor.

After that, he stops asking Shoko about you. That doesn’t happen because he stops wanting to know. It happens because every time he opens his mouth around the question, Shoko’s eyes go flat with warning and he remembers that access is not the same as care. He has lived too long assuming that if he could reach something, he had the right to touch it. He is learning, slowly and with resentment, that some doors remain closed not because he lacks strength but because strength is the wrong tool.

He hates lessons that can't be beaten into shape.

The year begins like a punishment and then turns into work.

Work is better. Work has edges. Work has numbers. Work has measurable progress and visible failure. Work can be repeated until the body understands what the mind has already decided.

He can wake up, eat what Uraume leaves, stretch, curse through the parts of rehab that remain, move into visual training, balance training, reaction drills, controlled strength, scar care, media obligations, sponsor meetings, garage review, sleep, fail, wake, do it again. He can build a day so full there is no space for the silence to sit down.

At first, the return to riding is small enough to insult him.

Controlled practice, Shoko says.

No aggressive jumps, Shoko says.

No competition pace, Nanami says.

No improvising, Choso adds, because Choso has gained a suicidal amount of courage in the past year.

Uraume says nothing, only places food in front of him and looks at him until he eats.

The first day back on the bike is not glorious. He feels nothing for half a second and it frightens him more than he will admit.

The bike is beneath him. The weight familiar, the handlebars solid, boots planted, gloves flexing, engine vibration climbing through bone. He should feel relief so violent it rearranges him. Instead there is a brief blankness, a suspended moment where the machine is real and he is not yet inside the old language.

It should be glorious. He expects some private ceremony inside his body, some recognition between muscle and machine. He expects the bike to become extension again, the world to narrow into throttle, clutch, dirt, line, sound. He expects the first roll forward to settle something so deeply that the months off become a bad dream he can outrun.

Then he opens the throttle carefully, not aggressively.

The vibration answers. His body wakes.

The sound enters his chest like something returned after being stolen. Not even as a metaphor, it’s pure sensation. Engine through ribs, wrists, thighs. The scent of fuel and dirt. The resistance in the clutch. The balance point shifting under him as he rolls forward. His left eye takes in the practice area, markers, distance, Choso’s position, Nanami near the fence with a tablet, Shoko pretending not to watch like a hawk, Naoya with his arms crossed and mouth thankfully shut.

His right side, however, remains dead.

Not dead in the body. Worse. Dead in the world. The missing eye doesn't ache that day, not physically, but it creates absence with every turn of his head. The track looks wrong. Distances make less immediate sense. The space between front wheel and rut requires thought where there used to be instinct. A cone near the edge seems closer than It's until It's not. A small rise of dirt looks flatter until the suspension tells him otherwise. Shadows lie. Approaches lie. The bike responds honestly, but the world has become less generous with information.

His body compensates badly at first. That is the part that enrages him.

He underestimates distance approaching a low feature and corrects too sharply. He hates the correction. He overcompensates turning his head, body stiffening where it should flow. He knows it. Feels it before anyone says it. The bike does what he asks, but his asking is different now. Less instinct, more calculation. He rides like a man translating his own native language back to himself.

Humiliation burns hotter than fear. But fear is there.

Tiny. Insulting. Buried under the anger. He can feel it when the ground approaches wrong, when the old sense of space fails to supply information quickly enough, when the body that once understood air and distance with brutal confidence has to pause and measure.

He doesn't crash. He doesn't even come close in a way anyone else would call dangerous. But he rides conservatively because he has no choice, and conservative feels like humiliation. He finishes the controlled session without breaking instruction. He comes off the track after twenty minutes with his forearms tight, jaw locked, sweat cooling under his jersey, and a feeling under his skin so vicious it makes his hands shake when he pulls off his gloves.

No one says anything for a moment.

Good.

Then Naoya, from a safe distance, says,

“Well, that was careful.”

Sukuna turns his head. Naoya’s smile fades a fraction. Choso steps in before the wrench in Sukuna’s hand becomes part of the conversation.

“Your entry speed into the second berm changed. You corrected late because you’re checking distance with your head turn instead of trusting the front. That’s expected.”

“Expected by who?”

“Everyone who understands you lost an eye.”

Sukuna’s hand tightens around the wrench. Choso doesn't move back. There is a new steadiness to him after the dinner, something guilt has tempered into courage. It irritates Sukuna because he has no one to blame for it.

Nanami speaks from the tablet, voice dry.

“If you would prefer feedback that ignores reality, Naoya can provide it. If you would prefer feedback that gets you riding properly again, listen to Choso.”

Naoya points vaguely with a screwdriver.

“I can do both, and I can be charming while doing.”

“No,” Shoko says from behind him. “You can be quiet and work on what you’re supposed to work.”

Sukuna breathes through his nose. The right side of his face pulls. Dirt sticks to the sweat at his temple, along his jaw, under the edge of the scar. His left eye stings from wind.

The bike sits beside him, warm, alive, waiting. He hates the bike for not solving him. He hates himself for expecting it to.

Then he turns back toward Choso.

“Again.”

Choso glances at Shoko. Shoko folds her arms.

“Ten more minutes. Controlled. If you pretend you didn’t hear the controlled part, I’m putting you back in the hospital myself.”

He says nothing because he hears her. That, too, is new.

The first month is full of small humiliations. He has to retrain lines that once lived in his spine. He has to exaggerate head movement without overcorrecting. He has to learn how speed alters the missing field, how the body can rebuild timing from other signals if he stops trying to force the old version back into place. He has to accept that depth is no longer instant but assembled. Front suspension feel. Engine note. Dirt texture. Peripheral information from the left. Memory of track shape. Choso’s markers. Nanami’s brutal replay pauses.

There is no room for mysticism in it. No inspirational rebirth. No phoenix, no miracle, no blessed champion rising from fire.

Just work.

Repetitive, ugly, patient work.

It's probably the only thing that saves him from doing something worse.

At night, after the track and the garage and the medical work, pain comes in layers. It's not the catastrophic pain of the hospital, not the surgical pain that made everything white and raw, but the old athlete’s tax. Shoulders, wrists, hips, the knee that still complains when cold, the neck from compensating, the lower back from tension. The scar tightens after sweat and washing. His remaining eye burns from overuse until he lies in bed with the lights off and still feels the track moving in the dark.

Those are the nights he remembers you most.

Not the crude things. Not the hospital confession. Not even the first night or the old heat of you in his lap.

He remembers your hand on his shoulder after practice, thumb finding the hard knot near the base of his neck. He remembers you sitting on the edge of his couch with a towel under an ice pack, expression serious enough to irritate him into listening. He remembers you telling him to eat before painkillers, and the way you never made a performance out of noticing discomfort. He remembers you pressing a kiss to his nape when you thought he was too tired to comment on it. He remembers how you would talk about school, students, Maki, some ridiculous staff meeting, your voice filling the parts of the apartment that now hold only appliance hum and his own breath.

He still doesn't text.

He writes messages sometimes. Once, at 2:13 in the morning after a bad practice day, he types, I didn’t tell you I was cleared to ride because I knew you’d look at me like I was killing someone you loved.

He stares at it until the words become unbearable.

Deletes it.

Another time, after seeing an ad with his scar edited smoother than reality, he types, You were right about the face.

Deletes that too.

The worst one comes after he dreams of the hospital. In the dream, you are sitting beside the bed and he can't move his hand. He tries to tell you not to leave, but his mouth is full of dirt. He wakes with sweat under his shirt and the old team shirt you returned twisted in his fist because at some point he took it from the closet and started sleeping with it near the pillow like a pathetic animal.

He types, I love you.

The phone looks obscenely bright in the dark room.

His thumb hovers over send so long the screen dims.

He deletes it one letter at a time.

Not because it's untrue.

Because sending it like that would make it hunger. It would make it a hook. It would make his loneliness your problem again.

He throws the phone onto the other side of the bed and gets up to shower, though he already showered once. Ice cold water helps nothing. He stands under it anyway until his skin goes tight and his breathing evens by force.

Four months into practice, his body begins to understand.

Not all at once. There is no clean turning point. One day the second berm feels less like a negotiation. Another day he takes a rhythm section at a pace that makes Choso’s eyebrows lift before he remembers to hide it. His starts sharpen again. He stops losing time on approaches where the old eye would have done the measuring for him. He learns to trust the bike through the absence, not because the absence disappears, but because he finally stops expecting it to.

Nanami shows him overlays on the tablet.

“Again,” Sukuna says.

Nanami looks faintly annoyed.

“You were within acceptable variance.”

“I didn’t ask for acceptable.”

“Of course not. Why aim for medically miraculous recovery when you can be personally irritating about decimals?”

“Show it.”

Nanami shows it. Choso gives feedback without cushioning it. Naoya, when he remembers that his continued existence depends on usefulness, gives harsh trackside observation with enough accuracy that Sukuna tolerates his voice. Naoya is part of the team for more than nepotism. He’s competent when he stops being absolutely insufferable. The younger riders come when they can. They still venerate him somehow, which is annoying and useful. They watch him run drills that would bore crowds to death and treat them like scripture because the champion is doing them. They ask questions. They offer to run lines with him. They cheer the first time he clears a jump that is not impressive enough for a show but means more than they know.

He calls them idiots. He rides better the next day.

The media version of it is fucking unbearable. Mei Mei calls it narrative architecture. Sukuna calls it bullshit.

“You survived a catastrophic accident, reconstructed your career after vision loss, and returned to elite performance under a major sponsor,” Mei Mei says, sitting across from him in a conference room with white walls and expensive water bottles lined like offerings. “If you think the public won't assign symbolism to that, you have misunderstood both capitalism and basic human sentiment.”

“I ride bikes. They can clap or choke.”

“They clap more consistently when given a story.”

“I’m not your little phoenix project.”

“No, you are far less cooperative and more expensive to maintain.” Her smile doesn't reach her eyes. “But the image works. Monster likes the severity. The scar helps with all the fire and symbolism. Your refusal to look humble helps. The fact that you actually did the work helps more than I expected.”

He narrows his eye. Mei Mei taps a manicured nail on the campaign mockup. Champion Reborn. It's printed over a photograph of him turned slightly toward his left side, scar visible but controlled by lighting, Monster green crawling around the composition like a promise of violent energy.

He hates it. He also knows it will sell.

That’s the worst part about Mei Mei. She is often right in ways that make morality feel like a secondary concern.

Kusakabe, the Monster representative, is less polished than Mei Mei and more tired than anyone in a sponsorship meeting should be. Sukuna likes him for that in a distant way. The man doesn't gush. He asks questions about risk, feasibility, liability, public optics and performance windows. He looks at Sukuna like an asset, but also like an asset that might explode if mishandled. That’s more honest than reverence.

Seven months after the dinner, six months after the first controlled ride, Kusakabe sits in the garage office with Mei Mei, Higuruma on a call through the laptop, Nanami against the wall, Shoko near the window with her arms folded, Choso standing behind Sukuna’s chair because the idiot still thinks proximity can prevent disaster. Kusakabe starts to speak.

“The next show is not positioned as the end-of-year spectacle, but it's large enough that a partial return will be read as a good statement. We can structure his involvement around appearance, controlled lap, maybe a lower-risk demonstration—”

“I’ll perform.”

Everyone looks at him. He doesn't repeat himself. He has learned not to waste words when the first version is clear.

Mei Mei’s gaze moves over him slowly, not the way reporters look at the scar, not the way younger riders look when they are trying to see the miracle. Mei Mei assesses the product, the man, the risk, the liability, the hunger. He can feel every category pass through her mind and slot into place.

Shoko opens her mouth. He looks at her before she speaks.

“I’m not talking about the globe. Not full FMX insanity. High jumps I’ve cleared in practice, two maneuvers, one stunt I’ve done clean twelve times this month. No improvising.”

The fact that he says it before she can demand it makes Shoko’s expression shift in a way that almost resembles suspicion. Choso glances down at the tablet.

“Fourteen times.”

Sukuna doesn't look back.

“Fourteen.”

Nanami’s brows lift a fraction. Kusakabe turns to Mei Mei.

“And you trust that?”

“I trust his judgment about his own body for once,” Mei Mei says.

Sukuna snorts. She keeps looking at him.

“Do not mistake that for me becoming soft. If you fuck this up, I will hand you your own ass on a silver plate, and I will make sure the plate photographs well for sponsor damage control.”

“That supposed to scare me?”

“It's supposed to remind you I am more creative than your doctors.”

Shoko mutters,

“Not difficult.”

The show happens under too much light.

It's not the biggest event of the year, but It's big enough to have teeth. Monster has its fingerprints everywhere. The promotional posters lean into the scar without making it grotesque. Champion Reborn on banners, screens, wristbands, merchandise. His face, half-shadowed. His number. His name dragged through the speakers until the crowd is primed to turn him into myth before he touches the dirt.

He hates how well it works. He also likes it.

That is the humiliating truth. He loves the crowd before he hates it. Loves the vibration in his bones, the way sound becomes physical, the way the bike answers beneath him when he rolls out and the arena realizes he is not there to wave.

He does look for you. He does it before he admits it.

From the paddock. From the tunnel. From any vantage point that gives him a view of VIP sections, general seating, the places you used to stand with Maki, Nobara, Mai, whoever Nanami had decided to tolerate that day. He tells himself it’s practical. If you appear, he should know. If Maki appears, he should avoid being run over later. If Shoko knows something, she will not say, because Shoko has turned withholding information about you into a moral stance.

You stopped going to events as far as he can tell. Maybe you can’t stomach them now. Maybe you never liked them once the person attached to them became something painful. Maybe you watch clips later. Maybe you don’t. Maybe your life has folded neatly around the hole he left and he is the only one still dumb enough to look into crowds.

The thought almost ruins his mood.

Then the engine starts.

The sound does what it always does.

It takes the excess thinking and burns it down into useful heat.

On track, there is no dinner, no Instagram, no plastic box, no Shoko returning shirts, no Maki threatening vehicular assault, no Kenny, not yet. There is dirt. There is distance. There is the ramp face approaching in a way his adapted eye-brain-body system now understands. There is the bike under him, alive and violent, answering his hands. There is the stadium roar changing pitch as people realize he is not there for symbolic courage. He is there to be great.

And he is. Not exactly as he was.

Better in some parts, worse in others, different everywhere.

The first lap is controlled. The second has more bite. He feels Choso’s setup under him, Nanami’s caution, Shoko’s threats, Uraume’s food, months of ugly work. The right side of the world is still gone, but he has built a map around the missing territory.

When he takes the first high jump, the air opens clean.

For a second there is no loss.

There is only throttle, ramp, suspension release, body position, engine scream, crowd scream, the violent quiet that happens inside him when everything is exactly aligned. He lands harder than he wants but not badly. Corrects. Runs the next section. Takes the second maneuver cleaner. The stunt he saves for last is measured enough to satisfy the team and sharp enough to make the stadium lose its mind.

He shines.

He knows he does.

He can feel it on his skin when he pulls off track, feral grin dragging at his mouth before he can stop it. The scar pulls with it. Good. Let it. The right side of his face is not gone from the story anymore — it's part of the threat.

The announcer gives the crowd what Mei Mei paid for.

Best rider. Champion reborn. The king returned. Miracle. Unbroken. Untouchable. Every word lands on him like heat. He stands through it, helmet under one arm, sweat cooling through his gear, pulse hammering so hard his fingers twitch. Kusakabe looks pleased enough to sign something expensive. Mei Mei’s satisfaction is controlled but visible. Naoya is grinning like he helped create God. Choso looks like he might cry if he had less dignity. Nanami gives one small nod, which is basically worship from him.

For a few minutes, It's almost enough.

Then the signing starts. Then the reporters. Then the same questions in different shapes.

How does it feel to be back? What did recovery teach you? Do you consider yourself an inspiration? What would you say to fans who thought they might never see this again? Are you afraid? How has vision loss changed your relationship with the sport? What gave you the strength to return?

He answers because Mei Mei has drilled the answers into him until they taste like chalk but come out usable.

Feels good. Work is work. He was never gone, just healing. Fans can think whatever they want as long as they watch. Fear is irrelevant. Vision changes mechanics, not hunger. Strength did not give him shit — repetition did.

Mei Mei steps in when he gets too honest. Nanami steps in when a reporter tries to ask about his private life.

Sukuna signs posters, shirts, helmets, photographs of his face from before and after. A woman cries when he signs her cap. A man tells him he inspired him through surgery. A kid with a small eye patch waves shyly from the line and Sukuna, because he is not entirely a monster on days when adrenaline is still high, signs the kid’s poster without making the eye patch the center of the interaction. He tells the kid not to ride like a coward. The kid beams like he has been blessed.

It should be funny. It is, a little. Then his body starts to come down.

The pain waits until the room thins and the lights become less theatrical. It comes with the sweat drying cold under his gear, with the old ache in the knee, with the shoulder tightening, with the right side of his face prickling where heat and exertion irritate the scar. His hands feel swollen. His lower back has the deep, grinding fatigue of controlled impact. His head is clear enough to function and tired enough to turn cruel if someone touches him wrong.

This is when you would have looked at him. Not like the reporters, not like the fans, not like Mei Mei measuring asset fatigue or Shoko assessing medical risk. You would have looked at the space between his movements. The way his jaw set before he reached for water. The little pause before he bent to unzip a boot. The second too long he spent gripping the edge of a table after standing.

You would have said, Sit down before you pretend you meant to lean like that.

He would have told you to shut up. He would have sat.

The memory hits with such stupid specificity that he almost misses what Naoya says to him.

“Car’s ready when you are. Kenny wants to know if you’re changing here or at the hotel.”

Sukuna blinks once. The name has already re-entered his life by then, casual as smoke under a door.

Kenjaku doesn't come back like an accident. Kenny, for those intimate enough to make the name sound casual. Kenjaku, when Sukuna wants to remind himself that intimacy is often just familiarity wearing perfume.

They appear first as a message after the comeback show, because of course they do. Not before. Not during the hospital year. Not when the body was bandaged and the contract uncertain. After the footage goes viral. After “champion reborn” trends. After Monster’s posts pull numbers that make Mei Mei almost cheerful for three consecutive hours. Kenny has never done anything without choreography. The first message had arrived after one of the early campaign images went public. Not the polished comment on the post. Privately. Of course privately.

You always did look good when you survived something.

He had stared at it for a full minute, then locked the phone.

Two hours later, he answered.

Took you long enough.

Kenny sent a voice note laughing, warm and low and poisonous in the way familiarity can be poisonous when it knows exactly which bloodstream to enter. Then they keep texting.

I wanted to let you miss me.

To which Sukuna replies after twenty minutes of considering.

Didn’t.

That is the thing about Kenny. They aim low with a smile because they know where low is. They dated for a long time before, if dating is the right word for two people who never cared for labels unless labels opened doors. They were the closest thing he had to a long-term partner before you, which says little good about either of them. A terrible one, Yuuji had called them, with the blunt moral disgust of someone who still believed affection should make people better. Even Choso had chimed in after the breakup, quietly but firmly, which meant the situation had been bad enough to wake his judgment from its usual reserved cave.

Kenny loved the champion.

The stage. The fame. The access. The luxury. The feeling of being attached to someone who turned heads before he even entered a room. They loved the doors he opened, the restaurants, the world tours, the VIP corners, the private rooms, the ability to post a table spread and let followers infer proximity to power. They loved the hand on their waist if the watch showed. The apartment view. The car interior. The hotel balcony. The suggestion of him more than the person.

Sukuna knows this. That’s why it makes sense.

There is comfort in a hunger that announces itself properly. Kenny doesn’t pretend to love him while he is useless. They love him while he is useful, beautiful, famous, shining, dangerous in public and expensive in private. They don’t ask about his pain unless it interferes with plans. They don’t ask whether he slept after the show, whether the scar pulls, whether the old fear returned when he lined up the jump. They ask where he’s staying. Whether he has dinner plans. Whether Mei Mei is still impossible. Whether he can get them into the afterparty.

This he understands. This has hooks he can see.

They meet first at a sponsor afterparty, because Kenny knows where doors open. They arrive dressed like they belong and leave with three people wondering who they are. They look good under expensive lights. They always have. They know how to stand near Sukuna without seeming small. They know which side photographs better now before anyone tells them. They know how to touch his arm like possession and performance are the same language.

The first kiss happens in a hallway outside a private room, not tender, not hesitant, not new. Their mouth tastes like champagne and cold calculation. Sukuna kisses back because it's easy to understand want when it comes with teeth and no innocence. Kenny doesn't ask if he is okay. Kenny doesn't ask whether his head hurts after the lights. Kenny doesn't look at his hands and tell him to ice anything. Kenny looks at him like he is restored access.

That still makes sense after all this time. It should disgust him more than it does.

Yuuji would call it self-harm with better clothes if he knew. Yuuji is also not hearing from him anymore. That is another silence he pretends not to hear.

At first, Kenny is almost perfect in their old, terrible way. They don’t ask for explanations. They don’t demand names for what they are. They like restaurants that require private entrances, hotel rooms with views, cars with tinted glass, photographs taken from angles that imply more than they show.

They post a hand on their thigh, his rings visible. The skyline from his apartment. Food from a place where the bill could pay someone’s rent. The edge of his jacket over the back of a chair. Never too much of his face unless the lighting flatters the scar or turns it into an aesthetic choice.

Kenny loves the glamour.

Kenny has always loved the glamour.

Sukuna used to think that honesty made it clean.

It doesn't. But it makes it legible for him.

They don’t ask about you.

At first, Sukuna appreciates it.

Then, later, when their hand slides over his wrist in the car, when their nails brush the inside of his palm and their voice drops into old territory, when they say his name like a challenge and not a question, he realizes they aren’t asking because they already know enough. Naoya would have told them. Or gossip did. Or Kenny simply read the absence. They have always been good at entering rooms after another person leaves.

The night turns rough in the way their nights always used to with them.

Never tender. Mouths that argue until they collide. Hands that grip like possession is a joke they both know is false and use anyway. Kenny likes the friction. Sukuna likes not being handled carefully. He likes, for a few hours, that no one looks at him as if his body might break. Kenny touches the scar without reverence. Not cruelly, not softly. Curiously. Aesthetic appraisal disguised as desire. He lets them because it does not ask anything from him emotionally. It only asks whether the change can be made into something attractive.

After, the room smells like expensive sheets, sweat, and Kenny’s perfume.

He is on his back, one arm thrown behind his head, scarred side turned slightly away out of habit he despises. His body is both sated and hollow in a way he doesn't examine, spent enough to be quiet, not peaceful. The sheets are expensive, too smooth, tangled around his hips. His body feels used in the simple way he understands. No tenderness lingering. No questions. No careful hands avoiding sore places. Good.

Kenny is sitting beside him with phone in hand, hair slightly disordered in a way that is probably deliberate even now. The city glows beyond the window. Then, Kenny lies on their stomach with phone still in hand and says,

“I’ve been thinking.”

“Unfortunate.”

They smile without looking up.

“You should wear an eyepatch.”

The room stills around him in a way only he notices. Then Kenny turns the phone toward him.

It's a photo of him he did not know they took. He is standing near a window, shirt open, head turned enough for the scar to catch the light. The image has been edited. A matte black eyepatch covers the right side, clean and severe, hiding the worst of the empty shape and most of the scar. It makes him look deliberate. Designed. Easier.

Kenny slides closer, voice bright with the pleasure of their own idea.

“See? It doesn’t look like shit. It sharpens the whole thing! We could have a few made. One plain black for events. Maybe one with your number, though subtle, not tacky. Jewelry if you want to be dramatic, loud, chic. It would photograph beautifully, and honestly, people would obsess over it. You already have the whole resurrected warlord thing going on.”

Sukuna looks at the image. For half a second, he doesn't hate it. That’s what makes anger rise slowly.

Because the eyepatch does make the face easier to process. It gives the absence a border. It turns loss into styling. It hides what surgery could not make clean. It lets people look without deciding whether to pity him.

It also covers what you looked at and called beautiful.

Kenny swipes. Another version. This one has a subtle number 49 worked into the side. Another with a thin metal accent. Another with jewelry draped too extravagantly from the edge, which makes him give them a look. Kenny laughs.

“Fine, not that one. Unless you’re feeling extra.”

“I’m feeling homicidal.”

“You usually are.”

“No.”

“You didn’t even let me finish.”

“You did. The answer is no.”

Kenny sets the phone down and stretches beside him, unbothered.

“It doesn’t have to be about hiding. It can be styling. Control the visual before someone else does. You used to understand that.”

He hates that because it echoes Mei Mei, and because it is not entirely wrong. He also hates the word hiding.

“I’m not wearing a costume for cameras.”

“You already do.”

He turns his head enough to look at them fully. Kenny smiles, lazy and sharp, knowing they have touched something.

“The jackets, the number, the helmet, the Monster colors, the whole feral champion thing. You’ve always worn costumes. This one just admits you changed.”

His hand closes around Kenny’s wrist before he thinks. Not hard enough to hurt badly. Hard enough to stop. Kenny’s eyes lift.

“Shut up and sleep,” he says. “Or I’m kicking you out.”

They laugh, not frightened, maybe a little pleased. They have always liked him like that. They like making him bare his teeth and then pretending the teeth are proof of passion rather than warning.

“You’re so sensitive now, Ryo.”

He releases their wrist. Kenny props their chin on their hand.

“It was a suggestion, Kuna. A good one. Don’t look at me like I tried to skin you.”

“Keep talking and I’ll consider skinning you.”

They roll their eyes and curl closer anyway, bold because history has taught them that proximity to his anger is not the same as danger for them. That used to be true. It might still be. He doesn't know whether that says more about them or him. He knows that’s how this worked and still works, apparently.

Always at each other’s throats. Making out. Fucking. Self-destructing in expensive rooms. Enabling each other’s worst behaviors because friction feels like intimacy when neither person wants to be known too cleanly. Kenny loves being his lover and muse, or whatever word they choose depending on the audience. They love appearing in reflections, in cropped photos, in gossip columns as the beautiful unnamed figure by his side. They love being almost seen. They love the speculation more than the answer.

He doesn't sleep. The eyepatch appears despite his wishes.

Not on his face. He refuses it. But Kenny brings it up in different ways, sends mockups, mentions designers, frames it as control, as image, as owning the narrative. Mei Mei, when Naoya stupidly repeats the idea in her hearing, considers it for exactly three seconds before rejecting it because “the current scar branding tests stronger.” That almost makes Sukuna laugh in her face.

Naoya endorses Kenny loudly. Of course he does. Naoya likes anyone who makes Sukuna worse in familiar ways because familiar dysfunction gives him something to narrate. He calls Kenny iconic, which nearly gets him punched. He makes sure photographers catch them from the better side. He whispers to a gossip account once and denies it badly. Kenny pretends not to know and then checks the photos with satisfaction.

The magazines call Kenny a muse. Sukuna sees the word and feels something old and ugly crawl under his sternum.

Muse.

You had never wanted to be that. You had never wanted to stand in his light to be seen by it. You hid from it. You protected your job, your privacy, your locked little life with dead flowers and school papers and a kitchen too small for him. You did not want VIP access as currency. You used it to bring friends who asked technical questions and screamed themselves hoarse because they actually watched the riding. You never posted his hand on your thigh to prove you had been chosen.

He used to find that strange. Now he understands it was mercy.

Kenny posts a photo of two glasses at a rooftop bar and the edge of Sukuna’s scarred jaw reflected in the dark window. The caption is nothing direct. Kenny is too good for direct. People understand anyway.

Kenny posts a lot. Always did. Always will.

They live for the aesthetic, and Sukuna’s life has plenty of it again. The glamour has returned. The sponsors. The adrenaline. The hotel suites. The stadium lights. The car. The expensive food. The half-public intimacy that gives people something to chew on. Kenny flourishes in it like a poisonous plant moved back into sun.

Sukuna should be satisfied. In some ways, he is.

The comments turn into speculation. Mei Mei doesn't care as long as it distracts from more complicated stories. Naoya is delighted. Kusakabe is indifferent. Shoko looks at the post once, then at Sukuna, then puts her phone face down with a disgust so quiet it feels medical.

He asks her only once.

It's after a practice where he rides well enough to be pleased and badly enough to be angry. The two states coexist often now. His body is near restored. His mind is not. Shoko is checking the skin near his scar because the treatment schedule changed, gloved fingers cool, expression professional. He can smell antiseptic and sweat and garage dust. Choso is outside arguing with someone over tire choice. The whole day feels too normal.

“Does she still go to events?”

Shoko’s hand stops. Only for a second. Then she continues.

“I’m not answering that.”

He expected it. It still irritates him.

“I didn’t ask where she lives.”

“How generous of someone that has been to her place.”

“I’m asking if she’s watching the sport.”

“You’re asking if she’s watching you.”

His mouth flattens. Shoko removes the glove from one hand and drops it into the bin.

“Her life is private. You lost access to it. Suck it up.”

“She was part of this before.”

“She was part of your life before. There’s a difference.” She points out. “Doesn’t matter to you what she does and doesn’t do anymore.”

He looks away. The right side gives him nothing. The left catches his reflection in a small cabinet mirror, scar visible under clinical light, ugly not in shape but in honesty.

“I won’t contact her.”

“I know,” Shoko says.

That surprises him enough to make him look back. She shrugs, reaching for ointment.

“You’re a lot of things. You’re not stupid enough to make Maki commit vehicular assault or manslaughter in broad daylight.”

He scoffs. Shoko’s expression doesn't change.

“And you know she asked for distance. You’re selfish, but you understand instructions when violating them would prove the exact thing she left you for.”

It's almost a compliment. He hates that he takes it as one.

“She remove you too?” he asks.

“No.”

The answer lands exactly where she intends it to.

He nods once. Shoko applies the ointment with more care than her mood suggests.

“I won’t let you look at her instagram on my phone either, before you embarrass both of us by asking.”

He had not been about to ask. He had thought about it.

“That account’s boring.”

“Then you won’t miss it.”

He shifts the subject, but not quite.

“Maki still having those little gatherings?” he asks.

Shoko does not look up.

“What a boring attempt. Creativity did leave you.”

“I asked a question.”

“You asked around the question.”

He says nothing. She finally glances at him.

“I’m not telling you whether she goes. No, I’m not telling you how she is. No, you cannot look at her Instagram on my phone. No, I will not accidentally leave it open. No, I do not care that you are restless. Is that all? Any other stupid, obvious question you have?”

His jaw works once. Shoko’s face softens nowhere.

“You lost access.”

“I know that.”

“Then know it quietly.”

He almost smiles because it is brutal enough to respect.

Almost.

He doesn’t ask again for a while. He asks Yuuji once, a month after the dinner.

Yuuji goes quiet over the phone. That tells Sukuna too much.

“How is she?” Sukuna asks, making the words sound like an afterthought and failing because Yuuji knows his afterthoughts better than most people know his speeches.

“I’m not doing that,” Yuuji says.

“She talks to you?”

“Sometimes.”

The answer enters Sukuna’s ribs sideways.

Sometimes.

You still talk to Yuuji.

Good.

Terrible.

“I asked how she is, brat.”

“And I said I’m not doing that. You can’t use me to check on her because she won’t talk to you.”

Sukuna’s grip tightens around the phone.

“Careful.”

“No.” Yuuji’s voice changes. Not loud. Older. Sadder. “You don’t get to do that either, Sukuna. You were awful, and I get that you’re my brother, and I love you, and I’m glad you’re riding again, but I’m not going to make it easier for you to deal with the consequences of your own actions and avoid apologizing.”

The word lands badly.

Apologizing.

As if he has not thought of it. As if the thought does not sit in him some nights like a live coal. But an apology sent too late without knowing what it must carry becomes another selfish thing. He has written messages and deleted them. Typed your name. Typed I’m sorry and stared until the words looked too small to deserve sending. Typed longer things that turned into explanations, and explanations looked like excuses, and excuses looked like him trying to win a fight that should never have happened.

He says none of that.

“You done?”

“Yeah. I guess.” Yuuji sighs.

They talk less after that. Not because of one call only. Because Sukuna gets busy again. Because riding returns and eats hours, days, entire stretches of attention. Because Yuuji texts and Sukuna sees the message while in a meeting, while training, while exhausted after a show, while Kenny is talking, while Mei Mei is handing him another obligation, and he thinks he will reply later. Later becomes too late. Too late becomes awkward. Awkward becomes irritation. Irritation becomes silence.

Yuuji stops trying as often. Then almost stops.

Sukuna notices. He does not fix it.

That is another thing he puts in the pile of consequences and refuses to examine because the pile is already too high.

The champion life returns.

The search for you becomes a habit he pretends is situational awareness.

He scans crowds. At first, he tells himself It's because depth perception and blind-side awareness require more deliberate environmental reading now. That’s true enough to be useful as a lie. He checks VIP sections, barriers, stairwells, the places you used to stand with your body half-forward, half-braced, like your fear and fascination were both pulling on you. He recognizes women with similar hair and dismisses them before his pulse can do something humiliating. He catches sight of teachers on school outings near public events and turns away before his mind gets creative.

You are never there.

Or you are there and avoiding where he can see.

He doesn't know which is worse.

Once, after a show, he sees Maki leaving the stadium.

There is no spotlight, no sudden score, no meaningful pause in the crowd. He’s walking through the side corridor toward a scheduled photography session, still in black event pants, sponsor jacket half-zipped, scar treated, hair damp from a rushed shower. Kenny is somewhere ahead talking to Naoya about outfits, because apparently standing near Sukuna now requires strategy. Nanami is on a call. Choso is behind him with a gear bag.

Maki cuts across the far end of the corridor with two people from the crowd flow, keys already in hand. She looks exactly like she belongs to no one and tolerates nothing. For a second he thinks she has not seen him.

Then her eyes meet his. She keeps walking. He hears himself say her name before deciding whether he wants the conversation.

“Maki.”

Choso stops behind him. Maki doesn't stop immediately. That’s deliberate. She takes three more steps, says something to the person beside her, then turns back alone. Her expression is already hostile enough that several people nearby decide to look elsewhere.

“What?”

No greeting. Fair.

Sukuna glances at the corridor behind her, then back.

“She here?”

Maki’s face doesn't change.

“Who?”

His jaw tightens. Choso quietly finds somewhere else to look. Sukuna doesn't play.

“You know who.”

Maki steps closer, not because she needs privacy but because she wants the option of violence to feel intimate.

“I won’t be telling some asshole superstar about my friend’s life, concussions made you stupider?”

The phrase is so precise he almost appreciates it.

Almost.

“I asked if she’s here, not for her detailed routine.”

“You don’t get to ask me anything about her.”

“She doing fine?”

Maki’s eyes sharpen because she probably can’t believe he’s so stupid. There It is, though. The question underneath the question. The one that has been rotting behind his teeth for months. He doesn't know why it comes out now. Maybe because adrenaline lowers his defenses. Maybe because Kenny’s voice ahead is irritating him. Maybe because Maki is the first person close enough to your life who can't hide behind medical professionalism.

Maki looks him up and down, not in admiration, not in fear. Assessment. Maybe some disgust. He wonders what she sees. The returned champion. The scar. The jacket. The sponsor money. The absence of you beside him. The asshole.

“She’s not a race result,” Maki says. “You don’t get an update because you’re curious how badly the crash looked from the stands.”

His teeth press together.

“Careful.”

“No.” She laughs once, without humor. “You be careful. You mind your business. If you even think about popping up near her unannounced because you got sad between photo shoots, I’m driving over you with my car. And before you decide I’m bluffing, remember I know exactly how fast to hit a man so he survives long enough to regret it.”

Choso makes a quiet sound that might be horror or approval. Sukuna looks at her for a long moment.

He believes her.

That should anger him more. Instead it settles something small and bitter. Good. Someone is between him and you. Someone with enough vitriol to threaten him. Someone who won't let his loneliness become a reason.

He tsks, because his mouth has to do something.

“Still charming.”

“Still an asshole.”

“Maki,” Choso says quietly, not warning. Just her name, with guilt threaded through it.

Her gaze flicks to him. For one second, something painful passes between them. Choso knew. Choso didn’t tell. She knows that too. The wreckage is not only Sukuna’s, even if the fault began with him.

Maki’s voice lowers.

“You don’t get to ask me either.”

Choso nods once. It looks like swallowing glass.

“I know.”

That’s all. Maki leaves. Sukuna watches until she disappears into the moving crowd. He has a photography session in an hour. Kenny wants to coordinate clothes so the pictures look right. Mei Mei wants him visible at the sponsor lounge. Monster wants content. Fans want signatures. Reporters want quotes about rebirth.

He wants to follow Maki and ask one more question.

He doesn't.

The fact that he doesn't feels like a victory so small no one else would recognize it.

The fact that it hurts feels like punishment enough for now.

Kenny is annoyed when Sukuna arrives late to the session.

They are wearing something black and fitted, hair arranged with deliberate effortlessness, jewelry chosen to catch light without looking like it tried too hard. They look beautiful in the way they always look beautiful — curated, sharp, available to admiration but not touch unless touch benefits them. Sukuna used to enjoy that clarity. He still does, some nights.

Tonight, it grates.

“You disappeared,” Kenny says, adjusting the cuff of his jacket without asking.

“I walked slower.”

“You’re so annoying after shows.”

“Then leave.”

They smile, eyes lifting.

“And waste the outfit?”

Naoya laughs from nearby because he has no survival instinct.

“See? That’s why I like Kenny. Knows the important part.”

Sukuna looks at him.

“Do you ever get tired of proving your skull’s empty?”

Naoya’s grin widens, but he takes one step back. Kenny taps Sukuna’s chest lightly.

“Don’t start. We need usable photos.”

“We don’t need shit.”

“Oh, but we do.” Their hand slides up to his collar, straightens it, lingers where the scar begins near his jaw. Their thumb doesn't touch the worst of it. He notices. “You’re the miracle. I’m the one hot enough to stand next to the miracle and make people wonder.”

“You always this humble?”

“I learned from you.”

That almost works. The old rhythm is there. Bite, answer, press closer, turn irritation into heat because heat is simpler than honesty. Kenny leans up like they expect him to meet them halfway for the cameras or for the hallway or for the pleasure of being seen wanting.

He does kiss them. It photographs well. Later, when the pictures circulate, people call them electric.

Sukuna stares at one of the photos in his apartment after midnight, pain settled into his shoulders and his body too tired to sleep. Kenny is curled against him in the image, face turned just enough to show satisfaction. Sukuna looks like he belongs exactly where he stands — dangerous, recovered, desired, expensive. The scar is visible. The missing eye is not the weakness people expected. It has been turned into a mark of survival.

Everything about the picture works. That’s precisely why he hates looking at it.

Kenny sleeps in his bed that night, sprawled comfortably on the side where you used to sleep.

Sukuna doesn't ask them to move. He also doesn't sleep.

In the morning, Kenny complains about the old shirt on the chair.

“You still wear that?”

Sukuna follows their gaze. The old team shirt. The one returned in Shoko’s paper bag. It has been washed since, folded, unfolded, worn once after a shower and then abandoned because it felt too loaded to put on and too pathetic to hide.

“What about it?”

Kenny shrugs, crossing the room naked enough that modesty is clearly not the point.

“It’s ugly.”

“Didn’t ask.”

“You have better clothes now.”

“I had better clothes before.”

“Then why keep it?”

He looks at the shirt.

Because you slept in it.

Because you gave it back.

Because It's mine and not mine.

Because if he throws it away, he is agreeing with the version of himself that treated tenderness like collateral damage.

Because if he keeps it, he has to live with the evidence.

“Because it’s comfortable.”

Kenny hums like they do not believe him. They are perceptive when perception can be weaponized. That used to be interesting. Now it feels like standing near broken glass barefoot.

“Sentimental,” they mutter.

He looks at them. Their smile turns sweet in the most dangerous way.

“Relax. I won’t tell anyone the reborn champion keeps ugly laundry because he’s secretly soft.”

“Get dressed.”

“Mean.”

“You knew that already.”

They laugh and drift toward the bathroom. He takes the shirt from the chair after they leave the room and folds it once. Not neatly enough. He fixes the fold, irritated with himself, and puts it back in the drawer.

The year continues.

He wins smaller things, then larger ones. Not always first, not immediately, not with the insulting ease people assumed he had before. But he climbs back with a consistency that makes even skeptics shut up. The first time he loses time because of depth misjudgment and recovers without panic, Nanami’s mouth tightens with approval. The first time he takes a bigger jump in show conditions and lands clean, Choso turns away too quickly and pretends to check the bike. The first time a young rider asks him whether he is afraid now and he answers honestly enough to surprise himself — “Fear’s just information. Use it or get used by it” — Mei Mei stares at him like she might be able to sell the quote for another quarter million. She probably will.

Monster is happy. Kusakabe is happy in the restrained, exhausted way of a man whose job depends on controlled catastrophe. He meets Sukuna after one sponsored event with a handshake and says,

“You are proving the investment correct.”

Sukuna almost likes that better than praise.

“Obviously.”

Kusakabe looks at his feral grin, the sweat still fresh on his skin, the post-track violence humming under the surface of him, and for once seems genuinely amused.

“Obviously.”

The representative’s satisfaction should feel like a clean win. In some ways, it does. Sukuna loves riding again. Loves the bite of the ramp, the way the crowd goes stupid when he commits to air, the brutal joy of landing exactly where he intends. Loves proving that the missing eye has not made him lesser, that the scar is not an ending, that the body can be forced to learn new rules if the will is vicious enough. Loves being useful and great. Loves the worship, even when he despises the simplicity of the worshipers.

He also misses you every single day.

It's not always striking or intense. That is the worst part. If missing you were always scathing, he could hate it properly. But some days It's just there, domestic and persistent, threaded through the ordinary. He sees a teacher’s tote bag in a coffee shop and thinks of your grading. He hears a song you once forced into his car playlist and remembers criticizing it while letting it play to the end. He passes the corner bakery near your street once by accident because traffic reroutes him, and for three blocks afterward his hands are too tight on the steering wheel. He catches someone in VIP wearing lilac silk and feels his stomach drop before the face turns wrong.

Kenny never notices the small reactions unless they can use them. Shoko notices and says nothing. Nanami notices once, after Sukuna pauses near a poster stand selling old event prints. One of the prints is from the helmet kiss show, not close enough to show your face clearly, but the line of your body at the globe entrance is familiar to him because his body remembers where you stood even when the photograph blurs you into spectacle.

Nanami stands beside him with two coffees, and after a long moment, he says,

“Some images are not improved by revisiting them in public.”

Sukuna takes the coffee.

“Didn’t ask for advice, Kento.”

“No. You rarely do before needing it.”

Sukuna looks at the poster one more second, then away.

“She still hate me?”

Nanami is quiet long enough for Sukuna to regret asking.

“I don’t know,” Nanami says in his usual, tired tone. “And if I did, I’m not sure I would tell you.”

“Everyone’s loyal now.”

“They were loyal before. You simply mistook access for allegiance.”

That lands like a clean punch.

Nanami drinks his coffee like he has not just said something that will sit in Sukuna’s ribs for weeks.

Sukuna looks toward the track entrance, where another practice group is moving into position.

“Choso hates me?”

“No.”

“Should.”

“Perhaps. He is more invested in being fair and competent than most of us.”

“You?”

Nanami sighs faintly.

“I’m tired of you.”

“That’s not new.”

“No,” Nanami agrees. “But the quality has changed.”

Sukuna snorts despite himself. Nanami’s voice remains level.

“For what it’s worth, I think you have improved in some areas.”

“That supposed to flatter me?”

“It's supposed to be accurate. You follow medical advice. You listen to feedback. You no longer make every warning into a challenge. That matters professionally.” He pauses. “Personally, I suspect you still have work to do.”

Sukuna’s mouth curves without humor.

“You always this diplomatic with everyone?”

“No. I am being generous because you rode well today.”

That, too, almost works on him.

Later that evening, Kenny posts another picture. A table at a restaurant. Their hand over his, rings visible, his black nail polish, the edge of his tattoo. Caption vague, expensive, intimate enough to invite speculation. Sukuna watches the notifications climb on Kenny’s phone while they preen beside him.

“People love us,” Kenny purrs.

“They don’t know us.”

“That helps them loving us.”

He looks across the table at them. Candlelight catches the clean planes of their face, the clever eyes, the mouth that knows how to smile like a secret. They are not wrong. People love surfaces because surfaces ask nothing difficult. Kenny understands that. Kenny has built a life out of making surfaces profitable.

“What?” Kenny asks, because his stare has gone too still.

Sukuna leans back. His knee aches. His scar is tight. His body wants ice and silence. Kenny wants another drink, another photo, another place where people can see without seeming to see. The old version of him would have leaned into it because being wanted for the shine was still being wanted, and being wanted without needing to be known felt safer than the alternative.

You had known too much. You had stayed anyway. That’ the part he still can't make sense of, even after a year.

“Nothing,” he says.

Kenny studies him for another second, then lets it go because nothing is useful enough when paired with a black card and a driver waiting outside. He takes them home because that is the script.

On the drive back, Kenny talks about a potential trip, about a brand event overseas, about how Sukuna should consider letting them style him for one of the shoots because Mei Mei’s people are too corporate and Naoya has no taste beyond “obvious whore with money.” Sukuna lets the words move through the car without catching many of them. Outside, the city streaks by. The glass gives him his reflection in pieces. Kenny’s profile. His own scar. His hand on the wheel.

He remembers another car ride, months and months ago, before the crash, before the hospital, before the dinner. You in the passenger seat, dressed in lilac silk, trying not to smile when he criticized every song you chose but refusing to change the playlist because you knew he was listening anyway. The light brown leather under your thighs. His hand on your leg. The strange, warm irritation of realizing he liked having someone there who did not try to turn his attention into proof.

Kenny reaches over and places a hand on his thigh. He doesn't move away. He also feels nothing.

At his apartment, Kenny walks in like the place is a set. They have always liked his apartment. The height, the glass, the controlled brutality of the design, the expensive emptiness that photographs well. They kick off their shoes and immediately move toward the windows.

“You need more art,” they say. “Something severe. Something that suits the whole rebirth thing.”

He thinks of the poster in your hallway. The one he told you to put back up. The one you bought before you knew him. The old proof that you had wanted the rider before you got access to the man, and somehow managed to love both without confusing one for the other.

Maybe you took it down. Maybe you did not. He will never ask Maki. He will never ask Shoko. He will never know unless you decide he can.

“No,” he says.

Kenny turns.

“No?”

“No art.”

“This place is depressing.”

“Then leave.”

They smile, but it has an edge now.

“You say that a lot for someone who keeps opening the door.”

He looks at them across the room. There it is again and again and again. The truth, easy and unpleasant. He does keep opening the door. Not because Kenny is good for him. Not because he believes them when they touch him. Not because they give him peace. Kenny gives him exactly what he already understands — want with conditions visible, affection sharpened into leverage, admiration tied to access, desire that thrives best under cameras and money and the heat of public relevance.

Kenny is not the wound. Kenny is the bandage he keeps wrapping too tight because numbness feels like control.

“You always talked too much,” he says.

“And you always avoided the point.”

He laughs once, low, caustic.

“That what this is? You making a point?”

Kenny walks back toward him, not afraid, never afraid in the ways that matter. They stop close enough for him to smell their perfume, expensive, dark, clinging to his apartment with the confidence of something that expects to remain.

“You’re different,” Kenny says, quieter now. “Not in the fun tragic way everyone’s buying... something else. You come back, but you keep looking over your shoulder like the important part didn’t follow.”

The words hit too close. His face goes still. Kenny’s smile returns, gentle and cruel around the edges.

“Oh. There it is.”

He should end it there. He knows that with the same clarity he knows how to take a jump now — not instinctive like before, but assembled from enough signals to be reliable. He should tell Kenny to get out. He should stop letting familiar poison call itself medicine. He should stop punishing himself with something easy because the hard thing is unreachable. Instead he says,

“Bedroom or door. Pick.”

Kenny looks at him for a long moment. Then they laugh softly and choose the bedroom. The night is rough enough to leave his body quiet afterward.

Not explicit in memory, not cruel beyond what both of them already know how to trade. It burns through adrenaline. It gives him sensation without asking him to name anything. Kenny falls asleep first, satisfied, one hand still near his hip like ownership can be casual. Sukuna lies awake beside them and stares at the ceiling.

His body is tired. His mind is not. So he thinks of the plastic box. He thinks of Shoko’s paper bag. He thinks of the first time you looked at the ruined side of his face and did not flinch. The way your hands had not trembled when you cleaned near the scar. The way you said you were right. You’re still beautiful. No matter what you think.

Kenny wants to cover it. The world wants to brand it. Mei Mei wants to sell it. Fans want to worship it.

He wants, with an ache so plain it disgusts him, one person who saw it before it became useful and did not look away.

In the dark, Kenny shifts and murmurs something half-asleep, pushing closer for warmth. Sukuna turns his head toward the window. The city looks back, bright and indifferent.

It should be easier. It is easier. That is not the same as better.

Some nights after shows, Kenny falls asleep with their phone still close enough to their hand to suggest devotion to a glowing rectangle above any living body. Sukuna lies awake, body aching, one eye open to the city or ceiling or unfamiliar hotel dark. His scar pulls. His hands still feel the handlebars. His ears hum with leftover crowd noise. Kenny sleeps without worrying whether he has taken anti-inflammatory medication. Without checking if the ice pack is placed right. Without asking whether his headache is normal or whether the landing aggravated his knee.

Good, he tells himself. He does not need fussing.

Then he remembers you sitting on his bathroom counter with your knees drawn up, reading the medication label because you didn’t trust him to remember the timing. You had looked ridiculous and stubborn and tired. He had wanted you so badly then that pain became a secondary inconvenience. You had said he could glare all he wanted, but he was not combining meds incorrectly just because he had the self-preservation of a dramatic beetle.

A dramatic fucking beetle. Who says shit like that?

He had threatened to throw you out. You had kissed his shoulder and kept reading.

He turns onto his side away from Kenny and stares at nothing.

He is back at it. Back as the champion. Back to high jumps, signatures, photo sessions, sponsor satisfaction, the particular violence of being excellent in public. Monster is getting its money back. Mei Mei was right. Kusakabe looks pleased every time Sukuna comes off track with dirt on his gear and that feral grin dragging across the scar. The simple minds bought the rebranding. Maybe not only simple minds. Maybe everyone wants a story where damage becomes proof instead of loss.

He has almost everything he was afraid of losing.

The bike. The track. The crowd. The money. The body, altered but obedient again. The worship. A lover who enjoys the shine and never asks him to be precious when he would rather be great.

He has everything that once made sense.

And every day, in some small, humiliating, ordinary way, he misses you, the woman who made sense impossible and somehow made life better anyway.

Sukuna closes his eye and doesn't sleep.

In the morning, he will train. He will ride. He will answer Mei Mei’s calls, ignore Yuuji’s old unread messages until guilt makes his thumb hover and pride makes it move away, tolerate Shoko, demand harsher feedback from Choso, threaten Naoya, let Kenny talk about clothes and angles and the image of being wanted.

He will keep becoming the champion again.

He will keep proving that the crash didn’t end him.

He will keep looking for you in crowds where you never stand anymore.

And because there is no engine loud enough to drown out what he destroyed himself, he will remember, every time the pain comes after the high, that there was once someone waiting on the other side of it with ice, warm hands, a sharp mouth, and no interest in making him a miracle.

Just a man. Just yours.

He opens his eye again before the thought can finish.

The room remains dark.

The other side of the bed is occupied.

It has never felt emptier.

The year apart completes itself without ceremony.

There is no anniversary because nothing ended cleanly enough to deserve a date, and nothing continues visibly enough to mark. Still, Sukuna knows. His body knows seasons better now because recovery carved them into him. Winter hospital. Spring controlled practice. Summer hard training. Fall comeback solidified. Nearing the time of the dinner again, he begins feeling a pressure he refuses to name.

He rides through it.

A sponsored event near the end of the year fills a stadium with heat and noise and green-black light. Not the same show. Not the same night. But enough elements repeat that memory stirs beneath his skin.

Monster everywhere. His number everywhere. A crowd drunk on spectacle. Mei Mei in full command. Kusakabe hovering with the pleased anxiety of someone who has attached too many projections to one man’s body. Kenny backstage in a coat that costs more than some people’s bikes, arguing with Naoya about which photographers are worth acknowledging.

Sukuna looks at the VIP section before gearing up.

No you.

He tells himself he expected nothing.

The lie is boring by now.

The performance is excellent.

He knows because the crowd responds before the announcer finds words. He pushes harder than planned but not beyond control, each maneuver clean, each landing exact enough to quiet the old fear. The biggest jump of the night feels almost holy in its violence. He rises, suspended for a breath, the stadium opening below him. In the air, there is no missing eye, no dinner, no Kenny, no social media, no contract clause. There is only body, machine, trajectory, correction.

Then landing.

Impact.

Control.

Roar.

He is alive.

After, the reporters swarm.

He answers better now. Worse in spirit, better in strategy. Mei Mei has trained him enough that his contempt comes out quotable instead of actionable. Someone asks what keeps him motivated after everything. He says spite before Mei Mei can stop him, then adds discipline because he can almost feel her looking at him.

They laugh.

They love it.

Everything he says becomes part of the machine.

Kenny appears beside him after the media line, hand sliding around his arm in perfect view of a camera. Their smile is luminous. Their body fits into the public frame like it belongs there. Naoya is pleased. The photographer gets the shot.

Sukuna looks over the camera flashes and, for no reason except that missing you has become reflex, searches the crowd beyond.

No you.

Always no you.

Kenny says something about dinner. About a private room. About wearing the eyepatch next month just once, for them, as if the suggestion is flirtation and not strategy. Naoya adds something obscene enough to make Kenny laugh. Kusakabe congratulates him. Mei Mei tells him the engagement numbers will be obscene. Choso asks whether the landing bothered his shoulder. Shoko says he is getting checked whether he complains or not. Nanami starts reviewing departure logistics.

Life moves around him in its restored orbit.

He has everything he fought to get back.

The riding. The worship. The contract. The body mostly obedient. The team still looking at him like champion is not past tense. The lover who understands luxury. The cameras. The noise. The usefulness.

It’s not enough.

This is the part he can’t forgive.

Not you.

Himself.

He should have been able to make it enough. Before you, it would have been. Before the hospital chair, the bathroom ointment, the returned shirts, before your hand under tables and your mouth on his visor, before you looked at the most damaged version of him and refused to lower your eyes. Before all that, the roar would have filled every hollow place worth acknowledging.

Now the roar ends.

And in the space after, he hears what is not there.

Your voice telling him to drink water.

Your quiet pride after he rides well.

Your anger when he risks too much.

Your ridiculous relief when he comes back in one piece.

Your hand, warm on his thigh, grounding him before he ruins something.

He stands under stadium lights with Kenny at his side, Monster pleased, cameras hungry, adrenaline still fresh in his veins, and feels the absence like a second injury that never bothered healing because no one gave it a protocol.

The champion is back.

Sukuna knows that better than anyone.

He also knows, with a clarity that sits colder than any ice bath he’s been taking regularly now, that the man who returned is still standing in the parking lot where he let you walk away.

He has been riding for months.

He has not moved from that spot at all.

When you ask how I've been I know you mean well, I know you mean well Who am I dialing tonight? That's a bummer Thaw out my freezer, burn feelings, for twenty summers

I'm just a cherub, riding comets through the night sky Screaming at the stars like night lights And I love my life, love my life

Running middle fingers through the red lights And I guess I'm getting older, 'cause I'm less pissed When I can't get onto the guest list To the end of the world, the end of the world Fever dream, tangerine sweat When I get down, down Silent killers are these years, coming like waves You put the fun, into dysfunction

Hold me, hold me like a grudge The world is always spinning and I can't keep up Whoa, oh, oh, faster and faster Can't do it on my own Part-time soulmate, full-time problem, yeah So, hold me like a grudge Hold me like a grudge, yeah, yeah Hold me like grudge Hold me like grudge

I guess somehow we made it back With a few dreams of ours still in tact I am a diamond on the inside, just add the pressure Know it's inside me, but I got no map, to my own treasure

I'm just a cherub, riding comets through the night sky Screaming at the stars like night lights And I love my life, love my life Running middle fingers through the red lights And I guess I'm getting bolder, 'cause I'm less pissed We didn't make to your year-end best list Not the end of the world, the end of the world

Fever dream, tangerine sweat When I get down, down Silent killers are these years, coming like waves You put the fun into dysfunction

Hold me, hold me like a grudge The world is always spinning and I can't keep up Whoa, oh, oh, faster and faster Can't do it on my own Part-time soulmate, full-time problem, yeah So hold me like a grudge Hold me like a grudge, yeah, yeah Hold me like grudge Hold me like grudge

I thought I knew better, I thought it would get better I figured somehow by now, I would have got it together And if you put your, put your, heart in it, heart in it Then we'll do more than just get by together Call you up and demand you have no fun without me I'm like a storm on the horizon, storm on the horizon You put the fun into dysfunction

Hold me, hold me like a grudge The world is always spinning and I can't keep up Whoa, oh, oh, faster and faster Can't do it on my own Part-time soulmate, full-time problem Yeah, hold me like a grudge (No, oh, no) Hold me like a grudge, yeah, yeah Hold me like grudge Hold me like grudge

Hold me like a Hold me like grudge

@mischivana @kunaskult @mako-sea @oranoyaora @dogggggggblog-kaye @inlovewithpsychos @onlykuna @cheam-creems123 @ravenraa I think I can tag you in the post now that I stopped breaking tumblr's limit of characters and tables. 🙂‍↕️