Satoru peers up from the sofa. “What’s for dinner, baby? Should we get food delivered? I’m up for anything.”
Jaw dropping, you reply, slowly like he’s an idiot, “There is no dinner. There is no we. You made sure of that.” Stomping over, you grab him by his arm and use all your weight and force to get him up from your couch. To no avail. He’s not called The Strongest for nothing, after all. “Get your fat ass up and out of my apartment!”
“Don’t be mean,” he whines. “It’s turning me on.”
You can’t believe this. Can’t believe that he’s here, lounging in your living room, trying to reach for your thigh to stroke the bare skin there, when just this morning, Satoru had broken up with you.
“A fucking text, Gojo,” you spat out. “You broke up with me through a text message that read, ‘too busy, gotta cut you loose. love ya always!’ And now, you just strut back in here, thinking you can act normal and I’ll let you back in? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you think I’m a pathetic fangirl who’ll let you walk all over her? Get. The. Fuck. Out.”
He pushes himself up to his feet, sighing. Satoru combs his hair back as he towers over you in his usual uniform. “Really hoped it wouldn’t come to this. Here goes nothing.”
In a flash, he falls to his knees and clings to your body like a leech.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry. Oh, fuck, baby. I’ve been so busy these days. I thought you were going to break up with me. I’ve never been broken up with, and it was scary, and I was just thinking of my pride, like I thought it would hurt less if I was the one who broke up with you first, but when you blocked me on everything and I couldn’t send you any funny tiktoks about dogs standing up on their hind legs, it started to set in, y’know? Like, this immense pain in my chest. I actually thought I was dying. And I knew I had to apologise and beg for you to take me back, but when you opened the door, all I could think about was how beautiful you are and the speech I had planned disappeared, and I just walked in like a dick, and now I’m on my knees literally begging and crying for you to forgive me. I’m so sorry, baby. Please take me back. Please, please, please. I can’t live without y—”
“Shut the fuck up,” you say, pushing him and his snot-nosed face from your stomach. He’s left a Gojo print of wetness on your shirt. Disgusting. “You’re the worst, you self-sabotaging, manchild.”
Satoru, through wet tears, gazes up at you. “I love Sabrina. She really captures my essence, I think. She’d hate me for what I did to you, of course, but I like to believe she’d be moved by my ability to throw all sense of dignity out the window to show you my sincerity… so what do you say?”
“Ugh,” you groan to yourself, “I have the worst taste in men.” Resigned to his inescapable hold, you grumble, “Alright, get up. Let’s unpack why you’re so goddamn impulsive.”
He kisses your belly button in gratitude and sheepishly asks:
“You have all night?”
just a thought I had as I was drying my hair. he'd definitely like to play it cool at first lol
pairing: bf!Yuji Itadori x f!reader
synopsis: just some texts I think Yuji would have with his girlfriend :)
cw: suggestive language and jokes, established relationship, fluff
a/n: happy birthday to my sweet bby Yuji omg I love him sm <3
Yuji masterlist
True form!Sukuna and all the silly ways in which he exploits his gigantic body against you - pure fluff (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)
True form!Sukuna is huge. Fact. He has four arms. Fact. He has a stomach mouth. Devastating fact.
True form!Sukuna loves to hear you shout at him for something he's done that he doesn't really understand why is so wrong. All he hears is 'sanctity of life,' 'children are precious' and 'mess.' Despite how irritating your words are, for he cannot comprehend what any of it means, he's grown rather fond of your voice. He can listen to you for hours. Days. But he occasionally finds that shutting you up is much more entertaining. So, as he sits on his throne, chin resting on one fist, watching your arms flail and your mouth move at an impressive speed, he decides he's done being reprimanded.
Suddenly getting on his feet, he watches his body cast a shadow over your entire frame. Then, silence befalling the both of you, he awaits that slow bend of your head back, creaking more and more as you stretch your neck to meet his amused gaze. He steps closer so your face is right in front of his mouth stomach.
In a flash, that mouth has opened up and given you a lick.
"Delicious."
You smack him on his chest and he bellows a laugh.
True form!Sukuna spars with you. It was your idea — you think it necessary for his spirit, to avoid feeling restless, to maintain some of his competitive spirit, ensuring that any urge for stretching his limbs is taken out on a consenting individual, rather than an innocent (not that he thinks such a person exists, all mortals, with one exception, are filthy inside and out).
These sessions never last very long because you get frustrated so quickly. Sure, it's his fault and he's willing to admit that, but he won't stop any time soon. He'll say it's because it's hilarious to watch you fight to get out of the grip one of his large hands has on your head as he keeps you at an arm's length, easily avoiding your swinging limbs. The truth, however, is that landing a blow on you is not how he'd like to pass time at all. Pinning you beneath him is, but in a different context, of course.
"Your technique could use much work. At this rate, it will be impossible for you to even lay a hand on me, much less strike me down."
Trying to peel his hand off your face, you mumble against his palm, "You have four arms, Kuna. You're being unfair."
"Your excuses fall on deaf ears. Now, struggle harder and use your legs too. It will not work but it will be funny."
True form!Sukuna acts like a man often, though he'd reject that accusation. One such occasion is when he is insulted you're much more focused on your phone than on him. He snatches that contraption from you and holds it up high with one arm. Jumping for it, he grins at your pathetic attempt to retrieve your personal belonging. It's like an ant trying to climb a tree.
Another is when he refuses to let you hold his hand. All four of them. You whine his name, trying to pry one of his hands open so you can place your own in his clutch. But he doesn't relent. Instead, he insists on holding onto four different things at once.
He'd hold four books at once, even as you smack his chest. Or he folds all his arms, grip impossible to break through, try as you might, and you certainly do.
Only when you sigh and give up does he make a tsk sound before all arms are wrapping around your frame and holding you up.
True form!Sukuna makes it up to you by carrying you around with one arm, another holding your phone up to your face, a plate full of fruit, and the fourth pushing ugly servants who come into his view with a ridiculous request away so they cannot disturb him.
True form!Sukuna utilises his stomach mouth in nefarious ways. Yes, exactly what you're thinking of, but also like a toddler.
Torso bare, he'll sit at the head of a meeting with you among the crowd, per your insistence since apparently he has 'wandering hands' that are both 'embarrassing' and 'distracting.' That mouth will curve into a mischievous smile, forcing a sigh out of you. With his face completely stone-cold, he'll stick a tongue out of his stomach and wriggle it, razor-sharp teeth glinting in the light as you fight the urge to laugh.
You know you shouldn't encourage him; it's immature and unbefitting of a lady. But, it's such an odd sight. Especially as the other members of staff and guests can do nothing but shuffle awkwardly, unsure of how to react because surely, their King wouldn't be so childish and that gesture is very clearly not directed towards them.
It doesn't stop there either.
When you're washing dishes, you have to be aware of your surroundings — masterful killer, he is, he slips behind you without making a single noise, shadow looming over you once more, and you find your shirt lifted up, cool breeze climbing up your back just as something wet and warm does.
True form!Sukuna licks you. Gasping, spluttering, squirming, all you hear in reply is a snicker before he pulls your shirt down, pecks your head and disappears to whatever dark corner he came from.
True form!Sukuna's pettiness knows no bounds. Truly. Very often when he finds himself at the receiving end of your lectures and scolding, he uses his face mouth to agree to everything you say but his stomach mouth will be snarking at you.
Or in arguments, he treats his stomach mouth as a third party observer who is not at all objective.
"No, I do not want daffodils in our garden," he insists. "They are a peasant's flower."
Tired, you fire back, "I like daffodils. They're just as pretty as gardenias!"
"Hmm, no, gardenias are infinitely better," Stomach Mouth says.
True form!Sukuna smiles. "I believe that is two votes against you. Accept defeat, woman."
"What? That's not fair! He doesn't count. Ugh, why doesn't he ever agree with me!"
True form!Sukuna even does something you hate very much: he eats you. And no, not like that. Okay, well, yes, like that but not in this instance.
He will stomp over to where you sit on the floor, playing with some cards on the coffee table and rolling your eyes at yet another shadow you find darkening your day. Wordlessly, he stands there. He would wait however long it takes for you to become exasperated and look up. That's when he strikes.
As soon as you make eye contact, your whole vision turns black as you are engulfed into his stomach. Your hands smack his thighs in a panic, silent scream leaving you as you struggle around the clamp of his lips. Licking your face, he releases you and you heave for breath, wiping the slobber from your skin.
True form!Sukuna laughs heartily, clutching his stomach and shaking the room with his amusement. Thoroughly entertained, he grabs your ankle and lifts you into the air, watching you dangle from a great height with a pout.
Shaking you, he demands, "Do not make that face, woman. If I really wanted to eat you, you'd be all chewed up by now. Rejoice in my mercy and thank me by walking on my back. Bending down so often causes aches only you can fix."
♡ husband!satoru’s genes are just too strong ( ˶°ㅁ°) !!
part 2
you’re sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand resting on your very obvious baby bump, the other clutching the newest ultrasound.
“i’m done,” you declare.
across the room, satoru pauses mid taking his shirt off. “done… with pregnancy? because i feel like that’s a little late.”
“with your genes,” you snap, glaring at the photo. “they’re ridiculous. actually unfair.”
he snorts, walking over. “nothing i can do about that, sweetheart.”
you shove the ultrasound toward him. “explain this.”
he looks at it, then at you. “…that is a baby.”
“that is you,” you correct immediately. “again. for the third time.”
he hums like he’s considering it. “we don’t know that.”
“we do,” you insist, growing more emotional by the second.
“we have two already, toru. two tiny versions of you running around with your face, your hair, your stupidly pretty eyes—what am i even contributing?!”
“everything?” he offers.
“no,” you shake your head, pouting. “i carried them for months. i’m carrying this one. i do all the work and your genes just— copy, paste, repeat!”
he tries— he really does— but a grin slips out anyway. “to be fair, it’s a very good face to copy—”
“satoru.”
“right. not the time.”
you huff, looking down at your stomach. the baby shifts faintly, and it only makes your emotional state worse. “i just… i want one that looks like me.”
that quiets him instantly.
he steps closer, slower this time, like approaching something fragile. kneeling in front of you, he gently takes your hand and places it more securely over your bump, covering it with his own.
“they are like you,” he says, softer now.
“they don’t look like me,” you mumble.
“they have your expressions. your attitude,” he replies. “the way they get emotional over the smallest things—”
“it’s not small!”
“—and the big things,” he corrects easily, a small smile tugging at his lips. “that’s all you.”
you hesitate, but your eyes are still shiny. “that’s not the same.”
“it is to me.” his thumb brushes under your eye, catching a tear before it falls. “and this one? might surprise us.”
“you said that last time.”
“okay, yeah,” he admits, “and i was wrong.. twice. but y’know— third time’s a charm.”
a reluctant laugh slips out of you.
“there she is,” he murmurs, leaning in until your foreheads touch. “besides… even if our baby comes out looking exactly like me—”
“she will.”
“—she’s still yours first,” he says gently. “you’re the one she hears, the one she feels. you’re home before she even opens her eyes.”
that makes your expression falter.
“…and,” he adds, grin returning just a little, “if we do end up with three mini me’s, i think that just proves you have excellent taste.”
you let out a shaky breath, then weakly smack his shoulder. “your genes are still stupid.”
“yeah,” satoru says easily, wrapping his arms around you and your bump, “but you married into the problem.”
you grumble, but melt into him anyway, his hand resting warm and steady over your stomach.
“…next one better look like me,” you mumble.
“personally, i do not mind if we keep trying.”
“and what— create a whole clan?” you huff.
“i mean—” you slap a hand on his mouth before he can continue.
thinking about butterfly kisses with satoru ꒰ᐢ⸝⸝⸝⸝⸝ᐢ꒱⸒⸒
“i wish i had lashes like yours, toru.”
you sigh like he’s committed some sort crime. maybe, in your defense, he has— no one should be allowed to look that pretty without even trying. especially not your boyfriend, who already has enough going for him.
and yet there he is, lounging like a cat next to you, one arm thrown lazily over your shoulder, the other tapping at his phone. his blindfold is off, pushed up into his snowy hair, and those stupidly long lashes could as well brush his cheeks every time he blinks.
“mm? what brought this on?” his tone is airy, teasing— he knows exactly what he’s doing.
you scoot closer, narrowing your eyes at him. “they’re longer than mine. it’s not fair.”
now that gets his attention.
satoru tilts his head, bright blue eyes locking onto yours, amusement already blooming in them. “are you jealous of my eyelashes?”
“obviously.“ you cross your arms. “why do you get lashes like that for free? i have to suffer with mascara and you just wake up like that.”
then he laughs.
not just a chuckle, a full, obnoxious, head-tilting-back kind of laugh that makes his shoulders shake. “that’s a new one,” he grins, leaning in closer. “out of all the things to envy about me…”
“don’t push it,” you mutter.
his smile softens— just a little, just enough that it isn’t teasing anymore. “c’mere,” he murmurs.
you don’t question it. you never really do with him.
phone long forgotten, his hand comes up to cradle your cheek, thumb brushing lightly under your eye as he guides your face closer to his. your noses bump first, then your foreheads.
one of your hands come to rest on top of his thigh— and then you feel it, the faint brush of his lashes before anything else.
soft and ticklish. and then he blinks, slowly.
his lashes flutter against yours, a delicate, feathery sensation that makes you squirm and giggle under your breath. instinctively, you do it back. closing the distance just enough, blinking against him, your lashes tangling in the strangest, softest way.
it’s kinda ridiculous. and yet— you do it again. and so does he.
a quiet little rhythm forms, nothing but the faint brush of lashes and the occasional stifled laugh between you.
“you’re weird,” you whisper, though your voice betrays you with a smile.
“so mean,” he shoots back instantly.
you pause for a moment, lashes still brushing his.
“…this is kind of nice.”
his grin widens, impossibly pleased. “thought so.”
and then he leans just a fraction closer— enough to steal a proper kiss this time, slow and warm and entirely smug.
“still jealous,” you mumble against his lips.
“mm,” he hums. “you can keep complaining.”
his lashes flutter against yours again, softer this time.
he picks up his phone on the first ring, ‘yes sweetheart? did you already reach? where are you?’
‘i’m almost there ken but i think i’m gonna need a minute or two to recover’
concern flooded his mind ‘recover? what happened-‘
‘i just saw the most beautiful man ever!’ you squeal through the phone.
what.
‘he’s drop dead gorgeous ken! and he’s not even doing anything, he’s just- standing there’ you sigh dreamily.
‘oh my god ken, his jaw is so chiseled i could grate cheese on it’ your squealing continues.
‘my love, what are you talking about?’
were you being serious right now? was his jaw not chiseled enough to grate cheese? was he not gorgeous?
why were you calling him, your dear boyfriend, to gush about some man guy?
‘and he’s in this light blue dress shirt which you already know is my personal weakness’
wait. oh.
just then, a small smile makes its way on to his face.
‘ken ken ken he just smiled! i think it might be my favourite smile ever! oh god, it’s so beautiful’ you’re swooning on the other side.
‘really? tell me more’ he’s full on grinning now.
‘i could go on and on but you know what? i think i’m gonna shoot my shot and ask him out. i’ll let you know how it goes later. bye, i love you’ you hang up and he has to stop himself from laughing.
he pockets his phone when sees you crossing the road to get to him.
you throw a small wave at him ‘hey, i was on my way to see my boyfriend but then i saw you and you’re just so beautifully sculpted and i decided that i’d rather spend my life with you instead. what do you say?’
‘i’ll have to ask my girlfriend about that’
clicking your tongue ‘of course a guy like you is off the market’ you feign defeat ‘but i bet i’m more prettier than her’
his eyes scan you from top to bottom ‘you’re ok i guess’
scoffing ‘gee ken thanks a lot. what’s the harm in playing along for a little bit?’ you pout, making him snicker.
you and your antics never fail to amuse him.
you feel his arms wrap around you then and pull you to his chest as you melt into him.
‘i’m not lying. my girl is the prettiest’ he says.
‘and i wasn’t either, you really do have a jaw for grating cheese’
the comment just slips out of nobara’s mouth like it’s nothing. “honestly, he’s like a dog.”
you blink. “who?”
she levels you with a bland look. “who do you think?”
she nods her head to yuji, who’s walking past with megumi. he’s all smiles and as if summoned by the universe itself, he looks up, eyes landing on you. his smile softens, he waves.
your heart does an embarrassing little somersault.
nobara leans in. “exhibit a.”
“i don’t see it,” you say weakly.
“if he had a tail, it’d be wagging right now. he likes you.”
“…no, he doesn’t,” you mumble unconvincingly.
“please. he’ll start bringing you sticks if you asked.”
you feel heat creep up your neck. “you’re exaggerating.”
nobara snorts. “am i? call him a good boy, see what happens.”
“i am not doing that,” you choke.
she just hums, already bored with your resistance. “suit yourself. you’re missing out on prime entertainment.”
so, naturally, later, when you and yuji are asked to pick up supplies from storage (extra training mats? you weren’t quite sure), nobara’s words linger in the back of your mind.
he grabs the boxes without complaint, and reaches over to add the ones you had in your arms to his pile.
“i got those,” he says, easy and bright.
“yuji, you’re already carrying like—five.”
he grins. “six isn’t that different.”
your chest does that stupid flip again, and: “thanks,” you say softly. “you’re such a good boy.”
silence.
yuji freezes mid-step, and you immediately regret everything.
“i didn’t mean—i mean, i did mean it, but not like—i just—” you start rambling, heat flooding your face.
he turns to look at you, and oh.
if nobara had been exaggerating before, she isn’t now.
his ears are bright red, eyes wide, and his smile, that usual easy grin of his, has gone all shy around the edges.
“i—what—” he stammers, voice cracking. “wha—did you just….”
you briefly consider faking your own death. “i just meant—”
his expression softens, deepens, turns warm and a little dazed. “say it again,” he blurts.
you blink. “what?”
“th-that,” he says, flustered. “what you just said.”
your pulse is loud in your ears. “…good boy?”
if possible, he gets even redder.
“man,” he laughs nervously, ducking his head. “that—uh—felt really nice.”
your heart melts, reduced to a puddle on the floor.
“it wasn’t, like…weird?”
“no!” he blurts immediately. “i, uh—you can say it again. only if you want to! just—yeah.”
he looks at you with those soft brown eyes, that gentle smile.
nobara was right.
you smile despite it. “c’mon, good boy. let’s drop these off.”
you don’t miss the way his entire face lights up this time “right!” he says, grinning. “i got it!”
yeah. if he had a tail, it’d be knocking things over.
What's the easiest way to get rid of a tenacious man who desperately asks for your hand? Give him twelve impossible challenges, of course, in hopes he'll drop out before finishing them all. But... maybe underestimating the Olympian's greatest hero, the strongest demigod alive, Zeus's warrior, wasn't the greatest choice.
part of the Gods, Heroes, Warriors collection!
pairings: Heracles!Nanami x Nymph!Reader
content/warnings: MDNI 18+, Greek Mythology AU, half mythologically accurate, mentions of Hades!Choso and Aphrodite!Reader, Nanami Kento is pathetic and miserable, also he's massive (like MASSIVE AND THE STRONGEST), fluff and smut, plot with smut, Nanami is desperate to get married, heavy breeding kink, oral (f. rec.), backshots, p in v, size kink, manhandling, size difference, Nanami is not gentle
WC: 7.2k
a/n: gentle suggestion to read this fic before, to not have any spoilers. Heracles Nanami is not super mythologically accurate, because 12 labours were actually given to him by Hera, and he also murdered his whole family, but I didn't want to make an angst out of his story.
art from @/ilameys_1 (IG)
divider by @uzmacchiato
Various types of nymphs walked this world.
Fresh-water ones, who lived in the lovely springs, presiding over the gentle streams and rivers, nurturing the mother nature and singing sweetly to the brooks.
Tree and forest nymphs, who sat highly on the trees and let their tender touch heal the sickly plants. They were of a curious sort, appearing to mortals as travellers and strolling around the forests in a jolly manner.
The lush meadows ones, with their bare feet running between the tall grasses and laughter catching the last rays of the setting sun.
The mountain peaks girls, who shouted and laughed and danced, till their lovely shriek could be heard on the grasslands and in the fields; between the drunken snickers of commoners and gentle giggles of little birdies in waiting.
They weren't goddesses, but of divine descent, playing and jollying with mother nature, bickering with the gods, and letting themselves indulge in love affairs with demigods. Silly girlies, playful and gentle as a sea breeze, with satiny skin and hearty eyes, making the mortals lose their reason. And as lovely as they were, of some poets even comparing them to Aphrodite herself, there was this one, special birdie, who one day flocked to the greatest demigod's mind.
You.
For Zeus's bastard son and the strongest warrior of the Olympus, it was always you.
Since the faithful meeting when he was still just a boy, with nothing to his name, nor without any knowledge of his godly descent. He would remember that day for the next few years, while fighting his way up to Mount Olympus and proving his worth. While dreaming of you every single night, with nothing but shimmering stars and the gentle splashing of a brook reminding him of the kindest soul he's ever met. With benevolent touch and bewitching eyes. The sweet power that helped him lick the wounds, and the lovely giggles following him in dreams every night.
After years of hardships, he finally ascended to heaven and got the recognition of his father. Became the golden child, a precious sweetheart, with a massive combat body compared only to Ares's and the strength of a thousand monsters locked up in the deepest parts of Tartarus. He was a monster himself, some may've said, but with a kind heart and, oh, such handsome looks.
Light hair as if bleached by the Mediterranean sun and deep eyes, thick as hazelnut paste, with the gentleness never seen among warriors. Broad shoulders that could lift a thousand mountains and split the seas, without a droplet of sweat sliding down his curved muscles.
He was nothing but a demigod, but his name and fame spread around the country like a fire. The strongest man alive, the greatest hero, a myth, whose travels and deeds ended up on the pages of local storytellers and curved smoothly within the marble walls of his temples. His journeys spread wide across the long coastlines and mountainous peaks, with the nymphs whispering of his slayers like little birdies.
Of the King of the Thrakian Gigantes, he has killed to free the princess from his clutches. Of the Libyan giant, son of Poseidon, who abused the travellers crossing his land and made them compete in wrestling matches. Of the Prometheus he has freed, and the eagle feeding on his flesh, killed by Heracles himself. His father, Zeus, wasn't merry upon hearing the news, but Heracles was no one if the most dear child of his – thus the Gods and mortals did not feel Sky Father's wrath.
There were lots and lots of myths and tales celebrating Heracles's deeds, praising his half-godly figure and spreading the fame.
What mortals, gods, and other divinities didn't know, however, was why.
Why was he doing all of it?
Why was he trying to achieve an almost godly rank?
Why did he want to sit among the highest ones and praise in glory?
Why?
Because for Heracles, or Nanami Kento as his mortal parents named him, it was always you.
And what would be the easiest way to ask for the precious Nymph's love? Became the greatest, strongest, most praised warrior of the Mediterranean Sea, of course. Was there anything beautiful creatures like you loved more than the fame and glory? Not really.
At least that's what he thought.
Until he finally met you again, high on the Olympus' peak, basking under the flaming sun and dipping naked body in a river. You weren't alone, as other little birdies chirped right to your ear, with soft voices and girlish laughs, glancing at the river's calm waters.
And as beautiful as they were, his pleading eyes were reserved solely for you.
Nanami Kento has never met Aphrodite, but how truly angelic could she be if his heart already raced for a simple nymph? What could she possibly have that you might've lacked?
Did her hair bounce the same way as yours? Were her eyes shimmering slightly as if cursed by the stars? Was her skin soft and plush, with flushed cheeks and lips plumped like the freshest peach, he dreamed of caressing with his own? Was Aphrodite's voice as mesmerising and honeyed as yours, tickling the deepest parts of his brain?
What did her laugh sound like? Was it as bewitching? Could she also sway her hips with the swelling of the ocean's waves? Would she be willing to help him the same as you did?
Was her heart as compassionate as your?
Because that's what Nanami Kento thought – of you, being the loveliest petal, with the tenderness and kindness not seen among any of the patheon's gods.
That's why he approached you with confidence and pride, with eyes never leaving your blooming face and his heart swelling under the single giggle slipping through your cheeks.
He was hopeful and full of anticipation to once again hear your gentle voice soothing his mind.
But when you saw him... oh dear.
"What do you want?" your voice slashed his heart. "Why are you here again?"
Well... maybe, actually, it wasn't his first time meeting you on Olympus.
Not the second and third, even.
The fourth? Maybe fifth.
You stopped counting after seeing him the third time, with the same beseeching look and broad shoulders hunching under your irritated gaze.
The first time he asked for your hand was surprising. You were surprised as to why the strongest man alive wished to marry you?
A simple nymph, bathing lazily under the Greek sun and stuffing herself full of rich olives while days were passing by. You were nothing but a small deity, playing over the rivers and gossiping with other sisters while sipping the sweet wine sneaked out of Dionysus's cellar.
He talked of some meeting years ago, and your healing power, but Mnemosyne could only remember when and where it had happened.
For too many men healed by your powers walked this earth, and too many of them wished to see your slippery figure once again.
Coming back to the same river again and again, in hopes of catching your fleeting shadow or a single melody of your laughter, looming over the waters as men possessed.
The sole look on their faces was truly miserable, but seeing them like that was, well, quite fun.
You liked it and watched them secretly, as their tears and pleadings were drowning in the depths of rivers.
So how surprising was it when one of those sorrowful admirers, driven by an obsession, managed to rise in glory and turn out to be the mightiest's son.
Oh, how problematic he was, following you like a shadow and turning the Mountain upside down, just to ask for your hand. You thought that the first rejection would stop his further pleadings, but when Zeus himself decided to visit your small cottage and beg to finally accept the offering – the highest one too could not bear the misery of his son – you finally gave in.
Did you accept Heracles's proposal? No.
Were you willing to do it? Maybe.
"My love, I've come to ask–" he started, standing over the river's edge and covering the hottish sun.
Other nymphs giggled quietly, and you knew how eager they were to step into your shoes any second. Jealous of having such a man as Nanami Kento wrapped around your finger, ready to plunder the mortal world for a single glance of yours.
"I already said no," you quickly added, looking at his curled shoulder with a sly smile.
"Is there anything I lack, love?"
He kneeled, closing up the distance between you. You rested arms on the river's edge, looking up with doe eyes. He tried, really tried, to not glance at your naked body, with crystal droplets paving their way down the plush of your breasts. But you were nothing if not daring, taking the pleasure in the way his huge palms fisted and hazelnut eyes swirled between wet hair covering your nipples and plush hips swaying slowly in the water.
"You're covering my sun," you chuckled, and he smiled shyly.
"I'll bring you a thousand other suns if you'll ask me to."
A gentle hum slipped through, and you once again traced over his figure. Golden hair and warm eyes. Creamy skin coated by a thin armour and nothing but a white cloth hugging his hips. Muscles so big they seem almost unreal, covering him thickly and massively, making Nanami Kento the biggest and the most powerful man the world has ever birthed. His fingers were long and thick, but always oh so gentle, whenever he pushed a single strand of hair behind your ear.
The most intimate and only gesture you've ever allowed him for.
"I don't want another sun, just move away from this one," your voice was soft, but the words made his shoulders falter even more.
"I'll do whatever you ask me for, my love. Just, could you please rethink–"
You raised an eyebrow. "Why would I do that?"
His sandy eyebrows creased, with a small wrinkle forming between them.
Because he didn't know.
He truly, honestly didn't know why you would be willing to marry him, being sure of nothing but only the fact that he loved you deeply. Maddeningly, almost, verging on following you miserably like a dog if you just asked him to. Ready to shoot a sun down, just to bring you a piece of warmth.
But he didn't want to be like Apollo - drive you mad till death would seem more pleasant than accepting his feelings.
But he also didn't want to let you go, waiting eagerly for the day when–
"Fine," you suddenly said.
What?
"I'm sorry?" he couldn't swallow it, tracing the cunning smile forming on your face.
"I said fine, I'll marry you," you giggled, pushing away from the shore and swimming a few meters back. "But firstly, you'll need to prove yourself to me."
Your naked body swirled, as if melting together with warm water, before swimming closer once again. Kento was still kneeling near the edge, with thick thighs and knees touching the grass. Your wet hands rested on his muscles before you lifted yourself up. But only in half, with crystal droplets dripping down from pinkish nipples and hips still hidden under the gentle waves.
He almost burned.
Oh, was he dying?
Was your touch that sizzling, fragrance so maddening, that he truly started to burn from the inside?
He didn't dare to touch you, but hazelnut eyes traced the watery paths carving your skin, oozing down the plush neck, collarbones and swirling between the soft breasts.
You were close, too close, with your nipple almost touching his iron-covered chest and lips tracing the little bobbing of his neck. Kento fought hundreds of monsters, but none of them felt as heavy as your hands on his bare thighs, bearing all of your weight solely on his muscles.
Not because you were heavy – oh dearest, he could lift you up with a pinky if you wanted to – but because the idea of you touching him willingly made him feverishly weak.
"You're very, very strong, right?" came out giggly, sweetly, with a thumb circling his skin.
He nodded, a voice stuck in a throat.
"How strong, hm?"
"The strongest."
"No one can beat you, right?"
His head shook. "No one, ever."
You lifted yourself up higher, with hips slowly surfacing out of the water and knees landing on the lush grass.
Bare and wet, with the softest skin not dared for his touch and alluring eyes never leaving his.
He truly was the strongest, with clenched fists and gaze holding yours, never, ever, sliding lower than down to your breasts.
And, oh, you were having so much fun, watching his crumbling composure.
"Then, should you prove your strength, I will marry you," your eyes shone upon seeing a tremble of his lips.
"Really?" came out in a whisper so quiet that only you could hear it. "You promise?"
You chuckled, slowly, slowly, climbing up his lap. His kneeling thighs between yours, breasts fully pressed to his light armour, dripping heat looming over creamy, bulged cloth wrapped around his hips.
"Mhm, I promise," you nuzzled against his neck, breathing in the musky fragrance that wrapped him tightly. "If you'll finish twelve missions, I will give myself to you," backing up, your arms wrapped around his neck. "Will become your sweet wife. You'll be allowed to do with me whatever you want," your voice was dripping with seductiveness, curling around his neck like a viper, only to finish him off with a poisonous kiss.
And Nanami Kento was more than eager to be killed by those sweet lips of yours.
"What is it? I'll do whatever you want, love."
He should know that the devilish smile that curved your lips was nothing but bad news.
You told him all twelve missions, one more horrendous than the other, with other nymphs' breaths catching in the background and his fists curling right next to your hips that straggled his.
A flimsy, creamy cloth was keeping his cock away from your heat. Feverish and sticky, with honeyed juices already smeared around his bulge, and your eyes not leaving his even for a second.
Hera herself, Zeus's wife, would be more merciful to her husband's bastard child than you were. The twelve labours sounded almost impossible, bizarre, absolutely savage even for a man like him.
But if that was your wish, then be it.
After you finished talking, he didn't say anything for a minute. Stared, with a pale face and furrowed brows. Golden hair caught the last rays of sunshine, basking his face in warm flames.
"Are you willing to–" but you didn't finish, when suddenly, you were gripped by your hips and placed back in the water.
Not a single word left his mouth, when he raised himself, gave you one last glance and turned around, disappearing in the lurking forest before the sun fully set.
Other nymphs quickly curled around you, watching his muscular back with sorrowful eyes.
"Sister, weren't you a bit harsh for him?" one asked.
"Dear, those labours... he may end up dead before finish them all," another added.
You sighed, wondering whether you'd actually gone overboard.
☾ 𖤓 ☾ 𖤓
He didn't visit you the next day.
Or the day later.
He didn't visit you even a week later, and when it prolonged to two, you started to worry.
Maybe you truly carried it too far?
But then, one night, while indulging with sister nymphs in the small, wine-party, one of them mentioned:
"Have you heard, dear? He killed the Nemean Lion."
You stalled, with throat clenching around the sipping wine.
"What did you just say?" you mumbled between the harsh coughs.
She slapped you gently on the back. "Your first labour – he did it. Strangled the lion with his own hands and skinned it for its fur."
It was true that the lion had been quite a trouble and a few gods had already tried to wrestle him, but you didn't expect Kento to do it so effortlessly.
With bare hands.
You didn't talk at all for the rest of the evening, wondering whether Nanami Kento would truly be able to finish all of your unachievable labours.
But after the first one, his next accomplishments came one by one. Sometimes over a distance of a few weeks, sometimes a month. And for this whole time, he didn't show himself even once.
You didn't catch a single strand of his golden hair nor the gentle, hazelnut gaze. Heavy, musky smell stopped following you around, and at some point, you even started to miss the deep voice that came to haunt you in dreams.
That space, dreams, seemed to be the only place where he appeared more human than ever. Long fingers grazed your cheeks and neck before slowly dripping down to your swollen breasts and soft belly. In that other, unfamiliar but at the same time so magnetic world, Kento was bolder than ever – more ferocious, brave, using his massive body to pin yours. Spreading your plush thighs, circling creamy clit with his fingers, warm eyes following every changing expression of your face.
You would wake up wet. Feverish. With pulsing heat and sweat dripping down your spine, before turning on your bed and glancing over the window, as if in a wish to see a piece of this golden hair.
And while you were trying to understand those new feelings, Kento was finishing labours one by one.
After the lion, he killed a Hydra, a monster with nine venomous heads, cutting each one of them with his sword, before dipping the silver into its poisonous blood.
Then he captured the golden-antlered deer alive, the most precious pet of goddess Artemis, before sending it straight to your cottage.
When you saw the animal chewing on the grass surrounding your place and drinking water from the river curling around the house, a deep sigh rolled from your lips. At least the deer looked quite well and indeed rather graceful.
For his fourth labour, he travelled to the land of the Centaurs and captured the Erymanthian boar, solely to return it to the King of Tiryns. It was a, well, sort of a present for a king, whose wife liked you very dearly.
The fifth labour was of the humiliating sort, and you thought that he might take offence. You forgot, however, that a man in love was prepared for all sorts of hardships and degradations, thus cleaning the stables of Augeius in a day was nothing but a pleasure break from killings. The stables were known as one of the biggest and filthiest ones, impossible to clean even in a month, but the idea of you becoming his wife was enough to forget about his ego.
Months were passing by, and the number of labours started to diminish rather quickly. On the contrary, all the little gifts you've asked for were coming one by one, till your deer got himself a precious, Cretan bull from Knossos, and a little hybrid cattle of Geryon straight from a foreign country, who was said to be born of a divine goddess. One day, three golden apples belonging to the Nymphs of the West appeared on your table, and you hid them quickly before the praying eyes would see the stolen treasure. Oh dearest, you were nothing but a simple nymph compared to the reputed Hesperides, with no other goddess but mother Hera having a single golden tree in her garden.
Nymphs started talking. Whispering, gossiping about the possessed demigod who plundered through the mortal realm and played havoc. They knew what his reason was. Everyone knew, together with gods and Zeus himself, absolutely furious over the foolish challenge you've brought upon his bastard son.
What frightened you greatly, however, was the last labour. The one you feared the most, knowing that it could've ended up badly not just for him, but for you too. For your justification, you truly thought that he would drop out (or be dead) after the first mission.
Thus, when the news of Cerberus, Lord Hades's dearest pet, being kidnapped spread around Olympus, you almost fainted.
It was best to keep good relations with all the gods and goddesses, as no one knew when one of them would turn out to be helpful.
However, keeping the especially good affairs with God of the Underworld himself was particularly beneficial, and his rage was the last thing all the deities on the Mountain desired.
And yet, you managed to get on his nerves.
His visit was to be expected, and you tried to prepare yourself. Three animals in your garden, together with golden apples hidden under the bed, only fueled the rage of all the deities disrespected by your challenge. You paced back and forth, looking outside the window, as if expecting the earth to suddenly open up and birth Hades's obsidian chariot to appear in front of your cottage.
But instead, three days after the Cerberus kidnapping, a gentle knock pealed inside the wooden walls.
And as it turned out, it wasn't Hades who decided to place you a visit.
But someone, who you truly, really, didn't wish to see, and maybe standing face to face with Tartarus itself would be a much more pleasant option than meeting–
"Good morning my dear, my I come in?"
–his wife.
Aphrodite, in all her fullness, dressed in a flimsy, rosy dress and whitish sandals, stood right in front of you. With a sweet smile and a single strand of soft hair caressing her flushed cheeks.
"My Goddess," you murmured, opening the doors wider. "Yes, please."
She lifted up misty robes and came inside, looking around your small cottage with a little nod of her head. You didn't have many occasions to face the most beautiful goddess herself, thus your eyes traced shyly every curve, every bump, every flush of her body. Hips hugged by a rosy dress, hair falling over the shoulder, and gentle eyes, currently looking outside the window at the golden-antlered–
Oh dear.
"My Goddess–"
"You know, Artemis really liked this deer," she chuckled, sitting down at the table. One hand placed on her belly, the other supporting a tilted head. "I was rather surprised that your man managed to steal it," she stopped for a minute, before laying eyes on your face. "Well, before he stole Cerberus, too."
You wanted to refuse, he's not my man, but a wave of shame washed over your body. You lowered your head and bit down on lip. "My Goddess, I'm–"
She, however, continued. "I'm expecting, you know?"
Yes.
You've noticed.
From the moment she came inside your cottage and never took a hand off her belly.
Your eyes slowly looked up. "Does Lord Hades know?"
"You see, I wanted to tell him. Around three days ago, I think?" Great heavens. "But then our lovely dog went missing, and I've never seen him so, hm, devastated."
Your knees buckled up, hitting the wooden floor with a faint hump! "My Goddess, I'm so sorry. I didn't expect him to actually do this."
Aphrodite didn't say anything for a second, looking at your trembling body and cheeks burning with shame. You knew how protective she was of her husband. How bizarre, but rather lovely their marriage was, with Lord Hades quite enjoying being walked like a dog by his mesmerising wife. You didn't know that they tried for a child, but it should be fairly obvious – how could the goddess of fertility and her madly obsessed husband not have children?
And you? You somehow managed to ruin such a precious moment.
A deep sigh rolled over before she helped you stand up. "Please, it's fine, dear. Don't worry," you sat next to her, still too embarrassed to look up.
You groaned, covering face with hands. "I really thought he would drop out after the first one! This foolish man!"
Aphrodite giggled, resting her hearty face on a hand. "He's just a man, after all. A desperate one at that – the most dangerous type. My husband is quite similar, although I would rather not test how far he would be able to go to grant my wishes."
You answered with a chuckle before finally looking at the goddess's face.
Oh, she was so, so beautiful.
"What I mean is, I'm not mad at you, dear. Rather amused, I must say. I'm glad your man is ready to go through such hardships, just to–"
"He's not my man," you quickly added with a deep sigh. "I promised him my hand under the condition of finishing all twelve labours. I just didn't know that he'll actually–" you groaned again, and Aphrodite laughed. "I'm sorry for ruining your surprise. Lord Hades surely will be overjoyed."
She hummed, circling with fingers the plush of her belly. "Yes, well. Tears will be shed, I suppose. My husband cries more often than I expected, but it's fine," you were almost sure that she bit her tongue, before saying I like him that way. "Cerberus is back and healthy, so you shouldn't worry. I guess your... Heracles took him only for a simple walk."
You sighed with relief, seeing amusement dancing in the goddess's warm eyes.
"Well, I guess he'll come back soon for his reward," she chuckled, slowly standing up. "I'd better go before Choso stalks me out. He doesn't know about the baby yet, but tends to be rather overprotective," you accompanied her till the doors, tracing the bloom that has spread over her cheeks. Oh, she really must've loved him dearly. "But please, next time give me a warning before my husband comes back home crying. In case I'll have other plans for that day."
You nodded with shame before she waved you goodbye.
As much as you adored Aphrodite, she truly was the most beautiful but terrifying goddess in the whole pantheon.
☾ 𖤓 ☾ 𖤓
So you've expected him to come the same evening.
But when he didn't, something panged in your chest. Oh well, maybe you should be relieved after trying so hard to get rid of him. Maybe after finishing all twelve labours, he decided that your hand was, in fact, not worth a bean. Maybe during his travels, he met another woman (a princess even?) and decided to marry her instead. Maybe–
"Sister..." one of the nymphs called, and you quickly collected wits.
The evening was of the warm sort, with the river's water nuzzling your bare skin kindly. Little droplets reflected the warm rays of the sunset, with a mix of orange, purple, and pink spreading over the forest. Birds were slowly going quiet, letting the crickets step in shyly and prepare for the symphony that was soon to spread near the river's bank. First fireflies, too, were timidly floating your way, with a gentle buzz of their paper wings.
You looked at her, seeing that she, in fact, was glancing somewhere over your shoulder. With an open mouth and eyes big as porcelain plates. "I think you have a visitor."
Your head turned, gaze immediately landing on the figure emerging slowly from the forest.
Heracles.
But this time he looked... oh.
"Good grief," the nymphs gasped, seeing the approaching monster.
Because no other word could the describe the man who has set his eyes on you.
With lion's skin draped over his shoulders, bulgy scars slashing naked arms and torso, swirling over pecks, thighs and even neck, as if some brute tried to cut him to pieces. Golden hair was still slightly marked by the crimson hues, as though the blood still gripped it mercilessly.
What shocked you the most, however, were his eyes. With no trace of gentleness from months before, rather filled with something... predatory. Beastly, maddening, with a gaze fixed on your frozen figure, still dipped in water.
Before you knew, other nymphs quickly flew away with terrified gasps, burdened by the heaviness of the atmosphere he spread around.
"Kento–" you whispered, as he came closer.
But before you could finish with a foolish question of what happened to you? His massive body steeped in the water. Gentle waves nuzzled him only till the ribcage, and you choked, when muscular arms lifted you up and sat on the shore.
Crystal droplets dripped down your breasts, nipples, down through the plush belly, naked heat, when he gazed up at you from below. With pledging, possessed gaze, focusing on nothing but your face.
"Tell me you want it," came in a whisper, quickly dissolved by the first melody of cricket's.
"Want what?"
His palms curled around your waist, face nuzzling against the softness of your belly, before he sighed deeply. "Me. Tell me you want me. You want everything that will happen the second you give me your consent."
A shiver dripped down your spine, and your lip trembled when his muscular arms tightened up. Something warm, feverish, started to coil in your stomach every time his breath hit your skin.
"And what will happen, if I may ask?" you knew that playing with fire would end up badly, but you wanted him to say it.
All those filthy, nasty, messy things you dreamed of every night and knew he did too. You could feel it, right now and before, with your legs still dipped in the river and feet poking something hard.
He looked up, with a dark hazelnut gaze, taking in your cunning smile. His arm lifted, thumb grazing the lower, slightly opened lip. "In details?"
You giggled. "Of course."
Fat finger pushed inside, landing right on your wet tongue. Plush muscle welcomed him warmly, with lips wrapping around it and giving a gentle suck.
His brows furrowed, and another arm pulled you closer to his dipped body, moving your hips right over the edge. Gaze still fixed on your face, but he could feel the heat of your cunt on his chest. From this perspective, you looked nothing but divine, with wet hair curling around your shoulders, plump lips sucking wetly on his thumb and eyes, fucking hell, looking down at him with a sly amusement.
"Tell me," you whispered, taking his thumb out and nuzzling cheek against his calloused hand. "My answer will depend on it."
He raised an eyebrow. "I thought finishing the twelve labours was enough."
The arm curling around your body suddenly dropped down, with long fingers tracing the smoothness of your tummy, thighs, circling, pinching, smoothing wet skin, before going down... and down... and down.
Till your breath hitched and lips once again fell open.
"Hm? Did you lie to me, my love?" he whispered, with a big thumb plastered to your puffy clit. "Have you deceived me?"
You didn't answer, but instead spread legs a bit wider, inviting his massive body in. He chuckled, seeing your hips hovering over the edge and creamy cum dripping straight to the river. "They do say to never trust a nymph," his eyes glanced down, thumb placing small circles on your clit. "Did you deceive me, then?"
Your head shook. "T-tell me," slipped almost beggingly. "What will you d-do-"
His arms shifted, with big palms landing under your thighs and pushing them up, till you folded easily like a leaf. Your back hit the soft grass, knees pushed against the breast, while his massive body was still dipped in a river.
Now, with your bare heat right in front of his face.
"Firstly," he dipped down, placing gentle kisses on your inner thighs. "I will work on your pretty cunt till you'll be nothing but a whiny mess," his teeth dipped into the fat of your belly pouch, before licking it sweetly. "Then, I'll stretch you out on my fingers, getting hard over your moans and maybe dragging my cock against your legs," lips traced down, through the mound of your cunt, right till the drenched folds. With two fingers, he spread them open. And groaned. "Fucking hell."
"A-and then?" you whimpered feeling his warm breath on your clit.
"And then you'll go on your hands and knees, spreading yourself nicely like my good wife," he gave you the first lick. Long, sweet, heavy, plastering his tongue to your trembling clit, till a pitched moan bounced from the river. "Gods, you taste so good, my sweet fucking wife."
Theoretically, you weren't even engaged yet, but this word, combined with his deep voice, somehow made you even wetter. Spongy tongue once again swirled around your clit, with lips sucking, grazing, ravishing it madly, as if Nanami Kento waited for this moment at least a millennium.
For finally feasting on your honeyed juices and swallowing all the precious moans that slipped past your lips. The sugary mmm Kento, and, sososo good, or, p-please put t-the finger in.
He was spreading you wide open, with your hips hovering over the river's edge and his nose grazing your clit. You trembled every time his hard cock nudged your feet, with wet pads smoothing its leaking head.
Your finger curled around his golden hair, pushing him closer, deeper into your cunt, riding his tongue with a starved desperation to release the knot that already fastened in your lower belly.
And when his long finger pushed inside, your pussy clenched.
"Fuck, my love, you're still so tight," he grumbled, looking up at your falling breasts and arched back. "So beautiful," floated in a whisper, before he lifted massive body up and slowly came out of the water. "My beautiful, beautiful wife, does it feel good?" long fingers curled inside your tight walls, sending another shiver down your spine. His lips wrapped around your wet nipple, sucking on it with a gentle hum. "Mmm, so sweet, you're so sweet everywhere."
"K-Kento, it f-feels so–nghhh–good, so so so good," a pitched whimper slipped through when he added another finger.
He pumped your squelching pussy, with lips sucking on your nipples and eyes looking up every few seconds, just to take a pleasure in your ever-changing expressions. Slightly lidded eyes, flushed cheeks, single strands of hair stuck to your forehead, and fingers still curled in his hair.
You looked beautiful, mesmerising, folded as if ready to be bread, with rolled belly and lifted thighs. He could already imagine your fat ass hitting against his abdomen and drenched cunt swallowing cock. Your back curved in the most delicious arch, and knees biting into the lush grass.
Oh, he could already think of sweet tears that will roll down your cheeks and soft belly pouch being slowly, slowly filled with his cum, till you'll be begging, whining, crying for him to take his cock out and–
"K-Kento, I'm gonna–" you whimpered, feeling his fingers pumping you faster. Lips sucked on your nipples as if he wanted to milk you out.
It felt overstimulating, feverish, too much, with his massive body almost fully lying between your thighs, pinning you into the ground.
"P-please let m-me–"
"No, my love. You won't be cumming in any other way but on my cock."
He took out his fingers and flipped you on your belly. Big palms traced the fat of your ass before lifting your hips up – just as he promised. With your chest stuck to soft grass and dripping cunt opened up widely, looking like the prettiest, the juiciest fruit he'll ever tasted.
You couldn't see his cock, but, well, could definitely feel it. The moment he took drenched, creamy robes off, it sprang up and nudged right against your hole. Sticky and feverish, with a pulsing head sliding through your dripping cunt, collecting all the cum that Kento's fingers dug out. A tremble washed over your body, feeling the fatness of his shaft and single veins curling around its length.
It felt so... heavy. He didn't even put it in yet, but you could already feel its heaviness dragging between your folds, with its head nudging your desperately fluttering hole.
"You want it, right?" He asked, spreading your ass cheeks and spitting heavily right between them. Fat spit slid down to your pussy, before he pushed it right inside. "Say it, my love. Tell me how much you want it."
"K-Kento, I want it s-so bad, please," your hips rolled against his cock, glazing it with saps. When he didn't move, you tried to reach for it and push it in yourself, but he locked both of your hands on your back. "Kento!"
"I asked you a question. How much do you want it?" his voice was low, stern, as if he was tired of all the bullshit you gave him for the past few months. "Do you want me to push inside?"
"Y-yes!"
"Do you want to feel me here?" his fingers circled your tummy, giving it a gentle squeeze.
"Mhmm, yes yes yes," you cried and he chuckled.
His cock, finally, pushed slightly, slowly inside, with sticky head catching on your entrance. "Do you want to get bred? Hm? Get stuffed so full, till you'll be feeling it in your throat?"
It was filthy, disgusting, nasty, but, oh, did it make you tighten around his cock like a little slut. Crying, moaning, and choking, while he pushed further, stretching your clamping walls and sliding through the creamy cum that stuck to his length.
You knew the strongest man alive would be well-hung, but when the head of his cock grazed your cervix and he still tried to thrust inside, something inside you broke.
"P-please, Kento, it's too muc–"
But your dear, gentle, always so careful hero turned out to be nothing but a filthy, possessed beast. You expected to hear his kind voice, sorry pleadings, maybe even a soft hand smoothing your bulging belly.
But instead, you felt it between your shoulder blades, as he pressed you harder against the grass. With his full weight hovering over your trembling body, heavy breaths nuzzling your neck, and cock thrusting deeper.
Nanami Kento was anything but gentle.
"Fuck, forgive me, my love. But I think I deserve a little treat after everything you put me through," and before you could protest, he shoved his length.
Fully.
Till his balls smacked against your cunt and big hands pulled your ass to his hips. Till you moaned in a mix of pain and pleasure, feeling his massive weight in your belly, lungs and throat.
"Fuck," he groaned, tilting head back, trying not to cum right that second, with your walls locking him in a deadly clutch. "My love, baby, dear, ughh, you need to relax," he moved, sending a shiver down your spine.
But how could you relax, if his girth was already smudging your womb? Dear heavens, how could you relax if every move of his was brushing this spongy spot inside?
"Kento, p-please move s-slower–ahhhh," you moaned, gripping the lush grass crumpling under your trembling hands.
It seemed, however, that he was already gone, with his thrusts quickly changing from gentle waves to aggressive crushes, dragging his pulsing cock through your pinkish walls. You felt him everywhere.
His hands on your ass, gripping the jiggly fat and pulling you over and over and over on his cock, somehow thrusting it even deeper. Smooching your pudgy womb, kissing plump g-spot, scratching feverish walls with even more sticky cum dripping down the grass. You've never been so drenched before, feeling his length moving inside without any obstacles. It was smooth, delicious, electrifying, with his fingers slowly sliding between your folds and finding the pulsing clit.
And when he pinched it? Dear gods, your hips started meeting his thrusts, with your hole accommodating him even deeper, sweeter, swallowing his fat cock and clamping down as if desperately trying to milk it dry.
Nothing but filthy squelching filled the evening air, and your moans tingling his ears like the loveliest melody.
Oh, and you looked exactly as he imagined. With swollen lips and tears swirling in the corners of your eyes. His name slipping every few cries, and eyes trying to look back at his massive, sweaty body.
His broad chest breathing heavily and lidded eyes, taking in the way your cunt sucked him in.
"Fuck, my love, you're so–nghh–I can't longer, fuck," he rambled, quickening his pace, with every thrust going straight to your womb. "Do you feel good, tell me dear, is it good?"
You could barely whimper, feeling the knot in your belly slowly, slowly, untying, and eyes rolling back. Thus, nothing but simple, "Mhm, K-Kento, gods, feels so, nghhh, mmm gonna c-cum," could slip away.
His fingers played with your clit – rolling, pinching, slapping it gently with your gluey juices sticking to his fingers. He lifted them up, licking the skin clean. "So sweet, fuck, you taste so heavenly. My pretty, pretty wife will eat your cunt out every fucking morning. Spread you wide on the table and fill with cum before the sunrise," his fingers went back to your clit, already feeling the spasmatic clenching on his cock. "Like it that much, love? Your pussy is swallowing me so nicely. Can't wait to see you swollen with my children, heavens."
"K-Kento, please, let me cum–mhmmm."
"Can't wait to be bred, huh?" he chuckled, but you pushed your hips out, meeting every single thrust.
"Yes, yes, yes, I can't wait t-to, ahhhh, fuck cum inside me."
Your words seemed to ignite something within him, because the next second, his reddened tip got glued to your womb, as if sucked in by your muscles. Fingers still circled your clit, harshly, with a pinch, till your thighs started shaking and feet curled. A quivering cry escaped your clenched throat, and Kento finally, finally, started cumming.
Or, well, flooding you with his seed, till your head spun and lower belly started to swell.
"Fuck, my love, you better pray it takes," he mumbled, resting his wet forehead between your shoulder blades.
He came deep, filling every corner of your trembling cunt with warmth, planting his gluey seed right inside your womb. It felt heavenly, maddeningly good, with his fingers still working on your clit and gathering all the watery cum that gushed right against his palm. Long tongue traced your sweaty back, soft lips placing gentle kisses right down your spine.
He thrusted gently, keeping his softening cock inside as if trying to make sure that not even a droplet of his cum will land anywhere but inside your womb.
"I meant it," he muttered after a while, before changing your positions. You lay spread on his chest, with his cock still nuzzled inside. "I want to have a family with you. A big one."
"How big?" you mumbled, too tired to even lift up your head.
"Ten?"
Oh dearest.
Your eyes somehow looked up, tracing the completely stony expression of his face.
"You must be joking."
"Not from such affairs, my love," his fingers gently nuzzled your back – a touch completely different from the violent thrusts of his hips.
"Not even the oldest gods of this pantheon have that many offsprings."
He looked down with a warm smile before placing a single kiss on your forehead. "Then it seems that we need to set up a new tradition."
And after going back to your cottage and getting stuffed full in every possible position, you started to regret that the strongest man alive with the stamina of a thousand bulls, was supposed to become your husband.
And for the dessert, as the last fic from this collection, we're getting the most heartbreaking angst, aka Satosugu as Alexander the Great and Hephaestion.
I got a request for the second part of Hades!Choso, and because it's my fav fanfic from this collection, I will be making it (that's why you got the preview hehe) :) It will be posted here, where I'll be adding all my other historical, myths, tales based fics.
[ID: A mostly cool colored, digital three page comic of teen Gojo Satoru talking to young Tsumiki Fushiguro.
Page one: Gojo makes a sandwich for Tsumiki who's leaning on the kitchen island. Tsumiki says "Thanks for the snacks, dad" and Gojo responds "No problem, Tsumi."
In the next panel Gojo complains "Man... I wish Megumi didn't hate me so much. At least you call me dad..." Tsumiki comments "Megumi does that too, though?"
In the third panel, Gojo activates his Six Eyes like a flashlight and yells "When!? Where!? Do you have it on camera!?" to a surprised Tsumiki.
Page two: Tsumiki thinks about the various times Megumi has called Gojo 'dad,' including when Gojo gave them a bad hair cut, when the divine dogs bit Gojo, when Gojo made soup, and lastly when Megumi asked Tsumiki to ask Gojo to make snacks which is all represented in blue tinted drawings. In the last panel she has a devious smile and is labeled "8 yr old who just realized how funny she can be"
Page three: Tsumiki cheerfully says to a gleeful Gojo "In your dreams!" The second panel shows them zoomed out with a lighting strike going through Gojo's shattered heart while Tsumiki has a cat like smile. In the third panel with a light orange background, Tsumiki is smiling while Megumi comes up behind her and asks "Why's dad crying?" /End ID]
Before this happened
Edit: It has kindly been brought to my attention that Tsumi means sin in Japanese I'm so sorry Tsumiki I should've taken five seconds to check I just wanted matching nicknames with Gumi 😭
Satoru’s sprawled across the floor of your living room, mindlessly scrolling through apps while you chat away with his students.
A particularly loud laugh grabs his attention, phone slipping from his hand, abandoned somewhere by his side as he turns his head, watching fondly.
You’re sat cross-legged, braiding little pieces of Nobara’s hair while she dramatically recounts Yuji’s embarrassing spill down the mall escalator.
Yuji’s loudly defending himself, blaming it on “all her stupid bags!”
You even catch Megumi laughing quietly to himself, hiding his smile behind his phone as the pink haired teen begins dramatically flailing his arms around in his own defense.
The two argue back and forth, Megumi coolly telling them to keep him out of it when they begin dragging him into the mess. You laugh so bright and loud, it cuts through the room like sunlight.
It’s loud, messy, alive.
And Satoru….
He just can’t look away.
There’s a soft look settled on his face, something quiet and awestruck as he takes it all in.
The way Nobara comfortably leans into you without thinking, how Yuji keeps inching closer even as he argues, the way Megumi stays just within the circle, never straying too far.
He feels himself smile softly, chest tightening at the sight.
This.
This is his favorite thing to see.
Just you, him, your “kids”, and a safe home to exist peacefully in.
It feels safe, normal.
For a second, it almost doesn’t feel real.
He thinks back to when he was a kid, watching moments like these from the outside, never allowed in.
Desperate for this kind of warmth, this kind of love.
Now he’s sitting here, watching you cracking up with these kids who stare at you with hearts in their eyes, feeling his heart soften ever so slightly when he realizes they’re looking at him the same way.
It makes his eyes sting a little, throat tightening. The ache in his chest burns as the realization settles in, soft and overwhelming, all at once.
This is his.
And he’ll do anything to protect it.
But for now, he just joins the circle, voice slipping easily into the chaos.
“Actually,” he hums, smirking, “he screamed on the way down”
“NO I DID NOT!”
And the laughter rings even louder.
Satoru leans against your shoulder, watching it all unfold with a soft smile and warmth spreading throughout his body.
Just for now, he doesn’t worry about anything else.
————————————————————————
A/N: Dadjo is my favorite obvs
this isn’t that good I just had to write it before I forgot it lol
How Husband!Nanami wins back your favour after upsetting you
Your husband doesn’t argue with you. Not really. He’s a firm believer in happy wife, happy life. It’s always, “whatever you say, honey,” and “forgive me, my love,” and “you’re always right, darling.”
‘Argue’ may actually be an inaccurate word to use; one-sided lashing is better.
Of course, if he needs to put his foot down, he’ll do it, and unhesitatingly. Like when you tried to adopt a homeless man you found wandering the streets, claiming to be a fourteen-year-old boy, or when you wanted to sell the house and backpack through the Amazon rainforest. So yes, when your safety and wellbeing are on the line, he’s not afraid at all to use his stern voice and give you that look that says, you cannot seduce me out of this decision.
Most ‘arguments,’ then, involve you freaking out at him over the littlest things — and sometimes for no reason at all: he painted the living room the wrong shade of white (not eggshell, not cream, not any of the ones he pointed out), he got you one too many packets of chocolate and you accused him of fattening you up, he got exactly the right number of chocolates and you accused him of not loving you enough, or for breathing too loudly when he sleeps.
What happens after you blow up at him, say, for rolling over in bed and not cuddling you?
He apologises. Naturally.
Nanami seeks you out, gathering you into his arms despite your squirming protests, and presses a kiss to the top of your head. “I was heartless, wasn’t I, my love? I hurt your feelings, didn’t I?”
You try to push him away by the chest, but he’s bigger and stronger than you. He doesn’t budge, not even a centimetre. Scowling, you say, “Piss off, Kento. Since you hate me so much.”
“Don’t say that, sweetheart,” he pleads, nosing at your face to get you to look at him. “You know I don’t. I could never hate my darling wife and her adorable pout.”
“Don’t baby me, you big blond dummy. Just turn away like you always do!”
Sighing, Nanami rolls the two of you over on the bed, cornering you between him and the wall, and drapes his heavy limbs over your body. You try to wriggle out of his hold. You can’t — he wouldn’t be a Grade 1 sorcerer if he were so easily moved, after all.
“It’d be wise if you didn’t get in the way of my quality slumbering time with my wife; I’m known to be grumpy in the morning if she’s not in my arms.”
Left with no choice but to resign since there’s no way you can shove his heavy ass off, you soften in his hold and petulantly mumble, “Don’t let go again, Ken. I was freezing last night without you cuddling me. Worst sleep of my life.”
“Oh, I know, sweetheart. And I’m ever so sorry,” he whispers, kissing your cheek again and again until you’re giggling. “Kento’s just a big, dumb blond idiot who doesn’t know better when he’s sleeping. I think he ought to be punished, say, with a taste of what’s between your legs?”
SYNOPSIS ── The blue spring of their youths—and everything after it ends. Your story told from the perspective of your closest friend since childhood, Shoko Ieiri.
PAIRING. ── gojo satoru x reader
TAGS. canon jjk timeline, (or at least as accurate as possible) coming of age, sorcerer!reader, angst, fluff, slice of life, mutual pining, friends to lovers, nostalgia, hidden inventory timeline, the tokyo five plus you, emotional vulnerability, dreams and nightmares, missing scenes, domestic fluff, megumi and tsumiki / dad!gojo dynamic, we love and adore shoko ieiri on this blog
WARNINGS. ! manga spoilers ! depictions of grief & loss, canon typical violence (described but not in detail), use of cigarettes and smoking, character deaths
WORD COUNT. 13.2k
mae's note. my debut work !! thank u for all the support on 'of love & lesson plans', the first chapter will be out by tomorrow hehee but i wanted to share a project i've been working on for over a year now <3 i also PINKY PROMISE my other fics won't be this sad jsjdjskd but i love u all and i'm so sorry in advanced ... but likes and reposts are much loved mwah mwah mwah
inspired by ♪ from the subway train, vansire 𖤣.𖥧.𖡼.⚘ ── ao3 version. playlist. header art twt/@5booosa. dividers by @cafekitsune
The air in December tastes like endings, bitter like smoke and cold enough to hurt.
Shoko stands alone beneath the harsh fluorescent glow of a streetlamp, cigarette trembling faintly between gloved fingers, the embers burning quietly, steadily, a small star of comfort in between her fingertips. Snow falls in careless spirals, catching in her hair, dusting her eyelashes, melting against her skin.
She watches her breath leave her body, a faint cloud in the chill, and thinks about how strange it is—how terribly quiet the world becomes when there’s nothing left but memory.
She swears it wasn’t always this cold.
i. november, 1989
You were both born in early November, five days apart.
Shoko first—small, silent, blue around the lips. Her mother would later tell her she hadn’t cried, not even once. She just blinked up at the ceiling, like she’d already seen too much of the world. You had come days after—red-faced and furious, shrieking like you’d already been wronged.
Balance, their clanhead called it. One to make, one to unmake.
They grew up in a quiet prefecture, tucked between the mountains, where fog collected on windows in the morning and everything smelled like pine and old rain. Their family was not a traditional jujutsu clan—not in the way the Zenins or the Gojos were—but they still had blood that remembered power, blood that ran strangely cold.
Shoko discovered her technique early—reversed cursed energy, delicate and warm, the ability to stitch together what others could only destroy. It made her quiet, made her thoughtful, made her feel too responsible for things she didn’t understand. You, on the other hand, were all forward motion and fury, manifesting offensive cursed techniques with raw instinct and terrifying precision.
You burned. Shoko cooled. A soldier and a healer.
It wasn't rivalry. It wasn't even contrast, really. It was rhythm—two halves of a heart, orbiting each other, moving through childhood in tandem. You protected her from bullies, from curses, from the dark under the bed. Shoko bandaged your scraped knees, held your hair back with her small hands when you threw up after manifesting your cursed technique for the first time, whispered questions into your shoulder late at night about whether they’d ever be normal.
Neither of you wanted normal. Not really.
So when your mothers had suggested both of you for Jujutsu Tech—you didn’t hesitate. It is the slight chill that Spring of 2005 that Shoko remembers most. Fifteen years old, uniforms they’d taken customized to their liking just a month before—Shoko, with her wide turtleneck and midi skirt. You, in a well-tailored blazer, and much to your mother’s disapproval—a short skirt.
Even after the arguments and bickering, their mothers had cried. Their fathers had barely nodded at them. The train took them away to Tokyo with petals sticking to the window, and their only belongings in duffle bags at their feet. Shoko’s hands were cold where they held yours softly.
She was afraid. You weren’t.
You had always loved the idea of being chosen, and Shoko just didn’t want to be left behind.
And maybe that’s how it all began—not with power, or fate, or bloodlines.
Two girls stepping onto a train together, one chasing strength, the other running away from a world she’d one day have to hold together with her hands.
ii. april, 2005
Jujutsu Tech was nothing like Shoko expected.
She thought it would be colder, older, more like the hospitals she’d passed on the train—tall and sterile and gray. But it was… soft. Vines curling around wooden buildings, laundry strung between windows, the hum of cicadas already testing their voices in the trees. It smelled like dirt and chalk and something faintly sweet, like sakura or summer air caught in the stairwells.
She didn’t talk much those first couple of days. Neither did Suguru Geto.
They met on their first day of class, standing awkwardly apart. Shoko was pressed against the wall, you beside her like a shield, when she noticed him—black hair long just at his shoulder, eyes unreadable, hands folded neatly behind his back like he was waiting for something more important than small talk. He caught her looking, and they didn’t smile, but something passed between them anyway. A kind of shared silence.
Then came Gojo.
She had heard of him before, of course. The honored one, the destined boy of the Gojo Clan. He arrived like a storm—messy white hair, too-tall frame stuffed into the uniform like it didn’t quite belong to him. He talked too much, laughed too loud, tripped over his own shoes, and still managed to radiate something untouchable. He was awkward, undeniably gifted, and absolutely convinced he had nothing to learn from anyone.
Shoko didn’t really like him.
You despised him worse, found him amusing. You would say he was infuriating, sure—but interesting.
“He thinks he’s better than everyone,” you whispered one night, grimacing into your pillow. “But his ears turn red every time I catch him staring.”
Shoko rolled her eyes, gave you a half smile. “He’s insufferable.”
“You're just mad that he said you would look better if you grew out your hair.” you teased.
“That's not true. I like my hair.”
“I like it too.”
“Then why does it matter to me what he thinks?”
But slowly—so slowly it almost escaped her notice—he changed. He started making jokes with them. And regrettably, Shoko would sometimes laugh at something he said. He started sitting with them at lunch. Picked up Suguru’s habit of folding napkins into strange little birds. Borrowed Shoko’s pens and returned them. Awkwardly, with both hands and a muttered thanks.
He began learning them. Their rhythms. Their silences.
It was the end of summer when it started to feel like something real.
Missions were few and far between in those first months. They trained hard, sweat and bruises under the cherry blossoms, sparring on grass that still held morning dew. Shoko hated sparring. She wasn’t built for it—not the way you were, with your reckless cursed technique and even more reckless joy.
But she tried. Because she had to. Because she wouldn’t let herself be the weak link.
And Gojo—he always held back when they fought. Even then, before he understood how to be gentle, he understood that she needed to win sometimes. Needed to prove that she could. He let her land hits, not because she needed help, but because he saw the way she looked at herself compared to the rest of them. She knew that Gojo—the freak of nature he was with those blazing blue eyes—saw her beneath her dry sarcasm and grins and tired eyes.
Suguru, on the other hand, never let her win. But he gave her pointers after. Explained why she slipped, what her stance betrayed. His feedback was quiet, clinical, never cruel. Always gave her a nod and a smile. Shoko trusted him for it.
Those were their blue springs—their youth washed in cloudless skies and laughter and rain-soaked uniforms drying on sun-warmed rocks. Those were the days of early friendships, of discovering who they were becoming.
They took the train into Tokyo for missions, packed into cars half-asleep, heads knocking against windows. You would always take the window seat, with your far too expensive mp3 player and ratty wired earbuds. You’d hum under your breath, fingers tapping a beat on your thigh. Gojo sprawled across two seats, his head inevitably ending up in someone’s lap. Suguru read novels and pretended not to notice you and Gojo’s helpless bickering.
❀
The first storm of the summer comes sudden, like most things that mattered back then. Sheets of water turning the courtyard into a lake, petals plastered to the stones.
Gojo didn’t run for cover. Of course he didn't. He stood in the middle of it all like some idiot, arms outstretched, hair plastered white against his forehead, laughing so loud it made the rain sound shy.
“You'll catch a cold,” Suguru called from the walkway, voice dry as the towel slung around his shoulders.
“Colds are a myth,” Gojo shot back, spinning in a circle, water flying from his sleeves. It wasn't rare back then for Gojo to turn off his infinity, especially for rain storms he used to practically bathe in.
Shoko watched from the step, dry under an awning with a cigarette between her fingers. Smoking was a new habit she’d picked up, in spite of the protests from her friends, in spite of the distaste and the mini interventions and scoldings you’d given her. All these years later, she can’t really remember where it started from.
You had taken the cigarette from her fingers that day and threw it in the rain, leaving her a little frustrated. Then she watched as you tried not to smile, and bolted straight into the storm after Gojo, shoes kicking up water like wings.
The both of you were soaked in seconds—shrieking, colliding, uniforms clinging like second skin. Grinning too bright for the gray sky above them.
❀
They went on their first mission as a full team in late October.
A cursed spirit in a temple in the countryside—nothing particularly dangerous, but big enough to warrant the four of them. The four of you, as it turned out, had garnered somewhat of a reputation in the Jujutsu world by this point, even though it had only been a couple months into your first year. There was Gojo, being who he was, and then there were you and Geto, two special-grade hopefuls, and then Shoko, with her reverse cursed technique. It was hard not to hear the excitement, the chatter from your seniors and teachers and higher-ups and worse, the curses, as they marveled at what potential the four of you possessed.
On their first mission together they took the train, bundled in thin jackets, feet tangled under the seats. You sat next to Gojo this time, your knees knocking occasionally as the train curved through the mountains. You two didn’t talk much, just passed a packet of rice crackers back and forth, you opening them with your teeth and Gojo laughing, soft, like he couldn’t help it.
Suguru fell asleep with his head against the window. Shoko watched the landscape blur, temples and fields dissolving into dusk.
She remembers that October day clearly — because the first time they saw a body together was on a bridge, the river swollen black beneath it, the cold gnawing at their ankles. The mission shouldn’t have had civilian casualties. It wasn’t supposed to be anything. Yet their world didn’t care about supposed to.
Shoko stood back as Suguru exorcised the curse, her hands clenching, heart banging against her ribs like it wanted out. When it was over, the corpse of the victim lay sprawled against the guardrail, mouth full of frozen air. A little girl—her hair so matted in blood Shoko couldn’t tell what color it was anymore.
Gojo tried to crack a joke, to distill the buzzing in the air—something stupid about ghosts haunting bridges—but no one laughed, not even him. You touched Shoko's arm, light as breath, and for the first time Shoko wondered if maybe they weren’t weapons at all. Maybe they were just kids with blood under their nails and no way out.
It's that night she remembers all these years later, coming home from the mission. They stayed up talking until sunrise. They lay on futons in someone’s dorm room, the windows open, moths circling the lights.
“Do you ever think,” you had asked, staring at the ceiling. “That we’re not meant to survive this?”
There's a quiet that fills the room, uncomfortable, like understanding the inevitable.
“Don't say that depressing shit,” Gojo said sharply, but his voice still held a hint of something that could’ve been mistaken for vulnerability.
“I'm serious. We're weapons. Tools. They'll use us until we break.”
“Then we don’t break,” Suguru said quietly.
“Or we break together.” Shoko said, so softly no one answered.
That first year, they were just kids. Cursed kids, sure. But kids.
And even though Shoko knew better—even though she could already see the shape of blood and bodies and burials in the future—she let herself believe in nights like those. The four of them sprawled on the floor, laughing at someone’s expense, playing cards and cheap candy wrappers littered on the floor.
In the way Gojo looked at you when he thought no one else saw.
In the way Suguru never raised his voice, but always listened.
In the way you gave your heart like the world hadn’t hurt you yet.
In the way they all leaned on each other like scaffolding, like maybe if they held tight enough, they wouldn’t fall.
iii. june, 2006
Summer in Tokyo hit different when you were sixteen and almost certain you’d die before twenty.
They weren’t supposed to go out—they had curfews, missions stacked like bones at the start of their second year—curses growing restless, schools asking for protection, strange whispers threading through reports about ancient prisons and shifting power balances. Still, they trained. Still, they laughed. Still, they stole naps on rooftops and dared each other to eat expired convenience store pudding.
Still, they were kids.
Gojo whined until Suguru sighed and gave in, and you had tugged Shoko by the wrist before she could protest.
The festival was a crush of lantern light and smoke, sweet batter curling through the air, fireworks cracking open the dark. You darted ahead, yukata swaying, hair pinned up with something glittering like starlight. Gojo stuck by your side, wolfing down skewers two at a time, Suguru following at a distance with his hands tucked in his sleeves, gaze flicking toward the crowd like a man always counting exits, but still roaring in laughter as Gojo almost chokes on his third kebab.
“Try this,” Gojo said, shoving a stick of candied fruit under Shoko's nose.
“I don’t want your leftovers,” she muttered, unimpressed. But after a bit of nagging she took it anyway, quietly unwrapping it and biting through the sugar shell and pretending it wasn’t good—just to spite him.
Fireworks bloomed overhead—white, then red, then a scatter of gold that turned every face strange and beautiful. For a moment, Shoko saw them like strangers: Suguru haloed in crimson, Gojo’s grin carved bright in the dark, and you tilting your head back to watch the sky like it would never fall.
The boom of the next firework swallowed her thoughts, and she let it.
❀
Shoko always thought the end would come like a firework—loud, blinding, impossible to ignore.
But it hadn’t. It came instead like fog. Slow, creeping, impossible to trace where it started.
By the time they noticed it was already over, the fog of it had already filled the room.
She thinks she can trace every lamentable moment of her life back to that August of 2006.
Gojo, Geto, you and the star plasma vessel mission she hadn’t been a part of. When she thinks back on it, she can’t exactly understand what happened in that week to have changed the course of their entire lives. Was it before Gojo died in a bloody mess? Was it after he came back, blood-stained, eyes dark, buzzing with an energy that she acknowledged—with bated breath—had finally crossed to godhood?
Gojo was stronger. Far stronger. Six eyes sharp as knives, his cursed technique threading into infinity like it had always been waiting for him to catch up. The elders watched him now—not as a student, but as a threat. You noticed it too. Started staying closer to him, stepping between him and the higher-ups during briefings.
“They're grooming him,” you told Shoko once. “Not for leadership. For war.”
Shoko looked at you—at the calluses on your hands, the scar on your jaw you hadn’t let Shoko heal.
“They're grooming all of us.”
You didn’t deny it anymore.
❀
There are softer things that year, where Shoko can’t remember the exact moment things changed.
Only that something had slowed, gone hazy. Like the last layer of frost on a windowpane, melting so gently it almost went unnoticed.
It felt like fall had come early. The leaves on the tech’s old trees went gold and red like they’d been waiting to burn. There were still wounds to be tended to, and there were still things they couldn’t talk about from the end of that summer.
But Gojo had grown taller over the summer, like his body had finally remembered he came from giants. His hair had grown shaggier, uniform didn’t fit right anymore, and he refused to ask for a new one. Shoko watched him adjust his cuffs every morning like it was some kind of ritual, then pretend not to notice when you offered him your spare hair tie for his sleeves. He took it without meeting your eyes, and wore it like armor.
Shoko noticed the shift in the air. Maybe it was the way that you had started lingering after training, towel around your neck, laughter caught in your throat like a secret. Or the way Gojo stood straighter when you walked into a room, blinking too slow, like he hadn’t meant to look. Maybe it was how the two of you had stopped fighting in that way you used to—loud, fast, like lightning cracking open the sky—and started teasing instead. Light, easy, ridiculous. Like you didn’t know how else to be near each other.
Shoko noticed it in the quiet, in the pauses between conversations, and in the way you touched your own wrist absentmindedly whenever Gojo spoke, like grounding yourself. She noticed how Gojo—always so proud of his attention span—started forgetting what he was saying mid-sentence if you laughed too loud.
“You're obvious,” Shoko told you one evening, as you stood in front of her dorm mirror brushing your teeth. It was practically your dorm now, too.
You spat into the sink. “He’s worse.”
“You're both insufferable.”
“He’s insufferable. I'm charming.”
“He told Nanami you punched him in the throat during training.”
“I did, so what? He totally deserved it.”
“I just can’t believe he let you in the first place.” Shoko shook her head, and thought of the infinity around Gojo, the invisible barrier between him and humanity. The thing that put him closer to godliness. A smile curling at her lips despite herself, understanding the implications of Gojo turning it off around you. “And yet you still gave him your last Milkis at lunch.”
“It was strawberry-flavored.” a shrug. “I don't like strawberry.”
Shoko didn’t say anything else. Didn’t point out the way you lingered when Gojo wasn’t around, or how your voice got quieter when you talked about him. Didn’t say that she’d seen Gojo staring out windows when he thought no one was watching, fingers tapping the rhythm of your laugh on his thigh.
There was something sacred about their closeness. Something fragile and half-formed, still soft at the edges. Shoko didn’t want to break it by naming it too soon.
She just watched. Just remembered.
Suguru was the only one who never commented.
He saw it too—of course he did—but he never overtly teased, only gave a knowing smile quietly to Gojo who would glare back, but never really poked at the obvious tension between the two. Maybe because he understood it, or maybe because he was the kind of person who noticed things and let them be.
He grew quieter that fall, but not in a way that worried her yet. It was more like he was watching, gathering. She felt like something was shifting behind his eyes, too slow and too early to name yet. He still joked with Gojo, still helped Haibara with his footwork, still spent long evenings reading next to Shoko in the common room without saying a word.
But he didn’t smile as easily. And sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, he would close his eyes like the world was too loud.
Shoko didn’t ask. She didn’t know how.
Maybe she should have.
❀
It's late November and the mission went fine.
They exorcised the spirit, cleansed the space, burned the remains. But it was what happened after that stuck.
They stayed overnight in a small inn at the base of the mountain, just two rooms—boys in one, girls in the other. The floors were tatami, and the air smelled like cedar and sulfur from the hot springs nearby. it should’ve been peaceful.
But Shoko couldn’t sleep.
You lay on your side, back to Shoko, eyes open in the dark. She listened to the wind outside, the drip of water from a leaky faucet, the quiet hum of something that felt like change.
And then, sometime past midnight, you slipped out of bed.
Shoko didn’t move, just watched the shadow cross the room, slide the door open, and vanish into the hallway.
It wasn't long before Gojo left too.
You weren’t subtle. Maybe you didn’t want to be.
Shoko waited a full minute before getting up. Her feet were cold on the floor. She didn’t know what she expected—to interrupt them, to tease them. She heard echoes in the hallway, but couldn’t make out a word. Just the shuffling of feet, and the wind blowing against the door.
But when she found the two of you — you weren’t touching.
You were standing in the snow-dusted garden outside the inn, facing each other, breathing visible in the cold. Your arms were folded tight across your chest. Gojo's hands were shoved deep into his coat pockets.
You weren’t saying anything, but she felt this air around you two. In your distance, in the heavy breathing and puffs of smoke between your lips, like you had run out of words to say.
Now, you were just looking.
And maybe that was worse. More intimate, somehow.
Shoko didn’t move. She stayed hidden by the shadows, her breath caught somewhere in her throat.
Then you reached forward.
Your hands touching Gojo’s cheek, just barely.
He flinched.
Not away. Not exactly. Just — startled. Like he hadn’t expected you to be real.
Shoko could see it then—how scared he was. Not of you, but of what it meant to want something in a world like theirs.
“You don’t have to say anything,” you said quietly.
Gojo looked at you. “I should.”
“You never say anything you don’t mean.”
“I don’t know how to mean this.”
A pause. Your breath hitched.
“Just don’t look away.”
He didn’t.
And she watched as you leaned in, closing your eyes for your first kiss. How his lashes had brushed against your cheek as he let you pull him in, his hand finding its way to gently hold your waist.
Shoko had left after that — witnessing a moment so intimate she felt shivers just watching it, intruding in it. Or maybe it was the cold that got her. But, she waited to sleep until you went back inside. Waited until you crawled into bed beside her again, colder than before, but smiling softly into the dark.
Neither of you said a word.
Shoko stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about how everything had already started to change.
❀
The next few weeks felt warmer, somehow. Like something had opened in their group that wasn’t there before. Not just between Gojo and you—but all of them.
They trained harder. Laughed more. She wanted to believe they were healing the cracks from that August, that the feeling of finality sinking into her wasn’t real.
Even Suguru seemed lighter again. He stopped frowning at the radio when the news came on. Started humming again while he read. He taught Haibara about a complicated binding technique in the training yard one afternoon and let out a laugh when their junior tried it himself. There was a moment—a brief, impossible moment—where Shoko almost believed in forever.
They sat on the school rooftop one evening, all four of them, sky streaked violet and pink and gold. Someone had brought a speaker, and someone else had brought a bottles of various soda. Music played low. She noticed that you had rested your head on Gojo's shoulder, and he didn’t move, just leaned into it like gravity.
Suguru was telling a story about a curse he saw shaped like a crab. Shoko laughed. The wind was cool and sweet. The world didn’t feel like it was ending yet.
“You ever think we’ll get out of this?” Suguru asked, voice low, cigarette between his lip.
“Out of what?” you asked.
“This. Jujutsu. Destruction and death and chaos—whatever it is.”
Gojo stared at the sky. “No.”
“Maybe,” Shoko took the cigarette from Geto’s lips, and took a puff. “but not whole.”
They sat in silence for a long time after that.
The sun set, and Shoko watched the light disappear behind Gojo’s glasses, behind your smile, behind the quiet curve of Suguru's mouth.
It felt like a beginning.
But all she could think about was how beautiful things always seemed, right before they broke.
iv. march, 2007
It’s cruel to her, how the missions only seemed to get worse after that.
Higher-ranked, more volatile, more death. More nights in strange towns with blood on their hands. They started seeing each other less and less. After last August, in the aftermath of Riko Amani’s death, Gojo had been assigned onto more missions alone—acknowledged for the first time in finality as the strongest. Started carrying all the mission files himself, memorizing them down to the street corners. Shoko started collecting more tools, more supplies, more sutures for the clinic at the tech, where she stayed more often than not now. She stopped wearing earrings because they got in the way of her face mask. You had learned how to kill without hesitation.
And she swore Suguru never complained about the missions he went on alone. But now he flinched when they passed playgrounds. Tensed when civilians asked for help. The curses he swallowed grew sharper, crueler. nastier, he had once told her late one night, the word leaving his tongue like he had coughed up bile.
“Don't let them suffer,” he said once, without blinking. “Fast is better.”
Shoko nodded.
She didn’t ask what he meant.
❀
The last mission they took together was in the early spring of 2007, before the start of their third year.
A cult in Hiraizumi—dark rituals, civilian disappearances, cursed users hiding behind holy symbols and incense. They traveled light, only the four of them. It felt like the early days again, for a moment—suitcases and jokes and Gojo making dumb puns as they checked into a cheap ryokan.
But the mission itself was ugly.
Children locked in closets. Blood on the temple floors. Curses formed from fear and starvation, clinging to walls like rot.
Suguru lost control halfway through.
Not of his technique. Not of his mind. But of his restraint.
He killed too quickly. Didn’t wait for surrender, and didn’t leave the last cursed user breathing long enough to answer questions.
Gojo grabbed him by the collar after.
“What the hell was that?”
“They were killing kids.”
“They were running away.”
“And they would’ve kept going.”
Gojo's hand tightened. his voice dropped. “We follow orders.”
“Do we?”
Suguru's eyes burned—hotter than Shoko had ever seen. “Whose orders, Satoru?”
Shoko watched you step between them. A hand on Gojo's chest. Your voice low. “Not here.”
Gojo dropped his hand, and Suguru had turned and walked away, scoffing.
The two of them didn’t speak again the rest of the trip.
❀
Haibara died not long after.
He had been bright—sun-bright, laughter-bright, too-young-to-fall-bright. He said “good morning” like it mattered. He addressed them all formally even when they told him to stop. He sparred with you like he was dancing, ate lunch with his mouth full, had dreams about being a sorcerer who saved people and meant it.
The mission was supposed to be simple.
Shoko remembers the call. A cursed womb, grade 3, nothing extraordinary. She remembers you saying, “they’re strong. Nanami'll be with him. they’ll be fine.”
They weren’t.
What came back wasn’t a body, not really. It was a mess of limbs and red and something too silent to be the Haibara she had known.
Nanami carried him. Wouldn’t let go, even as his uniform soaked a darker shade from the blood.
Shoko stitched Haibara's body together with shaking hands—not to save him. Just so his mother could recognize his face.
You threw up in the courtyard after the funeral. Gojo didn’t speak. Suguru didn’t cry.
Grief had finally split the group like glass under pressure—fracture lines running between them, invisible until the light hit just right.
Gojo got louder. More obnoxious, more ridiculous. He made jokes during meetings, fell asleep in class, tripped over his own feet just to make you laugh.
And you did laugh. Loud and real and reckless. But there was something sharp underneath it. A glint in your voice. A kind of defiance.
Suguru got even quieter.
Not the peaceful kind of quiet, the kind that meant calm or ease.
This was the kind that clung to him. That narrowed his eyes when he passed civilians on the street. That curled his lip when they reported to elders who hadn’t lifted a hand in battle in years. That made him look at Haibara’s photo like it was a question that would never be answered.
Shoko felt it most at night.
Suguru used to accidentally fall asleep reading in the common room, head tilted back, glasses slipping. Now, he sat up long after everyone else had gone to bed, staring at nothing, fingers curled like he was still gripping a weapon.
She said something once. Tried to, at least.
“Are you okay?” she asked quietly, as they stood in the hall one night. She can’t recall why, or where, but she remembers this moment because there has never been a part of her that hadn’t wished she had pushed back harder.
Suguru looked at her.
His smile was soft, fake. “Yeah.”
By then she knew he was gone.
❀
A couple weeks later, in the midst of an August heatwave — Suguru Geto disappears.
He left a note on the dorm kitchen table and a photo of the four of them.
Just one sentence: I can't do this anymore.
The rest was silence.
Shoko found it first. She read it twice, then sat down at the table and stared at the handwriting until you walked in and asked where everyone was.
Gojo didn’t say anything after meeting with Yaga. Didn’t come out of his room for the rest of the morning.
Though it’s the last time she sees Suguru, she understands this is it.
She had heard, just a little after reading his final note, what he’d done. A town massacred, burned to the ground and cursed residuals that couldn’t have been anyone’s but the man next to her — his own mother and father killed by their only son’s hands.
Yet here he was, lighting her cigarette for her and laughing. At least she could pretend for a moment that this didn’t have to be over.
She gives Gojo a call and waits with Suguru for his best friend to arrive and she wonders if Gojo could change the outcome of this. If Gojo Satoru could save Suguru Geto from himself. But another glance up at him, long hair disheveled, the purpled skin under his eyes deeper than she’s ever seen, and the emptiness behind his smile, that she realizes she doesn’t know the man next to her. Not anymore. Maybe not at all.
So he waves goodbye, and she nods and lets the smoke cloud her lungs.
And she never spoke to him again.
❀
That winter, the sky felt heavier. The air full of ghosts.
You stopped wearing bright colors. Started sleeping in your uniform, like you expected to be called into battle at any second. Gojo trained until his hands bled, and didn’t let Shoko bandage them.
“What if he’s right?” he asked her once. His voice barely audible. “What if we’re just killing things to delay the inevitable?”
Shoko didn’t answer, because she didn’t know. (Because something in her still wanted to believe.)
But by the end of that year she had found herself alone more often.
In the morgue. On the roof. In the silence between patrols. She smoked less, not because she wanted to live longer. Just because it didn’t feel worth the taste anymore.
You had stopped talking about the future.
Gojo stopped calling himself the strongest.
They were eighteen then. Too young to have seen so much. Too old to unsee any of it.
v. 2008
The years felt blurry after.
Like the sky after a firework show, after the beauty of it wears and you are left with the remains. Of the sky billowed in smoke, and the ground covered in ash. Shoko remembers the firework show during the summer festival in their second year, how she had watched the lights change your faces. How when she thinks of Suguru, she remembers him back then, hair in a half bun, wearing a yukata, his profile cast under the red glow of fireworks.
Mission after mission. Report after report. Half-empty dorm rooms. Birthdays that passed unnoticed. Names that became numbers. More curses. More blood. Fewer friends.
By then she had stopped smoking entirely, not because she wanted to live. But because you had always hated the smell.
And for a long time after Suguru left, Shoko couldn’t sleep without dreaming of the morgue.
The lights were always too bright. The steel trays too cold. Her gloves slick with blood that would never dry. In the dream, you always walked in first—whole, alive, laughing. And Shoko would reach for you. Call your name. But you would just smile, step onto the autopsy table, and lie down.
“You're early,” Shoko would whisper.
“I know.” you would say.
Then the door would swing open, and Suguru would walk in next. But his face would be hollowed out, eyes dark like tunnels. He'd sit beside your body, light a cigarette, and say nothing at all.
Shoko always woke up with her hands clenched tight around the sheets, fingers aching.
❀
Gojo never talked about Suguru.
Not once.
Not even on that day all those years ago when he came back from the confrontation in Shinjuku with blood in his nails and grief in his eyes.
He got stronger. Faster. Untouchable.
The elders stopped looking at him like a student and started looking at him like their greatest tool. He didn’t flinch, just started smiling bigger, make louder jokes, wore sunglasses indoors, and flirted and teased and deflected.
Shoko could see it, thought. In the slump of his shoulders, or the way his laugh caught wrong in his throat.
He was grieving like a dam breaking. Slowly and inevitably.
But never where anyone could see.
You stayed close to him after that. Stopped being fire and became gravity. Quiet and steady. The only thing that could bring him back when he started spinning too fast. You were the one who waited outside meetings. The one who kicked open his door and pulled him out of bed on the days he refused to get up, muttering, “If you don’t move, I'll set your curtains on fire.”
He always moved. Shoko thinks that it’s less because he believed in your vague threats, and more because he just believed in you.
Shoko watched it all from the edge.
The way you stopped waiting for him to say how he felt. The way you just stood there—open, unwavering—until he stopped running.
The two of you never made it official. Not with labels. Not with grand declarations or anything, But Gojo started showing up late to meetings because he walked you home.
Shoko didn’t know if it was healing, but for a while, it was peace.
vi. april, 2009
Around this time, the Fushiguro’s arrived.
Megumi. Six years old. Too serious. Too quiet. walked around everyone like he was ready to hit, or be hit. His older sister, Tsumiki. Not older by much, just eight years old, but she was sunshine, warm and motherly beyond her years. Shoko saw that you took to her instantly, buying her hair clips and braiding her hair — showing her how to throw a punch if she ever needed to.
Gojo brought them to the school with a box of takeout and a stubborn glint in his eye. "Don't say anything weird,” he told you and shook. “He already thinks I’m an idiot.”
“He's not wrong,” you smiled, and Gojo pouted at you.
Shoko bent down to meet the boy’s eyes, unsure of what to say. “Hmm. What’s something you like?”
He shrugged, and gave her an unimpressed look. “I like dogs.”
“Me too,” she said. “They’re honest.”
That night, they all sat in the common room eating cold noodles. Gojo told a story about a cursed tanuki that stole his left shoe. Megumi didn’t laugh, but he leaned into his sister when she did. Shoko watched as he leaned by Gojo's side as the lights went out.
You and Gojo had opened your arms and made space for the two of them.
Or maybe you had filled in the spaces left behind.
❀
Gojo cooked more, and wasn't great on his first try, surprisingly. Shoko had to supervise so he didn’t poison anyone, and you would’ve eaten anything Gojo cooked, regardless.
Shoko watched as the four of them fell into something like a rhythm. Not a family. Not quite.
But something softer than she had become used to.
The kids brought color back to the halls when they came to visit. Laughter that didn’t feel borrowed. It wasn't like before—but nothing ever was.
Gojo had bought an apartment for Megumi and Tsumiki, and the two of you stopped by almost everyday that year. You and Gojo made bento boxes. You went on grocery runs. You argued over what show to watch on Saturday nights. When Shoko would come over, Tsumiki would beg to paint Shoko’s nails, and once she had given in with her nails painted badly in rainbow and glitter, and you and Gojo had made fun of her for weeks when Shoko didn’t wipe it off.
You stopped wearing your uniform outside missions. Started wearing sweaters with loose sleeves, earrings again, mismatched socks.
You started reading books and magazines and things that weren’t just mission reports. Bought a plant for their windowsill. Put post-it notes on the fridge.
Shoko found one once that said, “Satoru, if you forget to buy me dorayaki again, I swear to God.”
He forgot anyway, but he came back late that night with flowers.
Shoko watched from the couch as you opened the door, just to see you blinking down at the bouquet like it had grown a second head.
“They didn’t have dorayaki,” he said, sheepish. “But they had these.”
You didn’t speak—just grabbed the collar of his coat and stepped into the apartment hallway with him, shutting the door without looking.
Shoko looked away, and gave them the evening. She hung out with the kids, because they were cooler, and let them sleep on the couch watching movies.
It’s after they had fallen asleep, and you and Gojo were nowhere to be seen, that she sat on the balcony and watched the city lights flicker, listening to the hum of traffic into the night.
For the first time in months, she felt… full.
Not happy. Not yet healed.
But full, like maybe all her pieces had stopped rattling.
Just for now.
❀
She still worked long hours, because the clinic never slept.
New students. New injuries. New names she tried not to memorize.
She stitched and cut and stabilized and cleaned. Practiced her technique until it no longer felt like a gift but a reflex.
She stopped praying, though she had never been good at it anyway.
But every time a body came in, not yet cold, not yet gone, she held her breath.
Please, not them.
❀
They didn’t talk about the past. At least not often.
But sometimes, when you had already fallen asleep and the wind whistled through the hallways, Gojo would sit next to her on the balcony and say things in a tone older than his twenty years.
“He liked soba more than ramen. I never knew that.”
And Shoko would nod.
“He read faster than anyone,” she’d add. “even me.”
“He believed in this more than we did.”
“Yeah.”
Then silence.
Then the night.
Then the world turning, regardless.
❀
Shoko isn’t sure what time it is now, but it feels like a bit past midnight. In here, it’s just the two of you on the couch with the weight of exhaustion like a second blanket. The balcony door is half-open, and the September chill is blowing in softly. There’s a glass of wine balanced precariously on the edge of the coffee table, that she keeps forgetting to drink, and you’ve got your legs tucked underneath you, hair damp from a shower, wearing one of those shirts that’s probably his — though neither of you ever acknowledges it out loud.
Shoko tips her head against the back of the couch, eyes tracing the ceiling like it’ll tell her the future, and mutters, “I feel so old.”
You laugh, soft, incredulous. “We’re twenty-one.”
“Exactly. And yet my back feels like I’m fifty.” You give her a side glance, smiling.
“My back feels perfectly fine, granny.”
“That’s because you have two little minions who give you back massages whenever you ask. And they can’t say no because you house and feed them.”
You nudge her knee with your own, half-amused, half-affectionate. “They’d starve if it wasn’t for us.”
“They’d at least learn how to cook instant ramen properly,” she fires back, though her tone is fond. She knows it as well as you do—how Megumi sometimes falls asleep at the kitchen table with his homework still out, how Tsumiki always insists on washing the dishes even when her fingers are pruned from her bath. How the apartment has begun to feel not just like a place to sleep, but like the kind of home you were never supposed to have.
It makes her chest ache.
She glances at you again, more carefully this time. “You’re happy, right?”
You blink at her, then tilt your head like you don’t quite understand the weight of the question. “Happy?”
“You know what I mean.” Shoko shrugs, too casual. “With all this — and with him.”
There it is. Not accusatory, just curious, like she’s been holding this thought in her mouth for months, letting it turn over until it smoothed into something she could say without breaking it.
You’re quiet for a moment, your gaze lowering to the glass of wine you still haven’t touched. “It’s not simple.”
“Nothing ever is with him.” She huffs a small laugh, but she doesn’t look away from you.
“Sometimes,” you admit, your voice softer, “it feels like we’re still kids, sneaking out after curfew, daring each other to jump rooftops. And then sometimes I look at him and I feel like—” You break off, shaking your head as though it’s too fragile to name.
“Like what?”
You exhale slowly. “Like he already belongs to the world, and I’m just borrowing him for a while.”
That hits Shoko harder than she expects. She shifts on the couch, watching the way your fingers worry at the hem of your sleeve. There’s something unguarded in the way you say it, something that makes her throat tighten.
Shoko leans her head against the couch cushion, her glass dangling loosely from her fingers. “You talk like he’s a library book or something. Checked out, due back in three weeks.”
You laugh, though it’s small and tired. “Maybe that’s all love really is. Borrowing someone for as long as they’ll let you keep them.”
“Morbid.”
“Honest.” You glance at her, and your smile is crooked, fond. “You know him. He’s… a hurricane in human form. Everyone wants a piece of him, and half the time I feel like I’m just holding on, hoping he doesn’t blow past me.”
Shoko hums, noncommittal, but her eyes are sharp. “And yet you’ve been holding on for who knows how long. Most people can’t even last five minutes with him in a room.”
“Don’t remind me,” you mutter, though your lips curve. “He still leaves his socks everywhere. Still eats candy for breakfast if I don’t stop him. And he—” You pause, and the softness of your voice betrays you. “He still looks at me the same way he did when we were sixteen. Like he can’t believe I’m real.”
Shoko conceals her smile, and masks it with a sip of wine. “He’d be an idiot not to.”
“I think about it sometimes,” you admit. “If we hadn’t met so young. If we hadn’t been thrown together in that pressure cooker of a school — would it have still been him? Would he have still found me?”
Shoko stretches her legs out, her gaze slipping toward the ceiling. “I think he was always going to be yours, you know. Some things just… fix themselves in place before you even notice.”
You fall quiet, staring at the wine in your glass, watching the way the light fractures against it. When you speak again, it’s hushed. “I’m scared, Shoko. I– I think I’m scared of losing him. Of the day the world asks for more than he can give, and I have to watch him walk toward it anyway.”
Shoko doesn’t answer right away. She looks at you — really looks — the girl who grew up at her side, who always chose kindness even when it cost you. You, who Gojo has loved since he was growing into his height, awkward and half-feral with grief and brilliance. You, who still look at him like he’s worth the trouble.
Finally, she says, “You know, when we were teenagers, I used to wonder if you’d grow tired of him. If one day you’d realize it was too much.”
You blink at her, startled. “And now?”
Shoko shrugs, her expression softening. “Now I think — if anyone was ever built to love him, it was you. Stubborn, patient, stupidly brave. He’s impossible, but you’ve always made the impossible look easy.”
Your laugh catches in your throat, trembling somewhere between joy and sorrow. “Don’t make me cry, Shoko.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” She lifts her glass in a lazy toast. “To you and him. To sixteen and twenty-one, and however long you can keep borrowing each other.”
You tap your glass gently against hers, the sound ringing low and warm. “To growing older.”
Shoko watches the way your face lights up at the thought, and takes a long sip from her glass. She tries for levity, though it comes out a little rough. “Well, if he breaks your heart, I get to kill him. That’s the rule.”
You laugh—really laugh this time, the kind that crinkles your eyes and warms the air between you. “You’d have to fight him first.”
“Please,” she scoffs. “He’s all bark. I’d win.”
“You’re funny, Shoko.” You smile a little sleepily, and lean your head against her shoulder, the way you used to when you were girls hiding from the elders in the back hallways of the clan compound. She doesn’t move, just lets you settle there, the weight of you a reminder that some things never change.
There’s a long stretch of silence, broken only by the city hum outside. Then, almost shyly, Shoko says, “Well, I hope he loves growing old with you as much as I loved growing up with you.”
You still against her, then let out a breath that sounds dangerously close to a sob. She doesn’t look at you, doesn’t push. That’s never been your language. Instead, she reaches for her wine, takes another sip, and adds, almost casually, “And if he doesn’t, then screw him. You’ll still have me.”
You laugh again, watery this time, and lean closer. “Always.”
❀
In the mornings, she drank coffee alone.
In the evenings, she liked to come to your apartment to the sound of laughter, and nonsense on the TV. To the smell of your cooking, which had gotten better than Gojo’s after a couple months. To Tsumiki and her hands that grabbed Shoko’s wrists and led her to the dining table. To Megumi, who Gojo tried so hard to make smile at his awful jokes.
Sometimes, she let herself believe it could last.
Sometimes, she let herself want more.
That was enough.
vii. 1997
When they were seven, you and Shoko built a grave for a bird.
They’d found it after a storm — a small thing, all bones and feathers, collapsed in the mud beneath a persimmon tree in the compound’s garden. You crouched beside it, poked it with a stick. “Is it sleeping?”
“No,” shoko said. “It's dead.”
“How do you know?”
“Its chest isn’t moving.”
“How do you know?”
Shoko didn’t answer. Just knelt down, tiny hands damp with soil, and began to dig.
They buried it beneath a square stone, lined the edges with pebbles. You picked wildflowers and bundled it with twine from the kitchen. Shoko pressed her fingers to the earth and whispered something she didn’t really understand — a wish, maybe, or a prayer.
They sat there until the wind died down, until your mother called them in, until the sky turned the color of ash.
“We should’ve saved it,” you whispered, wiping your nose with your sleeve.
Shoko didn’t say it, but she knew it then: sometimes you’re too late.
❀
january, 2014
The call comes at 2:19 in the afternoon, a higher-up’s voice, clipped and formal.
“She’s been recovered. We’re bringing you the body now.”
The world doesn’t spin, it just stills. Though Shoko sits at her desk for a long time after, the phone silent in her lap, her hands empty.
Shoko doesn’t ask whose, because there’s only one person left.
She's already standing.
Her coat’s already on.
Her tea’s gone cold. The light in the infirmary has gone muddled and slanted, painting long shadows over everything like a warning.
Her hands move automatically. Clipboard.Pen. Gloves.
The air starts to feel static.
The mission was supposed to be easy. “A clean-up.” A second sweep.She repeats, and repeats. Yet how many other times has she thought this?
You weren’t supposed to go alone, but someone backed out last minute, and you were never one to wait around.
Grade one curse. Warehouse District.
Shoko remembers the briefing because she was in the room. Because you had smiled — tilted your head, chewing gum, loose-limbed and tired. “I’ll be home quick.”
❀
Shoko gets a morbid sense of déjà vu when she sees you laid out on the table, covered with a sheet pulled too high.
But when she sees the body, it doesn’t feel like you.
Not you. Born five days apart. The soldier to her healer. Balance, the clanheads had once called them. One to make and unmake.
Not the same girl who used to share her shampoo, or talk in her sleep. Not the girl who burned bright and reckless and kissed Gojo Satoru like it was the only truth left in the world.
The word balance keeps running through her head as she stares at your face. So still.
No, it wasn’t you. This body is cold, and broken in ways Shoko doesn’t have the words for.
Her gloves are on. Her cursed energy thrums at her fingertips.
But it’s all useless.
The wounds are clean. Carved into you like declarations. Chest collapsed, Ribs fractured inward. Shoko's already cataloging the report in her head. Trachea crushed. Internal hemorrhaging. Cursed lacerations across the sternum.
Then she moves.
Like a surgeon. like a healer with something to prove, even if there’s no one left to prove it to.
She doesn’t try to bring you back. Not really. She's seen too many bodies to believe in resurrection.
She stitches muscle back together like it’ll matter. Seals split skin. Brushes blood from your scalp. A ritual, maybe. or penance. And as she runs her fingers through the ends of your hair, she thinks of being five years old when you had taught her how to braid it.
When she feels her vision blur she whispers, “don’t be stupid,” just like you used to.
Her voice doesn’t tremble until the end.
Too late, she thinks, and she sees a dead bird cupped in your small hands. Wildflowers wrapped in twine.
Too late, too late, too late.
She writes the report with mechanical precision.
Her handwriting doesn’t shake.
She signs it, and place it on top of the clipboard.
Then folds your arms across your chest, straightens your uniform collar, uses a towel to wipe a smudge from your chin, and the drawer of the morgue clicks shut with a hollow finality.
And she finally lets herself cry.
Just once.
Quietly.
Like a confession.
❀
Shoko takes the train without really knowing why she’s chosen this route over the school car. After she explained what she was doing, Ijichi had told her he could drive her with a solemn look in his eyes, always so insistent. She had declined, so now she sits by the window, forehead pressed to the cold glass, the tunnel lights strobing against her reflection until her own face starts to look like a stranger’s.
She's still in her work clothes, still smells faintly of antiseptic and smoke, and the folder in her lap feels heavier than it should. She keeps one hand pressed flat to its cover like she’s holding a wound closed.
People filter in and out of the train at each stop, their chatter muted, just faint shapes moving through her periphery.
She doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes. The only thing she lets herself look at is the glass, and the snow on the other side of it—each flake blurring against the motion of the city, small and perfect and already gone.
Yaga had told her, after, that Satoru wasn’t told yet, but she wonders if he already knows. If some part of him—whatever raw, uncanny instinct makes him the strongest—registered it the moment your heart stopped. Maybe he felt it like an earthquake deep in his bones, the sudden, wrong absence in the air. Maybe he was sitting on their couch, turning toward the door without knowing why.
Her mind drifts, unspooling memory:
Summer afternoons, the four of them sitting on the roof with drinks to cool the sweat on them. Your hair tangled from the wind. Gojo leaning back on his palms, his sunglasses pushed to the top of his head so she could clearly see the way his gaze snagged on you like he didn’t even notice he was staring. The quiet shift over months from banter to something slower, gentler, like they’d started speaking a language that Shoko didn’t know but could still recognize in the spaces between words.
A late night after a mission, all of them exhausted, half asleep in the common room. Shoko had woken to see them leaning together on the couch, your head on his shoulder, his hand resting loosely on yours. The kind of touch that wasn’t accidental.
There had been other moments—quieter, private ones she hadn’t meant to see—that told her this was the thing that had changed him. He'd always been brilliant, unbearable, untouchable. but with you, his edges softened. He laughed differently. He listened.
Now she wonders how much of that she’s about to take from him in a single sentence.
The train slows into her stop, brakes screeching. She rises, folder in hand. She doesn’t know why she carries the hardcopy—maybe it makes it feel more real, more final, more like evidence of something she already failed to prevent.
She had stopped by a gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes and a small black lighter for the first time in almost six years. There’s now a cigarette clamped between her teeth, though she hasn’t lit it.
Snow is falling.
It catches in her hair, her sleeves, her lashes.
When she reaches their apartment building, she stops at the bottom of the stairs and thinks about turning around. But she doesn’t. She climbs each step like she’s approaching a grave.
The light’s on under the door.
She raises her hand.
And knocks.
❀
The door opens almost immediately.
And for a second — just one, flickering, incandescent second — Shoko sees the look on his face.
Gojo Satoru opens the door like he expects you to be behind it. Not Shoko. Not grief incarnate. But you. The woman he loves. The only thing in the world that could quiet his mind and hold his entire future in her palms.
He opens the door like someone in love. Like someone relieved. Like someone who still dares to hope.
And then he sees Shoko.
And everything stops.
His face doesn’t fall.
It freezes.
She watches the hope die in his expression. It doesn’t vanish — it dies. Like something physically collapsing inside of him. A structure caving in, silently, under its own weight.
His shoulders lock, and she watches his jaw tense. He doesn’t move aside to let her in, doesn’t say a word.
Just stares.
He looks at her like he had known this would be how it ended all along, but still — still, deep down, some piece of him had been holding on. Had left the light on. Had made her side of the bed. Had waited.
Shoko clears her throat.
The words don’t want to come.
"I’m sorry—she’s gone.”
That's all it takes.
Gojo doesn’t flinch.
But she sees it in the way his hand clenches around the edge of the door. The way his breath leaves him — sharp, shallow, wrong. The way he looks past her, like he’s trying to reframe the hallway, the scene, the moment.
Like maybe he can rewind it.
Undo it.
See you behind her, scolding her for delivering bad news so bluntly.
But Shoko is alone, and the silence is loud.
He steps back, and turns.
Walks into the apartment like everything inside was knocked over.
Shoko follows and shuts the door behind her.
The apartment is dim. Bathed in soft warm light. The heater hums gently in the corner, and there are two mugs on the table, one empty and one half-drunk. Your sweater is still hanging over the back of the couch, sleeves inside out. Your boots are by the door. The windows are covered by sheer white curtains, but the shade of blue that appears just after sunset peeks through, framing the room the same color as melancholy.
Shoko wants to scream.
Instead, she places the folder on the table.
Neither of them look at it.
She taps the folder once, not to push him, but to make its presence undeniable.
“Are you going to read it?”
His back is still to her. She can see the angle of his spine through the thin cotton of his shirt, every muscle tight, like he’s bracing for impact.
With no hesitation, “No.”
Shoko expected that answer, but she still feels something drop in her chest.
“You sure? It’s not… it’s not just medical jargon. I kept it clean. No gore.”
He turns his head just enough for her to see one sharp eye over his shoulder.
“You want me to read the autopsy for the love of my life?”
She pauses, feeling herself hold her breath.
“I want you to know what happened,” she says, voice level. “Exactly what happened. Without the stories you’ll tell yourself later.”
He scoffs—a sound halfway between disbelief and exhaustion—and shakes his head.
“The story I want is that you’re lying.”
Silence.
He pushes away from the counter, crosses to the table. His height makes the space between them smaller without him even trying. He puts a hand on the folder like he might open it—thumb brushing the edge, fingers curling.
And then he just… freezes.
Shoko watches him, and for the first time she sees it—not the usual walls, the sarcasm, the easy dismissal. This is different. This is a man standing at the edge of a cliff, staring down, knowing there’s nothing but rocks and cold water below.
“I can't,” he says finally, and it’s not defiance. It's quiet. almost gentle.
“Why?”
he swallows, eyes still on the folder.
“Because the second I read it, it’s over. She's gone in ink. In numbers. In your handwriting.” he glances up at her, and there’s no shield in his expression now. “If I don't read it, she’s just… late coming home.”
Shoko's throat tightens.
For a moment, she wants to tell him she understands. That she’s done the same—taken certain pages out because the words make her feel sick. But she doesn’t. She just nods, takes the folder back, tucks it under her arm again.
He exhales like he’s been holding his breath the whole time.
He’s not moving.
Not breathing, maybe.
His hand rests on the counter like it’s the only thing keeping him upright and she watches his shoulders shake.
Once.
Then still again.
His face is unreadable.
But his eyes — god, his eyes.
Shoko has known him for more than a decade, has seen him bloodied and laughing and blind with pain and victory. But she has never seen him like this.
Not even after Suguru.
Not even after Toji.
This isn’t rage.
This isn’t despair.
This is something else.
Something jagged. Something bottomless.
He looks at her like she’s the executioner. Like she didn’t just bring the news — but she made it true. But maybe, in some way, he’s right to feel that way.
“You’re sure that she’s—?” he asks, voice quiet. She could’ve mistaken his tone for desperation.
Shoko nods.
That's when it happens.
He laughs.
Short, ugly, and bitter.
An instinct, like flinching.
He runs a hand through his hair. Leans back against the counter.
The quiet settles like dust.
Shoko sits down on the couch. something crackles beneath her — one of your notebooks. She picks it up, flips it open without thinking.
The last page is filled with sketches. a little cartoon version of Gojo, grinning, speech bubble saying “have you seen my honey?”
Her throat tightens.
She doesn’t speak.
“I thought I had more time,” he says. Shoko doesn’t have it in her to speak.
“I wanted to take her to Okinawa again. Not for a mission this time. Just because.”
He closes his eyes.
“She never got to see it in winter. She would’ve liked the cold.”
And she stays the night on their couch. Like old times, except there is no wine and no laughter and your warmth isn’t beside her. Shoko never really registered that she’ll never see you again. Even now, it feels like you’ll call her at any moment and ask her if she wants a drink.
But that first night without you, she doesn’t think she could really fall asleep.
And he doesn’t really cry.
But in the morning, he makes coffee with hands that won’t stop shaking.
She drinks hers cold, and so does he. But she watches him press your mug to his lips and set it down again, like it burned him.
❀
august, 2014
Gojo is twenty four, and he’s older than he was meant to be. More tired than he lets on, and somehow still waiting for something that already ended.
Sometimes, when it’s late, and the city is loud, and the stars don’t show themselves—Shoko catches him leaning against the doorway of his apartment balcony, looking at the buildings and cars and passerbys like he’s trying to remember the shape of your face.
And that, she thinks, is love.
Not flowers.
Not vows.
Not even the waiting.
But the remembering.
The carrying.
The way his world stopped. The way he never quite leaves the doorway, just in case you might still come home to him.
viii. 2015
Grief, when it lingers long enough, becomes routine.
Shoko wakes the same way every morning: early, cold. the city a dull hum outside her window. The kettle clicks on. She measures out coffee. Drinks it black, because that’s how you liked it, and then cooks konnyaku because you hated it.
The irony keeps her company.
The mornings are always quiet now. The kind of quiet that settles into your bones and stays.
And Nanami leaves the Jujutsu world around that time.
Quietly. Respectfully. Without fuss.
He came to her clinic on a Tuesday, knocked once, sat down across from her, and said, "I'm leaving.”
She didn’t ask why, because she felt like she already knew.
He was twenty three and already looked like he’d seen the end of the world twice.
“You'll be good,” she said softly. “Too good for this place.”
Nanami looked away. “I just want to live like a person.”
She envied him for thinking it was still possible.
Before he left, he placed a small paper-wrapped gift on her desk.
Inside was a lighter, clean, silver, unused.
She held it in her palm for a long time that night.
But she didn’t smoke.
Not yet.
❀
She sees Gojo more often these days.
Not because they talk more, and not because they seek each other out. Just because there’s no one else left.
They don’t need to make plans anymore. They just end up in the same places. The clinic. The faculty room. The convenience store on that street with the broken traffic light.
Sometimes he brings her canned coffee. Never says anything when he hands it to her.
She drinks it anyway.
It’s the only thing he offers that she can still take.
And he laughs a little more now, but it’s not the same.
When he does, it’s wrong. Jagged. Like something trying to escape from under his skin. It reminds her that he’s still grieving, even when he tells her “he’s over it.”
The students adore him. Still think he’s invincible, and think the blindfolds and wit and charm are who he really is.
But Shoko knows better.
❀
december, 2017
Suguru's death didn’t come like she expected, though to her, Suguru Geto had died the August they were seventeen.
From the outside, he went out in flame and fury.
But then again, it feels like he went out quietly. Gently. By Gojo’s own hands.
Because, in the end, that was the only way it could’ve happened.
Not in hatred or vengeance, but in recognition of what they’d been. Of what they’d lost. Of the thin line between who you are and who you become when the world stops making sense.
“It was quick,” Gojo told her afterward, his voice steady, eyes blown wide with something far beyond pain.
Shoko believed him. Not because she trusted the words, but because she trusted the silence between them.
❀
She thinks of Suguru now more than she admits.
Remembers how he used to hum under his breath while taking notes. How he’d hand her highlighters during meetings without looking. How he used to let them braid his hair on missions just to make them smile.
Remembers the way he stood the last time she saw him, on the night of the cursed parade—back straight, curses curling around him like smoke, eyes tired in a way that made her want to scream.
He broke long before he died.
Shoko knows this.
She also knows he would’ve been a wonderful teacher.
If the world had been kinder, and if someone had stopped to tell him that softness wasn’t weakness. That wanting to save people didn’t make him naïve.
That watching them die wasn’t his fault.
❀
Gojo comes to dinner sometimes.
Not often or predictably. Sometimes he just knocks, steps inside, doesn’t take his shoes off properly, and drops onto her couch like he owns the place.
She used to yell at him for that, but now she just lets him.
He eats whatever she makes. Doesn’t complain, even when it’s instant ramen or cold rice or nothing at all.
They don’t talk much during those nights.
But sometimes, he falls asleep.
And sometimes, she covers him with the old blanket you used to use when you were over — just because. Just to remember what it felt like to care for someone who was still breathing.
There's one night that she remembers, after a long day of treating a couple injured sorcerers in the midst of a mission, that she finds him already waiting.
In the kitchen, cutting vegetables.
“What are you doing?” she asks, flatly.
“Trying to give you a break,” he says.
“By mutilating my carrots?”
“They fought back.”
She puffs a breath from her nose and smiles.
It’s the closest she’s come to laughing in days.
He makes curry. It's too spicy. The rice is slightly undercooked — but it’s not half bad.
She eats every bite, and doesn’t thank him for showing up.
They’re not close, not in the way people imagine. They don’t tell each other secrets. They don’t hug. They don’t reminisce out loud. Their bond lies in the memory of what it meant to be sixteen and still whole. Of how it felt watching the strongest boy in the room slowly learn how to be gentle. Of seeing him break and build and break again.
Of surviving the wreckage together.
He keeps her from vanishing. She keeps him from shattering.
They exist near each other.
Orbiting.
Keeping each other tethered.
❀
Shoko's the only one who doesn’t have a grave.
Not really.
Haibara's is now marked in a clean Kyoto cemetery. Suguru's ashes were never recovered, but there’s a stone for him outside his old temple. You have a simple plaque under the oak tree they used to study beneath.
Shoko visits them all, but she doesn’t linger.
Because it’s not the places that hold them.
It’s the way she still turns her head when someone says “Geto” in a briefing. It’s the way she keeps chopsticks in her drawer for four, not one. It's the way she wakes from a dream, disoriented and reaching for an image of herself, of when her hair was cut to her chin and she is surrounded by people who were once her home — before she remembers that no one’s coming.
Though, there's a new photo on her desk now.
Four teenagers. Uniforms on and grins wide.
Gojo has his eyes closed. Suguru is pretending to look annoyed. You’re flipping off the camera. Shoko is mid-laugh, mouth open, eyes crinkled.
She doesn’t remember who took it.
Doesn’t remember what they were laughing at.
But she leaves it there.
Next to the medical files and the pills and the list of new students.
It’s a reminder — not of who they were, but that they were. That at one point in time, the four of them had existed together. That at some point, that was all that mattered.
ix. december 24, 2018
The first snow falls unceremoniously. No warning and no wind to carry it.
Just flakes, slow and fat, drifting sideways over the rooftops of Shinjuku like ash from something that’s already burned.
Shoko watches it from the roof.
She doesn’t move.
Not yet.
It's the holidays, and she hates this time of year. There’s too much pretending, too many bright windows, too many mouths grinning like the world hasn’t ended five times already.
This year, the snow comes early.
And with it—him.
She thinks the city is strange under snow. Not soft. Not pretty. Just muffled, hollowed out. Sirens echo longer. Footsteps vanish quicker. The skyline dissolves behind a white veil, lights blurring like bruises.
She walks through it alone. Past vending machines glazed in frost and power lines sagging beneath the weight. There are paper lanterns swaying over shuttered storefronts, their glow smudged and dim.
Her boots crunch the snow like something brittle and alive. She isn’t wearing gloves. She likes the cold biting at her skin. It feels honest.
She finds him in the square.
Tall. Unmovable. Eyes like winter distilled into glass.
He's facing Sukuna, and there’s no backup. No panic. No speeches or horns sounding in the dark. Just two gods standing where no man should be.
She doesn’t call his name or break the silence. Only stands at the edge of it all, smoke slipping from her mouth, her eyes dry as bone.
He knows she’s there.
He doesn’t turn.
But he tilts his chin, barely, like a gesture carved out of stone.
And she understands, like she did all those years ago in August, when Suguru Geto had lit her cigarette. When he smiled and waved and she had turned away, for the last time.
That this is the end.
Not just of him. Not just of this fight.
But of everything that tethered them to a time when living felt possible.
Springtime in Jujutsu Tech. Sunlight tangled in white hair. You, singing too loudly, Suguru sighing like the world rested in his lungs. Sandos split in half. Train cars rattling at dusk. Leaves falling as soft as promises they never kept.
All of it.
Ending here.
Under a sky in a city stripped down to bone.
He burns too bright, even now. Bends space like a god, cuts air like a blade, shoulders the infinite and makes it look like art. And still—Sukuna is cruel. patient. inevitable.
Shoko watches as it begins: sharp, merciless, a brilliance that blinds and dies just as quickly.
She sees him hold and hold and hold—until he doesn’t.
He doesn’t scream.
He just folds.
Quietly.
Finally.
And the moment he hits the ground, the world doesn’t shatter.
But something in her does.
Everything slows.
The air thickens. Her breath fogs in front of her. Her hands are shaking, not from fear, but because she’s remembering. Nostalgia has always had its way of killing her, of creeping up on her and leaving her feeling sick. There is nothing left to reminisce now, as the last remaining part of her youth lies split in half in the show.
❀
The lab smells like steel and antiseptic, like every failure she’s ever catalogued. Fluorescent lights hum above her, sickly and bright, making her want to tear them out of the ceiling. She doesn’t. She just sets the instruments in place, lines up scalpels with the precision of someone who cannot afford to think.
Yuta lies unconscious on the table, his chest rising shallow, his pulse steady under her fingers. Now, she moves over to the drawer, where she placed Satoru’s body after stitching it back together. When she pulls back the sheets, she touches his hair once, brushes it off his forehead the way she remembers you used to when he was too stubborn to sleep.
Now she stands over him, and for the first time in years, her hands shake.
Not from inexperience. Not from fear of failure.
But from knowing that if she succeeds, it won’t really be him. And if she fails, she will have killed the last piece of her friend’s legacy with her own two hands.
Her cursed technique hums, steady, inexorable. Flesh unravels, rewrites. Neurons glimmer under her touch like constellations in a dark sky. She threads them carefully, patient as a weaver, until she feels something spark. Until she feels him.
Not Yuta, not exactly.
But not Satoru either.
Something between.
A gasp, sharp and wet, tears through the air. fingers twitch. The body arches against restraints she swore she wouldn’t use, but had to.
And then—eyes.
Too blue. Too familiar.
Her knees nearly buckle.
Because for an instant it feels like the dorms again and being a teenager. Then for an instant, she is twenty two again, and she watches Gojo lean down to talk to Tsumiki and Megumi, to give them reassurance, to protect their youth.
But then the boy blinks, coughs, chokes on his first words, staring at his hands. and Yuta is suddenly speaking to her, from Satoru Gojo’s lips.
And it’s not him.
It’s not him.
She forces her hands steady, swallows down the tremor in her throat. “Well, it worked.” She says, clinical, detached. Like she didn’t just carve open time and stitch it into something monstrous.
The snow keeps falling outside.
❀
Later, they ask her what happened. after transferring Yuta back to his own body, after dismantling Satoru, pieces lying on a table in her clinic — while Yuta walks, unscathed.
She gives them the facts. stripped bare, like bone. No softness. No poetry.
“Gojo fought. He fell. He's dead.”
Nothing more, because she refuses to let them dress it in glory, refuses to let them write a hymn where there was only silence.
He was tired.
He died.
And there’s nothing beautiful about that.
❀
She cremates him herself. In the same furnace that once took you. Her gloves are soaked by the end of it, dark and slick, but she doesn’t take them off. Doesn’t cry either. Not this time.
x. 青春
Tokyo feels different after. Like the city is holding its breath, waiting for something that will never come.
That evening, she stops beneath a streetlamp outside the school. Cigarette trembling faintly between gloved fingers. Snow catching in her hair, turning her into something ghostlike. Embers glow like memories in the dark.
For the first time in forever, she speaks. Not to anyone. Just to the cold, to the shadows that linger in her bones.
“You win.” she whispers.
The lamp above her flickers once, then dies.
And Shoko stands alone in the dark. Utterly. Finally. Completely.
Yet that night, she finds herself dreaming in color that she thought had left her vision over a decade ago now.
Dreams not of blood. Not of battle, or of bodies in a morgue, or the harsh December air.
But of summer. The old apartment bathed in sunlight. Then, you’re next to her, seated cross-legged, fingers deftly braiding Tsumiki’s hair. Gojo at the table, laughing, trying to pry the cap off a bottle of soda with his teeth while Suguru shakes his head, pretending not to smile at him. Somewhere on your balcony, Haibara’s voice rings out, bright with Nanami’s deeper murmur tucked inside it.
Shoko feels a weight in her hands, and forces herself to look down for just a moment just to see that she is holding a camera. She lifts it. Frames them in her viewfinder — her whole heart in one room. Click.
A still life. A stolen moment that no one else notices.
They’re too busy being alive.
(終わり) END.
When August comes, I don’t count the days
Transitory views from the subway train
How strange, when life unfolds this way
In the drift less zone, sky’s prone to stay off-gray
Clouds are omens too, fading at the rate
That most pleasant memories do
mae's note. first chapter of "of love & lesson plans" out tomorrow, and i pinky promise it won't be this sad </3 likes + reposts are appreciated, thank you soso much for reading
need more gojo recs that are pure domestic fluff. husband gojo helping you cook or fiance gojo meeting your parents JUST I NEED SOME LOVEY DOVEY TEETH ROTTING GOJO FICS PLS
it’s 6:08am. the sun isn’t even fully up yet. and baby yuji is already in full goblin mode - sockless, giggling and currently trying to climb nanami’s leg like a tree trunk.
nanami is in his work clothes with his blonde hair neat and styled. dress shirt crisp. tie halfway done.
“he wants your tie,” you mumble.
nanami glances down. yuji is clinging to his knee, making grabby hands.
“you can’t have papa’s tie,” nanami says, crouching down. “you’ll chew on it again.”
yuji immediately tries to bite it.
nanami sighs.
“see?”
you snort into your mug.
eventually, nanami picks him up - effortlessly, with one hand under his bottom and the other steadying his back. yuji squeals, clings to his dress shirt like a koala.
and nanami just… lets him. presses a kiss to his chubby cheek. holds him like he’s the most fragile and precious thing in the universe.
“you should leave soon,” you murmur. “you’ll miss your train.”
nanami looks at you.
then at the clock.
then back at you.
and then he sits down beside you with a baby on his chest and a tie still undone.
“they can wait,” he says softly.
you smile so hard it hurts.
you shift closer, curling into his side. baby yuji hums softly, chewing on his own fingers now instead of the tie. your head rests on nanami’s shoulder. his arm wraps around your waist without even thinking.
he’s still in his dress shirt. still in his slacks. the most put-together man in tokyo at this hour, probably. and yet here he is, willingly trapped under a sleepy baby and a sleepier spouse, forehead resting lightly against yours like this is all he’s ever needed.
and maybe it is.
he presses a kiss to your temple.
“love you,” he mumbles.
“even when i let your son chew on your expensive italian tie?”
he sighs. “especially then.”
based on this request
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