for what is your purpose in seeking out this shrine?
kayuekou ( yoo-eh-ko ) . 1702 . ⸝⸝ adult ꩜ look around you , are you going to leave me again ? ノ she . her — fanfiction . analysis . rambles . ಄ not spoiler-free : warning provided ◞ multifandom , mature .
2026 — now ⸝⸝ offerings are left on the haiden ... asks, comments, requests open, ノ latest ﹕public display of impatience (satoru) ಄ last updated 22/07/26 ⟢ minors dni with nsfw posts . working ﹕ mortuary assistant (jjk. toji)
The King of Curses become intoxicated with the dip that connects your shoulder and your neck because of your scent. Despite being your lover, he thinks this is a troublesome thing.
content ꩜ 2.5k words ， (domestic) fluff ， heian au ， herbalist reader ， marriage life ， having a child together ， scents and sniffing... ， honestly lots of purple prose ， no real warnings its just sukuna fluff ， i can't say anything
You have noticed that before supper, Lord Sukuna becomes restless every time he comes near you.
You realize this not soon enough, but this is simply due to the doing of Ryōmen Sukuna being utterly, thoroughly, and inexplicably enthralled by the way you, his wife smells. There is a certain way the fragrance that clings to the fine hairs on your neck feel and smell, one that Lord Sukuna does not know how to describe. Truthfully, this should not be a concern for him, especially given you are simply you, the herbalist daughter of that man who owns the apothecary.
And yet, he cannot stop himself from restlessness nor get the thought of you out of his head because of three distinctly indistinct reasons.
Firstly, the hollow of your neck smells of the herbs you pick at dawn. He does not know why they linger so often and so potently, however, the smell is unmistakable, because Ryōmen Sukuna cannot be mistaken. He has wandered through the plains near the capital much and many times, some at your request when you were too sickly to gather said herbs (and even then, you still smelled like the plants you gathered). This is a hassle to him. Because now Sukuna possesses knowledge and assumptions that beneath your jaw lies angelica smelling of earth and warmth, tangy sweetness hidden under musk. Then the slight bitterness of mugwort and dried chrysanthemums that’s near honey-like in softness.
You have been courted by Ryōmen Sukuna for six months, officially. This is merely because although the King of Curses, the Four-Armed Calamity does not abide by rules given by anybody other than himself, you have become the bender of his soul at your will. The featherlight touches you have given each other during your exhausting sessions of teaching him literacy—which have still resumed in motion—have proven intoxicating to Sukuna because at the second your body comes into his vicinity, he is swallowed by the warmth of your potent scent. Although, he would never admit to it.
Secondly, the sleeves of your kimono smell of smoke. They seem to absorb everything, and they seem to absorb home. The charcoal of hearth sticks strongly to the intricately woven strings of the fabric and a reddish, almost skittish in aroma comfort sticks to the roof of Lord Sukuna’s nose. Then there is the smell of fresh steamed rice, the surprisingly sweet smell that coats your sleeves again; only available to him once he’s stood close enough to you. Then there comes roasted tea, to the fresh rush grass of the apothecary’s tatami, to the undeniable overarching smell of sun: warm linen, spring wind.
Sukuna has found himself inching closer to you as you work. Your father had begun snickering whenever Sukuna came over for you. Your father is a man too, and your father had been in love with your mother for far too long to not know the humiliating way a man can become transfixed with a woman’s scent.
Thirdly and lastly, Lord Sukuna has memorized the scent of your hair. Before supper, Sukuna has found you in your chambers alone frequently; nothing immoral, nothing indecent happens. You are simply a woman that understandably prides herself in her hair, as all women do in this period. A wooden brush combs through the bottoms of your silky hair at first, then it breaches up, up, and up. Your hair also smells of spring, somehow even in the winter. The locks of your hair are well taken care of. You brush through it once and smile once you are alerted of his unannounced presence.
But that does not matter, because your hair smells of plum blossom oil. You perfumed it. You also smell like camelia, clean and unfloral, somehow exhilarating for Ryomen Sukuna. In the fourth month of your courtship, Sukuna had presented you with a gift—which you have suspected was stolen—of aloeswood. You had never used it because who are you but not a humble herbalist? You are no noble. Even if Sukuna seems to treat you as such.
Now Ryōmen Sukuna has never understood why nobles insist on burning expensive incense until their robes smell like forests that have never existed. Smoke is smoke. Perfume is perfume. If a person smells pleasant, they smell pleasant. If they do not, they should bathe.
Simple.
Which is precisely why he refuses to acknowledge that his newly-wedded wife smells different from everyone else. The proximity that is afforded by the act of sharing a home together has become Lord Sukuna’s blessing and Lord Sukuna’s curse. Because now, he owns a home that smells of you, or you smell of home. You’ve infiltrated the space where he resides and it has become a problem as it bedriddens him in bed, almost refusing to let go of his partner as the sun comes to wake him from his slumber. And it is horrible to get him off you before supper.
You notice of course. Sukuna, your husband—the word tasted so foreign in your mouth, yet with the same sweetness of pounded rice cakes—and his shift in demeanor. You have known the man for years. Taught him, thought of him, loved him. You figure it is simply because he is your husband that he has started creating excuses to stand as close to you as possible. Ridiculous, you’ve said to his face. He simply frowns at the comment and refuses to leave your side.
And this problem of your scent worsens considerably after your marriage. He wants to bury himself in the crook of your neck constantly. It did not matter that Lord Sukuna, the terror that came from the East had learnt courtship for you—because even if you knew the decadent tales of women in the Heian period, you still dreamed of proper marriage; some hope you never thought would be lived until the man whom everyone feared somehow made it come true. It did not matter that Lord Sukuna learnt how to read because of you, and then for you. Because he at the very least understands that those acts had a goal: you. Now what is the goal of him wanting to merge his body with you because of your scent? And how does it not make it worse now that he’s realized, as you’ve settled in your new home, that your scent no longer belongs only to you.
Eventually, Ryōmen Sukuna accepted that every room you occupy eventually begins to resemble you. The bedding. His robes, if you have folded them—and while he has never explicitly asked, you cannot deny the amusement you feel when you see your husband tug at his sleeves whenever you’ve washed and folded his clothing. The wooden engawa where you insist on sitting to dry herbs. The sleeves of the kosode you absentmindedly borrow and never remember returning. This, apparently, is what wives do.
Irritating. Extremely. He does not mind; he minds very much.
Marriage, Sukuna discovers, is deeply inconvenient. Before, he only encountered you when he sought you. Now you are simply everywhere. You brush your hair beside him. You fall asleep against him. You steal his blankets despite claiming they belong to both of you. His rooms smell like plum blossom oil. His robes smell faintly of dried chrysanthemum. There is perpetually tea somewhere. He has begun identifying your whereabouts by scent alone. This is an ability no battlefield has ever required of him.
Once, Uraume asks where you’ve gone during the winter. Of course, you pluck herbs, you wander about constantly. Yet you are now Lord Sukuna’s lady, which means you must be protected because stuffs and persons that Lord Sukuna possesses must be protected.
Sukuna looks up from the veranda. His arms are tucked into his sleeves; you’ve modified his new kimono for his second pair of arms, even as you waddle pregnant, after Sukuna had deflowered you on your wedding day. He grunted for you to stop as you would exhaust yourself and you had not listened. “…South garden.”
Uraume blinks. “Did Lady [Name] tell you?”
Sukuna merely shakes his head and he leaves it at that. He continues to stare at the unseeable particles that are swept by the breeze, tucking his hands further into his sleeves. Uraume waits and still, Sukuna says nothing further.
Several moments later, you emerge from the south garden carrying a basket of herbs. Uraume decides not to ask. Uraume notices something odd the next following months; Lord Sukuna had begun collecting your hair, the ones that fall out from the weight of your weave. Somehow, they still smell like your oils.
Sukuna believes nothing could get as disturbing as your scent after your marriage. He is proven wrong. Ten months after your marriage, your son is born. Effectively humanoid-looking, and with the grip that your father, his grandfather says, might rival Lord Sukuna himself. Sukuna had struck his father-in-law a proud little smirk at that comment. His son shall grow strong. He shall also inherit your beauty, and perhaps, the constant, everbearing scent of the hearthlike smoke and camelia oil.
Sukuna stares at the infant for an extraordinarily long time, and soon enough, it is the summer and your son has grown faster than you would like.
Your son toddles through the house on unsteady legs, forever smelling faintly of warm milk, crushed grass, and the plum blossom oil you insist on rubbing through the child’s hair whenever it begins sticking up. Sukuna has developed the deeply unfortunate habit of lifting the boy beneath the arms whenever he walks past, not because he particularly intends to but merely because he can. Each time, he pauses and sniffs once.
Sukuna watches with curious eyes, your son waddling in the open garden; eventually, he trots over to his father. Sukuna bends slightly and effortlessly, picks your son up, that little boy that’s become too heavy for you to carry but of course, all too light for Sukuna to carry—though he does not seem to mind being assigned carrying duty. One measured breath. Angelica. Mugwort. Smoke. Spring wind. All over again, his nose is engulfed with the smell of you. So he speaks, “You smell.”
Your son’s face crumples, like his favorite bamboo toy had been broken right in front of his eyes. But before tears can stream down his face, Sukuna continues. “Like your mother.”
Perhaps materializing out of thin air, you appear behind him. “You keep smelling him,” you laugh. A radiant giggle at the antics of your husband. Still, you have not quite figured out the exact reason why he keeps smelling you, nor your son.
“He smells of you,” Sukuna murmurs. Your son blinks up at him once, then yawns, tucking his face and the tousle of hair into his father’s chest. Your son was inexplicably fond of your husband it seems, mostly because he had read him tales for children in different voices, even if he would never admit it to you. “And he smells of milk.”
You blink. “He is a baby.”
Sukuna nods, because he does not want to demand answers. Sukuna is not afraid of things, however, demanding answers from you has caused unpleasant things to rise and curdle in his chest. So Sukuna simply stays quiet. He has just stayed content and irrationally pleased at your son’s acquired scent.
On the eighteenth day of the third month, before supper, you had changed the scented oil you use in your hair simply because you found a new recipe from an elderly woman in the neighboring village which you infused with something else. It’s more woody. No doubt about it, it is the scent of aloeswood, the agar of it all making you smell… royal. That evening, Sukuna freezes the moment you walk into the room. He frowns deeply and it only serves to make you frown back. “What?”
“Something is different,” Sukuna mutters, akin to an afterthought he had not yet even conjured up yet. “You smell…” he struggles. Like the words physically pain him. Your hair does not smell of the clean plum blossom he had grown to detect just by standing, it smelled like something heavier. Not unpleasant, just, “…Wrong.”
You gasp dramatically. “My own husband has insulted me.”
Sukuna frowns at your conclusion. “I did not.”
“You say I smell wrong,” you point at him, eyes narrowing. Sukuna has learnt that upsetting you is something that is as much of a hassle as an army sent by the Imperial Court itself. Sukuna takes a step back, hands slipping into his sleeves once more, his ever-staying habit.
“You do,” he reaffirms, “your hair smells different,” you would find it almost comical how much he had moved from his position after taking that step back. He sniffs your hair once, a heavy whiff of deep, woody textures that smell entirely too wrong surrounds him. “You must change it.”
“No,” was your simple answer. And after arguing for three more sentences, Sukuna forfeited. No, postponed his battle, because Sukuna does not forfeit. Sukuna does not lose. And yet Sukuna spends the entire week pretending not to care. He gave you the scent you are wearing. It is technically a bestowment. And he should not care about the scent of his woman, and yet, he absolutely cares. He dislikes this new scent. Not because it smells bad. Because it doesn’t smell like you. He doesn’t realize that’s the reason so he tells himself the plum oil was simply superior.
Eventually you switch back. Entirely because you preferred the old one anyway. That evening Sukuna walks past you. Pauses. His shoulders visibly relax. “…Better.”
Sukuna still does not understand why the scent of your hair changing bothers him so much. “Did you hate it that much?” he does not respond. He didn’t. Still, it was not you.
One evening, before supper, after you have both long since put your son to bed—he had also become a rather restless little creature, same as his father—you find Sukuna sitting alone on the engawa. The night is cool and crickets sing. You settle beside him without a word. After all these years, silence between the two of you has become comfortable. You lean your shoulder against his. He says nothing and only turns his head slowly until his face rests against the crook of your neck.
You smile despite yourself. “What are you doing?”
Sukuna does not answer your call. Not even a small grunt escapes his throat and he simply looks onward at your shared garden. You try again. “My lord?” and he still does not answer. So you try again. “Sukuna?”
A long pause. Then, quietly, he murmurs, again, like it is an afterthought that he couldn’t even fathom thinking, “…You smell nice.”
You laugh softly. “That’s all?”
“Yes.”
So you understand now. The way he had started associating your scent with things he has never had names for. Returning. Warmth. Rain against the roof. Dinner waiting. The sound of brushes scratching against paper. Home. He does not know it is home. He only knows that whenever he catches the familiar mixture of plum blossom oil, crushed herbs, smoke from the hearth, and the faint sweetness of dried persimmons you insist on keeping in the cupboard, something deep inside him unwinds.
“You looked terribly serious,” you say blankly.
Sukuna looks at you for one moment, then brushes the hair covering your neck. He plunges into the valley. “I am serious."
With the political crisis your kingdom is in, your father arranges you into an unwanted marriage with the notorious Prince Gojo—an elegant solution to keep two powerful kingdoms from tearing each other apart. Despite your hopes for the kind of love you’ve always dreamt of, Prince Gojo is everything the rumors said he was: lustful, untouchable, and emotionally closed off in ways you couldn’t begin to fathom. And when the suffocation of court life finally drives you beyond ballroom walls and polished smiles—you find yourself wandering in the palace gardens. It is there in those gardens, that you find your true salvation in a man who looks at you in the way you’ve always craved—like a human being rather than a title.
pairings: suguru geto x princess!reader x prince!gojo
content/warnings: renaissance au, arranged marriages, toxic relationships, angst, tension tension tension, the patriarchy, love triangle, infidelity, morally grey characters, reader is in an arranged marriage with satoru, emotional manipulation, political drama, fluff, deception, not super accurate to the renaissance era
notes: fanart is by ladycapuccino on Pinterest! I always think of the 2015 Cinderella movie when writing this fic like it’s so fucking perfect. Sorry this is shorter than I expected but I was dealing with some preeetty bad writers block
<<chapter one — masterlist — playlist — chapter three>>
comment to be in the taglist !
Soft morning light spilled across your room in warm gold, but it did nothing to soothe the lingering unease in your chest. You had barely closed your eyes before the memory of the garden resurfaced, causing you a particularly restless night. You sat up slowly in bed, throwing off the heavy blankets.
For a moment, you simply sat there, enveloped by the mocking silence of your chamber. A sigh escaped you at the sound of a soft knock at your door. You just woke up and you were already needed for something.
“Your highness,” a voice called gently from the other side. “His majesty has requested you.”
Your stomach tightened immediately. “Now?” You asked, despite already knowing the answer.
“Yes, your highness. He said it was urgent.”
You exhaled slowly, forcing yourself to steady. Of course it was urgent. You rose from the bed, shakily smoothing down your night gown and trying to ignore the way your thoughts immediately spiraled. Whatever your father wanted, it couldn’t be worse than what your imagination was suggesting.
He couldn’t have possibly found out. Gojo hadn’t pushed anymore after the ball, and Geto certainly wasn’t foolish enough to announce what had happened. The garden was secluded, hidden behind hedges and vines. No one had seen you.
The reassurance did little to settle your nerves. As you dressed for the day, your father’s summons lingered at the forefront of your mind, turning every possibility into something malevolent.
You left your chambers and made your way through the palace corridors. Servants hurried past with food trays and armfuls of linens, bowing politely as you passed. Normally, the familiar morning bustle would be comforting but today it only made you feel more exposed.
By the time you reached your father’s wing of the palace, your stomach was twisted into knots. You sounded a soft knock on those massive wooden doors, the juxtaposition of the sound against the grand doors almost feeling laughable.
“Enter.”
You stepped inside, offering a respectful bow. Your father sat behind his desk, his posture as rigid as his personality. No matter how old you’ve gotten, the fear that you harbor for your father had never gone away. Whispers of the king during wartime followed him for years, weaving themselves into court gossip and soldiers’ tales alike. They spoke of a ruler whose mercy was scarce and whose judgment was absolute. A king who never hesitated to take the life of anyone who stepped in his way.
As a child, the truth of those stories had terrified you.
As an adult, they still did.
“Father,” you greeted quietly, somewhat afraid that your responses would anger him.
His sharp eyes lifted from the documents scattered across his desk. “Sit.”
The command was calm, yet you obeyed without question, lowering yourself into the chair opposite of him. A heavy silence stilled between you as your father studied you for a moment, his expression as unreadable as his eyes.
“There is a matter we need to discuss.”
The seriousness in his tone pulled the knot in your stomach even tighter than before. You straightened slightly, “W-What is it?”
He folded his hands atop his desk, pursing his lips lightly. “Our negotiations with the northern kingdom have concluded.”
You paused, fighting the urge to break your poker face. “I wasn’t aware they were ongoing.”
“They are no longer.”
Something about the way he said it made a razor sharp feeling of unease crawl up your spine. Your father leaned back in his chair, never once looking away from you. “You will be relocating there within the next month.”
The words landed with crushing force, your throat tightening painfully like something was lodged inside. “…I’m sorry?”
“You heard me,” he declared, his expression never faltering as he looked at you like you were nothing more than some poor servant girl.
Your heart sank, within a month you would leave behind everything you’ve ever known. Your palace, your bedroom, your precious garden. You felt small compared to him, your word meant absolutely nothing to him. There was no other option but to obey, he wouldn’t even think twice about saying no to a compromise.
“Okay,” you whispered, staring down at the floor like it could swallow you up and save you from this moment.
“You may leave,” your father ordered, sparing you one last look before focusing back on the hundreds of documents scattered around his desk.
You stood up, hesitating in the door way. You sulked like a little girl, the weight of his words hung down on your shoulders like two heavy stones. You let out a shaky exhale, two small teardrops escaping before you could blink them away. Your fingers curled on the doorknob before moving out of his study.
Your footsteps felt heavier on the way back to your chambers, everything blurred together like a color swatch on one of your royal portraits. Within the safety of distance, your composure started to fracture.
It was unfair—how easily the decision had been spoken. How easily your freedom was cast away. You turned a corner too quickly, nearly brushing past a passing attendant, but you didn’t stop to apologize. You couldn’t. If you did, you weren’t sure you’d be able to even speak clearly.
By the time you reached your wing, your hands shook. You pushed your door open and stepped inside your room, letting it close behind you. Your breath came unevenly as you crossed your room, ripping off the corset that strangled your ribcage.
Then you stopped.
Something was there, laying on your windowsill.
A delicate envelope, sealed with a black wax seal. There was no name nor address on the envelope, absolutely nothing to indicate who the person who wrote this was. It wasn’t a royal seal or one of your father’s court, it wasn’t from anyone that should be able to reach you.
You furrowed your brows, lifting the envelope in the direction of light shining through your open window. You picked open the seal and unfolded the piece of paper inside.
The parchment was smooth, smoother than any paper you’ve ever touched. The ink was dark and deliberate, the handwriting completely flawless. Your fingers tightened slightly at the edges as you began to scan the words.
My princess,
If you are reading this, I’m assuming you are alone. Completely alone.
I have spent the better part of today attempting to convince myself that what happened last night was nothing more than a pleasant distraction. Yet, I haven’t been able to get my mind off of you since you left me under that willow tree last night.
It is a rather humiliating thing to admit, considering we have scarcely known each other a day and you’re betrothed, but every thought seems to find its way back to you. I remember the sound of your voice more clearly than conversations I have held for years. I remember the way your lips felt against my own. Most troubling of all, I remember how reluctant I was to let you go.
I should be satisfied with one single evening and leave it as one fond memory, I’ve tried but I’ve failed miserably. I find myself wondering what you are doing at this very moment. Whether you’ve even thought of me or that kiss at all.
Perhaps I’m a fool. If so, indulge me in one more act of foolishness.
Meet me tonight at dusk on the east side of your palace, near the hidden lakeside pavilion. If you do not come, I’ll accept that I’ve imagined something more than what it really was.
If you do come, I wish for the chance to get to know you beyond a stolen evening and mask. Until then, I remain hopelessly distracted by the thought of you.
There was no name on the note but you knew who it was from, Geto. A sigh escaped your lips as you massaged your temples, the folded parchment resting in your lap. You should have thrown it into the fireplace, that would’ve been the sensible thing to do. Instead, your fingers traced the edges of the envelope, lingering on the wax seal he had perfectly placed just for you.
Something in your stomach fluttered at that thought.
Curiosity won, despite your clear efforts to fight it back. You unfolded the paper once again, your eyes drifting over his elegant handwriting.
You pressed your lips together, staring at the words. The man had known you for less than a day, yet the words felt painfully sincere and intimate. The corners of your mouth betrayed you with a faint, giddy smile.
Your smile drifted as reality set upon your shoulders. Your father would never approve, your husband certainly wouldn’t. Despite these circumstances, your thoughts drifted to that little pavilion past the east wing of your palace.
A knock sounding from your door interrupted your thoughts. “One second!” You shouted, stuffing the note under your pillow.
“It’s me, your highness,” Nanami informed. “May I come in?”
“Yep!” You replied, shuffling to act like you were busy with something.
Nanami stepped inside your room, shutting the door as gently as possible. “I’ve come to inform you that you have brunch with Prince Gojo in roughly 20 minutes,” he told, briefly glancing at the watch on his wrist. You huffed, giving him a look that told Nanami you’d rather do anything else.
“It’s mandatory.”
“I know,” you sighed, biting the inside of your cheek. “It’s fine, really. I just hope they have my favorite fruit tarts.”
“I’m positive they couldn’t forget again after the fit you threw last year,” Nanami joked, still standing awkwardly near your door.
“I was having a bad day,” you defended, snorting lightly. “Will you sit down somewhere and stop looking so out of place?” You said with a laugh.
“I’ll have to be going soon, I have other duties beside your well being, your highness,” he added, the faintest hint of amusement hidden in his voice.
A quiet disappointment settled in your chest before you could stop it. “Of course,” you continued, “are you ever going to stop with the formalities, Ken?”
One of Nanami’s brows quirked up, “No.”
You groaned, palming your face in your hand. “Come on, we’ve known each other since we were kids.”
“You are still a princess.”
You sneered at him, “You didn’t use titles when I was 13.”
“You also used to hide frogs in my desk when you were 13,” he deadpanned. You gasped playfully, clutching your chest. “That happened once!”
“It happened over three times.”
“Allegedly,” you added, shaking your head in disapproval. Nanami sighed, though there was no real irritation behind it.
“Regardless, your highness. Some habits are difficult to break.”
You folded your arms across your chest. “And calling me by my title every other sentence isn’t a habit?”
“It is,” he faintly shrugged.
“Then break that one?”
“I’ll consider it.”
“You won’t.”
A faint smile appeared on his tired face, “No, I won’t.” The answer came so quickly that you couldn’t help but laugh in his face.
For a brief moment, the unease that had followed you since the meeting with your father eased from your shoulders. Nanami had always possessed a strange talent for grounding you, even when he was being impossibly stubborn.
His expression softened slightly. “Now, I suggest you start getting ready for your brunch. Looks like I’ve cut down your time to 15 minutes.”
The reminder was enough to make the warmth leave your chest. “Right.”
“It’ll be okay,” he kindly said before leaving you alone in your room. A frustrated sigh escaped you, but you were grateful none of your maids had rushed in to help you get ready.
Inside your mind, you were already refusing to put on any corset for the brunch. Your mother would just have to suck it up. She always insisted that you wear one daily, to ‘keep up your look’. Quite frankly, you thought it was unnecessary and uncomfortable.
You scurried to your wardrobe, skimming through dresses. Soft fabrics brushed against your fingertips as you passed gowns in muted pastels, deep jewel tones, and the occasional elaborate piece reserved for court appearances you’d rather avoid.
Despite the copious amount of clothing you had, nothing felt quite right. Your fingers paused on a lighter dress tucked slightly behind the others. It was simpler than the rest: a soft green with faint gold threaded along the hem and sleeves. Looked rather comfortable too.
You pulled it free and held it up against yourself in your mirror, quietly admiring the way the green looked against your skin tone. The neckline was modest, the sleeves short and breathable. It wasn’t meant to impress anyone and that was enough comfort for you to throw it on your body.
You dressed quickly, smoothing the fabric as you went. With a press of a couple pins in your hair, you were ready for a torturous breakfast. A sudden knock at your door pulled you from your appearance.
“Come in!” You called, smoothing down your dress once more. It was Shoko, the head maid, who came quietly into your bedroom.
“Your highness, I’ve came in here to make sure you’re ready for the brunch with the Prince,” she informed softly. “Are you?”
Shoko Ieiri was your personal favorite servant, her calm demeanor and sharp wit made her a welcome presence among the suffocating formalities of palace life. She reminded you of an older sister you’d never had, like someone you can go to no matter what.
“Yes, I’ve gotten ready myself today,” you replied, sending a soft smile in her direction.
Her eyes lit up slightly at your appearance. “The dress is beautiful, your highness,” she said, coming up behind you in your mirror. “You’ve grown so much, I can’t believe you’re married now.”
You looked down at the solid gold ring that sat on your ring finger. A soft sigh escaped your lips, “Me neither.”
Shoko frowned, brushing aside a piece of hair from your forehead. Somehow, she knew everything you were feeling by one look. Maybe it was the friendship you two harbored since you were little children, clueless of titles that determined your lifestyle.
“Come on,” she muttered. “It’s time to go.” She gave you one last understanding glance before pulling the chamber door open. The chatter of servants and the distant echo of footsteps instantly flooded into the room, reminding you once again that your brief moment of solitude would have to come to an end.
You nodded your head and stepped out your room, greeting the guards outside of your room with a smile. They immediately straightened, bowing in synchronization.
The palace halls were already alive with the daily bustle you were used to. Sunlight poured through the tall windows, spilling golden patterns across marble floors. You winced as the light hit your face, holding up your hand to shield your eyes.
You smoothed your dress as you walked, trying to ignore the small flutter of nerves in your chest. It was only brunch with Gojo. Your husband. A simple meal between two betrothed strangers.
You had actually spoken to Gojo a few times before being engaged, all of your interactions being at lavish galas and balls. It was enough to know he possessed an effortless charm to every woman that even glanced his way. He was so quick with a joke or flirtatious remark, so it wasn’t a surprise when your father announced the engagement(considering the massive amount of rivalry between your father and Gojo’s father).
The rivalry had been brewing for decades, passed down from generation to generation. It finally ended up blowing over last winter when a violent dispute over trade routes erupted into open conflict. Soldiers amassed over each border as whispers of war echoed through every noble court.
Neither kingdom could afford it, even if Gojo’s kingdom was more wealthy than yours. That winter had been significantly unforgiving, harvests were poor, villagers were hypothermic and dying from famine. Both crowns knew that prolonged conflict wouldn’t do them any good, so peace became the only sensible pass.
The peace treaty was drafted within days, its final condition written in the most elegant ink at the bottom of the parchment. A marriage: his eldest one and your father’s only daughter. Two signatures were all it took to end years of hostility. And with them, your future had been decided.
The dining hall doors loomed over you. Two well equipped guards stood perched in front of them, awaiting for your arrival. You bowed briefly, sparing a quick smile.
“Your highness,” they said, perfectly in sync. The towering doors swung open, revealing the dining hall bathed in gentle sunshine. Unlike the grand banquets held in this very room, only a small section of the endless table had been prepared. Fine porcelain rested atop crisp ivory linens, polished silver gleamed beneath crystal glasses, and an assortment of fresh fruit, warm pastries, honey, cheeses, and tea had been carefully arranged between bouquets of white lilies.
It almost felt…intimate.
You had to bite back a scowl as your gaze drifted to the lone figure sitting at one of the two seats that had been prepared. Gojo lounged comfortably in his chair, one arm draped lazily over the carved wooden armrest as if the whole palace belonged to him. His white hair sat unruly atop his head, almost the complete opposite of the way you saw him last night.
At the sound of the doors closing, those unmistakable cerulean eyes lifted to meet yours. A familiar grin spread across his face. “There you are,” he smirked. “I was beginning to think you’d escaped through a window.”
You couldn’t help the amused smile tugging at your lips. “I’m afraid the guards would’ve noticed,” you added softly, trailing across the dining hall.
“They do tend to ruin all the fun, hm?” He said, rising to his feet. His eyes sparkled with amusement as he pulled out the seat across from him. “You look…beautiful,” he complimented, raking his eyes over your figure.
Hshdjdiridixjdjd
“Come,” he instructed. “I’ve been instructed not to begin without you, and I’ve already spent the last ten minutes arguing with the chef over whether it’s acceptable to eat pastries before the main course.”
“And who won?” You asked, sitting down on the chair he pulled out.
“The chef,” he sighed dramatically. “For now.”
You bit back a chuckle that threatened to escape you, shaking your head slightly. “Right.”
“Well,” he said, lounging back into his chair as a servant poured tea into his cup. “I think it’s time I get to know you, yeah?”
You blinked.
“All I have is observations,” he explained. “I have no clue who my wife is,” he added, his expression softening just enough for you to notice.
A soft sigh escaped from your lips, knowing deep inside that everything he said was right. You would have to get to know your husband sooner or later.
“What do you wish to know?” You asked plainly.
“Hmm.” He rested his chin on his hand, tilting his head as he studied you with exaggeration. It wasn’t long until his eyes lit up, like a lightbulb being turned on inside his brain. “Let’s start with an easy one! What’s your favorite color?”
You snorted at his enthusiasm, this is the man who has women from all over fawning over him? “I don’t have one,” you deadpanned.
His smile faltered. “What?”
“I said,” you cleared your throat. “I don’t have one.”
“That’s impossible, everyone has a favorite color,” he defended. “Like, my favorite color is blue, obviously.”
“It’s definitely not impossible, I’m living proof?” You shrugged, taking a bite of a pastry.
“There has to be one that stands out from all the others.”
You rolled his eyes at his stubbornness. “Okay, fine.”
He posture straightened instantly, eager to hear your answer. You could practically see an invisible tail wagging behind him.
“If I had to choose, it would be a light green,” you told.
“You look like a green person.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” You defended, squinting your eyes at him.
“You just look like you like green.”
“Okay, forget it.” You said, rolling your eyes(though the smile on your lips contradicted that). “It’s only fair that I get to ask you something about yourself now.”
“Excellent,” he spread his arms dramatically. “Ask away, I have nothing to hide.”
“Nothing?”
“…very little.”
You raised a skeptical brow.
He sighed in defeat. “Nothing important.”
A quiet laugh escaped you. You rested your chin lightly against your palm, pretending to consider your options. There were countless questions you could ask. About his kingdom. His childhood. Whether he had wanted this marriage any more than you had.
You took one last bite of your pastry before dusting the crumbs from your fingertips. “What are some of your hobbies?”
His ivory lashes dusted over his eyes, blinking at you. “That’s your question?”
You nodded. “It seems reasonable.”
“I was wanting something scandalous,” he sighed dramatically. “Well, one of my favorite things to do is fencing. My father insisted on me learning before I could even spell.”
You faintly smiled, imagining the arrogant man as a little naive boy. “I’ve heard you’re quite good.” Despite the rivalry between your kingdoms, rumors never failed to spread to your land. Satoru Gojo—a universal fencing champion, being one of many.
“I’d certainly hope so after all these years,” he blurted, dragging a hand through his hair. He began counting on his fingers. “I enjoy riding whenever I can escape the palace, reading—only about things I don’t already know, and I also dabble in archery every now and then.”
“You read?”
He gave you an exaggerated look of offense. “Yeah, how shocking.”
“I just can’t imagine you sitting quietly with a book in your hand,” you snickered. “The more you know.”
“My parents couldn’t either,” he agreed, earning another snicker from you. “What are your hobbies?” He countered, sipping off his tea.
You sighed in thought. “I love to explore the palace—all the places left undiscovered,” you informed, fiddling with your hands. “I also enjoy reading poetry.”
Gojo rested his face in his hand, listening attentively as you went on about your hobbies. “Exploring the palace?” He asked. “is that what you were doing last night?”
Your hands stilled.
“I was.”
A knowing smile tugged at his lips, yet he didn’t seem to comment on whatever plagued him. “I thought so,” he replied. “You’ll have to take me with you sometime, yeah?”
“We’ll see,” you countered, sipping off your tea. “Will the entree be ready soon? I’m starving.” You said, trying your best to change the topic away from last night’s events.
As if on cue, the grand doors opened, it seemed like the universe was on your side today. A line of servants in practiced formation, each carrying a platter of arranged food. The fragrant aroma of freshly baked bread, roasted herbs, and butter drifted through the room at their arrival.
Gojo inhaled dramatically, “perfect timing.”
The servants carefully replaced the breakfast pastries with the main course, setting steaming plates before the two of you.
“Thank you so much, it looks amazing,” you said to the servants with the biggest smile you could conjure up. “I was beginning to think I’d have to raid the kitchens,” Gojo admitted.
You glanced at him over the rim of your cup. “Would a prince truly do that?” You replied.
“Oh, absolutely.”
You almost laughed. “And what would the Royal staff say about that?”
“They’d sigh,” he answered without missing a beat. “Then make me a plate anyway.”
You hummed in acknowledgement, “I can’t say I’m surprised.” You grabbed your silverware, slicing into the honey-glazed ham on your platter.
The conversation drifted easily after that, and you can’t say you were upset with it. Between bites, Gojo recounted a disastrous experience with his horse which ended in him having a broken leg and cracked ego, while you shared stories of getting lost around the palace. The longer you spoke, the less the silence between you seemed forced.
Before either of you realized it, the servants had already cleared away all empty dishes and replaced them with tea. Gojo leaned back in his chair with a contented sigh. “I think that was the best meal I’ve had in weeks.”
You scoffed, fighting the urge to roll your eyes. “You’re from the wealthiest kingdom, you’re telling me they don’t give you good meals?”
Despite the wealth your kingdom carries, the Gojo clan has remained at the top for centuries. Their lands stretched farther than any realms, their ports overflowing with trade. The Gojo trading company logo even spread to your own kingdom, stamped on important crates and merchant ships. It was a quiet reminder that the Gojos’ reach extended far beyond their borders—whether your father liked it or not.
Gojo chuckled, peering at you through his cerulean eyes. “Oh, the food is excellent.”
“Then what’s the complaint?” You sneered, tilting your head. Was he seriously that spoiled?
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I never said it wasn’t good.”
“You implied it, no?”
“I merely said it was the best meal I’ve had in weeks,” he smirked, enjoying the feeling of proving you wrong. He bit into a fried croissant, closing his eyes dramatically.
“It tastes better when you’re enjoying it with someone.”
The words were so casually spoken that you almost missed them. You swallowed, “How smooth of you, Gojo.”
“I beg of you, address me as Satoru,” he pleaded, giving you a look of satirical sadness.
You snorted, rolling your eyes with no intention of hostility. “It doesn’t work that easy,” you replied almost immediately.
He laughed, unfazed by your words. “So,” he said, taking another bite of his croissant. “May I accompany you on one of your adventures, wife?”
You blinked.
“Don’t push your luck,” you said with a knowing look. “And don’t call me that.”
“I’ll take that as a maybe,” he smiled, glancing up at you. “You’re my wife, can I not call you that?”
You grimaced, the title still sounding foreign from his lips. “It’s just…weird, y’know?” After getting to see him past the facade he presents, it felt easier to talk to him about the marriage—like he would listen. The charming prince you had expected was still there, but the calm interior he refused to show to the public was beginning to bloom in front of you.
“We’ve spent our entire lives as children of rival kings, and then overnight I’m just suddenly your wife?” You offered a small, hesitant smile.
His expression softened, yet you didn’t feel pitied by his gaze. “I suppose it will take time getting used to.” He gave a thoughtful hum, absentmindedly tracing the rim of his teacup. “I won’t force it.”
You blinked at him.
“When it stops feeling strange,” he continued, “I’ll call you my wife without you making that face.”
“What face?”
“That one you’re making right now.”
You gasped softly, immediately relaxing. “Whatever.” He laughed, a genuine laugh that you hadn’t heard from him all morning. It was enough to draw a smile from you in return.
By the time the last of the dishes had been cleared, the warmth of the dining hall had begun to fade into something quieter.
Gojo rose from his chair, adjusting the sleeves of his coat. “Well,” he said, glancing toward the windows where sunlight poured over the gardens. “I have a proposal.”
You eyed him suspiciously. “Whatever you’re gonna say, I don’t wanna hear it.”
“Just give me a moment, I beg!” He exclaimed.
“Fine.”
“Come riding with me,” he proposed.
“Riding? Now?” Your brows furrowed in confusion.
“Why not? Looks like it’s the perfect time,” he stated, referring to the white sunshine that almost blinded you. “Come on, it’ll be fun!”
You tried to hide your smile and miserably failed. There was something almost childish about his excitement, like someone who had spent too long being expected to act like a future king and rarely got to simply enjoy himself. It was cute, you had to admit.
“Besides,” he added, offering you his arm, “you can’t explore the hidden corners of the palace without knowing the land surrounding it.”
You raised a brow, “That’s your excuse?”
“Of course.”
You shook your head but nevertheless, accepted his arm. “Fine.”
His eyes brightened, “Perfect.”
His touch outside the ball felt like something new on your skin. There wasn’t hundreds of wealthy eyes scrutinizing you, nor were there any expectations on how you should act or what you should say. His arm rested between your own, holding you close to him. A slow heat rose up your neck and to your cheek. You tilted your head away from him, hoping he wouldn’t notice the change yet something inside told you he would.
The man walking beside you was still the same prince who charmed every room he entered, but without the pressure of a ballroom surrounding him, he seemed more like a human being.
The royal stables were quieter than you expected. The smell of fresh hay and leather filled the air as horses shifted in their stalls, greeting the familiar voices of the stable hands. Gojo seemed completely at ease and in his element in the stables. Somehow, that made him actually interesting.
“You look surprised,” he noted as he approached his horse.
“I suppose I am.”
“Why?”
“I just didn’t expect you to be so…comfortable here, I guess it’s nice to see,” you admitted, running your free hand over the horse’s mane.
He smiled boyishly, “I just get to be alone out here, nobody to impress,” he explained, his eyes lingering where your hand petted the horse. “I don’t have to be the crown prince, even if it’s just for a little while.”
There was an honesty in his voice that caught you off guard. “You don’t enjoy all the attention?” You asked, furrowing your brows.
He let out a soft laugh. “Don’t get me wrong, the attention is nice,” he said, moving the horse out of its stall. “Expectations are the difficult part, I’m sure you’re familiar with them.”
You snorted. “Tell me about it.”
For a moment, neither of you spoke. The only sounds were the horses shifting in their stalls and the occasional tweet from a bird flying past.
Gojo soon broke the silence.
“You know,” he said, fastening his gloves, “I think everyone forgets that princes and princesses are people before their titles.”
“They expect us to become exactly who they want us to be,” you agreed. He met your gaze, a faint smile returning.
“Well, let’s get going. I want to be back before sunset,” he said, guiding the horse out of the stables. The reminder of sunset made your steps falter. Your thoughts drifted, unbidden, to Geto. In merely a few hours he would be expecting you, in that pavilion, to betray your kingdom. You still were debating on going. Despite the consequences that came with it, you had regretfully considered it. He made you feel something—like you were seen past your title.
“You coming?”
Gojo’s voice gently pulled you back to the present.
You blinked, realizing you stopped in the middle of the stable aisle. “Sorry,” you muttered, offering an apologetic smile. “I got distracted.”
He studied you for a brief moment, concern flickering across his features before his usual easy smile returned. “Well,” he said, swinging effortlessly onto the saddle, “I promise I’ll make this ride interesting enough to keep your attention.”
Despite yourself, you smiled. “I’ll hold you to that.”
“I’m sure you can,” he said as he effortlessly mounted onto the horse. He settled onto the saddle before turning his attention toward you.
“Your hand,” he said, extending his gloved one.
“I can manage.”
“Humor me.”
You sighed before hesitatingly placing your hand in his. Before you could protest further, he pulled you upward with ease. For one brief, embarrassing moment, you lost your balance.
You yelped as his steady hand caught you, right at the waist. Your breath caught the moment his hand steadied against you, the warmth of him spreading against your skin.
“Easy, honey,” he chuckled. “I’ve got you.”
Heat rushed to your cheeks as you quickly straightened yourself on the saddle. “Let’s never speak of this again,” you uttered, choosing to ignore the term of endearment.
“My lips are sealed.”
“Wipe that smile off your face,” you scoffed.
“My apologies, ma’am,” he smirked, gathering the reins.
“You’re so impossible,” you huffed, instinctively grabbing onto his waist to steady yourself as the horse lurched into motion.
His laugh rumbled softly in front of you. “I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”
The horse carried the two of you away from the palace, leaving the manicured gardens and stone walls behind. Soon enough, the road narrowed into a winding trail swallowed by the forest.
Towering oaks and trees arched overhead, sunlight only peeking through the gaps to create abstract pieces of gold. Ferns and wildflowers carpeted the forest floor, while ivy climbed the trunks of ancient trees. The only sounds were the rhythmic thud of hooves against the dirt path and the steady breath of Gojo.
It was secluded enough that the outside world seemed to disappear. No courtiers prying into your business or expectations to uphold, only the stretch of woodland and the surrounding river.
Gojo slowed the horse to an easy walk, breathing in the crisp scent of pine and damp earth. “This,” he said quietly, “is my favorite part of the kingdom.”
You found yourself smiling as you looked around, taking in a deep breath of fresh air. “I can see why.”
The filtered sunlight caught in his pale hair, painting an ethereal image of Satoru against the emerald leaves overhead. Bathed in ribbons of gold, he looked nothing like when you first saw him. You were beginning to see him like the boy he truly was instead of the renowned prince he painted himself as. Somehow, you found it quite beautiful.
The rest of the ride passed without urgency. You wandered wherever the forest path carried you, crossing narrow streams and weaving between towering pines as the afternoon melted into evening. Ever so often, Gojo would point out something that reminded him of something—usually of his childhood.
You found yourself listening more than speaking. Not because you had nothing to say, but because you liked hearing him talk.
Before long, the sun began its slow descent, staining the sky with shades of amber and rose. The forest glowed beneath the fading light, and the familiar silhouette of the palace came into view beyond the trees.
“I suppose we should start heading back,” Gojo murmured.
“Before they send out a search party?” You snorted.
He laughed along with you. “Your father probably already has.”
“Yikes,” you replied humorously. You smiled to yourself as the horse carried you to the palace stables.
Your day had begun with brunch alongside a stranger—one you had been convinced you would dislike. Now, as you arrived back at the stables, you found yourself smiling at his ridiculous remarks and horrible flirting instead of rolling your eyes. Perhaps, that was the most unexpected of it all.
Somewhere between the forest and the palace, Gojo ceased to seem like a thorn in your side. He was simply…Gojo.
And though you would never admit it aloud, you found yourself looking forward to the next conversation you would inevitably share.
nearly maxed out tags cus i’m crazy and just have so much love in my heart i wanted to tag everyone but i had to condense so i’m sorry if i missed anyone also but just know i love you all so bad
also a lot of you i haven’t interacted with in a long time and i feel bad abt that🙁 and some ppl that i tagged haven’t even been active since last year or longer like omg pls come back soon i miss you guys 😣😣
OMG THANK YOU SM BABY I MISS INTERACTING WITH YOU TOO<\3
my most favourite people here🙂↕️: @cherryvvave @moviecritc @bloomcissa @cryptic-doe @rh1nestcned @lechelovestoyap @luviery @vianawaits @scissorhvnds @dreamersentity @kamislop @batwngs @sakunai @mystiquevoid @1nsignia @patientofarkhamasylum @arfemiz @froggibus @tinafication @bitemysin @torupng @brinawing @biovomit @evilmanhater @gr0und-zer00 (i'm sorry if i didn't tag someone, but know that you're very dear to me too<3)
i feel like i don't say it enough, but i love you all, and y'all are very very dear to me. here on tumblr i found the community i feel sort of belonging to and with who i have experienced peak girlhood♥️
GAH STOP THIS IS SO SWEET siri how do i tag all of my 150+ mutuals-
i'm going to tag some of my babygirls and if i miss some PLEASE DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY i love and cherish all my lovely mooties :( even if we don't interact much
yall are soooo sweet i cant handle it 😢🩵🩵 tysm tay nora and daphne for tagging me 🫶🏽 tagging some of my beautiful sweet talented mutuals cos yall are the realest and i love yallll, always wishing the best for everyone here!! IM SO SORRY IF I FORGOT ANYONE 😭
thank youuu tina, sy, aisha, leah, anna, and jade for tagging me omg you all made my day a thousand times better!!! tagging all of you && some of my other lovely, talented mutuals!! <3
𝒪𝓃ℯ 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃ℊ 𝓎ℴ𝓊𝓇 𝓁ℴℴ𝓀𝒾𝓃ℊ 𝒻ℴ𝓇𝓌𝒶𝓇𝒹 𝓉ℴ 𝓇𝓃༯ Going to the Orlando metro area with my man and my best friend.
𝒴ℴ𝓊𝓇 𝒷𝒾ℊℊℯ𝓈𝓉 𝒹𝓇ℯ𝒶𝓂༯ Fulfillment, meaning, and peace. Also to become an actress but also a figure for other black women and guide us till I can't anymore.
𝒮ℴ𝓃ℊ 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉'𝓈 𝓅ℯ𝓇𝓂𝒶𝓃ℯ𝓃𝓉𝓁𝓎 ℴ𝓃 𝓇ℯ𝓅ℯ𝒶𝓉༯ I literally can't choose but artist that I'm rarely gonna skip are: Miguel, Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion, Iyla, & Arctic Moneys.
hair color: i have a split dye, one side is my natural brown the other side is pink and green
favorite colors: pink and green (shocker, i know)
favorite drink: big fan of ice water
one thing you love about yourself: my own sense of humor, i genuinely believe i’m the funniest person on the planet
if you could be any animal, what would you be: a chihuahua specifically owned by myself or my husband. we love our little ratdogs 🫶
dream place to visit: i’ve always wanted to go to new zealand, ireland and greece
one thing you’re looking forward to right now: i’m going to the beach tomorrow!
my biggest dream: i’d love to own an animal rescue 🥺
song permanently on repeat: currently summer disease by millington
no pressure tags: @satorusdollie @satorusdreamer @hotties4gojo @satoruined @lunarkyn @oporotheca @iamsoclone @serpenttine @plaguecxlt @siennayaps + whoever would like to join
HEHE thank you for the tag!🩵 *steal your homemade cocoa tea*
Hair color
Jet black, not even Helios can make it look a little brown in the sun.
Favorite color
Soft blue, to be more specific Glaucous.
Favorite drink
Lemon tea.
One thing you love about yourself
My spice tolerance.
If you could be any animal, what would you be?
If i was an animal I want to be able to FLYYY. So i choose Barn Owl, a silent flyer too.
Dream place to visit
Komodo Island, especially Labuan Bajo.
What's one thing you're looking forward to right now?
The release of God of War Laufey.
Your biggest dream
I can say be able to play certain instrument like piano and guitar. Or be able to have books on my wishlist. Or be able to experience new things with make up. Or get Playstation and PC so i can play all the games that i really want to play. Then i realized all that thing need money, so I'd say be rich LMAO.
Song that's permanently on your repeat
SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK by Joji.
No pressure tag : @jaybeeriddle @miloo-eppy @kayuekou
poject calendar for the remaining of july is gonna be a heian sukuna ficlet (tomorrow i think) then on the 31st i’m posting work wife (2). might have something else for heian sukuna this month? i’ll be busy in august + i’ve been working on a visual novel with my friends because i’m #niche like that, so fics might be slower. for september hopefully i’ll have a longfic coming up but i don’t wanna be in longfic limbo so i’d really want myself to finish a couple of buffer chapters
anyway, speaking of projects, there are lots of things i’ve been fantasizing of… i’ve been meaning to write for lads but i’m not very lads-savvy and i don’t even know the men all that much. i only played the beta + early versions because i liked chinese character customization. i also have this smau in my head but i really despise using fake social media apps because the fonts never match so i’m learning figma in the meantime to make this.
furthermore i think i might be branching out to hornier prose? i only have like two fics with smut and it’s mostly because i hate writing unearned smut (and i suck at it) but i think i might try to write proper raunch soon. lots of things go on in my mind and never get completed. booo tomato tomato 👎👎
༘♡ ·˚↳ content and warnings: religious virgin rookie leon x fem reader. this is basically porn with plot. missionary, a little awkward sex. pulling out and creampie. oh, and hyperspermia!
disclaimer: i’m not mocking any religion, i made this just because i was raised on a catholic family too. this is just fanfic.
“It’s a cute date- it’s a… date. Be normal. Everything’s good. You’ve got this.” Leon repeated in his head as he left the movie theater room beside you. He was trying —keyword: trying— to pretend that being so close to you wasn’t affecting him. His arm was around your shoulders, and he could smell your shampoo scent. Was that… vanilla? coconut? Anyways.
The rookie cop invited you to a date, the idea was charming, straight out of a dream: dinner and watching a movie in a cinema. You accepted without hesitation, secretly, you laid your eye on him since the first second you saw him. Little did he knew, you even asked the tarot if you two would be together.
He kissed your cheek when you both were in the street, saying goodbye in a cute way. But you didn’t want the night to end, and since your roommate wasn’t in the apartment, you grabbed his arm, telling him to stay, without pressure.
When you opened the door of your place, he sat down in the couch, looking a little bit uncomfortable…
Scared. Leon was scared as hell. He liked you too since he saw you, and he even practiced in front of the mirror how he would ask you to go on a date. Clearly he didn’t even imagined this scenario.
Plus, he doesn’t have any experience. What would he do if…? No.
The thing was… Leon was a certified, through-and-through virgin.
Since teen, his catholic parents told him that looking a woman with desire was a sin. Having “fun” before marriage? Sin. Jerking off? Sin. Once, he even googled “porn” in curiosity, and before clicking in any site, he remembered his parent’s face saying “sin, sin, sin.” He was a good boy, after all, he couldn’t disobey his father, mother and God.
You noticed him struggling, but not knowing why, so you sat down next to him, putting your hand in his thigh. “You… okay? need water, something?” you asked, but Leon just nodded, almost doing thumbs-up. Almost, because he imagined he would look like a loser.
He wasn’t okay, at all. He was being tempted by the Devil himself, and the only thing he could think about was your lips. How would they taste? Are they sweet like candy, or vanilla just like your hair?
He stared at them shamelessly, and you noticed it, hoping that he would do something with that, because you were dying for a kiss. But of course, he didn’t. He was pretty busy repeating in his mind “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
You cupped his cheek, tilting your head, and finally… you leaned in, testing, at first. He froze for some seconds, almost dissociating. Did you really…?
Yep, Leon definitely didn’t thought about this scenario when he practiced how to talk with you in the mirror.
The first kisses were cute, Leon was trying to follow your lead, since he didn’t knew how to do it. But surprisingly, he was a very quick learner… and the innocent, cute little kisses quickly turned into a shameless make-out session.
And his hands started to get greedy. The kind of greed Leon read about in the Bible.
Still clumsy in eagerness, his hands touched your waist, then your hips, and shyly, he palmed your breasts through your shirt, making you gasp.
Between kisses you guided him to your bedroom. Your back hit the mattress since he pushed you softly, and he positioned himself on top of you, his legs locking around yours hips, his body making some friction against yours. Suddenly, he felt his pants tightening. What was that? He didn’t know, but he was sure he didn’t want to stop. He kissed your neck, your collarbones, your jaw, every spot he could. His lips found yours again now his tongue was dancing with yours.
Definitely, the rookie was a quick learner.
His bulge was making more friction, chasing that feeling. “So good,” you mumbled. This time, you rolled your hips against him. He was about to lose his mind. His hips jerked up instinctively as he kissed you in a messy, open mouthed and desperate way. Every roll of your hips made his cock twitch painfully, and Leon couldn’t help but gasp.
He was on fire, he never felt this way. Like he was burning inside.
Leon unbuttoned his red shirt and he took it off, seeking for relief. Oh, oh. He forgot he had it on: The prayer beads, a religious symbol. They slipped from his neck in that exact moment, swinging down close to your face. His gaze locked on the rosary for some seconds. He realized he was about to sin. He remembered the times his parents told him this was wrong, he remembered God and the Bible.
With a quiet sigh, he lifted the beads off completely and placed them on the nightstand. He closed his eyes, whispering, praying inside his mind, “Father, please forgive me.”
The prayer had barely faded before his mouth crashed back onto yours, hungrier than before. He was a sinner, but right now he couldn’t care less. He could confess it later in the church.
He was a gentleman, and he helped you to took of your clothes. In less than a minute, you both were completely naked… and Leon didn’t knew what he was doing, but he was getting carried away by the heat of the moment.
He was trembling as he hovered himself between your spread thighs. His untouched and veiny cock was already leaking pre-cum, leaving a trail in your inner thigh.
Finally, he positioned himself in your entrance, two bodies becoming one flesh.
“H-holy f-fuck,” Leon whined, his voice covered with lust and a little of shame, as his tip were pushing past your folds. You moaned as he stretched you open, and how wouldn’t you? he was bigger than you expected, filling you in a perfectly way, making your back arch.
“Oh god,” he groaned, burying his face in your neck. “It’s so warm… so tight. It feels like…”
Heaven: proper noun, where God lives, where good people go when they die, everyone is happy there. Usually, a catholic person imagine it being high up in the sky.
Leon always believed in heaven and its definition. But why did he, being inside you, felt like he was in it?
He stayed still for a long moment, trembling, fighting not to cum right away. It was too much, and he knew he would explode in any second.
But he wanted you to enjoy it, so the instinct took over, making his hips snapping forward in desperate thrusts that grew deeper and harder, fucking you in a messy missionary position. His bright and innocent eyes were dark with lust now.
In a few moments —seconds, sadly—, he felt a certain warmth pooling in his lower stomach. Was he about to—? He can’t do it inside. Even he knows what would happen if a guy did it.
“I’m close already,” he gasped. “F-f… God, I’m—”
He pulled out at the last second, his cock twitching violently against your abdomen as the first rope of cum exploded across your skin. Then another, and another, and it didn’t stop. Thick, heavy spurts that just kept coming and coming, painting your belly, your tits and even your collarbone in long and hot white streaks, far more than you’d expected. His balls draw up tight as he milked himself through it. “S-so much… I can’t stop—” Leon mumbled between moans. Of course that would happen, he had been saving it up for years.
He came for nearly fifteen seconds straight. You didn’t even complained about his hyperspermia, in fact… the sight was incredibly hot. His body paint decorating your skin… It turned you on more and more.
He finally looked down at your face, staring at the mess he made. “I’m so sorry… didn’t know it’d be like that, I’ve never let it out before,” he confessed, embarrassed.
It should be illegal being that cute while saying that he was untouched until now. He hid his face on your neck, and you petted his hair slightly, trying to erase his worries.
Leon, trying to recover from his climax, remembered some of the seven deadly sins, specifically greed and lust.
And right now, he was a fallen soul. A backslider, unrighteous in the eyes of God.
Yet, those thoughts didn't keep him from getting a boner again. Yeah, he was greedy and lustful, once he had you, he wanted more and more. Verdict: guilty of sin.
He slid back in easier, your pussy was even wetter now, all because the sight of his massive first load. This time his thrusts were more confident, even grinding against your clit with every roll of his hips. Missionary again, but closer: your legs wrapped tight around his waist, his chest pressed against your tits, his lips kissing you in a sloppy way. Your poor bed cracked under his powerful strokes. His balls felt heavy against you, full once more despite the ocean he just dumped on your belly.
You felt him swelling thicker inside you, the tip kissing your cervix, and that made you see the stars, obscene and pornographic moans left your lips. It wasn’t your first time having sex, you knew how you liked it. He was fucking you harder and deeper than before.
He felt how your walls were clenching around him, how you were cumming around his cock, and that made him felt weird.
Well… weird was an understatement.
“I… I think I’m gonna…” Leon tried to warn you but his second orgasm hit him like a freight train, unexpectedly. His hips stuttered, then slammed forward one last time. His eyes closed, his mouth opened in reflex, and a deep moan left his lips. He opened his eyes to look at you because he noticed something. “Hah— ah wait—oh shitshitshit— I’m cumming inside—“
The rookie couldn’t pull out, couldn’t make a proper thought. His whole body was jerking, as he kept whimpering and moaning intensely. Thick and hot jets of cum pumping directly against your cervix, pulse after heavy pulse. It felt like it would never end. Leon was flooding every inch of your cunt, his hyperspermia turning your insides into a creamy mess, even it started leaking out, creating a creamy ring around his cock. His hips kept grinding unconsciously, as if trying to push it even deeper.
“‘s too much— too much,” he whimpered, a little bit guilty.
You came again, harder this time. your walls were clenching around his dick, prolonging his orgasm. Leon collapsed on top of you, still buried to the balls, twitching as the last of his second load drained into your cunt.
His face was buried in your neck, breathing raggedly, his body was trembling from the intensity. “Sorry,” he whispered, between gasps. “I didn’t meant to, didn’t even feel it building… it just hit me and I couldn’t stop, I’m so sorry…”
You stroke his hair in a sweet and tender way, gladly you were on the pills. He kissed your jaw and your throat. “You’re staying tonight,” you said. “And I’m not asking you.” Leon left your neck to look at you with a tiny smile.
i planned on posting 8 fics this month but i got an insane workload irl and got sick so that’s the reason i’ve been writing jjk ficletslop so much. i still have to write for work wife chapter 2 and 3 because i put it off for SO long but i’m pretty sure writing during recovery makes you sicker
Gojo Satoru really wants to kiss you but he keeps getting cock (well, lip) blocked.
content ꩜ 1.9k words ， fluff n slightly suggestice ， university au ， romcom stuff ， no plot ， kissing and making out ， shameless flirting ， established relationship ， gojo learns delayed gratification ， jaaonese equivalent of fratjo i guess
“Can you not stand so close?”
…Is the first thing you say when Gojō Satoru, 3.98 GPA in information science and economics, representative of PULSE, a.k.a. the Campus Event circle of your university—which is really just a circle that plans bang-for-buck end of semester blackout drunk on Friday parties—certified freak of hackatons, and much more importantly, your addicted to being unable to exercise restrain boyfriend, comes to your side after your shared probability elective. He’s standing right behind you, hands shoved in his jeans’ pockets looking so carefreely after finally being freed from the shackles of academia.
Satoru is faced with a dilemma.
It’s not really that uncommon for Satoru to stare at you constantly with an impatient little expression while standing too close for public decency. Over the several meet ups you’ve had at Sadaharu Aoki especially after you first started dating, Satoru has shown himself to be inexplicably not privy to your personal space. Not that you mind. But today, Gojō Satoru is stupidly needy.
Satoru huffs, clicking his tongue, moving his fingers like he’s tapping in the inside of his pockets.
You turn your head around, looking at him with the mild annoyance you’d have for a stray strand of hair sticking to your lip gloss. Despite this. you know exactly what he wants and you want it too. Satoru quirks a questioning eyebrow up, stepping away from you. The lecture hall is filled with the squeaks of shoes from above and someone says excuse me in the flattest tone as they brush by you. Everyone scatters out in hushed murmurs, either spewing about how grateful they are that class ended early or how horrible that worksheet you got was. Your friend’s eyebrows shoot up to accompany Satoru’s and his face churns into a knowing, disbelieving smile.
Shaking his head, he shoves his hands into his hoodie. “Anyway, did you get question four?” he asks.
“No,” you shake your head, glancing at Satoru. You tap on your thigh. Beside you, Satoru gives your friend—technically his too—a noncommittal grunt. You can’t decipher whether he’s saying yes or no.
“Bayes,” sighing, your classmate slumps down. You’re pretty much certain that your entire worksheet will bring your average down. It’s okay though, nobody got the worksheet correct anyway. You don’t really care all that much right now, you’re mostly preoccupied with something else. “And uh, you got whatever he said about the assignment next week?”
“…Oh,” you grimace, not having anything else to say. Waiting patiently, Satoru taps his foot on the ground in rhythmic four-by-four beats. Hands still shoved into his pockets, earbud in one ear, and looking usurpingly bored or impatient over something. You scratch your arm, thinking of what to say about the lecture that doesn’t make you sound like a complete idiot or totally uninterested. You force out something academic: “I think Professor Tanaka said—”
“…and apparently we need citations from—”
“Mhm.”
“Gojo?” your classmate calls out, face contorting into another amused expression. Satoru only lets out an inquiring hum, far too distracted on whatever it is to keep his eye. “You’ve been staring at her for like three minutes, dude.”
“…Have I?” he questions lowly, and entirely sarcastically. You sigh, giving your friend an apologetic yet ridiculing smile, entirely directed at your boyfriend. Despite this, you glance at the exit door yourself; Satoru’s eyes follow suit as if you have some secret language nobody else understands.
Eventually, you get back into rhythm and talk to your friend politely, enough that you don't need to think, but enough that they’re kept happy. Yet there’s only a small amount of time before you apologize and wave at him, dragging Satoru by the wrist.
“You have the patience of a toddler,” you shake your head, letting his wrist go with enough momentum for him to sway, smugly smiling at you. You don’t talk to many people when it comes to school and Satoru’s expecting this to be the end of this. You’ll go to a private place, maybe get a coffee at the café down the street then get back for another class. He spins his heel, regaining his balance. At that, your glare deepens and you step on his foot.
Satoru snorts, then hums. “Is it bad for me to wanna spend time with my girlfriend?”
“Yes,” you reply flatly, hand extending to grip at his forearm, lip accidentally catching between your teeth. “When you look like you’re timing everyone with a stopwatch,” you add reason. Satoru watches the small dent that forms when your teeth sink into the bottom lip and with the motion, Satoru slyly smiles. Your eye twitches. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Wasn’t doing anything,” he lies, the smile worsening into a grin, eyes briefly flickering to your lips. It’s not much of a secret that Gojō Satoru is extensively into PDA. It’s also not a secret, especially to you, that he likes kissing a lot, even publicly. But still, Satoru still has the concept of shame, even if photos of him downing beer down from a keg circulated proudly on Instagram. As annoying as he is, your body betrays you either way. Your eyes avert from his face and heat crawls up your neck.
Satoru has been waiting since probability class. He steps into your space again.
Before he can do anything though, a voice crawls through the empty, spacious hallways of the campus building and you both turn around to the sound. One of his friends from his circle speed walks towards you. “Gojo!”
Satoru closes his eyes for exactly one second. He gives him an easygoing smile, and you realize now that it’s one of his friends from the economics department, Haibara or something. “Yeah?”
“You free Friday? PULSE still needs someone to call the venue,” he says, worried and sheepish little smile plastered on his face.
"Already did.”
“Already?”
Satoru nods. You’ve realized not long ago that Satoru, while seemingly the most outlandish, most infamously popular person ever, with the reputation of a demon, is stupidly reliable. You simply observe the interaction, patiently waiting. “This morning.”
“Seriously?”
“Mhm.”
“You’re a lifesaver, dude,” Haibara says, expression washed with relief.
“No problem,” he says, eyes momentarily flickering towards you. Haibara nods at him, raising his fist up for a small fist bump; he turns towards you and gives a sheepish smile. You return it and he leaves right after. Satoru immediately turns back. “…Now.”
“Satoru—”
“I’ve been waiting since probability,” he cuts you off.
Before you can answer, someone else calls out your boyfriend’s surname with the urgency and enthusiasm of a high schooler. You snicker, which earns you a side-eye from Satoru. “Gojo!”
His smile doesn’t disappear, it just becomes painfully practiced, something you find stupidly hilarious because you know exactly why it’s like that. “…Yeah?”
“Did you send me the sponsorship spreadsheet?” his friends asks. He’s slightly panting, which you find abnormal because who runs in college hallways? You shake your head, making a small, private expression to yourself at the minuscule detail.
“I’ll send it tonight,” Satoru replies curtly, smile still not gone from his face. You understand his impatience, to be fair. You’re not that far off from being touchy yourself today. But sadly, your academics needed more attention than Satoru at that point so you weren’t very keen on kissing every second even if you did want to. You had rules and shame as well, more than Satoru.
“You’re the best.”
“Mhm,” he airily waves to him. Silence. He waits until the person is actually gone. Satoru turns his body physically towards you for the upteenth time today, like muscle memory at this point.
“You sound oppressed,” you state simply.
Whining, Satoru grips at your wrist firmly, some way you believe is transferring his complaints towards you. You wait for whatever he wants to say next, tapping the tip of your shoe on the ground. He doesn’t say anything for a solid fifteen seconds and at this, you cross your arms. “Nobody has interrupted us for—” he glances at his watch, smirking, “thirty-two seconds.”
“You’re counting?” with a snicker, you lean against the wall. Out of curiosity, you glance towards the hallway behind Satoru then look behind your shoulder, finding nothing, no one in sight. Stupidly enough, you feel relief. Stupidly enough as well, you suddenly want Satoru to get on with that same thing you’ve been quietly postponing and refusing to let Satoru have for the past two hours.
“I’ve been suffering,” he corrects.
“You’re so dramatic,” you murmur, face turning disappointed. Satoru only hums at this, not disagreeing at all. Because who would disagree that the loudest and most unserious man on Earth isn’t dramatic?
Satoru mirrors your movements. With a simple lean, he lets gravity take over and his body lands on the surface of the reinforced concrete. His eyes go back down to your lips. “I’ve earned it.”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t do anything,” he smiles, real and yet again sly this time.
“You’re thinking about it,” you insist. Satoru’s lips flick up into a cocky little simper and you have to avert your eyes again. Your gaze lands on the hallways once more
Satoru answers and for a moment you really think about the possibility and probability of someone walking in on you two flirting in a public place. You’re a statistics student. You can figure that out. “…Maybe.”
“We’re still in the hallway,” you mumble, knowing exactly what he wants from the seventh time he’s glanced at your lips.
“Exactly,” he nods, looking to his left to see if anyone’s there, then turning back towards you, stepping near you until your shoes touch. “High risk.”
“…That’s your argument?” you snort.
“Makes the reward better,” you hiss at his answer but your body betrays you. You turn to look at the corridor again and then the other way. Satoru doesn’t even make fun of you. “…Nobody?”
“Nobody.”
“Yeah?” he murmurs. Satoru’s already leaning in, but he stops. His body retreats and surveys the area once more and he blows air between his teeth. Eventually, growing tired of waiting, you grab his hoodie and tug him down.
Satoru takes it as the sign that it is. Man, was he waiting. At your pull, his lips immediately crash down onto yours and you find yourself squeaking out a sound you are entirely too ashamed of to admit to. “Dude,” you laugh out which he muffles with his mouth.
Your back hits the wall with a small thud and you let out a small whine of complaint against his mouth. Satoru simply presses deeper. Pure white silence fills the corridor with complete apathy and the only thing you can hear besides it is your lips smacking against his. His tongue brushes your bottom lip and your hand’s grip on his sweater tightens while you open your mouth to let him in. Air doesn’t seem like much of an issue to you; you separate anyway, panting with your mouths open and looking at each other like two people who had just made an objectively terrible decision and were already considering doing it again. When you want to join again, yet another voice echoes through the corridor.
“GOJŌ—“ the voice yells his surname, which has been said far too many times today, before it abruptly halts. “Christ!”
Both of you spring apart like you’ve committed tax fraud. Satoru instantly steps away from your vicinity, clearing his throat; but his friend had already turned around. “…Yeah?”
notes ꩜ hi i have nothing of importance to say. i just wanna experiment with my prose (this was a very stream of consciousness thing so not proofed as always, but even more not proofed, also scenario i just kinda went along with it). so i’m dumping all my short vignettes here. anyway, i have a taglist (or u can ask manually), i have an ao3. comments and reblogs appreciated. byebye 𖹭
I have a feeling, you think as you stare at the temptation singing its siren song on your screen at the ripe time of 12:03am, that I'm about to be screaming and moaning and throwing up over my girl.
A typical reaction to the brainy and brawny beauty of a cherub that is Tsukumo Yuki. She could be Aphrodite herself for all you know, with a hand of sculpted marble delicately outstretched and another gently parting her legs, inviting her worshippers to gaze at her in all of her divinity.
If the not-so-sly little comment she paired in with the attachment— "wish it was you touching me ;(" — hadn't been enough to get you worked up, the preview image of the damning video sitting on your phone has your legs instinctively welding shut like a steel trap, pressing some friction over your cunt to stem the sudden ache.
Shirt all racked up in the most classic of thirst trap poses, except instead of looking like a try-hard uncouth frat boy, the tease of it bunched atop her pierced breasts— no bra, holy shit, boobs, you're dizzy— is the playfully languid kind of provocation that Yuki excels at. A bit like a lioness in heat lying on its stomach, haunches high, the suggestion alone more intoxicating than anything overt could be. Her stomach and breasts take up the center of the frame— a Pandora's Box not of horrors, but of everything you could ever want in this world.
God, how you want to paint her tanned, bunched abdominals with your tongue and teeth…
The eagerly buzzing lust already spiking your clit has you tapping play on the video before you can think any harder on it, reduced to a mere slave to your own desires rather than the strong sorceress you pride yourself on being, already hunching over your screen with your teeth sawing over your bottom lip.
One second in, and you know you're in for a treat of the ages.
Yuki props up her phone against the wall her hotel bed runs alongside. The room around her is dimly lit, almosy gloomily so, overhead lights just barely atwinkle, but it still flatters her so nicely that you wouldn't be surprised if she were capable of light manipulation on top of her Star Rage's mass manipulation. Her golden skin is bathed in the dew of her perspiration, buttery-soft. Though seeing her in a hotel rather than here with you, in the bed you share with her naked skin laid out over the sheets for your own perusal, stings a tad more than you'd like.
You think you may just die if she doesn't cut her trip short and come home tomorrow.
You zone back in just in time to watch her tie her sheets of long blonde hair up into a messy bun, her shapely curtain bangs fanning around her face as she looks down, the hem of her shirt trapped between her teeth. Yuki releases it once she's set and the compression top falls right back into place above her tits, tight enough that it stays in place without slipping further down. Then, donning that pretty crescent-eyed grin that spells out her wicked intent to ruin you from hundreds of miles away, tongue dragging enticingly over the bright white of her teeth as she leers at the camera, Yuki plops back on her heels so that the entirety of her body is captured in the frame and spreads those gorgeously muscled thunder thighs.
Fuck. The glimmering shock of wetness staining her inner thighs and blonde hair-crowned cunt is enough to make your insides twist on an unconscious clench down, slick already beading at your own core. You didn't expect her to already be naked from the waist-down. Your lower belly feels like its on fire.
"Wasn't kidding when I said I wish it were you touching me." Yuki plays up her pout, giving a regretful little eye roll as her fingers start at her sternum and swirl down, down, down, chasing the need burning her asunder. The first pass of her fingers over her slit, slipping between her puffy pussy lips and presenting herself wide, makes you gasp; Yuki, on camera, copies you with a breathy intake of air. "Would you touch me here, first? Or maybe tease me a little, hm?"
Glossy and messy and so very gorgeous on display for you over the video, her cunt weeps like honeyed sap down the long stretch of her fingers, drip drip dripping a staccato of pleasure. Once thoroughly soaked, she touches over her six-pack again, varnishing the pronounced ridges defining each ab in lustorous slick. Painting herself further in a decree of her need.
"Even though I'm busy, I'm still taking the time to work out when I can, keep myself in shape. Knowing you," she muses, head tipping enough for her chin to kiss her sternum as she watches the playful heart she traces dead-center on her midriff, "you'd probably feel me up right now if you had the chance. Ah, y'know, I'd kill to hear those sweet compliments of yours fall from your pretty lips right about now. Always gets me so worked up…"
Her hand sinks right back down to cup the swollen mound buzzing with arousal between her legs. Yuki's stomach gives a mighty kick; even the mildest of touches is enough to frazzle her. Biting your lip, you widen the gap of your thighs a smidge, shoving your hand there in order to greedily rub the heel of your own palm against your clothed cunt.
"Just not the same when you're not here," she husks, and you agree.
Pleasure is pleasure no matter how it's wrought, but you're beginning to think half of desire is simply surviving the cruelty of distance when the person you crave most looks this sexy unraveling over a phone screen. It's torture when you know exactly how warm Yuki'd feel beneath your hands; how wet she'd be.
You could fuck yourself silly on the plethora of toys you two stash beneath the bed, hell, even hump the goddamned pillow she sleeps on like the degenerate freak you are for your favorite blonde, and still, it'll never compare to the unbearable luxury of having her draped over you. Tsukumo Yuki in the flesh, where temptation stops being hypothetical and becomes something alive enough to bruise.
Fuck, you might just be Sappho with the way your mind is spitting out sonnets in her name.
Yuki quivers from the veins in her neck to her bunching calves when she pulls her hood back with a finger on her non-dominant hand while the other goes to town, rolling her clit between thumb and forefinger.
A frisson of lustful excitement sizzles through you, warm as whiskey and twice as dizzying, when she moans, loud and proud, unabashed. The sound chokes off when she tweaks herself just so, punched from her chest like she's imagining your hands instead of her own; like she can't quite survive the gravity of her own desire.
"Do you think of me the same way I think of you when I'm gone? I hope so, because, hah, you drive me fucking crazy even from miles away, princess. You're always in my head. 'M always having to— mmf, get myself off. No one could ever make me feel the way you do. Not even myself," Yuki huffs, words labored, eyebrows jumping together in a scrunched-up frown.
Ardently tugging and rubbing at her reddening, jumping bud alone isn't making due anymore, apparently, for she gives in with a frustrated whimper (yup, this is going straight to the fap folder in your brain) and plunges one digit riiight up her cunt with a vulgar shhlick of her stickiness giving way. Her body swallows it with ease.
"My pussy's so wet for you, baby," she croons, voice all croaky and gone. The sound of her through your phone is like a hand between your thighs. Yuki saws her finger further in, drags it back out; wetness clings to it in webby strings that catch the meager light. "This is all yours," she adds breathlessly as she gives it a lick, dragging a helpless whine from your throat in answer.
God, what you'd give to taste her… for her to swing a leg over your face, plump ass and pussy all on display for you, and sit herself right on your mouth all proudly. For you to devour.
You splay your palm harder over the pajamas hugging your crotch, feeling your clit throb with tension. The friction isn't dry at all, given your panties are tacky and clingy to your skin already. You can work with this.
Slouching back against the pillows, you drag frantic circles over yourself to tease at the same time as Yuki anchors her weight by splaying her thighs wider and digging her knees into the give of the mattress, allowing her to hump and bounce a feverous tempo on two fingers, now. She's practically riding her fingers. The arm working at herself is deliciously corded with tension. You think you're drooling; unsurprisngly, your thumb comes away damp just from grazing the corner of your mouth.
"Missing your pretty tits; miss how you squirm when I suck on them. You'll let me pierce them soon, yeah? Just like we talked about, so you can match me? I don't think I'll be able to stop touching your tits once you get them," Yuki laughs breathily, and you just barely resist scoffing. It's totally not like she gropes you on the daily anyways, you think sarcastically.
Though, the reminder of her piercings have your eyes drunkenly dragging away from how her cunt's making a mess of the hotel sheets in order to focus on the jiggle of her heavy tits as she works herself, entire body rolling. Yuki in motion is hypnotizing; she's such a pussy-fluttering vixen. Her hooded eyes only add to her dreamy allure. They remind you of spiked hot cocoa; warm and sweet, lax and hazy.
You pause the video for a second to take a screenshot of the vision she makes. Legs bowed open, ripe cunt on display with the blonde curls surrounding it gone-frizzy from exposure to slick, her back bowed in a sinful arch that makes her look less like a mortal woman touching herself and more like a devotional painting that turns the hotel room backlighting her into a cathedral. The expression she makes is one of raptorous ecstasy, the image amplified by the strands of loose blonde gradually falling from her bun. The dim light shrouding her winks across the barbells knotted through the bases of her dusky nipples; the rhinestones on them are the color of your eyes.
Yuki's a sweat-sheened, molten-gold siren, and you're a sailor charmed stupid enough that you'd crawl straight into her waiting hands with a love-drunk smile plastered on your face. You stare at the paused screen for a beat too long after swiping your new screenshot away, struck silent by the unfairness of someone being sculpted specifically to kill each and every rational brain cell of yours, one by one. Bless (and curse) whatever gratuitous spirit that led you to meeting Yuki.
Hitting play on the video again and hearing her velvety moans resume nearly finishes you off right there. Your ears burn as the noises slither between the cracks of your skin, turning every nerve in your body traitorously toward her.
You struggle to keep your eyes from rolling back each time you rub over your clit just right, not wanting to miss a single second of Yuki working herself towards a messy orgasm to the thought of you. Peering from beneath heavy half-lids that threaten to droop even further, you watch the blur of Yuki's fingers pummeling in and out of her entrance, her cunt visibly squeezing down every time she presumably pets over her sweet spot.
"G-uhhh, shit," Yuki pants, grunting and grinding windy circles on the now three fingers she's got herself stuffed full with like she’s a bunny in heat. "I'd kill for your sweet fucking pussy on my mouth right about now, ngh. Shoulda brought you with me on this trip, I could've spared myself from the crappy hotel food 'n instead just feasted on your pussy every morning. Miss her taste— ugh, miss her smell, too. The thought of your pussy is gonna get me institutionalizedddd."
The final blow Yuki delivers with a weak yet nonetheless seductive grin— snatching up her phone to angle it beneath her, giving you a full frontal shot of her cunt spluttering all sloppy across her screen— has you wildly shoving your pajamas and panties off so fast that your ankles briefly get tangled in them before you snag your toes in the hems and rip both articles clean off, kicking them over the edge of your lonely bed.
You waste no time in rectifying the cool air jetting over your sensitive skin by warming your cunt with the squirming press of your own fingers, pushing them deep and writhing over the maddening burn of tightness quickly giving way for bliss.
It feels so good— you moan that thought aloud without a care— even though it doesn't hit the same as Yuki herself wrenching your thighs open over her own lap so that she can finger you until you're crying in staggered pulls and drowning her in your slick.
Her knuckles are coated with the salaciously sticky evidence of how much Yuki's enjoying this, wetness smearing in rivers across the back of her hand. It’s obscene, how sopping wet Yuki is. How much she squelches each time she pulls out, the raunchy plap plap plap of the bases of her fingers slapping against her cunt whenever her fingers dive back in. You groan at the sight, sounding like you've been socked ten times in the stomach and had yet to catch your breath.
"Yeaaaah, I'm not gonna l-last long," Yuki hisses from between pearly gritted teeth, her bared grin slightly crazed as it tugs at her rosy-painted cheeks. She tosses her head like a stallion, thighs violently quivering beneath her.
Blood teases your tastebuds when you bite down a little too hard on your bottom lip, the poor thing now chewed raw like a feral bunny got to your lip. You sync your pace with hers as best you can, desperate to connect yourself with her no matter the distance, desperate to get a share of her debauchery.
As if she knew exactly how you'd have yourself spasming on your fingers over her video before she even hit send on the video, the omniscent goddess on your screen peers down at the phone between her legs, mouth forming a sloppy 'o' as she croons, "You touching yourself for me, sweetheart? Is your Yuki getting you all wet and desperate? Hmm? C'monnnn, pretty girl," and that has your dropping your own phone onto your lap so you can get your now free fingers to run round and round your twitchy clit, her voice gleaming with the power of hypnosis, "give that pussy a few smacks 'til you cum for me since I'm not, hnnh, there to do it for you, juuust the way you like it."
"Fuck," you gasp, jackknifing off the bed as you fold like paper mache for Yuki and slap your hand down over your swollen-hot cunt a few times at the same time as you relentlessly work at your g-spot until you're breaking apart with a hoarse cry. Slick sprays a thick shower past the patting rhythm of your palm against your mound, soaking straight through the comforter crumpled beneath you.
You cross your legs tight around your wrists, trying to put more pressure on your cunt while simultaneously quelling the urge to yank your hands away now that pleasure has you on the knife's edge, every nerve heightened to a hundred. Heat melts down your every limb to strings of putty, making the next few taps to your clit as your orgasm tapers off lazily executed. It's only when you open your eyes to lift your legs and look past them at the mess you've made that you realize your eyes were even closed in the first place.
"Oh my fuuuck," you mutter between rapid gasps for air, voice quivering. “Holy fuck. Needed that.”
Shakily, you dislodge your fingers with a wet noise, clenching futilely around a nothingness that you wish Yuki could fill, before wiping your palms on the blanket (you're gonna clean up anyway) and fumbling for your phone where you accidentally launched it off of your body by writhing around. Your text that you send to Yuki is incomprehensible (you swear you said something intelligent and oh-so-sexy, but alas, it's been lost to the string of typos your thumbs mashed out), but she'll get the point, surely.
And that's when you realize you were so wrapped up in chasing your orgasm that you completely missed out on watching Yuki cream all over her fingers. You missed her orgasm. Your eyes bug out to catastrophic levels.
Fuck, you are a fraud fucking loser. You need to watch her unravel twenty times— no, thirty.
You don't get the chance to do your mad scramble to rewind the video before a FaceTime notification pops up on your screen.
Yuki.
You buffer for a grand total of five seconds, your synapses struggling to fire off anything useful in the wake of such a mind-numbing, pussy-tingling orgasm, before accepting the call.
Yuki's upper body floods your screen. Her phone's propped up again so that she can pull her hair down from her bun in order to retwist it into place, which she does with long, deft fingers that lazily card her summery hair back into the shape she desires.
“Baby," she purrs, and you sit up ramrod straight despite the dopey gooeyness in your body that's weighing you down. "I need you to stick your fingers back inside of yourself— I know you were touching yourself— and describe to me exactly how your pussy smells and tastes right now so I can picture the real thing while I rub one out again."
"Oh," you say dumbly, sounding like you have rocks for brains. How crassly forward of her— typical. "Hi? How are you? Good day?"
"Hey, I'm peachy how are you, better now that I'm talking to you; there, satisfied? I thought, given the video I sent you, we were past the pleasantries and all." Yuki waves off your attempt at properly conversing.
Which, honestly, is kind of a genius idea.
Seeing her lean forward on her hands and knees (the bunch of her muscles and the sway of her pierced tits is unfairly seductive) now that her bun is fixed up, those spell-binding chocolate-brown eyes all sultry-smooth and more satisfied than a well-fed lion as they eye you up through the call, doesn't exactly makes you want to talk— if anything, you're already itching for a round two. One that Yuki can now properly talk you through, and—
"So," she interrupts your train of bumbling thoughts. "This is kind of a revolutionary idea, I know, but I think we should have phone sex." Rocking back on her heels again, Yuki pulls the nearest hotel bed pillow closer to her and sits up enough to properly stuff it between her thighs (still soaked, you note deliriously), hissing a little once her oversensitive cunt is comfortably straddling it. "You gonna let me watch you touch yourself while I ride this pillow?"
Goosebumps sprout down your arms. You were right. You are about to be screaming moaning and throwing up over your girl.
꩜ ◞ HOW TO GET A NERD ADDICTED (WITHOUT MEANING TO)
Gojō Satoru, the insufferably disciplined chemistry prodigy tries a harmless experiment that spirals into an unexpected habit. At first it's funny but the jokes fade when you realize he only reaches for it after impossible expectations, disappointing grades, and phone calls from home. Without ever asking him to quit, you start using every excuse God has invented to get him to focus elsewhere. Somewhere between replacing a habit and becoming one herself, the line between friendship and dependence simply disappears. First love sometimes feels like withdrawal.
content n warnings ꩜ 8.3k words ， high school au ， friends to lovers ， slowburn ， humor fluff angst in that order ， emotional hurt comfort ， vaping and nicotine YEAAAAAAAA ， recreational nic use ， typical nerd gojo stuff ， they're both stupid your honor ， not proofread AT ALL n trying out a new prose style
ONE: Drip tip.
Three p.m. breeze hits your arms in fitful sways, residual sweat clinging to your skin slowly dissipating with the wind. Like most days, you’re somehow ruining your health one way or another. Aerosol curls inside your mouth and unfurls into the afternoon air, and with no time left in between, you huff in another inhale of the blueberry-flavored liquid. You turn your head and Satoru is already behind you, one hand, with a plastic bag wrapped around his middle finger, is in his pocket, definitely fiddling and circling the lining, one hand balancing a stack of books poorly.
Satoru’s footsteps stop right at your flank and on cue, you exhale out the vapor coating your throat, more aerosol coming into the air. Satoru clicks his tongue almost condescendingly, but after a year of chemistry with him, you’ve realized it’s simply his normal cadence. "You know, every time I see you with that thing, I lose a little respect.”
You lean harder against the metal guardrail bordering the convenience store's small parking lot, loosening your grip on your newly-bought pod. You spent the remaining pocket money you had on a random Tuesday to impulsively buy it off from Shoko. Tokyo had finally remembered it was autumn, and the wind had no mercy for bare legs. Five minutes before sixth period ended, you'd slipped into the bathroom and rolled your skirt another few centimeters anyway. Your chemistry teacher had looked at you over the rim of his glasses when you walked back in—equal parts disappointed and exhausted—but with ten minutes left before the final bell, neither of you had the energy to make it a discussion. A gush of wind hits the exposed skin of your legs once again.
"Good afternoon to you too,” you murmur, looking up at him. You grimace at his hand and its hold of the stacks of books, briefly wondering why the hell he didn’t just shove them in his comically nerdy, comically large backpack he’s had since tenth grade and for some reason refused to get rid of.
You tuck your pod into your palm, hiding the body from yours and Satoru’s eyes, though the tip is still visible. Satoru deadpans, “You're inhaling chemicals."
"You're inhaling copier toner every time you print your notes at the school co-op,” you shoot back instantly, one restless knee idly slotting itself between the vertical metal railings. Your foot stretches out into the air through the small space and you look at Satoru expectantly, waiting for an answer. Looking at your playfully used leg, he frowns in faux thought.
Satoru balances his books carefully, taking a moment to respond. "...That's different."
"Because?" you query.
"The copier doesn't taste like strawberry,” he responds completely seriously. Satoru’s hand shifts under his books yet again, and you briefly wonder if his constant book holding—at least an hour since you left school—would give him scoliosis or not. Satoru’s eyes drift to your vape. "...What flavor is it?"
You raise both your eyebrows at this. Satoru huffs, setting down his stack of books on the pavement, no mind to how dirty it could be, or how ridiculous it could look. "I thought you hated it."
"I do,” when he retreats back to his standing position, he deadpans.
"So why're you asking?" scanning the plastic bag in his left hand before beckoning it over. Satoru complies, holding it up and you take out the boring vanilla ice cream you had asked him to get for you minutes ago. You tear off the wrapper and shove the ripped bits into your skirt’s pocket—thank god it’s Friday, no matter with dirty skirt pockets.
For all of the one year you’ve known Satoru, you’ve known him as a certified loser. Not necessarily a loser in your sense, you could care less about how he displays himself, you honestly think he’s pretty cool, granted if he’s not talking about gacha probabilities. But Satoru’s of course your typical nerd. No vaping, not a wince of alcohol, no skipping classes. You can commend him for that. "...Scientific curiosity.”
You bite on the top chocolate layer of your ice cream cone, Satoru watching intensely with his normal accidentally judgy eyes. You lick at your cone and the coldness mixes with the minty parts of your pod’s flavor. Realizing what he just said, you snort. "Oh my God,” holding your pod out, you nudge it towards his face, earning you a much bigger scowl from him. "One hit."
"I don't—"
Cutting him off, you tease. "Scared?"
"I'm not scared,” Satoru, holding his ground, crosses his arms, eyes ripping away from the vape to look at your face. You have the smuggest expression he’s ever seen, usually reserved for when you manage to fool him into buying you something at some dessert parlor (Suguru usually tagging along) or when you somehow manage to outsmart him in maths.
You look at him daringly. "Then?”
It takes one, two, then five seconds for Satoru to click his tongue with the smallest hiss, looking everywhere except your little e-cigarette, then finally settling his eyes on it. He takes it with a low grumble, which only strengthens in sound when he sees the smugness on your face not disappearing, instead becoming more apparent. "...Fine.”
He takes the tiniest inhale imaginable. Nothing comes out. You’re quite sure Satoru’s never hit even once in his life, maybe because nobody approaches him with intentions of corrupting him—unlike you—so you understand the amateurish attempt. Nevertheless, it doesn’t stop you from snorting. "You inhaled like you're sipping hot soup."
"I did inhale,” he defends, eyes narrowing at you.
"You absolutely didn't,” you shake your head. Before Satoru could even utter a word out, you cut him off again, just as he says I. You reach over, tapping his shoulder, "Breathe in first."
He tries again, vapor filling his throat. Half a second later, you hear the wretched cough resonating deep beneath his lungs. He doubles over and you can’t help yourself from bursting into laughter. You topple over yourself, smile stretching across yourself with glee from the hilarity of his attempt. Satoru glares at you, "Coughing does not—" another cough settles in his throat, "—indicate quality."
"You look pathetic,” you wipe away little tears almost threatening to stream out.
He glares, pointing an accusatory finger at you for god knows what. "My lungs reject mediocrity."
"That's the nerdiest thing you've ever said,” you state, retrieving your pod back and shoving it in the pocket of your skirt. You watch Satoru grab his books and a wave of secondhand pain washes over you. At least the books are tied but how the hell is he going to commute with that thing.
Snapping you out of your sympathy, Satoru comments. "...I have said much nerdier."
The next day, you’re walking back home—with Satoru of course, because after a month of knowing each other you realized that you lived around the same neighborhood and you boarded the exact same train—and absolutely tarnished after your first physics class. You slump down, and absentmindedly, you dig into your pocket to retrieve your vape and you hit it once, letting the vapor settle in your tongue for quite some time before rushing to a place where you can actually exhale.
Satoru, following behind you and eyeing it, points at you meekly. "...Can I try once more?"
You look over your shoulder, finally letting the aerosol out of your mouth. You hand it over without thinking. He takes another hit and still coughs. "Marginal improvement."
"Barely,” you murmur. Silence engulfs you both for a split second, only being cut by the sound of your grin a moment later. "You know what people do?" you grab your vape back from him, a mischievous glint already present in your eyes, "They kiss while passing the smoke."
Satoru’s eyebrows furrow, blinking. "...Wh?" he continues, "that sounds—inefficient."
"It is,” you laugh, near delighted. You already expect him to roll his eyes at your next suggestion and call you an idiot, sixty percent because you’re friends, forty percent because he’s a snob that won’t kiss anyone and hasn’t kissed anyone. "Wanna try?”
Instead, he shrugs. "Okay."
More silence settles between you two and you stare at him with mild confusion. Your hands fiddle with the vape and you debate whether to tuck it back in safely in your jacket or not. "...Okay?"
"You asked,” yes, you’ve been friends with Gojō Satoru for quite some time. You can’t really deny that you’ve had a small, insignificant crush on him for… maybe four months now, but that’s about it. Satoru is pretty. Infuriatingly pretty, but again, that’s about it. Shoko thinks he’s pretty, Suguru sure as hell thinks he’s pretty with all the homosexual jokes he keeps throwing around at him. But Satoru is Satoru, and you value your friendship more than a romantic relationship with him anyway. You didn’t expect he’d be the type to casually go along with something like that.
"I was kidding,” you glare.
"Oh,” he pauses. "...Do you not want to?"
Your brain completely stalls and you glare at him, nearly like you’re disgusted. "I—" that couldn’t be more the case. You shake your head, trying to find the correct words—especially ones that don’t make you seem either like you’re rejecting him, or way too desperate. "...No—I mean yes—I mean—" you give up, sighing. “I want to.”
Satoru quirks a questioning brow at you, already leaning in. You jump at his motion but you quickly inhale a deep puff of the blueberry vapor, leaning in just as he does. It's soft, quick, barely there, and entirely too stupid for you to actually count as a kiss. Sure as hell was a kiss to Satoru though. You inhaled half of the aerosol in your mouth and transferred it to Satoru’s—you’re not sure if he caught it though at first, but you were proven he did when he started coughing lightly.
When you pull apart, you clear your throat. So."
"So,” you start, picking at the right words, "that was..."
"...A successful experiment?" Satoru shrugs, the joke landing with a casual cadence. You laugh at the absurdity, not minding that you just kissed one of your closest friends at a random whim mere seconds ago. You nod. Capriciously, Satoru adds, "Wanna do another trial?"
You nearly trip and topple over the curve.
TWO: Atomizer.
It’s only a week later, after grueling nights of studying past materials in your first year because you just had to pick physics as an electives not knowing two shits about physics, that you find Satoru by the vending machines with a blue vape, brand new, and certainly from a brand that Shoko usually carries around to deal with. He’s fidgeting with the thing, squatting while a paper is in his lap, looking concentratedly frustrated. Residual school air clings onto you, and you note that you and him are both still near school grounds. Satoru isn’t one to tamper with the reputation of your school and especially himself.
As if on cue to further your awestruck, Satoru takes a hit of the vape—now you can’t trick yourself into thinking that’s someone else’s and he’s just holding onto it for some reason—and you actually stop in your tracks. Who is this person who possessed one of your closest friends?
"...Satoru,” approaching him, you stand directly in his vision, brown loafers in his vision, shadow casting on top of him.
Looking up he gives you an awkward smile, “Oh, hi.”
"You bought one,” you say quizzically and if you looked close enough, amusedly. You never took Satoru for someone to have some weird fear or missing out, neither did you think he was the type to become addicted after one singular puff. Nevertheless, the thought of the Gojō Satoru, the guy currently representing your school for regionals in a robotics olympiad, casually vaping after trying it the first time a week ago, is deeply funny to you. “Why do you have one—you hated mine."
"I disliked yours,” he corrects like it’s common sense. "This one is mint."
Your eyes drop down from his eyes, down to his vape, down to his notes, those perfectly color-coded and coordinated notes that you sadly rarely see because all he gives you are his ugly in-class notes instead. You squat down beside him, taking his pod and examining it. In retrospect, you feel quite embarrassed that you’re so worked up over something as common as an e-cigarette, and it shouldn’t and doesn’t bother you. "You bought a vape because... yours tastes better?"
"That was one contributing factor,” he simply replies, hand skimming the pages of his binder once more. The high-pitched and annoying chime of the school bell rings from a couple meters away. You sulk. You came out of school grounds with a permit just for a soda and was hoping to get back immediately but you spent it all on talking with Satoru.
"You are unbelievable,” you mutter, turning your body to the vending machine and putting in your money. You punch in the buttons and soon enough, two peach sodas at the top row drops and clacks against the mouth of the vending machine. You take both and throw one at Satoru, opening the other.
"I've been told,” he smiles, catching the can.
Satoru vaping is a funny thing. All your friends have gathered that. After cornering Shoko and asking if her ass had anything to do with it, and her confessing quite transparently, you quietly deduced that Satoru is just trying things out. New bad boy in training. Several realizations have dawned on you since the first time you caught him carelessly (though knowing him, anything but careless, even if it was only meters away from school) holding a blue mint-flavored pod.
Firstly, vaping doesn’t suit him. Not necessarily because he’s bad at it, he’s gotten quite good in the week he’s spent doing it and being extremely open with your usual table at school—Suguru, Shoko, you, him—but because Satoru simply isn’t the type.
Secondly, Satoru doesn’t talk about it. One day, while you’re at some open-air coffee shop that allowed vaping near school, he just pulled it out while the four of you were sat on the table, laughing about how one of your mutual friends got caught reading a book below the table by your history teacher and lied that she wasn’t when it was completely allowed. One hit, then two, he doesn’t even pay attention to how Suguru’s jaw dropped. None of you were used to it but of course, it was funny nonetheless.
The third, you don’t know yet. But you know that it takes embarrassingly little time for everyone to stop reacting.
Now you’re remembering. The first day, Suguru nearly choked on his melon bread when Satoru casually fished the little blue pod from his blazer pocket between classes, earning himself a solid smack to the shoulder from Shoko because, "Quit acting like he's smoking crack." By the third day, the novelty had worn off entirely. Satoru would take one, maybe two drags while waiting for the train, tuck it neatly back into his pocket, then launch into an entirely unrelated explanation of why your physics teacher's grading rubric disproportionately rewarded memorization over understanding. You'd already stopped laughing at the sight by then. Mostly.
"...You look weird with that thing."
Satoru glanced up from the margins of his notebook, pencil still tucked between his fingers. His brows pinched together in genuine confusion, not even bothering to pocket the vape before answering. Coldness touches your fingertips; the coffee shop here is extraordinarily good facilities-wise, but don’t ask about the coffee itself. "How?"
"You look like you're pretending to be cooler than you are," you reply, reaching over to flick the edge of the pod with your finger. It barely budged in his grip. "Which is saying something, because you're the least cool person I know."
"I wasn't aware coolness was measurable,” he closes his notebook with one hand, expression completely level despite the offense you were very obviously trying to inflict. "...What's the unit?"
You open your mouth, only to realize you don’t actually have an answer. After several deeply contemplative seconds spent staring at the ceiling of the classroom, you settled for a shrug. "I don't know. Vibes?"
One afternoon, Suguru plucked the vape straight out of Satoru's hand before he could take another hit. Satoru stopped mid-motion, eyes following the little blue pod now dangling carelessly between Suguru's fingers. There wasn't even annoyance on his face. Just mild inconvenience, like someone had moved a bookmark he'd been about to use. "...Suguru."
"Hm?" Suguru hums innocently, already inspecting the thing like he'd discovered a strange species of insect. He flips it over once, then twice, lips quirking at the pristine condition. At this point, it’s been in his hands for two weeks, and you've seen him use that thing seven times.
"I was using that,” he frowns, sighing when Suguru simply says he noticed. "Give it back."
Suguru lifts his arm higher the second Satoru reaches for it, grin growing wider with every centimeter the vape traveled farther from his reach. You don’t really think you enjoy bullying your friend, and usually Satoru isn’t the butt of the joke, but it’s amusing either way. "Say please."
Satoru sighs through his nose, sounding deeply inconvenienced by the concept of manners. He glanced at you, perhaps hoping for sympathy, only to find you already biting the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing. "...I could just take it."
"You could," Suguru agrees. "But that'd be rude."
Silence helps nobody. Eventually, he resigns. "...Please,” the word left his mouth with all the enthusiasm of someone reading terms and conditions aloud. You laughed so violently your peach soda fizzed up the wrong way, coughing into your sleeve while Shoko looked between the three of you like she'd somehow become responsible for an entire kindergarten class.
You doubled over the cafeteria table, nearly spraying peach soda through your nose while Shoko looked equally unimpressed by the exchange. Satoru accepted the vape back with all the dignity of someone collecting a confiscated calculator, brushing invisible dust off the casing before slipping it between his fingers again. "...You all derive an alarming amount of joy from my suffering."
"Mostly yours," Suguru admits.
The funniest part, at least to you, wasn't that Satoru had started vaping. It was how catastrophically academic he'd become about the entire thing. Not nicotine—not once did he ramble about nicotine—but the device itself. You'd make the mistake of asking one harmless question outside the convenience store and suddenly he'd be explaining coil resistance with the same seriousness he used when tutoring you in chemistry, phone already unlocked to some forum full of people arguing over battery capacity.
"...See, disposable pods are significantly less efficient in the long run,” was what he said three weeks into the whole vaping fiasco. You’ve gotten somewhat used to it. But still, like a monkey fussing over a banana, you were still amazed that you somehow made Satoru into someone who owns a vape. "And because the battery output isn't adjustable—" he continues even when you only hum with a nod, "it compromises flavor consistency."
Satoru lowers his phone. "...Are you even listening?"
You tear your attention away from the crow currently losing a fight to a pigeon over an abandoned onigiri wrapper. You weren’t, of course. YOu know you will probably be interrogated by him and asked to repeat what the hell he just said. You lie anyway which earns a sigh. "...Absolutely."
Eventually, curiosity got the better of you.
You caught up to him after school, right as he was stuffing worksheets into the clear folder he insisted kept them "psychologically organized," the vape balanced absentmindedly between two fingers while he worked. You nudged his shoulder with your own, waiting until he'd actually acknowledged your existence before speaking. "...How much did that thing cost?"
Now you’re a little too accustomed to how much Satoru uses the thing. Not enough for it to be concerning of course because vaping is harmless, in most ways. He answers almost immediately, like he'd anticipated the question sometime in the past week and had rehearsed the answer in his head. He names the price plainly, without a hint of shame or hesitation, before going right back to underlining a formula in fluorescent yellow. Your jaw drops.
"You spent that much?" you ask, voice pitching higher than intended. A couple of students from the neighboring table glance over before immediately deciding your conversation isn't worth eavesdropping on. You point accusingly at the vape, then back at him. "On that?"
Satoru explains—well, he says that he got it from a friend—finally looking up from his notes. He says everything with complete sincerity too, as if that singular fact justifies every financial decision he's ever made. Satoru's eyes drift toward the ceiling with the unmistakable expression of someone deciding whether honesty is worth the consequences. His fingers drum absentmindedly against the edge of his notebook once, twice, before he sighs through his nose.
Suguru lets out a bark of laughter loud enough that someone shushes him from across the cafeteria. You bury your face into your folded arms, shoulders shaking with barely contained amusement, while Satoru simply watches the three of you with mild confusion, as though he genuinely doesn't understand what's so ridiculous. Even Shoko looks vaguely offended.
She finally tears her attention away from her phone, blinking at Satoru with the same expression one reserves for people who microwave fish in shared office kitchens. "...I gave her mine for, like, 3,000 yen."
Satoru's brows furrow almost instantly. "...You overcharged her."
"I absolutely did," Shoko replies without a shred of remorse, slipping her phone into her blazer pocket. "Impulse purchase tax."
"You told me market pricing was dynamic,” you murmur.
"It is."
"...So?"
Shoko shrugs, completely unbothered. "...You're my friend."
For a brief moment, Satoru simply looks between the two of you. His eyes land on Shoko. Then on you. Then on the vape sitting innocently beside his notebook, as though it somehow betrayed him too. "...I think I'm being bullied."
"You are," you and Shoko answer in perfect unison.
Suguru doesn't even bother hiding his grin anymore. He reaches across the table to steal one of your fries, shaking his head at Satoru with something almost pitying in his eyes. "Dude," he says between bites, "you somehow got scammed and became a vaper in the same week."
Then you finally get the third point, which makes you light up with joy. You realize it shouldn’t though, the weeks to come.
The third is that Satoru does it after every minor inconvenience that strikes him and not dramatically. You find it amusing, of course, at first. You’ve known how much his family expects of him since forever, and you certainly know how much of a perfectionist he can be. You don’t comment on it most times, but still, after two weeks of watching him take a hit out of the thing every time he gets a ninety-five instead of a hundred, you start noticing patterns.
You find him after a phone call, right at the vending machines near school that have a better array of fruit sodas compared to the perpetually ‘broken’ vending machines inside school. You wave at him and he grants you a wave back, brows furrowing as he listens to whatever it is the person on the other side of the phone is saying. When he eventually hangs up, he immediately reaches into his pocket. Click. Mint. Exhale.
You swat away the cloud that comes up to your face, stopping right in front of him. "...Everything okay?"
He shrugs his shoulders. "My mother."
"...Ah."
Another puff. Satoru turns his face away, making sure the cloud of aerosol doesn’t hit your face. There’s a slump to his shoulders, no doubt, from studying math until his ears bled because of how many dispensations he had during class because of his competitions and olympiads. "She says I should apply somewhere else."
“Aren’t your grades perfect?” you ask, trying to seem harmless, shoving your hands into your pockets, fiddling with a loose string in the lining. Satoru’s eyes briefly land on yours and he takes several seconds to respond to your question, like it’s the stupidest query to have ever been uttered. To be fair, it technically is. It’s rare for you to not know who Gojō Satoru is; plastered in the school halls as a poster boy for the academics guy. It’s unfortunate he’s also attractive.
"They are,” he replies, and automatically, like it’s something that’s simply a given, he adds," they can always be more perfect."
You don’t know what to say after that. You’re sure Satoru’s parents are demanding—you know they are, one of the rare subjects of your talks during second break—judging from the way he laments in the mornings during report card day, but of course you don’t know the extent of it. You have your own share of demands from your parents, but who can’t shoulder measly hopes and dreams from the people who raised you? But Satoru isn’t you and you aren’t Satoru. You awkwardly shift your footing. Then again, it’s Satoru, he’s full of surprises. You ask, helpfully, "...Mint?"
He raises a brow. Holding out the vape, Satoru watches you and expects you to take it. You’ve said that you liked his flavor before. You flail your hand to decline, now thinking of how many times does he really use that damn thing and how many times has he used it since he got it. “Keep it.”
Putting on a smile, you tug at Satoru’s sleeve. “Come back to class, I wanna show you something.”
THREE: Fire button.
Your classroom was freezing today, heavy with the gushes of air from the newly fixed air conditioning. You were shivering at eighteen degrees and sliding your hands inside your jacket, meanwhile your seatmate, Gojō Satoru of course, was leaning into the table, doodling on the margins of his stoichiometry notes. You’ve spent too many hours thinking of Satoru the past few days and you entirely suspect because you’re still too shocked about his newly found second habit of popping his vape out of his pocket to take a hit whenever the timing suits him.
Because suddenly, you realize the difference between him and you. Mostly that every time you use one, it’s purely recreational, just something you do to either seem cool and not completely wreck your lungs like tobacco does, or something you try to attempt cool tricks with aerosol. And yet with Satoru, it’s something he does every time he gets a bad grade—when he bombed that one quiz, not really, he didn’t even fail he just got a 92 instead of a 100—or when he gets another phone call. A puff.
You don’t say anything about it though. Haven’t said anything about it. Class ends and everyone’s already packing their bags by the time you get snapped out of your day dream. Even if the CCTV cameras were out in your classroom, you know how stupid it is to inhale in your classroom. And yet, you find Satoru already pulling the damn thing out.
You frown. Grabbing his wrist, you tug on him, not enough to hurt, you’re not sure it could even hurt, Satoru’s too strong of a guy, leading him to wherever you please. The FamilyMart right beside your school. "Come on."
"...Where?" Satoru whines, though he doesn’t make an effort to release from your grip.
"Food."
He complains, already slinging his slowly slipping backpack further on his shoulder into a more comfortable position, digging into the blades of his shoulders. You’re a little bit mad to be honest that your school doesn’t open its west gate after school and you have to go around the main gate. It takes too long. "I'm not hungry.”
"I am,” you counter. Crossing the street and tugging at him very violently, he shakes his head at your antics. Arriving at the FamilyMart, you scan the area for a place to sit and when you do, you state: "You owe me."
"I do?" he asks, befuddled.
"You borrowed my calculator,” you say, completely serious, sitting down and settling your bag on the thoroughly loved outdoor sofa, with rips and bits that you’re sure hold as much bacteria as a yoghurt bottle. Satoru snorts and absentmindedly puts the vape away.
Sluggishly, Satoru follows suit of the motion, setting his bag on the sofa and getting up from his seat when you do, approaching the FamilyMart. You’re hoping for some ice cream—the FamilyMart cone actually, if the machine isn’t broken—or at least something extremely sweet and extremely cold. Eventually, you settle with a milk tea you’ve made far too sugary. Satoru settles with dumplings despite not really being hungry.
Only a minute later after settling down in your seats again, he's looking for it again. Noticing, you slide the milk tea across the table.
"Drink,” you say, not really an offer, just a command that Satoru responds to far better than he should. Satoru eyes you carefully. You offer him lots of things often, but it’s in the nature of friendship to be suspicious of things your friends do.
He questions. "...Why?"
"Because I bought it,” pushing the plastic cup further to his side, you quickly retract it to take a sip of it yourself, brows furrowing as you try to suck in a particularly stubborn tapioca pearl. Sugar reaches all the way to the roof of your mouth and you slide the cup back to him.
"...Okay,” he drinks instead. You watch the vape from your peripheral and a smile laces your face when you see him pocketing the small device back instead of putting it on the table or taking a swig at it the second he swallows your drink.
Eventually, every interaction with Gojō Satoru, the now vaper turns into you coaxing him to do something. Because you realized Satoru needs something to keep him company. Something to keep him occupied so he’s not drowned with his thoughts. "Wanna walk home?" was the go-to you said, because being neighbors was a fun trick, and you always had stories to share to him because of your much enthusiastically social lifestyle. "Library?" is your second go-to because Satoru loves libraries.
You don't know when grabbing his sleeve became instinct. Maybe sometime between the third phone call and the fourth ninety-five. You stop asking if he's hungry. You just start handing him something to do before his hand can disappear into his pocket.
So the next is "I found a café,” which Satoru sees through. Not the trying to get him to stop vaping part, but the secondary part which he thinks is your main motive, which is just really wanting to get sweet stuff and try a bunch of cookies from different coffee shops. And the coffee. "Movie?" after school when he doesn’t have cram school. "Come quiz me,” when physics comes up and you spend fifteen minutes laughing at something abysmally stupid. "Help me with this,” that somehow makes him feel useful.
The one that you always use, technically, every single day when you have class together. "...Sit with me." How can he complain?
He starts saying yes without asking why, you can’t even begin to talk about the delight you feel.
You’re in the middle of the hallway when you find Satoru languidly walking to his next class, a stack of books in hand. You can understand holding a stack of books on the first day of school, but lockers exist and he doesn’t need to be carrying all of those books in the first place. You laugh with a bell-like jingle, raising a judging brow at Satoru’s occupied hands, the little cloud disappearing into the air. Satoru stares. You whip around, a frown tugging at your own mouth as you stare at the top book, your curriculum’s mathematics book. “Why are you carrying those?”
“Because they’re books,” Satoru blinks.
“You own a backpack,” you mutter simply, finger pointing at the heavy-duty backpack slung only over his left shoulder, probably because Satoru with all his intelligence, fully believes slinging the weight of his backpack will balance out his hand. He nods. At that, you frown at him. “So use it.”
“They wrinkle my notes,” he meekly says as if he knows you’re going to burst out laughing the second he utters his words. You don’t, but you scoff at him ridiculously either way, leg kicking microscopic dirt at him. Silence engulfs the two of you for not as much as an uncomfortable time, but enough for you to ponder. You come to his flank and smile, shoving yourself in his vicinity to the point where he flinches, half (fake) disgust and half-shock, “wanna get coffee later?”
“Uh, sure,” he shrugs one shoulder, careful not to upset the impossible equilibrium of books balanced in his arms. Eventually, after a class you don’t take with him, you meet up with the boy in front of the school gates, with you scrolling to your phone desultorily, the last Instagram reel you see being a niche food parlor near a district not far from you.
When you see him from your peripheral—his shoes, actually, you shove the phone inside your pocket, nodding at him. You begin walking again, matching his pace automatically after months of taking the same route together. The afternoon sun spills through the gates, warming the pavement beneath your loafers. It isn’t until several steps later that your eyes drift toward the pocket of his blazer.
"...You aren’t touching it," you mention, narrowing your eyes at the lack of motion. Usually by 500 meters from school, he’s toying and fidgeting with it inside of his pocket instead of the seams inside, and by 600, he’s pulling it out and finding the nearest place where smoking’s allowed to take a hit.
"Hm?" Satoru hums absentmindedly.
"Your vape,” you slow your steps, feeling something get caught in your shoe. You check to see whatever it was but nothing is there. You frown, hopping on one leg for just a second, almost comedically.
He instinctively reaches towards his pocket before stopping halfway, looking down as if expecting the device to magically appear in his hand. For a second he simply stares at the outline beneath the fabric, brows knitting together with genuine confusion. Then, almost comically, recognition crossed his face. "...Oh—huh,” he hums, "I didn't even notice."
You slow to a stop without really meaning to, watching him more carefully than you had been lately. The blue disposable sat exactly where it always did, tucked neatly into the pocket he'd reached for dozens of times over the past few weeks. Except this time, he'd walked halfway across campus without touching it. Somehow, that tiny difference lodged itself somewhere uncomfortable in your chest.
"...I feel kinda guilty," you admit after a moment.
Satoru looks over. "For?"
You rub the back of your neck, suddenly finding the scuffed toes of your shoes far more interesting than meeting his eyes. It sounds ridiculous now that you actually have to say it aloud. People tried things all the time. Nobody accidentally turns their best friend into a vaper... probably. Whatever Satoru did after you gave him your vape was his choice and even if you made him do it the first time, it’d be stupid for you to be the reason for a guy to suddenly have a nicotine addiction. "I was the one who let you try it," you mutter.
A quiet laugh escaped him. "You think you corrupted me?"
"I mean..." you gesture vaguely toward the pocket where the vape still rested. "Evidence suggests I might've,” you hiss at the constant, sticky whatever it was stuck to the bottom of your shoe, profoundly more interesting than whatever response you or Satoru could conjure up in this conversation. "You bought your own."
"I bought my own," Satoru agrees, "you didn't make me."
The certainty in his voice makes the conversation stall before it could become an argument and you look at him like he just said two plus two equals five. Satoru slips the little blue vape from his pocket at last, though instead of lifting it to his lips like you expected, he simply rolled it lazily between his fingers. The plastic clicks softly beneath his thumb, catching glints of late afternoon sunlight. A cat passes by you and nuzzles at your leg and you resist the urge to pet it. You’re allergic. He watches it spin with an expression you couldn't quite decipher.
"...I think I just wanted something to do," he said quietly. “Something that shut my brain up."
You look at him without answering. There wasn't much to say to that, not when you'd caught glimpses of the phone calls, the perfect grades that somehow still weren't enough, the expectations he carried as naturally as those ridiculous stacks of books. Satoru doesn’t look at you while he speaks. His attention fixes very stubbornly on the vape that he turns slowly between his fingers.
"I mean, lately," he began before stopping. Satoru nudges the cat wedged between your legs, a carefully balanced toe-box caressing the cat’s chin. Or rather, letting the cat caress his shoe. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, "I don't really think about it when you're around."
The words land so softly you almost miss them. Satoru continues walking, though still visibly befuddled. You blink once, then again, waiting for him to elaborate, to tell you he'd misspoken or that there was some perfectly logical explanation waiting just around the corner. There isn’t. He simply stood there looking faintly puzzled by his own admission. You catch up to him, looking up at him to do what you do; joke. “Are you confessing to me?”
Satoru ignores you. "I keep forgetting it,” Satoru agrees again, more to himself this time, sounding just as confused as you felt. You shift from his face to the untouched vape still resting loosely in his hand before a grin slowly tugs at the corners of your mouth. It was too funny not to say. The next joke arrives before your brain could stop it.
"So..." you began, trying—and failing—to suppress your smile. "I'm nicotine replacement therapy?"
Satoru considers the question with alarming seriousness, his brows drawing together exactly the way they did whenever he was solving a difficult chemistry problem, or when Miyagi-sensei said something stupid in class that made him want to take his glasses out and rip his eyeballs out of his sockets. For a moment you genuinely wonder whether he was going to start listing reasons why the comparison is scientifically inaccurate. Instead, he gives a tiny nod. "...That's one way to put it."
You laugh, bumping his shoulder. "You are impossible."
FOUR: Aerosol.
After that, catastrophe happens. Because everything you do somehow loops back to Satoru, especially in a place where he’s in. You being in his vicinity, at school, at the library, at anywhere, somehow you end up texting him or talking to him.
It starts with the night of that conversation. Satoru calls you an idiot through the phone because you called him on a whim right after you finished showering to ask about chemistry notes for tomorrow. Of course, he eventually put on his camera and with shaky fingers, pointed the extremely bad-quality video call camera to his notes for you to screenshot, not thinking of the much more efficient thing of simply taking a picture of them and sending them to you. Then the next day you start acting like you like him too much, which includes stealing his favorite hoodie, that one that smells too much like his horrible Axe cologne, but mixed with his own scent that you’ve somehow identified from a mile away.
You’re at the cafeteria, yawning as you drag yourself to your regular table. Shoko isn’t here yet, but Suguru is sleepily buried and engrossed in his sociology textbook and devouring a burger you believe his mother packed for lunch. You ought to think it’s because of his notoriously delusional, a little bit crazy sociology teacher who you’re not even sure actually qualifies to teach.
You throw your books to the table, a crisp smack resonating in the air. A couple of people look at you yet Suguru doesn’t even bother to look at you. You momentarily let yourself linger, hands on the table interrogatively. "Where's Gojō?"
Suguru looks up, finally, but you’re already scurrying to the drinks vendor and buying yourself a bubblegum drink. Following your figure, he gives you a ridiculing expression. "You text him every morning."
"So?"
"So you know exactly where he is,” he says matter-of-factly. When you finally slide into the bench across from him and process his words, the end of your middle finger’s nail digs into the plastic cup from the force of your grip; Suguru tilts a peculiar head at this. This marks the first person to know that there’s something fishy going on between you two.
The first thought Suguru has is how strange your reaction was, of course, you only tighten your grip on something when you’re about to throw things—which normally happens when something agitates you or embarrasses you, it’s a terrible habit. The second thought is why the mention of you texting Gojō Satoru would get you worked up like that when you haven’t had a single bad interaction with him in four months, not counting when he spilled juice on your shirt three weeks ago after school. The third and final thought is that he wouldn’t mind seeing you and his bestest friend as an item—especially because Satoru has morbidly horrible game.
A small, infuriatingly smug smile plasters itself across Suguru’s face. There’s nothing wrong with the expression though, not exaggeratedly smug, so you have absolutely no ground to physically assault him. You instantly understand what his expression hints at and you hiss. “Fuck off."
The second person who notices is of course, Ieiri Shoko, and still at lunch.
Satoru is already sitting at your usual lunch table when you arrive, two cartons of strawberry milk set neatly beside his lunch, and fries he bought before the recess bell to time it perfectly for when they got here. The open air of the cafeteria is making way for very clammy people to wiggle through small gaps and the humidity of the entirely too heating air to make you withdraw all your sweat. Suguru, is yet again, buried in his notes. You wonder why all the men in your friend group are intensely obsessed with studying while you and Shoko laugh and giggle around like lunatics during lunch. Suguru doesn’t even take the hard subjects, which he always threatens to punch you for if you say that in front of him. He takes social sciences and he just participates in debate and chess competitions.
Your eyes land on Satoru, already opening up his binder. You resist the gagging sound you want to emit when he does, just to piss him off, but you’re more occupied by the carton of strawberry milk. You, distracted, take a single stick of his fry, shoving it in your mouth. “You bought two."
"I know, [Last Name],” he says impassively, “I’m not blind.”
"...Why?" you say, tugging at his binder until it lands to your side of the table. Ssatoru doesn’t even whine for it, the same way when Suguru took his vape, he looks at you like it’s just a minor inconvenience. Somehow, you don’t notice the upwards curve of his lips as you do. Shoko certainly does; biology makes you incredibly keen on minor details.
He shrugs, taking out a physics worksheet tucked inside his binder and occupying himself with that instead. Leering at the piece of paper, you feel a small betrayal as your attempt to bother him fails. "You usually complain about not wanting to buy them.”
“Huh, thanks,” you're halfway through stealing more fries from Satoru's tray when he quietly slides the ketchup toward you before you even ask. You stop as if you’ve been caught red-handed. “I wasn't gonna—"
"You were looking at it,” he responds, staring up at you like he’s revealed your biggest darkest secrets.
Shoko watches the exchange, stealing a piece of his fries herself, taking a generous amount of sauce from the mini sauce place. Satoru glares at her and to that, she cheekily giggles. Though, it’s cut short by her own question, pointing a finger at him casually.“How did you know?"
Satoru doesn't even hesitate. "She taps her thumb twice on the table whenever she's deciding whether to steal my food."
"...I do not,” you frown.
"You do."
Insistently, you repeat. "I don’t."
"...gods,” Shoko looks at you. Then back at Satoru. Then at Suguru. Suguru’s already pinching the bridge of his nose, but the second he finds Shoko’s eyes, he understands exactly what she’s thinking. Because you aren’t subtle at all, and neither is Gojō Satoru of course. “Suguru,” she murmurs, leaning into his shoulder and whispering her next words, “our boy; he’s gone.”
Suguru sighs, “hopeless.” It would be better if Satoru, their best friend, didn’t have the emotional intelligence of a calculator—a scientific calculator, to be more precise.
So then, the third person to realize is you. You’re walking home again, almost exactly where the first time you kissed Satoru, almost near your neighborhood apartment complex. The pavement that nears the main road has been fixed, and it’s no longer as bumpy as it was around a week ago when some kids threw a damn rock at the spot and dented it. The sun is setting and cascading an orangey, pinkish sky, your bones feel like jelly after another day of school. You have a pork bun in your hand, half-chewn, and Satoru’s shoving a candy wrapper in his uniform jacket.
Eyeing him like a hawk, you see Satoru reach into his pocket. He doesn’t realize you’re noticing, and yet he pauses, then looks at the vape. He quietly slides it back into his pocket. You smirk at him teasingly, taking another bite of your pork bun. You take care to calculate just how many bites left for you to leave with the most satisfying bite. "No experiment today?"
"Hm?" he hums, squinting and pushing his glasses up as you approach your street.
"The vape,” you point and at that second, Satoru stops walking. You follow his motion, technically, lack thereof, and gaze at him quizzically.
"...Nah,” he steps closer and you’re forced to look up at him.
You swallow the last remains of the sweet meat in your mouth, suddenly very acutely aware of how Satoru smells; vaguely of sweat, the nice kind, and now citrusy cologne which you can’t deny you like. "Then what?"
A couple moments of silence wedges between you two like some unwanted guest. Though, even if you thought it was extraordinarily awkward and awaiting, it was bearable. Largely due to the fact that you didn’t wanna hear whatever could come out of Satoru’s mouth in a situation like this. And you didn’t want him to say something that would ruin you both.
You didn’t say anything about what he can do though. So instead of answering, he leans down. You curse him for his stupidly lanky frame in your head. Eventually, his lips reach yours and you physically feel the hair on your arms jolt awake, the muscles spasming as they press against yours. It’s longer than the first kiss you shared, and it’s certainly more impulsive. There’s no joke, neither smoke. Just warm lips and a smile he tries—and fails—to hide as if he’s been waiting to do that. When you separate, your face feels hot, and his feels too.
Satoru, of course, tastes like the jelly candy he just swallowed, strawberry coating his tongue. One of the main reasons you hang out with each other so much is because you’re one of the only people who can keep up with his sweet tooth. He once lied straight to your face that it was to mentally stimulate him. You taste like pork bun. It's rather disgusting when you think about it for more than a second.
“What did you do?” you rasp, voice coming out uneven, embarrassment fully draping itself on top of your form.
“Totally didn’t mean to do that,” he stammers out, reaching down to his pocket, tugging at the fabric inside and stretching it to his hand. You know he’s playing with the lining right now. “Sorry.”
You take a step back, laughing into her sleeve because you don’t know what else to do, hopelessly flustered. You take your time to gather yourself. You’ve been close to guys before. You’ve kissed guys before. You still didn’t know what the hell to respond with. “You're an idiot!”
"I've been told,” he agrees, stepping back too, fidgeting with his pocket.
"By me."
He agrees again, nodding. By now, a smile tugs at his face; you aren’t withdrawing, and you certainly aren’t showing any signs of being creeped out. Instead, you’re laughing nervously and looking anywhere but him, and even if Satoru apparently had the emotional intelligence of a—scientific—calculator, he understood from this that you liked him at the very least. "Mostly by you.”
He decides to go for it, "...Can I kiss you again?"
You’re appalled by the question. But the answer isn’t no. You pretend to think about it, shifting your weight from one leg to another. You still refuse to look him in the eye and Satoru is looking at you expectantly, though funnily enough, he can’t look at you either. “Only if you stop making everything sound like a research proposal."
"So that's a yes?" he asks. Giddiness laces the final syllable of his words.
“Go away,” you murmur, leaning in to kiss him first. Again, the disgusting pairing of food mushes in your mouth, and still, you don’t care. Satoru smiles into your lips again. So therefore; the final person to realize what’s been going on between you two probably isn’t Satoru. It could be you.
notes ꩜ i think everyone knows what types of stories i like writing ugh. sorry 4 not posting for so long. making a longfic and i have school fucking me anal style. um. enjoy. anyway, i have a taglist, i have an ao3. comments and reblogs appreciated. byebye 𖹭
i've not posted a fic in 7 days which has fueled me with intense displeasure. also im in econ right now. guess what new fic is about after i abandoned toji and whoever else in my roster for gojo satoru rofl emoji rofl emoji rofl emoji
being a moderately social young adult is fun because the people in your friend groups have very specific archetypes. one spends all their money on alcohol, one spends all their money on stocks, one spends all their money on gacha games, and one spends all their money on pokemon trading cards
preface ꩜ good evening this is different from my usual stuff (actual fanfiction, larping, and schizoposting) but i really wanted to explore something that's been bothering me for quite some time and thought this would serve useful especially fanfic writers. so um i hope you don't mind this small yap. tldr is down below if too lazy 2 read
಄ ⋆ PRELIMINARIES / ABSTRACT
this post examines the tendency of English-speaking fandom to reinterpret Japanese naming conventions through English-speaking linguistic frameworks. i will be using several different forms of Eastern media, such as Jujutsu Kaisen for case study. i'll be exploring why epithets are frequently mistaken for personal names, how Japanese naming works, how translation contributes to this misaligned phenomenon, and why these reinterpretations become normalized through fandom. while truthfully, triggered by one particularly frustrating fanfiction, i'll be arguing that the issue reflects a broader linguistic pattern rather than isolated author error.
಄ ⋆ BACKGROUND
to bring to light why i wrote this, while reading an otherwise enjoyable fanfiction, i encountered a line in which Heian-era sukuna was addressed by "ryomen" as though it were his given name, and this had been a repeated trend i've seen in Jujutsu Kaisen sukuna fanfiction. this tiny detail—which objectively should not have occupied my thoughts for as long as it did—sent me down an unfortunate rabbit hole regarding naming conventions in Japanese media, translation practices, and the tendency for English-speaking fandom to reconstruct unfamiliar linguistic systems into something more recognizable.
names are rarely "just names," even within simplistic language systems. across different cultures, they carry distinct systems, conventions, and social functions that determine not only what a person is called, but why they are called that in the first place. English-speaking fan communities frequently interpret foreign naming systems through familiar Western frameworks.
಄ ⋆ SIGNIFICANCE
i believe it is well known that fanfiction often rewards emotional accuracy over linguistic accuracy (not saying disparagingly). however, repeated reinterpretations of foreign naming systems can gradually become accepted as "common knowledge" within fandom. examining why this occurs reveals less about individual writers and more about how language shapes the way audiences understand unfamiliar cultures.
಄ ⋆ CHAPTER 1. WHAT DOES A NAME DO?
to start, i must quote unnecessarily, "i think therefore i am." this does not mean anything, i just really wanted to use it because it's funny.
before discussing why fandom repeatedly misinterprets foreign names, we first have to answer a surprisingly difficult question. what exactly is a name? a name, linguistically, is a term used for identification by an external observer and it can identify a class, a category of things, a single thing (people, places, objects) either uniquely, or within a given context. the entity identified by a name is called its referent. a naming convention is a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms, or criteria for naming things. it is important to note that names have rules.
at first glance, a name looks like a label. a chair is a "chair," a table is called a "table," it's a very simple concept. but people are not objects, human names do not just classify, they distinguish. when i say "dog," i've identified a category; when i say "hachiko," i've identified one specific individual. so therefore, names are referential rather than descriptive. their primary purpose is to let which person is being talked about, not what kind of person they are. that's why names can be completely arbitrary, because it's simply a pointer.
names also don't just identify people. they also encode relationships, telling you by who calls you what something about your relationship hence, the difference of someone calling you Jonathan, John, Johnny, Dad, Mr. Sherlock, Big John. They are all referring to the same person but every choice communicates something different; familiarity, hierarchy, affection, respect, distance, and intimacy. and i'm sure a bunch of other things.
English-speakers often unconsciously assume that [First Name, denoting who they are] [Middle Name, denoting a specifier] [Last Name, denoting from where they came] is the default and universal human format. it isn't obviously, different cultures answer completely different questions. some emphasize family, ancestry, then some emphasize birthplace or achievements. some religion, some ranks. that's why some cultures have patronymics, some don't have surnames, some have courtesy names, some names change throughout their life.
಄ ⋆ CHAPTER 2. NAMES HAVE JOBS, NOT ALL JOBS ARE NAMES
there are several different categories in which names fall in (sources i'm using are very broad, but i'll link them below), that are often unused, unheard, or underutilized in the English language. having established that names are social tools rather than arbitrary labels, we now encounter another problem: English frequently treats every identifier attached to a person as though it were simply "their name." linguistically, however, many of these identifiers perform entirely different functions. They may indicate family lineage, social status, profession, achievement, respect, or reputation rather than personal identity itself.
the most important question isn't "what is this called?" when talking about names, but instead "what job is this word doing?" so consider the sentence, "Professor Smith spoke to John." both "Professor" and "John" identify the same individual in different contexts, but they do not perform the same linguistic function.one indicates institutional status, while the other functions as a personal identifier. so? words attached to people aren't interchangeable.
⋆ personal identifiers
a given name is a name that identifies the individual within their family or community, it's typically a name assigned to an individual at birth or later in life. in English, this is often the first name. it primarily serves toto distinguish them from other members of the same family. examples are John, Satoru (悟), Yor, Leon.
a family name (surname) is a name that identifies a person's family lineage and is shared among relatives. depending on the culture, it may appear before or after the given name (while stylistic choices are of course welcomed, standard practices adopt the original culture's naming order). examples are Gojo (五条), Smith, Liu (劉).
a middle name is an additional personal name placed between the given and family name. its purpose varies widely between cultures and may commemorate relatives, saints, or simply provide another identifier. examples include John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Leon Scott Kennedy.
a patronymic is a name derived from one's father (or sometimes a male ancestor). it indicates parentage rather than functioning as a hereditary surname. the female version, a matronymic, is derived from one's mother rather than father. it is less common globally but exists in several naming traditions. examples: Ivan Ivanonich ("son of Ivan").
a clan name identifies membership in a larger kinship group rather than an immediate family. multiple unrelated households may share the same clan. examples are Gojo (術師家) and the Uchiha (うちは一族).
⋆ social identifiers
a title is a name that denotes rank, occupation, office, or status rather than identity. titles answer the question of "what are you?" rather than "who are you?" examples include: King, Doctor, Professor, Lord, Captain.
an honorific is a word or title or grammatical form that conveys respect, familiarity, or social hierarchy between speakers. unlike titles, honorifics describe the relationship between people rather than the identity of the individual. examples include: in Japanese, -san (used to convey respect used between any age), -sama (used for individuals with a higher rank than oneself, -kun (used to refer to people of junior status or men in general), in English, Mr., Mrs., Sir, in Indonesian kak, mas, mbak.
a house name denotes the membership in a noble or dynastic house. example: House Stark, House Windsor. a courtesy name is an additional name adopted upon reaching adulthood or entering society. It is often used by peers instead of the person's birth name. this is historically common in Chinese naming traditions. example is Confucius' (Kongzi) courtesy name Zhongni (仲尼).
a temple name is a name bestowed after death upon monarchs in several East Asian traditions and is primarily used in historical or religious contexts. a posthumous name is a name granted after death and often reflects the person's achievements or character. unlike a birth name, it was never used by the individual during life.
a regnal name is a name adopted when someone ascends to a throne or other high office. example: Pope Francis, Queen Elizabeth II.
a religious name/dharma name is a name adopted upon entering a religious order or undergoing initiation. Ii often symbolizes spiritual rebirth or new identity.
⋆ descriptive identifiers
an epithet is a descriptive word or phrase attached to a person's name that highlights a characteristic, reputation, or distinguishing feature. unlike a given name, an epithet describes rather than identifies. examples: Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Richard the Lionheart, Ryōmen ("two-faced") Sukuna.
a sobriquet is an informal descriptive nickname earned through reputation, personality, or achievement. unlike a legal name, it develops through public use.
a byname is an additional identifier attached to distinguish someone from others with the same personal name. it often describes appearance, occupation, birthplace, or family. many historical epithets function as bynames.
⋆ chosen identifiers
a nickname is an informal alternative used by friends, family, or acquaintances. nicknames often shorten, modify, or replace a person's given name. examples: Jonathan → Jon, Katherine → Kate. meanwhile an alias is an assumed name used instead of one's legal identity, often for privacy, disguise, or professional reasons.
an art name is a name adopted by artists, scholars, or writers as part of their creative identity. this is a also called a pseudonym or moniker. examples are Su Shi also known as Dongpo Jushi, Takashi Murakami, KAWS.
a pen name (nom de plume) is a pseudonym adopted by an author for publication. a stage name is a professional identity used by performers instead of their legal name. a username identifies an individual within a digital environment. unlike legal names, usernames are chosen, platform-specific, and need not correspond to real-world identity.
notice that every category above identifies a person in some capacity, yet none performs exactly the same job. English often collapses these distinctions under the broad concept of a "name," whereas many other naming systems preserve functional differences between personal names, titles, honorifics, and descriptive epithets. while all of these may appear beside a person's identity, they are not interchangeable. some identify the individual, some identify their family, some describe their reputation, and others communicate social relationships. referring to all of them simply as "names" obscures the distinct roles they perform within their respective cultures.
if these distinctions are so common across cultures, why do English-speaking readers so frequently flatten them into a single naming system?
಄ ⋆ CHAPTER 3. WHY ENGLISH SPEAKERS MISREAD FOREIGN NAMES
having established that names perform different social functions across cultures, we arrive at another question: if these distinctions exist, why are they so frequently overlooked in English-speaking fandom? the answer is surprisingly mundane. it is not usually a failure of research (though it's the second most common reason), nor a lack of intelligence. rather, it is a consequence of how humans process unfamiliar information.
the first reason is that our brains simply do this because of pattern recognition or schema activation, something i spend much time on in thinking. we as humans are extraordinarily good at categorization. we don't read every unfamiliar thing from scratch—we compare it to something we already know. linguists call these mental shortcuts schemas but for this, i simply call it 'already knowing enough' (larping). when English speakers encounter "Ryomen Sukuna," our brains don't consciously ask what naming convention is being used. they see two capitalized words and immediately retrieve the closest familiar template.
a lot of what contributes to the reason of why people mistake foreign names so badly, especially names with their own alphabet, and especially with vastly different scripts, is due to once transliterated into the Latin alphabet, these names become visually familiar to English-speaking audiences. they appear to follow the same structure as English names—two capitalized words separated by a space—despite often operating according to entirely different cultural conventions. this visual familiarity encourages readers to unconsciously apply English naming expectations where they may not belong. humans also do chunking. you don't read Tanjiro as T-a-n-j-i-r-o, but Tan-Ji-Ro. you don't read my username as kayuekou but it gets mentally segmented as kay-ue-kou. or if you come from a more East Asian linguistic background, ka-yue-kou (which is the correct way to divide my name).
and this isn't ...nearly all your fault. after being immersed in English naming conventions, ie. Jane Doe, Peter Parker John B. Smith, our brains automatically shove Ryomen Sukuna, Kuroki Tomoko, Kamado Tanjiro into the same system. Ryomen Sukuna is chunked into Ryomen (first name) - Sukuna (last name).
಄ ⋆ CHAPTER 4. EVERYTHING GETS ENGLISH'D
so now, having established why English-speaking readers naturally reinterpret unfamiliar naming systems, it becomes apparent that this phenomenon extends far beyond Japanese media, my original grievance. whenever a naming system differs significantly from English conventions, readers often simplify, reorganize, or reinterpret it into something more immediately recognizable.
in practice, what does this look like?
first, mistaking family names as first names because of the Eastern name order (family name first, given name second), obviously this is most commonly seen in East Asian names. my examples will primarily derive from Japanese, mostly due to its almost uniquely similar structure to English when transliterated. this is often seen in Japanese fan media, which i found most prominent in fanfiction made pre-2021, such as mistaking Gojo for Satoru's given name.
specifically in Japanese, starting from the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Western name order was primarily used among the Japanese nobility when identifying themselves to non-Asians with their romanized names. as a result, in popular Western publications, the order became increasingly used for Japanese names the following decades (Shinzo Abe, Osamu Dazai, Satoru Gojo). however! in 2020, the Government of Japan reverted the Westernized name order back to the Eastern name order in official documents, and has recommended that the same format be used amongst general Japanese public; they also requested Western publications to change this. this is a big reason why Japanese becomes quite confusing when you dip your foot in and understand what the Eastern naming order looks like, because sometimes you don't know if they're using the Western or Eastern order. unlike the Chinese and the Koreans who have never used Western name order (Chinese leader Xi Jinping not being referred to as Jinping Xi, Moon Jae-in is not Jae-in Moon).
second, names getting split strangely. i recently saw in a fanfiction (that i've put on hold simply because of this) that the author named the fanon interpretation of the Gojo twins as Sato and Toru. this is most likely because they assume those are natural halves of "Satoru." Except Japanese morphology doesn't work that way. likewise, my name has been mistakenly used quite a lot, my nickname from my moniker kayuekou sometimes become kay because "Kay" already exists in English.
but this is especially frustrating once you understand that the kanji system, derived from hanzi, uses a logographical system. meaning, the Japanese writing for a name, almost always has a set meaning. "五条悟" or Gojo Satoru is split into "Gojo" or "五条" meaning 五 five, 条 an article or clauses, and 悟 meaningly enlightenment or to understand. the second you strip away Satoru and become Sato, that has become a completely. new name. in some dictionaries, maybe Sato as 悟 could happen, and i've checked myself on jisho that there is a given name called Sato with that exact kanji, but now it's a matter of logic and accuracy. Sato is almost alway used as a surname; Sato as 葛巻, Sato as 郡, Sato as 慧. there are rules to what a kanji can or cannot do in a name, but i will not deep dive into that in this essay.
third, in Russian, and a classic example, Ivan Ivanovich Petrov is often frequently read by English-speakers as Ivan, Middle name Ivanoich, Last name Petrov when the "middle name" is actually just telling you whose son he is. fourth, a fascinating one because it almost flips the problem, are Thai names. Thai people commonly have long legal names (due to surnames needing to be legally unique, therefore combining many words and subsequently creating incredibly long surnames) and short nicknames, sometimes ones that don't have any relation to their legal name. many foreigners sometimes assume the nickname isn't their "real" name, when culturally, it's often the primary everyday identifier.
although each example arises from a different language, the underlying mechanism remains remarkably consistent. readers encounter an unfamiliar naming system, identify superficial similarities to English, and unconsciously reorganize it according to English expectations. the details differ; the cognitive process does not.
a worthwhile minor topic to touch is things that English speaking writers accidentally normalize. such as the tendency of first-name basis immediately, honorific inconsistencies, modern Western flirting in Eastern historical settings, school culture assumptions, legal names vs epithets. i would touch the topic but i'm no fiddler.
಄ ⋆ CHAPTER 5. NOT EVERYTHING IS A GIVEN (NAME)
by this point, we have established three things. firstly, names are not merely arbitrary labels, but social tools that identify individuals within a cultural system. secondly, not every identifier attached to a person performs the same function. lastly, English-speaking readers naturally interpret unfamiliar naming systems through frameworks they already recognize. we now arrive at one of the most common consequences of this process: assuming that every identifier attached to a person is a given name.
not every word attached to a person is attempting to answer the same question. like we discussed in the previous chapters, a given name answers, "who are you?" a family name answers, "which family do you belong to?" a patronymic answers, "whose child are you?" a title answers, "what is your rank, occupation, or position?" an honorific answers, "how should I address you?" an epithet answers, "what are you known for?"
these may all appear beside one another when referring to a single person, yet they are not interchangeable. they perform different linguistic and social functions despite identifying the same referent.
epithets are probably the clearest example of this distinction. an epithet is not another personal name, but a descriptive identifier attached to an individual because of a notable characteristic, achievement, reputation, or physical trait. history is full of them. Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart, Ivan the Terrible, Erik the Red, and William the Conqueror are all remembered through epithets. English speakers immediately recognize that "the Great" is not Alexander's surname, nor is "Lionheart" Richard's given name. these descriptors tell us something about the individual rather than functioning as the individual's personal identity.
the interesting part is that this intuition often disappears when the epithet originates from another language.
once romanized into the Latin alphabet, foreign epithets lose many of the visual and cultural cues that distinguish them from ordinary names. rather than seeing a descriptive title, English-speaking readers often see another capitalized word occupying the same position as a conventional first name. without consciously realizing it, the epithet is reassigned a new job. it is no longer interpreted as a description, but as a personal identifier.
this distinction matters because misunderstanding an identifier is not simply a matter of pronunciation or terminology. it changes the role that identifier plays within the naming system itself. an epithet interpreted as a given name no longer functions as a description; it becomes an identity. a title mistaken for a surname no longer indicates social position; it becomes ancestry. in other words, the word has not changed—but the job we assign to it has.
so anyway. this brings us to another important question. if these distinctions are meaningful, why do official translations, subtitles, and fan translations so rarely communicate them? more importantly, are translators responsible for preserving these naming systems, or are readers simply encountering the unavoidable limitations of translation itself?
಄ ⋆ CHAPTER 6. TRANSLATION FUELS THESE MISTAKES
so now that we've established that identifiers perform different linguistic functions and that English-speaking readers naturally interpret unfamiliar naming systems through familiar frameworks, another question inevitably follows: if these distinctions are important, why do translations so rarely preserve them?
the answer is not that translators are careless. rather, translation itself is an exercise in compromise.
contrary to popular belief, translation is not simply the process of replacing one word with another. every translator must constantly decide what should be preserved. should priority be given to literal meaning, readability, cultural context, historical accuracy, emotional impact, or natural dialogue? more often than not, preserving one inevitably sacrifices another.
names are particularly difficult because they rarely carry meaning in isolation. instead, they exist within larger cultural systems that are often invisible to those who already understand them. a Japanese reader generally does not require a footnote explaining the function of an honorific, the order of family and given names, or whether an identifier is an epithet rather than a personal name. these conventions are already understood. an English-speaking audience, however, approaches the same text without that shared cultural framework.
romanization further complicates this process. when Japanese is written in its native scripts, it is immediately recognizable as a different writing system. readers instinctively understand that they are encountering another language. once those same names are transliterated into the Latin alphabet, however, they become visually familiar. two capitalized words separated by a space resemble countless English names, despite following entirely different cultural conventions. the alphabet remains familiar even when the language does not.
this creates what i consider one of romanization's greatest paradoxes: it increases accessibility while simultaneously creating an illusion of familiarity. readers correctly recognize the letters, but unconsciously assume they also recognize the system behind them. translation, therefore, often preserves the words while inevitably losing parts of the framework that gives those words meaning.
again, this is not unique to Japanese. consider honorifics such as -san, -kun, or -sama. many English translations omit them entirely because there is rarely a natural English equivalent that carries identical social nuance. likewise, patronymics in Russian are frequently interpreted as middle names, while Chinese family names are often mistaken for given names simply because the translated text cannot pause to explain an entirely different naming convention every time a character is introduced.
doing so would be impractical. imagine a subtitle interrupting every conversation with a linguistic lecture explaining why a particular identifier is functioning as an epithet rather than a personal name. accurate? perhaps. readable? absolutely not. translation, after all, is intended to communicate a story—not to teach an entire course in comparative linguistics.
this is where fandom enters the equation. readers naturally fill in the missing pieces using the only framework they possess: their own. one fanfiction assigns an English role to an unfamiliar identifier. another writer adopts the same convention. a hundred readers encounter it repeatedly. eventually, what began as an unconscious interpretation slowly transforms into accepted fanon. the reinterpretation is no longer questioned because, through repetition, it begins to feel canonical. translation does not create these misunderstandings on its own. it merely provides the conditions under which they become possible. the actual reinterpretation occurs in the minds of readers, where unfamiliar linguistic systems are quietly reorganized into something that feels comfortably familiar.
಄ ⋆ CHAPTER 7. CASE STUDY
which leads to a minor footnote, and the inciting example on why i made this post. one of my favorite little linguistic quirks in JJK is that "Ryomen Sukuna" isn't really a given name in the way a lot of English-speaking fans read it.
the historical figure that inspired Jujutsu Kaisen's Sukuna is traditionally known as Ryōmen Sukuna. the term Ryōmen (両面) literally means "two-faced" or "two-sided," referring to the figure's unusual appearance. rather than functioning as an ordinary personal name, it is widely understood as a descriptive epithet attached to Sukuna.
as discussed in chapter 2, epithets perform a fundamentally different function from given names. they describe rather than identify. however, once romanized into the Latin alphabet, "Ryōmen Sukuna" visually resembles a conventional English first name–surname pairing. the epithet is therefore reassigned a familiar role: first name. this interpretation is further reinforced through repetition. once a sufficient number of fanworks address Sukuna as "Ryomen," subsequent writers encounter the convention repeatedly and naturally assume it reflects canon. over time, the reinterpretation becomes self-perpetuating, not because readers consciously reject the original naming system, but because the English framework has already become normalized within the community.
modern AUs present a somewhat different situation. since these settings intentionally remove characters from their historical and cultural contexts, writers are free to assign entirely new naming conventions if they wish. someone may choose to reinterpret "Ryomen" as a legal first name simply because it functions conveniently within the world of their story (but still, when you take into account kanji, and you should, it becomes messy). fanfiction is, after all, transformative by nature.
admittedly, none of this prevents me from visibly twitching every time Heian-era Uraume solemnly addresses Sukuna as "Ryomen" with the energy of someone calling Alexander the Great "Great." that, however, is a personal problem rather than a linguistic one. not everyone is a nitpicker. ultimately, the question is not whether fanfiction is "allowed" to call Sukuna "Ryomen." fanfiction has never depended upon strict historical or linguistic accuracy. rather, this example demonstrates how easily unfamiliar naming systems become reorganized according to the expectations of another language. what appears to be a single naming choice is, in reality, the product of translation, cognition, and community convention acting together.
಄ ⋆ CHAPTER 8: WHAT CAN YOU DO?
if this essay has accomplished anything, i hope it has not convinced you that your fanfiction is "wrong." rather, i hope it has convinced you that naming conventions are often far more culturally complex than they first appear.
the purpose of this essay has never been to argue that every writer should become a historian, a linguist, or a professional translator before opening Google Docs. fanfiction is transformative by design. writers are free to alter names, settings, relationships, and entire worlds if doing so serves the story they wish to tell.
the distinction lies in intentionality.
there is a meaningful difference between deliberately changing a naming convention because it better suits your story and unconsciously changing it because you assumed it worked like English. the former is a creative decision. the latter is simply a assumption. fortunately, assumptions are surprisingly easy to challenge.
when writing characters from another culture—particularly historical settings—it is often worth asking a few simple questions before assigning an unfamiliar identifier a familiar role. is this actually the person's given name? could this instead be a title, epithet, clan name, patronymic, courtesy name, or honorific? am I following a convention because the source material suggests it, or because other fanfiction does? if i removed my English expectations, would i still interpret this name the same way? the answer, of course, may still be "I'm going to write it this way anyway." and that is perfectly acceptable.
the goal is not perfect authenticity. absolute historical accuracy has never been the defining characteristic of fanfiction, nor should it be. creative writing thrives on reinterpretation. what matters is understanding what you are reinterpreting.
once you recognize that names are cultural systems rather than isolated words, small details begin to reveal themselves everywhere. family names stop looking like first names. patronymics stop looking like middle names. epithets stop looking like legal names. romanized words stop feeling automatically familiar simply because they share the same alphabet. most importantly, you become aware of your own assumptions. language is remarkably good at making itself invisible. we rarely notice the frameworks through which we interpret the world until we encounter one that functions differently. by then, our brains have often already attempted to reorganize the unfamiliar into something comfortably recognizable.
that tendency is not a personal failing. it is simply how humans make sense of the world. the challenge—and, perhaps, the fun—is learning to recognize when our own language is quietly filling in gaps that another culture never intended to leave. and if nothing else, perhaps the next time you encounter an unfamiliar name in a piece of media, you'll pause for just a moment before asking the question that inspired this entire essay: "is that actually their name... or have i simply given it an English job?"
oh and start using dictionaries.
಄ ⋆ CONCLUSION / TL;DR
this essay began because one (1) line in one (1) fanfiction annoyed me far more than any reasonable person should probably admit. human beings are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns, therefore English speaking consumers and writers interprets foreign naming systems through a framework they're already familiar with. the result is not usually malice, laziness, or ignorance—it is simply the remarkably human tendency to organize unfamiliar things into familiar categories.
this essay therefore is not an argument for linguistic perfection, nor is it a declaration that fanfiction must adhere to strict historical authenticity. rather, it is an invitation to become more conscious of the assumptions we bring into the media we consume and create. understanding that names have different jobs, that translation cannot preserve every cultural nuance, and that fandom often reinforces its own conventions allows us to appreciate foreign naming systems on their own terms. and if, after reading all of this, you still decide to call Heian-era Sukuna "Ryomen" anyway... well, i cannot stop you. i can, however, quietly sigh, open another tab, and begin drafting the sequel to this essay.
಄ ⋆ BIBLIOGRAPHY (IT"S JUST WIKIPEDIA)
English honorifics (Wikipedia)
given names (Wikipedia)
honorifics (Wikipedia)
Japanese honorifics (Wikipedia)
names (Wikipedia)
personal names (Wikipedia)
surnames (Wikipedia)
note ꩜ hi edit. it’s 1am i forgot to link my sources. i’ll add it to the bibliography in like a couple hours after i sleep. sorry everyone. oh and also, deleted the second paragraph of my background because apparently it got duplicated
