simon points out the final girl getting chased by the slasher in the horror film you’re watching together and sighs out a dreamy little “that’s us” and then just doesn’t elaborate at all
𑣲. smoking weed with your best friends gojo and geto but they start making out in front of you.
𑣲. cws: gojo x geto x gn!reader ; substance use ; modern au ; everyone is in their early 20s ; suggestive (a little more than that tbh but there’s no ‘direct’ smut) ; dry humping ; everybody’s making out w/ each other ; satosugu is the main focus.
𑣲. approx. 1.9k words
art by @/K05062688 on twt.
a/n: when you smoke with those two friends that passionately kiss on the mouth hahahah lol. also i tried my best to embody the vibe of that one weird friend group where everyone kinda has a thing for each other.
The pungent smell of weed is strong enough to make your nostrils itch. Flashing lights from the cars passing by in the streets reflect on the walls of Geto’s apartment, fading away just as quickly as they appear. The window is wide open, letting in a pleasant breeze and the chaotic sounds of the bustling street at this hour of the night: people going in and out of clubs, laughter, the occasional car honk, low music… it’s nice. Grounding.
The three of you are lying in the bed. You’re seated between them, or more precisely, on them. Your head rests comfortably on Geto’s lap while your thighs lie on top of Gojo’s own. They’re both sat up, back against the wall and legs stretched out.
You’re currently fixated on Geto. There’s something so relaxing in the way he slowly draws smoke into his lungs, holds it in for exactly two seconds, and then exhales it from his nose like a sort of divine Kōryū.
When he’s done with his puffs, he looks down at you only to find you already staring; a couple strands of raven hair fall in front of his face as he does, those sharp eyes of his hanging low as a lazy smile approaches his lips. Even in your hazy state, it occurs to you that you’ve never found him more alluring than you do now, under the drug’s effect. There’s a calm to him so palpable that it feels like you could reach out and touch it; a calm that does not exist on any other regular day, when you’re not smoking weed and hanging casually.
You’ve always thought of Suguru as being like a quiet storm. Inaudibly tormented.
“You seem out of it,” he murmurs, and instead of passing you the burning joint, he parts your lips with his ring finger and places it between them. You inhale, then smile back as you catch the joint between your fingers and blow the smoke away from his face.
“I’m fine.”
Beside Geto, Satoru yawns soundly before letting his head flop onto his shoulder.
“This is starting to make me sleepy,” he mumbles, and you give him a light shove in the hip with your knee in response.
“Don’t. You literally promised you wouldn’t fall asleep like you did last time.”
A playful smile tugs at the corner of his lip as he looks over at you, the crystalline sea in his eyes glowing charmingly in the light coming from the buildings outside. “Promises are meant to be broken.”
Geto huffs a laugh from his nose as he wriggles his shoulder lightly, jerking Gojo’s head a little.
“Could be the smartest thing you’ve ever said.”
They inevitably start bantering after Suguru’s witty remark, low voices and giggling playing out like sounds of a distant radio in your fogged-up head.
As cheesy as it may sound, you’re glad you’re here: between them, smoking, saying stupid shit and laughing when there’s nothing to laugh about. It feels like you belong to them in the same way you belong to a certain place—like that particular spot you’ve always cherished as a kid, even though you were never able to pinpoint what made it so special in your heart.
You’re about to say something as your eyes flutter open (when did you even close them?) and you sit up, only to see Gojo and Geto with their lips intertwined. Any trace of thought is wiped clean from your mind.
The slowness and touchiness of it all suggest that this is definitely not their first time doing this.
One of Geto’s hands is cupping Gojo’s cheek while the other makes its way up and through his white locks. The gesture itself is almost as intimate as the kiss they’re sharing.
If weed had already begun to dry out your mouth, you’re now certain that said dryness comes from an entirely different feeling.
It’s when one of them hums something close to a soft moan into the other’s mouth that your stomach curls and tightens and suddenly you’re way too aware of your own labored breathing.
Have you smoked too much…? Maybe you’re hallucinating and this isn’t real.
But what if it is real? Are you supposed to leave them alone? You feel like you shouldn’t be witnessing this. There are so many emotions swirling inside of you that it’s impossible to discern which is which.
You put the joint down in the ashtray between you three, deciding that it’s best if you just go drink some water and maybe when you’ll be back you’ll see that none of it happened and that it was all made up by your intoxicated imagination.
That was the plan until you felt a hand on your thigh—that being Satoru’s. When you turn to look at him, he looks beautifully disheveled in the same way organized chaos is, like in those apocalyptic paintings of the nineteenth century.
“Stay,” is all he says. It’s not exactly a plead, but it’s definitely not a command either. As if he knew you’d comply either way.
Before you can muster up any sort of response, another hand—Suguru’s—crawls up the back of your neck and pulls you in. You don’t even try to resist since you already know that you just can’t. They’ve always felt ‘magnetic’ in a way, as if some unnamed force of sorts kept on tugging you towards their orbit: once you’re in its epicenter, there’s no way out. Not that you ever tried to find one.
In a much similar way, you yield to their touch and let them draw your body between their pleasingly warm ones. You feel fuzzy and tingly all over, unsure if it’s because of the drug working up your system or if it’s because of them simultaneously sinking their heads in the sides of your neck. Their breaths are warm and their lips wet as they pepper open-mouthed kisses and the occasional gentle bite up and down your feverish skin; you can do nothing but melt into them, arms slowly coming up to wrap around their shoulders as you sigh.
You should be wondering if they were casually making out just because they’re high (that can happen, right?) or if they have a ‘thing’ going on—and if they do, why didn’t they tell you? You should also be asking yourself why they made you stay, and even more so, why they’re kissing you now.
You really, really should.
But reality is, whatever this is feels too good to be questioned.
You force yourself to keep your eyes open, suddenly afraid that once the drug’s effect is over you won’t be able to remember any of this. You need to commit every single second to memory. You need to know that this is real and tangible.
Maybe that’s why you pull on Gojo’s hair. Not roughly, but definitely hard enough to make him feel something, given how he hums against you. He glances up at you, then traces his mouth all the way up your cheek in a damp trail of scattered kisses until he takes an unexpected turn towards your lips instead.
Satoru’s tongue is in your mouth before your body even reacts to the sudden intrusion. He tugs at your t-shirt, drawing you closer until you’re facing each other completely. He shifts to sit on his knees without breaking the kiss and so do you. His arms naturally find purchase around your waist, like you’ve done this a hundred times before. He grips you tighter for a brief moment and scoops you up so you’re settled in his lap, each knee beside his hips.
He spills languid moans into your mouth, forcing you to drink them in, making your stomach do weird flips with every noise. He’s all but gentle with it—he’s slow and sensual but increasingly intense and sloppy, as if he’s getting impatient. It’s the kind of pace difficult to keep up with when you’re high. You wonder if he’s as messy when sober.
When your senses become so overwhelmed that your ears begin to ring, you feel Suguru’s chest lean against your back. He applies enough pressure for you to press tighter against Satoru; he’s holding you together to make sure you don’t melt away. He works lingering kisses behind your ear, earning a shiver out of you.
Your hands instinctively come up to hold onto Gojo’s shoulders as you pull away from his lips to catch your breath, a single string of spit being the only thing connecting you two before it inevitably snaps. His chest rises and falls heavily with every breath, forehead dipping to rest against your shoulder.
One of Geto’s hands reaches up to run its fingers through his silky hair just to tug at it the next second, making him look up.
There’s something punishing in the way Geto catches his lips next, crushing you between their bodies with the force with which he leans in. Something primordial and raw that you’re not part of, and aren’t meant to be.
You can hear Gojo’s moans muffled by Geto’s mouth when his hips start bucking up against yours.
That’s when you see it for how it truly is: they’re ruining each other through you.
As of now, you’re a tool to them.
You don’t know if it should, but it indeed turns you on.
Your mouth finds Gojo’s neck to kiss and suckle on as your hips move in tandem with his, making your ass bump against Geto at the same time, who soon catches the rhythm. They’re both hard—you can feel it—and it’s driving you insane, almost as much as the sounds they make. Your brain could melt out of your ears at any moment at this rate.
After they break their kiss, they both lean onto you, panting and seemingly exhausted if it weren’t for their hips still incessantly rolling up into you. You bite down your lip to suppress any obscene sound threatening to spill out, but Geto grabs you by the chin with a firm hand, turns your head towards his, and presses his lips to yours.
His kiss is searing, even vicious in a way. He’s relishing the way you taste and the way Satoru tastes on you, that much you can tell. However, deep inside, your gut tells you that he wants you to know that Satoru tastes better on him.
You involuntarily let out a whimper as your lips part further, allowing full entrance to his tongue. You meet him halfway, letting the wet smacking noises echo in your ears.
You’ve rarely witnessed anything so primal from Geto, and even then it probably wouldn’t compare.
When he lets you go with a huff, leaving you with numb lips and out of breath yet again, he draws away from you and you let yourself peel off of Gojo in turn. In that brief instant, their eyes meet: a midnight sky clashes with a midday one. They share a look—a specific one: the kind that says things too heavy for words to hold. Yet, it remains undecipherable to you. It’s exclusive to them.
You can only sit alone with the conclusion that yes, you do belong to them, but they’re not yours.
𝑏𝑜𝑦𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑!𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 who carries all of the heavy shopping bags when you go to the mall. Buff arms piled high with cloth and paper bags.
𝑏𝑜𝑦𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑!𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 who follows you into every store without any complaint.
𝑏𝑜𝑦𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑!𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 who won’t complain when you take him into the candle store even tho just passing it gave him a small headache.
𝑏𝑜𝑦𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑!𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 who will smell every candle you brought up to his nose to sniff.
“That doesn’t smell bad.” You said, bringing the large candle back to your nose for another sniff.
Simon’s nose scrunched. He didn’t like it. It was too sweet for his liking. “Bit sweet, innit?”
“It’s mild to me.” You replied as you flipped the candle to look at the fragrance notes. “Maybe you just have a better nose than me.”
“Maybe.”
𝑏𝑜𝑦𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑!𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 who lingers outside of the changing room, arms crossed as he leans against the cool wall - patiently waiting for you to push the curtain to the side and model the clothing you picked out.
“Does this look good?” you asked, running your hands down your waist.
Simon's eyes examined you from head to toe. “Look lovely, dove.” His tone was almost bored as he replied.
You hummed as you tilted your head side to side. You twisted your body in the mirror, getting every angle to determine whether you liked it. “I don’t know...”
He watched as you twisted and turned. Simon’s mouth turned into a subtle frown. “What do you not like about it?”
“Sits weird here.” You grabbed the extra fabric darting around the armpit.
𝑏𝑜𝑦𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑!𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 who will grab different sizes of the clothing you're trying on if the one you brought into the room didn't fit right at first. He’d keep grabbing until one was just right for you.
“That fit better?” He asked through the thin curtain.
You pulled the curtain back with a smile beaming on your face. Now modeling the tailored clothing happily. “Yeah!”
𝑏𝑜𝑦𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑!𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 who sneakily pays for most of the shopping. If you took too long to pay, he’d pay. If you took too long to get the right amount of change, he’d already swipe his card. So fast you didn’t even realize it until you held out your cash or card.
𝑏𝑜𝑦𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑!𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 who would take you to dinner if you were at the mall past dinner time. Taking you to a nearby fish and chips shop, making sure you got your fill.
𝑏𝑜𝑦𝑓𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑑!𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐨𝐧 who, when you’d get home, would bring your legs over his lap and rub your sore feet as you both crashed on the couch. He’d watch some football game as he pressed his thumb into your arch, almost absentmindedly.
a/n: simon is a good boyfriend, can't change my mind (>'-'<)
TAGS: Satoru Gojo/Reader, Explicit, PWP, Rough Sex, Dirty Talk, Creampie, Dominant/Cocky Gojo, Sensory Details, Starting In Media Res, FEM!Reader.
DISCLAIMER / READER WARNING: All characters depicted in this story are consenting adults over the age of 18. There is no familial, blood, or fraternal relationship between any of the characters. This work contains explicit sexual content, including graphic descriptions of sex, dirty talk, and adult themes. If you are under 18 or uncomfortable with such material, please do not read or continue.
The air in the room was thick with heat and the wet, filthy sounds of skin slapping skin. Satoru Gojo had her bent over the edge of the bed, one big hand splayed across the small of her back, pinning her down while his other gripped her hip hard enough to leave marks. His cock was buried to the hilt inside her, thick and scorching, stretching her open on every brutal thrust.
“Fuck—look at you,” he groaned, voice low and rough with pleasure, that usual cocky lilt still there even as he fucked into her like he owned her. “Taking me so goddamn deep. You’re dripping all over my cock, you know that? Soaking the sheets.”
He pulled almost all the way out, the fat head of his cock catching on her rim with a wet, obscene pop, then slammed back in hard enough to rock the bed. The impact punched a broken moan out of her throat. Satoru laughed under his breath, the sound dark and delighted.
“Yeah, that’s it. Let me hear it. Don’t you dare hold back.” His hips snapped forward again, faster now, the wet schlick-schlick-schlick of his cock pistoning in and out of her cunt filling the room. Every thrust dragged against that sensitive spot inside her, sending sharp sparks of pleasure racing up her spine. “Feel that? That’s me rearranging your insides, sweetheart. And you’re still clenching like you want more.”
He leaned over her, chest pressing to her back, the heat of his body searing. One hand slid under her to cup her breast, fingers pinching and rolling her nipple roughly while he kept fucking her in deep, grinding strokes. His breath was hot against the side of her neck.
“You’re shaking already,” he murmured, teeth grazing her ear. “Poor thing. Can’t even handle me properly, can you? Look at how your legs are trembling. Pathetic...”
He pulled out completely this time, leaving her empty and clenching around nothing. Before she could protest, he flipped her onto her back like she weighed nothing, spreading her thighs wide with his knees. His cock—shiny with her slick, flushed dark and heavy—slapped against her clit as he lined up again.
Satoru’s blindfold was still on, but the way he looked down at her felt intense anyway. He grinned, that signature shit-eating smirk, and pushed back inside in one long, relentless slide.
“Ahh—there we go. Full again.” He started thrusting once more, harder, the wet slap of his balls against her ass loud and filthy. One hand found her throat, not squeezing hard, just resting there possessively while the other pushed one of her knees higher, opening her wider. “You’re so tight it’s almost annoying. Trying to milk me already? Greedy little cunt.”
Every stroke was deep and punishing, the head of his cock kissing her cervix on the hardest thrusts. Sweat slid down the sharp lines of his abs, dripping onto her stomach. The scent of sex—salt and musk and her own arousal—hung heavy between them.
“Say it,” he ordered, voice breaking just a little on a particularly deep thrust. “Tell me how good it feels getting ruined by the strongest. Come on. I wanna hear that pretty voice crack.”
When she tried to answer, the words came out broken and stuttering, half-moans and gasps. Satoru’s grin widened.
“Aww, can’t even form sentences? That’s adorable.” He fucked her harder, the bedframe slamming against the wall. “Guess I’ll just have to keep going until you can’t think at all. Until the only thing left in that head is my cock and how much you need it.”
He shifted the angle, grinding the base of his shaft against her clit with every thrust, and the pleasure turned sharp and overwhelming. Her walls fluttered and clenched around him, wetter than ever, the filthy sounds growing louder. Satoru’s breathing grew ragged, that teasing confidence still dripping from every word even as his own control started to fray.
“Fuck, you’re close, aren’t you? I can feel it—you’re pulsing around me like crazy. Do it. Come on my cock. Make a mess. I want to feel you fall apart while I’m still buried inside this perfect, filthy little hole.”
He didn’t slow down. If anything he drove into her faster, chasing her orgasm and his own, hips snapping with brutal precision. The wet, lewd noise of their bodies meeting filled the room along with her broken cries and his low, satisfied groans.
“That’s it—fuck, yes—squeeze me just like that. God, you feel unreal. Gonna fill you up so deep you’ll be leaking me for days. You want that? Want me to breed this greedy cunt until you’re dripping?”
His hand left her throat to slide between them, two fingers finding her clit and rubbing in tight, filthy circles while he kept pounding into her. The dual sensation was too much. Her orgasm hit hard, walls clamping down around his cock in rhythmic waves, soaking him even more. Satoru cursed under his breath, thrusts turning erratic as he chased his own release.
“Shit—taking me so well—gonna come—right there—”
He slammed in one final time and came with a deep, guttural groan, cock pulsing hard as he pumped thick ropes of cum deep inside her. The heat of it flooded her, overflowing around his shaft and dripping down onto the sheets in messy streaks. He kept grinding through it, milking every last drop, hips rolling in slow, filthy circles while he painted her insides.
Even after he finished, Satoru stayed buried deep, breathing hard, that cocky smile still playing on his lips as he looked down at the mess he’d made of her.
“Not bad,” he murmured, voice rough and satisfied, giving one more lazy thrust just to feel the wet slide of his cum. “But we’re nowhere near done. Hope you didn’t have plans… because I’m not pulling out anytime soon.”
you don’t know why you thought simon would be a cocky fuck.
maybe it was how cool and collected he always was. that hot, quiet confidence.
if only you knew when you’d finally got him into bed. ready for him to be rough, to be a little mean, not that you’d mind.
in reality, he was whining into your neck as he pumped into you at a primal speed. whispering and mumbling half words into your throat as he groped you anywhere he could. his eyes were rolled and he was drooling on your collarbone.
“o-oh.. oh, fuck- nghhhuhh… yyeah?.. awww… my baby.. gonna fill y-you… mhm…”
sweet little brain-numb nothings falling of the tongue of the smartest, coldest man you know.
and you could’ve cum just from the sight when he lifted his head and started actually panting and pathetically stuttering his hips against yours like a mutt.
୨ৎ | YANDERE CLANHEAD!GOJO SATORU X FEM!READER
› Arranged Marriage AU, Curses/Sorcerer AU, Non-Sorcerer!Reader, Older reader
𝜗𝜚 | SYNOPSIS: The proposal was meant for your little sister, but you had instead caught the eye of Gojo Satoru, a boy who had never been denied anything he wanted.
CONTENT WARNINGS (please heed all warnings)
DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT, obsessive/possessive/protective/toxic/unhealthy behavior, age gap, gross pining from satoru when he was younger, unrequited love/one-sided crush, female reader/terms, non-consensual touching, non-consensual sex, r*pe, unprotected sex, piv, fingering, explicit sexual content, mentions of masturbation, implications of murder, minor character death, forced kiss, satoru abusing infinity, breeding/impreg kink, mentions of pregnancy, baby-trapping, time skip/jumps, arranged marriage, power imbalance, mating press, profanity, no use of y/n, unnamed sisters, fictional characters, fair warning satoru is a yearner in this (and a brat) so slight ooc
WORD COUNT: 13.9k A/N: Based off of this request that I got too crazy with and lost sleep over, i slightly altered it but i hope it still applies :(
You remember when your little sister began to have the "terrors" the elders of your clan had vaguely explained when you were younger.
You were only seven at that time when they pulled you aside; it started with small, incomprehensible whispers among them, a small group of the higher-ups of your clan - the elders, as you'd come to call them - speaking to your father in words you could barely pick up or understand at your age.
They spoke to you as if you were much older, as if you weren't only seven and barely grasping what a clan even was, and as if you'd already understood everything they were saying. Their words became riddles, tangled up with the small stories you'd grow up believing were only fairytales - myths, you assumed, blown out of proportion by elders too far gone in age to separate memory from dementia.
"Curses," they called them - creatures existing in plain sight, "but not to you."
They described them loosely then, explaining that each one differed from the next, each more grotesque and abominable than the last. Your father had looked at you so fondly that day, like a prize and a sacrifice all at once. He told you that you'd understand when "it" came to you - that you'd see them soon enough.
You never did.
You were seven then when you began to question who your clan was putting in charge.
You were eight when your sister's face contorted into what could only be horror - she was barely six at the time - staring at a blank space beside an elderly woman during a visit to the Buddhist temple in your small town. An empty space, absent of anything that would make a child cry. You'd only assumed she'd seen something she didn't like in passing, that whatever she was crying about stemmed from the ordinary behavior of any child prone to easy discomfort.
You comforted her at first, being the closest to her during the initial prayers, but she wouldn't stop crying. She kept telling you that "it was climbing on her," pointing at the old woman indignantly. You immediately chastised her, telling her it wasn't nice to point at people. She just sat there, immovable as if in shock, sobbing into your arms while hiccupping out between wet sobs: "It's eating her."
"Curses," you thought, the word surfacing when your father came running to her side. He looked at you that day too with a fond look, but it differed from before.
The offer came when you were thirteen. A pristine white envelope with a stamped crest, an emblem you'd never seen before. It was beautiful in the same way it was terrifying. You could not look away from how the crest shone like a beacon of light; you assumed your parents were awestruck by its beauty as well, although the horrified expressions on their faces made you think otherwise.
Your sister, on the other hand, was only nine - you remember how grand and ceremonious her birthday celebration had been, only a month prior. You thought the look on her face as she blew out her candles seemed solemn.
You think your mother apologized to her later that night.
You met Gojo Satoru at fourteen: platinum-white hair, eyes a bright, aquamarine blue. They glittered like fragments of crystal nestled deep in his irises, and it didn't help how sharp his stare was - pointed and unabashed, as if he were fully aware of everything, yet distant, watching from the sidelines the way someone might watch a play unfold. You'd even call it boredom, though something about it felt too old for a boy his age to wear so easily.
That day you hung your head as low as your neck could manage; you remember your hands itching to massage the small muscles that felt seconds away from snapping. It wasn't by choice - your father had advised you multiple times leading up to the meeting to keep your head down unless spoken to, and that if, on the rare occasion they addressed you, you were to maintain steady eye contact as a sign of respect before lowering your head once more.
They didn't speak to you that day. You remembered being told they were the heads of the Gojo clan, though not that they were the parents of the pale boy sitting eerily still across from your sister. You weren't sure if you were thankful for it or ashamed, existing in a way comparable to just another piece of furniture in the room.
At least you managed to tune out most of what was being said, catching only fragments - words like inheritance, bloodline, burden passed between the adults like stones skipped across still water. You didn't understand half of what was being negotiated, only that your sister's future was being decided in a tatami-floored room that smelled faintly of sandalwood incense and aged paper, sunlight filtering thin through the shoji screens, and that no one thought to ask her opinion on the matter.
Eventually, someone - you think it might have been the family's advisor, a thin man that nearly look frail - suggested that "the children" be excused. You remember the relief that flooded your chest, sharp and immediate, at being granted permission to exist outside the suffocating weight of that room.
Your sister didn't want to leave at first. She kept glancing at the boy across from her, transfixed in the way children often are with anything unfamiliar and strange. He hadn't moved the entire meeting, hadn't so much as blinked more than necessary, and yet she stared at him like he was something out of one of her picture books - a prince carved from ice, maybe, or a ghost mistaken for a person. When a servant gently guided her out by the shoulder, she twisted her head back for one last look, as if committing his face to memory.
You wandered the estate alone after that, still in your socks from where you'd left your shoes at the genkan, your sister tucked safely under the watch of one of your family's servants while the adults continued whatever business required hushed voices and closed doors.
The Gojo estate sprawled endlessly, its engawa verandas stretching between manicured gardens, each room more pristine than the last, as though dust itself knew better than to settle there. You didn't know where you were going. You only knew you didn't want to go back to that room.
That was when you found him in the hallway.
He stood there alone, dressed in a deep blue kimono of fine weave, the fabric catching the light with an understated sheen that spoke of expense and careful craftsmanship.
The formality of the garment made him look even more like a carefully arranged porcelain figure, something too perfect and fragile to touch. His hands were tucked into the sleeves, and he stared out through a window at nothing in particular, the stillness of him unnervingly practiced for someone so young.
You almost didn't say anything - almost kept walking, pretending you hadn't seen him - but something about a ten-year-old standing unsupervised in a house this large struck you as wrong. Your eyes drifted across the hallway, down its length, then back toward the direction you'd come from.
The estate was so vast, so quiet. Everyone had made such a fuss about him during the meeting - important, the strongest, a prodigy - and yet here he was, alone in a corridor that seemed to stretch on forever.
You found yourself glancing around again, almost fearful, increasingly concerned that no one had thought to check on him.
"What're you looking at?" he asked suddenly, his voice cutting through the silence.
You turned back to find him watching you now, his head tilted slightly. For a moment, he looked away too, his aquamarine eyes scanning the hallway the way you had - methodical, observant - and you caught the way the light caught in his irises, making them shine just a fraction brighter before he turned his attention back to you, as if he'd already cataloged everything worth seeing.
"Shouldn't you have someone watching you?" you asked, keeping your voice soft, the way you might speak to your sister when she was upset.
He turned to look at you more fully now, unreadable, his aquamarine eyes flat and assessing, as if trying to determine whether you were worth the effort of a response - an expression far too composed for a child his age.
"I live here," he said simply, like that answered anything at all.
"That doesn't mean it's safe to wander around by yourself," you said, more insistent this time, though you weren't entirely sure why you cared.
He didn't respond immediately. Instead he studied you the way you imagine scientists studied things under microscopes, dissecting and cataloging, searching for what made you tick.
"You're weird," he finally said, and before you could decide whether to be offended, he held his hand out to you, palm up, expectant.
You took it. You're still not sure why.
The playdates began not long after that, arranged with the same rigid formality as everything else your clan seemed to touch.
You always came along, ushered into the role of chaperone though no one used that word outright, and you supposed it made sense - your sister was still small, still easily overwhelmed, and Gojo was, despite his unsettling stillness, still only a child himself.
Those early visits resembled a strange, one-sided game of twenty questions, your sister peppering him with things like what's your favorite color and do you like animals while he answered in the same flat, distant tone he'd used with you in the hallway. He never asked questions back. He simply existed beside her, present but untouched by whatever she was trying to build between them.
"He's just weird," you told your sister once, on the car ride home, when she asked - hurt, in the quiet way children get hurt - why he never smiled at her jokes. "He wasn't raised like us. I don't think anyone taught him how to be normal around people."
She seemed to accept that explanation, though you weren't certain you believed it yourself.
What you didn't mention, because you weren't sure what to make of it, was the way Gojo gravitated toward you during those visits instead. He'd trail a few steps behind you through the gardens, or reach for your hand without prompting when you walked him back toward the main house, his small fingers curling into yours with a certainty that felt oddly deliberate for someone his age. You told yourself it meant nothing. Children latched onto whoever was nearest and least frightening. That was all it was.
By the time he turned thirteen, something in him had begun to bloom - there was no better word for it. The flat stillness that had defined him as a child gave way, slowly, to something livelier, more textured. He started talking more, filling silences with details about his day, his training, some argument he'd had with an instructor about technique. His expressions multiplied: a narrowing of his eyes and a small click of his tongue when he was annoyed, the corner of his mouth twitching upward when he was pleased but trying not to show it. Even his posture had changed, less like a doll arranged just so, more like a boy who had somewhere he wanted to be.
You found yourself watching these small transformations with something like fondness, the same fondness you might have felt watching your sister learn to ride a bike or lose her first tooth. He was, after all, still a child in your eyes - a strange, occasionally exasperating one, but a child nonetheless, someone you had watched grow from that porcelain-still boy in the hallway into whoever he was becoming.
"Call me Satoru," he told you once, apropos of nothing, while you sat across from him at the low table in his study, both of you cross-legged atop the tatami. "Not Gojo."
"Isn't that your name?" you asked, amused.
"That's my family," he said, you could note the slight bitterness in his tone, picking at a loose thread on his sleeve and not quite looking at you. "I want you to call me Satoru."
You obliged, mostly because arguing over something so small felt pointless, and partly because you liked the way his face brightened, however briefly, whenever you did.
You found yourself feeling something close to pride during that stretch of time, watching him grow into someone with color and shape, someone who existed beyond the porcelain stillness of that first meeting. You thought about how far he'd come from the boy who'd barely spoken, who'd stared at you like you were a puzzle he couldn't solve, and it struck you as something worth being proud of - the way you might be proud of any child finally settling into themselves. You thought, foolishly, that it meant good things for your sister's future.
You thought his warmth, however small, was being cultivated for her, and that one day she would be lucky to have it.
You were seventeen by the time you began attending the playdates less. School had consumed most of your attention by then - assignments piling up, a boy you were seeing on and off, a life slowly expanding beyond the narrow corridor your clan had built for you. You told yourself your sister didn't need you there every time, not when Satoru had grown fond of her, not when things seemed, on the surface, to be progressing exactly as they were meant to.
You didn't notice, not at first, how the shape of things had shifted in your absence.
It became obvious around the time his height started catching up to yours, his voice dipping into something rougher at the edges, his limbs stretching in the awkward, uneven way boys' bodies do when puberty finally takes hold. He'd try, casually, to take your hand the way he used to as a child, except now there was nothing childlike about the way his fingers lingered, or the way he'd pull back too quickly when you gently untangled your hand from his, muttering some flimsy excuse about your hands being cold, or his own being sweaty, anything to explain away the moment.
You noticed, too, the way his questions changed.
It started small, the kind of thing you almost didn't register until it had already happened three or four times.
You'd come by on a Sunday to find your sister had already gone to lie down in one of the back rooms, fatigued from the afternoon - she'd seemed more tired than usual lately, her training having ramped up to something far more grueling than it used to be. Satoru remained sprawled across the couch in the living room with some manga held up in front of his face, the pages angled just high enough to hide everything but the crown of his white hair. He refused to leave even when your sister wasn't in attendance anymore, and you'd long since stopped trying to convince him otherwise.
"Does your sister like guys with long hair?" he asked one afternoon, not looking up from the book, voice pitched carefully casual. "Or short?"
You glanced up from the coffee table, where you'd been grading through some notes for one of your classes. "I don't know. How would I know, Satoru?"
"Okay, then what about you?"
You blinked at him, pen paused mid-sentence. "What, what about me?"
"Short or long." He still hadn't looked up from the manga, though the pages had gone still, no longer turning. "Hair. Which do you like."
"I don't know - I guess short," you said, mostly just to get him to drop it, already looking back down at your notes.
There was a pause. You heard the soft rustle of the manga pages shifting, but he didn't say anything right away. You glanced back up, expecting him to move on to something else, but he was still there, still hidden behind the book, the silence stretching in that particular way that made you realize he was waiting for something.
"So, my length?" he finally asked, his voice quieter than before.
You looked at him properly then, taking in the platinum hair cut short - an outgrown buzz is what you could describe it as, that barely fell over his forehead, just enough to catch the light. You let the moment sit for a beat, long enough that you could feel him tensing behind the book.
"Nah," you said, turning back to your notes. "Longer."
There was another pause, this one different - almost satisfied. Then, quietly, from behind the pages: "Okay. Cool, cool."
The manga snapped back up to cover his face entirely, faster than the moment really called for.
You went back to your notes, unbothered, chalking it up to whatever it was boys his age fixated on.
"What about tall guys? Does she like those?"
You sighed, setting your pen down. "I don't know - most girls like tall guys, it's not that surprising."
"I'm just asking," he said, and there was something almost defensive in it now, the manga creeping back up another inch.
"If you want to know what she likes, ask her yourself. I'm sure she'd tell you."
Satoru didn't answer right away. The silence that followed stretched long enough that you almost went back to your notes, almost forgot the conversation had been happening in the first place, before he said, quietly, from behind the manga, "I'll be taller than you soon."
You blinked, glancing up. "What?"
"Nothing." The book snapped back up fully this time, covering his entire face.
You didn't think much of it beyond a passing, bemused sort of confusion, chalking it up to whatever strange, competitive instinct boys his age seemed to develop out of nowhere, the same way they suddenly cared about who could run faster or throw a ball farther. You went back to your notes and didn't bring it up again.
But the questions kept coming after that, disguised each time as concern for your sister's preferences before pivoting, inevitably, back toward you. What kind of things did you like. What you found annoying. Whether you preferred someone quiet or someone who talked too much. He'd always start with her name in the question and end with yours, as though he thought you wouldn't notice the sleight of hand if he moved quickly enough.
"You know," you said one day, setting your pen down with a huff, "you could just ask her these things directly instead of going through me every single time. It'd save us both a lot of trouble."
His face contorted immediately, nose wrinkling in something that looked almost like embarrassment, the manga finally dropping into his lap. "It's not that big a deal. I'm just asking."
"Sure you are," you said, unimpressed, going back to your notes.
"I'm just saying," he grumbled, arms crossing, ears reddening at the tips in a way that suggested the irritation wasn't nearly as simple as he wanted it to look. You rolled your eyes and kept grading, chalking the whole exchange up to nothing more than an irritating younger brother being an irritating younger brother, the way he always had been, the way you assumed he always would be.
The question that finally cracked something open came just after his fourteenth birthday, on one of the rare evenings you'd stayed late at the estate, your sister already sent off to bed by one of the house's attendants after a long day of formal obligations you'd never understand.
You and Satoru remained, the low table between you scattered with the debris of the tea neither of you had finished and the sickly sweet snacks he'd brought, the tatami cool beneath your knees in the quiet that settled once the house had gone still.
"Hey," Satoru said, too casually, not looking up from the book he was reading. "Have you ever slept with someone?"
You blinked, certain for a moment you'd misheard him. "What did you just ask me?"
"You heard me." He glanced up then, and there was something in his expression - equal parts nerve and performance, like he'd rehearsed the bluntness of it and was watching now to see if it landed the way he'd hoped.
"Satoru." Your voice came out sharper than you meant it to, some mixture of scandalized and unsure whether to laugh. "Where on earth did you even hear something like that?"
"I'm just asking," he said, that familiar shrug rolling through his shoulders, though the tips of his ears had gone faintly pink. "It's not that weird a thing to wonder about."
"It's exactly that weird, coming from you." You set your cup down, giving him the look you usually reserved for your sister when she'd said something she knew better than to say. "You're fourteen. You shouldn't even know to ask that."
Something flickered across his face - not quite embarrassment, but close to it, the confidence faltering for just a moment before he caught himself and smoothed it back into that familiar smugness.
"I know things," he said, vaguely, tilting his chin up like the vagueness itself was an answer.
"Clearly not the right things," you muttered, shaking your head, though you didn't push further. Whatever corner of the clan house he'd overheard something so inappropriate in, you decided, quite firmly, that it wasn't a thread you wanted to pull on tonight.
By the time Satoru turned fifteen, the countdown to Jujutsu High had become something he brought up so often it started to feel like a nervous tic, the kind of thing he couldn't help circling back to no matter what the conversation had originally been about.
"You know I'm leaving soon, right?" he said one afternoon, apropos of nothing, while you sorted through a stack of paperwork.
"Yes, Satoru. You've mentioned it. Several times." You didn't even look up from the papers.
"I'm just saying. It's not like a weekend trip. It's a long time." He was sprawled on the couch again, the same way he always was, though his legs took up considerably more of it than they used to.
"I'm aware of how the school works, yes."
"A really long time," he pressed, like the emphasis alone might make you understand something you clearly weren't grasping. "Like, I won't be back for holidays half the time. Maybe not even for a whole year."
"Okay." You glanced up briefly, more amused than anything, arching an eyebrow at the theatrics of it. "And?"
He seemed to falter for a second, like he hadn't fully thought past the announcement itself, like the reaction he wanted from you hadn't been "okay" delivered in that flat, unbothered tone. "And nothing," he muttered, looking away, jaw tight. "Just thought you should know."
"You've told me probably five times this week alone," you said, setting the papers down finally, unable to keep the smile off your face. "I promise it's registered."
He didn't answer that, just picked at a loose thread on the couch cushion, expression unreadable in the way it got sometimes now that he was older, harder to parse than the porcelain stillness of his childhood or the easy brightness of the years after. You didn't think much of it. Boys his age got moody about all sorts of things, and leaving home for the first time - even to a place as prestigious as Jujutsu High - was reason enough for a little sulking, you supposed.
The morning he left, the estate was a flurry of quiet, controlled motion - attendants moving trunks toward the gate, your father exchanging low words with someone from the Gojo clan's staff, your sister standing beside you in her travel clothes, back straight the way she'd been taught, though her hands fidgeted at her sides in a way that gave her away.
Satoru stood near the car, dressed simply for once, none of the ornate fabric of his childhood, just a plain dark jacket that looked almost strange on him after years of seeing him wrapped in fine, deliberate cloth. He looked older in that moment than you'd fully let yourself register until then - fifteen, taller than you now, the outgrown buzz cut long gone, replaced by hair that fell messily over his forehead in a way he still hadn't quite figured out what to do with.
Your sister went first, wrapping her arms around him briefly, murmuring something about texting when he landed, and he hugged her back easily enough, distractedly, his gaze drifting toward you over the top of her head the entire time.
Then it was your turn.
You stepped forward and hugged him the way you always had, an arm looping around his shoulders, a quick press meant to say be safe and I'll see you eventually all at once. Except he didn't let go the way he was supposed to. His arms tightened around you instead, pulling you in closer than the moment really called for, his chin dropping to rest against your shoulder, and he held on for a beat too long, then another, long enough that you felt your sister shift awkwardly beside you, long enough that you had to be the one to eventually pull back.
When you did, his expression had gone tight, jaw set in that particular way he got when something wasn't going the way he wanted it to, mouth twisted at the corner - the same look he used to give when he was annoyed as a child, except sharper now, more deliberate. He looked, if you had to put a word to it, almost disappointed. Pissed, even, though you couldn't imagine at what.
"Hey," you said gently, misreading it entirely, reaching up to squeeze his shoulder the way you might have done for your sister. "I'll miss you too, you know."
His mouth twisted further, something flickering behind his eyes that you didn't have the vocabulary yet to name. "Yeah," he said, voice flat, already turning toward the car. "Whatever."
You watched him climb in beside your sister, watched the car pull down the long gravel drive until it disappeared past the gates, and told yourself it was just nerves, just a boy leaving home for the first time, dressing up his fear as irritation because that was easier than admitting to being scared.
That morning marked the last uncomplicated day of it - the last time you'd see him as simply Satoru, before Jujutsu High swallowed him whole and returned him to you as someone else entirely.
Thirteen years is a long time to hold onto a version of someone. You know that now, though you didn't back then, back when you still believed people stayed roughly the shape you left them in, like pressing a flower between pages and expecting it to bloom again the moment you opened the book.
You were thirty-two the evening it happened, coming home from work the way you did every other evening, keys already out of your bag before you'd even reached the front step, your mind somewhere between the grocery list you hadn't made and the emails you'd forgotten to answer. You hadn't seen your sister in person in five years, only briefly given permission for her to visit. You hadn't seen Satoru at all since the morning he climbed into that car and disappeared down the Gojo estate's gravel drive.
It wasn't that you'd meant to disappear on either of them - it was that leaving the clan estate had meant leaving behind the only channels that ever connected you to that world in the first place. Even reaching your sister had become its own small ordeal, routed through servants and schedules and whoever happened to be near enough to a phone that week, and somewhere in the shuffle of building an entirely separate life, the reaching had simply stopped happening.
You'd told yourself, eventually, that Jujutsu High swallowed people whole, and that it wasn't abandonment so much as distance, the kind built into the very architecture of the world your sister had been born into and you hadn't. You knew, somewhere underneath that reasoning, that you probably could have tried harder. You just weren't sure it would have mattered.
So when you looked up from your keys and saw a man leaning against your doorframe, arms crossed, head tilted back against the wood like he owned the place, your first thought was that you had the wrong house.
Your second thought, arriving a half-second later with the force of something physical, was that you knew him.
He was taller than you remembered, though of course he would be, that had been true even at fifteen, his frame stretched out now into something lean and unfairly put-together, all long limbs and easy posture, like standing there cost him nothing at all.
His hair had grown past the outgrown buzz you remembered into something longer, messier, pale as moonlight even in the dim porch light. A blindfold covered his eyes - dark fabric wound carefully around his head, obscuring the startling blue you'd known since childhood. For a moment you wanted to ask about it, some question forming and dissolving before you could speak it, but then memory surfaced: by the end of his fourteenth year, he'd begun wearing those round, completely blacked-out glasses, something about the strain of seeing the way he saw. You supposed this was just the evolution of that.
Whatever it was that used to unsettle you about him as a child had only sharpened with age, blindfold or not - you could feel it in the way he held himself, in the careful attention of his posture even as he leaned against your door like he had nowhere else to be.
"Took you long enough," Satoru said, like you were fifteen minutes late to something, like this was a scheduled meeting and not an ambush on your own doorstep.
"What the hell," you said, because it was the only thing your mouth seemed capable of producing, keys still in hand. "Satoru?"
"Ding ding," he said, pushing off the doorframe with a lazy, theatrical flourish, spreading his arms wide like he was unveiling himself for an audience. "In the flesh. Bigger, better, taller. You're welcome."
You stared at him. You kept staring, waiting for some detail to resolve the wrongness of it, grinning at you like the years between hadn't happened at all. "How did you even find my address?"
"Jujutsu sorcerer," he said, tapping his temple with two fingers, "super strong, remember? Finding one woman who dropped off the map isn't exactly advanced technique."
"I didn't drop off the map, I - " You stopped, exhaled, tried again, more honestly this time. "It's nice to see you. It is. Why are you here, Satoru? Is my sister with you?"
"Mm." He rocked back on his heels, ignoring the question entirely, something flickering behind the easy grin, there and gone so fast you almost convinced yourself you'd imagined it. "That's it? Thirteen years and I get 'nice to see you' like I'm a neighbor." His voice stayed light, teasing, pitched exactly the way it used to when he was being deliberately obtuse as a child, except there was an edge underneath it now, something coiled and simmering that hadn't been there before, or that you'd simply been too young yourself to recognize. "Not even a New Year's card in thirteen years. I'm hurt. Genuinely. Wounded, even."
You rubbed at your temple, guilt and irritation tangling together in a way you didn't have the energy to sort out. "You're being dramatic. You make it sound a lot easier to contact anyone out there than it really is."
"I'm allowed to be dramatic," he said, stepping closer, close enough that you had to tilt your head back slightly to keep looking at him, close enough that you caught the faint scent of cedar and something colder underneath it, unfamiliar. "You left. That's not dramatic, that's just facts."
"I didn't leave, I moved. People do that. It's called having a life." Your back had found the doorframe somewhere in the last few seconds without your permission, and you weren't entirely sure when that had happened, only that he'd filled the space between you and the door so thoroughly there wasn't much room left to retreat into. "And you're one to talk about disappearing, you were the one who went off to some elite school and dropped off the face of the earth."
"See, that's different," he said, tilting his head, that same maddening, unreadable expression flickering across his face that you remembered from childhood, except sharpened now into something adult and far harder to read. "I had a good excuse. Special grade curses, world-ending stuff, very busy schedule. What's yours?"
"I don't need an excuse, I'm not the one standing on someone's porch like a stray cat."
Something in his jaw shifted at that, a muscle ticking there before the grin widened to cover it, too quick, too practiced. He leaned in another fraction of an inch, effectively erasing whatever space had remained between the two of you and the door at your back. "Guess you'll just have to let me in, then," he said, voice dropping into something quieter, something that didn't match the smile at all. "Been a long thirteen years."
The meeting room hadn't changed at all.
That was the first thing you noticed, sitting there with your knees pressed together beneath the low table, the same tatami beneath you that had been beneath you eighteen years ago, the same shoji doors diffusing the afternoon light into something soft and directionless. Even the air smelled the same, faintly of cedar and old incense, as though the room existed outside of time in a way the rest of the world hadn't been permitted to.
Except this time you weren't the girl kneeling beside her mother, told to keep her eyes down. This time you sat where the elders had once sat, cushion firm beneath you, spine held too straight because it was the only thing keeping you upright. And across the table, in the place where a ten-year-old boy had once perched like a doll too carefully made to be touched, sat Satoru. Grown now. His hair combed back with lazy effort and decided to ditch the pair of black glasses or thick blindfold he usually sported.
You still weren't entirely sure how you'd gotten here. The days folded into each other strangely when you tried to retrace them, fragments surfacing out of order, refusing to arrange themselves into anything you could call a memory.
The funeral.
You remembered that, though only in pieces - the black fabric of your own sleeve, the smell of lilies too sweet for the occasion, a line of relatives you barely recognized bowing in practiced unison. You didn't remember crying, though you must have. You remembered a phone call afterward, someone from the clan's outer household asking, with excruciating politeness, whether you'd be willing to return, just for a short visit, just to discuss a few matters concerning the family. You remembered thinking, even then, that the request had come too quickly, though you hadn't let yourself follow the thought any further than that.
And then the envelope. Pristine white, the Gojo crest stamped into the seal like a wound. The same one. You didn't know how they'd found your new address, though you supposed by now you should have stopped being surprised by things like that.
They hadn't even waited a month after your sister's death.
You didn't know why your sister had died - no one had told you anything beyond the vague, careful language people used when they wanted a subject closed - but you knew this: however she'd gone, whatever had taken her, the clan had grieved for exactly as long as it took to draft new paperwork, and not a single day longer.
You sat with that thought lodged somewhere behind your ribs, cold and immovable, while the room filled slowly around you. Elders you barely remembered took their places along the far wall, murmuring amongst themselves in tones too low to follow, occasionally glancing toward you with expressions you couldn't read and didn't want to. You kept your hands folded in your lap to stop them from shaking.
It was almost funny, in the bleak, airless way certain truths are, that you were even here at all. You couldn't see curses. Had never been able to, not once, not even as a child straining to glimpse whatever it was your sister saw clinging to that woman at the temple all those years ago. You had no technique, no lineage worth speaking of beyond the accident of blood that had made you useful to negotiate with, once, briefly, when you were only a body to be positioned beside another body.
You were thirty-two. Satoru was twenty-eight.
Even the arithmetic of it felt obscene, four years that had meant nothing when you were a teenager watching over a child and meant something entirely different now, sitting across from a grown man in a room built to formalize whatever came next.
You had nothing to offer.
And yet here you were, seated exactly where your sister knelt, waiting for someone to explain to you, again, what your life was going to be used for.
The elder nearest the head of the table shifted, papers rustling faintly in his hands, and cleared his throat with the particular gravity of a man about to speak words he'd rehearsed. Across from you, Satoru hadn't moved at all, his gaze steady, unreadable, fixed on you with an intensity that made the silence before the elder spoke feel unbearably long.
The elder's words had blurred together somewhere around the third sentence, something about formalities and timelines and the necessity of "smooth transition," until eventually you'd stopped trying to hold onto any of it and simply nodded when nodding seemed required. You didn't remember standing. You didn't remember being led anywhere. You only became aware of yourself again once you were sitting on the tatami of a room you hadn't chosen, knees tucked beneath you, hands folded so tightly in your lap that your knuckles had gone pale.
It was a nice room. That was the worst part of it, somehow - the care evident in every detail, the tokonoma alcove with its single, deliberate arrangement of flowers, the futon already laid out and waiting though it was nowhere near evening.
You weren't a guest. You understood that now, sitting here with your bag still packed at the door because unpacking it would mean admitting the shape this was taking. This was a preview. A room that belonged, technically, to Satoru's house, in the way everything in this house eventually belonged to Satoru, and you were meant to understand that once things were "finalized" - that word, chosen so carefully by the elder, still turning over in your stomach like something rotten - this would simply be where you lived.
You didn't know how long you sat there before the fusuma slid open with a sharp, careless scrape, no pause beforehand, no announcement.
"God," Satoru said, stepping through and dragging the door shut behind him with his foot, not bothering to look at you yet, "I cannot stand talking to those meatheads. Every single one of them talks like they're reading off an ancient scroll. You'd think after forty years of practice at least one of them would figure out how to finish a sentence without three unnecessary clauses."
He dropped down onto the tatami a respectful distance away, folding his long legs beneath him with the kind of ease that made the whole room feel smaller, more crowded, though there was nothing but the two of you in it.
"Honestly," he went on, tipping his head back to study the ceiling like it had personally wronged him, "I think that one elder's been saying the exact same six sentences since I was ten. Different order sometimes, if he's feeling adventurous." He glanced sideways at you, waiting, apparently, for the laugh that always used to come easily enough when you were younger, some rhythm built into you both from years of practice.
It didn't come.
You kept your eyes on your lap, on the small, useless motion of your own fingers twisting together, and said nothing at all.
Satoru's mouth twitched, some joke half-formed and abandoned before it reached his lips. He watched you for a beat too long, the playful cast of his expression flattening at the edges, though he didn't press. He simply exhaled, long and theatrical, and shifted closer across the tatami until his shoulder nearly brushed yours, close enough that you could feel the warmth radiating off him even through the space you'd left between you.
"Hey," he said, softer now, though the lightness hadn't entirely left his voice. "You're quiet."
You didn't answer that either. Your hands stretched and then balled up in your lap, and then deciding to pick at the sleeves of your yukata.
"C'mon," he inquired with that gentle yet playful cadence, and then deciding to seat himself next to you, long legs stretching and folding out before he found it a comfortable position. "Tell me what's on your mind."
You craned your head to look over at him from its hung position, you felt nothing but pity when you looked at him, even when there was a small hint of a smile pulling at his face. He really had jewels for eyes, but his pupils were swallowing most of it with how dilated they were.
And just as much as you felt pity for him - this situation he was forced into - you felt the pull of searing anger. Everything reminded you of why you wanted to leave in the first place. You just wished you could've brought your sister with you too - maybe she would've been alive, talking to you about the wedding plans she had envisioned when she was younger.
"Satoru," you began, your voice slightly hoarse and cracking, "I'm sorry - this is just. God, I'm sorry."
His head perked up, his eyes moving in small movements across your face, you would've questioned the confusion washing over his expression, but perhaps he was already used to everything; fear and loss. You could only imagine how he had taken the news of your sister's death; whether he allowed himself to mourn if his clan didn't.
"What - wait," he stalled with a slight panic before leaning closer to you, you hated the fact that your vision warbled. "Don't be sorry, nothing is your fault." And then adding when a moment of silence stretched: "It's okay, it's alright. This is just - this is what they're like, how it's like."
You laughed, though it came out wrong, wet and broken somewhere in your throat before it could finish becoming a laugh at all.
"How's it like, Satoru? How does anyone explain how it's like to lose - "
You stopped yourself before the sentence could finish becoming something crueler than you meant it to be, something that would land on him too, because he'd lost her too, hadn't he. Whatever complicated, engineered version of loving her he'd been handed since he was ten years old, he'd still lost her.
"I don't know how it's like," he admitted, and for once there wasn't a joke folded into it, no deflection waiting in the wings.
His hands were doing something restless in his lap, fidgeting with the hem of his sleeve the way he used to when he was younger and trying to look like he wasn't listening as closely as he was.
"I don't - I'm not gonna pretend I know what you're feeling right now. That'd be stupid. I just know it's not your fault. None of it is. Not the - " he gestured vaguely, encompassing the room, the elders long since filed out, the entire architecture of the arrangement pressing down on both of you, " - not any of this. You didn't ask for this any more than I did."
You pressed the back of your hand to your mouth, aware of how close you were to losing whatever tenuous grip you had left, and hating yourself a little for it, hating that after everything - after thirteen years of building a life specifically constructed to be far away from all of this - you were still capable of falling apart in a room in the Gojo estate like nothing had changed at all.
"Hey," Satoru said again, softer this time, shifting closer on the mats. "Hey, don't - c'mon, don't do that."
"I'm not doing anything," you said, except your voice cracked directly through the middle of the sentence, betraying you completely, and the first real sob broke loose before you could stop it, ugly and involuntary, the kind that arrived from somewhere lower than your throat.
"Oh - okay. Okay, yeah, you're definitely doing something." There was a beat of him clearly panicking, of him visibly deciding what to do with his hands, and then he simply gave up deciding and pulled you into him instead, one arm sliding around your shoulders and the other coming up against the back of your head, guiding you against his chest with more certainty than the fumbling moment before it had suggested he possessed.
The hug felt exactly like it had years ago. That was the thought that arrived first, absurdly, before grief had the chance to fully take hold - the same too-tight grip, the same refusal to loosen even slightly, his arms locking around you.
Except back then you'd been the one holding on, the fifteen-year-old boy stiff and furious in your arms on a gravel driveway, and now it was reversed so completely you almost couldn't stand it, his chin resting against the crown of your head, his hand pressed flat and steady against your back like he'd done this before, like some part of him had been waiting thirteen years for exactly this.
You cried into his chest for longer than you were proud of. Somewhere in the middle of it you became distantly, mortifyingly aware of the picture you must have made - thirty-two years old, sobbing into the front of a twenty-eight-year-old man's shirt like a child who'd scraped her knee, while he murmured things against your hair that didn't amount to much of anything, just soft, wordless sounds meant to fill space, the occasional "I know" or "I got you" that didn't mean anything and meant everything simultaneously. You felt, distinctly, like the child in the room. He was the one holding steady. He was the one who hadn't fallen apart, not visibly, not yet, and you weren't sure if that was strength or if it was simply years of practice swallowing things whole before anyone could see.
Eventually the crying wore itself down into something quieter, hiccupping breaths and the occasional tremor, and you pulled back just enough to press the heel of your hand against your eyes, feeling how swollen and raw they'd gone, how sore the skin felt already.
"God," you managed, sniffling, attempting something like composure and falling well short of it, "this must feel gross for you."
Satoru blinked. "What?"
"This." You gestured weakly between the two of you, your voice still thick and unsteady. "Crying all over you too like this. It's - I don't know, it's a lot."
He lifted one finger, like he was about to deliver a lecture on something painfully obvious. "Crying's normal. It's healthy. I cried when Future Gohan died."
You laughed - a real one this time, weak and watery, dragging your sleeve across your eyes. "No, I mean - " you tried again, shaking your head, "marrying me. This whole thing. It's got to feel like marrying your grandma, or something close to it."
He went quiet.
It wasn't the kind of quiet that preceded a joke. It was longer than that, heavier, his expression settling into something you didn't immediately recognize on him.
"I never thought of you like that," he said finally, and his voice had dropped into a register you hadn't heard from him yet. "Not once. Not as - old, or whatever you're trying to say. Not as anyone's grandma." He paused, and his eyes seemed to fix on you with an intensity that made you want to look away and unable to.
"Satoru - "
"I'm not saying anything," he said quickly, too quickly, the old deflecting rhythm trying and failing to reassert itself, some ghost of the teasing grin flickering weakly at the corner of his mouth before dying out entirely. "I'm just saying you're wrong. About the grandma thing." His hand hadn't left your back. It stayed there, steady, thumb moving once in a slow, absent line along your shoulder blade, like he wasn't entirely aware he was doing it. "I've thought about you a lot of ways over the years. That's never once been one of them."
You stared at him, unsure what to do with your face, unsure what to do with any of it.
The silence stretched long enough to become something else entirely.
You looked away first.
You weren't sure why - only that his eyes had taken on a quality you weren't equipped for. You focused on the far wall instead, the faint grain of the wood paneling, the pale light coming through the shoji screen, anything that wasn't the weight of his hand still resting against your shoulder blade.
"It's late," you said finally, uselessly.
"It is," he agreed. He didn't move.
The clan's letter had arrived three days after the formal meeting. Not hand-delivered this time - left on the low table in the room you had been assigned in Satoru's residence, as though someone had simply walked in while you slept. You'd unfolded it over your morning coffee, still half-asleep, and had to read the second paragraph twice before the language settled into meaning.
It was not a request. It wasn't even framed as one. The phrasing was precise and bloodless, the kind of language that had clearly been drafted, reviewed, and agreed upon by multiple people who regarded the subject matter as administrative rather than human.
Something about continuity of lineage.
Something about the particular urgency given the current holder's age and the window of optimal - you had stopped reading at optimal.
There was a date circled at the bottom of the second page. Clean, black ink. No explanation accompanying it, as though none was needed.
You had sat with the letter in your hands for a very long time.
The date on the letter was today.
You were acutely aware of that when Satoru slid back the door to the room that evening, shrugging out of something and rolling his neck the way he always did when he'd been sitting too long in formal company. He was in lighter clothes now, the structured formality he wore around the clan traded for something easier - a plain dark shirt, the collar open, hair a little disheveled. He looked, irritatingly, entirely comfortable in his own body in the way he always had.
"God, I was beginning to think they were never leaving," he said, dropping onto the cushion across from you. He reached for the small cup of tea you hadn't finished and drank from it without asking. "I could actually feel my will to live leaving my body during the last hour. Like - physically. There it went."
You watched him.
His ears were pink.
Not flushed red, not dramatically so - just faintly, at the tips, the way skin goes when blood comes up too quickly. He was talking a little faster than usual, his hands not quite settling anywhere, picking up the empty cup, setting it back down, pushing it slightly to the left and then back again. He met your eyes and then glanced to the side and then met them again.
He knew what day it was too.
"Satoru," you said.
"Mm."
"We need to talk about it."
A pause. His jaw shifted once. "Talk about what?"
"You know what."
He was quiet for a moment, and then the corner of his mouth came up in that familiar curve, the one that bought him time.
"I have no idea what you're referring to. You're going to have to be much more specific, I'm afraid, I have a lot going on mentally - "
"The letter," you said. "The - whatever they called it. The window."
The word landed the way you'd intended it to. His expression flickered for half a second before the performance reasserted itself, though it sat less easily on him now. He picked up the empty cup again and set it down again.
"Right," he said.
"I've been thinking," you started, keeping your voice level. "There are other ways. Medically. A surrogate - or insemination, there are clinics that handle exactly this kind of - "
Satoru laughed. Not unkindly, but genuinely - a short, startled sound that dissolved almost immediately into something more rueful.
"Yeah," he said, "I'm going to need you to picture the faces in that meeting room if I walked in and proposed clinical insemination as the solution to the Gojo heir situation." He tilted his head, performing consideration. "Actually, do picture it. Take your time. I want you to really see it."
Despite everything, something almost like a smile caught at the edge of your mouth.
"I'm serious," you said.
"So am I. Genuinely. Gramps would have a spiritual crisis. The older one - you know the one, looks like he was personally there for the Heian period - I think he might dissolve." He paused. "Besides," he added, more quietly, the joke thinning out at the edges, "that's not - it wouldn't be proper. They wouldn't accept it. You know that."
"That can't be the only reason," you said.
He didn't answer immediately. His eyes had drifted to somewhere around your collarbone, and he redirected them with what looked like a conscious effort.
"It's not," he said simply.
The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago.
You looked at him - the line of his jaw, the faint tension in his shoulders beneath the relaxed posture he was performing, the way his hand on the table had gone still with something that wasn't quite calm.
"I don't know," you said. "I keep thinking - this just feels wrong. Like I'd be taking something from you." You chose the next words carefully. "You should do this with someone you love, Satoru. Not because a room full of old men circled a date on a calendar and handed it to you."
The silence that followed was a different kind from before.
He didn't laugh. He didn't deflect. His mouth opened, and then closed, and then opened again, and nothing came out for long enough that you watched the muscle in his jaw work once, twice, some internal argument resolving or failing to resolve behind his expression.
When he spoke, his voice was quieter, and the performance had gone out of it almost entirely.
"I'm not a kid," he said. "I know what I'm doing."
Some misguided instinct toward lightening to conversation made you raise an eyebrow.
"Do you?" you said, and it came out gently, genuinely meant as a joke, the kind of thing you'd have said to him at fifteen to ease the tension between you.
Satoru's lips pushed against yours after, kissing you.
No preamble - no warning, no gradual leaning in. He closed the distance between you in one motion and his mouth was on yours before either of you had fully processed the decision, warm and a little clumsy at the start, startled by his own momentum. You went completely still. Your hands, which had been folded in your lap, stayed there, suspended.
It lasted only a few seconds before he pulled back slightly - not away, just enough to breathe, his forehead nearly against yours, his eyes open and searching your face with an expression that held nothing of his usual armor in it whatsoever.
Your heart was doing something extremely impolite in your chest.
"Satoru - " you started.
He kissed you again. Slower this time, more certain. His hand came up to the side of your jaw, careful and then less careful, and you felt yourself lean into it slightly before your brain fully caught up with your body.
When he broke away that time his composure had lost the battle entirely. His face was deeply, helplessly red, from his cheeks to the tips of his ears, and his breathing had picked up in a way that he was clearly and unsuccessfully trying to conceal. But his hand stayed where it was, fingers warm against your jaw, and his eyes didn't leave yours.
Then his other hand found your waist.
It started careful, but the restraint slipped almost immediately, and what followed was less a seduction and more the collapse of something that had been held under pressure for a long time. His hands moved to your back, your hips, pulling you in with an urgency that bypassed graceful entirely. His fingers caught in your hair, your name half-formed in his throat.
"Hey - " you managed.
He didn't stop. His mouth found the side of your jaw.
"Satoru. Wait - "
Still moving, fingers pressing gently at your lower back.
"Okay - " you pulled back slightly, getting a hand between you, pressing lightly against his chest. Your face was so hot you could feel it in your ears. "Slow down, Casanova."
He stopped.
Immediately, completely - hands going still where they were, not withdrawing but not pressing either, just suspended mid-motion like something paused. His forehead dropped forward until it nearly touched your shoulder, and you could feel him exhale - one long, unsteady breath against the fabric of your clothes. He didn't move for a moment.
Then he lifted his head.
His face was extraordinary. Not embarrassed exactly, though the red had deepened considerably, but caught between two things he couldn't quite reconcile - the obvious, visible wanting that he was apparently done pretending wasn't there, and something else, the part of him that had always paid attention, that had always been better at watching you than you'd noticed.
"Okay," he said. His voice was rougher than it had been. He cleared his throat, which did very little. "Okay."
A pause.
"Do you want me to stop," he asked, low and direct, the joke entirely gone from his tone now, "or just - slow down."
His hands were still resting at your sides. Present, patient, making no assumptions.
The room was very quiet. Outside the shoji screen, somewhere further in the house, something creaked and settled.
You looked at him - flushed, undone, still watching you with an attention that had nothing casual left in it - and you took a breath.
And then you didn't say anything for a very long time.
The silence wasn't uncomfortable exactly, or maybe it was and you were just too overwhelmed to register discomfort as a distinct sensation on top of everything else. Your heart was going at a pace you were fairly certain was medically notable, loud enough that you were briefly grateful he couldn't hear it.
You were trying, very carefully, to sort through the tangled mess of what you were feeling - because there were at least two separate things happening and they were not the same thing, and it mattered that they were not the same thing.
There was the clan. The letter. The circled date and the bloodless language about lineage and windows, the whole machinery of expectation that had been running in the background of your life since you were thirteen years old and a white envelope had arrived and changed the shape of your future without asking. That thing made you feel small and managed and profoundly exhausted, and whatever you did tonight, you did not want to do it because of that.
And then there was - this. Him.
Satoru, sitting close enough that you could still feel the warmth of his hands even though they were barely touching you now, watching your face.
You were still working through this when Satoru made a sound beside you.
It was not quite a groan. It was the close relative of one - something swallowed halfway, bitten back, but not quite successfully. You glanced over to find him sitting rigidly upright, jaw set, staring at the far wall with the expression of a man practicing extraordinary self-restraint and finding the exercise deeply unpleasant.
"You're killing me," he said. His voice had gone slightly strangled. "I just want you to know that. Factually. For the record."
You blinked. "Satoru - "
"I don't wanna wait any longer." He said it quickly, turning to look at you, and caught whatever was on your face immediately, hands coming up in a gesture of surrender. "Not - that's not - I don't mean it like that. I'm not - " He exhaled hard, scrubbing a hand through his white hair and succeeding only in making it worse. "I mean I don't want to keep pretending. I don't want to do this because some ancient panel of miserable old men put a date on a piece of paper. That's what I mean."
He dropped his hand. Looked at you sideways.
"The waiting is still also genuinely going to kill me," he added, quieter. "But that part's not your problem. Just - stating it."
Despite everything, something close to a laugh escaped you before you could catch it. Nervous, a little strangled, barely qualifying as a laugh at all - but real.
"You're unbelievable," you said.
"I've been told." He turned toward you more fully. "I just - you should know it wasn't nothing. For me. It wasn't the clan, or the arrangement, or - any of that. It was never that."
You looked at him. Something in your chest did something complicated.
"I'm sure it was obvious," he said, and his voice came out flatter than it probably should have, like he was trying to make the words matter-of-fact and they weren't cooperating. "I liked you. Always have."
The nervous laugh came again, and this time it had a slightly desperate quality. "Satoru, come on."
"I'm not joking."
"You were a child," you said, hearing your own voice tip toward something almost pleading, like if you said it plainly enough it would reorganize the facts into something more manageable. "I was practically - you treated me like a sister. Like family."
His expression shifted.
It was subtle, and it was very specific, and it was the kind of shift that told you clearly he was deciding something - weighing it, measuring the distance between what was true and what was safe to say out loud, and coming to a conclusion that surprised even him.
The silence lasted long enough that you almost filled it.
And then he said it.
Quickly. Slightly strangled. Eyes wide and the color in his face gone from flushed to something approaching catastrophic.
"I masturbated to a photo of you practically every night."
You did not move.
You were fairly certain you stopped breathing.
"There was a photo," he said, the words tumbling out in a rush, like he was trying to get them out before he lost his nerve entirely. "I know it's going to sound bad, but you went to the beach with your sister, and there was a picture of you in a - the bikini."
He stopped. His jaw worked silently for a moment.
"I kept it," he added, and the admission seemed to cost him something. His face went from flushed to a shade of red that looked genuinely painful, like all the blood in his body had decided to relocate to his cheeks at once. "I'm going to stop talking," he said finally, voice barely above a whisper, and closed his eyes like he was genuinely considering whether he could will himself out of existence through sheer force of embarrassment.
You opened your mouth.
"Okay," you said, a little too quickly, your mind reeling with excuses, justifications. "Okay, well - you know. You were a boy. You go through puberty. That's - I mean, that's completely normal. That's just - that's a normal thing that happens."
You were aware, even as you said it, that you were reassuring yourself more than him.
Satoru's expression screwed up. Not embarrassment exactly - something more like frustration, like you'd handed him the wrong answer and he was physically pained by it. His brow furrowed, his mouth pulled to one side, and for a moment he looked so much like the fifteen year old who'd twisted his face when you said something he didn't like that your chest did something strange and complicated.
"I wanted to kiss you," he said flatly.
You blinked. "Satoru - "
"Not in a - " He exhaled hard through his nose. "I'm talking about - " He stopped. Pressed his mouth shut. Started again, slower, like he was choosing each word with more care. "I wanted to be with you."
"Okay," you said carefully, "I hear you, but my sister - "
He shook his head once, not unkindly, but firmly. The way someone shakes their head when they are done letting a conversation go in a direction that avoids the point.
"I wanted you," he said.
The words were quiet. Direct. Not performed, not rehearsed - just true, sitting in the open air between you with nowhere to go.
"I wanted to get my hands on you. I wanted you to be mine." His voice dropped slightly, losing the last traces of the playful register he usually hid behind. "When the arrangement came, the new proposal. I made sure it would be you."
You didn't say anything. Something about the last few words he uttered sat with you in a way that made alarm bells ring in your head.
And then he moved.
Not fast, not dramatically - just a slow shift across the tatami, closing the distance between you in the unhurried, deliberate way of someone who had already decided and was simply waiting to see if you'd stop him. His white hair fell forward over his face with the movement, shifting across his eyes, and he didn't push it back. He just kept moving until he reached you, until there was nowhere left to close, and braced himself there - one hand settling beside yours on the tatami, close enough that his warmth registered against your skin without quite touching it.
You leaned back instinctively.
Your hands found the floor behind you, palms flat, holding you up as you put what distance you could between your face and his without actually moving away. There was still space. He hadn't taken it. He was just - there, close and flushed, his hair half across his face and his eyes somewhere between earnest and absolutely unbearable, and he was not pushing further. He was waiting.
"Can we please continue," he begged, his voice a whisper.
You think your thoughts began to cloud with red, one idea - a horrible idea - sitting between it all in plain sight.
"Satoru," you said. "Did you - did you arrange this? The marriage?"
He didn't answer.
The silence stretched a beat too long, then another, and something cold started climbing up the back of your neck. You watched his face for the easy denial, the scoff, the what, are you kidding me that should have come immediately if the answer were no. It didn't come. His mouth stayed shut. His eyes, still close to yours, went carefully, deliberately still - not blank the way a child's face goes blank when it doesn't understand a question, but blank the way a door goes blank when someone has already decided not to open it.
"Satoru."
"They can't say no to me," he said finally. Flat. Matter-of-fact, the way he might have told you what he'd eaten for breakfast.
The dread didn't hit all at once. It arrived the way cold water finds the gaps in your clothes, slow and total, filling in everywhere at once until there was nowhere left dry.
"That's not - " Your voice cracked on it. "Satoru, that's worse. Do you understand that's worse? Think about how that sounds. Think about how I'm supposed to feel, hearing that."
"I did think about it." He said this plainly too, like an accusation of thoughtlessness was the one thing he refused to accept. "I thought about you. About this. For a long time."
"That's not the same thing."
"You'll - " He stopped, started again, more careful this time, like he was choosing the words for how they'd land rather than how true they were. "You'll learn to like it. I'll give you everything. Anything you want. As long as I have you."
You felt your stomach drop somewhere below the floor.
"Satoru, that isn't - you can't just - " You shook your head, grasping for the one thing that had to still mean something to him. "My sister. She was going to marry you. She - "
"I could've cared less about your sister." He said it without heat, without even the decency of cruelty, just plain and even like he was correcting a small error in your understanding. "The only thing I liked about her was that she looked like you. In some ways."
You went very still.
There was a ringing that started somewhere behind your ears, high and thin. You thought, distantly, that you might actually be sick - that your body might simply decide this was too much information to hold and reject it the way it would reject bad food.
"Satoru." Your voice didn't sound like yours. "That is my sister."
He didn't flinch. That was the part that undid you - not the words themselves, which were already enough to hollow you out. As though none of it had ever once occurred to him that this might be a monstrous thing to say out loud.
You started to pull back. Away from him, away from the warmth of him at your side, away from the whole shape of what you were only now beginning to understand had never once been a coincidence - not the letter, not the timeline, not any of it.
Something shifted in his face. A tightening around the eyes - not anger, not yet, but something that was waiting just behind patience.
"I don't - " you began. "I need a second, I need to - "
You moved to put your hand on his chest, to press back, to put even a few inches of deliberate space between you and the particular expression he was wearing. Not to push him away entirely. Just to breathe.
Your hand stopped.
Not because you chose to stop it. Not because he grabbed your wrist or blocked you. It just - stopped, a few centimeters from the fabric of his yukata, as though the air between your palm and his chest had quietly thickened into something solid. Your fingers stayed spread. Nothing hurt. You simply could not close the remaining distance.
You stared at your own hand.
You pressed forward, gently, experimentally. The resistance held.
"Satoru."
He hadn't moved. He was watching you with an expression that was very careful and very controlled, and that was somehow worse than anything else he could have done. His jaw was set. There was a quality to the space around him now - something still, something sealed, the dust near the hem of his yukata hanging at an angle that made no sense with the air in the room.
"Did you just - " You pulled your hand back slowly. Tested the edge of it. The invisible resistance gave as you withdrew, returned when you reached forward again.
Infinity.
The word surfaced with a cold, clarifying horror. You knew what it was. You had grown up in the orbit of this world long enough to have heard the stories, to have understood, in an abstract way, what the particular ability meant. That nothing reached him unless he allowed it to.
But it worked both ways.
For a moment, silence filled the room, a dreadful length of silence that made you wonder if you were dreaming everything.
And then, his mouth opened, his tone cautious and words punctual.
"I made sure that it wasn't painful - for her."
His voice was quiet.
It was also the most frightening thing he had said to you all night.
You lowered your hand to your lap. You kept your eyes on his face as horror began to sweep over your features.
Something in him flinched. Barely. A small contraction around the eyes, a tightening of the mouth that looked like the beginning of an apology and then stopped being one.
His hand lifted slowly. One deliberate movement, palm open, like he was trying to show you he was not holding a weapon.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "I'd never hurt you."
The air between you stayed still.
You stayed still.
Neither of you moved. Your eyes darted to where the hallway was, just behind the thin screen - just a few steps away. Your hands tensed on the floor, before your legs began to unwind themselves in one quick and panicked movement. You raised yourself, your eyes leaving his the moment you stood and darted towards the shoji screens.
Just as quick as you stood up to ran, barely getting in a half-step, an invisible and crushing weight engulfed your body. An invisible force pushing you down within seconds, your hands falling in front of you to cushion the fall, leaving you on all fours and the tremor of adrenaline coursing through every vein in your body. The force increased on your back like sand being loaded onto you, the air around you sounded like static.
"You'll forgive me - you will," he mumbles breathlessly as he comes up behind you, his figure engulfing yours. The words sounded more as though he was speaking to himself than he was to you. "You'll have to."
Everything happened so quick you barely had an opportunity to fight it - not that you'd be able to as he exploited the restraining force of Infinity. Your clothes stripped off of your body in one quick movement, his face had the pointed focus, every once in a while daring to look up at you before he shed his own clothes after. He cooed with wet kisses, when the tears began to roll consistently down the sides of your face, wiping them away with his hands that felt rough at the fingertips, soft at the palm.
The same fingers that would dip below the band of your underwear, experimentally prodding the lips of your cunt as is just wanting to feel the plushness of it. You hated how a bloom of red settled onto his face when his finger ran along the inner lips, sliding with enough slick and ease that made your heart pound harder.
His cock twitched in his own boxers, you could see the horrifying outline of it, the flushed and bulbous tip peeking out from the top. You could see the beading of pre-cum before slowly dripping down the head and collecting on his boxers.
It wouldn't fit.
Your muscles ached with energy, wanting to move, practically tensing with the sheer need to squirm. And yet you laid there, frozen by nothing, your hands pinned above your head.
Then, slowly, very slowly, he pushed a finger against a ring of muscle, pushing against his finger with a wet resistance. The force made something hot pool in your belly, feeling the muscles in your legs wanting to ripple with a shiver. You bit down hard on your bottom lip as he pushed with a bit more force, breaching it, and immediately feeling his finger pump against your walls eagerly. The room filled with the smallest hint of squelching alongside your muffled moans. You were sure your bottom lip was bleeding, just as bright and red as your face was, realizing that your body was betraying you.
He watched your face despite it all. His eyes obviously watching your lips with rapt attention, and then he'd look back down. Slowing his pace before adding another finger, pumping faster.
"Does it - ," he huffed out between a heavy and hot breath as he fucked his fingers into you with a brutal yet keening force. "It feels good, right?"
He met your face once more, looking at you with pure black swallowing blue. He looked manic if anything, as if he was the happiest man alive.
You whimpered before another sharp moan left your mouth, your bottom lip feeling too raw before being overshadowed with the slick drag of his fingers.
"Fuck," he muttered with a small groan.
There was one last drag against your walls, his fingers leaving your pulsating heat. Within one motion he had shimmied his boxers off with a feverish manner, his hands twitching with the movements when his cock bobbed against his lower abdomen. Needle thin hairs leading down into a tuff of white.
"I'll make you feel really good," he said, his hands gripping the meat of your thighs as he situated himself between your legs.
He ran his hands along your skin, momentarily gripping your waist before sliding back up to your legs. He gripped onto them with a bruising force, pushing them upward into your chest, your body folding into a mating press that had you wincing from the stretch of muscles trying to accommodate the position.
"We have to produce a heir," he said. "I'll make sure that it sticks."
A strangled sob left your mouth, something similar to a beg as his thumb pushed his cock between the folds of your cunt. His cock felt wet, even wetter than you did, rubbing along the inner lips with ease. You could hear it. The tip occasionally catching onto something when it dipped just enough, pushing against it. Your eyes widened in fear, the sheer pressure of only his tip teasing against the resistance was enough for you to realize that it'd be too much - he would not fit - he shouldn't.
"God, you're going to be so - " he cut himself off with a sound between a moan and a whimper as he pushed the tip in. " - so tight. Fuck."
He was going to split you in half. Tear you.
Your cunt fluttered as he attempted to push more of his length in, his cock twitching as he agonizingly scraped against your walls, meeting a slow resistance. Visible sweat began to perspire along his forehead as he attempted to completely sheath himself inside of you.
And when he did, completely bottoming out, you couldn't help but let out a breath you didn't know you were holding. Your chest tightening and arms sore from its restlessness, but even worse, the shiver of pleasure running along your spine as his cock kissed all the right spots, the tip grinding into your cervix.
"I love you," he said breathlessly, his chest rising and falling as he met your eyes. "I love you so much."
The heat from the skin of his pelvis leaving you as he pulled away before snapping his hips forward with a sharp intensity. His head fell forward, an audible gasp before he repeated the movement, faster and harder.
It wasn't long before he developed a rhythm - a brutal pace in both speed and force as the slapping of skin filled the room. Your moans strained, but rivaling the sounds as every sticky kiss from the tip of his cock to your cervix had your skin pricking with heat. Something warm boiling at the pit of your stomach.
He began babbling amidst it all. Mindless words that you didn't want to pick up, repeating "mine" like a curse, "my wife", or small breaks between your name and "I love you".
The worst is when he forced your legs closer to your chest, impossibly folding your body into yourself more than you thought it could take. The lower half of your body no longer touching the floor as he pummeled. Contorting and holding your body in any way he wanted with ease.
"I can't wait," he managed to say, voice rough but coherent as he watched your face. "You're going to look so good - so, so fucking good when you're finally round with my baby."
You wanted to cry. Instead, everything went white at the edges, your vision fraying into static as sensation outpaced thought, his pace quickening, each movement harder and more erratic than the last. Something warm began to well around his cock, the plush and slick walls tightening like a vice around him.
"Fuck," he breathed, voice cracking. "Take it - all of it."
Something in him seemed to break loose, all at once. His whole body went rigid before folding forward, a broken sound leaving his throat like relief and devastation at once.
Satoru didn't move away. He stayed close, his breath ragged against your skin, white strands damp and stuck to his forehead. You felt hollowed out, wrung through, your body sore in ways you couldn't yet name and your mind refusing, point-blank, to catch up with what had just happened.
Your breathing fell into a similar rhythm with his, although his pants much heavier as if trying to intake as much air as possible.
Your hands still pinned above your head, muscles pulling to curl your fingers and expecting to meet resistance from his Infinity.
Your fingers curled despite it, moving freely with ease, as if nothing had been there to hold you the entire time.
⤷ ゛ click here to request / talk to me ! | click here to access masterlist ! ˎˊ˗
Your soft boyfriend finally learned how to talk dirty. A little too well, actually.
⤷ Part I
cw: NSFW. dirty talk, degradation kink, light bondage, soft-dom nerdjo, rough sex, light choking, established relationship, fluff at the end.
cr: mauvay
Weeks had passed since that night in his dorm.
You’d kept fucking. Often. Really often. You were just that insatiable for each other. Sometimes it stayed soft and sweet, the way Satoru naturally defaulted to. Other times, you gently pushed him further.
He practiced, and he improved a lot. The grip in your hair had gotten firmer, the thrusts had gotten less careful. But he still called you “baby” more than anything else. He still avoided the filthiest words. “Slut” had barely made another appearance since that first night, and at this point you were almost certain he quietly hated it, and that it would never become part of his brand-new, still-awkward pack of dirty talk.
Still, whatever form it took, sex with Satoru was always too fucking good.
And that was exactly why, after celebrating the results of your biggest project of the semester with your best friends, you found yourself heading straight to his apartment, already looking forward to dinner, his arms around you, and eventually crawling into bed with him.
You were still buzzing from the drinks at the bar when you finally made it back to his place.
“Toru? I’m already here,” you said as you opened the door and stepped inside, glancing around for him as you dropped your bag by the door and kicked off your heels.
Suddenly, warm arms slid around your waist from behind, pulling you flush against a familiar chest. His mouth brushed the side of your neck once, then again, slower.
You turned in his arms, surprised.
He kissed you like he’d been thinking about it all evening. No hesitation, no greeting first. Just his mouth on yours, deep and hungry, one hand sliding up into your hair while the other stayed locked around your waist. You made a small sound of surprise against his lips before melting into it, kissing him back just as hard.
When he finally pulled back, his blue eyes were already half-lidded behind his glasses.
“Hi, baby,” he said softly. “Missed you.”
Before you could answer, he was kissing you again, walking you backward toward the bedroom without breaking contact. Your back hit the doorframe for a second, then the door itself, and suddenly you were inside his room, the door kicking shut behind you.
You barely had time to process how different this felt—how forward he was being—before his hands were already under your top, sliding it up and over your head. He tossed it somewhere behind him. Your bra followed a moment later. He kept going, his mouth trailing down your throat while his fingers worked the zipper of your skirt.
The fabric pooled at your feet. You stepped out of it, and all that was left were your panties.
Satoru guided you onto the bed, gently pushing you onto your back. You went willingly, still a little stunned by this sudden shift in him. He reached into the drawer of the nightstand and pulled out a soft black ribbon. Then he took both your wrists, lifted them above your head, and tied them together with careful, practiced knots.
“Keep them there,” he said “Above your head. Don’t move them.”
You stared up at him and nodded, dazed.
What got into him?
He was still fully dressed — sweater, jeans, glasses perfectly in place — while you lay there in nothing but panties, wrists bound, chest rising and falling a little faster than normal. The contrast was so hot it made you squirm under his gaze.
Satoru exhaled slowly, almost like he was steadying himself. Then he reached up and carefully removed his glasses.
He held them by one arm for a second, turning them once in his fingers like he was deciding something. His blue eyes looked even brighter without the lenses, locked on you. There was still a faint flush high on his cheeks—the one that never quite disappeared when he got like this—but he didn’t stop. He leaned over you.
The cold metal of the glasses brushed your lower lip first. He dragged it across your mouth, then pressed a little firmer. You parted your lips in response, and he slid the arm of the glasses between them, just enough for you to feel the cool weight against your tongue. When he finally pulled them free, a thin string of spit connected the frame to your mouth for a second before it broke.
He didn’t wipe it off. Instead he dragged the wet frame down your chin, along the side of your throat, then across your collarbone. He moved lower, circling one breast, then the other, the thin arm gliding over soft skin until it found a nipple. He pressed there, rubbing the hard peak.
“Satoru—” you moaned, arching your back.
“Look at you,” he said, voice rough. “Already so fucking responsive. So easy for me. Smartest girl in your class, highest grade on the project… and here you are, tied up on my bed, getting wet because I’m using my glasses on you.”
He dragged them lower, over your ribs, across your stomach, stopping just above the waistband of your panties. You were already breathing harder. Your thighs shifted restlessly against the sheets.
Satoru’s free hand settled on your hip. His thumb stroked once, almost absently, before he caught himself and tightened his grip.
“Stay still,” he ordered, though the command still carried that soft edge he could never fully erase.
You bit your lip and stayed still, thanking whatever had gotten into your boyfriend tonight.
He kept going lower until the frame pressed right over the front of your panties. He rubbed slowly up and down. The pressure was light at first, then firmer.
You fought to keep your hands still. Your hips twitched anyway.
“Greedy,” he said, testing the word. “Look at how you’re moving. Can’t even keep still when I’m barely touching you. Such a needy little slut.”
You whimpered. He actually called you a slut.
You didn’t even get time to process it before he shifted the glasses, angling them so one thin arm slid under the waistband of your panties. The cool metal slipped lower, right against your bare pussy, nestled between your folds. You gasped at the sudden contact.
Satoru pushed a little further, letting the arm rest against your clit, then slowly moved it back and forth. It slid easily with how wet you were.
“Fuck—look at that,” he murmured, watching the metal disappear under the fabric. “You’re getting them all wet and messy. You’re such a fucking whore.” He rubbed faster. “I could tell you to do anything right now and you’d do it without even questioning it.”
“Yes—fuck, I’d do anything—”
Your wrists strained against the ribbon. Soft, broken sounds kept leaving your throat. You were already so close it was almost embarrassing.
Satoru noticed. He pulled the glasses free and set them carefully on the nightstand, like they were something precious. Then he hooked his fingers into the side of your panties and dragged them down, exposing you completely.
For a moment he just stared.
You watched his throat work as he swallowed. His cock was visibly hard in his jeans, straining against the zipper.
“You’ve been walking around all night with your friends,” he said, voice low and rough, “celebrating, looking perfect… and the whole time this cunt was waiting for me, wasn’t it? Waiting to get used.”
He finally unzipped his jeans and pushed them down just enough. His cock sprang free, impossibly hard and flushed. He climbed back over you, one hand bracing beside your head, the other wrapping loosely around your throat.
Your eyes widened.
“You ready for me?” he asked, voice rough. The soft edge was still there, buried under the filth, but it was fighting hard.
You nodded, almost frantic.
“Please—”
Satoru lined himself up and pushed in with one long, slow thrust that stole the air from both of you.
He bottomed out and stayed there for a second, breathing hard. His hand tightened just slightly around your throat.
“Fuck… look at you,” he muttered. “Taking every inch like the needy cockslut you are. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You were dying to have my big cock in your greedy cunt.”
He pulled almost all the way out and slammed back in, harder this time. The wet sound of it filled the room.
“Such a fucking whore for it.”
His hips set a steady, deep rhythm, each thrust punching the air out of your lungs. The hand on your throat stayed firm but controlled—thumb stroking once almost tenderly before he remembered himself and pressed a little harder.
“God, you’re so wet. Dripping all over my cock like a cumdump. Is this what the popular girl does when no one’s looking? Spreads her legs for the physics nerd and begs to get degraded?”
He angled his hips, hitting that spot that made your vision blur. Your mouth fell open on a broken sound.
“That’s it. Make those pretty noises for me. Let everyone in the building know what a desperate little whore you are. Taking cock this deep and still looking like you want more. Fucking insatiable.”
Inside his head, the soft, hopelessly in-love part of him was screaming. He just wanted to untie your wrists and pull you into his arms. He wanted to call you baby and press kisses to your forehead and tell you how proud he was of your project while you rode him and used him however you wanted.
But he’d practiced. He’d rehearsed every filthy thing and was determined to get them all out.
So he kept going.
“Pretty sure you’d love to keep this cunt stuffed full of my cock for the rest of your life,” he said, thrusting harder. “You’d love to keep your legs open, waiting for me to use it whenever I want. My personal little toy... That’s all you’re good for right now, isn’t it?”
Tears were already starting to gather at the corners of your eyes from how overwhelmed you felt.
“What do you think your classmates would say if they saw you like this? They’d know you’re the chemistry department’s secret whore. They’d know you’re just as good at taking your boyfriend’s cock as you are in the lab.”
He shifted the angle again, driving into you with short, deep strokes that made the bed creak. The hand on your throat tightened just enough to make your head spin in the best way.
“You’re squeezing me so hard. Greedy little hole can’t get enough. Bet if I pulled out right now you’d beg me to put it back in. You’d say anything, wouldn’t you? Call yourself a slut, a cumdump. You’re just that cockhungry”
You were past coherent words. Soft, wrecked whimpers and broken moans were all you could manage. Your wrists pulled uselessly at the ribbon—you were dying to free yourself and grab his hair.
“Satoru— please—”
Satoru leaned down closer, mouth brushing your ear, voice dropping into something darker and more strained.
“I’m going to fill this slutty little cunt up. You’re going to take every drop like the good fucking slut you are. And tomorrow you’re going to walk around campus with my cum still inside you, acting like the perfect student while your pussy remembers exactly who owns it.”
The combination of the words, the pressure on your throat, and the way he kept hitting that perfect spot finally broke you.
“Oh my god—Satoru—Shit!”
You came hard, tears spilling over, a long broken sob tearing out of your throat as your body clenched around him. Satoru followed right after, burying himself as deep as he could and spilling inside you with a low, wrecked sound that was pure him underneath all the filth.
He stayed there for a few long seconds, breathing hard against your neck, hand still loosely around your throat. Then, carefully, he loosened his grip completely and reached up to untie your wrists. His fingers were trembling slightly.
Once your hands were free he brought them down gently, pressing soft kisses to the faint marks the ribbon had left, like he couldn’t help himself.
He stayed inside you a moment longer, forehead resting against yours, eyes soft and a little dazed. Those big blue puppy eyes were already back in all their glory. Then he finally spoke, voice quiet and warm, the filthy edge completely gone.
“Congratulations on your success, baby. I’m so proud of you” He kissed you gently. “I wanted to give you something special tonight. I hope I did better this time.”
You just stared at him for a second, still trying to catch your breath.
Better?
Your brain felt completely scrambled. You had never come that hard in your entire life. You weren’t even sure what the fuck had just happened.
“…Toru,” you finally managed, voice rough.
“Mhm?”
“Next time you’re going to smack my ass till I can’t think straight while you say all of that again.” You paused, then added, completely serious, “Fuck it. You should slap me too.”
Satoru’s eyes went wide. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Then he let out a long, defeated sigh and rubbed his eyes with one hand.
“Baby... I’m starting to think you enjoy watching me malfunction.”
Gaz has personal beef with delivery man because, for some unknown reason, they always give him your packages.
You, his neighbor, who's two houses down with a clearly marked mailbox.
Or...he used to have beef with the mailman, until he knocked on your door one day instead of leaving the mail on your porch. The prettiest damn thing he's ever seen. Warm in your pajamas, clearly only having woke up a bit ago.
You blinked so sweet at him before asking "uhm? Can I help you, sir?"
Gaz spent...far too long fantasizing about you. About that lovely smile, how soft and gentle you are in every movement. Sometimes he'll spot you watering your garden and somehow you make those grass stained overalls look adorable.
The next time he incorrectly receives your mail, his entire face burns hotter than fire.
He opts to leave it on the porch this time.
Meanwhile, you have the mortifying experience of opening your door wondering where that handsome neighbor is only to find your bad dragon order was not shipped with discreet packaging.
The next time gaz sees you, he can hardly get a word out. Mind conjuring up images of that giant, knotted monster toy and trying to compare it to the sweet thing that moves worms off the pavement.
Dad bf!Simon, Like ruffling your hair, pats to the ass, checking your outfit all curt like that makes you feel all confident (lifting your chin up, fixing your shirt, kissing your forehead). Helping you calm down when you’ve got big emotions you can’t describe. Sitting you in his lap, rubbing your back.
Or telling you to “Watch your mouth.” When you get too smart. Or drawling out his words, “Coool it,” when you’re doing too much.
Doesn’t mind wrangling you up out of the truck and making you apologize to the rest of the 141 after being a brat for half the night, drawling out your name, a warning, leans against the hood. The much needed cigarette already to his lips. And you’re a hiccuping and babbling mess while you apologize, it’s all embarrassing because it not like you. You know that, but it’s all too much, tears burning your cheeks as they fall.
You wipe your tears with your wrists, eyes glancing at Simon and more tears building up. Letting out the littlest meek of ‘Dad’
He’s scuff, one end of his lip curving upward, “Fuckin hell, come ‘ere.”
You’re lucky you’re cute, adorable and his, gently tugging you into his chest by the back of your neck. Letting your feet stumble as they catch up to his movements, your sobs get muffled into his shirt. Poor thing doesn’t even know what’s wrong with you, Simon does though.
“Kids just stressed, lil things more than tired.” Simon explains to the men who are all ‘aww’ing’, talking as if you’re not there. Just small, by his side.
“Still got her workin mate?” Gaz asks.
“‘F she likes it, ‘f it’s too much I’ll pull the plug…” his thumb rubs your nape, feeling his arms wrap around you, voice coming out so much softer, “But… can’t say no to ‘er.”
a/n: oh shut up his is cute!! You’re his baby🥺 Im actually get Deja Vu and might have written this already ☠️☠️
gamechangershow
titsay
stormborns
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
romaincrisis
