[sargeteen]

݁ᛪ༙⋮ reiner braun . . . stop this , please . ⸝⸝ sorry, but i just can’t help it! ˶

( masterlist ) ✷ ( wattpad ) ✷ ( ao3 )

[6ives]

deaf pirate gojo satoru x siren (gender not specified) reader tw : piratexsiren AU, drowning, violence, blood, death, horror imagery, supernatural creatures, deaf gojo, siren reader, rusty writing r! is mentioned to have long hair @/ndsoda on twt (pic creds)

𝕲𝐎𝐉𝐎 𝐒𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐔 could not hear the thunder of cannons, could not hear the crack of masts splitting apart during storms, nor could he hear the drunken songs that rolled through the ship at night like waves themselves.

and yet, somehow, he was the finest navigator aboard.

freshly twenty years old. lean and sunburnt, with pale sea-salt curls constantly falling onto his sharp blue eyes. a scar split through his eyebrow, pale against skin, and another crossed the corner of his mouth.

he spoke rarely, and when he did, it was through rough hands moving faster than most men could think. the crew learned his language eventually. gojo moved through the ship like he belonged to the ocean more than the deck beneath him, felt vibrations through wood before anyone else sensed danger.

and you first saw him on a moonless night. lingering beneath the ship like a shadow beneath candlelight, crystal eyes following the silhouette leaning over the railing.

for you, sailors were easy creatures to lure.

they were lonely, greedy men. men who mistook beauty for mercy. you had drowned hundreds, sometimes gently, sometimes not. but this one-- the white haired man didn’t react when you sang.

the melody rose through black water, soft as silk. usually, by the first verse, sailors would already be stumbling toward the edge with glassy eyes and parted lips.

but this boy remained still, and your song curled around him uselessly. no widened pupils, nor turns of head-- it infuriated you. only the steady movement of his fingers against the railing as he stared into the sea.

you narrowed your eyes. impossible.

you had long dark hair drifting around you like spilled ink, tangled with pearls and bits of gold chains taken from the drowned men and women alike. your tail shimmered deep blue beneath moonlight, scales sharp as blades near the fin.

beautiful, terrifyingly beautiful.

you surfaced silently beside the ship, only your eyes visible above water. the boy looked down, and instead of fear, curiosity swirled beneath his pure blue eyes, as if he’d discovered a star fallen into the ocean.

at first, he thinks, someone fell overboard. so he grabs a rope instinctively, but then the figure doesn’t call for help, doesn’t splash. it just watches him. and the longer he stares, the more wrong it becomes.

hair floating despite no current, eyes unblinking, a face too perfect in a way humans aren’t, and beneath the water-- something massive shifting.

and instead of backing away immediately, curiosity overrides survival instinct for one fatal second.

you stared. humans never looked at you like that. they looked hungry, sometimes enchanted, perhaps with a hidden terrified soul. but never curious and so you sang louder.

nothing.

the boy tilted his head slightly, confused by your expression now. then he tapped two fingers against his own ear and shook his head once. understanding struck you like lightning. deaf.

the pirate was fucking deaf.

for the first time in nearly three centuries, you laughed. after that, you followed the ship constantly, fascination, you first made yourself believe, he was a pirate after all, eventually he would fall too.

ever since, gojo began noticing strange things.

fish gathered near the vessel in impossible numbers, storms bent away from their route. once, he glanced overboard and caught pale silver eyes beneath the waves before vanishing water swallowed them whole. he knew it was you, and so he started waiting for you at night.

every evening after the crew slept, he drifted toward the railing with a lantern in hand, and every evening, you appeared. sometimes only your eyes surfaced, sometimes your entire figure rose from the sea like something sculpted from moonlight. the first real conversation between you two happened without sound.

the white haired pirate sat cross-legged at the edge of the deck while you floated beside the ship. he pointed toward himself, then signed carefully. gojo satoru.

you watched his hands, brows furrowing, how were you supposed to know sign language? then you touched your chest, "[name]," you said aloud. he couldn’t hear it.

but he watched the shape of your mouth carefully and repeated it softly, "[name]." something strange flickered across your face.

sailors had screamed your name before, but ever spoken it gently.

weeks passed, then months, then the sea became their strange little world. gojo taught you signs, and at first, you mocked them. god, there were too many movements-- too human.

but eventually you began using them anyway, awkwardly at first. idiot, gojo signed one night after you splashed freezing water directly into his face. you grinned wickedly, idiot, you copied back incorrectly, accidentally calling him a fish instead.

he laughed so hard he nearly fell overboard, the soundless laugh shook his shoulders violently, and you stared at him longer than necessary. you realized then that you had become addicted to expressions you could never hear.

but humans and sirens were not creatures built for peace.

the captain discovered you eventually.

captain yaga was a cruel skinny man with gold teeth and a permanent smell of rum soaked into his skin. he’d noticed gojo disappearing nightly, noticed the calm waters where storms should’ve destroyed them.

and then he saw you.

beautiful enough to start wars, but valuable enough to end them, "there’s fortune in that creature," he told the crew, "sirens fetch kingdoms!" he grinned so wickedly that gojo understood immediately from their faces alone.

panic exploded through him, he signed furiously, NO. but sailors were already loading harpoons. that night, you surfaced, with no hesitation, trusting your soul, your voice with a pirate.

and found iron chains waiting. the harpoon struck through your shoulder before you could dive. blood spread black through seawater, your scream tore across the ocean. and though satoru couldn’t hear it, he saw it.

saw the agony twisting your face, the terror replacing the fury as chains dragged you toward the ship. something inside him snapped. sailors shouted and guns were fired while waves slammed against wood.

gojo moved through it like a storm given human shape. a knife buried into one sailor’s shoulder, another collapsed after smashing into the mast. captain yaga grabbed gojo by the throat and snarled something vicious.

satoru only saw his mouth moving, then he drove a blade between the captain’s ribs. once, twice, until he couldn't count anymore, until the man stopped moving. the ocean erupted violently around the ship, because sirens did not forgive cruelty.

you ripped free from the chains with blood-covered claws. waves rose monstrously high, swallowing screaming sailors whole, the ship cracked apart beneath the fury of the sea itself. and through all the destruction, you only looked at gojo. standing alone amid ruin, bleeding.

by dawn, nothing remained of the ship except wreckage drifting across endless water. the deaf pirate floated on a broken piece of mast, barely conscious. the sea beneath him glowed faintly blue. then you emerged.

in daylight, you looked less terrifying, your once sharp eyes were round around the edges, the fangs now smaller, your wound had already begun healing.

and when your eyes met his blue ones, for a long moment neither moved. then gojo lifted trembling hands. you came back. you stared at the signs carefully. you answered in imperfect movements.

thank you.

[burgojo]

07. [ DELIVERANCE GONE ]

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE VEIL BETWEEN

series masterlist | wc. 10.3k taglist ( open ) !! @kageyzma, @cigurette, @lovely-venusss, @scary-thingz, @ezzies-stuff, @livelaughlovekuni, @satoruxzide, @iglb12, @kneelarmhstrung, @holyshitelis, @literaturedog, @seventeen-x, @boredpretty, @corylaa, @5h4d3-2n1ght, @alebrasil0101, @mouuszii, @aberosexualbean, @melss, @noelslibrary, @vampyric-puppy, @curiousangell, @princesstiti14, @haitaniheux

notes. title should really be 'The Chapter Where Satoru Almost Gets It (Then Misses Completely)' but the current one sounds mysterious and way cooler. remember to like and subscribe for more pining !! :D CT-growth arc for reader beginning next chapter, everyone wish him luck :3

The quiet of the medical wing smells like antiseptic and citrus. Through Shoko's office door, cracked open, the echo of two pairs of footsteps carries through. A familiar loud laugh travels down the corridor. Shoko straightens, wincing slightly at the ache in her neck.

Her door slams open, rattling the pencil holder on her desk, and Satoru fills the doorway with a heroic pose and a bright grin.

"Shoko! Shokooo, where are you?"

"Stop shouting, Four-Eyes. You know exactly where I am."

"Details, shmetails." He bounds into the room, vibrating with barely-contained excitement. He grabs her rolling chair and drags her away from her desk to the pristine white patient bed, where he hops up and swings his legs like a child. Her chair bumps the edge of the bed and stops. "Guess what?"

"What?"

"I beat up a curse user yesterday! Not the one we were hunting – YN took care of him with one bullet, it was awesome – but one of his grunts. Still cool. Apparently he's part of some criminal organisation that mixes jujutsu crime with normie crime. Totes illegal, on all fronts." Satoru grins, leaning close. "We basically dismantled a whole operation today! Isn't that crazy?"

"Pretty crazy. It seems you're moving up in the world, going from exorcisms to manhunts," she replies with a chuckle. "Now, did you break down my door to tell me this, or are you actually critically injured and about to die in my office?"

A second figure steps into her office, holding two ice cream bars. You greet them both with a soft hello, giving Satoru the strawberry one and Shoko the matcha one. Satoru tears open the packet with glee, leaning into your side as you move to stand next to him.

"I healed him on-site. He was bleeding too much for me to do nothing," you explain, lifting a hand and ruffling Satoru's hair. "Multiple lacerations – stellate and split, mostly around the knuckles. Shallow avulsions around the face and neck. Periosteal contusions in the hands."

She recoils slightly, pausing with her ice cream – half open – in her hands. "Avulsions? On his face? What the fuck?"

Satoru grins, unaffected. "I'm looking good, right? Props to YN for making me pretty again."

"Do you know what avulsions are?" Shoko smacks his knee, making him yelp. "People get those in machine accidents and bad car crashes! It's up there with degloving as some of my least favourite meat injuries! What the hell were you doing to get hurt like that?"

"Degloving?" Satoru tilts his head, biting his ice cream.

"Imagine pulling off a winter glove. Now imagine that glove is your meat and your hand underneath is the bone. That's degloving."

Satoru looks down at his reddish-pink ice cream. "I don't feel so hungry anymore."

With a harsh exhale, Shoko pops her ice cream into her mouth and breaks off a corner with her teeth. "I see why YN got me a snack, too. It's bribery."

"An apology," you correct. "Officially, I'd like you to minimise the damage on the medical report. Everything except the avulsions should be fine."

Shoko turns in her chair to look at you, pointedly facing away from Satoru. "Why? Just because it's ugly doesn't mean I can't fix it."

You sigh. "This was originally my mission. Satoru might have pulled some strings to join, but the responsibility is on me. Letting the elders know that someone managed to bypass his Infinity and injure him to that extent – under my watch – will tell them what they've always believed but can't prove: I am a detriment to Satoru's growth as a sorcerer."

Silence falls. A small frown creases her brow. After a moment, she glances at Satoru, who sits uncharacteristically quietly. His feet no longer kick above the floor.

"Is that true?" she asks quietly. "Did that curse user get past your technique?"

He huffs, fiddling with the wrapper. It crinkles in his grip as he lifts it to his mouth. "No," he mumbles. "I had it down so I could hit him. He didn't bypass anything."

"So then what's the issue? Why would they blame it on anyone but you?"

"They won't care that it was intentionally dropped," you say. "All they'll see is that he was badly hurt under my observation, and I couldn't stop it."

You remember your long hours in the temple's ancient library, reading the remnants of collected research about the man who shared your technique a thousand years ago. You remember how he vanished at the same time as the contemporary Six Eyes user stopped responding to all letters and summons – and how, only a few years after their simultaneous disappearances, a new child with those heavenly eyes was born.

The reports never confirmed it, but every sentence you read dripped like venom with the implication.

You killed the Six Eyes.

You glance down at your hands. Clean, now. Weren't always. Was it some awful joke the universe played, to make you Satoru's best friend? The universe didn't do jokes, of course, being an unfeeling logical cycle of cause-effect-rebirth, but something deep in you is convinced it must have at least cracked an eye open the moment Satoru first looked at you, all those years ago.

It was too perfect. You weren't even that good at sorcery; most of your strength came from taijutsu and knowing the human body better than your opponent. It just so happened that your innate technique was a perfect shutdown of Infinity, as if you were made for this one singular purpose.

Was it cruel, then? To let him stand by you while knowing that if something in you breaks, not even he could do a thing to stop you?

Now, he reaches for your wrist, pulling you away from Shoko's window, where you'd wandered during the conversation. You could throw him to the ground right now and you know, as certainly as you know your soul, that he could not lift a finger to hurt you.

Unable to protect himself both passively and offensively... Did the universe want you to kill him, too? Is this why it made him adore you, so that when his Infinity fails and your hands wrap around his throat, he'll think not of death, but of the familiar warmth of your skin on his?

The hand tightens around your wrist. Satoru, with his glasses on his head and his soft azure eyes on you, tugs you closer. "Angel, hey," he murmurs. "It's not your fault. You were fighting, too. You didn't just let me get hurt."

"I'm older. More experienced. I shouldn't have taken so long to put down that shikigami." You look away. "Then you wouldn't have been injured."

Satoru's brows furrow. His grip tightens on you as he stands up, crinkling the empty wrapper in his other hand. "Oi, dummy. Stop blaming yourself just 'cause I was stupid and reckless and didn't care to block." He exhales sharply. "See, there – I said it! I was stupid! Now quit beating yourself up and making that sad face. I hate it when you make that face."

"I'm not making a face," you say weakly.

"Yeah, you are!" He wiggles a finger and flicks you on the forehead. "Dummy. Just tell Shoko what to write in her report and we can get out of here. This place stinks like cleaning bleach and unpaid overtime."

Shoko snorts. "You can say that again."

"Dummy," Satoru repeats, smugly.

You sigh. "You don't have to sound so happy to insult me."

"You're never stupid, so when you are, I have to rub it in your face to get proper mileage out of it."

"Very funny…"

He leans in and bumps his forehead against your temple, butting you with his head like a cat. Or a goat. You laugh softly, and Satoru smiles, flushing with pride.

"Alright, alright, Satoru. Sit down while I discuss your medical report with Ieri."

With a toss like a three-pointer, Shoko chucks the wrapper of her ice cream in the wastepaper bin. She kicks off the floor and spins back to her desk, picking up a clipboard and snapping two double-sided pieces of paper beneath the clip. She lifts a pen, turning around and crossing one leg over another, all business.

"So – you wanted to list just minor lacerations and bone bruises, right? Is there any reason beyond the political bomb that is your relationship?"

You hum, leaning against the edge of her desk as you read her scrawled notes. She goes down a list of checkboxes, ticking them off in rapid succession. "It's not just about me. He needs to remain the strongest so no one will undermine his name. After so long without a Six Eyes user, the big clans have grown attached to their power – if Satoru shows weakness, they may believe he can be overruled, and whispers of his fallibility may trickle down to curse users like the ones we fought today. They might try something."

Shoko nods as her pen scratches over the paper, detailing injuries and checking 'no' for 'continued observation recommended'. "Damn, that's so shitty. He can't even get slightly more hurt than usual or people might try to kill him? It's hard to imagine medical notes about breaking an arm leading to assassinations and mutiny."

"You don't know what power-hungry vultures these old farts are. Once, a bunch of them tried saying I wasn't fit for leading my clan 'cause I invited YN to my birthday party," Satoru scoffs, leaning back on the patient bed and tucking an arm under his head. He deepens his voice mockingly. "Such close attachments are indicative of immaturity. A clan head should stand strong on his own. What a load of utter bullshit."

"Why wasn't I invited to your party, rich boy? I bet your house is huge."

"I was, like, nine. I didn't know you existed."

Her nose crinkles. "Oh, no – immaturity at nine years old, how terrible. What, did they expect you to pop out of the womb fully-grown?"

He closes his eyes. "Probably. They blamed my clan for coddling me. Pah – as if I needed the protection of a bunch of sycophantic grade three sorcerers."

"It’s always demanding old dudes dictating what we do with our lives, huh? Some things you just can't escape." She shakes her head and signs off the date on the second sheet of paper. She leans back and grabs the stapler, punching them together. "Right, all done. Gojo, deliver this to the principal." She holds it out expectantly.

Satoru's eyes widen. "Eh? Why me?"

"'Cause I'm putting my career on the line to make sure you don't get yourself killed. Consider the delivery paying back a favour."

Reluctantly, he takes it, scanning it briefly. Wow, she already has the doctor's chicken scratch down. "The principal's office is literally down the hall. What's so bad about doing it yourself?"

"If it's such an easy trip, surely the great Gojo Satoru won't have a problem walking there, hm?" Shoko smiles sweetly. "Or is this a task too arduous for a man of your noble standing?"

Groaning, Satoru picks himself off the bed, lower lip pushed out in a pout. "Okay, okay, fine… Sheesh. So many words just to say you're lazy."

"Gojo."

"Mmhm?"

"Get out of my office before I break your legs and make you crawl there."

He swallows and skitters for the door. "Yep! Uh-huh, leaving, going right now. Angel!"

"Yes, just give me a moment, no need to shout." You turn to Shoko and squeeze her shoulder with a small, grateful smile. "Thank you for doing this for me, Ieri."

"No problem." She pats your hand. "Least I can do to pay you back for your company. Are you staying long this time?"

You shake your head. "No, only a little while. I have to meet with the elders soon. They likely have another mission for me." You sigh, glancing pensively out the window. "I haven't returned to the temple in a while. I'll stay here for a few days to ensure Satoru isn't hiding any lingering injuries, then see if I can't fit in a visit before travelling. I'll make sure to come say goodbye before I go."

"I can watch Gojo, if you want," she offers, spinning a pen between her fingers. "I'll get him to come in tomorrow and the day after for a check-up."

"Thank you, but I should do it. I... also have things to discuss with him," you admit. Having him sit still is a miracle I need to take advantage of."

Shoko chuckles, but you can see the flash of concern that flits over her features. "If you insist. Guess I'll be busy with the curse user you brought back, anyway. You can leave the door open when you go – I need some air circulation in here."

You nod, stepping away. "Thank you again, Ieri. I know politics should stay out of what you do, but I'd be naive to ignore the ramifications of unfiltered truth. Don't hesitate to call me if you need anything."

She waves as you leave and says lightly, "I'll hold you to that promise."

You exit her office to find Satoru lazily sprawled across a cushioned bench, papers hanging from his grasp in a rolled-up cylinder that will definitely take some flattening to get back to normal. He lifts his head when you step out, expression brightening at the sight of you.

"Angel! Ready to go?"

You hum as you fall into step beside him, your shoulders brushing as you walk. "You didn't need to wait for me. Did you forget the path to your principal's office already?"

"No, of course I remember. Down the hall past the drinking fountain, third door on the left." A sigh flutters past his lips. They twist as he looks away. "I heard what you said, by the way. About your meeting."

You glance up, surprised. "You were listening?"

"Pressed up with my ear to the door," he says sarcastically. "No, the door was slightly ajar. I heard everything. I'm not hiding injuries – you know I wouldn't. So why did you refuse Shoko's offer?"

You watch your boots, footsteps naturally perfectly synchronised with his. "I wanted to talk about earlier," you say quietly, "regarding your fight with the curse user."

Glancing at you from behind his glasses, he presses his lips together. "Well, go on, then," he replies. "Why wait for tomorrow when you can say it now? Fresh on the mind, and all."

The silence stretches. He doesn't back down. You gather yourself with a soft inhale.

"Physically, you fight efficiently. Good control of the fight, good minimisation of collateral damage. You understood that as a shikigami user, he would likely be less comfortable in close quarters, and you gave him no space to breathe. I'm pleased you applied my tip of using your legs to both take space and deny it. Here, you outranged his arms – I saw you noticed how he seemed more confident with them – and to reach you, he had to overcommit. He left himself wide open."

He winces. "I hear the 'but' coming."

"But… you are emotional. You let it drag you around instead of sliding off like oil on water. It's something of a trend I've noticed with you: you begin strong, but you get cocky and turn the fight personal. All your opponent has to do is succeed in goading you and you falter because you're too busy trying to save face. You should work on that with Geto."

"Not with you?"

You lift a brow. "You think I would willingly insult you?"

He smacks your arm lightly with the paper cylinder. "We can train you this time. 'The Art of Shit-Talking'." He spreads his hands in an arc before him. "You'd probably be great at it, with how good you are at reading people."

"That's a terrible use of my skills."

"But think of the advantages you could gain by getting into people's heads!" He leans closer and wiggles his fingers with a grin, trotting by your side. "Make 'em let their guard down, y'know? 'Cause you need to get close for your technique to work. Just a split second of anger, and then bam! You're all up in their space, and you win."

Triumphantly, he smacks the rolled-up paper against his other palm. With a soft huff, you shake your head, a smile tugging at your lips against your will.

"I'm serious, Satoru."

"So am I." Competitively, he gazes into your eyes. You gaze back unblinkingly. He squints. He loses the staring contest – perhaps on purpose, but he won't tell you that – and blows a raspberry, rolling his eyes. "Okay, fine! No lessons for the master. I am, as always, your devoted disciple..."

"Good. As my disciple, then, you'll ask Geto to train with you this week. Refine that trick with Blue again – the trick from the mission. It seems like a good staple move to give you an edge in the neutral fight."

Glancing down, Satoru coats his fist in Blue, and his eyes gleam brighter as he traces the unstable waves of cursed energy, which fluctuate as his instinct attempts to reform it into a more familiar shape. The strength of Blue comes from the 'centre point' of the 'sphere' – at least, that's how he imagines it. It shouldn't be too difficult to stabilise that 'core' while it's stretched into a thin layer. Ideally, he just has to shift that core into the centre of his fist.

Now that he thinks about it, if he could learn to snap Blue rapidly around his fist, could he also technically stretch it into other shapes, like a really long stick? Like a laser? Though, the location of the 'core' where space condenses might make it ineffective. It sounds a little strategically useless, too, because regardless of the shape of the projectile, it'll still have the same effect.

But shit, a beam attack would look sick as hell.

He disperses his technique with a sigh. "Are we going to talk about… the thing?"

"Thing?"

"You know… the big one." He slows down slightly, and you match him automatically. "When I wanted to…"

"Ah." You hum, gaze trained on him as you choose your next words carefully. You glance away. "I'm willing to let it pass. You said you understood what I meant. I trust you."

He blinks, lifting his eyes. "That's it? You're just… letting it go?" He tilts his head. "Not gonna nag me? Everyone else would."

"I can if you want, but I figured you'd appreciate my belief in your maturity. Do you?"

Pausing in front of the principal's office, Satoru turns to you with his hand on the knob. Half a step behind him, you tilt your head patiently, hands clasped behind your back. His mouth opens and closes a few times before his throat bobs and his gaze slants sideways.

"Thanks," he says quietly, "for not treating me like a child. I won't let you down."

He pushes the door open and peeks around the edge. Empty. It wouldn't be out of character for him to snoop around, maybe try to find his schoolwork to find out his grades in advance, but he simply steps up to the desk and places his own medical report right in the centre. When he unfurls it, he even flattens it by briefly rolling it the other way, fixing the curled corners.

"What kind of mission are the higher-ups gonna give you, ya think?" he asks, turning around and resting against the edge of the desk. "I hope it's an exorcism. I wanna see if I can persuade them to let me come."

Your lips quirk up. "Again? You're not tired?"

He shrugs his shoulders, tapping his fingers against the desk's fine dark wood. "I slept well last night. You're warm. And before you make excuses about my homework: I finished it all early," he says smugly. "I've got nothing due for the next four days! Praise me, please. Tell me how great I am at time management."

"Sure, you finished it, but did you do it well?" you chuckle. "You still skip your working-out in maths. That bad habit got you a seventy per cent in last chapter's test."

"Ughhh, but I hate it," he whines, clutching his head melodramatically. He squishes his cheeks. "It takes foreverrr and takes up so much real estate in my pages! My brain works too fast for all this nonsense. Why do I have to spell it out step-by-step? It's baby calculus – maybe I'll oblige when I start vectors or whatever."

"I know," you say soothingly, "but they can't play favourites. They have to treat you like everyone else."

"But I'm not everyone else," he complains. "There's a conspiracy out there to prevent me from spending time with you, I swear. Are you in on it? Is that why you're telling me to waste my time writing out every single change happening to a number? I'll beat you up if you say 'yes'."

You step closer, glancing down at him with an amused glint in your eye. "Will you?"

He slouches further, crossing his arms. He blows a strand of hair out of his eyes noisily. "No… But I'll punch Geto in the face instead! You don't want that, right?"

"So you want me to lie, and you'll punch someone else for that lie? That doesn't sound very rational to me, Satoru."

"No, it isn't. I've backed myself into a corner. But I am no quitter – and I will defend this hill until I die!" he declares.

Silently, you reach out, wrap an arm around him, and hook your chin over his shoulder. You hold him gently, pressing him into your chest and threading your fingers through his soft hair.

His eyes widen as his heart stutters. His hands hover over your sturdy chest. He can feel the shifting muscle beneath your robes, so close to his own. You feel so warm.

He clears his throat, blinking rapidly as his body finally responds and he wraps his arms around your middle. "Not that I mind this," he coughs, "but is there a reason you're hugging me?"

"Do I need a reason to hug my friend?"

"N-No, of course not. But you're not, usually, you know…. the one who initiates it." His arms tighten around you and he buries his face in your shoulder. You smell like incense and something sharply herbal. His eyes flutter shut. "This is nice," he mumbles, trying to bury his nose even deeper in the collar of your robes. He's basically headbutting you. "Really nice…"

You tuck his hair behind his ear, cupping the back of his head. "I don't want to hear about you dying," you murmur, grip tightening around him as if to anchor yourself in his presence. "Please."

That horrible prophecy again, he thinks. He relaxes in your arms. "Okay. I won't."

You squeeze him one more time, lingering, before you let him go with a soft warmth in your cheeks. You scratch the back of your neck. "I'm sorry. It's been a long couple of days."

"It's fine, I know it has. My presence probably didn't help, what with you having to hide both of us instead of just yourself." Only reluctantly does he pull back. His thumb rubs absentminded circles into your wrist, feeling your steady pulse beneath the fine skin. He glances up – a little apologetic, a little hopeful. "Can we, maybe, go out for dinner? I want to try out this dumpling place I found in the city. Little alleyway shop. The type with six chairs total and only enough space to sit at the counter."

"Sure," you agree, "though I have my meeting at five-thirty. Can we go before that?"

"Lunner it is!" He beams. He hops off the principal's desk and reaches up to fix your collar. "Meet me by the eastern gates at four. Wear something casual."

—

The wind rakes gently through swirling fallen leaves on the stone path and rustles the hedges lining the bottom of the school's boundary walls. You lean against it near the entrance with your arms crossed and one foot kicked up against the wall. Your eyes are closed, and you wear a serene expression. Here, the hum of machinery and rapid, unimpeded modernity is silenced, replaced by birdsong and the hush of leaves.

It reminds you of the temple – almost reverent in its quiet, with so much room to breathe that you glance behind just to check where the nearest wall is. Nothing steps on your heels, urging you to move faster, kill quicker. These days are few and far between.

"Angel!"

A smile tugs naturally at your lips at the bright joy in his voice. You open your eyes to see him jogging up to you, waving excitedly. On his wrist is a familiar string of glassy red beads that match the ones around your neck.

They fit him, finally. They no longer slip off his wrist every time he lowers his hand.

"Hey," Satoru breathes, approaching quickly. "You're early. Miss me, didja?"

"I didn't want to make you wait," you reply, pushing off the wall. "Ready to go?"

"Mm-hm." He lifts his sunglasses to the top of his head and grins, linking his arm with yours. He wears a zip-up hoodie with a graphic tee, and relaxed, light-wash jeans. His sneakers are scuffed and a little grass-stained from kicking Suguru out of a tree in a game of hide-and-seek that got too serious, but he wears them with pride, refusing to buff out the marks. They're proof of his independence, a quiet rebellion – if his clan elders order him to be here, separated from you, then he'll be damned if he doesn't drag their pristine reputation through the mud as well.

"The restaurant's run by a little old lady and her husband," he says as he skips down the steps, rocking sideways into you on every other step as if he's dizzy. You're used to it, steady as a rock like always, and nothing could be more perfect. He gets to be so much closer to you this way. "Food's made fresh for every order. When the lady mentioned a vegetarian bowl, I just knew I had to take you there."

"You asked for recommendations?"

"Of course! All the pictures looked too good. I couldn't choose which one to get, so I asked for her opinion. I got her top three. All freakin' amazing."

You smile gently. "You're sweet, Satoru."

"Hm? For being indecisive?"

For thinking of you even when he's alone. "Just… in general."

He puffs up his chest and fixes his glasses with a smug grin. "I better be – with how much sugar I eat daily, I now share the atomic structure of a marshmallow. It's my greatest achievement. My second-greatest is the time I took to finish those three massive bowls of ramen. Seriously, they were huge." He fans his face. "Wow, I surprise even myself sometimes."

"I'm sure the owners appreciate your endless wallet and stomach. Maybe they'll name a dish after you."

He laughs, squeezing your arm. "That'd be awesome."

You spend the trip into the city practically glued together. Satoru sits right next to you when you board the train, shoulder and thigh pressed to yours as he pops in an earbud, listening to ripped songs from his newly-purchased MP3 player. It's fire truck-red – metallic, slim, and fitting perfectly into the palm of his hand. His foot taps along to an upbeat pop song, and his head comes to rest on your shoulder as he turns sideways along the seats and lets his feet hang over the edge. You should probably tell him off for being inconsiderate, but the train car is nearly empty despite the hour and he looks so peaceful that you'd hate breaking that.

He hums along softly, slightly off-key. His sleeves are pushed up unevenly around his elbows, and his bracelet gleams crimson in the late afternoon light as it flashes by billboards, skyscrapers, and tunnels. It's like a tiny piece of you with him all the time. He hates tradition for the sake of stuffy etiquette, wears Nike socks under the uber-formal kimonos his clan forces him into when meeting with the elders, but he chooses to wear something as religiously-charged as prayer beads because you gave them to him.

The beads around your neck probably aren't the same ones you wore all those years ago, but Satoru's bracelet looks brand new, carefully maintained and worn under his sleeves to stop the string from catching or the beads from chipping. And, even though he doesn't pray the way you do, when he fidgets with them, he never goes past the distinctive mother bead, larger than the rest – he flips it around and counts the other way.

You're not even sure he remembers why he does it. But you know he used to watch you do it, and so he does it, too.

His hair catches the light in a pale, effervescent halo as his head bobs gently. He hums a few soft words in fragmented English, copying the sounds more than anything, and he taps his fingers to the beat on his thigh.

You shift your shoulder slightly to make him more comfortable. He tilts his head back, gazing up at you through his lashes, and smiles, the warmth of the sun cutting golden shadows across his high cheekbones.

Your heart beats a little faster. You look away and stare at your hands.

Later, Satoru herds you into a tiny restaurant in an alley, hardly larger than a single bedroom. He smiles at the old woman behind the counter and drags you over to the seats she gestures to – one of only two tables. He takes the furthest seat from the entrance – to 'watch the door for bad guys', he says with a smug grin, winking over his glasses. You order the vegetarian bowl while Satoru agonises over putting pork on top of ramen or rice.

"It's a little cold tonight," you say. "Why don't you go for the ramen? It comes with soup."

He picks the ramen.

It arrives quickly. He barely manages to slam his palms together for a quick 'itadakimasu' before he's shoving the first huge slab of pork belly into his mouth. He nearly weeps with utter bliss, savouring the tender meat that falls apart in his mouth.

"Ohh, that's good," he says through a mouthful of food, shovelling bamboo shoots and greens into his mouth before he even swallows. "It's melting in my mouth. Melting. If I start crying – no, I didn't."

Even though you haven't started eating, this is already the nicest dinner you've had in a good long while. You feel as if you can relax for once – nobody here is watching your every move, just begging you to twitch wrong so they can brand you a problem they have to forcefully correct. Every breath comes lighter, easier. The bowl is hot under your fingertips; the air is pleasantly warm and carries the scent of grilled meat and sweet steamed vegetables. You can focus on the sensation of the porcelain bowl burning your fingers as you rotate it without wondering if it's a test of your obedience.

Your lips quirk up as you watch Satoru's glasses fog with the steam, blocking his view. Your ramen is a rich umami broth filled with miso-roasted vegetables and topped with tofu, and you don't even blink as Satoru tangles a huge ball of noodles on his chopsticks and shoves the whole thing into his mouth. He has nearly his entire bowl's worth of noodles wrapped around his chopsticks.

"You should slow down when you eat," you suggest. "You'll get heartburn."

"So? You're here. You can heal it, right?"

"I could. That doesn't mean I will."

He gasps and whines, eyes widening with betrayal. "So mean, angel! You wouldn't do anything even if I was in horrible pain and begged for your help? Heartless!"

"I'll see how I feel when you start begging." You pop a piece of tofu into your mouth. "Besides, you know how much it takes out of me to heal someone else. I'm not sure RCT for heartburn is worth it when antacids exist on every block's corner store."

"But you'd receive my devotion and undying gratitude," he tries, stirring his bowl. A thin layer of oil swirls perfectly on the surface. "You're talking like over-the-counter medication will give me the same love and affection you give me. Pills just give me an icky coating on my tongue. An' you know how many times I have to push the pill down? Like, physically shove it down my throat?" He drags his fingers down the front of his throat and scrunches up his face. "I hate it! Feeling the bump go down grosses me out. It's seriously body horror. You're so much better – gentler on my fragile body."

You sigh, even though you're smiling. "You're not supposed to hold the pills on your tongue. You can also just… take the pills with water, you know that? You aren't any cooler because you're dry-swallowing. It's like running down the highway instead of taking a car."

He narrows his eyes, pointing at you dramatically. "How many times have you seen someone in a movie drink water with pills? Huh? Now compare that to the number of times they toss it back, maybe grunt a little – like, hngh – and then go on with sewing their own wounds up while their abs glisten under a single fluorescent lightbulb. It's undeniably cooler than washing it down."

"And who are you looking cool for?" You arch a brow, feeding yourself between sentences. The deep, savoury heat of the broth tingles on your tongue. "I watched you fall into a pond once."

He makes a noise, brows furrowing as his cheeks turn pink. "Not true! You pulled me in! And you tricked me. That wasn't my fault."

"How was it not? You were so small I barely had to try, and you barely reacted until after you were already falling in. Such slow reflexes," you tut. "I could've done far more embarrassing things to you if I had the will for it. Fortunately, you looked so pitiful, sitting in that pond. I suspect you wouldn't like me half as much as you do now if I had, for example, held your Game Boy above your head out of reach every time I saw you."

"You were a year older, of course I looked small in comparison! One year for kids is like five for us." He pouts hard. "I wasn't small, by the way. I was a perfectly normal size for my age."

"Maybe it was those big eyes of yours, then. They made you seem so much younger because they took up half your face."

"You mean these big eyes?" He widens them, batting his thick white lashes up at you with that pout still on his glossy lips. He presses his hands together against his cheek. His pupils are larger than usual in the soft light, swallowing the blue of his irises; he looks like a doll, porcelain skin included. "You should totally give me some of your food to apologise for being mean – past and present. I'm a growing boy, y'know. I need extra protein to build more muscle so I can finally beat you without cursed energy."

You point at his half-full bowl. "You still have most of your pork, Satoru."

"And? You think that's enough to sustain muscle growth across my entire body?" He stretches his legs out beneath the table and hooks his feet around your heels as he flexes an arm and leans back. "There's so much potential here. So much real estate. Angel, you'd be praised by the entire jujutsu world for helping me become the strongest, once and for all."

With a smile, you lean over and grab his wrist, tugging it up between you. You glance at it and encircle his wrist with your thumb and middle finger. They touch.

After a beat, Satoru goes bright red, yanking his arm back and cradling it as if burnt. "Oi! That's considered bullying, you know!"

"I didn't even say anything."

"You didn't have to! I-I tasted the intent behind that look on your face!"

You hum. "Maybe you should order another bowl, Satoru. Have you gone mad with hunger? You're not talking right anymore."

"You're not talking right," he replies stubbornly, still cradling his hand. "You're also being very mean, poking my insecurities like that, and I'm heartbroken right now." His eyes glint with mischief. "But – I bet I'd cheer up if you gave me half of your egg."

"Why did we even order separate dishes if this is what happens?"

"Hey, hey!" he says, affronted. "It's not like I planned this. You don't have to sound so suspicious. You just happen to be a bully, and I just happen to know what brightens my mood. So pay up – share with me."

You purse your lips. "You're not even asking anymore."

He grins cheekily. "Did I ever?"

You sigh. You edge your bowl closer to him, and he lights up with glee as his chopsticks snap out and transfer the egg so quickly to his own bowl it feels like teleportation. You blink and it's already submerged in his soup.

"You can have the other half if you like," you offer, watching as he reaches for the soy sauce and drizzles it over the egg, an amount that's just shy of being 'too much'. "Did you eat before this?"

"Nah, you keep that piece – I'm feeling generous. And nope, not since breakfast." Satoru's feet jiggle against the backs of your calves, his legs stretched all the way out and under your own chair. He bites into the soft, creamy yellow yolk, and his body does this excited little wiggle as his eyes flutter shut in total bliss. "Oh, man, it was so worth it, though! I can fit twice as much as usual inside me."

Pulling back your bowl, you stir the rest of your ramen, chuckling as he renews his efforts and inhales half his bowl in roughly four mouthfuls. You eat at a more respectable pace. "Consistency is better. Three meals a day, 'Toru. It's what everyone else does for a reason."

With some difficulty, he swallows, and his mouth twists into a lecturing grimace. "Uh, says the guy who used to never eat after noon?"

"That's different. And I can't really do that anymore – the number of missions I receive requires me to eat more to keep up, biologically speaking." You shrug. "But I don't mind it much. It means I can eat dinner with you."

His expression softens slightly. He hums as he hooks his feet around your boots, then kicks up one foot to brace against the footrest of your chair. Your calves press together. "Silver lining, huh?"

"I take everything I can get," you agree, and Satoru grins as he kicks the side of your boot lightly, playfully.

"Hope that doesn't apply to your egg," he teases. "It's non-refundable, but I could probably give something back if I tried hard enough."

"No, thank you. I prefer to chew my own food."

He laughs brightly, a clear sound that rings out in the tiny restaurant. He doesn't bother muffling it. Why would he, when genuine joy comes so rarely to sorcerers?

He plucks a laminated menu from the edge of the table closest to the wall, where it's propped up by the napkin dispenser. He leans in and points at a dish of pan-fried vegetable gyoza. "Let's get some of these, too. I'm still hungry. Do you feel like ginger?"

As late afternoon turns to early evening, Satoru grows noticeably clingier. There's a slight furrow between his brows as he concentrates on pulling apart one of the last dumplings. He'd dumped more than half of them into your bowl before you could protest, and you're certain he's making up for your stolen egg. You're not sure how part of an egg is equivalent to half a dozen dumplings, but drawing attention to it might just make him embarrassed rather than anything productive. In a way, they're gifts, and you won't ever reject his.

"We should order more. Or go to a dessert place. You up for crepes? Shaved ice sounds really good right about now."

Your chopsticks clack against the rim of the plate as you dip a dumpling into sauce. "You're trying to think up excuses to make me stay."

He glances up. "Hm?"

"You look like you don't want me to leave this restaurant. Your legs are twisted with mine. I might trip if I try to get up."

He rests his cheek on his palm as he averts his gaze. He tries to whistle – doesn't get far. "Eh, what're you going on about? No idea. Stumped."

You lower your chopsticks. "It won't be long – I should only be gone for an hour or so. If you like, I can stay tonight on campus rather than returning to the temple. Would you like that?"

"Yeah," he says immediately, and the sound of his own voice is pathetic, even to him. He clears his throat and rubs his warm cheeks. "I-I mean – it's closer than the temple. Easier for you."

You hum and smile slightly, lifting a dumpling to your lips. "Oh, but before I forget – can I ask something of you?"

He straightens. You never ask him for help. "Sure, anything. Whatever you need."

You reach under the table. When your hand comes up, you're holding the little blue rectangle of the Digimon Pendulum, your thumb hooked through the loop of string.

"I want you to keep this safe for me," you say, brushing your thumb over one corner as you gaze at it. "I fear I might not give it enough attention. I've already hatched it, but I feel it might have a better life with you."

"You hatched it already?" He blinks. "When?"

"Last night, after you went to bed – got curious, plus I couldn't sleep. Too quiet." You click it on, and a tiny, pixelated creature pops up on the screen, looping through an idle animation. "I want you to take care of him."

Carefully, he accepts it from you. You haven't fed it today, so he does that in your place. "You're abandoning your Mochimon?" He frowns, lifting it next to his face and turning the screen around to face you. It's a circle with big eyes, a line for a mouth, and two little feet. "But look how cute he is! He has my eyes. You're really gonna orphan our baby like that?"

"It's not 'orphaning', it's a handful of pixels."

Satoru gasps and cups it to his chest protectively. "Don't let him hear you say that! His own father… How cruel!"

"Please don't make me feel bad over a virtual pet."

"Well, maybe you deserve it, angel," he sniffs, propping his elbows on the table and pressing the buttons on the side to give the creature a little wash-down when the alert pops up. There – poop-free zone. "You didn't even clean him! You're so neglectful. He poops every three hours, and he could get sick if you don't clean him once a day. If he gets sick twenty times, he dies."

"Twenty days?" You look horrified. "I've gone on missions longer than that."

He harrumphs. "Maybe it is better I take care of the little guy. As long as you pay child support, I'm okay with keeping him with me."

"How much does that cost?"

He lifts a thoughtful finger to his lips, his eyes roaming the ceiling of the restaurant. "One soda whenever I ask for it. On campus."

"Don't I already do that?" you tease. You incline your head. "But alright. I can afford that."

"Good. Now, look, our son already wants to evolve. He's so eager. C'mere, come watch."

You lean in and he matches you. You probably look silly, heads pressed in close as you stare at the tiny box in Satoru's palm. But Satoru's almost vibrating with excitement, his foot constantly kicking yours as it jiggles.

"This is where his future is written," he whispers, his voice almost reverent. He lifts his eyes to yours, his smile bright and eyes brighter. His messy hair tickles your temple. "What he becomes now will determine what Ultimate forms he might eventually evolve to. Are you ready to watch our son graduate from 'baby' to 'child'?"

You nod firmly. "He'll always have a warm home to return to, regardless of what he becomes."

Satoru reaches out and grabs your hand, gripping it tight. You hold him back, unable to hide your smile as you watch him practically tremble in your arms. You shift your arm around his shoulders and he leans into you, holding his breath.

With a celebratory animation and a musical jingle, the Digimon evolves.

Letting out a gasp far too loud for the location, Satoru throws his hands up to cheer. "Yes! He's a Gottsumon! Angel, I'm such a good single father! Tell me I am!"

"You fed and cleaned him once," you note, though you laugh anyway because his delight is infectious. "But you're a great parent, anyway."

He bobs his head fervently. "From here, he can evolve into a Tortamon, a Starmon, or a Gekomon." He lists them off on his fingers. "But what I'm really hoping for is that he'll become a Monochromon! That's basically a dinosaur, by the way." He grabs his hair. "Argh, but I can't remember what the prerequisites are for it! I found this blog that details a whole bunch of Pendulum evolutions, but since this is the 1998 version, I'm not sure if it'll have it. Might be too old. But that's for future-me to worry about. Look, look – see how cute our baby is? Look at his widdle frowny face," he giggles, cooing as it blinks in what is, indeed, an adorable animation. "He gets that from you."

"Didn't you say he evolved from a baby? You have to treat him like the grown-up child he is," you say with false solemnity as Satoru pouts. "Otherwise, he'll get embarrassed. I'll become the favourite parent by elimination."

"So mean! But I guess you're right. I'll hatch mine when I get back to my dorm tonight – then our firstborn can have a little sibling and they can grow up together on my desk." He grins, putting the Gottsumon to sleep for the next few hours. "Can't wait. It'll be adorable."

You pop the last dumpling into your mouth. "You're going to be busy with two of them, aren't you?"

"Yeah, but that's fatherhood for you! I'll be fine. In a way, Gottsumon will be my reminder of you when you're off doing god-knows-what. I'll remember all the highs and lows we had together, raising him from an egg through many harsh winters and scorching summers." He sighs, resting his hand against his forehead like a fainting maiden. "But that was all before you decided we weren't good enough for you."

"I think you're overreacting slightly, Satoru. I'm working hard to make money for us so we can live comfortably. An unfortunate side effect is my absence."

He lowers his gaze and his lips curve up, a slightly mournful tilt to them. "Yeah, I know…" he sighs, and pushes all the empty plates and bowls together. "Fine, I can take a hint. I guess I've stalled you as much as I can." He looks up with a complicated expression. "You promise you won't take long at the meeting? Come back right away. You should get to witness the birth of our second child."

"Of course, 'Toru. It only makes sense," you promise, standing up as he does. "Why don't you wait outside? Too cramped here to fit both of us if customers want to come in."

"Paying for our meals without me having to say a thing? What a gentleman," he jokes, pretending to swoon. He pats you on the shoulder. "I'll pay you back later. I'll be outside."

He attaches the Digimon to his belt and steps out of the entrance as you move up to the counter, where the old woman walks over and greets you. Satoru leaves the steady heat of the small kitchen and tugs his hoodie sleeves down his arms as he leans against the wall, tilting his head back and exposing his pale throat. A silent sigh escapes his lips.

His phone vibrates in his pocket.

Stole your bo staff for training, will be keeping for a week. How's the date?

He rolls his eyes.

Geto I h8 u

It's not even surprising how quickly he responds.

RMB: don't be a nerd, don't eat lobster, don't talk about the weather ;) IDK how senpai even likes u honestly

Satoru makes a face, fingers already moving rapidly.

'Senpai' eww LOL Fine mr know it all, hows ur d8s then? Oh u dont even have 1 Cuz ur a LOSER hahahaha

"Um… excuse me?"

Satoru glances up from his phone, not even bothering to move his head. Doesn't really need to, anyway, because the voice belongs to a teenage girl who barely comes up to his chest. She wears the fiercest blush he's ever seen on someone. She's gripping her phone tightly in her hands.

"Oh," he says, glancing back down to his phone. "Not interested."

"A-Ah, don't worry, I wasn't going to ask for your number," she squeaks, waving her hands madly, and her friend giggles behind a hand – he assumes it's her friend, anyway, because they have matching charms on their shoulder bags. "I saw you inside with that guy in the red… I assume you're friends?"

Satoru's eyes narrow suspiciously. He straightens slightly, and perhaps that gives the girl hope, because she stands a little more confidently and lifts her chin. "Yeah. Best friends, actually."

"Oh, great!" She takes a deep breath. "If it's not too much trouble… Could you introduce me to him, maybe? I just, um, think he's super cute."

What did she just say…?

Cute?

Cute?

His fingers twitch. His heart begins to pound beneath the cage of his ribs.

Oh, hell no.

"He's off-limits." His voice is flat, controlled. He can hear his heartbeat in his ears.

Her smile fades. A sick satisfaction settles in his chest, and something dark compels him to keep going.

"What, were you too busy mooning over his pretty face to realise what he's wearing? Are you seriously blind or something? He's very clearly a monk – the only thing that could make it more obvious was if he wore bright yellow and started chanting the Wisdom Sutra in your face. Y'know what a monk is, right? That means no romance, no marriage, and no picket-fence life where you hand-feed him strawberries and make pancakes for breakfast." He scoffs, settling back against the wall. Is everyone fucking in love with you or something? What's changing? You don't look that much different from three years ago. "Sheesh. Kids these days."

"Hey—!" Her face is bright red, and her annoyance seems to have overtaken any embarrassment. "I can't be much younger than you, dickhead! And I only saw him for a few moments, it isn't that clear he's a monk. Even if he is – who are you to be so rude for nothing?"

"Yeah, yeah, go cry me a river. Isn't like he'd be into someone like you, either, so just drop the whole creepy idea and turn around. You look like you could be in middle school."

"I'm sixteen!"

He looks her up and down and rolls his eyes, crossing his arms. "Could've fooled me. Now shoo, shoo. You're blocking the light."

"You…!" She glares hard, her curls bouncing around her face. "Ha. Fine, I'll go. But just so you know, nobody ever gets this defensive about their buddy potentially scoring, even if that buddy's religious. I've only had this kind of response in one situation: when I asked a girl about the guy she's in love with. Maybe you should just say that next time, rather than being a shitty person to a stranger."

Satoru stiffens. His neck almost creaks when he slowly turns to stare at her, his eyes wide with something unreadable. A sharp, dark shadow bathes half his features in shadow.

"Say that again," he whispers, his voice dangerously even. His nails dig so deep into his bicep that he feels his knuckles grind under his skin.

"You deaf?" she barks. "I said: you're acting like a jealous girl in love!"

His blue eyes almost seem to glow.

A few minutes later, you exit the restaurant with a cheerful jingle of the bell overhead. You look up to find Satoru leaning against the opposite wall, staring unblinkingly down the dark end of the alleyway, where the skinny road ends in a burst of light and movement – but there's a long stretch of darkness between you and that light.

"Satoru," you call, and his head snaps to you. "Are you alright?"

After a beat, he drops his folded arms. "Never better," he replies, pushing off the wall and joining your side. He pushes his hands into his pockets, concealing his clenched hands.

Why is it only you who makes him this way? Why does it have to be you, and no one else?

You watch him for a moment, but he flashes you an easy grin, hiding behind the shield that is his sunglasses. His strides are long, loping, and normal. There's a slight tension to his shoulders, but you suppose there's a hundred-and-one things someone like him might be stressed about. Your heart aches – if only you could ease that burden.

"Alright," you relent, and Satoru hums. "Try to walk quickly – we spent longer than I anticipated at that restaurant and we might miss my train."

Making a face, Satoru begins exaggeratedly dragging his feet, whistling off tune. He dodges backwards when you try to grab his arm, giggling when you chase after him a few steps in the wrong direction.

"Hey, hey! Hands to yourself, mister. I might throw up if you manhandle me like that. I ate way too much back there."

"Satoru," you try, and laugh when he dodges you again but trips backwards over an uneven manhole cover. You dart forward and catch his wrist, pulling him upright. You misjudge the distance and he ends up crashing into your chest, but that's better than being sprawled on the ground.

"Ow!"

"Satoru, you're so clumsy," you chuckle, flicking his forehead with a finger. He whines and rubs the spot. "That's payback for earlier. Be careful, silly."

"Dummy," he retorts, pouting. "Seriously, you nearly pulled my arm off! You know how much it'd cost to sew that back on?"

"Probably about… a minute's worth of constant cursed energy usage. And a particularly filling meal to stop me from getting a headache," you estimate, and Satoru rolls his eyes with a big, loud sigh. You smile and turn around, pulling him along. "Come on. The sooner I leave now, the quicker I'll be back."

"You better. Our second child is going to be born tonight. You gotta be there for it."

"I'll do my best," you promise. "I'll hold your hand through it. You can squeeze my hand as hard as you like."

"Ooh, you say that now, but it'll hurt. Bad." He sways into you, draping an arm over your shoulder with a lazy stretch. He grins, glancing at you from the side of his glasses. "It'll be a real test of your love for me, angel! I'll scream and cry, and I'll need a lot of attention and burden you with bringing me breakfast in bed every day for months. Think you can survive that?"

"You're not a burden," you say. "Not to me. Not if it's you."

For once in his life, words fail him. Something about the way you spoke – so earnest, so plain and painfully truthful – makes his words catch in his throat, his laughter dying before it can fully form.

He looks at you. Really looks at you.

Your cursed energy reserves are running thin. The last time he saw you operating at full capacity was before he enrolled at Jujutsu High. You always recovered slower than him, and now also slower than Shoko or Suguru. He assumed it was the trade-off for being able to hit so hard, and on anyone else, his Six Eyes would tell him at a glance whether or not he was right. You, though… You've always been different. He can't read you the same way; it's like his Eyes falter when they pierce too deeply, shying away from learning you too intimately.

But he doesn't need his one-in-a-billion eyes to see that you glow whenever you spend time with him. Despite your tired eyes and slow blinks, there's a joy in the curve of your mouth that's hard to ignore, lighting you up from the inside with the warmth of a star. He's seen it in the way you smile at the sight of him, the way you stand straighter and never look away until he's pressed securely against your side, safe where you can protect him best.

You're not a burden, you say, but what you really mean is You could never make me leave you.

"Oh," he whispers, and there's a humiliating little wobble in the middle that he can't control. He clears his throat and drops his arm from your shoulders, looping it around your elbow instead. He flashes you a big, overconfident grin and pushes his glasses higher on his nose. "Of course not, angel, I was just testing you! You passed, by the way. Flying colours. Gold star."

"Thanks." You smile, amused. "Now, try not to trip again. The train station looks crowded."

"That was one time! It was only 'cause I ate so much that it affected my centre of gravity and I wasn't used to it. I am, now. And you caught me that time, so whatever, I'll just make you catch me again."

"I fear I spoil you too much," you muse, unwrapping your arm from his to hold his hand instead. You manoeuvre around a queue of salarymen in dark suits at a small food stall, walking single file along the underground tunnel towards your platform. There's not enough room to walk side by side. You glance back and smile at the pout on his face as he's forced to give up his preferred proximity to you. "Case in point. You don't have to look so upset when you can't walk beside me."

"I do, actually," he argues. "The angrier I look, the more space people will give us, and then I don't have to walk behind you like a kid."

"Is that your angry face?"

"Yeah. How is it?"

"Ah…" When you said 'upset', perhaps you should have used 'sad'. "You certainly look more emotional than the rest of the people here."

Satoru laughs and shrugs, absently rolling his beaded bracelet higher on his exposed wrist. "Close enough. But stop walking so damn fast – I'm tripping over myself back here, y'know?"

"Can't do that. I told you, we're already late – all because someone wanted extra dumplings."

"Hey! That was the best idea I've had in weeks, thank you very much!"

He complains about your blindness to his apparent 'genius' all the way to the correct platform – down two sets of crowded stairs. Luckily, you manage to dart between the doors of the train moments before they close, though it forces you and Satoru chest-to-chest in a crammed-up carriage of underpaid and overworked nine-to-fivers.

Somehow, Satoru retains his smile all throughout – he pops in one earbud and offers his MP3 player to you in the tiny space between your bodies, mouthing 'You choose' and tapping the little LCD screen. You pick a playlist at random, pressing play, and you must have chosen correctly because he lights up and nods ferociously. He accepts the player back from you and tucks it into his pocket.

Listening to music for the sake of enjoyment is typically not allowed for you. But as Satoru cranks up the volume, and as the crowded space forces you to press your cheek to his temple, you can hear the song playing clearly enough that you can pick out the lyrics. It's a pop ballad, a woman crooning about life in the big city where everything moves too fast and love clings on like cigarette smoke.

With a hard sway of the train, Satoru's forced to switch handles hanging from the roof. His fingers brush yours in the loop, and his lean body presses closer. You wrap a hand around his bicep, steadying him from someone bumping into his shoulder blades, and he rights himself quickly.

He smells like his honey and vanilla shampoo, silky and luxurious. A silent, embarrassed laugh vibrates through his chest, and you can feel every inhale, every shift of his ribs beneath his clothes. His body is warm and solid against yours. You inhale without sound, shutting your eyes as the train emerges from the dark tunnel into the violet, neon-lit evening.

I love you, stay by me; these feelings

They lead the night astray

Just for now, stay by me; nestle close to me…

[ourseasone]

CHAPTER 1O ━━━ look both ways before you cross!

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Already two long months had passed since you had opened for the very first time, in your five years in this world, the journals of The First, and during all that time, you had read absolutely nothing else.

Not a single page beyond the five first volumes, not a single entry, not even a glance at the protective papers that preceded each subsequent book, which you had come to regard as the archival equivalent of taking a deep breath before plunging into ice-cold water — necessary, perhaps, but also a form of procrastination dressed up as preparation.

The books rested on their pedestals in the restricted section, completely intact, their leather spines catching the golden light that filtered through the paper-covered windows each afternoon, just waiting for you to return. You could sometimes feel them waiting for you, when you were lying in your bed at night, staring at your ceiling while sleep refused to come; a soft pressure at the edge of your consciousness, like a hand not quite touching your shoulder, like a voice you couldn't quite hear, like the memory of words you hadn't read yet pressing against the inside of your skull.

I know, you would think, turning over in your ridiculously comfortable bed, punching your ridiculously soft pillow into a different shape. I know you're there. I know I need to read you. I just… can't. Not yet. Not right now.

But you simply could not read.

Not because you didn't want to — don't misunderstand, you wanted to desperately, with a hunger that genuinely surprised you every time you thought about it. The words you had read of The First had slipped under your skin in a way you had not anticipated at all, settling into your chest like small stones that shifted with every breath you took, with every beat of your heart, with every moment that passed between then and now.

You wanted to know what happened next.

You wanted to follow the thread of The First's life, from that lonely, perceptive child who saw threads and architecture and the sky looking back, to whatever he had become by the final volume — the seventeenth, the one that had been sealed with techniques that no one in the clan had been able to replicate since. You sincerely wanted to understand. You wanted to absorb every single word, every single observation, every single piece of hard-won wisdom that had been preserved across centuries specifically for someone like you.

But… there was simply no time.

The mornings belonged to Satoru.

That hadn't changed, except that Satoru had started holding back even less as your small body grew more and more stronger and your techniques more and more refined. The gap between you was still enormous, still laughably wide, but it was shrinking. Slowly, incrementally, almost imperceptibly. And as it shrank, Satoru adjusted.

Your training sessions had become so brutal that you could barely crawl back to the Okada clan estate afterwards, your Golden Blood drying on your skin in thin, flaking lines, your poor muscles screaming protests that your mind completely ignored because acknowledging the pain would mean admitting just how much it hurt, and admitting how much it hurt would mean acknowledging that you might have reached your limit, and you had learned — the hard way, the only way you ever seemed to learn anything — that your limits were further than you thought.

Satoru would then sit on your tree trunk, eating mochi and offering commentary that was half critique and half affectionate mockery, his legs swinging idly, his sunglasses pushed up into his white hair. And you would lie in the grass, staring at the sky through the leaves — carefully, always carefully, remembering Entry 12 and the sky that looked back — and feel, against all logic, a sense of contentment that you couldn't quite explain.

"You're getting faster," Satoru said one morning, tossing an empty mochi wrapper at your prone form. It landed on your stomach, crinkled and pink. "Still slow. But faster."

"That's… the nicest thing… you've ever said to me," you gasped between breaths, your chest heaving, your vision swimming slightly at the edges.

"It's also the truth. Don't let it go to your head."

"Too late. It's already there, living rent-free."

Satoru snorted — an undignified sound that didn't match his carefully cultivated image at all — and threw another wrapper. This one bounced off your forehead and landed in the grass next to your ear.

"You're weird when you're exhausted."

"That's not true. I'm always weird. Exhaustion just makes me honest about it."

"Honest Y/N is my favorite Y/N."

"Honest Y/N is currently regretting every life choice that led to this moment."

"But you're not stopping."

It wasn't a question. Satoru's voice was casual, almost lazy so, but there was still something underneath it — something that sounded like curiosity, or maybe just the kind of observation that came from knowing someone well enough to hear what they weren't saying out loud.

You stared at the sky through the leaves.

"No," you said finally. "I'm not stopping."

"Why?"

The question hung in the air between you, simple and complicated all at once. You could have given a dozen answers — because you wanted to be stronger, because you needed to protect your friends, because the future was coming and you weren't ready — but none of them felt quite right.

Instead, you said;

"Because you're not stopping either."

Satoru was quiet for a moment, and then, so softly that you almost missed it; "No. I'm not."

You lay there in comfortable silence, the morning light filtering through the leaves, the stream babbling its endless babble, and you thought that this — this moment, right here, with Satoru's quiet presence and the grass tickling your neck and the taste of mochi still lingering on your tongue — was worth all the broken bones in the world.

The afternoons belonged to the Okada clan.

Your grandfather, whether out of genuine necessity or mere subtle sabotage (you still didn't know which, and you suspected you might never really know) had suddenly started entrusting you with responsibilities.

Small at first, almost token gestures designed to make you feel important without actually giving you anything meaningful to do. You merely had to observe training sessions and report back on what you saw, to review reports from the clan's various outposts and initial them with your seal, to attend meetings where the elders would talk in circles for hours and hours without ever reaching conclusions that couldn't have been reached in twenty minutes if anyone had been willing to be direct.

But as the days passed, these responsibilities multiplied and grew, creeping into every corner of your schedule like ivy overtaking a wall, until you found yourself with a busier calendar than most adult sorcerers you knew.

"You are the clan heir," your grandfather had said, without any malice, when you had mentioned — casually, you had thought, even if your desperation might have shown through in the way your voice cracked slightly on the word 'archives' — that you hadn't had any time to visit the archives recently. "These are things you must learn, Y/N. The clan doesn't run itself. One day, it will be yours to lead. You cannot lead what you don't understand."

"Yes, I know, but The First's writings—"

"The First's writings will still be there when you have time."

Your grandfather's brown eyes were so calm, so warm, and so absolutely inflexible. There was no cruelty in them, no desire to punish or obstruct, simply the quiet certainty of an old man who had made his decision and wasn't going to be swayed by a five-year-old's impatience, no matter how justified that impatience might be.

He's not wrong, you had thought, frustration curdling in your stomach. The books will still be there. They've been there for centuries. They can wait a few more weeks.

But I don't want to wait.

I've been waiting my whole life — both of my lives — for something to make sense. And those books… those books might be the closest I ever get to understanding what I am.

I don't want to wait anymore.

You had wanted to argue. God, you had so wanted to point out that the whole point of the reading condition was to read, not to spend your days in meetings that could have been emails, not to endure endless lessons on Okada clan history that you could have absorbed in a fraction of the time from a book, not to smile and nod and play the role of the perfect little heir while the books gathered dust in the archive building.

But you had seen something in your grandfather's expression — something that might have been worry, or perhaps even hope, or perhaps just the desperate desire to keep you close just a little while longer — and the argument had died in your throat, unspoken and unresolved.

Grandpa is scared, you had realized, and the realization had made your chest ache. Grandpa is just scared of losing me. Not to death — he doesn't know about that — but to the world. To the school. To the future that's waiting for me outside these walls.

He's trying to hold on.

And I'm trying to let go.

We're both trying to protect ourselves, and we're both failing, and neither of us knows how to stop.

So you attended the meetings, you reviewed the reports, and you observed the training sessions and offered your observations — carefully, always carefully, remembering The First's warning about people who probably don't want to know the truth about themselves. You smiled at the elders and bowed to visiting dignitaries and played the role of the perfect precious heir with a skill that sometimes frightened you, because it was becoming harder and harder to tell where the performance ended and you began.

And at night, when the estate was quiet and your body was sore from training and your mind was too tired to sleep but too restless to rest, you would lie in your ridiculously comfortable bed and think of The First.

You thought about the threads — golden and structural, connecting everything to everything else. You thought about the sky that looked back, about the weight of being perceived by something vast and ancient and utterly indifferent. You thought about how observation could become participation, how looking at something could change it, how seeing a weakness could make it worse.

You thought about a boy who had been so lonely he had forgotten what it felt like to simply live a moment, and who had written it all down in notebooks that had survived for centuries, waiting for someone like you to read them.

Yes, you would think, staring at your white ceiling, listening to the distant sounds of the clan settling in for the night. I really have to go back.

Soon.

Not tomorrow — tomorrow is training, and after that there's a meeting with the eastern outpost representatives, and after that Grandfather wants me to observe the younger students' advancement examinations.

But soon.

Maybe next week.

Maybe—

The thoughts would endlessly spiral, and sleep would eventually claim you, and another day would pass without you opening Volume Six.

But today was different.

Today, you had made a decision.

You scaled the Eastern Wall before dawn, the stones cold beneath your fingers and your breath forming clouds in front of your face with every exhale. The sky was still dark, stars scattered across it like scattered diamonds, and the Moon — a thin crescent, hanging low on the horizon — cast just enough light for you to see where you were placing your feet.

You jumped into the forest, landing softly on the familiar path, and made your way to the clearing.

The clearing was quiet at this hour — quieter than it would be later, when the birds started singing and the Sun started warming the grass. The stream babbled softly, barely audible, and the trees creaked in the cold morning breeze, their bare branches reaching toward the sky like fingers.

And Satoru was already there, completely sprawled against your tree with a half-eaten onigiri in his hand and his dark sunglasses pushed up into his hair, which caught the faint starlight and seemed to glow with its own soft radiance. His eyes were closed, his breathing slow and steady, and for a moment — just a little moment — you thought the teenager had actually fallen asleep.

Satoru looked so peaceful like this.

The sharp edges of his personality softened, the constant performance set aside, the weight of being the strongest temporarily forgotten. He was just a boy, fifteen years old, sitting against a tree in the dark, waiting for his friend.

He waited for me, you thought, and the thought made something warm bloom in your small chest. He always waits for me. Even when it's cold. Even when it's early. Even when I don't ask him to.

Satoru just… shows up, every day, without fail.

Simply because he said he would.

"You're thinking too loud," Satoru said without bothering to open his eyes. His voice was slightly rough with sleep, but there was amusement underneath it, the kind that came from knowing someone well enough to tease them.

"I'm not thinking at all."

"Liar."

You settled quietly onto the tree trunk, your small legs dangling, your hands in your pockets, and pulled out a packet of mochi that you'd grabbed from the kitchen before leaving the clan estate. The plastic crinkled in the silence, loud and cheerful, and Satoru's eyes opened immediately at the familiar sound, tracking the movement with the kind of focus most people reserve for life-or-death situations.

"You brought snacks?"

"I always bring snacks."

"Today's snacks look particularly snack-like."

"They're mochi. They're the same mochi I bring every single day. The same brand, the same flavor, from the same convenience store, purchased at approximately the same time each morning."

"But today, they're my mochi." Satoru sat up, reaching for the packet with greedy hands that made him look less like the most powerful sorcerer and more like a very tall toddler who had spotted something shiny. "Give me that."

You handed it over and watched the white-haired teenager open the packet with unnecessary violence — ripping the plastic, tearing the seal, scattering a few crumbs on his dark uniform — before stuffing a piece into his mouth and chewing with an expression of intense satisfaction that bordered on religious ecstasy.

"Good?" you asked, even though you already knew the answer.

"Transcendent," Satoru said around a mouthful of mochi. "These are the best ones. The ones with the red bean filling. How did you know I wanted these specifically?"

"You texted me at 11PM last night. Seven times. All caps. Something about 'red bean or bust' and 'if I don't get red bean mochi tomorrow I will simply perish'."

"…That does sound like something I would do."

"Well, it's something you did do. I have the messages. I can show you."

"No need. I believe you." Satoru ate another piece of mochi, chewed thoughtfully, and swallowed. "So. What's the occasion? You don't usually bring my favorite flavor unless you want something."

You hesitated.

The words you needed to say sat on your tongue, heavy and awkward, and you weren't sure how to arrange them into something that would make sense. You'd been planning this conversation for days — rehearsing it in your head while you sat through meetings, while you reviewed reports, while you lay in bed staring at your ceiling — but now that Satoru was here, looking at you with those too-blue eyes, all your carefully prepared speeches seemed to evaporate.

"We're not training today," you said finally.

Satoru stopped chewing.

His blue eyes — a little darker than usual, because you had noticed that Satoru's eyes were darker when the teenager wasn't actively using Infinity, when he was just being rather than performing — fixed on your face, narrow and assessing. The playfulness that usually lived in his expression disappeared completely, replaced by something sharper, more focused.

"Are you sick?" Satoru asked, and there was genuine concern underneath the casual words. "Did something happen? It's your grandfather, isn't it? Did he—"

"No, Satoru, I'm not sick. And nothing happened." You held up your hands, placating. "I just… need to do something else today. That's all."

"What something else?"

You hesitated again.

You obviously hadn't told Satoru about your plan to find Yuuta and Rika. You hadn't told absolutely anyone — not Suguru, not Shoko, not anyone at all. It seemed far too strange, far too complicated to explain. 'I want to meet those two children because I know, from another life, that one of them will become a special grade sorcerer and the other will become a curse so powerful it terrifies everyone, and I want to be on good terms with them before any of that happens'.

Yeah, you couldn't say that.

But you could say something else.

"There are people I need to meet," you said carefully, your shining gold eyes fixed on the stream rather than on Satoru's face. "Children, about my age. I think… I think it's important that I know them."

Ugh, you berated yourself internally, your cheeks heating. The last part of your sentence wasn't necessary at all, Y/N. You absolute idiot! You could have just said 'there are people I need to meet' and left it at that. But no, you had to add the dramatic 'I think it's important' like you're in some kind of prophecy movie.

Satoru stared at you for a very, very long moment.

The stream babbled, the trees creaked, and somewhere in the distance, a bird — braver than the others, or maybe just more oblivious — finally began to sing, its song bright and cheerful in the cold morning air.

Then, finally, Satoru shrugged, ate another piece of mochi, and said;

"Okay."

You blinked. "Okay?"

"Yeah, okay." Satoru's voice was casual, almost lazy, but there was something underneath — something that might have been understanding, or perhaps just the kind of trust that came from long months of training together, of bleeding together, of falling asleep in each other's company and waking up still there. "You don't have to explain everything to me, Ninie. You have your reasons. I don't need to know them."

"You're not going to ask?"

"Would you tell me if I did?"

You thought about it.

You thought about the lies you would have to weave, the half-truths you would have to tell, the careful omissions you would have to maintain to keep Satoru from asking too many questions. You thought about the weight of secrets — your own and others — pressing against your chest like stones.

"Probably not," you admitted.

"Then what's the point?" Satoru finished the mochi, crumpled the wrapper into a tight ball, and easily threw it at your head with the casual accuracy of someone who had spent months practicing exactly this movement. It bounced off your forehead — right between your eyes — and landed in your lap, crinkled and pink. "Go do your mysterious thing. We'll train twice as hard tomorrow."

"Tomorrow is Sunday."

"Sunday is a social construct."

"You're going to make me train on a Sunday?"

"I'm going to make you train every day until you can finally beat me." Satoru smiled a sharp, brilliant smile that showed all his perfectly white teeth and leaned back against the tree, his arms crossed behind his head. "So… forever, probably."

You laughed despite yourself.

The sound surprised you — it was bright and genuine, the kind of laugh that came from somewhere deep and didn't have to be forced at all. Your small shoulders shook slightly, and Satoru's smile softened into something almost tender, something that looked like it belonged in a different context, on a different face, in a different kind of story.

"Just be careful, Y/N," the teenager said as you stood up and brushed the dirt from your training clothes. The playfulness was gone again, replaced by something heavier. "People are weird. Even children. Especially children, maybe. They say things they don't mean and they're cruel without realizing it and they—"

"Satoru."

Satoru stopped mid-sentence, his mouth still open, his eyes slightly wide.

"Yeah?"

"It'll be fine."

Satoru's jaw tightened — you could see the muscles clenching, you could see the tension gathering in his shoulders — and then, slowly, it relaxed. His breath came out in a long exhale, visible in the cold morning air, and he nodded.

"Yeah," Satoru said, and his voice was softer now, almost reluctant. "It'll be fine."

He paused, then added, almost as an afterthought;

"You're the strongest person I know, Ninie. And I know a lot of strong people."

Your chest did something complicated.

The words settled between your ribs, warm and heavy, and you didn't know what to do with them. You weren't the strongest — you knew that, could feel it in every bruise, every broken bone, every moment when Satoru's attacks came faster than you could dodge. You were strong, maybe, stronger than you had any right to be at five years old, but you weren't the strongest.

And yet.

Satoru said it like it was a fact, like the sky was blue and the stream was wet and Okada Y/N was the strongest person Gojo Satoru had ever met.

Why does he believe that? you wondered. What does he see that I don't?

"I'm not—" you started, but Satoru cut you off.

"You are." Satoru wasn't looking at you anymore; his eyes were fixed on the sky, on the clouds drifting past, on something you couldn't see. "You're the strongest because you keep getting back up. Every time. No matter what." He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was quieter, more thoughtful. "That's what strength is. It's not never falling. It's always getting back up. And you… you get back up more than anyone I've ever met."

You didn't know what to say to that.

Your throat was tight, your eyes were stinging, and something hot and unfamiliar pressed against the back of your eyelids, threatening to spill over, and you blinked rapidly, refusing to let it surface.

I'm not going to cry, you told yourself firmly. I'm not going to cry because Satoru said something kind. That's ridiculous. That's—

But no one has ever said anything like that to me before.

Not in my first life, not in this one.

No one has ever looked at me and seen… that.

"I should go," you said, and your voice came out rougher than you intended. "I have… things. To do. People to meet."

"Yeah." Satoru's smile returned, smaller than before, softer, more real. "Go do your things, Shishi. Meet your people."

You turned around quickly and walked away, toward the Eastern Wall, toward the Okada clan estate, toward the long walk that awaited you.

But Satoru's words followed you, warm and heavy, settling between the spaces of your ribs where hope lived.

You're the strongest person I know.

You keep getting back up.

Every time, no matter what.

Your hand drifted to your chest, pressing against the fabric of your clothes, feeling your heartbeat beneath your palm.

I hope he's right, you thought. I hope I am strong enough for what's coming.

Because something is coming.

I can feel it.

And I don't think I can face it alone.

Finding Yuuta and Rika took you about two hours.

Two hours of walking through neighborhoods that blurred into one another — identical streets lined with even more identical houses, each one differentiated from its neighbors only by the color of the front door or the type of car parked in the driveway or the particular arrangement of potted plants on the porch. Two hours of corner grocery stores on street corners with their faded awnings and hand-painted signs, vending machines humming their silent songs in front of train stations and office buildings, and the occasional vending machine that sold something unexpected, like hot ramen or small toys in plastic capsules that you had been tempted to buy just for the novelty of it.

Two hours of Shinji's teasing echoing in your head, not quite useful but not quite useless either, like a commentary track on a movie you hadn't asked to watch but couldn't turn off.

[ You could just ask the system for their location. ]

Those were the very words Shinji had said about seventeen times already.

'Seventeen' wasn't even an exaggeration, you had actually started counting after the fifth repetition, because that was the kind of petty, detail-oriented person you had become in this new life — someone who kept track of small things to distract yourself from larger ones.

"Nah. That would be cheating if I do," you had replied, about eighteen times; once for each of Shinji's suggestions, plus an extra for good measure, because you were nothing if not consistent.

[ How is using the resources at your disposal cheating? ]

"Because I want to find them myself." You kicked a small stone on the sidewalk, watching it skitter across the concrete and disappear into a gutter. "Because it feels more… real."

[ More real? ]

"You know…" You gestured vaguely with one hand, trying to capture a concept that didn't quite fit into words. "More like I earned it? Like I actually put in the effort instead of just… having the answer handed to me."

[ That's not how effort works. Effort is about the work itself, not about artificially limiting your tools. ]

"Maybe." You turned a corner, following a street that looked slightly less familiar than the one before it, your small legs carrying you forward with the kind of stubborn determination that had become your signature. "But I'm doing it this way anyway."

[ Because you're stubborn. ]

"Because I'm principled."

[ Those aren't the same thing. ]

"They are when I say they are."

Shinji had been quiet after that, and you had continued to walk calmly, your little feet carrying you through streets you had never seen before, past houses where you had never set foot, beneath power lines that buzzed with electricity and the faint resistance of curses you had learned to ignore — the same way you learn to ignore the hum of a refrigerator, always there, but faded into the background of your awareness until something draws your attention back to it.

The neighborhoods changed as you walked.

The houses grew older, smaller, closer together. The cars parked along the streets were less expensive, more worn. The vending machines were older models, their paint faded, their selections more limited. You passed a small shrine tucked between two buildings, its torii gate worn smooth by weather and time, and the young boy paused for a small moment, pressing his hands together in a gesture that felt both foreign and familiar.

I don't know what I'm doing, you thought, looking up at the weathered stone. I don't know if I'm supposed to pray to you or if you're even listening. But… if you are… just please let me find them.

Please let me get there in time.

Please let me be enough.

You weren't sure who you were praying to — the Gods of this world, the ancestors whose paintings lined the halls of the Okada compound, or just the vast, indifferent universe that had somehow, inexplicably, decided to give you a second chance. But the words felt important, so you said them anyway, and then you kept walking.

You found the two children in the seventh park.

Seven parks. You had checked seven parks in two hours, walking from one to the next with the kind of single-minded focus that made other pedestrians step aside without quite knowing why. Seven parks with their swings and slides and sandboxes, their patches of grass worn thin by countless small feet, their benches occupied by parents scrolling through phones or reading books or simply staring into space while their children played.

The first park had been empty, save for a single mother pushing a stroller back and forth along the walking path, her face tired and distant.

The second park had been occupied by a group of older children, maybe eight or nine years old, who had looked at you with narrowed eyes and whispered among themselves until you had walked away.

The third park only had a dog — a large and friendly golden retriever that had instantly bounded up to you with its tail wagging, and you had spent five minutes petting it before continuing on your way because, well, it was a golden retriever, and you weren't made of stone.

The fourth and fifth parks had been empty.

The sixth park had been closed for renovations, surrounded by orange mesh fencing and signs that said things like 'DANGER' and 'KEEP OUT' in bold red letters.

And then—

The seventh park.

It was small, nestled between two apartment buildings, the kind of place that probably got sunlight for maybe three hours a day and spent the rest in shadow, the buildings blocking the Sun's path across the sky. The playground equipment was old but well-maintained — a slide with faded red plastic that had been patched in several places, swings that creaked when you used them (you could hear them creaking from the sidewalk), a sandbox that had probably been cleaned recently given the absence of animal tracks or discarded trash.

And there, on the swings, were two children.

You stopped at the edge of the park, your heart suddenly pounding so hard you could feel it in your throat, your palms suddenly damp despite the coolness of the evening.

There they are.

There they are, there they are, there they are—

The girl was older, maybe six or seven, with beautiful long black hair tied in a ponytail that swished when she moved and a yellow dress that seemed too bright for the overcast sky, like a small piece of sunshine had decided to take human form and sit on a swing. She was pushing herself lazily, her feet dragging in the dust, not really trying to go higher. Her eyes were fixed on the other child — a boy, smaller, sitting on the swing next to her, his hands gripping the chains so tightly his knuckles were white.

Okkotsu Yuuta.

Even from a distance, even at five years old, even with only the vague memories of panels and anime and fan art to guide you, you recognized him.

The dark hair, soft and slightly disheveled, falling across his forehead in a way that made him look like he'd just woken up. The impossibly soft features — the kind of face that made you want to protect him, even if you didn't know why. The way he held himself, shoulders hunched slightly, knees pressed together, as if he expected to be told he was doing something wrong at any moment and wanted to make himself as small as possible for when the criticism came.

Yuuta was only four years old — just one year younger than your current body, although you seemed to be a bit taller than him in stature, maybe from better nutrition or better genes or just the random luck of genetics — and he was so painfully, heartbreakingly small.

Oh my God, you thought, and something in your chest cracked — it was a soundless, invisible fracture that spread through your ribs like ice forming on a winter pond. Oh my God, he's just a baby.

They're both just babies.

And I know what's going to happen to them.

I know what's going to take her away and what's going to be left behind and how much it's going to hurt, and I can't—

You took a breath, then another.

Then a third, for good measure, because apparently you really needed to stockpile oxygen like a camel preparing for a desert crossing.

You knew this, intellectually.

You had known it before you left the Okada compound this morning, before you started walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods, before you checked park after park after park. Yuuta was only four years old in the current timeline, still far from the events that would define his life, still far from Rika's death and the curse and the crushing weight of being special in a world that ate special people alive.

But knowing something intellectually and seeing it with your own eyes were two very different things.

And seeing Yuuta right now — the small boy sitting on a swing, holding the chains too tightly, his small chest rising and falling with each breath — brought home the reality of the situation in a way that no amount of planning or preparation could have prepared you for.

He's just a child, you thought. They're both just children. Yuuta should be worried about homework and bedtime and whether he'll get the toy he wants for his birthday. Not about curses. Not about death. Not about any of the things that are coming for them.

But they will be soon.

And I—

I can't stop it. I can't save her. I can only… be there for him, after everything.

If he'll let me.

"Shinji," you whispered, your voice barely audible even to your own ears. "I think I'm going to be sick."

[ You're not going to be sick. ]

Shinji's voice was soft, almost gentle, the way it got when you were spiraling and needed someone to pull you back to solid ground.

[ You're going to go over there and introduce yourself like a normal person. ]

"Ugh, but I'm not a normal person."

[ Then pretend. ]

[ You're good at pretending. ]

You almost laughed at that, at the absurdity of it, at the truth of it, at the way Shinji could say something that was both a compliment and an indictment at the same time.

Yeah, you thought. I am good at pretending, aren't I?

I've been pretending my whole life.

Pretending to be someone I'm not.

Pretending to feel things I don't.

Pretending not to feel things I do.

Pretending to be a child when I'm not, pretending to be an adult when I was, pretending to be normal when I've never been anything close to normal in either of my lives.

Pretending is what I do.

It's who I am.

Might as well put it to good use.

You took a deep breath, squared your shoulders, and finally stepped forward.

The girl noticed you first.

Rika's head turned when you approached, her brown eyes sharp and assessing in a way that vaguely reminded you of Shoko — that same watchfulness, that same careful evaluation, that same sense that she was cataloging everything about you and filing it away for future reference. She didn't smile immediately, she didn't frown either, she simply watched you come over with the patient stillness of someone who had learned not to trust strangers, not because she had been hurt by them, but because she was smart enough to know that trust should be earned.

"Hi," you said, stopping a few meters away — close enough to be friendly, far enough to not seem threatening, a distance you had learned through trial and error during months of meeting new people at Jujutsu High.

You shoved your hands in your pockets, trying your best to look casual, trying to look like a normal five-year-old child approaching other children on a playground, and not like a reincarnated adult with the weight of two lifetimes pressing down on your small shoulders.

"My name is Y/N. I'm new here."

It wasn't technically a lie.

You were new here — new to this neighborhood, new to this park, new to the particular configuration of apartment buildings and corner stores and vending machines that made up this small slice of the city. And you were new to them, to Yuuta and Rika, to the particular dynamic that existed between the two of them that you could already see, even from a few meters away, was something special.

Rika's eyes flicked to Yuuta — it was a quick and protective glance, checking on him, making sure he was okay — before returning to you.

"My name is Rika," she said finally, her voice softening slightly, the wariness in her expression easing by just a fraction. "And this is Yuuta."

Yuuta didn't say anything.

The little boy was staring at you with big, dark, shy eyes — the kind of eyes that seemed to take up half his face, that made him look perpetually on the verge of tears even when he wasn't sad. His mouth was slightly open, his small hands still gripping the swing chains as if they were the only things keeping him grounded, as if letting go would cause him to float away into the sky and never come back.

Up close, Yuuta was even smaller than you had thought.

He was so delicate, with such a fragile quality — thin wrists, pale skin, a slightness to his frame that suggested he didn't eat enough or maybe just had a fast metabolism — that it made you suddenly want to wrap him in blankets and hide him somewhere safe forever, somewhere the curses couldn't find him, somewhere the world couldn't hurt him.

This is the boy who's going to carry the strongest curse in history, you thought, and the idea seemed so absurd, so impossible, that you almost laughed. This tiny, shy, fragile-looking child is going to become a special grade sorcerer.

This is the boy I came to find.

This is the boy I'm going to—

"Hi, Yuuta," you said, more softly, lowering yourself slightly so that you were closer to Yuuta's eye level.

The gesture was automatic, something you had learned from interacting with children in your first life, a way of making them feel less intimidated, more comfortable, and it seemed to work, because Yuuta's shoulders relaxed just a fraction.

Yuuta's lips moved, but no sound came out.

His mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping for air, and his cheeks flushed pink with embarrassment, and you felt your heart crack a little more.

"He's very shy," Rika said, and there was something in her voice — protectiveness, perhaps, or simply the kind of fierce love that only children seemed capable of expressing without irony or self-consciousness. "He doesn't talk much to people he doesn't know."

"That's okay," you said, and you meant it. "I don't talk much either. Usually."

Well, you thought, as soon as the words left your mouth. That's a lie.

I talk a lot. Constantly, almost. Especially when I'm with Satoru or Suguru or anyone who makes me feel comfortable enough to stop performing.

But they don't need to know that.

Rika didn't call you on it.

The girl just nodded, as if that made sense, as if she understood something about you that you hadn't said, as if she could see past the performance to the person underneath. Or maybe she couldn't, and she was just being polite, and you were projecting because you wanted to believe that someone so young could see you clearly.

"You can sit with us," she said, gesturing to the swing next to Yuuta's. "If you want."

You sat down.

The swing was cold against your pants, the chains rough against your palms, the metal cold enough to make you shiver slightly. You pushed yourself gently, just enough to sway, but not enough to really fly — the way you swing when you're not really swinging, just moving back and forth because it feels better than sitting still.

You let yourself look at the playground without looking at the two children next to you.

The slide, red and faded, with patches of newer plastic where it had been repaired. The sandbox, its wooden borders worn smooth by weather and time, the sand within a pale beige that had probably been brighter once. The small patch of grass that was more brown than green, worn thin by countless feet running back and forth. The bench near the entrance, occupied by an old man reading a newspaper, paying you no attention.

The buildings on either side, their windows reflecting the overcast sky, their laundry lines strung between them like clotheslines in an old photograph. The smell of someone's cooking drifting from an open window; something savory, maybe curry, or something else, warm and comforting and completely out of place in the cool evening air.

I want to remember this, you thought. I want to remember every single detail. The creak of the swings. The smell of the cooking. The way the light looks through the clouds. Because this moment — this ordinary, unremarkable moment — is going to matter.

It's going to matter to Yuuta, someday.

When everything else has been taken from him, when Rika is gone and the curse is all that's left, he's going to remember this afternoon.

Yuuta is going to remember playing in this park with Rika and a strange boy.

And I want to remember it too.

"You have pretty eyes," Yuuta said.

You turned your head toward the boy, surprised.

You hadn't thought about your eyes at all — you hadn't thought about what people might think of them, how they might react, whether they would be scared or awed or simply indifferent. You had been so focused on finding Yuuta and Rika, on getting to this park, on the mission itself, that you had forgotten that your eyes were… noticeable.

Stupid, you berated yourself internally. Of course they're noticeable. They're gold. They literally glow in certain lights. You can't just show up somewhere and expect people not to notice your eyes.

But Yuuta noticed.

And he didn't say words like 'weird' or 'creepy' or 'why are your eyes like that'.

He said 'pretty'.

Yuuta was looking at you now — his dark eyes fixed on your face with an intensity that seemed far too big for his small body, that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his four years of life experience. There was no fear in his expression, no distrust, no hesitation. There was just… curiosity, and something else. Something that might have been wonder, or recognition, or the simple, uncomplicated acceptance of a child who hadn't yet learned to be afraid of things that were different.

"Thank you," you said, and your voice came out softer than you intended, almost a whisper. "Yours are pretty too."

Yuuta blinked.

His dark eyes — impossibly dark, like pools of ink, like the spaces between stars — widened slightly, and then, slowly, shyly, the boy smiled. It was a tiny smile, barely there, the kind of smile you could easily miss if you weren't paying enough attention, the kind of smile that seemed to cost him something to produce, like he wasn't used to smiling and wasn't sure if he was doing it right.

But you were always paying attention.

It was the curse of your eyes — the blessing and the burden, the thing that set you apart from everyone else. You saw the small smile on Yuuta's face, and you saw the way it transformed the boy's entire expression, lighting up his features from within, making him look like someone who had forgotten how to be happy and was now remembering.

And you felt something tighten painfully in your chest.

He is way too cute, you thought, and the thought was so intense, so overwhelming, that you almost couldn't breathe. I'm going to die. I'm really going to die from his cuteness.

[ You can't die. ]

Shinji's soft, amused voice echoed in your mind, and you could practically hear the smirk in it.

Shut up, Shinji.

[ Just stating facts. ]

I said shut up.

Rika watched the exchange with an expression that had shifted from watchful to something almost approving.

She hadn't smiled yet, and you didn't blame her, because after all, you had just met, and you were a complete stranger, and she had no reason to trust you at all, but her shoulders had relaxed considerably, and Rika had now stopped assessing you as a potential threat and started assessing you as… something else. A curiosity, maybe, or a possibility. Someone who might be worth knowing.

"Where do you live?" she asked.

"Far away," you replied, which was true.

The Okada clan's domain was far away from this neighborhood, far away from this park, far away from the ordinary world that most people inhabited. It existed in a different reality almost; one of ancient buildings and political maneuvering and the constant hum of cursed energy that most people never noticed.

"But I'm just passing through. I wanted to see new places."

"That's weird," Rika said, and her voice wasn't unkind, just… direct. The way children often were, before they learned to soften their observations with politeness. "Most kids your age don't visit new places alone."

"I'm not like most kids."

Rika considered this.

Her brown eyes — sharp and assessing, but not unkind — studied your face, your eyes, the way you held yourself. She was trying to figure you out, you could tell. She was trying to decide if you were lying, if you were dangerous, if you were worth the risk of friendship.

Then she simply nodded, as if you had passed a test you didn't know existed.

"Yeah," Rika said, and a small smile tugged at the corner of her lips. "I can see that."

The three of you sat on the swings for a while after that, not talking much, just… existing, sharing the same space without needing to fill it with words.

You let your gaze wander over the playground — the slide, the sandbox, the small patch of grass — and you tried to memorize every little detail.

The way the light filtered through the buildings, casting long shadows on the ground that shifted slowly as the Sun moved across the sky. The sound of traffic in the distance, muffled and indistinct, a constant background hum that was easy to ignore. The smell of someone's cooking drifting from an open window that made your stomach growl despite the fact that you weren't actually hungry.

The creak of the swings when they moved.

The rustle of the wind through the trees.

The soft sound of Yuuta's breathing, slow and steady, as he sat on his swing and stared at the clouds.

You wanted to remember this.

You wanted to remember Yuuta's small smile, and Rika's watchful but kind eyes, and the way the two of them existed together as if they had always done this — as if they had been sitting on these swings, in this park, for their entire lives, and would continue to sit here for the rest of them.

Because soon — much too soon — everything was going to completely change.

The curse would come, and Rika would become something else, and Yuuta would carry a weight that no child should ever have to bear. The park would still be here, probably. The swings would still creak, the slide would still be red, the sandbox would still be full of sand, but the two children who sat here now, in this moment, would be gone.

Rika would be gone.

And Yuuta would be someone else entirely.

But right now, in this moment, they were just children.

Just two adorable children on a playground, living the ordinary magic of a Saturday afternoon, unaware of the darkness gathering at the edges of their story.

"Do you want to play?" Yuuta asked, pulling you from your deep thoughts.

Yuuta's voice was still quiet, still hesitant, still barely above a whisper. But there was something in it; hope, perhaps, or the kind of hesitant advance of someone who had been hurt multiple times and was trying again anyway, because the alternative — giving up, staying completely silent, never reaching out — was worse.

Your heart clenched.

"Yes," you said, and you smiled — a real smile, not the performance you had been maintaining all afternoon, but something genuine. "I'd like that."

They played on the slide first.

Rika went first, climbing the ladder with the ease of someone who had done it a hundred times before, her yellow dress flaring out behind her like a flag. She paused at the top, looking down at the boys with a grin that was half excitement and half challenge.

"Watch this!" she called, and then she pushed off.

The girl slid down quickly, her laughter bright and unexpected and loud, echoing through the small park like a bell. Rika landed at the bottom with a thud, her shoes scuffing the dirt, and she immediately got up, brushing the dust from her hands and her yellow dress.

"Your turn, Yuuta!" she called, her smile wide and encouraging.

Yuuta climbed the ladder slowly, his small hands gripping the rungs with white-knuckled intensity, his feet finding each step with meticulous precision. The little boy wasn't like Rika — confident, carefree, unafraid. Yuuta approached the slide the way someone might approach an awfully difficult test, or a scary movie, or any other thing that required courage he wasn't sure he had.

At the top, he stopped.

He sat there, at the edge of the slide, his legs dangling over the side, and stared down at the ground with an expression that was half-excitement and half-terror. His small hands gripped the edges of the slide, his knuckles white, his whole body tense with the effort of not moving.

"You can do it, Yuuta," you encouraged him from behind, your voice soft but firm.

Yuuta glanced back nervously, his big dark eyes wide.

"What if I fall?" he asked, and his voice was so small, so scared, that you felt your heart crack all over again.

"You won't fall."

"But what if I fall?"

You thought for a moment.

You thought of your own body — broken and rebuilt and broken again, over and over, one hundred and sixty-two times now, each death a lesson, each resurrection a promise. You thought of the golden blood, the golden threads, the golden eyes that saw too much and changed what they saw. You thought of the pain — the searing, burning, consuming pain of dying — and how it had become something you could observe rather than feel, something that happened to your body while your mind watched from a distance.

And you thought of Satoru's words, the ones the teenager had spoken that morning, before you had left the clearing.

You're the strongest because you keep getting back up. Every time. No matter what. That's what strength is. It's not never falling. It's always getting back up.

"Then you get back up," you finally said, and you smiled gently, hoping it was reassuring. "And you try again."

Yuuta stared at you for a long moment.

His dark and doe-like eyes searched your face, looking for something — a lie, maybe, or simply a reassurance that he didn't quite believe. And whatever Yuuta found there, whatever he saw in your expression, in your golden eyes, in the small smile that curved your lips, made something shift in his own face.

The fear didn't disappear, exactly, but it changed.

It became something that looked almost like determination, like the decision to be brave even when you didn't feel brave, like the choice to trust even when trust felt dangerous.

And then, finally, Yuuta pushed off.

He slid down the slide, not quickly, not in the same way Rika had, but more slowly, tentatively, his small body tensed for impact, and when he landed at the bottom, Yuuta's little laugh — surprised and delighted and just as bright as Rika's — echoed throughout the playground.

"I did it!" Yuuta said, and his voice was louder now, more certain, filled with a joy that seemed to light him up from the inside. "I did it, Y/N!"

Your chest swelled with something that felt dangerously close to pride.

"Yeah, you did," you said. "Good job, Yuuta."

The three of you played on the swings after that, taking turns pushing each other, seeing who could go the highest.

Rika was competitive — fiercely, delightfully competitive, the kind of competitive that made her push harder, swing higher, laugh louder every single time she surpassed the boys. Her yellow dress flared behind her like a banner, and her ponytail streamed out like a tail, and her smile was so bright, so unguarded, that you had to look away for a moment because it hurt to look at.

She's going to die, you thought, and the thought was cold and sharp and unwelcome. She's going to die, and she's going to become a curse, and Yuuta is going to carry her for the rest of his life, and there's nothing I can do to stop any of it.

But right now—

Right now, she's alive.

Right now, she's laughing.

Right now, she's just a little girl on a swing, enjoying a Saturday afternoon with the little boy she loves the most and a strange boy with golden eyes.

And that has to be enough.

It has to be.

Yuuta was gentler, more cautious, always checking that everyone was okay before letting himself really have fun. Yuuta pushed you on the swing with careful, measured pushes, asking 'is this okay?' and 'does that hurt?' and 'are you sure?' until you wanted to completely wrap him in a warm blanket and never let him go.

"You don't have to be so careful, Yuuta," you said, after Yuuta had asked for the fifth time if he was pushing you too hard. "I'm not made of glass."

Yuuta's brow furrowed.

"But what if I hurt you?"

"You won't hurt me."

"But what if I do?"

You thought about your body again — the way it broke and healed, broke and healed, broke and healed, in an endless cycle that had become as familiar as breathing. You thought about the pain, and how it had stopped meaning anything, and how that was perhaps the saddest thing of all.

"Then I'll be okay," you said. "I promise."

Yuuta looked at you for a long moment, that same searching look, that same attempt to find the truth beneath the words.

And then, slowly, he nodded.

"Okay," Yuuta said. "I trust you."

And you…

You pretended.

You pretended to be a normal five-year-old child, laughing at things that weren't particularly funny, exclaiming over things that didn't really surprise you, letting yourself be pushed, swung, and slid without analyzing the architecture beneath the joy. You pretended that your heart wasn't heavy with the weight of knowing, that your mind wasn't crowded with memories of a future that hadn't happened yet, that your eyes were just eyes and not windows into something deeper and more terrifying.

In all honesty, it was exhausting in a way that training with Satoru wasn't, because at least with Satoru, you could still be yourself — tired, sarcastic, too old for your body and too young for your mind, a strange amalgamation of two lifetimes that didn't quite fit together.

At least with Satoru, you didn't have to perform.

But here, with Yuuta and Rika, you had to play a role.

You had to be a five-year-old child.

You had to be someone they could trust, someone they could play with, someone they could see as a friend rather than a curiosity, a project, a strange boy with strange eyes who appeared out of nowhere and asked strange questions.

You had to be normal.

Or as close to normal as you could manage.

And it was worth it.

Every awkward moment, every forced laugh, every time you caught yourself observing instead of living and had to consciously pull back — it was worth it. Because Yuuta was smiling now, a bright smile that spread across his entire face, that reached his eyes and lit them up from within, and Rika had completely stopped looking at you as a threat and had started looking at you as something else.

A friend, maybe.

Or the potential for one.

"You're really weird," Rika said, after they had collapsed on the grass, out of breath, tired, and happy. The Sun had shifted in the sky, the shadows growing a little longer, the air growing a little cooler, and the three of you lay on your backs staring at the clouds. "But I like you."

"Thank you," you said, because you didn't really know how to respond. "I think."

"It's a compliment."

"It was?"

Rika's lips twitched that almost-smile again, the one that made her look softer, more like the child she was.

"Maybe."

Yuuta was lying on his back, staring at the cloudy sky, his small chest rising and falling with the rhythm of someone who had just run a marathon — or, in his case, someone who had just spent several hours playing on playground equipment for the first time in what was probably a while. His dark hair was spread out on the grass like a little halo, and his eyes — those impossibly soft eyes, dark and deep and full of wonder — were fixed on the clouds drifting past.

"Y/N," Yuuta said, breaking the comfortable silence.

"Yeah?"

"I know I already told you, but…" He turned his head, looking at you with that same intense curiosity from earlier, that same sense that he was trying to figure something out. "Your eyes are really, really beautiful."

You could feel your heart swell in your chest — a physical sensation, almost painful, like your ribs were expanding to make room for something too big to contain.

"Thank you, Yuuta."

"I've never seen eyes like yours before." Yuuta's brow furrowed slightly, like he was searching for the right words. "They're all shiny and gold. Like… like a treasure."

"Like a treasure," you repeated, and your voice sounded strange to you — thick, almost, like there was something caught in your throat.

"Yeah!" Yuuta smiled again; that small, shy smile that transformed his whole face, that made him look like someone who had forgotten how to be happy and was just now remembering. "Like a treasure."

Rika was quiet for a moment, watching the two boys with an expression you couldn't quite decipher.

Affection, maybe. Or amusement. Or simply the quiet satisfaction of seeing Yuuta truly happy.

Then she leaned over and poked Yuuta's cheek.

"You're so weird," she said, but her voice was fond, almost affectionate.

"You're weird too."

"We're all weird," you said, and you meant it more than they would ever know.

The three of you spent the afternoon in that park, moving from the swings to the sandbox to the small patch of grass that was more brown than green, playing and laughing and existing together in the easy way that children had — without agenda, without expectation, without the weight of the world pressing down on their shoulders.

They built sandcastles that collapsed almost immediately, Rika declaring that the sand was 'bad' and Yuuta nodding seriously in agreement, as if this were a matter of great importance. They chased each other around the playground equipment until they were too tired to run, their laughter echoing through the small park like music. They lay on the grass staring at clouds while you pointed out shapes that weren't really there — dragons and rabbits and faces in the clouds — and Rika called you a liar every time.

"You're lying," she said, when you claimed a cloud looked exactly like a dragon. "It's just a cloud."

"All clouds are just clouds. But some clouds are also dragons." You gestured at the sky with one hand, trying to look wise and philosophical. "It's a matter of perspective."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"It makes perfect sense. You're just not thinking about it correctly."

Rika rolled her eyes, a gesture so familiar, so reminiscent of the current Shoko, that you almost laughed, but Rika was still smiling, and Yuuta was laughing — a small, joyful sound that squeezed your chest in the best way — and the afternoon light shifted from gold to orange, the Sun beginning its slow descent toward the horizon.

They had been here for hours.

You hadn't even noticed.

You had been too busy pretending to be a child, too focused on your role, to realize that at some point, the role had stopped feeling like a role. You had laughed — a real laugh, not the forced laugh you had used all afternoon — when Rika fell face-first into the sandbox, her yellow dress getting covered in sand, her expression one of utter betrayal. And you had felt genuine warmth, not the performance of warmth, but the real thing, when Yuuta carefully grabbed your hand to drag you toward the slide, his small fingers warm and slightly sticky and completely trusting.

When had that happened?

When had you stopped pretending and started just… being?

[ Maybe you're not as different from them as you think. ]

You didn't reply, you really couldn't reply.

Because the Sun was setting, the shadows were growing longer, and Rika was looking at her phone with a displeased expression, her brow furrowed, her lips pressed together in a thin line. And Yuuta's smile — that beautiful, adorable, and fragile smile — was fading into something even more fragile, something that looked almost like sadness.

"We have to go," Rika said, getting up and brushing the grass and sand off her yellow dress with sharp, decisive movements. Her voice was flat, resigned, the voice of someone who had learned that fun things always ended too soon. "We need to be home before it gets dark."

"Oh," Yuuta said, and his voice was so small, so disappointed, that you felt your heart crack yet again.

You stood up too, your legs stiff from sitting too long, your hands cold from the evening air, your body protesting the movement after hours of inactivity. You looked at Yuuta — his dark hair, his soft eyes, the way his hands fidgeted in front of him, twisting together like he didn't know what to do with them — and you felt something twist in your chest.

I don't want to leave, you thought. I don't want to leave them. I don't want to go back to the compound, to the meetings, to the weight of being the heir. I want to stay here, in this park, with these children, and pretend that the future isn't coming.

But I can't.

I have to go.

I have to—

"Can we see you again?" Yuuta asked.

The question was so direct, so hopeful, so completely unexpected, that it caught you completely off guard.

You had expected to have to work a lot for this — to earn the two children's trust over several meetings, to slowly build a relationship that might one day become genuine friendship. You had expected hesitation, suspicion, the kind of guardedness that came from children who had learned that strangers didn't always mean well.

You hadn't expected Yuuta to ask, outright, if they could see each other again.

He already trusts me, you thought, and the realization hit you like a physical blow. After just a few hours, after just one afternoon, he trusts me.

Why?

What did I do to deserve that?

"Yes," you said softly, and your voice came out rougher than you intended. "I'd like that."

Yuuta's smile returned — bright and relieved and so full of hope that it almost hurt to look at.

"Tomorrow?" he asked, his eyes shining with anticipation, his small body practically vibrating with excitement.

"I can't tomorrow." Your heart sank as you said the words, watching Yuuta's smile falter. "But soon. I promise."

Tomorrow is training. Tomorrow is Satoru and the clearing and the brutal, beautiful rhythm of pushing myself past my limits once again.

But after that, I'll come back.

I'll always come back.

"Y/N," Rika said, and her voice was serious in a way that made the young boy pay more attention — her voice was sharp, focused, the voice of someone who was about to ask a question that mattered. "You're not lying, are you? You're really going to come back?"

"I'm really going to come back, Rika."

Rika studied you for a long moment.

Her light brown eyes — sharp and assessing, not unkind but not naive either — searched your face for something. A lie, perhaps, or the first sign of a broken promise, or simply the truth, plain and simple, written in your expression for anyone who knew how to look.

And then, finally, she nodded.

"Okay," she said, and her smile returned, smaller than before, but real. "We'll be there. Same time. Same place."

"I'll find you."

"You found us today."

"That was just luck."

"Then get lucky again, Y/N."

You laughed — a real laugh, surprised by Rika's pragmatic confidence, by the way she said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

"I'll try."

Yuuta stepped forward shyly, then stopped just after. His small hands reached out — toward you, toward the space between you — then fell back to his sides, as if he wanted to hug you but wasn't sure if he was allowed.

The hesitation hurt your chest.

Because the boy was so cute — so painfully, heartbreakingly cute — and he clearly wanted connection, wanted touch, wanted to bridge the distance between you, but he didn't know how. He had been hurt before, maybe. Or told no too many times. Or simply learned that reaching out was dangerous, that people didn't always reach back.

I want to hug him, you thought. I want to wrap my arms around him and tell him everything is going to be okay, even though I know it's not, even though I know it's going to get so much worse before it gets better.

But I can't.

"Goodbye, Y/N," Yuuta said, and his voice was small and soft and sad.

"Not goodbye." You shook your head, your voice gentle but firm. "See you later."

Yuuta's eyes widened, and so did his smile — that beautiful, adorable smile that transformed his whole face, that made him look genuinely happy.

"See you later," Yuuta repeated, as if testing the words, as if wanting to make sure they were real.

"See you later," you repeated, and you meant it with every fiber of your being.

Rika gently took Yuuta's hand, her fingers curling around his, and they started walking toward the edge of the park.

You watched them walk away — their small figures shrinking as they headed toward the street, toward the buildings, toward the home that awaited them. Rika's yellow dress was bright against the gray of the evening, a small spot of color in a world that was slowly fading to shadow. Yuuta's dark hair bounced with each step, and his small hand was held tightly in Rika's, and they walked together as if they had always walked together, as if they would always walk together, as if nothing could ever separate them.

But something will, you thought, and the thought was cold and sharp and unwelcome. Something will separate them. Something terrible. Something I can't stop.

And Yuuta will be alone.

For years, he'll be alone.

Until he finds his way to Jujutsu High, until he meets the people who will become his friends, until he learns to carry the weight of what he is.

But I can be there before that.

I can be there now.

I can be his friend.

I can make sure he knows he's not alone.

"Hey!" you suddenly called out, your voice louder than you intended, carrying across the empty park.

The two children turned around.

Rika's expression was curious, slightly confused, and Yuuta's expression was hopeful, his dark eyes wide, his small body already turning back toward you as if he had been waiting for you to call out.

"Don't you guys forget to look both ways before crossing the street, okay?"

Rika rolled her eyes.

"We know how to cross the street."

"Just wanted to make sure."

Yuuta gave a small wave — a tiny, shy gesture, his fingers barely moving, as if he was afraid that waving too enthusiastically would be somehow wrong.

And then finally, the two children were gone, disappearing around the corner, swallowed by the evening shadows.

You stayed in the park for a long time after they left.

The swings creaked softly in the breeze, their chains clinking against the metal frame in a rhythm that was almost musical. The slide cast a long shadow over the sandbox, the red plastic darkening to burgundy in the fading light. The sky above was a breathtaking blend of colors — beautifully pinks and purples and golds and deep blues, layered like the pages of one of The First's journals.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog was barking — a sharp, rhythmic sound that echoed through the quiet neighborhood. And somewhere else, someone was calling their children in for dinner, their voice faint, carrying on the evening air.

Dinner, you thought. I should eat dinner. I should go back to the compound. I should—

You didn't move.

Your legs felt heavy, weighted down by something you couldn't name. Your chest felt tight, constricted, like someone had wrapped a band around it and was slowly pulling it tighter. Your eyes — your stupid, gold, impossible eyes — were burning, and you blinked rapidly, trying to clear them.

[ Y/N? ]

"Yeah?"

[ You're crying. ]

You touched your cheek, surprised.

Your fingers came away wet.

"Oh," you said, and your voice sounded strange to you — distant and disconnected, like it belonged to someone else. "I guess I am."

[ Are you okay? ]

"I… I don't know." You slowly wiped your eyes with the back of your hand, smearing the tears across your skin. "I don't know if I'm okay."

[ Do you want to talk about it? ]

You thought about it.

You thought about Yuuta's smile — small and shy and so, so precious. You thought about Rika's bright laugh, her fierce protectiveness, the way she looked at Yuuta like he was the most important person in the universe. You thought about the two of them together, walking hand in hand toward a future that was going to tear them apart.

You thought about what was coming.

Rika's death. The curse. The years of pain and isolation that awaited Yuuta. The weight he would carry, the guilt he would feel, the loneliness that would consume him.

And you thought about their small size, their fragility, their total unpreparedness for the world that was going to completely eat them alive.

"I can't save everyone," you finally said.

[ No. ]

Shinji's voice was soft, almost gentle, and there was no judgment in it — just acceptance, just the simple acknowledgment of a truth that you already knew.

[ No, you can't. ]

"I can't stop what's going to happen to them."

[ No. ]

"But I can be there." Your voice broke on the last word, cracking like ice under pressure. "I can be there, now, while there's still time. I can be their friend. I can make sure they know—" You stopped, swallowed, then started again, your voice quieter now, more vulnerable. "I can make sure they know they're not alone."

[ That's a lot for a five-year-old child to carry. ]

"I'm not really five years old."

[ No. But you look like it. ]

[ And sometimes, Y/N, looking like something is already enough. ]

[ Sometimes the appearance of childhood is in itself a form of protection. ]

You didn't know what to say to that, so you said nothing at all.

You just stood in the empty park, watching the light slowly fade from the sky, and let yourself feel the weight of everything you couldn't change.

Tomorrow, you would try go back to the archives.

Tomorrow, you would try to read more of The First's writings, you would try to absorb more of that ancient wisdom, and you would try to understand what you were and what you were becoming.

Tomorrow, you would train with Satoru, you would push your body past its limits, you would bleed gold and heal gold and come back stronger than before.

Tomorrow, you would attend your grandfather's meetings, would review reports and smile at elders and play the role of the perfect heir with the skill that sometimes frightened you.

And tomorrow, you would pretend to be a child in a world that didn't make sense, in a life that was too big for your small body, in a story that you already knew the ending to.

But tonight, you would remember this.

The creaking swings. The red slide with its faded plastic. The sandbox with its pale beige sand. The buildings on either side, their windows reflecting the dying light. The smell of someone's cooking drifting from an open window, warm and comforting and completely ordinary.

The girl with the bright smile, who had looked at you with sharp eyes and asked if you were lying.

And the small, shy smile of a boy who had called your eyes a pretty treasure.

You would remember, and you would keep going, because that was what you did.

That was what you had always done.

[ It's getting dark. You should head back. ]

"Yeah," you said, and your voice was steadier now, more certain. "Okay."

You turned around and walked away from the park, your small feet carrying you toward the Okada clan's domain, toward the life you had been given in this world that shouldn't exist. The stars were appearing, one by one, scattered across the darkening sky like scattered diamonds, like gold threads woven into the fabric of the night.

Somewhere behind you, in a small apartment in a quiet neighborhood, a boy with dark hair and soft eyes was telling his friend about the strange child with golden eyes who had appeared in their park and promised to return.

"That's stupid," Rika said, pulling off her shoes and setting them by the door. "He doesn't even know where we live. How's he supposed to find us again?"

"I know," Yuuta said, climbing onto the couch and pulling a blanket around his shoulders. "But I still believe him."

Rika was quiet for a moment, standing in the middle of the living room with her hands on her hips, her yellow dress still covered in sand from the sandbox.

Then she said: "Yeah. Me too."

She climbed onto the couch next to him, pulling the blanket so that it covered both of them, and they sat there in the dark, watching the stars appear outside the window, waiting for a boy with golden eyes to come back.

previous masterlist next

note ∘ ∘ ∘ omg PLEASE let’s all collectively ignore the fact that i COMPLETELY messed up the timeline with yuuta and rika 😭🙏🏼

taglist ∘ ∘ ∘ @suunani @nikomenom @michisilly @bitterinkandblood @sukunaslilsocks @soafhie @d4iky-s-nsh1ne @im-so-goddamn-tired @ilovebattinson @starrykies @mentaltrouble2201 @lovely-venusss @getos-personal-slut-1 @ktkitty-v @unwittingmagesblog @1800imgay @noomsy @pavlovsfavoritedog @jupiterlvr @iglb12 @c4tsf4n @goldfish-glubglub @m31snot @haoeffect @dyama17 @dumbisme @sasahzs @evilscientistwithevilintentions @mouuszii @senthething @winjoytaro @gardening-guy-round-2 @weponxwrites @ilovenag1i @innerrunawayunknown ( please comment or send me a message if you wanna be added! )

[sargeteen]

𝕰ND 𝕺F 𝕬UGUST ✦︎ JJK

݁ᛪ༙⋮ oh . . . everythin' you see out here will die .

summary   ✷ Satoru Gojo wasn't the strongest sorcerer because he was Satoru Gojo; he was the strongest because of the three friends that he surrounded himself with. There was the obvious Shoko and Geto, the two more talked about sorcerers that stuck by Satoru Gojo's side, but there was also you, a slightly younger sorcerer who didn't have even a quarter of Satoru's strength. You were the weakest link out of the four of you, but that didn't mean that the other three sorcerers liked you less; in fact, it somehow made you all closer together, mostly because they were always keeping an eye out for you, just in case. The four of you escaped to a clearing above the city, a spot where you could be free of all of the needs and wants of your teachers, a spot where you could just be regular teenagers.

tags and warnings   ✷ y/n used once or twice, second person point of view (you, yours, etc.). satoru and reader kind of maybe had a thing??? but reader calls satoru his brother,,, they're not biological tho. kind of sad kind of angsty, but also fluff and happy. slice of life. based off of end of august and willing and able, both by noah kahan.

author’s note   ✷ listened to willing and able the entire time i wrote this. i also wrote this on my phone literally in tumblr and it took me like 2 hours maybe ish but i was listening to willing and able and i was like "omfg this would make such a good fic idea" and then it happened. so yeah i hope you guys enjoy this even tho it isnt the sukuna x t!male reader or the zuko x reader .. guys just shut up and read this ok masterlist. 3.3k words.

Pebbles crunched under your feet as you walked along the cobblestone path that had now become overgrown with time. Moss peeped through the cracks and there were a few dandelions that grew around the stone. They adapted to the years of malnourishment—nobody ever walked this path anymore, and you rarely ever did. Only on special occasions did you, and you guessed that today was a special occasion as you held a cardboard box under your arm.

Last time you walked this path, you were accompanied by a smoking Shoko, and the air was filled with the smell of cigarette smoke and your argument that the cigarettes were going to kill her one day—she always claimed that she was going to be fine because of her reverse technique. You had no space to argue, as your own cursed technique relied solely on whoever you were fighting.

Out of the main four of you—Geto, Shoko, Gojo and you, of course—you were the weakest. You had tough competition from the man who swallowed the souls of curses, the woman who was one of the few with a reverse curse technique, and, literally, Gojo Satoru. But, despite being the weakest link, the three of them tugged you along wherever they went. It was nice—growing up, you didn’t have many people to surround yourself with as you constantly spoke of seeing monsters, so it felt nice to have people who wanted you around.

Once you reached the end of the path, you had to push a branch out of your way to enter the large clearing. It was a large open space, a circle of grass and clover patches where Gojo swore he found a four-leaf clover. Old and still growing trees lined the clearing, one of which held the knife carvings of the names of those who claimed it one summer night—Geto Suguru, Shoko Ieiri, Gojo Satoru and L/n Y/n.

The path stretched up a large hill, and the clearing sat at the top overlooking the city. The four of you found it one hot summer night after a tiresome day of fighting off curses. You all walked along the sidewalk, hunched over and stomachs growling for something to eat. Then, Gojo pointed out the end of the path, which wasn’t even a cobblestone path yet; it was just a weird, empty clearing through tree branches. Gojo claimed it was a path worth checking out and started through the woods, leaving behind all of your complaints about being hungry.

After grumbling and groaning, you followed Gojo first, with Geto and Shoko following behind you reluctantly. You followed after him quite clumsily with your tired and drowsy head, so Geto had to grab your arm a couple of times to keep you upright after you tripped on a rock, a stick, or even the air.

But once you reached the top, Gojo stood at the edge of the clearing, which showed off the city at sunset from above. It was a breathtaking view, and the rest of you found yourselves stopping at Gojo's side. You all stood in a line and let out heavy sighs, ones of awe and tiredness.

“Wow…” you muttered first, your brows raised at the mix of pinks and orange hues that covered the sky. There were a few clouds that decorated the sky, but they turned orange and pink with the sunset. The pastels projected onto your faces and onto the buildings of the city, making it look like something out of a piece of fiction, not real life.

“Yeah, wow…” Gojo followed up with a small chuckle and shook his shoulders. His sunglasses were pushed up into his hair, and a few strands of his white hair fell onto his forehead. It was something he rarely ever did, as he jokingly claimed to be insecure about his forehead, but you always complimented him on the look.

Shoko stood at the end of the line with Geto between her and Gojo. Her hip was popped out and her arms were crossed over her chest as she stared out at the pink and orange city. “A horrible view, isn’t it?” A smile danced on her lips as she glanced over at Geto, who nodded along with her with a smirk.

“Oh yeah, ugliest thing I’ve seen,” Geto chuckled and shook his head. After a beat of silence passed over the four of you, he sighed. “This definitely beats killing curses, if you ask me,” he hummed with a soft smile.

“Definitely,” you hummed, and Shoko and Gojo nodded along.

That night, you all claimed that clearing as your own. It was only made official the night after with a carving of all of your names in a tree done by a cursed knife you had somehow snuck out of the armory. Gojo wanted to pick the tree, Geto wanted to carve his name first, Shoko leaned on the tree and told Geto he was doing it wrong and you nearly cut your damn hand off as the knife slipped as you started to carve your first name.

Shoko almost took the knife from you. “I swear, L/n, if I have to heal a damn cut on your hand ‘cause you can’t carve a fucking tree…” she trailed off as her eyes narrowed at you.

You straightened up and suddenly became more meticulous as you carved your name. Gojo and Geto laughed in the background, and horribly tried to hide their smiles behind their hands as you turned to glare at them.

That clearing was your clearing now, an empty spot that was made for the four of you, an empty spot that was wishing for something to inhabit it.

A month or two after you carved your names into the biggest tree on the edge of the clearing, you started to create a cobblestone path up to the clearing. And by path, it was just a couple of big rocks that you all struggled to lift—well, you struggled to lift—and pushed into the ground to create some sort of path up to your spot.

A couple of months after that, you and Gojo carried a bench up there. You weren’t sure where Gojo acquired the bench, but he showed up with it outside of your dorm and claimed he needed you to help him bring it to ‘the spot’.

Now, years later, you sat on the bench with the box next to you where Gojo would sit. You would all sit in a line, just like you did when you all found the clearing. So, you were always on the right end, Shoko on the left end and then Geto and Gojo between the two of you. Sometimes you would lean against Gojo, sometimes he would lean against you and sometimes he would even rest his head in your lap while the rest of his body lay on the laps of Geto and Shoko, while your hand played with his overly soft hair.

Your hand closed around nothing as it rested in your lap. You never used the armrest that was screwed to the side of the bench, and today wasn’t going to be the day you start.

You stared out at the city that was cloaked in a pink and orange sunset, much like it was on the night when you all found the clearing. The sky was clear, not a cloud in sight, so there was nothing to obstruct the sunset from the beautiful city.

“What a waste of a lovely night, huh?” You mumbled as you turned to look at the tree that held your name along with the names of your best friends—no, the names of your family. “Just horrible, hm?” You pushed yourself up from the bench with some struggle, your body worn from years of saving the citizens of Tokyo from curses.

A quiet groan left your throat as you stood.

Your hands opened up the cardboard box and you pulled out two bouquets of chrysanthemums and baby’s-breath. You never knew what Gojo and Geto’s favorite flowers were, but the young teenager who worked at the florist down the street from your home said that you could never go wrong with chrysanthemums after she saw the grave look on your face. As she built the bouquets for you, she asked you questions about who you lost.

“My brothers,” you said with a small smile as memories of your time with Gojo and Geto together resurfaced.

Your knees popped as you crouched, and it would definitely take you a minute to get up in a minute, but for now, you delicately placed the two bouquets down on the ground in front of the two wooden signs. One read Geto’s name while the other read Gojo’s, both painted in black paint and both were worn from weather, Geto’s a bit more so. You had to redo the paint on his every now and then, but you had yet to do so with Gojo’s.

A sigh heaved your body as you looked up to the tree above you, the carvings of your names right above the two signs.

You remember when you, Gojo and Shoko came up here after Geto left. It wasn’t relaxing or comfortable like it had been when it was the four of you. None of you said much while you sat on the bench with an empty spot between Shoko and Gojo for Geto, but Gojo did slouch in his seat and lean his head on your shoulder.

It was pretty much the same when Geto had died, though the silence was a lot heavier, and you shared quiet stories between the three of you of your favorite memories with Geto.

That night, as the sun set in front of you and Gojo’s head weighed down your shoulder, you looked over at the tree you all marked on your second night in the clearing. A blanket of silence had covered the three of you a while ago as your tears dried on your cheeks.

You were the first to break it.

“We should put something up here for him,” your voice was rough and gravelly from hours of crying.

The next day, you three sat on the bench in the same positions, but there was a piece of plywood on your lap and a paintbrush in your hand. Gojo held a small paint palette with one of the divots filled with black paint. On the other end of the bench, Shoko lit a cigarette as she watched the two of you.

You painted on Geto’s name quietly with a lump in your throat. Gojo hid his head in your shoulder as you started to paint on the year of his birth, and then the year of his death. You experienced weird deja vu as you did so, despite not painting on a piece of plywood before.

Years later, as you sat on the bench alone with a new piece of plywood and a new bottle of paint, but the same paintbrush, you experienced the same feeling. You wonder if your body knew this was going to happen, that you would watch two of your family members die before you could even think of growing old alongside them.

“Wish you guys were still here,” you hum as you push yourself back up slowly, your knees protesting every movement. “Sunsets aren't as beautiful without you guys.”

You turn back towards the bench, and you believe, at least for a second, that you saw Geto and Gojo waiting for you on the bench. Geto’s hair was back up in a bun and Gojo’s hair was pushed out of his face with his round sunglasses like they did in their teenage years. And, for at least a second, you believe that they’re alive again, waiting for you to come back to the bench after using the bathroom behind a tree.

The only thing that was missing was Shoko, though, nowadays she was a lot busier. Nowadays, you have nothing but time. You left behind the world of sorcery a while ago as you took a page out of Nanami’s book, and you found yourself a job. It wasn’t anything special, as you lacked an actual high school diploma and college degree, but you worked at a small late-night ramen shop that the four of you used to frequent.

It was hardly something that could pay your bills, though Gojo left a large sum of money behind in your name, even after years of him claiming that the only thing he was going to leave you guys in his will was his friendship. But you loved it, and the kids and businessmen that showed up in the middle of the night with growling stomachs loved you as well.

Yuji came in every now and then, and he sat at the same table you used to inhabit with Geto, Gojo and Shoko, though he did so unknowingly. Sometimes he would have you sit across from him and tell him stories that you remembered from your time as a Jujitsu High student; a lot of them he had heard before, but he never said so, he just listened along like it was the first time he heard them.

One night, a couple of years after Gojo’s sign had joined Geto’s, Yuji came in wearing a sweatshirt that you recognized—it was an old American college sweatshirt that Gojo had bought for you once, and you wore it until the name of the college started to disappear. You thought you had thrown it out, but it must’ve been your old mind betraying you as Yuji pulled the hood over his head when he sat down in his usual chair.

“I recognize that sweatshirt,” you hummed as you brought over his usual bowl of ramen. His hands reached out quickly and took it from your shaking hands, and you both muttered a ‘thank you’.

Yuji looked down at the maroon hoodie like he had forgotten which one he had pulled out of the back of his closet. The white lettering had faded a long time ago, so now it was just a ragged old maroon sweatshirt that looked like it had gone through years of wear and tear—which, it had.

“Oh, yeah,” Yuji’s mouth held a small smile. “I found a box I had yet to go through of Gojo-sensei’s. This hoodie was at the bottom of it, and it was pretty comfortable, so I grabbed it and put it in my closet. Um,” he paused and he dug a hand in the pocket as you sat down across from him. “I found this in the pocket,” his voice quieted as he pulled out a Polaroid from the pocket. He handed it over to you and held it patiently as you grabbed it with shaky hands.

A smile grew on your face when you turned it over to see the picture. It had been of you and Gojo on the bench in the clearing. You were both much younger, and you were wearing the hoodie, though the white lettering had looked brand new. Gojo’s head was on your shoulder as your head rested on his; both of your eyes were closed and Gojo’s mouth was wide open, no doubt snoring as loud as possible.

“Have I told you about our spot, Yuji?” You asked, but your eyes never left the Polaroid that you used to cherish.

Yuji just shook his head as he broke apart the wooden chopsticks that you brought alongside his ramen.

“It was a spot where we could truly be teenagers,” your voice held years of nostalgic memories as you continued to look at the Polaroid. “During the day, we were sorcerers, kids turned into soldiers to protect the unknowing world, but once the sun started to set, we came up to this clearing and we became something we barely had time to be anymore: kids. We carved our names into the largest tree there, pushed rocks into the ground that led up the hill and brought up a bench that we watched the sunset on.

“We didn’t bring our techniques up there, up there we were powerless kids who talked of a life that they wished they had. Once, Gojo talked about crashing a college frat party—we all laughed at him and told him that he probably wouldn’t even be let into the party. He nearly tipped over the bench with all of us on it. We had a pretty bad argument up there, too. I started crying and didn’t show up for a week. After the week, I walked up there, and they were all sitting on the bench waiting for me like nothing had happened. But, Gojo did apologize.”

You hadn’t realized it, but Yuji watched you as tears started to trail down your cheeks. A sigh racked your body as you set the Polaroid down. Now you realized you were crying, and you lifted a hand to wipe at your cheeks.

Yuji took a deep breath and set down the bundle of noodles that he had between his chopsticks. After a beat of silence, Yuji spoke up.

“Would you,” he paused as you looked up at him with your eyes still teary, “would you want to go back up there? Am I allowed to go up there with you?”

After you locked up the ramen shop, Yuji walked slowly at your side as you guided the two of you to the stone path you created with your family. His hand rested on the small of your back as you walked up the hill, worried that you might slip on the stones. Once you reached the top, Yuji lifted the branch out of the way of your heads like you did for yourself so many years ago.

“I haven’t been up here for a while, so sorry for the long grass,” you apologized for the mistreatment of the clearing you once cleaned up every week. The grass reached past the top of your shoes, and you both were thankful for wearing pants with the grass at this height.

“It’s alright,” Yuji mumbled as he looked around the clearing. It was dark, and the only thing that lit up the path and where you were walking was his phone flashlight.

He panned his phone over to where you started to stray away from him, and his brows furrowed, but he kept quiet as you reached for something attached to a tree. His brows froze as string lights that wrapped around the trees surrounding the clearing suddenly turned on. He looked back at you and watched as you fiddled with a small solar panel.

“This thing always sucked,” you grumbled at the small box before turning back towards Yuji, who started to look around the clearing now that it was lit up.

His eyes caught on the bench from the Polaroid that now lived in your pants pocket, the makeshift wooden tombstones near the largest tree in the clearing and the names carved into it above them. Yuji then looked at you as you sat down on the right side of the bench.

He walked over to you, but he didn’t sit down. He looked out at the city like you were. But his head flew back to look at you when you patted the bench.

“You can sit in Gojo’s spot. He doesn’t need it anymore,” you mumbled and you rested your hand in your lap. Yuji sat next to you and you started to dive into another story about your time in the clearing.

You weren’t sure how long you were there with Yuji, sharing stories that he hadn’t heard before. But you stayed long enough for the sunrise, the first time you ever did so. As the sky and city started to be painted in beautiful pastels, you opened your mouth without thinking.

“A horrible view, isn’t it?”

“The worst I’ve seen.”

[sargeteen]

hi guys going through some crazy stuff rn so maybe sukuna x trans male reader soon and maybe that zuko request soon too…

[sargeteen]

hey so! lol!

we unfortunately had to put my childhood dog down today, so i don’t know when new fics will come out, especially with my finals being in two weeks as well.

anyways, look how how beautiful my sweet girl was 🤍

she really knew her angles thats for sure

+ a partial face reveal i guess if i havent done one before

[mlmmetalhead]

i love your writing so much, i have no preference if this is hcs or a ficlet. i know whatever you're moved to do will fuck so hard - but something with holland march, maybe something messy, maybe a little praise? or neither. truly just anything with holland

Taste test

holland march x m.reader

SMUT MDNI

summary: holland can’t get enough of his boyfriend just like he can’t get enough of whiskey.

tags: established relationship, hairy march 🤤, messy sex, top reader, bottom march (sorta, you’ll get it), sweat as lube, no actual penetration but gets close to it, march has alcohol induced erectile dysfunction, sex under the influence, blowjob through boxers, sort of foodplay..?, holly doesn’t gaf that her dad’s gay in the 70s cause she’s woke like that.

a/n: I got like super carried away during this and it shows 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Holly opens the door for you, and sighs, already throwing a backpack over her shoulder. “Dad’s in the bathtub with this clothes on again.” She walks right past you, kicking a rock on her way down the little stairs.

“You going to Janet’s?” You turn to ask the little girl, hand on your hip. “You not hungry or anything, all good?”

Holly snickers and glances back over her shoulder. "Yeah, I'm okay, thanks, Dad." She puts a little extra emphasis on the word, and you can hear the eyeroll in her voice. "Just don't go too hard on him. He couldn't walk for two days last time."

You open your mouth to scold her, she's barely a teen, she should not be making comments about inappropriate topics, let alone to her father's boyfriend, but she's already halfway down the street, hair swinging, completely unbothered.

You find Holland exactly where Holly said he would be: in the bathtub, fully dressed, soaking wet, surrounded by empty bottles that float around him like little lonely boats on a sad, alcoholic sea. He called you just from this position, you’re guessing based on the discarded phone on the bathroom floor.

“Hello there.” You murmur, leaning against the wall of the tub, fingers brushing the water. It was hot at some point, you can tell, but now it's barely room temperature.

Holland's eyes flutter open at the sound of your voice. His pupils are blown, he smiles, lopsided, and reaches for you like a baby koala. “Hi baby…” he slurs, doing grabby hand motions in your general direction. You hum, reaching for his middle and hauling him upward. Water cascades off him in sheets. His clothes cling to his body like a second, much wetter skin.

“Nooo..” he whines, but makes no effort to get away. “I like the water..”

You set him down on the bathmat. His clothes are a disaster, his shirt is plastered to his chest, his trousers are sagging, and his socks have been turned inside out. You're not even going to ask about the socks. “How long have you been in the tub?” You ask, undoing his shirt, or at least attempting to, the wet fabric stubborn and hard to get a proper hang of.

“Fifteen? Twenty? I dunno.” Holland mumbles. Then he catches on to what you're doing. your hands on his chest, working his buttons, and a slow, crooked smirk spreads across his face.“Hey…” he licked his lips, his own palm trapping yours against his shirt. “You just got here, y/n… that impatient?”

You roll your eyes so hard you nearly sprain something. You shake his hand off and manage to pry his shirt open, shoving it off his shoulders. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Holland. I’m trying to get you out of these so that you won’t get sick.”

"I can do the pants myself," he says, and reaches down to wiggle out of his trousers without waiting for a response. The sight of a grown man shimmying out of wet pants on a bathroom floor while wearing nothing but a half-unbuttoned shirt and a very self-satisfied expression is, you have to admit, not the sexiest thing you've ever witnessed.

You drag him to the bedroom, his arm slung over your shoulder, his feet scuffing against the floor. He's down to his underwear by the time you get him to the bed, boxers, blue with little pineapples on them, because of course, and you're almost 100% certain he's faking the worst of the drunkenness at this point. Because when Holland March rolls onto his stomach, face buried in the sheets, and lets out a dramatic little hum, he says: "Mm. I wish someone would cuddle me right now." And his voice is perfectly clear.

You cross your arms. Stare at his back. At the ridiculous pineapple boxers. At the way he's sprawled across the bed like a very large, very drunk starfish.

"Holland."

"Mmph."

"You're not that drunk."

"Am too."

You sit down on the edge of the bed. He doesn't move. But you can see the tension in his shoulders now, the way he's waiting for you to either leave or stay.

"Holland," you say again, softer this time.

He rolls over. His eyes are clear. A little red-rimmed, a little tired, but clear. He's been crying sometime in the last few hours, you can tell by the puffiness around his eyes, the way his nose is slightly pink.

"What's going on?" you ask.

"Nothing."

"Holland."

He sighs. Runs a hand through his wet hair. "I don't know. Bad day. Bad week. Bad life."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

You look at him. At the man you've been dating for eight months, the man who is somehow both the most competent person you know and the most profoundly stupid person you know."Come here," you say.

He doesn't need to be told twice. He crawls across the bed and collapses against you, his head in your lap, his wet hair soaking through your jeans.

"You're getting me wet," you say.

"You like it."

"I don't—"

"You do." He looks up at you. His eyes are gray in the dim light. "You like taking care of me."

You don't deny it. You can't. Because he's right. You do like taking care of him. Even when he's a disaster. Especially when he's a disaster. A few minutes pass. Maybe more. The room is dark except for the sliver of light from the bathroom. Holland's breathing has slowed, and you think he might be falling asleep, when he shifts and reaches for the nightstand.

"What are you doing?" you ask.

"Getting a drink."

"You've had enough."

"One more."

"Holland—"

But he's already uncapped the bottle, whiskey, expensive, the kind he only breaks out on bad days, and taken a long swallow. He offers it to you. You shake your head. He shrugs and takes another.

"You're going to be sick," you say.

"I'm already sick. Mentally."

"That's not... that's not what I meant and you know it."

"Emotionally sick."

You sigh. Reach for the bottle. He holds it just out of reach, grinning. It's a sloppy grin, drunk and uncoordinated.

"Make me," he says.

"Holland."

"Make me," he says again, and there's something in his voice now: teasing, inviting. You lunge for the bottle. He pulls it away. The motion is too fast, or maybe he's drunker than he's letting on, because the whiskey sloshes over the rim and spills. Right onto your chest. Right onto your shirt. The liquid is cold and sharp-smelling, soaking through the fabric in seconds. You look down at yourself. Then at him. He looks down at your chest. Then at you.

"Oh," he says. "Oops."

"Oops?"

"That was an accident."

"You're holding the bottle. You're the one who—"

"It was a reflex."

"You don't have reflexes. You're drunk."

He sets the bottle down on the nightstand. Very carefully. Very deliberately. Then he turns back to you, and his eyes have gone dark, "Well," he says. "Can't let it go to waste."

Before you can ask what he means, he's leaning in. His hand comes up to your chest, flattening against the wet spot, and his tongue licks the whiskey off your shirt. Right there. In the middle of the bedroom. While he's still in his pineapple boxers and his hair is still dripping and you're both a complete mess. You stop breathing.

"Holland." your breath shudders.

"Mmm," he hums against your chest. "You taste good."

"That's whiskey."

"I know. But it's on you."

He does it again. Slower this time. His tongue is warm through the wet fabric, tracing a path along your nipple, circling it through your wet shirt, humming as if he was savoring the taste.

"Holland, we're—you're—"

"Shh." His voice is low, rough. "I'm cleaning."

"You're licking."

"Same thing."

You should push him away. You should be annoyed. He spilled expensive whiskey on your shirt, your favorite shirt, and now he's lapping it up like a cat with a bowl of cream, and you should be annoyed. Instead, your hand comes up to the back of his head. Your fingers thread through his wet hair. You don't pull him away. You hold him there.

He makes a sound, a small, pleased sound, and presses closer.

"Holland," you breathe shallowly, and of course your dick feels it’s time for fun, and makes a shift in your boxers.

"Honey," he murmurs against your skin.

He licks the last of the whiskey off your shirt, right over your heart, and then he looks up at you with eyes that are dark and hungry and more sober than they have any right to be.

"Better," he says.

"You're insane."

"So I've been told."

He kisses you. Tastes like whiskey and sweat. His hands are on your waist, your back, pulling you down onto the bed with him.

"You're still wet," you say against his mouth.

"You're still wearing a whiskey shirt."

"I wouldn't be if someone hadn't—"

"Shh." He kisses you again. "Don't ruin the moment."

"What moment?"

"The moment where I'm very sorry and also very attracted to you and you’re very hard in your pants.”

You laugh. You can't help it. He's ridiculous. But the laugh dies down in your throat as you feel his hand palming over the front of your pants. March leaned back down to your shirt, sucking more whiskey out of it, nosing between your pecs now with a very sloppy noise.

You throw your head against the headboard, and your body goes haywire now, your cock straining against your boxers and fly as March continues slowly stroking you through the pants. His other hand reaches for your shirt, finally, and tries pulling it off of your body. He whines when it doesn’t work immediately and you can’t help but smile at him again. “Let me help you..” you murmur, pulling the shirt which was now sticky and possibly ruined off of your torso.

March lunges right back in, sucking marks into the slope between your neck and your shoulder, his other hand still on your cock, frustratingly not pulling it out of your pants. You swear at the ceiling and close your eyes, breathing heavily as you feel your boyfriend lick and kiss down to where the alcohol clung to your skin.

“Fuck you taste good.” Holland muses, his tongue now going for the other nipple, sucking it lightly.

“Holland-“ you suck in a breath and your hand finally remembers how to move, and finds your boyfriend’s ass, squeezing it through the boxers. This sends a whine out of his mouth, the vibration still on your chest.

March ruts back into your hand, grinding against the heel of your hand hungrily. He finally lifts his lips from your chest and you are a little too distracted by the way his hand is working your jeans open to notice how he’s reaching back for the whiskey bottle.

“Man I love this brand.” He muses, one hand pushing down your jeans and letting your erection spring against just your boxers now.

“Holland..” you breathe out heavily, almost begging for your boyfriend to do something.

“I’m here honey.” He murmurs, leaning down to your crotch with the whiskey bottle in his hand. It is too late when you notice the bottle and start trying to protest, March spills a few drops on your hardness and immediately sinks down on you, his wet mouth enveloping you still in your boxers, tongue running in circles trying to suck out all of the alcohol from the fabric.

A moan dies in your throat as your eyes meet the ceiling and your hips make a small involuntary push further down the private eye’s throat. He’s good at this, no denying that. Not when he swallows around you tentatively and pulls off with a very obscene noise, only to immediately duck back down, pressing open mouthed kisses over your clothed cock.

“Holland, just fucking— come on…” you rasp and tangle your hand in his hair, forcing his mouth back down, much to his delight, judging on the blissed out moan coming from him.

You close your eyes and let yourself get lost in the feeling of both the fabric of your boxers, now completely soaked with booze and your boyfriend’s spit, and March’s hot tongue circling the head, his hand coming up to help him pull the waistband down. His lips find your length again as soon as the boxers come down, now only the head in as he hollows out his cheeks and looks up at you through hooded eyes. You feel your heart leap in your chest at the sight, all the breath knocked out of you.

March comes up for air and buries his nose in the happy trail on your stomach, pressing timid kisses against the sensitive skin there. “So, so good, y/n..” he muses, and you almost miss how he’s pulling down his own boxers, and making an attempt to climb into your lap. You can’t help but notice he’s still only halfway to a hard-on, if that. He seems to notice your eyes catching between his legs and raises his hand in protest. “Oh, don’t worry, I fuckin’ dig you, honey, it’s just I’ve had— uh.. issues with getting it up lately…”

He sits in your lap, hairy thighs on each side of your hips now, a loopy grin on his face as he looks down at you from this position. “You’re so handsome…” March murmurs, leaning down to give you a surprisingly sweet kiss before you can respond. And while your lips are trapped in the kiss, you feel your length slip between your boyfriend’s cheeks as he starts tentatively moving.

“Ho- ohh…” You can only breathe out in surprise as your cock catches on his rim but doesn’t slip in, rather continues sliding up and down between Holland’s ass.

“Mm, don’t feel like prepping.” March says, as if responding to the mess of noises you made just now, his hands braced on your shoulders. “But you feel good like.. mmm…”

You guess your dick managed to massage his prostate from the outside, pressing a little harder on his sternum, as much as you could manage. And judging by a high pitched whine emitted by the man in your lap, whatever it is you did was a good idea. You slide your arm around his waist and grind March on your cock more, his asscrack enveloping you nicely from both sides. His head lulls to your shoulder, hands now travelling down to cling onto your back.

“Babyyy…” Holland whines, adding some of his own pressure on your member, his thighs growing more restless as he abandons the nice rhythm, instead opting to rut against you, all the while you still slide him on you, just hoping his hair won’t give you carpet burns.

“You’re doing great, sweetheart.” You murmur into his ear and smile at the feeling of him clenching his muscles in response to the praise. You enjoy sliding your cock against his crack a few more minutes, savoring the high pitched and loud noises now directly into your ear.

“Y/n… cum… please?” March murmured, voice now a lot more quiet and fucked out. You bite your lip and grip your boyfriend’s waist tighter, sliding him up and down the length of your cock like his crack owed you money. He was all too happy to meet you there, his own hips moving eagerly in tandem with you, his ass clenching around you nicely. “Cum, cum… cum, please…” March begged with a breath against your ear, and with his insistence, you weren’t able to deny him, a few ropes landing somewhere on the sheets.

You both collapsed on the bed, and Holland immediately tucked his nose into your neck. “G’night…” he murmured, an arm and a leg clutching your side.

“Are we not gonna clean up?” You ask, still a little out of breath.

March makes a dismissive sound, nuzzling you closer, “It’s whatever. Sleep.”

And you do, even though it is around 7 in the evening.

[sargeteen]

rewatched the nice guys tonight and im astounded at the little number of fics holland march has for male readers…guys please where are you guys come out of hiding

also yes im working on the zuko fic rn it’s coming soon

[sargeteen]

lowkirkenuinely who wants a ishowspeed x male reader smau like this man has been taking over my entire mind bro

[ravcnism]

PERIAPSIS. ( PART 2 ) — RYLAND GRACE x Male!READER

SUMMARY: Twenty-two hours is a long time for a ship to settle into orbit, and enough time for your thoughts on a man to change. Ryland Grace is terrible at zero gravity and annoyingly good at getting under your skin.

# # TAGS: Semi-Canon-Adjacent, Long Form, Male!Pilot Reader, Eventual Rocky (No Rocky Here Yet), Ryland Falls First, Reader Falls Harder, Developing Feelings, More Zero Gravity Tension, Pining, Slowburn-ish, Part 2 of ??

# # WARNINGS: Canon-typical Space Dread, Mentions of Dead Bodies, Mentions of Isolation, Inaccurate Space Science, Mature Language, Brief Mentions of Grief.

NOTE: Thank you all so much for the love and patience! I did a thing in the first part to lengthen the gap between arriving to Tau Ceti and meeting Rocky. I needed Ryland and the reader to have more time together. And for… things to transpire. No specifications of reader's height nor form. Reader's pronouns are he/him. No use of Y/N. 5.1k words. I am not an astrophysicist and I am literally just making this up. Enjoy.

The engine had been the loudest thing on the ship for four straight years. Now, there was only silence. 

Though the technical term is ‘orbital insertion’, what it actually was, was a controlled fall. The Hail Mary was settling into the curve of its new path, thrusters firing in small automatic bursts as the system learned a gravitational field it had spent four years approaching and was only now touching.

You'd explained it to Grace as best as you could. It was like acclimating a fish to a new tank, you'd told him. The engine wasn't broken and the ship merely needed some time to adjust. 

Grace frowned as he thought. You glanced at him without moving your head and tried not to smirk at the little face he pulled when he was running numbers in his mind. “Ah.” His eyes lit up. They did that when something clicked. “So the waiting period is for the mechanisms. Otherwise the lab, the readings, every output's just–”

“Noise,” you agreed. 

Grace exhaled through his nose. “So we wait.” 

“So we wait.” 

“For how long?”

“Twenty-two hours, give or take.” 

Grace nodded. 

It was like riding a bike, Grace thought. If the bike had no seat, or handlebars, or wheels, or a road to bike on. Up and down were no longer facts but opinions. And surely it was his own fault for naively relying on the Lilliputian laws of Earthly physics. But it was impressive, he supposed, that even in the absence of gravity, he still managed to find plenty of different ways to fall on his ass. 

He didn't notice you watching. 

“You're fighting it,” you said from the doorway. 

“Jeez!” Grace flinched so violently you'd think he got shot. “How long have you been standing there? Well– floating there.” 

You were on your side, arms crossed over your chest, completely unbothered by the fact that there was nothing beneath you. A socked foot was idly hooked to one of the handrails on the wall — an effortless measure to keep you from drifting away. Your head tilted to look at Grace, hair sticking out in odd (but charming) angles. 

You were smiling at him, amused. “Watch,” you said. You pushed yourself towards him with one toe. “A little goes a long way. If you're kicking and flailing like that, you're bound to slam into things.” 

Grace's eyes followed as you crossed the room on your back, then righted yourself to hover next to him. Like a superhero, he thought. 

“Easy for you to say,” Grace grumbled. As if on cue, he started tilting backwards. His arms shot out for something to grab, but as nothing was there, the force only made him spin faster. “Mother-fudging frick!” 

Grace was fully upside down then, feet to the ceiling, eyes leveled to your chest, cheeks flushed with an embarrassed pink. You chuckled quietly. With your arms still crossed, you pushed off the ground and spun yourself to match his orientation. Now you were both upside down, floating face-to-face, the floor above your heads. Grace held his breath. He'd been panting and the last thing he wanted to do was breathe on you. 

You smiled. “Havin’ trouble, Doc?” 

“Gee, I wonder,” he strained. 

Grace's heart sank when he felt himself drifting closer. His hand flailed to try and move himself away, but then his nose was only inches from yours. “Oh, god–” 

Chuckling, you pushed him off with a finger to his chest. 

Grace floated away with a pout. “I'm glad my suffering is entertaining to you, Captain.” 

“I can't help it. Your vocabulary is very colorful.” Deciding you'd had your fun, you drifted towards him to take his wrist and help him upright. “Stop fighting it.”

Grace's jaw tightened. “I'm not fighting it.”

“You are. Every time you start to drift you grab for something.” You let go of his wrist. He immediately began to tilt sideways. His hand shot out. You caught it before it could find a wall. “See?”

He made a face. “Okay well sorry if my survival instincts start kicking in to — I don't know — survive.”

You laughed. “Yeah, but you're not surviving. You're making it worse.” You repositioned his arm, returning it to his side. “Your body will want to correct. Don't let it.”

“That doesn't make any sense.”

“It will.” You drifted back a few feet and crossed your arms again. Watching him. “Okay. Let go.” 

Grace looked at his hands. He was gripping his own jumpsuit at the hem, knuckles slightly white. He hadn't noticed he was doing it. He let go, slowly, like releasing the edge of a swimming pool. He drifted, marginally. Then there was a slow, lazy lean to the left. His hand twitched.

“Don't,” you said.

He didn't. It took visible effort, but he held himself still against the urge to correct. The drift slowed, then stopped. Grace blinked. “Oh.”

“There you go.”

“I’m not spinning.” 

“Yeah, when you're not freaking out. You just have to tell your body you're not falling.” 

Grace nodded, pleased with himself. 

“Now come to me,” you said. You'd positioned yourself at the end of the corridor. Not too far; seven feet, maybe eight. 

Grace looked at the distance between you like it was the distance between the Earth and the moon. "And how exactly do I do that."

“Pick a surface. Push off it. Gently."

The floor would have been tricky; if he didn't angle his body right, it would only push him up. His next option was the wall. He carefully planted his feet to the closest one, knees bent, eyes watching your face for any sign of a mistake. When you smiled and indicated there were none, Grace pushed off. Too hard. 

He tried to warn you, but he came at you fast; arms out, eyes wide with terror. You had about a second to brace yourself before you collided chest to chest, his hands catching your shoulders. Your back took the momentum and carried you both into the wall behind you with a dull thud. It was the cockpit all over again; but worse. 

Grace went still. His face was hardly a few inches away from yours. Other than his grip on your shoulders, his knee had also managed to slot between your legs. Your arms had come up to catch him on impact, one hand at his back, the other at his arm. Somewhere in the collision your foot had found the handrail and stopped you both from bouncing off it. Which meant you were now pinned between Grace and the wall, with nowhere else to go. 

Awkward silence in space was worse than awkward silence on Earth, Grace thought. There was an extra layer of quiet that made room for twice the amount of shame. “Shit,” he whispered. Why was he whispering? 

Your brows raised. You whispered back. “So you can swear.” 

Grace steadied himself with a breath. “Miscalculated.” 

“Did you?” 

He nodded, helpless. “I think I’m getting the hang of it, though.” 

“I said, gently, Grace. Was that gentle to you?” 

He shook his head. 

You smiled. You took his hand and pulled him away from your chest. And when you let go, Grace needed to flex his fingers to get rid of the burning feeling your touch had left. 

“Again,” you said, your back still pressed to the wall. The look in your eyes made him nervous. “Less touching this time. Think you can do that?” 

Grace swallowed hard. 

To Grace’s relief, you left when you saw that he was getting it. You told him to call you if he died and he waved you off with a weak and embarrassed laugh. He held his hands to his face and thrashed around the moment you were out of earshot. ‘What was that? What the hell was that?!’

Without you in the room, he spent the next thirty minutes ensuring it would never happen again. Well — he spent the next thirty minutes subconsciously replaying it in his mind, but he also learned the difference between enough and too much somewhere around the twentieth attempt. With his efforts, his body eventually stopped treating every surface like a threat and started treating it like a tool.

He pushed off the far wall and drifted toward the center. And then, because he had nothing else to do, his mind returned to the same place it had been wandering to. The thud of the impact. Your back against the wall. The way you hadn't moved as you stared at him from two inches away with those calm, unreadable eyes. Your hand on his spine, the warmth of it through the jumpsuit. Why didn’t you move? You could have avoided the collision. Why hadn’t you shoved him off? Why did you hold on? Why did you hold him at all? 

“Miscalculated.” 

“Did you?” 

Ryland’s face went warm. 

It was nothing. Obviously it was nothing. He was a grown man and a respectable scientist. He had a PhD, for cripes' sake. It was nothing. It was three months of isolation and the biological imperative to be near another human being — that was all. The human body craved proximity. It was textbook. He could name six studies off the top of his head. It was all biology and psychology and every other ology in between. 

Grace lasted precisely thirty minutes without seeing you. 

He told himself he was hungry. The mess hall was a perfectly reasonable destination and had nothing to do with the fact that you were in it. 

You were at the far end of the table, legs crossed at the ankle and floating slightly off the bench, stability so ingrained you probably didn't notice it anymore. You had a food pouch in one hand and your navy moleskine open in the other. There was a pen tucked behind your ear. Your eyes moved across whatever was on the page.

Grace pulled himself through the doorway and went to the food stores. The mess hall wasn't really a hall but another small room made to conserve space. It did the job, there was no reason to complain. He took his time selecting his meal, which wasn't much time at all as the selection wasn't broad. Even if it was the bagged version he had to eat due to microgravity, he settled on ramen. He always settled on ramen. He was beginning to suspect he'd liked ramen before all of this and simply couldn't remember.

The heating unit beeped. He collected his pouch and made his way to the table, hovering to the seat across from you, bearing the careful poise of a man who had spent the last half hour practicing exactly this. He did not bump into anything, which he considered a victory.

You looked up from your notebook. “Well, aren't you a fast learner?” 

Grace tried to come up with something proud and snarky, but all he managed was a scoff. It didn't seem like your earlier moment bothered you as much as it bothered him. All the more reason to let it go, he thought. 

He ate his space ramen. You read. The ship hummed around you; it sounded better than it had that morning. Acclimating, as you had called it. 

There were still twenty hours left to kill. 

“Hey,” you said. 

Ryland's response was immediate. He whipped his head up. “Yes?” 

“What do you miss most about Earth?” 

He blinked at your question, not knowing what prompted it; or what to respond. “Miss? About Earth?” 

A laugh sounded from your throat. “Yeah. You asked me last night.” 

Grace's brows raised. “I did?” 

“In the lab.” You tilted your head at him, grinning. “Well, you were half asleep.”

He stared at you. The memory wasn't there. He searched for it and found nothing, which was either a worrying side effect of the amnesia or he really was just semi-conscious at that point. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. I told you to go to bed.”

“Ah.” Grace nodded slowly. “Right.” He squeezed at his ramen bag. “Sorry about that.”

“Don't be. You were very sincere about it.” You watched him suffer for a moment, which you seemed to enjoy. Then you leaned forward, forearms resting on the table, and looked at him evenly. “So,” you said. “What do you miss most about Earth?”

Grace sighed as he thought. He made an offhand gesture, like he wasn't really thinking about it. Then his face stilled. “Teaching,” he heard himself say. 

A vivid memory of his classroom brought itself forward. It wasn't a clear picture but a strong cluster of feelings, blurred and warm. When the light came in at that particular angle in the afternoon and turned everything amber, the squeak of marker against the whiteboard, the specific smell of the place — dry-erase ink, old paper, the faint scent of whatever the cafeteria was doing two hallways over. His desk in the front with its perpetual landslide of folders and permission slips, sentinelled by a mug of cooled coffee. 

And the kids. He couldn't see their faces, but he could see their hands, small and eager, shooting up before he'd even finished the question. Some of them were so insistent they'd lift themselves half out of their seats, all for the effort of being chosen; of being heard. 

Ryland's eyes looked distant. “I miss teaching.” 

You watched him regain the thought. “What about it?” you prompted. 

He didn't have an answer for that. But the way he smiled told you it wasn't something words could have explained anyway. 

"Sounds like a nightmare," you said eventually. "Standing in front of a room full of kids for seven hours a day."

Grace laughed despite himself. "It was," he said. "But it was my nightmare, you know?" The small grin that followed was private. Like he was looking at something only he could see. "I wouldn't have traded it for anything.”

And yet he did.

Your eyes fell from the sentimental look on his face, to the golden patch sewn onto the breast pocket of his jumper. Wings, meant to be silver, already gold. It was standard issue in every way except one. That small, seemingly minuscule alteration made a pit in your stomach. His civilian patch would have been changed upon his return to Earth. But as that wasn’t going to happen, they’d skipped the ceremony and gave him the honor from the start. He was already a martyr; he just had to get on the ship. 

Grace would never teach again. You felt yourself resisting the realization. He would never stand in front of a classroom, never sign another permission slip, never pinch the bridge of his nose at a PTA. The mission had taken his life from him. You thought back to the airlock, to Olesya’s funeral, and remembered the feeling of her cold hands. You thought of the photos pressed into her palm, the look on her father’s face as he hugged her with pride. He would never see her again either. 

And then there was you — the ever-responsible captain, the ballast against the storm. Where were you in all of this? Why had it been you? Why had it been Ilyukhina; why had it been Grace? Good God, had you asked them? Had you stood in some sterile briefing room and looked them in the eyes as you asked them to die? You wanted to remember. Why couldn’t you remember?

Grace was still talking. He was telling you about an incident in the lab. One of his students’ projects had gone wrong, but the mistake was apparently so ridiculous that it amused the entire class. 

You couldn’t name what you felt, but it was eating you whole. Sick, heavy pressure. Like drowning — like water rising in your lungs. 

You looked at the golden wings of his patch. Blessed Saint Grace, on his way to his demise. Why did you have all this grief for him? Why were you suffocating in your guilt? Who was he to you? What had you done? 

"—and the kid had the nerve to look me dead in the eye and say it was a controlled experiment," Grace finished, shaking his head. He looked at you, awaiting your reaction. 

You smiled half a second too late.

Grace was quick to notice. "Hey." His voice shifted. "You alright?"

“Show me,” you heard yourself say. 

Ryland tilted his head, confused. “What?” 

“Teach me something. The way you used to. Tell me about astrophage; you’re the expert on that.” 

Grace laughed. It was still nervous around the edges, but it had been so sweet and so warm that it seemed to light up the room. The aching in your chest eased.

“You’re messing with me,” he said. “You run this whole ship. You’re the pilot-commander — you’re probably leagues smarter than I am.” 

You shook your head. “I know how to operate the ship. I got us here, but I’m not the appointed scientist. And everything I know about astrophage is relatively surface-level.” 

Ryland smiled, defeated. Worryingly, it seemed that he could not say no to you. 

You spent the rest of your afternoon cycle in the mess hall, floating loosely around the narrow table. It was easy for Grace to break through his reservations when he fell into a rhythm. His passion for sharing knowledge was clear, and it took you little to no effort to bring it out. He spoke confidently, eagerly, his hands moving between you to map out diagrams you couldn’t see. 

At one point he had borrowed your moleskine notebook, flipping it open to find an empty page. He had moved from across the table to the spot beside you. Your shoulders bumped as you bent yourselves over his equations. He drew crude illustrations with a pencil: jagged cell membranes, looping arrows, energy conversion, rough formulas scrawled in the margins — all written in the chicken-scratch handwriting you now recognized so well. His brows furrowed as he wrote. He was looking at the math but you were looking at him. 

He was explaining the specifics of the Petrova Line when he turned to you and paused. “You’re actually listening,” he said, almost surprised, a small, crooked smile tugging at his mouth.

“I am,” you replied quietly. “Why wouldn’t I be?” 

Ryland held your gaze. “Any questions?” 

You grinned. “None so far, Mr. Grace.” 

You stayed like that for a while, daring not to keep your distance. You’d ask him a thing or two just to keep him talking, and he’d answer despite knowing it.

When he ran out of space to write in, he flipped the page of your notebook, only to be stopped by the familiar polaroid of himself that you had shown him around a week ago. Grace’s brows raised. 

“Oh,” he said. “This is still here.” 

You tilted your head. “Why wouldn’t it be?” You watched his expression. “It’s where I found it.” 

Grace took the photo between his forefinger and thumb. He gave it another study, sighing at the absence of a memory to pair it with. When he looked at you, your eyes met. “What about you?” he asked. 

“Me.” 

“Yeah. What do you miss the most about Earth?” 

You stared at him for a while. You weren’t able to answer him then, and you wondered if you could answer him now. “I don’t know,” you replied. Pencil shavings floated between you. You caught one before it could tangle itself in his hair. 

Grace frowned. “No fair, I told you mine.” 

You smiled. “No, like seriously. I don’t know. I can’t remember.” You hiked up your shoulders and gave him a look that said, ‘well, what can you do’? “I know the ship inside and out, I know how to run it blindfolded, I know every detail of what needs to be done. But for some reason, I can’t seem to remember anything prior.” 

Grace’s eyes softened. “Oh.” 

“I don’t have a lot to go with,” you continued. I didn’t seem to pack a lot of things with me. Maybe I’m just not the sentimental type.” You sighed a breath out your nose. “But I mean, I’ve got this letter from some guys back in the task force. They signed it, wished me well. There’s Olesya. I remember her. I don’t remember all of her, but I remember that we were friends.”

Grace turned to face you fully, brows knitted together as he listened. 

“Then there’s nothing,” you told him. “If I think back to anything beyond that, there’s a whole lot of empty.” You rubbed the back of your neck, the gesture uncharacteristically uncertain. “Then, there’s you.”  

Grace perked up. “Me?” 

“I don't have vivid memories of you,” you said carefully. “Nothing concrete. There’s no specific moment I can point to and say — there, that's where we met, that's what we were.” You paused. “But something's there. I know it. Like a word on the tip of your tongue, you know?” Your eyes found his, searching with an expression so earnest that it left him stunned. “Do you… remember me?”

You looked so hopeful that it made Ryland’s stomach hurt. His fingers stilled against the edge of the table. He wanted, very much, to say yes. He searched for it through the fog of recovered memories, through the faces and names and fragments that had been returning to him in pieces. Nothing matched. He couldn’t find your face, nor your name, nor any semblance of a moment that might replicate or explain the way he was beginning to feel for you. He could only remember you from the moment he woke up. He could remember the relief that washed over him when he peered at your monitor and saw that your vital signs were stable. He remembered dragging his blankets and pillows over to your pod and watching you until his eyes grew too heavy to do so. You had brought him comfort since the moment you met. You continued to do so even then. 

“I don’t…” He trailed off, choosing his words. “I don’t remember you from before. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” You nodded in a way that told him you’d anticipated his answer. “It’ll come back,” you said. “I know it will.” 

And if it didn’t, well, what else was there to lose?

The alert came nineteen hours in. There was a single amber light blinking quietly in the upper left corner of the main panel. You had dozed off in your chair, one foot hooked under the console out of habit. You were awake before the second pulse. You sat up, causing your notebook to fling from your chest and drift away. You caught it without looking, already preoccupied by the alarm. The diagnostic was already running by the time your eyes found the screen. You pulled it up and scrolled through the output. 

“What’s wrong, girl?” you mumbled under your breath. 

The antenna array. Specifically, the relay coupling on the external mount of the Petrova scope's antenna array. Impact damage. A fragment from the debris field, probably no larger than your fist, had nicked it. The scope itself was fine. You checked if it could protract and retract as instructed, and it could. But without the antenna feeding it signal, it was a very expensive and completely useless piece of equipment.

You pulled up the external camera feed. The damage was visible even at this resolution. There was a clean gouge in the coupling housing, one of the mounting brackets bent at a concerning angle. You zoomed in. The bracket wasn't just bent, it was sheared almost completely through.

You sat back.

Behind you, the sound of someone pulling himself through the corridor hatch.

“Hey.” Grace's voice, careful and still sleep-rough. He'd been in the Immersion Node last time you'd checked. “Mary flagged something.” He floated to the threshold and stopped himself with a hand on the frame, reading your face before he read the screens. “What is it?”

You turned the monitor toward him.

He looked at it for a moment. Then at you. “Is that–?”

“The Petrova scope antenna.” You crossed your arms. “Something came through the debris field.”

Grace pushed off the frame and drifted closer, squinting at the feed. He wasn’t entirely sure if he was seeing it correctly, or if he knew the extent of the damage. He drew a conclusion from your expression. “That’s bad,” he said. “What do we do? It’s an antenna, so, can we reroute the signal or something?”

"No."

He looked at you.

“It's a physical component," you said. "On the exterior of the hull. There's no rerouting it.” You nodded at the screen. “Someone has to go out there and replace the coupler.”

“Someone,” Grace repeated. 

“Me,” you clarified. 

Grace's jaw tightened. He looked back at the monitor, frowning at the readings still scrolling in the sidebar. You watched him do the math you'd already done. 

“Do you really have to–” he started.

“Yes. We need the scope. We didn't fly four light-years to sit in orbit and look at a star we can't measure.” You uncrossed your arms and pushed out of your chair. 

“Wait, wait.” Grace followed you out, clumsy in his haste. His heart was pounding in his chest. 

You’d pushed your way towards the suit lockers, which were at the forward end of the airlock. There was a narrow compartment lined with equipment mounts, tool bags, and the three EVA suits secured to the wall. Grace had always hated seeing them. He had always hated the fact that there were three. Yours was on the far left. 

You pulled your jumpsuit off and stowed it in the designated slot. There was no fear nor urgency in your actions. The sequence was muscle memory by now. Cooling garment first, then the lower torso. One leg, then the other, the waist ring checked and locked in two practiced motions. You didn't think about any of it. Four missions had reduced the whole process to something your hands could do without consulting the rest of you. You'd suited up in worse conditions, worse stakes.

Grace made a worried sound.

You glanced at him.

He had his fist against his mouth, brows knitted together in obvious concern. 

You turned back to the suit.

The hard upper torso was mounted to the wall at chest height. There was a rigid fiberglass shell housing the life support backpack, the display and control module, and the environmental systems that would keep you alive for the next several hours. You rose into it from below, threading your arms up through the sleeves, your head through the neck ring. The two halves of the suit came together. You reached back and felt for the closure mechanism and locked it. The suit sealed around you with a definitive click.

“You’ve done this before,” said Grace, which wasn't a question, but a way to reassure himself. 

“Hundreds of times,” you confirmed. 

“Right.” He uncrossed his arms only to cross them again. 

You could see him worrying, still. “Parts inventory,” you said, without looking up from the waist ring. “Forward storage, third panel on the left. Relay coupling for the external antenna mount — it'll be in a flat yellow case.” You checked the seal with two fingers. “Grab it for me.”

Grace blinked, then straightened. “Yeah.” He looked as though he was regaining his composure. “Yeah, okay. Yellow case, third panel.”

“Third panel on the left.”

When he came back, he handed it over to you. You thanked him with a nod. You watched him hover there in the airlock doorway, yellow case delivered, hands now unoccupied and anxiously searching for something else to do. He was trying to keep his face neutral, and failing. 

“Grace.” 

He looked at you.

“I need you on the monitors while I'm out there.” Your voice was even. “Debris field readings, suit telemetry, hull pressure. If anything spikes, I need someone who can tell me before the suit does.”

He pointed at himself. “You want me watching the screens?”

“I need you watching the screens.” You picked up the helmet and held it between your arm and waist. “You see anything you don't like, you tell me immediately.”

“Right.” He was nodding then. “Yeah, okay. What am I looking for specifically? Like, pressure variance?” His brows raised. He was only then realizing that he knew what those words meant. 

“Yeah. Mary will flag the obvious stuff but she's not always fast enough on the debris readings.” You paused. “I trust you to catch what she might miss.”

That last part might not have been necessary, (Mary would not miss,) but it landed where you intended it to.

“Okay.” He nodded once, decisive, a man on a mission. “Okay, yeah. I'll be on the monitors.”

He pushed off the doorframe and disappeared down the corridor toward the control room. You were about to put your helmet on when he came rushing back. He had kicked himself off the wall too hard and accidentally missed the doorway. Clumsily, he returned, hands braced against the frame. 

“Be careful, Cap.” There was more than just worry in his eyes. He was looking at you with true, genuine fear. You’d think he was the one about to get out there. You couldn’t blame him; space was already a horrifying concept on its own. You couldn’t imagine how a civilian with no spacewalking experience felt. 

You threw him a half-hearted salute. “Watch my six, sailor.” 

Grace saluted back. He opened his mouth like he was about to say something more, but decided against it and left. 

When he was gone, you wore your helmet and sealed the airlock. 

It was, you thought, like handing a child a disconnected Xbox controller and watching them lean into the turns. He knew the ship well enough to read the basic outputs. Whether any of it would matter was another question. But he would be doing something. He would be occupied. And that was worth the small dishonesty of making it sound like a critical assignment rather than what it was — which was you finding him a safe place to put his worry while you went and did the part he couldn't help with.

The outer door opened, and you stepped off the edge.

[sargeteen]

𝕱ORMULA 𝕺NE

✶ ― LOGAN SARGEANT

𑣲 ST. CHROMA . . . Small Rapper!Reader, SMAU, Black Male Face Claim, Requested.

𑣲 FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS . . . NFL Player!Reader, SMAU, Dalton Kincaid Face Claim, Short-Form.

𑣲 HIS MASTERPIECE . . . Professional Golfer!Reader, Partial SMAU Partial Written.

𑣲 ALL MY LOVE . . . Red Bull Racing Driver!Reader, SMAU, Fluff.

𑣲 THAT WOULD BE ENOUGH . . . McLaren Driver!Reader, Partial SMAU Partial Written, Pato O'Ward Face Claim. Childhood Best Friends to Lovers, Song Fic.

✶ ― CHARLES LECLERC

𐙚 SOMEBODY ELSE . . . Male!Reader, SMAU, Partial Angst. ( Part Two ).

𐙚 EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE . . . Driver!Reader, Mostly Written Partial SMAU, F175 Live Event, Idiots in Love.

𐙚 UNPAID INTERN . . . Ferrari Social Media Manager!Reader, Cringe Crack Humor, SMAU. ( Part Two ).

𐙚 I KNOW PLACES . . . Secret Husband Driver!Reader, SMAU, Shourtney AU.

𐙚 THOUGHT I LOST YOU . . . Rival Mercedes Driver!Reader, Written, Reader Endures Horrible Car Accident, Everybody Lives, Requested.

✶ ― OSCAR PIASTRI

✿ COULD YOU BE LOVED . . . Surfer!Reader, SMAU, Painfully Short.

✿ WE HUG NOW . . . Ex-Driver!Reader, Written, Texts, Angst, Slight Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Reader-Centric.

✶ ― MAX VERSTAPPEN

⛥ FREE BIRD . . . NASCAR Driver!Reader, Earnhardt!Reader, SMAU, Chase Elliott Face Claim, Requested.

⛥ LUTHER . . . Drag Racing Driver!Reader, SMAU, Young!Paul Walker and Hayden Christensen Face Claim, Suggestive Language.

✶ ― LEWIS HAMILTON

‏𖦹 ENCHANTED TO MEET YOU . . . Secret Husband Actor!Reader, Mostly Written Partial SMAU, Damson Idris Face Claim, Age Gap Relationship, Requested .

𖦹 SUPER RICH KIDS . . . Son Singer!Reader, SMAU, Jonathan Daviss Face Claim, Requested, Painfully Short. Horrible. Do Not Read.

✶ ― OTHER DRIVERS

✽ REVIVAL . . . Formula 1 Grid x Alcoholic Turned Sober!Reader, Haas Driver!Reader, Angst, Partial Written Partial SMAU, Texts. Personal Favorite.

✽ MATILDA . . . Charles Leclerc & Max Verstappen & Rookie Driver!Reader, High School Student!Reader, Familial, Partial Written Partial SMAU, Hurt/Comfort, Fluff. Personal Favorite.

✽ EVORA (AND MAX)'S GUIDE TO LOVE . . . Charles Leclerc x Single Dad!Reader, Driver!Reader, Max Verstappen & Original Female Character, Written, Fluff, Humor.

✽ BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN . . . Daniel Riccardo x Cowboy!Reader, SMAU, Black Male Face Claim, Humor. Horrible. Do Not Read.

𝕬NIME

✴︎ ― JUJUTSU KAISEN

𖠰 END OF AUGUST . . . Satoru Gojo x Male!Reader, Kind Of... Gojo & Geto & Shoko & Male!Reader Friendship. Written 3.3k Words, Second Person POV, Sad/Angsty/Fluff/Happy Stew. Yuji is there, too. Personal Favorite.

✴︎ ― MY HERO ACADEMIA

𖠰 THE FIRE ESCAPE . . . Katsuki Bakugo x Male!Reader, Written 3.3k Words, Second Person POV, University & No Quirks & Everybody is Normal AU, Puts The Romance in Bromance, Kind Of OOC.

𝕺THER

☼ ― YOUTUBERS

𖧧 PUCK BUNNY . . . Nick Sturniolo x NHL Player!Reader, Partial Written Partial SMAU. ( Part Two ).

𖧧 BABY, IT'S COLD OUTSIDE . . . Schlatt x Boyfriend!Reader, Written, Song Fic.

𖧧 DO I WANNA KNOW? . . . Schlatt x Male!Reader, Written, Song Fic, Horrible. Do Not Read.

[sargeteen]

gonna make a new masterlist soon, but i just opened my requests for project hail mary, attack on titan, my hero academia and avatar the last airbender. just a reminder, and for new followers, too, i write male char x male readers only. i can write ftm (either char or reader) too. i also only write sfw stuff, unless there’s like a joke or two (like my recent bakugo fic). uhhh oh yeah i’m a 19 y/o college student so i’m kind of busy so fics won’t be out right away or they’ll take a couple business days to finish. so…yah…

i’m not very good at writing angst n stuff, my strengths usually lie in fluff writing, and i can do smaus as well 🙏

i like listening to music while writing and making fics based off the sound of music, so if you include a song i could listen to with the vibe you want with ur request that would def help me get it done quicker.

[sargeteen]

ykw…let’s add spyxfamily and gachiakuta in there, too!

[sargeteen]

hi! would you write zuko x male childhood friend reader? i’m a sucker for childhood friend tropes 😓 thank you :)

omg 🚬🚬 would you want him in the gaang and go through some like original plot lines of him chasing aang or something like that?

[sargeteen]

gonna make a new masterlist soon, but i just opened my requests for project hail mary, attack on titan, my hero academia and avatar the last airbender. just a reminder, and for new followers, too, i write male char x male readers only. i can write ftm (either char or reader) too. i also only write sfw stuff, unless there’s like a joke or two (like my recent bakugo fic). uhhh oh yeah i’m a 19 y/o college student so i’m kind of busy so fics won’t be out right away or they’ll take a couple business days to finish. so…yah…

i’m not very good at writing angst n stuff, my strengths usually lie in fluff writing, and i can do smaus as well 🙏

i like listening to music while writing and making fics based off the sound of music, so if you include a song i could listen to with the vibe you want with ur request that would def help me get it done quicker.

[sargeteen]

I see the aesthetic change #noticing👀👀👀

woah hello this was from a month ago sorry yes i changed it twice now 🤤🤤🤤

[sargeteen]

𝕿HE 𝕱IRE 𝕰SCAPE ᝰ KATSUKI BAKUGO.

݁ᛪ༙⋮ katsuki . . . in the light of the sunset , find me . ⸝⸝ i will never not look for you. ˶

summary   ✷   In another universe, one that lacked quirks and the discrimination that came along with them, Katsuki Bakugo lived in a horrible apartment in New York City with his roommates. He went to a liberal arts college in the heart of the Big Apple, and he was much less of a sour priss to those he cared about. In another universe, there was you, Katsuki's favorite roommate. Your room in the apartment was the one connected to the fire escape, the one that you and Katsuki found an escape on, like an ironic joke. In another universe, the two of you sat out on the fire escape, music playing on the CD player back in your room through the open window and the golden hour sun lit up the tips of Katsuki's hair, which made you think about writing poetry about the sun.

tags and warnings   ✷   18+ jokes (cum jokes, sex jokes, virginity jokes and other stuff like that). no use of y/n, second person point of view. university, no quirks, everybody is normal people alternate universe. bisexual katsuki bakugo. he/him pronouns for reader. katsuki bakugo referred to as katsuki and kats. friendship teetering on the line of relationship. puts the romance into bromance. kind of sudden ending, i don't know how to end fics so this is really shit, so, yeah.

author’s note   ✷   i haven't watched all of mha and i haven't watched it in a hot minute so it's going to be a bit ooc, but lowkirkenuinely speed's cosplay of him has me thinking about bakugo a lot so that's why you guys are getting this. i haven't written in a hot minute, and i don't remember the last time i wrote in second person pov, so this is going to really be like riding a bike. i hope you guys enjoy.. masterlist 3.3k words.

Music flowed out of an open window from a CD player inside. There was a spinning CD in a CD player from the 90s, one that had been either thrifted or become a hand-me-down from a parent. Though from a different decade, the music matched the vintage CD player, as the sound of Stevie Nicks' voice traveled like a boat in the water, like it was meant to be there. The sound of the speakers was a little grating, but given the number of years it's been in use, it was quite surprising how well intact the CD player was.

The metal grate of the fire escape that was bolted outside of your bedroom window made marks on your skin that were bound to fade minutes after you stood up later. It happened every time you sat outside in shorts, and you could feel the grate dig into your skin, so it was guaranteed to happen today as well. The sun was out, and it had been all day, so the grate was warm under your legs, which were starting to grow slick with sweat, but you couldn't care less as it was one of the first nice days in a while.

On Monday, the highest temperature was a whopping 39 degrees; on Tuesday, it was a beautiful 57 degrees; on Wednesday, it dropped back down to mid-20s; then on Thursday, it rose back up to 40 degrees; and finally today, Friday— one of the best days of the week in your humble opinion—was a beautiful high of 62 degrees. It was officially shorts weather, and the threat of snow was no longer on the horizon as spring in New York City finally started to kick into gear.

The random bits of silence in your classes were now filled with sniffing from your classmates, and your nose itched every time you passed by the flower shop on the corner across from your favorite bodega—the one with the stereotypical red and white striped awning that caught the attention of tourists, only to be met with the owner, an old italian man with the most unintelligible New Jersey accent you could only understand if you've known him for years, which you did; and, you were his favorite customer, of course.

The sky was starting to get filled with the blooms of the cherry trees that lived inside Central Park, and they were carried by the wind past the windows of dreary office buildings, showing a glimmer of hope that the warm seasons were bound to come, and they were able to turn the air conditioning on once more.

This nice weather also meant that everybody was starting to bring out their fire escape—or balcony, if you were one of the very few rich people in New York City that liked to decorate your balcony like a college student—decorations, and you were no exception. Your shared apartment was quite small, but you were gratefully given a fire escape that you abused like every 2000s rom-com you watched when you were younger, and forced your roommates to watch the first weekend you moved into your apartment.

There wasn't much room for any seating, save for one chair that one of your roommates bought that you hated, so you always opted to sit on the uncomfortable grate; it always brought some comfort to you, though, like some sort of grounding technique whenever you were stuck in a rut in studying for your next midterm. But, potted flowers that you did buy surrounded you and brought a pop of color to the otherwise ugly and boring dark brown and rusting fire escape.

The window beside you was open as you leaned back against the brick wall next to the window. Just a minute ago, you had slid your computer back through the window onto the table that was set inside for that reason exactly, when there were one too many things on the fire escape, and you just needed to set something down quickly. Your eyes were closed as you leaned your head back on the brick wall and let the light breeze travel over your features and blow through your hair.

As you took a deep breath, sucking in all of the fresh air that you could, a thud was heard in your room, breaking the peaceful silence you held with Stevie Nicks' voice singing Go Your Own Way. You let the breath out as a sigh, and you didn't have to turn around to check who was knocking shit over in your room, but you still did just to see his face. You leaned over and squinted your eyes as you looked into your room to see the man you were expecting: Katsuki Bakugo. A small chuckle left your lips as he stumbled around, his clumsy feet stepping around the aftermath of your panic that morning of trying to figure out what to wear. Clothes strewn about the floor, including T-shirts that you have stolen from Katsuki's closet, a pair of sweatpants you haven't worn in nearly a year, a couple of hoodies that were too hot for the weather and a couple of pairs of shorts that had become too big over the winter months.

This past winter, Katsuki had forced you out of the apartment and into the apartment gym, where he spent a good amount of his own free time. He had become your trainer over the winter, as he said that you needed to "start working on that summer bod", even though that was back in November. Still, you played along with this fantasy of him being a personal trainer, and you paid him in Animal Crossing minutes on your Nintendo Switch—he didn't have one of his own, and he claimed that he didn't like Animal Crossing, but whenever you pulled out your switch, he clung to your shoulder and hovered as he watched you build up your island and listened to you rant about how shady Tom Nook was.

"You okay?" You asked with a chuckle as Katsuki swore under his breath.

He narrowly avoided stepping on a stray Lego piece that jumped off your shelf earlier, and you didn't feel like picking it up.

"Shit, I feel like I'm walking through a room covered in land mines," Katsuki grumbled. After a beat, he reached the window and easily climbed up through it, and he pushed your face away lightly as he passed through the opening like he had done it a thousand times, which he definitely has. "You like living in a pig sty, or what?" He asked once he sat on the chair he bought. It was a borderline ottoman from the dollar store, and was insanely uncomfortable, so you avoided sitting on it like the plague. But Katsuki hated sitting on the grate, unlike you, so you let the ugly, uncomfortable chair live on the fire escape, because it was his too.

You shrugged. "You just don't get my vision. Maybe I should change my major to interior design."

You let out a hum as your head leaned back against the brick wall again. You closed your eyes, and you could hear Katsuki move over you to reach through the window. A light blush waved over your cheeks.

"Yeah, that sounds like a horrible idea," Katsuki grunted as he reached for something through the window.

The sound of a paper bag crunching caught your attention as Katsuki moved back to his earlier position on the chair. Then, something landed on your lap and caused your eyes to shoot open. You looked down to see a while bag on your lap, and it was a familiar weight. With a raised brow, you glanced at Katsuki to see him holding a wrapped make-shift panini sandwich. You recognized the white wrapping, and you immediately ripped open the white bag and reached in to grab your own sandwich.

"Figured you didn't eat anything today again," Katsuki said through a bite of his sandwich. He was unfortunately right, and you proved him to be so as your stomach growled once you unwrapped half of your sandwich. "I was passing by Fran's, so I grabbed you a sandwich."

It wasn't just any sandwich; it was the same sandwich order that you've been ordering from Fran's for years, and it tasted like Heaven on Earth, and Katsuki started to look suspiciously like an angel with the gold from the beginning of the sunset falling on his features.

"God, you're amazing," you all but moaned out as your head fell back against the wall once you took a bite. As you chewed, all of your stresses about your upcoming exam in a couple of days went away, and all you could think about was the sandwich in your hand and Katsuki watching you like a hawk with narrowed eyes.

The thing is, you had an interesting relationship with Katsuki. You met your freshman year of college, as you were neighbors turned roommates when each of your roommates ditched you in the middle of the night. There was no awkward stage in your friendship as you clicked instantly over shared interests and the posters that covered your walls in your attempt to try and make the dingy dorm room a home. Your attempt was futile as it was still a dingy dorm room that always smelled like cat piss from your other neighbor, who never cleaned their emotional support cat's litter box, but you had each other, and that's all you really needed.

From the beginning, your relationship was destined to be different from your other friends, being roommates and all. You've seen more of Katsuki than you have of your high school friends, who you barely even talk to anymore, and you shared a locker room with them for a couple of years for gym class. There was just something different about Katsuki, the way that he just didn't really care what others thought, and how he burst a blood vessel any time someone said something a little bit off, and the way that when he was drunk, he only calmed down whenever you were near. So, from the start, it was an interesting relationship that didn't have many boundaries.

Katsuki raised a brow. "Jesus, if I knew you weren't a virgin, I would've asked if you were just from the way you look like you're about to cum in your pants."

You opened your eyes to glare at Katsuki. "Are you always going to mention the fact that you were in the room when I lost my virginity? I thought we'd moved past that already. It happened like 2 years ago, get over it, you loser."

"Hey, I'm just saying, it's weird to have sex with a junior in your freshman dorm while your roommate is sleeping not even 6 feet away," he raised his hands in surrender, but a smile took over his face. He had gotten over his anger and disgust quite a while ago, so he only had space to laugh about it now.

It was a month or two into them being roommates, and you had gone out to a party that your new "boyfriend" had invited you to. It was a football party, seeing as he was on the football team, and he said that you were his plus one, so you couldn't bring anyone with you. Katsuki raised a brow at that when you told him before the party, while pulling your pants on, but he let it go and flew into bed with your Nintendo Switch that he stole off your desk. He had fallen asleep a couple of hours later and woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a man shushing someone and muffled moans.

He pretended to be asleep and closed his eyes tightly as he heard your "boyfriend" say, "You say you're a virgin, but you're such a slut for my cock, huh?"

How the fuck was he supposed to forget about that?

You both had a long conversation the day after, with Katsuki sharing his distress and anger while you sat down with your head in your hands. Later that day, Katsuki rubbed your back as you cried into your shoulder after you learned that your "boyfriend" was talking to other girls and guys alike. Katsuki had the words "told you so" on his tongue, but he bit them back as he comforted you.

"I was a 19-year-old virgin hooking up with a 21-year-old with a power imbalance kink, alright?" You groaned. You leaned your head back again and covered your face with your free hand. "Can we stop talking about this?" An embarrassed chuckle left your lips as your cheeks flushed.

Katsuki smirked, leaned back against the railing of the fire escape and nodded. "Yeah, alright. Whatever, just eat your sandwich, nerd."

For a few minutes, you both ate your sandwiches in silence, save for the crinkles of the paper wrapping, the busy ambiance that the city always carried whenever spring came around, and, again, Stevie Nicks singing Songbird.

Once he was done, Katsuki balled up his wrapper and tossed it toward the bag, but it just bounced off your head and landed off to the side. You rolled your eyes and grabbed his wrapper to shove it into the bag, along with yours. You then tossed the bag through the window into your room with Stevie Nicks to clean up later.

"Thanks for that, I needed it," you hummed.

The sun was bound to set soon, so it was reaching peak golden hour time. You could see a couple of people down below on the street posing for their Instagram post, with the sun making their faces a beautiful golden color. You glanced up at Katsuki, and he was already looking at you. His hair glowed in the golden hour sunlight, and it colored his face like he was an angel from heaven.

"Yeah, I know," Katsuki murmured, like it was just for you.

The air had started to change, not just because the sun was setting and taking some of the heat with it, but also because Katsuki looked at you like you were the only thing in the world.

Your face turned golden, too, though the sun highlighted the left side of your face. It made your features look more defined, and like a painting of a man that Katsuki would actually look at in a museum that you were forced to go to for your roommate's art history project. His eyes trailed over your face and your hair, which looked light and airy in the light of the golden sun.

It felt like a scene in a movie; The Chain had just ended and You Make Loving Fun had started to pour out of the old and garbage speakers of the CD player. A small smile grew on your face as you looked over Katsuki's face, and he looked over yours. You could only hope that the song was trying to tell you something, something hidden between the layers of your relationship that you haven't explored yet, that there was something there you didn't know about. That Katsuki made loving fun, and that there was something there between the two of you that made both of you believe in miracles.

"What?" You asked as you let out a breath.

Katsuki shook his head, "Nothin'."

You hummed. "Okay."

A beat passed. "You know I don't believe in miracles."

You shook your head and hummed. "Yeah, I don't either."

There was a pit in your stomach that started to light on fire, much like your cheeks did, too. Your eyes narrowed as you looked at Katsuki.

"You have a face that people would go to war for, I think," you hummed.

"You think?" Katsuki asked as he leaned back. He turned to face the sun, and he moved his limbs around—his right arm moved up to rest on the railing, his left dangled down and rested on his lap, and his legs rested in a natural man spread, but he stretched them out, and his right straightened with a small bend in the knee while his left stayed bent at a 90-degree angle. "Is this 'go-to-war' worthy enough?"

You laughed and shook your head, "I shouldn't've said anything. You're getting a big head now."

Katsuki turned back to look at you, his eyes squinted from looking in the direction of the side. "You always give me a big head."

Both of you paused for a beat at the sexual implication of his sentence before you both let out a laugh.

"God, we're children," you laughed and shook your head again. You pulled up and tucked your right knee up to your chest. You rested your chin on the bend of it as you looked up at Katsuki, who was laughing, too.

Katsuki nodded along with you before he turned and looked down at the street, just to look away and hide his cheeks that were starting to grow red. "Completely," Katsuki added, and he took a deep breath before he looked back at you.

"I would go to war for your face," Katsuki hummed. His head tilted as he studied your face like he had done a thousand times.

A shocked laugh left your mouth. "Oh, um, thank you, Kats." You looked away.

Another beat passed between you two.

It was sudden, something that shocked both of you, and quiet enough that you almost missed it.

"Can I kiss you?" Katsuki breathed out.

You turned to look at him in shock, and he looked almost as shocked as you. Stevie Nicks was still playing in your room, and the grate digging into the back of your left thigh grounded you.

"Yeah, yeah," you nodded.

Before you knew it, Katsuki pushed himself off the chair you hated, sacrificed his knees as he kneeled on the hot metal grate floor, and took your face in his hands as he pressed his lips against yours like a man starved. It obviously wasn't your first kiss, nor was it Katsuki's, but it sure felt like it was. Not in the way that it was messy and could've been a better kiss, but in the way that it felt as though everything was connecting in your head, and in the way that all of your attention was suddenly only focused on Katsuki Bakugo in front of you, holding your face.

You moved your lips against each other until Katsuki separated for air, which was only for a beat before you chased his lips and brought him into another kiss. It was a movie scene; the way that your hands rose to grab onto the back of his neck to pull him closer, the golden hour sun shining on the sides of your faces and lighting the soft strands of your hair, and the way that the only thoughts in your head were 'Katsuki Katsuki Katsuki'.

The next time Katsuki pulled away for air, he pulled away far enough—though, reluctantly—so you couldn’t push forward for a third kiss.

"Fucking hell, you're a good kisser, holt shit," Katsuki breathed out.

"Could say the same thing about you," you hummed.

That night, the fire escape was more than just an escape for the two of you; it was the place where you shared your first of many kisses. Even as the sun set, you sat out in the chill night air sharing lazy kisses between laughs and stories of random things. Katsuki sat at your right, his arm around you as he hugged you close to his side.

Even as your Fleetwood Mac CD stopped, you sat outside with your head on Katsuki’s shoulder.