[suku-enthusiasts]

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[suku-enthusiasts]

chapter ten || The Quiet Shift - R. Sukuna

ryomen sukuna x f!reader

❝You grew up behind locked doors—kept “safe” until safety started to look like a cage. One night, something inside you snapped, and the world answered with sirens, courtrooms, and an iron-lit ward that promised treatment but fed on fear. That’s where you met him. Sukuna—another monster on paper, another lifer with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He watched you like he recognized the shape of your loneliness. Like he’d been waiting. And when the ward turned bloody, when the gates cracked open for a moment too long, he took your hand and didn’t let go. Now living in the aftermath—moving country to country, carrying secrets like loaded guns. Because what escaped with them wasn’t just love. It was something darker.❞

cw; non-con. smut. abuse. manipulation. mental health. trigger warning. MDI. 18+.

word counter; 8.1k

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Your parents arrived the way spring arrived—quietly, not asking permission, simply happening.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no cinematic rush through an airport with tears and running and loud declarations. It was paperwork and careful planning and your father’s calm, measured voice on the phone, saying he’d accepted a transfer to teach at a university in China, like it was the most natural thing in the world to rearrange an entire life just to be near you.

Your mother found an apartment down the road from yours—close enough to walk, close enough that the city didn’t swallow her whole before she could reach you. Your father unpacked books first, of course. Your mother unpacked the kettle. Hiro moved in with them, laptop and quiet shoulders and the look of someone who had decided the only way to survive regret was to keep it in his mouth until it dissolved.

When they came by for the first time after the move, your father’s gaze went to the door immediately.

The camera was gone.

He didn’t say anything at first—only blinked, slow and thoughtful, like he’d expected to see a little black eye watching him. Your mother’s hand brushed the doorframe as she stepped inside, as if she could feel where it had been mounted, the lingering shape of it in the air.

Hiro looked too.

Then looked away.

You felt the smallest, strangest swell of pride in your chest. Not because you needed their approval—no, not that—but because you’d lived so long inside other people’s cages that even the absence of one felt like proof you had a life now. A life you could breathe in.

“Tea?” you offered softly, out of habit, out of love, out of the part of you that still tried to soften every room before anyone else could harden it.

Your mother’s eyes warmed. “Only if you sit down first.” You obeyed, because you were pregnant and tired and because her voice still carried that old gentle authority that had never needed to be cruel to be listened to. 

Sukuna had been at work when they visited—welding dust and metal and long hours—but he came home later that evening, and your parents witnessed the version of him that existed now more often than not: quieter. He still filled a doorway like a threat, still had that crimson gaze that seemed to weigh everything. But his shoulders loosened when he saw you. His mouth softened, barely, in a way that would have looked like nothing to anyone else.

He didn’t greet your parents with warmth, exactly—Sukuna didn’t do warmth the way other people did—but he nodded once and then moved straight to you, checking your face like it was a temperature gauge, checking your hands like he could read your pulse through your skin.

“You eat?” he asked you first, voice low.

You nodded. “I did.” He exhaled like the answer held him together. Then he turned and brought you tea anyway. Brought you a snack without being asked. Sat behind you on the couch and, without making a show of it, lifted your feet into his lap like it was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world that your body deserved relief.

He massaged your arches with his thumbs while he listened to your father talk about the university.

Not fidgeting. Not pacing.

Just… there.

Your mother noticed, of course she did.

She watched the way Sukuna paused mid-press when you made a small sound, immediately adjusting pressure like he was learning the map of your comfort by heart. She watched the way he asked if you were nauseous, if you’d had water, if you needed to lie down, and how the questions were still frequent—still too frequent—but the tone was different.

Less like a leash.

More like a hand offered.

Your mom began coming with you to your prenatal classes, too. Your mother sat beside you sometimes, her hand lightly on your back, and met the other pregnant women with the same gentle brightness she brought to flowers—curious, careful, kind.

They noticed how often Sukuna called.

How he texted you even during work.

You there.

Eat.

Water.

Home at 6.

I love you.

Your mother saw you smile at the messages, soft and shy, like the attention warmed you even when it sometimes overwhelmed you. She saw you reply quickly, almost automatically, like you were afraid silence would make him unravel, and she saw the way he had changed since the camera came down.

Not healed—no. Not cured. But altered, like something inside him had been forced into the light and could no longer pretend it wasn’t there.

One afternoon, when Sukuna was at work and the city outside your window shimmered with late-day haze, your mother came to see you alone. She knocked gently, as if she still wasn’t sure how to step into your life without breaking something.

When you opened the door, she smiled at you, and for a second you were fourteen again, looking up at her through the blur of your own mind, trying to decide which voices were real and which weren’t.

“Hi, mama,” you said softly.

Her eyes glistened. “Hi, sweetheart.” She stepped inside and you both moved around each other in the kitchen the way you always had—her finding the kettle without asking, you pulling two cups down without being told. It was muscle memory. Love memory. The kind that lived deeper than fear.

When the tea steamed between your palms, you sat together by the window. Outside, China kept living—people moving, scooters buzzing, vendors calling out. A world that didn’t know what you’d been, what you’d done, what you’d survived.

You traced the rim of your cup and asked quietly, “Do you miss Japan?” Your mother’s gaze softened, then drifted. “I miss… familiar things,” she admitted. “The smell of home. Your father’s favorite market. The way the light hit the street in the morning.” You nodded. “Do you think the authorities suspect anything?” The words came out like a whisper you didn’t want the air to overhear. “Do you think they’re looking for us still?”

Your mother’s hand shifted on the table, her fingers folding and unfolding once. She had always been honest with you in a way that didn’t stab, only steadied.

“I think they suspect,” she said gently. “But suspicion is not proof, and borders are complicated. Your father took a legal route. Hiro works from home. We’ve done everything we can to appear… ordinary.”

You swallowed.

Ordinary.

You looked at your belly, the gentle swell of it beneath your shirt, and your voice dipped even softer. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back.” Your mother’s eyes lifted. “Back to Japan?” You nodded, and your throat tightened like grief had hands. “Even if I wanted to. Even if—” You didn’t finish, because the next thought tasted like rust: Even if I left Sukuna. Even if I—.

You stared down at your tea so you wouldn’t have to watch her face.

Your mother reached across the table and covered your hand with hers.

Her palm was warm.

“You don’t have to decide everything today,” she said.

A laugh almost escaped you—small, bitter, disbelieving. “My whole life has been decided for me,” you whispered, and the sentence felt like a confession you’d never dared to say out loud. “Even when I thought it wasn’t.”

Your mother’s grip tightened slightly, not painful—anchoring.

For a while, you listened to the city hum. Then your mother spoke, slow and careful, like she was stepping around something fragile.

“Sukuna has changed,” she said.

Your breath caught.

She continued, watching you. “He’s calmer. He’s… gentler. I’ve seen him take care of you in ways I didn’t think he knew how. So I need to ask you something, sweetheart.”

You looked up.

Her eyes didn’t accuse. They worried.

“What happened?” she asked softly. “What changed him?”

Your mouth went dry.

Because it wasn’t one thing.

It was a series of moments, each one sharp enough to leave a scar.

You stared at the steam rising from your tea like it could hide you, and you heard that kinder voice in your head—It’s okay. She’s safe. Tell her. Tell someone.

You swallowed.

“There was… a fight,” you admitted.

Your mother didn’t interrupt. She only nodded once, encouraging.

You took a breath that shook. “The camera,” you began. “Of course I noticed it. I… I confronted him.” Your fingers curled around the cup, knuckles pale. “And he got angry.” Your mother’s face shifted, small and pained, but she stayed quiet. “He said it wasn’t about trusting me,” you whispered, eyes stinging. “He said it was about not trusting you. But… it felt like he didn’t trust me.” Your voice cracked. “I’ve been obedient. I did everything he asked. I tried so hard.” Your mother’s hand slid to your wrist—gentle, as if she could still feel old bruises that weren’t there.

“I cried,” you said, and the shame of it burned even though it wasn’t shameful at all. “I told him I didn’t want to be watched. I told him it made me feel like a prisoner again.” Your mother’s eyes closed for a brief moment, like she was praying without words. “And then,” you continued, throat tightening, “he… he locked me in the bedroom.”

Silence fell heavy.

Not the ordinary hush of afternoon, but the kind of silence that made the air feel too thick to breathe.

Your mother’s lips parted. “He did what?” You nodded quickly, almost frantic, as if explaining could make it less real. “He was angry. He said I was worked up. Delusional. He—” You stopped, swallowed hard. “He made it seem like I was imagining it. Like I was the problem.” Your mother’s grip on your hand tightened, and her voice stayed soft only because she knew raising it would scare you. “Sweetheart…”

You shook your head, tears sliding down your cheeks before you could stop them. “And the next day we had a doctor appointment and I—” Your breath hitched. “I flinched when he woke me up. And he… he got so agitated. Like my fear offended him.”

Your mother’s eyes shone, wet and fierce.

You wiped your face with the back of your hand, embarrassed by how easily you still fell apart.

“At the clinic,” you whispered, “the doctor said my blood pressure was high. That I was stressed.” Your laugh broke, small and horrible. “And I told her Sukuna was stressful.” Your mother made a small sound—something between heartbreak and anger. “And when we got home,” you said, voice trembling, “he threw a pamphlet on the table. He asked what the fuck was wrong with me.” You looked down at your belly, fingers spreading gently over it as if you could shield the baby from memory. “And I… I snapped.”

Your mother leaned closer. “What did you say?” You inhaled shakily. “Everything,” you whispered. “I told him he didn’t love me. I told him he wanted control because he was afraid of being left. I told him he saw me as weak, and he was trying to mold me into what he wanted.” Your eyes squeezed shut. “I told him I would go back to Japan. That I couldn’t do it anymore.” Your mother’s hand flew to her mouth.

“He panicked,” you said, tears spilling faster now. “He… he looked—” Your voice broke completely. “He looked like a lost boy.” You remembered it too clearly: the way Sukuna’s face had gone pale beneath the anger, the way his eyes had blurred like he couldn’t see past the fear. The way he had dropped to his knees like standing was impossible. The way he had clung to your waist and pressed his forehead to your belly, shaking.

“He was crying,” you whispered. “He begged. He said he’d take the camera down. He said he’d let me go out. He said he would take his medicine. He—” You shook your head, like the words were too much to hold. “He was sobbing like he was a little boy again.” Your mother’s tears slipped free now, silent. She didn’t wipe them. She let them exist.

“And I…” you confessed, voice small and devastated, “I wiped his tears. I comforted him.” Your mother’s hand cupped your cheek gently. “Because you’re you,” she whispered. “Because you’ve always tried to hold other people together, even when you’re the one breaking.”

You leaned into her touch like it was the only safe thing in the room.

“I love him,” you said, barely audible. “And I hate that loving him feels like… like standing too close to fire. Warm. Bright. Dangerous.” Your mother kissed your temple—soft as petals, firm as roots. “Sweetheart,” she murmured, “I believe he can change in ways. I also believe you deserve love that doesn’t ask you to bleed for it.”

You swallowed, eyes burning.

“And that baby,” your mother added, her voice gentler still, “deserves a home where love doesn’t come with fear hidden inside it.” Your hand drifted to your belly again, you nodded, shaky and tired, and for a moment you let yourself imagine it—love without a leash, safety without a cage, a life that didn’t require constant apology.

Outside, the city kept moving.

Inside, your mother held your hand as if she could anchor you to something better—something that wouldn’t vanish the moment someone’s voice turned sharp.

And in the quiet between your breaths, you realized something that scared you with its tenderness: Your parents hadn’t come to China to take you away in the night. They’d come to stay close enough to catch you if you fell… at least thats what you told yourself. 

Your father called when the tea had gone lukewarm and your mother’s thumb was still circling the back of your hand like a lullaby. “I’m downstairs,” his voice came through her phone, calm, ordinary—too ordinary. “I’ll take you both to lunch. Get some air.” Your mother looked up at you with that same softness she’d worn your whole life, the softness that used to mean safety.

“Lunch,” she said gently, like the word itself could soothe you.

You nodded.

You stood carefully, one hand bracing at your lower back, the other drifting to your belly out of instinct. Your mother helped you with your sweater even though you didn’t need it, her fingers fussing at the collar like she could tuck fear away with fabric.

Down the hall, down the stairs—each step felt like a small act of normalcy, a rehearsal for a life that didn’t always feel like it belonged to you.

Outside, your father’s car waited at the curb.

He smiled as you approached, and for a heartbeat you believed it. The normal. The family. The little afternoon where you could pretend the world wasn’t made of consequences.

He opened the door for you.

You slid into the backseat, your mother beside you, the car smelling faintly of his cologne and warm upholstery and home.

Your phone buzzed in your palm, and you typed quickly.

Going to lunch with my parents. I love you.

You added a little heart with your words in your mind even if you didn’t send one. You stared at the message a second longer than necessary, then hit send.

The car pulled away.

At first you watched the street through the window, letting the city blur into watercolor—shops and scooters, people crossing, sunlight on glass. Your eyelids grew heavy in that safe-sounding hum of a car moving, in the soft rhythm of your mother’s breathing next to you.

Pregnancy made sleep sneak up like a thief.

You didn’t even realize you’d dozed until your head dipped and your dreams swallowed the road.

When you woke, it was wrong before you even opened your eyes.

The air felt different.

Not the inside-of-a-car air—tight and familiar—but something colder, sharper, full of outside.

You blinked hard, groggy, mouth dry.

Your mother’s hand was gripping yours so tightly it hurt.

Your father wasn’t looking at you in the rearview mirror.

He was staring straight ahead, knuckles pale on the steering wheel and then you saw them.

Police.

Not one or two—enough to turn the street into a barricade, enough to make your stomach drop so fast it felt like falling.

You pushed yourself upright, panic snapping your fog into splinters.

“What—?” your voice cracked. “Where are we?”

Your mother’s lips trembled.

Your father parked.

The doors locked with a soft click that sounded like a gun cocking in your mind.

And then you saw her.

Shoko Ieiri stood near the police, her hair tied back, her expression careful—gentle on the surface, grim underneath. Beside her were nurses in familiar neutral uniforms, the kind your body remembered even when your mind tried to forget: hands that held clipboards, hands that carried syringes, hands that promised help while your skin screamed danger.

Your breath seized.

“No,” you whispered.

Your mother swallowed so hard you heard it. “Sweetheart…” You backed into the seat, your knees drawing in protectively, palms going instinctively to your belly as if you could shield the baby from the sight. “Y/n,” your father said, voice thick. “Listen to me.” You shook your head frantically, hair falling into your eyes. “No—no, no, no—”

Your mother’s eyes filled. “They just want you to be healthy and okay.” She squeezed your hand harder, pleading through touch. “We’ll fight for you not to go back to the ward. We will. But right now—right now we have to get you away from him.”

The words struck like a slap.

Away from him.

From Sukuna.

From the apartment that had become your world, your routine, your safety with teeth.

Your throat closed.

“No,” you said louder. “I’m not leaving. I’m not— I’m not going.” Shoko stepped forward slowly, palms open in that practiced way—non-threatening, clinical, calm. “Y/n,” Shoko said, voice soft as she could make it, “no one is here to hurt you.” Your laugh came out broken. “You’re lying.” Shoko’s eyes tightened—pain flickering, quickly buried. “I’m not.”

A nurse approached the back door of the car.

Your body reacted before your mind could negotiate.

You scrambled sideways, heart slamming, breath shredding. The nurse opened the door and reached for you with a murmured, “It’s okay, sweetheart—” You screamed.

A sound ripped out of you like it had been trapped behind your ribs for years.

“No! Don’t touch me—don’t—”

The nurse grabbed your forearm.

You clawed.

Not to kill—just to escape, to live, to not be taken. Your nails raked skin, and the nurse recoiled with a sharp gasp.

Your mother cried out your name.

Your father shouted for everyone to be careful.

You slipped out of the grasp, half-falling, stumbling down to the pavement, pregnant and shaking and flooded with adrenaline that didn’t care about balance.

Someone tried to grab you again.

You twisted away, sobbing, and ran.

Your feet hit the sidewalk in uneven bursts. Your lungs burned immediately. Your belly pulled heavy with every step, an anchor you carried with fierce love.

“Y/n!” your mother’s voice shattered behind you. “Please!” Police shouted something in Japanese—fast, urgent.

A nurse called, “Don’t run, you’ll hurt yourself!”

But the only thing your mind heard was: They’re taking you.

Japan.

Ward.

Solitary.

That door that closed and never opened unless someone else allowed it.

You ran harder, tears streaming, vision blurring.

You cut down a narrow side street, then another, and when you saw an alley between two buildings—dark and cramped—you dove into it like a prayer.

You pressed your back to the brick wall, chest heaving, hands covering your mouth to swallow your sobs.

Everything shook.

Your shoulders. Your knees. Your soul.

You felt the baby move—small, real, a flutter that snapped you open from the inside.

A kick.

Not strong, but undeniable.

Your hand flew to your belly.

“Baby,” you choked. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry—” Your heart pounded so loud you thought it would give you away.

Through the mouth of the alley you could see movement—figures searching, scanning and then you understood, fully, horrifyingly:

They hadn’t brought local police.

They’d brought Japanese officers.

They’d brought Shoko.

They’d brought the ward—its language, its rules, its hands.

Your fingers trembled as you fumbled for your phone.

The screen blurred under tears.

You found his name.

SUKUNA.

Your thumb slipped once, twice, then finally hit call.

It rang.

Once.

Twice.

Each ring felt like a heartbeat you didn’t own.

He answered.

“Y/n?” His voice was immediate—low, alert, already sharp around the edges. “Where are you? I saw your text. Lunch—” Your sob broke open like a dam. “Sukuna,” you gasped, barely able to breathe. “Sukuna—please—” The line went dead quiet for a fraction of a second, the way it did when his mind latched onto danger. “What happened,” he said, not a question. A command. “Tell me.”

“They—they tricked me,” you cried, sliding down the wall until you were crouched on the ground, arms wrapped around your belly. “My dad—my mom— they said lunch and then—and then there were police and Shoko and nurses—Sukuna, they’re here, they’re here to take me—”

A sound came through the phone—like fabric shifting, like movement. “Where,” he said, voice dropping into something terrifyingly calm. “Where are you right now.”

“I ran,” you sobbed. “I ran and I’m— I’m in an alley, I don’t know where—I don’t know—” Your breath hitched into panic again, your chest hurting. “Please don’t let them take me. Please. I can’t go back. I can’t—”

“Breathe,” Sukuna ordered, rough and low. “Breathe for me.”

You tried.

It came out in broken pieces.

“I’m scared,” you whispered, the words tiny against the roar of your heart. “I’m scared, Sukuna. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be locked away. I don’t want… I don’t want to lose you.” On the other end, something in him shifted—audible even through a phone line. A silence like a blade being drawn.

“You won’t,” he said.

Two words.

Absolute.

And in the alley’s shadow, with your hands shaking around the phone and your baby moving faintly beneath your palm, you clung to that certainty like it was a lifeline—

Even as sirens wailed somewhere nearby,

Even as footsteps scraped the pavement in the distance,

Even as Sukuna’s voice, calm and deadly, murmured into your ear:

“Stay where you are. I’m coming.”

Sukuna found you the way storms found shorelines—inevitable, furious, guided by instinct and the thread he’d tied around your life with his own hands. Your knees were drawn to your chest on the concrete, your back against the alley wall, phone still clutched like a rosary. Your sobs had turned thin and breathless, hiccupping in your throat as you tried to stay quiet, tried to be small enough not to be seen.

Then shadow fell over you.

Your head jerked up.

Sukuna stood at the mouth of the alley like he’d been carved out of the dark—hair damp with sweat, chest rising too fast, eyes burning that deep, violent red that never promised mercy. He scanned you the way a predator scanned for injury.

When his gaze locked on your face, something in him cracked into motion.

He rushed to you.

Not cautious. Not careful. Fast—like he’d been holding his body back from sprinting through walls.

“Hey,” he said, voice low and tight, dropping to a crouch in front of you. His hands hovered for half a breath—like he remembered you flinching sometimes—then settled on your arms anyway, firm and grounding. “Look at me.” Your lips trembled. “Sukuna—” you tried, but it came out as a sob. “I’m here.” He swallowed hard, jaw flexing. His thumb wiped at your cheek, but it only smeared tears. “Can you stand?”

You shook your head, not because you couldn’t—because your body didn’t believe it was allowed to move.

He didn’t argue.

He rose in one smooth motion and pulled his phone out, turning away just enough to speak without letting you out of his peripheral vision.

“Toji,” he said, voice clipped. “Go to the apartment. Now. Check if anyone’s waiting—outside, inside, across the street. If you see them, don’t engage. Just tell me what you see.”

A pause.

His face tightened.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll handle it.” He ended the call and pocketed his phone like it was a weapon he’d sheathed.

Then he came back to you.

“You’re cold,” he muttered, even though the air wasn’t cold—your fear was. He slid his jacket off and wrapped it around your shoulders, pulling it snug like armor. The fabric smelled like him: clean soap, sweat, and something metallic that always lived under the surface.

You clutched the lapels and shook.

“I’m terrified,” you whispered, voice breaking. “Sukuna, I’m so— I’m so scared—” He crouched again, eyes level with yours. His expression was controlled, but you saw it in the veins standing out along his temples, in the way his hands flexed and released like he was trying not to crush the world. Rage hummed under his skin like electricity.

“They can’t arrest you here,” he said, slow and certain, like he was laying boards across a broken bridge. “They can’t drag you anywhere. Our crimes don’t follow us into China like a leash.”

You gasped a breath, shaky and thin.

“They fooled you,” he continued, voice dropping even lower. “That was illegal. They used your trust like a trap.” Your throat tightened so painfully you thought you might choke on grief. “My mom…” you sobbed. “My dad… I— I fell asleep, Sukuna— I didn’t know—”

“Stop.” It wasn’t harsh. It was final. He lifted you carefully, hauling you up by your arms until you were standing. He kept one hand at your elbow, steadying you when your legs wobbled. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Your belly tightened with stress, and you instinctively pressed a palm to it.

Sukuna noticed immediately.

His gaze dropped, softened for a split second in a way that almost made you cry harder. “Easy,” he murmured. “Breathe.” You tried. It came out jagged.

He guided you out of the alley, his body angling between you and the street like a shield. A truck idled nearby—the kind of unremarkable vehicle you’d walked past a hundred times without noticing. Sukuna opened the passenger door and helped you up like you were made of glass.

The seatbelt clicked across your chest.

Your hands shook so hard you couldn’t keep them still. Sukuna slammed the door and rounded the hood, sliding into the driver’s seat with a violence he didn’t direct at you—just at the world. His hands gripped the steering wheel, veins bulging across his forearms, knuckles white.

He turned to you.

“Look at me,” he said again.

Your eyes found his.

“I’m not letting them take you,” he said. “Not you. Not the baby. Not ever.”

The certainty in his voice was both a balm and a warning.

Your phone buzzed in your lap.

A name lit up the screen.

HIRO

You flinched like it was a knife. Sukuna’s eyes narrowed. He reached across you and snatched the phone before you could even think, thumb sliding to answer. “What,” he snapped, voice ice-sharp. “Do you want.” Hiro’s voice spilled through the speaker, rushed and strained—panicked in a way you’d only heard once before, years ago, when the world had first split open.

“Don’t—don’t talk to me like that,” Hiro said. “I’m not in on this.” Sukuna’s jaw jumped. “Funny.”

“I didn’t know,” Hiro insisted, words tripping. “They didn’t tell me. They called me after she ran—after it went wrong. They wanted me to convince her to do the ‘right thing.’” Sukuna’s eyes flicked to you—your trembling hands, your swollen eyes, your chest still heaving with leftover panic. “What right thing,” Sukuna said, voice low. “Back to a cage?” Hiro exhaled, sharp and shaking. “No. I told them no. Because I know what happens if she goes back.”

Sukuna went still.

Hiro’s voice dropped, heavy with truth. “They’ll take the baby.”

Your breath caught.

Your stomach turned over, nausea rising fast.

Hiro continued, voice breaking just slightly. “They’ll say she’s unfit. They’ll say it’s for the child’s safety. They’ll take the baby the moment she gives birth and lock her up again. They’ll call it help.” Tears spilled down your face again, silent this time—like something inside you had finally accepted what it always feared.

Sukuna’s hands tightened on the steering wheel until the leather creaked.

Hiro swallowed hard. “Listen. I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want to… I didn’t want to make it real. But I’ve been working on something for years.” Sukuna’s voice was deadly quiet. “What.”

“A way out,” Hiro said. “A real one. Not hiding forever. I’ve been saving. I hired a lawyer. I got you both visas.” Sukuna blinked once, like he hadn’t heard correctly. Hiro pushed on, urgent now. “America. The lawyer—he got it done. Legit. It’s in an envelope. Money. Keys. Passports. Visas. Everything you need.” Your mouth opened, but no sound came out.

America?

Your mind struggled to picture it—skyscrapers in movies, streets you’d never walked, an ocean between you and the ward, between you and Japan, between you and the hands that reached for you today. Hiro’s voice softened—your brother again, the one who used to knock on your door just to check if you were okay.

“I did this for you,” he said, hoarse. “I’ve been saving for this for years to get her free.” Sukuna stared ahead, breathing slow and harsh through his nose. “You’re lying,” he said, but there was something else threaded under it: calculation. Hope sharpened into a blade.

“I’m not,” Hiro said. “The envelope’s already been dropped off. You need to pack whatever you can and get the hell out of China before my parents try something again. They crossed a line today. They’ll do it again.” Sukuna’s eyes slid to you, and you saw the decision forming behind them—fast, brutal, absolute. “You hear that?” Sukuna asked you, voice quieter now, almost gentle in its intensity.

You nodded, tears dripping from your chin onto the jacket he’d wrapped around you. “I—” Your voice broke. “Hiro… you did that… for me?”

On the phone, your brother exhaled like a sob he refused to let out. “Yeah,” he said. “For you. For the baby. For the life they never let you have.” Sukuna lifted the phone again, voice clipped. “Where.” Hiro gave him the details quickly—addresses, names, instructions—like he knew there wasn’t time for softness.

Sukuna listened without interrupting, every muscle in his body taut, as if any second now the world might lunge.

When the call ended, Sukuna didn’t move for a moment.

He just sat there—staring at the windshield, jaw tight, throat working.

Then he turned toward you, and his hand found your knee, squeezing once—firm, grounding.

“We’re leaving,” he said. “Tonight.” Your breath hitched.

Your fear tried to stand up again, to argue, to tremble louder than your hope.

But the baby fluttered faintly under your ribs, and your chest ached with the idea of a place where no one knew the ward’s name, where no one could dangle it over you like a punishment.

You swallowed.

“Okay,” you whispered.

Sukuna’s eyes locked onto yours.

“You trust me?” he asked, voice rough—like he needed to hear it, like he needed to believe he wasn’t the only one gripping this lifeline.

Your lips trembled.

You were scared of him sometimes.

You were scared of everyone.

But right now, you were more scared of going back.

You nodded. “Yes.”

Sukuna exhaled through his nose, a harsh, controlled breath.

Then he started the truck and pulled away from the curb like he was tearing you both out of the mouth of a trap—his grip on the wheel iron, his eyes scanning mirrors, the veins in his neck still standing out with barely-contained violence.

And beside you, in his jacket, with your palm over your belly and your phone heavy in your lap, you tried to hold on to the fragile, trembling thought that maybe—

maybe your life wasn’t over.

Maybe it was just changing shape.

Home felt different when you crossed the threshold again—like the apartment had become a skin you could no longer live inside. The air was the same, the furniture in the same places, but something invisible had shifted. Trust had been cracked open today, and the sound of it still rang in your bones.

Sukuna locked the door behind you and didn’t take his eyes off the peephole until the deadbolt clicked. Then he moved—fast, efficient, frighteningly calm in the way only Sukuna could be when his mind had chosen a direction.

You stood in the entryway with your arms wrapped around yourself, his jacket still on your shoulders, your belly tight with leftover fear. Your throat hurt from screaming, your cheeks sticky with tears that had dried and re-wet themselves too many times.

Sukuna glanced at you once, and his gaze softened—just a fraction.

“Sit,” he said, voice low.

You nodded and did, lowering yourself onto the couch like your body didn’t fully belong to you yet.

He went straight to where the envelope had been tucked away—exactly where Hiro said it would be, like your brother had predicted every breath you’d take after betrayal. Sukuna tore it open with one sharp motion and spilled its contents onto the table.

Cash. Thick stacks that made your stomach flip.

A credit card—his name embossed on it, clean and real, like a new identity printed into plastic.

Bank information.

Two brand-new phones still sealed in their boxes.

Keys on a keyring that looked too ordinary for what they promised.

And an address.

Sukuna picked up the paper and stared at it for a long beat, the way he stared at things when he didn’t want anyone to see he was moved by them. Then he pulled his phone out, typed the address in, and watched the screen populate with images.

A house.

Not a towering city box, not a cramped apartment like this one—an actual house. A yard that stretched green and open. Trees. A porch. A driveway. Quiet neighbors set back a few acres away, the kind of distance that breathed.

Outside New York City—more scenery than skyline.

A place that looked like mornings had space to unfold.

You blinked hard, disbelieving.

“I don’t understand,” you whispered, voice thin. “How did he…” Sukuna didn’t answer right away. He just stared at the photos again, jaw shifting as if he were grinding his disbelief into something usable.

Then, finally, he spoke—quiet, almost rough with it. “He’s been saving for you,” he said. “For years.” The words landed heavy in your chest, like a hand pressing there.

Hiro. Your brother who carried guilt like a second spine. Your brother who had looked away from Sukuna every time he visited, not because he hated you—but because it hurt to see you loved by someone dangerous.

Sukuna exhaled through his nose and stood.

“Eat,” he told you, already moving toward the kitchen. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m not hungry,” you whispered automatically.

He turned his head, crimson eyes pinning you.

“You’re pregnant,” he said simply, like that ended the argument. Not harsh—just absolute. So you nodded, because you didn’t have the strength for another fight and because the baby shifted faintly inside you like a small reminder that your body wasn’t only yours anymore.

Sukuna moved around the kitchen with quick, controlled motions—setting out something simple, something you could stomach. Crackers. Fruit. Water. A bland little meal built for survival.

He brought it to you and watched until you took a few bites.

Only then did he begin packing.

It wasn’t frantic.

It was surgical.

He dragged the duffel bags out first, unzipping them with a hard tug, then moved through the apartment like a man stripping a room of its ability to hold him.

Your clothes first—folded, stacked, shoved in with a blunt practicality.

His clothes next.

Baby items—everything you’d bought, everything you’d touched with careful hands: tiny fabric, little bottles, neutral blankets, the soft things that made you believe in gentleness again. He paused with one of the baby items in his hands—a small piece of clothing—and his throat worked like he swallowed something sharp.

Then he packed it too.

He went to the drawer where you’d kept your papers and pulled out everything that mattered: your medical records, your clinic notes, the prenatal papers from Dr. Lin, the ultrasound printouts you kept like talismans. He slipped them into a separate folder, sealed it in plastic, and tucked it into the safest part of the bag like it was a heart.

You watched him, foggy, exhausted, trying to make your mind catch up to the shape of what was happening. He crossed the room and crouched in front of you, hands braced on his knees.

“You need to sleep,” he said, your eyes stung. “I don’t think I can.” He tilted his head slightly, gaze narrowing—not in anger. In calculation.

Then his voice dropped, gentler.

“You’re running on fear,” he murmured. “If you don’t rest, you’ll get sick. Or you’ll fall apart. And I can’t—” His jaw tightened. He swallowed the end of the sentence like it was too honest. “Please. Just nap. I’ll handle everything.”

You stared at him.

Sometimes Sukuna asking sounded like a threat anyway.

But right now, it sounded like he was holding his own panic by the throat so yours didn’t drown you.

You nodded slowly.

“Okay,” you whispered.

He helped you stand—not because you couldn’t, but because his hands needed to do something with their helplessness. He guided you into the bedroom, pulled the blanket back, and sat you down with a quiet firmness.

“Lie down,” he said, softer now.

You did.

The pillow smelled like laundry soap and faintly like him. Your body sank into the futon, heavy as stone. You tried to keep your eyes open—tried to stay awake in case the world shifted again—but exhaustion won. Fear had burned through you like a fever, and now all that was left was ash.

Sukuna’s hand brushed your hair back from your forehead.

“Sleep,” he murmured. “I’ll wake you when it’s time.” You barely managed a nod before your eyes fluttered closed. Somewhere far away, you heard zippers. Fabric. The click of drawers. The quiet thud of bags being set down. Sukuna’s footsteps moving back and forth like a metronome, counting the seconds until escape.

You drifted in and out, and every time you surfaced, you felt him nearby—like a guard dog, like a storm on a leash, like the only thing between you and the hands that tried to take you today.

At one point, you felt him press something to your lips.

Water.

You drank without opening your eyes.

“Good,” he whispered.

Then the fog claimed you again.

When everything was packed, Sukuna stood in the living room and stared at the bags lined up by the door. His chest rose and fell slowly, as if he were forcing his lungs to obey him.

He pulled out his phone and called Toji.

You didn’t hear Toji’s voice from the bedroom, but you heard Sukuna’s.

Low.

Controlled.

“Clear?” he asked.

A pause.

His shoulders loosened by a fraction.

“Good,” Sukuna said. “Stay alert anyway.” He ended the call and moved quietly back to you. You were still asleep—your face turned toward the pillow, your body curled instinctively around your belly like you were protecting the life inside you from the world.

Sukuna stood over you for a moment, watching.

There was something strange on his face then—something that looked almost like grief, almost like devotion, twisted together.

Then he bent down.

Careful. Slow.

He slid an arm under your knees and another behind your back and lifted you like you weighed nothing at all. You stirred, a small sound leaving your throat, but you didn’t wake fully. “It’s okay,” he whispered against your hair. “I’ve got you.” He carried you out to the truck, the night air brushing your cheeks as the door opened.

He settled you into the passenger seat with a gentleness that didn’t match the violence in his blood.

Seatbelt.

Click.

He adjusted the blanket around you so it covered your legs and your belly, tucked it like he was tucking in something sacred.

Then he shut the door and moved around to the driver’s side.

The engine started with a low hum.

Sukuna’s hands gripped the wheel.

He looked once at the apartment building—at the place that had held you, threatened you, nearly lost you.

Then he put the truck in gear and drove.

Toward the airport.

Toward the envelope’s promise.

Toward a house with a yard, neighbors far away, and a future that didn’t have locked doors unless you chose them.

And beside him, asleep and bruised by the day, you breathed softly—unaware of how tightly the world was about to chase, and how hard Sukuna had already decided he would run with you in his arms.

The airport lights felt too bright—too sterile, too honest. They cut through your sleep the moment Sukuna eased the truck into a quiet corner of the parking structure. The engine died. The world went still except for the far-off hum of traffic and the faint echo of rolling luggage somewhere above you.

You blinked awake, foggy and sore, blanket tucked around your legs, your mouth tasting like fear that had dried overnight. Your neck ached from sleeping wrong. Your belly felt heavy, warm, alive.

Sukuna leaned across you, careful not to press into you, and brushed his knuckles along your cheek.

“Hey,” he murmured. “Wake up.” Your eyes fluttered. “Where—”

“The airport,” he said simply.

The word landed like a stone dropped into your chest.

Memory rushed back in ugly flashes—your mother’s trembling mouth, Shoko’s calm face beside police, the nurse’s hands grabbing at you, your feet slapping pavement as you ran, your lungs burning, your baby’s small kick like an alarm bell inside you.

You sucked in a shaky breath.

Sukuna watched you closely, his hand hovering near your shoulder as if he wanted to hold you but didn’t want to spook you awake into panic. “We’re leaving,” he said. “We’re safe.”

Safe.

The word didn’t fit yet.

You nodded anyway, because you needed something to hold onto, and Sukuna’s voice—steady, low—was the closest thing to a railing you had.

He helped you out of the truck carefully. You were still wearing soft clothes, comfortable enough for travel, and he immediately draped a thicker blanket over your shoulders like the world itself was a draft he could fight. He slung one duffel over his shoulder, grabbed the other with his free hand, and kept his body angled slightly in front of you as you walked—an unspoken barrier between you and everything.

Inside, the airport smelled like coffee and disinfectant and strangers.

Announcements echoed overhead in clipped, cheerful tones that felt almost cruel in their normalcy.

Sukuna guided you to the check-in kiosks first. His fingers moved fast on the screen, jaw tight, eyes scanning the room between each step of the process. Boarding passes printed. He took them, glanced at the names, and tucked yours into his pocket like he was afraid the paper might vanish.

Then baggage drop. Then security.

The line moved like molasses. People complained softly. A child cried. Somewhere a couple laughed, bright and careless.

You stood beside Sukuna and tried to breathe like you weren’t running from the shape of your old life. When the TSA agent asked you to remove your shoes, Sukuna’s hand hovered at your back as you bent down, protective, steady. When you stepped through the scanner, you felt exposed—like the machine could read your history off your skin.

But it didn’t.

It only beeped at belts and metal and normal things and somehow, that made you want to cry harder.

Once you were through, Sukuna guided you to a quieter corner near your gate. He found a seat, tugged you down beside him, and immediately tucked the blanket around your shoulders again. Then he reached into his bag, pulled out a bottle of water, and pressed it into your hands.

“Drink,” he said.

You did, obediently—because it was easier than thinking.

Your fingers trembled around the bottle. The water tasted like nothing, and still it grounded you. Your gaze drifted across the terminal. People in coats. People with backpacks. People with lives that did not include psychiatric wards or running while pregnant or being betrayed by the two people who had sworn they would never leave you.

Your throat tightened.

Sukuna’s arm rested along the back of the seat behind you, close enough to feel without trapping you. He leaned toward you slightly, voice lowered.

“You okay?” The question cracked something open. You turned your face into the blanket and tried to swallow it back, but your eyes burned, and your voice came out thin anyway. “I can’t believe they did that,” you whispered. “I—” Your breath hitched. “I believed them. I believed they wouldn’t.” Sukuna’s jaw clenched. You felt it even before you saw it, the anger vibrating under his skin like electricity.

You stared at the floor, shame flooding in hot and relentless, because that’s what shame did—it made everything your fault even when it wasn’t.

“And it’s my fault,” you blurted, words tumbling out faster as panic rose. “If I—if I hadn’t said anything, if I hadn’t—if I hadn’t made them worried, if I hadn’t—”

“Stop.” Sukuna’s voice cut through you, not loud, but sharp enough to make you freeze.

You blinked, tears spilling anyway.

Sukuna turned to you fully, crimson eyes fierce and steady. He reached for your hand—not your wrist, not your arm, not anything that could feel like control—just your hand. His grip was warm, firm, human. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “You didn’t make them do anything. They chose it.” Your mouth opened, but nothing came out.

“They lied to you,” he continued, voice low with contained fury. “They used you. They tried to steal you back like you’re property.” You flinched at the word, and his expression softened—just enough to remind you he knew you were fragile in a way the world couldn’t see.

“You’re not,” he murmured, gentler. “You’re not property. Not theirs. Not anyone’s.” Your chest ached. The tears came harder, silent and humiliating.

Sukuna lifted your hand and pressed his mouth to your knuckles—brief, grounding, like a vow.

Then you heard it.

A throat clearing.

You jerked, eyes snapping up. A man stood there with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, hair slightly mussed from rushing, expression soft in a way you hadn’t seen on him in years—not fully. Not without guilt sitting behind it.

Hiro.

For a second, your mind refused to accept it. Like you were still in a fog and this was another hallucination your brain had invented to soothe you. “Hiro?” you breathed, voice small.

He smiled—gentle, tired, real.

“What are you doing here?” you whispered, eyes wide, tears clinging to your lashes. Hiro stepped into the row and slid into the seat on the other side of the aisle, close enough that you could see him clearly, far enough that he wasn’t crowding you. He set his duffel down by his feet and looked at you like he was trying not to spook a wounded animal.

“Did you really think,” he said softly, “that everything I worked that hard for was only for you and Sukuna?” Your throat tightened. Hiro’s smile wavered, emotion flickering across his face like light through water. “I’m coming too,” he said. “I packed my stuff. I’m coming with you.” You stared at him—your brother who’d carried guilt like penance, who’d stayed close even when he didn’t know how to fix what had broken, who’d just… shown up in the middle of an airport like love could still be simple.

Your lips trembled.

“You—” Your voice cracked. “You’re really…?” Hiro nodded once, eyes shining. “Yeah.” A sob slipped out of you before you could swallow it back. Your hand flew to your mouth instinctively, like you could hold the sound inside.

Sukuna’s hand tightened around yours, anchoring you.

Hiro leaned toward you just slightly, careful, respectful. “I’m not letting them do it again,” he said quietly. “Not to you. Not to the baby.” Your shoulders shook as you tried to breathe.

Tears slid down your cheeks in slow, silent trails and for the first time since you’d woken up to betrayal and sirens and hands grabbing for you, your heart did something strange.

It loosened—just a little.

Like maybe you weren’t running alone anymore.

@marcelinebtw @chososcupoftea @winkii @eli54sa @strawberryosaki @rumblehoneyy @ellsiedjarin @poopypantsstinkface @tojisunicornbraidd @it2muse3 @wildlycruelphoenix @kamisiag @blissingtaehyung @moe-moes-stuff @simplyspooky8 @attackonnat @confusedmomfriend @man1cslut @xunquish-blog @cherrycokeline @onlykuna @quietworld7 @grimm3r @moonlight-dara @tojis-ball-sack @metal-fl @ellsiedjarin @blissingtaehyung @darkkuna @achildofaphrodite @puttyly @sadlovergirlhere @loramae @mitown @whatitdodobby @3lliesrifle @dawnsoblivion @laceyvnilla @divvagal @n4namislover @nanamisprettyhousewife @lkukaknka @ayookeikooo @classycreationlight @leon-kennedys-wife1 @moonlight-dara @unlimited-impressions @swagalicious27 @moonlight52moonlight 

[suku-enthusiasts]

Chapter Seven || The House that Learned How to Breathe - R. Sukuna

ryomen sukuna x f!reader — sorcerer au

“Her hands once only knew ruin. Then she met a man monstrous enough to love the darkness in them, and together they built something savage, tender, and dangerous enough to survive the end of the world. But love born from blood never stays quiet for long.”

tw; death. ptsd. abuse. murder. graphic scenes. smut

masterlist | series masterlist | end

A year later, there were mornings when you woke and could hardly believe this was your life.

Not because it felt unreal in the flimsy, dreamlike way people usually meant. It felt real. Deeply, stubbornly real. That was what undid you sometimes. The weight of it. The tenderness of it. The way peace had stopped feeling like something you borrowed and started feeling like something that belonged to you.

A year ago, you had been bloodied and bound in Suguru Geto’s hands, dragged into war like a weapon someone intended to aim. A year ago, your body had been split with bruises, your heart with fear, your future still something sharp and uncertain. A year ago, you had stood in a domain of white nothingness and looked horror in the face with a third eye open on your brow.

Now the estate was quiet with spring rain and birdsong.

Now you were twenty-two.

Now Sukuna was twenty-nine.

Now you lived back in his home—no, your home too—and your mother lived there as well, her laughter sometimes floating from the kitchen in the mornings when she and Uraume quietly disagreed about tea or herbs or what should be planted near the eastern wall. Now there were fresh flowers in the halls because you kept putting them there. Now the koi pond glittered gold under the sun and the gardens listened when you walked through them.

And now you were seven months pregnant with twins.

Big and round and glowing in a way that made everyone around you go soft without meaning to.

Your body had changed. Of course it had. Your belly curved full and beautiful beneath the silk of your robes, unmistakable now, impossible to hide even if you had wanted to. Your breasts were fuller, your hips softer, your movements slower only because balance had become a negotiation with two little lives who already seemed to have opinions. The scars Suguru and the world had once written across you had healed sweetly over time, fading into pale traces that no longer looked like punishment. Even your face had changed around happiness. It had softened. Brightened. The old hunted look around your eyes had gentled into something open and warm.

You smiled more now.

Not the wild little slash of mischief you once used like a knife.

Real smiles.

Easy ones.

And Sukuna—

Sukuna looked at you like you were still the first astonishing thing he had ever found and been allowed to keep.

The two of you were unbearable.

Everyone knew it.

You and Sukuna were like teenagers in love despite everything you had survived, despite marriage and war and grief and the long work of learning one another in the aftermath of all of it. Maybe because of those things. Maybe because once you had both nearly lost this, you stopped pretending restraint was noble when affection was so much more honest.

You were always touching him now.

Always.

Not with claws. Not with teeth meant to punish. Not with the old frantic violence you had once used as your first language. You loved on him now. Softly. Shamelessly. You reached for his hand in the hall. Curled into his side when he sat. Kissed his shoulder in passing. Stroked his hair when he laid with his head in your lap. Pressed your face to his neck just because you could. If he walked by, you touched him, and if he stayed still long enough, you loved on him like the sun itself had taught you.

He returned it in ways just as constant.

This morning, the estate was quiet, the hour still early enough that the world had not fully stirred. Soft light spilled in through the open shoji, carrying the scent of wet grass and moss from the garden beyond. Somewhere in the distance, water moved through the pond in a low soothing rhythm. You were seated on the engawa wrapped in a loose robe the color of cream, one hand under your belly out of habit, the other holding a half-finished cup of tea you had forgotten to drink.

The babies had been active since dawn.

One of them had wedged itself insistently under your ribs while the other seemed determined to kick at your lower belly with tiny tyrannical feet. You had complained to them both in a whisper and then smiled anyway because every movement still felt miraculous.

Sukuna came out of the house behind you carrying a tray.

You turned at once.

Even after all this time, your heart did that stupid soft little thing when you saw him first thing in the morning.

His hair was still loose from sleep, pale pink and unruly around his shoulders. He wore dark robes undone slightly at the throat, exposing the hard column of his neck and the beginning of the tattoos that still made your gaze linger every time. His body had changed less than yours but his face had not—still severe, still handsome in that unfair way that made people nervous, still edged with that natural danger he would carry until death itself got brave enough to ask for his name. Only around you had the expression softened over the last year, the steel in him warming into something private and startlingly tender.

He set the tray down beside you. “You forgot breakfast again.” You blinked at the tray.

Rice, fish, cut fruit, soup. Enough for a small army, which meant just enough for Sukuna to feel like he was feeding you properly while pregnant.

You looked up at him. “I didn’t forget.” He gave you a flat stare.

You smiled sweetly. “I postponed.”

“That is the same thing.”

“It is not.”

“It is when you’re carrying my children.” You looked down at your belly and then back up at him with mock offense. “They’re hearing you be bossy.”

Sukuna crouched down in front of you, one broad hand settling without thought on the curve of your stomach. His entire expression changed the moment he touched you there. It always did. Something in him still went quiet with wonder, even seven months in, even after every appointment and every night spent with his hand spread across your skin feeling them move.

“They can hear the truth early,” he muttered.

As if summoned by his voice, one of the twins kicked hard against his palm.

Sukuna went still.

You laughed softly.

“There,” you said. “That one agrees with me.”He narrowed his eyes at your belly. “Traitor.”

Another flutter rolled across your skin.

You reached down and covered his hand with yours, your fingers small and warm over his. “Good morning to you too, my love.”

That made him finally look up at your face.

The softness in his eyes hit you fresh every time. You still did not know what to do with it except lean into it.

He rose just enough to kiss you.

Slow.

Unhurried.

His mouth warm and familiar against yours, one hand cupping your jaw while the other remained over the swell of your stomach as if he could not bear to lose contact with any part of you. You kissed him back with all the open tenderness that had replaced your old instinct to bite. When he pulled away, your lips followed him for one little second more before you smiled.

“You missed me,” you murmured. “I was gone ten minutes.”

“That is too many.” He huffed a quiet laugh through his nose and brushed his thumb over your cheek. “You’re dramatic.”

“You like that about me.”

“I tolerate it.” You gasped softly in fake offense and caught his wrist. “Liar.” Sukuna’s mouth curved at the corner. “Eat.” You leaned back against the wood post behind you and looked down at the tray. “Feed me.” He stared at you for a beat.

Then, because this was your life now and he had become the sort of man who would indulge you far more than he admitted, he sat beside you on the engawa and picked up the fruit first. You opened your mouth expectantly without shame, and he placed a slice against your tongue with infuriating patience.

“There,” he said. “Are you helpless now?”

“A little.”

He fed you another piece.

You chewed and sighed happily, leaning your shoulder against his upper arm. “I think they’re going to be awful.”

“The twins?” You nodded solemnly. “Mean. Demanding. Beautiful. Too smart.” Sukuna arched a brow. “You just described yourself.”You smiled into his shoulder. “And you.”

He took up the tea and held it for you when you reached, guiding the cup carefully because your balance seated like this had become less trustworthy in recent weeks. You drank, then looked at him sideways over the rim.

“Do you think they’ll have your eyes?”

“No.” You frowned. “Why no.”

“They’ll have yours.”

“That wasn’t the question.”He set the cup down. “I know.” You watched him for a second, the familiar shape of his stubbornness making warmth bloom in your chest. Then you reached and fixed the collar of his robe for no reason other than wanting to touch him. “You’ve become sweet,” you said.

His expression changed instantly into suspicion. “What do you want.” You laughed. “Nothing.”

“That’s a lie.”

“It is not.”

“You only call me sweet when you want something.” You pretended to think about it. “Well. There is one thing.”

“There it is.” You shifted carefully, turning a little more toward him despite the resistance of your belly, and laid your head against his shoulder. “Carry me to the garden later.”

“You can walk.”

“I know.”

“Then walk.” You tipped your face up and kissed the underside of his jaw. “But I want you to carry me.” Sukuna was silent for a long moment.

Then, very dryly, “You use pregnancy as a weapon.”

“Yes.”

“At least you’re honest.”

Another kick hit beneath his hand.

He went quiet again, gaze dropping to your stomach.

You watched his profile while he felt for the movement, the severe line of his face softening in that private way it only did for you and now for them too. You had once thought he was all storm, all blade, all teeth. And he still could be. The world knew that better than anyone. But here, at home, with your body round under his hand and the morning light turning his hair pale as cherry blossom silk, he looked like peace learned how to wear a dangerous face.

You touched his cheek.

He turned into your palm instinctively. “I love you,” you said.

No dramatic pause. No high emotion. Just truth placed gently between two people who had earned it the hardest ways.

Sukuna looked at you for a long second.

Then leaned in and kissed you once more, deeper this time, his hand at your nape and his mouth warm and sure. When he pulled back, his forehead rested briefly against yours.

“I know,” he murmured.

You smiled. “That’s not what you’re supposed to say.”

“I’m aware.”

You waited.

He sighed like the words cost him something, though by now you knew better than that. “I love you too.” Satisfied, you kissed the corner of his mouth and settled closer at his side.

The morning stretched golden and slow around you. Somewhere inside the house, you could hear your mother’s footsteps and Uraume’s lower voice. A bird landed on the garden stones. The koi rippled beneath the surface of the pond, bright flashes of orange and white under reflected light. And there, on the engawa with breakfast half-finished between you and his hand still spread over the place your children moved beneath your skin, Sukuna looked less like a man who had once terrified the world and more like what he had somehow become with you—

a husband in love,

a father already listening,

and a heart that had finally learned it did not need barbed wire to survive every kind of touch.

Sukuna had only been at Jujutsu High for maybe fifteen minutes before he knew something was wrong.

Not from cursed energy.

Not from the students.

From Satoru Gojo.

Gojo did many things with flair. With mockery. With a grin too wide and a voice too light for whatever bullshit he was about to drag into the room. Seriousness on him always looked wrong at first, like seeing blood on fresh snow.

So when Gojo came striding toward him across the corridor without a smirk, without sunglasses pushed up into his hair, without any of the lazy taunting nonsense he usually wore like a second uniform, Sukuna’s body tensed immediately.

“Come with me,” Gojo said.

No greeting.

No joke.

No time wasted.

Sukuna frowned. “What happened.”

“Now,” Gojo said.

That was enough.

Sukuna followed him.

They moved fast through the hallways, past students and assistants and people with clipboards who wisely stepped out of the way the moment they felt the air around both men. Gojo led him into a meeting room tucked farther back in the administrative wing, slid the door shut behind them, and for one heavy second just stood there with his hands on his hips, like he was choosing exactly how to say something he already knew would go over badly.

Sukuna looked around once, then back at him. “Spit it out.” Gojo exhaled.

Then he said, “The higher-ups know about your marriage.”

The room went still.

Sukuna’s face emptied.

“Principal Yoshinobu Gakuganji,” Gojo continued, voice flat now, “from the Kyoto branch, told them.”

For one second Sukuna did not move.

Then his fist came down on the table with such force that the wood cracked clean through the center.

“Fuck.”

The word came out low and vicious.

The sound of splintering echoed off the walls. Papers jumped. One chair shifted from the shock of it. Gojo did not flinch. He only watched him, jaw tight, eyes unusually hard.

Sukuna stared at the broken table, breathing once through his nose so sharply it almost sounded like a snarl. His mind had already outrun the room. To you. To the estate. To your mother. To the fact that you were seven months pregnant and glowing and soft and entirely too visible now if the wrong people started asking the right questions.

Gojo spoke again.

“It’s time.”

Sukuna looked up.

The words hit oddly.

Not because he didn’t understand them.

Because he did.

Immediately.

The room around him blurred for half a second, replaced by a memory so old it still had teeth.

They had been seventeen.

Both of them too tall already, too angry, too strong for boys their age, and still nowhere near strong enough to stop the things they were beginning to understand. The night had been cold. The school grounds emptying into dark. Suguru had already gone. The village had burned. The bodies were still fresh in everyone’s mind, and the world of jujutsu had done what it always did best—looked at blood on children’s hands and called it necessity after the fact.

Haibara was dead.

Riko was dead too, another child offered up to a system built by old men who never seemed to stand where the knives actually fell.

Sukuna had been leaning against the wall outside the dorms, arms crossed, face turned toward the black line of trees. Gojo had come out a while later, hands buried in his pockets, white hair stirred by the wind, expression stretched too thin over too much grief and fury.

They hadn’t liked each other then.

Not really.

Respected, maybe, in the snarling territorial way of young monsters forced into the same cage. But liking was too soft a word for what existed between them. They had challenged each other more than spoken plainly. Tested, mocked, pushed. Two boys with too much power and nowhere proper to set it down.

That night had been different.

Gojo had stood there for a long time before saying, “The higher-ups are the reason.”

Sukuna had looked at him sideways. “For what.”

“For all of it.” Gojo’s voice had gone flat in that dangerous way it sometimes did when the joke dropped out of him entirely. “Haibara. Riko. Suguru. They keep sending us up like we’re disposable. Like kids are just pieces they can throw wherever they want as long as the paperwork sounds noble enough after.”

Sukuna had said nothing.

Because he agreed.

Because he had been thinking the same thing in uglier words for months.

Gojo turned his head then, blue eyes lit with something too sharp and too young and too furious to fade back into obedience. “One day,” he said, “when we’re strong enough, we’re ending them.”

There had been no grin on his face.

No exaggeration.

He had meant it.

Sukuna had held his gaze for a long second in the dark, and for the first time in their lives, the two of them had stood on the exact same ground.

Then Sukuna had nodded once.

“One day,” he said.

And that had been that.

A promise.

Not spoken again.

Not needed.

Now, more than ten years later, Gojo stood across from him in a cracked meeting room with the same look in his eyes.

Older.

Colder.

Certain.

And Sukuna knew exactly what he meant.

The jujutsu world shifted around those words before they were even fully acted on. He could feel it, like the first rumble under the earth before something old and buried finally split open.

It’s time.

Time to end the old men in their safe rooms.

Time to drag a system built on sacrificing children into the light and break it over a knee.

Time to do the thing they had promised each other at seventeen when grief had still been fresh and they were both too young to know how long rage could survive in the body.

Sukuna’s expression changed.

The fury did not leave.

It sharpened.

He straightened slowly, shoulders rolling back, one hand still resting near the crack he had driven into the table. When he spoke, his voice was quieter than before.

“What do they know.” Gojo folded his arms. “Enough. That you’re married. That she’s living at the estate. Probably that her mother is there too. Maybe more, depending on how much Kyoto’s loose lips have been flapping.”

Sukuna’s jaw clenched.

Gojo watched him. “You know what happens if we leave this alone.”

Yes.

Sukuna knew.

They would investigate. Interfere. Demand registration reviews, lineage, technique evaluation, pregnancy implications, all dressed up in bureaucratic language that hid the simplest truth: once the higher-ups knew about you, they would decide what kind of threat your children might become before those children ever took their first breaths. And they would do it from behind polished tables with tea in hand, the same way they had always decided which young lives were acceptable losses.

Not this time.

Not with you.

Not with his children.

Sukuna lifted his head fully and met Gojo’s gaze. “It’s time to make a plan,” he said.

Gojo nodded once.

Sukuna’s voice went harder. “I have to protect her at all cost.” Gojo didn’t argue.

Didn’t joke.

For once, he understood exactly the shape of the line in front of them. “Then we do this clean,” Gojo said. “Fast. Before they can act first.” Sukuna glanced toward the door as if he could already see the path leading from this room to the entire rotten spine of jujutsu society. “Gakuganji first?” Gojo’s mouth twisted. “Tempting. But not first.”

Sukuna looked back at him.

Gojo stepped closer to the broken table and braced both hands on either side of the crack. “We need names, locations, schedules, who’s meeting where, who has guards, which old bastard runs if he hears a floor creak. We take the whole nest, not just the loudest crow.”

Sukuna was already thinking ahead with him now. Estates. Safe houses. Elder compounds. Night meetings. Records. Which ones traveled alone. Which ones trusted barriers too much. Which ones had spent their whole lives making children do the bleeding for them and had therefore never once considered what it might mean when those children grew up.

He looked at Gojo and saw it there too—old fury ripened into adult capability. They were no longer seventeen-year-old boys making vows in the dark with blood still fresh on their grief.

They were men now.

Strong enough.

Monstrous enough.

And entirely out of patience.

Gojo exhaled and tapped one finger lightly against the cracked wood. “Once we start this, there’s no putting it back.” Sukuna’s expression did not shift. “I know.”

“The whole jujutsu world changes after.”

“It already has.”

That made Gojo go quiet for a second.

Then he gave the smallest nod.

Because he knew Sukuna wasn’t only talking about institutions and bloodlines and power structures. He was talking about you. About the children growing inside you. About a world that had no right to remain untouched if it meant touching them first.

Outside the meeting room, the school still moved in ordinary rhythms. Students trained. Assistants filed reports. Someone somewhere laughed without knowing the shape of what had just been set in motion behind a closed door.

Inside, two men who had once been angry boys stood over a shattered table and prepared to break open the spine of the old world.

Sukuna looked toward the window, where pale daylight cut across the floor, and for just one second he pictured you at home. Barefoot. Heavy with twins. Probably annoyed at something small. Probably smiling. Probably with one hand under your belly and the other reaching for tea, unaware that the promise made more than a decade ago had just risen from memory into action.

His face hardened into something final.

“Tell me everything they know,” he said.

And Gojo did.

The meeting room stayed shut for over an hour.

By then the cracked table had become covered in papers, old records, copied schedules, internal reports, security diagrams, and handwritten notes in Gojo’s impatient scrawl. The overhead lights cast everything in that ugly sterile glow that made conspiracy look administrative, which somehow only pissed Sukuna off more. He stood with both hands braced against the edge of the broken wood, head bent over the documents while Gojo paced and talked through the structure of the higher-ups like he was reciting a disease from memory.

“They rotate more than they used to,” Gojo said, tapping one page. “After Suguru, after the war, after all the internal pressure, they got paranoid. More private meetings. More layered barriers. More sealed routes.”

Sukuna’s gaze tracked over the names. Old men. Old women. Ancient families. Protected voices with blood on their hands and ink-stained fingers who had spent decades deciding which children were expendable and calling it tradition.

“Cowards,” he muttered.

Gojo gave a humorless laugh. “Always have been.”

Another file lay open nearby—Yaga’s documentation.

That was the part that had given even Gojo pause when he first laid it out.

Principal Masamichi Yaga had spent years quietly collecting evidence on the corruption in the Kyoto branch, building a record piece by piece, every suspicious directive and vanished report and buried death filed away with the patience of a man who knew that one day the truth might need to survive the people trying to suffocate it. Misappropriated funds. Mission alterations. Deliberately falsified curse-grade reports sent to younger sorcerers. Names connected to bribes, ritual abuse of authority, clan manipulation, political pressure from higher-ups who treated entire branches like hunting dogs.

Sukuna flipped through the folder with growing disgust. “Yaga’s taking Kyoto himself?” he asked.

Gojo nodded. “He said those records are his responsibility. He knows who’s rotten there. He knows where to hit.” Sukuna scoffed softly. “Good.” Gojo stopped pacing and leaned one hip against the far edge of the table. “That leaves us with the council compound here. Their inner ring is protected by multiple seals, rotating barriers, and old-domain locks that only open to approved signatures.”

Sukuna’s mouth curled. “Then we break them.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Gojo shoved another map toward him. “There are three main entry routes. Front is useless unless you want alarms the second you breathe wrong. North wing has two barrier gates and those old shrine locks. South service route is less guarded but deeper underground. Once we’re through the sealed doors, it narrows.”

Sukuna studied the map, tracing the path with one finger. “They’ll scatter.”

“Some will.” Gojo’s eyes sharpened. “The oldest ones won’t. They trust the seals too much.”

Sukuna looked up. “Then they die where they sit.”

The words hung there simply.

No drama.

No need.

Gojo held his gaze for a second and gave one short nod. “Exactly.”

They went over timing next. Shifts. Watch rotations. The private meeting windows where the higher-ups gathered in person because they still believed face-to-face conspiracy made them harder to touch. Who carried talismans. Who relied on guards. Which doors were physical, which were cursed, which would require dismantling and which could simply be forced off the hinges once enough pressure hit them.

Sukuna absorbed it all fast.

Too fast for any ordinary man.

Gojo noticed and said nothing.

The mood in the room had become its own living thing by then—old fury made practical, teenage vows grown teeth and architecture. Neither of them was smiling now. Neither needed to pretend this was anything other than what it was: the opening steps of a slaughter made righteous by long neglect.

Then the door slid open.

Both men looked up sharply.

Ijichi stood there with his hands clasped too neatly in front of him, shoulders tight in that anxious way he wore like a second spine. He cleared his throat once before speaking.

“Sukuna.”

Sukuna’s eyes narrowed. “What.”

Ijichi swallowed. “Master Tengen wishes to speak with you.”

The room froze.

Not metaphorically.

Actually froze.

Gojo straightened off the table. Sukuna’s expression emptied. Even the air seemed to tighten in response to the name.

Tengen.

Sukuna had never spoken with Tengen.

Never needed to. Never wanted to. Tengen was the sort of presence one understood more as infrastructure than person—ancient, distant, built into the bones of Jujutsu High and the barriers that held the world together. People spoke about Tengen. They did not casually get summoned by them.

Gojo looked at Sukuna.

Sukuna looked back.

Neither spoke for a beat.

Then Sukuna shoved away from the table. “Fine.”

Ijichi stepped back at once.

Sukuna followed him from the room without another word, leaving Gojo staring after him with a crease between his brows that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago.

The route down to Tengen was older than the rest of the school.

It lived in the parts of Jujutsu High most people never saw, tucked behind sealed corridors and passageways so quiet they seemed to swallow sound as punishment for trespassing. Ijichi led him through two barrier checkpoints and one narrow stone hall before they reached the elevator.

It was old.

Older than the building above it, by the feel of it.

Its doors were iron, etched with scripts half-eaten by time and cursed residue. When they opened, the inside smelled faintly of dust and cedar and age itself. Sukuna stepped in without comment. Ijichi did not join him.

“The elevator will take you the rest of the way,” he said quietly.

Sukuna gave him a look. “You’re not coming.”

Ijichi looked like the answer had offended him by existing. “No.”

The doors closed.

The descent began.

It was slow.

Slower than any modern lift had a right to be, the old mechanism humming and shuddering through stone as though it were lowering him through the roots of the school and into something much older buried beneath it. The deeper he went, the stranger the air became. Denser. More layered. The cursed energy down there did not move like ordinary energy. It pressed from all sides with a vast stillness that felt less like power and more like enduring architecture—an intelligence so ancient it had stopped needing to announce itself loudly.

When the elevator finally opened again, the world beyond it was not a corridor.

It was Tengen’s space.

A domain in all but formal name.

The room—if it could even be called a room—stretched wider than it should have, stone and emptiness and barrier-light folded together in impossible geometry. Pillars rose into darkness and vanished. The floor was smooth beneath his feet, pale and old and marked with rings of script that glowed faintly under the skin of the surface. There was no clear source of light, and yet he could see. The silence there was not natural. It felt curated. Sacred. Severe.

Sukuna stepped forward.

For a moment, he saw nothing but the center platform and the slow ambient shimmer of barriers older than the lives of nations.

Then Tengen appeared.

Not with spectacle.

Just there, gradually resolving from the depth of the place like something the room had decided to remember and let be seen.

Sukuna did not bow.

Did not lower his head.

He only stood where he was and looked.

Tengen’s appearance was exactly the sort of thing no one could describe correctly until they saw it themselves—ancient and altered by time and cursed evolution, less human than they had once been and yet still undeniably a mind shaped by centuries of looking at the world from too far away. Their voice, when it came, held that same unsettling quality: calm, old, and impossible to place in age.

“Ryomen Sukuna.”

Sukuna’s face remained flat. “Master Tengen.”

There was a beat.

Then Tengen said, “I have been watching you for years.”

That would have unsettled most men.

Sukuna only crossed his arms. “That’s unfortunate.”

Something almost like amusement touched the edges of Tengen’s expression, though it vanished quickly.

“I have also watched your wife.”

At that, Sukuna’s whole body changed.

Not visibly dramatic. More dangerous than that. His shoulders went still. His eyes sharpened. The room seemed to notice.

Tengen continued before he could speak.

“I have watched her since she was a fetus.”

That made him freeze.

Actually freeze.

The silence after was different than before—no longer sacred, but poised.

Sukuna stared at Tengen.

And listened.

Tengen’s voice remained calm. “Mizuki was a kind woman.”

The name struck him at once. Your mother.

“She could heal,” Tengen said. “She could make things blossom. Her cursed technique was gentle in its design, though her life was not.”

Sukuna said nothing.

“She could bear no children.”

The ancient barrier-light around them pulsed once, faintly.

“She came to me,” Tengen went on, “long ago, in grief and hope both. She begged for a daughter.”

Sukuna’s jaw tightened.

Tengen looked directly at him now, and the weight of what came next landed before the words fully did.

“I used a cursed technique to impregnate Mizuki.”

The room went silent in a new way.

Sukuna did not move.

Tengen’s voice did not soften. It did not need to. The intensity of the truth was already enough.

“She has no father.”

A pulse of something cold moved through Sukuna’s spine.

“Your wife carries only Mizuki’s blood and mine.”

For one breath, perhaps two, Sukuna’s mind refused to arrange the statement into anything usable.

No father.

No man.

Only Mizuki.

Only Tengen.

You, born not of violation, not of ordinary lineage, but of a cursed intervention from one of the oldest beings in the jujutsu world because your mother had wanted a child badly enough to kneel before eternity and ask for one.

His face hardened not with revulsion, but with the sharp disorientation of a truth too large to fit cleanly into the shapes he’d already built around you.

Tengen continued.

“She is rare.”

The words settled over the domain like law.

“Unique.”

Sukuna finally spoke, voice low and dangerous. “Why tell me now.”

“Because the higher-ups must be stopped.”

That answer came immediately.

No hesitation.

Tengen’s gaze never left him. “They do not understand what she is. They will only understand threat. Bloodline. Influence. Potential. They will dissect what should not be touched.”

Sukuna’s hands had become fists at his sides.

Tengen went on. “A woman born of a blossoming technique and an immortal barrier-keeper. A cursed human carrying both life and decay in impossible balance. A woman already powerful. Already awakened. Already mated to one of the strongest sorcerers alive. Now carrying twins.”

The room itself seemed to tighten around the shape of the future being named.

“They will not leave her in peace,” Tengen said. “Nor the children.”

Sukuna exhaled once through his nose.

Slowly.

He understood now. Not every part, not the whole terrible mystery of it, but enough. Enough to know why your cursed energy had always felt like something older than the categories people wanted to put it in. Enough to know why your domain had looked like judgment instead of mere destruction. Enough to know that if the higher-ups got their hands on the truth of your blood, there would be no limit to what they would justify in the name of preserving order.

His voice came out rougher than before. “Did Mizuki know?”

“Yes.”

“Did Y/N?”

“No.”

That made something hot flash across his face. Not anger at you. At the timing. At Tengen. At the world for continuing to stack revelation on top of danger as though you were not already carrying enough.

“You’ve watched her all this time,” he said. “And said nothing.”

Tengen accepted the accusation without flinching. “Observation is not always intervention.”

Sukuna’s mouth curled. “Convenient.”

Tengen did not defend themselves.

Instead, they said, “I am intervening now.”

Sukuna laughed once.

The sound had no humor in it.

“Now,” he repeated. “When the higher-ups are already moving. When my wife is seven months pregnant. When the whole rotten system is preparing to do exactly what it has always done.”

The air around him darkened.

Not enough to constitute attack.

Enough to remind the ancient being before him that he was not a passive listener, and never had been.

Tengen held his gaze. “That is why you were summoned.”

Sukuna’s expression flattened into something lethal and final.

“You should’ve told her.”

“Yes,” Tengen said. “Perhaps I should have.”

A beat passed.

Then another.

The anger in Sukuna did not diminish, but it changed direction. Became clearer. Sharper. No longer merely the outrage of a husband protecting his wife, but the fury of a man who now understood that the woman he loved had been extraordinary before the world ever had a chance to brutalize her for it—and that the same world would do so again if given even one more day of power.

He stepped closer.

Not enough to threaten physically.

Enough to make the words between them feel like a vow instead of a conversation.

“They will not touch her.”

Tengen’s expression did not change.

Sukuna continued, voice dropping lower, more terrible in its control. “Not the higher-ups. Not the clans. Not anyone.”

The ancient light around the domain flickered softly against the edges of his face.

“They don’t get to know her blood,” he said. “They don’t get to name what she is. They don’t get to decide what my children mean before they’re even born.”

Tengen inclined their head.

It was not submission.

But it was acknowledgment.

“And if they try,” Sukuna said, “I’ll burn their whole world down to stop them.”

The stillness after that was immense.

Then Tengen said quietly, “That is why I believe you will succeed.”

Sukuna stood there in the ancient glow of Tengen’s hidden space with rage in his bones and revelation still settling jaggedly into place, and for the second time that day the world shifted under him—not because he had learned you were more than he knew, but because every piece of that new truth only sharpened the one thing that already mattered most.

He had to get home.

He had to get back to you.

And whatever plan he and Gojo had begun upstairs was no longer merely revenge, or reform, or the breaking of an old promise into action.

Now it was war for you.

By the time Sukuna got home, the sky had gone the color of bruised lavender.

Evening had started settling over the estate, soft and gold at the edges, the gardens breathing out the last warmth of the day while the house itself held that quiet domestic stillness it had grown into over the past year. Light spilled from the open shoji in long warm rectangles across the engawa. Somewhere in the back, water moved through the koi pond in a low familiar rhythm. It should have felt peaceful.

It didn’t.

Not when Sukuna came through the gates like a storm with its skin on.

The car barely had time to settle before he was out of it, slamming the door hard enough to shake the frame. He crossed the stones in long furious strides, shoulders tight, jaw set, cursed energy rolling off him in sharp waves that made even the air near him feel dangerous. He did not pause to remove his shoes properly. Did not call out first. Did not stop to gather himself.

He stormed inside.

Mizuki was in the sitting room arranging tea when he entered.

She looked up immediately, startled by the force of his presence alone, and before she could even rise fully, Sukuna pointed straight at her.

“Why have you lied?”

The words struck the room like a blade thrown too hard.

Mizuki froze.

The teacup in her hand shook once.

You were nearby, seated on the floor cushions with one hand under your belly and the other resting idly against the side of the low table, and the sound of Sukuna’s voice made you start at once. You pushed yourself up carefully, your body slower now under the weight of seven months and twins and the full sweet strain of life growing in you.

“Sukuna?” you said, confusion already cutting into your face. “What is going on?”

He turned toward you then, and the fury in him changed shape just enough that you could see the wound underneath it. Not directed at you. Never at you. But radiating so hot it still made your pulse jump.

“You tell me,” he snapped, then checked himself visibly. Hard. Dragging a hand down his face as if trying to physically pull the rage back inside where it wouldn’t hit you by accident.

You looked between him and your mother, unease rising quickly now. “Why are you accusing her of lying?”

Mizuki had gone pale.

She set the teacup down with trembling fingers and stood slowly, eyes moving between you and Sukuna with the look of a woman who had always known this moment might come and had still never found a way to survive it in advance.

Sukuna took one harsh breath.

Then another.

His gaze landed on you fully. “The higher-ups know about us.”

Your face changed instantly. “What?”

He stepped closer. Not threatening. Just too full of momentum to remain where he’d been. “They know about the marriage. They know you live here. They know your mother is here. Gojo came to me at Jujutsu High today. Gakuganji told them.”

Your hand moved automatically to your stomach.

The babies shifted as if they felt the spike in your pulse.

“What— why?” you breathed. “Because the jujutsu world is rotten,” Sukuna said. “And because old men with power are nosy, cowardly pieces of shit.”

Your eyes widened, fear beginning to creep in under the confusion. “And?”

“And Tengen called for me.”

That made the room go still.

Even Mizuki’s breathing seemed to catch.

You stared at Sukuna. “Tengen?”

He nodded once, sharp and humorless.

You had never met Tengen. Had only heard the name the way most people in your world had—spoken with respect, distance, caution, like something not quite human and far too old to question.

Sukuna’s jaw tightened. “I went down there. Tengen told me…” He looked at Mizuki for half a second, then back at you. “Tengen told me they’ve been watching you for years.”

Your mouth parted.

Sukuna continued, because now that the words had begun, there was no mercy in dragging them out.

“They said they watched you since before you were born.”

You looked at your mother sharply.

Mizuki’s face crumpled.

And in that second, before Sukuna even reached the heart of it, some deep part of you already knew this was about to hurt.

“Sukuna,” you said quietly, “what did Tengen tell you?”

His voice dropped lower.

About Mizuki, he thought. About how she could heal. How she made things blossom. About how she wanted a child so badly she had gone to Tengen and begged for one. About how—

He held your gaze.

“They told me,” he said carefully, “that your mother couldn’t bear children.”

You frowned, already shaking your head once in confusion.

“They said Mizuki went to Tengen asking for a daughter.” His eyes did not leave yours. “And Tengen used a cursed technique to impregnate her.”

The words did not land all at once.

You stared at him.

Then at your mother.

Then back again.

Sukuna’s expression was hard as iron and wounded beneath it.

“They said,” he continued, “that you have no father.”

Mizuki made a small sound then, something pained and broken and resigned all at once.

But Sukuna did not stop.

“They said your blood is only Mizuki’s and Tengen’s.”

Silence.

A terrible one.

You didn’t move.

Didn’t breathe for a second.

The room seemed to warp around the words, as though the simple shape of it—your mother, the low table, the soft glow of evening, Sukuna standing before you—had become less trustworthy all at once.

“No,” you said.

It came out too soft to be forceful.

Then louder, “No.”

Mizuki stepped forward instinctively. “My love—” You backed away from her at once. The tears came before you could stop them. “You lied to me?” you whispered.

Mizuki’s whole face broke open around that.

“I didn’t— I never wanted—”

“You lied?” you said again, voice cracking. “All this time?”

Sukuna looked at Mizuki then, fury climbing back up through him in ugly waves. “When were you planning to tell her?”

Mizuki had tears in her eyes now too. Her hands trembled at her sides, fingers curling helplessly against her skirt.

“I was going to,” she said.

Sukuna barked out a bitter laugh. “When?”

She flinched at the sound.

“When she was older,” Mizuki said, voice unsteady. “When she had peace. When her life had stopped being survival and pain and fear and I thought maybe—maybe maybe I could tell her when it wouldn’t feel like one more thing taken from her.”

You were crying openly now.

Not loud.

Just helplessly.

Your hand stayed against your stomach as if anchoring yourself there might keep the rest of you from coming apart.

“You knew?” you asked your mother, voice thin with disbelief. “You always knew?”

Mizuki nodded, once.

The sight of that nod undid something in you.

You took another stumbling step back until your calves hit the edge of the cushion behind you and you nearly sat down by accident. Sukuna moved at once, one hand coming to your elbow to steady you, but your eyes never left your mother.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” you asked.

Mizuki started crying too then. “Because I was afraid.”

The answer came too quickly to be rehearsed.

Because it was true.

“Afraid if I told you too soon, you’d feel like a thing built from secrets instead of love. Afraid if anyone else ever knew the truth, they would try to take you from me for what you are. Afraid you’d think I lied because I didn’t want you.” Her voice broke hard on the last part. “I wanted you more than anything.”

You shook your head, tears slipping down your face in steady lines now. “That don’t change that you lied.”

“I know.”

“I thought—” Your breath hitched. “I thought my father…”

You couldn’t finish it.

Didn’t know how.

The man who had terrorized your childhood, whose violence had lived in your bones so long you still sometimes startled at certain sounds, had not even been your father. Not by blood. Not by anything except damage. The truth of it was too tangled to sort cleanly through grief and shock.

Sukuna’s hand tightened slightly at your elbow, not restraining. Supporting.

“Tengen said you’re rare,” he said more quietly now. “Unique.”

You gave a helpless broken laugh through tears. “That sounds awful.”

Under different circumstances, it might have made him smile.

Instead, his face only twisted with the pain of watching this happen to you.

“They also said the higher-ups can’t know,” he continued. “Not the truth of your blood. Not what you are. Not the babies. None of it.”

At that, your free hand moved fully over your belly.

Mizuki saw and closed her eyes for one second, breathing through her own grief.

You looked between them both, trying to hold too many truths at once and failing.

“So I ain’t got… no father?” you asked, but your speech had slipped again under emotion, the old roughness returning around the hurt. “Just you and… Tengen?”

Mizuki’s tears fell faster. “You have me.”

You laughed once, a short devastated little thing. “That wasn’t the question.”

She took one small step closer. “No,” she whispered. “No, you do not have a father. Not in the way most people mean it.”

You covered your mouth with your hand.

Sukuna looked at Mizuki with all the fury of a man who had just learned the woman he loved had been carrying an old secret in her body the same way she had once carried babies, violence, and grief—quietly, painfully, alone.

“You should have told her.”

Mizuki didn’t defend herself this time.

She only nodded with tears on her face. “I know.”

That answer seemed to take some of the fight out of the room.

Not because it fixed anything.

Because no one was denying the wound anymore.

You sank down at last onto the cushion behind you, the weight of the babies and the day and the revelation all too much to hold standing. Sukuna crouched with you immediately, one hand still at your back, the other braced on the floor beside your knee. He did not try to make you stop crying. Didn’t tell you to calm down. Only stayed there, solid and fierce and present.

Mizuki looked at you from across the low table and seemed to gather herself with visible effort.

Then she came closer.

Slowly.

Not forcing. Not reaching until she was near enough that you could stop her if you wanted.

“My love,” she said, kneeling in front of you. “I am sorry.”

You cried harder at that.

Because the apology was too late and also sincere and both of those things hurt.

“I wanted you,” Mizuki whispered. “From the moment I begged for you. From the moment I knew I had you. Every single day after.”

Your eyes shut tight.

She kept speaking through her own tears.

“You were never an accident. Never a burden. Never something strange I regretted. You were the most wanted thing in my whole life.”

Sukuna bowed his head once, quiet beside you.

Mizuki reached toward your face, then paused just before touching you. Waiting.

You opened your eyes and looked at her.

Really looked.

At the woman who had raised you for only five years and then lost you for fifteen more. The woman who had lied, yes, but also gone to the oldest being in your world because she wanted you enough to ask for the impossible. The woman who had spent a year under your roof helping you heal, never pushing too hard, never once making you doubt you were loved.

You didn’t pull away when she touched your cheek.

Her fingers were warm.

Gentle.

That somehow made the tears worse.

“I’m still mad,” you whispered.

Mizuki gave a wet little laugh through her crying. “You’re allowed.” You nodded once, hard, because you needed that to be true.

Then, finally, because your whole body was shaking and the babies were restless under your grief and Sukuna’s hand at your back had become the only reason you remembered how to sit upright, you leaned.

Not toward Sukuna this time.

Toward your mother.

Mizuki gathered you in immediately, careful of your belly, careful of the life inside you, careful of your breaking heart. You cried against her shoulder while Sukuna sat beside the two of you on the floor, one hand rubbing slowly over your back and the other pressing hard against his own thigh as if it were the only way to keep the rest of his rage from tearing through the walls.

The room stayed like that for a long time.

Three people in the middle of a truth too large for one evening.

It was late enough into the night that the whole estate had gone soft and still around you.

The fire had burned low. The lamps had been turned down. Even the gardens outside seemed to sleep beneath the winter dark, frost gathering pale at the edges of stone and grass while the wind moved quietly through the trees. You and Sukuna had long since gone to bed, the weight of the evening still lingering between you after the truth about Tengen and your blood had been dragged out into the open. He had held you until your crying quieted. You had laid with your head on his chest, one hand under the heavy curve of your stomach while the twins shifted sleepily beneath your skin, and eventually exhaustion had dulled the sharpest edges of the hurt.

By the time the pounding started, the house was swallowed in that deep night silence that made every sound feel enormous.

The banging on the front door was frantic.

Not polite.

Not measured.

Violent enough that you jerked awake immediately, your heart leaping into your throat. Sukuna was already moving beside you before you had even fully opened your eyes. One second he was in bed, warm and solid and half asleep. The next he was upright, every inch of him alert with danger.

Another round of pounding shook the front of the house.

Uraume’s footsteps sounded in the hall, quick but controlled.

Sukuna was already reaching for clothes, shoving his arms into the first robe he found, body gone sharp in the dark. He looked back at you once, and the force of that look alone held enough command to stop you before you could even try to stand.

“Stay.”

Then he was gone from the room.

You sat up too fast anyway, one hand clutching at the blanket, the other bracing under your belly as the twins shifted hard in protest. Your pulse hammered. From down the hall you could hear the front of the house opening, the low murmur of voices, Uraume saying something quickly, and then Sukuna’s steps hitting the floor harder as he reached the entry.

When he got there, he found Satoru.

It had to be near three in the morning.

Gojo looked unlike himself—not disheveled exactly, because he was still Satoru Gojo and even panic seemed to arrange itself around him with unfair grace, but there was no smugness in him now. No teasing, no loose smile, none of the irritating lightness he wore like armor. His breathing was hard. Fast. The cold had bitten his face. He looked like he had moved through half the night at impossible speed and still barely gotten there in time.

“The higher-ups sent assassins,” he said immediately.

No greeting.

No easing into it.

Sukuna went still.

Gojo’s eyes flicked toward the house behind him and then back again. “They’re coming here. They’ll kill every one of you if they get the chance.”

The words hit like ice water.

For one sharp second, Sukuna’s expression did not change.

Then everything in him turned to motion.

He spun and went back down the hall almost before Gojo had finished the sentence, moving so fast the air seemed to tear around him. By the time he reached the bedroom you were already trying to stand on your own, panic bright in your face, one hand at your belly and the other on the bedframe to steady yourself.

He crossed the room in two strides.

“Hey,” he said, low and fast and trying very hard to keep his own fear from spilling into you. “Hey.” Your eyes were full already. “What happened?”

He shushed you before the tears could turn into the kind of fear that made breathing impossible. One hand cupped your face. He kissed you quickly, once on the mouth, once on your forehead, his own breath rougher than he wanted it to be.

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered. “I’m going to help you up. But we have to move.”

The twins shifted under your hands as though they felt the tension tearing through the room.

You nodded, though your mouth trembled.

Sukuna moved with a steadiness that was almost frightening in itself. Fear sharpened him rather than scattering him. He helped you sit up fully, then to your feet, one arm around you as he guided your wobbling body toward the bathroom because even in a moment like this he knew you too well. Knew that at seven months pregnant with twins, if he rushed you out without letting you pee first, you’d be miserable and in pain before you even reached the car—or whatever Gojo had planned.

“You’ll be quicker if you go now,” he said.

Your eyes widened wetly with disbelief that he was thinking of that right now.

He gave your shoulder a brief squeeze. “I know.”

While you hurried into the bathroom, one hand under your belly, the other braced against the doorway, Sukuna turned and packed.

Not wildly.

Not sloppily.

Fast, yes—but methodical. He grabbed clothes for you first. Warm ones. Layers. Whatever would keep you from shivering in the December cold. Then his own things, though fewer. Then another bag, and this one he packed for the babies with a focus so intense it made the room itself feel smaller: bottles, cloths, diapers, the tiny clothes you had folded into drawers with such care, the soft wraps, the things he had once pretended not to know the purpose of and now gathered without hesitation.

He trusted Gojo to have thought ahead.

But instinct still drove his hands.

He would not be caught with nothing for his children if the world was ending around them.

When you came out, he was already kneeling to help you into your shoes. The sight of it nearly undid you—this huge dangerous man on one knee before you, hands steady as he guided your swollen feet into winter shoes, then rose to pull your coat around your shoulders and tie it carefully so the cold couldn’t cut through you too easily.

You looked at him with tears slipping free now. “Sukuna—” He touched your mouth gently. “No.” His own face had gone too hard for tears, but his eyes were full of something raw and terrified all the same.

“Come on.”

He got you to the front.

Your mother was there already, pale but composed in the way only women who had survived impossible things ever were. She had a bag clutched in one hand, the other over her mouth for a moment before she lowered it and came straight to your side. Uraume stood nearby with their own things gathered, silent and sharp and entirely ready.

Gojo waited just outside the threshold.

The night air was bitter. Frost-white breath left everyone’s mouths. The grounds beyond the estate looked dark and empty, but every one of you knew better now than to trust quiet.

“Everyone close,” Gojo said.

Sukuna moved closer to you automatically, one arm around your shoulders, the bags in his other hand. Your mother came to your other side. Uraume stepped in. Gojo drew a breath, cursed energy already rising around him in bright impossible layers.

Then the world folded.

It wasn’t like traveling by car. Or train. Or even by cursed creature. It was a wrenching, breathless instant where space itself gave up pretending to be fixed. The estate vanished. The winter dark broke apart. Your stomach lurched hard enough that you clutched Sukuna’s arm and gasped. Cold air changed shape around you.

And then you were somewhere else.

The mountains surrounded you first.

Dark pines. Deep woods. The kind of remote wilderness that made the world feel old and private again. The air there was colder, cleaner, threaded with snow and evergreen. Before you stood a cottage.

Not tiny.

Not crude.

A real house, gentle and soft-looking under the moonlight, half hidden among the trees as if it had grown there deliberately. Smoke rose faintly from the chimney. Lamps glowed in the windows. The whole thing looked absurdly peaceful considering the way you had arrived—like a place built for safety rather than escape.

Sukuna looked around sharply, immediately assessing boundaries, sightlines, weaknesses.

“What is this?” Gojo, breathing once to steady the energy expenditure, said, “A safe house.”

Sukuna looked at him.

Gojo shoved his hands in his pockets like he hadn’t just teleported an entire household across the country in the middle of the night. “I designed it a few years ago.” Sukuna scoffed, though there was no real surprise in it. “Of course you did.”

Inside, the place was warm.

Clean.

Prepared.

Furniture already in place, shelves stocked with food and water, lights humming faintly overhead, enough blankets to bury a family, a functional kitchen, a clean bathroom, wood stacked by the hearth. Even electricity. The floors were polished. The futons and bedding were fresh. There were first-aid supplies laid out where someone could reach them quickly if needed.

You looked around in stunned silence.

You knew Gojo was rich. Everyone knew that in the abstract. But this—

This had thought in it.

Contingency.

Care.

It surprised you more than it should have.

Gojo stood in the middle of the room and looked at the four of you with uncharacteristic seriousness. “I have to go back to Jujutsu High.” Sukuna’s head snapped toward him immediately. “I’m coming.” Gojo shook his head. “No.” Sukuna stepped forward. “Satoru—”

“This time,” Gojo said, cutting across him with a firmness that felt older than their usual rivalry, “your mission is making sure she stays protected and can’t be snatched up again.”

The words landed hard.

Sukuna’s mouth opened, then shut.

Because he knew.

Of course he knew.

Because the moment Gojo said it, the truth of it settled in the room like weight. This time the fight wasn’t his. Or rather, not only his. Not if leaving you exposed meant everything they were trying to destroy could still reach through the ashes and touch what mattered most.

Sukuna took a breath.

Long.

Slow.

Then nodded.

It looked like it cost him.

Gojo held his gaze for one second more, then stepped closer and held out his hand.

“Don’t make me regret saving your life.”

Sukuna scoffed and took it.

The handshake lasted exactly one second before something in both of them shifted. Maybe it was the hour. The danger. The years behind them. The knowledge that this night might end with blood in places neither of them wanted to imagine. Whatever it was, Sukuna’s grip tightened, and instead of letting go, he yanked Gojo forward and pulled him into a rough abrupt hug.

It was awkward.

Sharp.

Nothing graceful in it.

Exactly what it would have looked like if two brothers who had spent their lives fighting one another suddenly admitted, for one unguarded moment, that they would never stop competing and would still never want the other gone from this world.

Gojo froze in surprise.

Then hugged back.

Just once. Tight.

When they pulled apart, neither of them looked at the other for a second.

Gojo cleared his throat. “I have to go.”

No one stopped him.

He waved once toward the room—too quick to be casual, too familiar to be formal.

Then he was gone.

Just like that.

The cottage felt larger without him in it.

And your body, which had been running on fear and motion and instinct for too long, finally began to understand the pause. You were trembling with exhaustion. Your feet hurt. Your back ached. The babies had gone oddly quiet in the last twenty minutes, and that worried you in the way only pregnant women understand—too much motion is scary, but too much stillness can be worse.

Sukuna noticed immediately. “Come here.” His voice had gentled all the way down now.

He took you through the home after a quick scan of every room, every window, every door. The place was exactly what Gojo said it was—ready, defensible, hidden. One of the rooms already had futons laid out neatly, blankets folded at the foot, lamps turned low. Sukuna set the bags down and brought you to the bedding with both hands on you as if the world might still try to take you if he let go for a second.

He lowered you carefully.

You sank onto the futon with a sigh that turned halfway into a shudder.

Sukuna knelt beside you immediately. He kissed you gently once, then again, then bent and pressed his mouth to the curve of your belly through your clothes.

“It’s going to be alright,” he whispered to the twins.

Then to you, “I’ve got you.”

That was when you cried.

Not loudly.

Just gently, the tears sliding down your face while the strain of the night left your body in slow aching waves. You touched his cheek with trembling fingers. “I’m sorry,” you whispered.

His brows drew together at once. “For what.”

You swallowed. “I don’t know why they want me dead so bad.”

The words broke on the way out.

Sukuna’s whole face changed.

He took your hand and kissed the center of your palm before pressing it flat over his chest. “Don’t apologize,” he said.

His voice was quiet and absolute.

“Not for this. Not for what they are.”

More tears slipped free.

He leaned down and kissed your forehead, then each wet cheek one by one, as though he could ease the fear from your body by touching every place it had passed through.

“Focus on the babies,” he told you softly. “That’s all I need from you right now.”

Your hand moved instinctively to your belly.

Sukuna covered it with his own.

“I’ll take care of everything else.”

You looked at him through the blur of tears, and for all the fear still lodged in your chest, you believed him.

Because this was what he was when it mattered most.

Not just strong. Not just violent. Not just the terror of everyone foolish enough to threaten what was his.

He was steady.

A wall.

A promise.

When you woke the next morning, the cottage was quiet in that tender, unfamiliar way only mountain mornings seemed to know.

The light slipping through the curtains was pale and cold, soft silver at first, then warmer where it caught the wooden floor. Somewhere outside, the wind moved gently through the trees, and from farther away you could hear water—maybe a stream, maybe snowmelt, maybe just the mountain remembering how to sing to itself. The room smelled faintly of cedar, clean blankets, and breakfast from somewhere beyond the door.

For one long moment, you didn’t move.

You were still so tired.

The kind of tired that lived in your bones and behind your eyes, heavy and sweet after too much fear and too little sleep. Your body ached in that broad quiet way pregnancy often left in you now, especially after a hard night. The twins were awake before the rest of you fully was, rolling and shifting under the round curve of your stomach as if they had already begun their morning disagreements.

You touched your belly gently.

“Good morning,” you whispered to them.

The movement caught Sukuna’s attention instantly.

He had already been up.

Of course he had.

You turned your head slightly and found him across the room, kneeling by one of the open bags, quietly unpacking the things he’d grabbed in the middle of the night with the same focused thoroughness he brought to everything. Baby clothes. Bottles. A folded robe. One of your hair combs. Things that had clearly been shoved into bags in panic but were now being set carefully into order, as if making this place functional would somehow make it safer faster.

The moment he sensed you were awake, he stopped.

Then he was beside you.

Not hurried in a wild way.

Just immediate.

He crossed the small room and knelt by the futon, one hand already going to your face, then your hair, then your belly, as if he had to touch all three places to settle himself.

“How do you feel?” Your eyes were still heavy with sleep. “Like I got dragged through the night.” His mouth twitched faintly, though his eyes stayed serious. “You did.”

You made a soft little sound at that and let your head sink deeper into the pillow. The babies moved again beneath your palm. Sukuna’s hand joined yours there, broad and warm over the curve of your stomach. He stood the tension of the night before with you in silence for a second, feeling the life there, reassured by the simple insistence of their movement.

“You hungry?” You looked at him through sleepy lashes. “Always.”

That, finally, softened him.

Uraume had already cooked that morning, because of course they had. By the time you’d managed to sit up enough to eat, a tray had appeared with warm rice porridge, soft fruit, tea, broth, and things easy on your stomach. Sukuna fed you half of it himself while you stayed tucked into the futon, too exhausted to pretend dignity mattered. When you tried to take the bowl from him at one point, he gave you a look and kept the spoon anyway.

“Bossy,” you muttered. “Yes,” he said. “You like this too much.”

“Yes.” That made you smile a little despite how wrung out you still felt.

Afterward, he let you lie back down.

You barely protested. Your body welcomed the softness immediately, the blanket pulled up over your legs, the pillow adjusted behind your shoulders just so. Sukuna stayed near, moving around the room in that quiet purposeful way of his, making order from chaos, making temporary things feel livable.

A little while later, there was a soft sound outside the bedroom door.

Not knocking exactly.

More like hesitation.

Then your mother’s voice, gentle even through the wood and paper between you. “Sukuna? Is she alright?”

Sukuna looked toward the door at once. His answer came low and calm, pitched to keep from startling you even though you were already listening.

“She’s fine. She just needs rest.” From the futon, you lifted your voice a little, still drowsy. “I’m okay.”

The shoji remained closed for one second longer.

Then Sukuna crossed the room and slid it open just enough for your mother to look in.

Mizuki stood there with worry all over her face, one hand twisted in the fabric of her robe, the other resting against the doorframe. The fear of the night had not fully left her either. It still sat around her eyes, made her shoulders too tight. But the moment she saw you resting there, alive and warm and speaking, some of it eased.

You smiled at her.

Small. Sleepy. Real.

“I’m okay,” you repeated. “Just need more sleep.”

Your mother nodded quickly, relief washing over her so visibly it hurt a little to see. “Alright.”

Her eyes moved over your face, then your belly, then back again. “I love you,” she said.

The words were simple, immediate, the way mothers say them when fear has already reminded them too vividly what it would mean not to get another chance.

You nodded against the pillow. “I love you too, Mama.” That made her mouth tremble with feeling, though she smiled. “Rest, then.”

Sukuna slid the door closed gently after she stepped away.

The room settled back into quiet.

When he turned toward you again, something in his face had softened even more. Or maybe you just had more strength now to see it. He came back to the futon and knelt beside you once more, and this time when he leaned down, it was not to ask anything practical.

He kissed you.

Slowly.

Not a hurried brush of affection, not the quick grounding touches of the night before. A real morning kiss, lingering and warm, his hand cupping the side of your face while you melted into it with the sleepy trust of someone who had already given him her whole heart and did not know how to do anything halfway.

When he pulled back, he kissed your belly too.

Once near the center.

Then lower, where one of the twins had just kicked.

You laughed softly at the sight of it—this enormous dangerous man bowed over the roundness of you like prayer had finally learned what to do with its mouth.

“They know your voice,” you murmured.

“They should.”

He reached for the small jar sitting near the bedside after that. Uraume must have packed it. Or maybe your mother. The lotion inside smelled faintly of herbs and flowers, something soothing and clean. Sukuna warmed some between his palms first, then pushed your robe gently up over the curve of your stomach with a care that still made your chest ache.

His hands spread the lotion over your skin slowly.

Not clinical.

Not distracted.

Tender.

The stretch marks that had begun to bloom there over the past months were faint pink and silver lines like small rivers under the skin, signs of the life your body had made room for. Sukuna touched them as if they were sacred. His palms moved in long slow circles over the roundness of you, easing tension from the skin, rubbing the lotion in with a patience no one else in the world would have guessed lived in his hands.

You watched him while he did it.

His hair fell partly over his face. His mouth was set in that focused, slightly irritated line he got whenever he was being gentle on purpose and pretending it was a task rather than devotion. The sight of it made love rise in you so suddenly it almost hurt.

You reached down and touched his cheek.

He turned his face into your hand automatically.

Your thumb stroked once beneath his eye.

“Sukuna.”

He looked up.

You held his gaze for a second, then another. The mountain light lay pale across the room. The cottage was quiet. The world beyond it still dangerous, still moving toward something you could not yet see, but here—here it was only the two of you, your children between you, and the fragile shape of safety he was trying so hard to build around all of it.

“Promise me again.”

His brows drew together slightly. “What.”

You touched his cheek again, softer this time. “That you’ll protect us.”

He was still.

“You already know that.”

“I know.” Your voice stayed quiet. “I need to hear it.”

Something in his expression changed at once.

Not annoyance.

Not reluctance.

Only the weight of understanding how deeply fear had carved itself into you, and how even now, loved as you were, safety still sometimes needed to be spoken aloud so your body could believe it.

He covered your hand with his.

“I’ll protect you,” he said.

Then, glancing toward the door for the briefest second, “Your mother too.”

You nodded.

“And Uraume,” you added softly.

That actually made the corner of his mouth twitch.

“You’re worried about everyone.”

“Yes.” His thumb brushed over your knuckles. “I’ll protect all of you.” You kept looking at him, not satisfied yet, and he knew it. So he leaned in closer, forehead nearly touching yours, voice dropping low enough that it felt less like speech and more like vow. “No one is taking any of you from me.” Your eyes stung instantly.

You smiled anyway. “Good.” Sukuna kissed your palm, then your forehead, then the top of your belly once more as if sealing the promise into every place it needed to live. After that he stayed beside you, one hand still rubbing slow absent circles over the curve of your stomach until your breathing evened back out and the heaviness of sleep started tugging at you again.

Outside the room, the little mountain cottage held its hush.

DONT HATE ME BUT YES THIS IS THE END! I wanted to write something that left on a cliff hanger and gave the readers a chance to use y'alls imagination on how the story could end. I wanted to write something and have my readers comment their predictions and give me their version of their ending. I love yall mwah.

also its my birthday today so i will be back next week!! byeeeee

@tobesocoldasyou @beereadzzz @unlimited-impressions @elladollie @marcelinebtw @chososcupoftea @winkii @eli54sa @strawberryosaki @rumblehoneyy @ellsiedjarin @poopypantsstinkface @tojisunicornbraidd @it2muse3 @wildlycruelphoenix @kamisiag @blissingtaehyung @moe-moes-stuff @simplyspooky8 @attackonnat @confusedmomfriend @man1cslut @xunquish-blog @cherrycokeline @onlykuna @dawnsoblivion @ngueyu @iynmwb-ivelle @cherry-peach-flavored @tinkspen @localfandomjumper @christansworld @ejk31 @jjktsworld

[suku-enthusiasts]

Is love we learned be similar to the weight of want? Don’t get me wrong I love that fic but I kinda didn’t like how we still ended up with Sukuna in the end after all he put us through. And I feel like Hiromi had the right to feel they way he felt about Sukuna coming around to often.

I swear, Kento better be end game after you put us through when he became a cheater and a narcissist with that other fic😒 actually I’ll wait till it’s complete to read the ending cause you traumatize me too much😂

BWHAHAHAHAHA I LOVE HOW YOU ASK ME A QUESTION AND THEN YOU TELL ME AT THE VERY END YOU DON’T WANNA KNOW 😭🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[suku-enthusiasts]

I love everything you write. I love how you always make Sukuna so devoted and loving and a bit obsessed with reader. Like he can’t see anyone else but her. Ugh I wish he was real😫❤️

Ughhh yes I love an obsessed Sukuna 😭😭😭💗💗💗

[suku-enthusiasts]

chapter nine || Wildflowers & Witnesses - R. Sukuna

ryomen sukuna x f!reader

❝You grew up behind locked doors—kept “safe” until safety started to look like a cage. One night, something inside you snapped, and the world answered with sirens, courtrooms, and an iron-lit ward that promised treatment but fed on fear. That’s where you met him. Sukuna—another monster on paper, another lifer with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He watched you like he recognized the shape of your loneliness. Like he’d been waiting. And when the ward turned bloody, when the gates cracked open for a moment too long, he took your hand and didn’t let go. Now living in the aftermath—moving country to country, carrying secrets like loaded guns. Because what escaped with them wasn’t just love. It was something darker.❞

cw; non-con. smut. abuse. manipulation. mental health. trigger warning. MDI. 18+.

word counter; 7.1k

masterlist | series masterlist | next

Two weeks passed the way a wound scabbed over—slow, careful, tender to the touch.

You didn’t leave.

And Sukuna, for once, did what he said he would.

The next morning after that fight—after his knees on the floor, after his tears soaking your sweater—he took the doorbell camera down with his own hands. No dramatic speech. No excuses. Just a ladder, a screwdriver, and the quiet acceptance that you had seen him clearly, and that if he wanted to keep you, he had to change more than his tone.

He left the pamphlet on the table, not thrown this time—placed. He slid cash beside it, neat bills like an offering, and told you, voice rough but steady, “If I’m at work, you take a taxi. You don’t wait for me. You don’t ask permission.”

Your fingers trembled when you picked the pamphlet up.

You still kept your location on.

He kept his on too.

Two pins on a map—two heartbeats trying to learn the shape of trust.

The next day, he went to a doctor.

He came home from the pharmacy with a white bag and a bottle that rattled when he set it down. You watched him open it. You watched the pill in his palm. You watched his throat work as he swallowed it.

He took it like it was a vow.

Like it was a rope tossed across a gap he’d nearly pushed you into.

And when you told him you wanted your medication too—quietly, carefully, as if asking for help was still something you feared he might punish—he didn’t argue.

He took you to Dr. Lin. 

He sat in the chair, stiff, jaw tight, but he stayed quiet while you spoke. While you admitted, cheeks hot, that you didn’t want your mind to get sharp again. That you wanted stability. That you wanted to be a mother without the world inside your skull turning violent or loud.

Dr. Lin nodded, kind and clinical and steady.

And Sukuna—Sukuna listened.

Two weeks in, you noticed the changes the way you noticed sunlight returning after a long winter.

He was softer.

Not gentle in the way your mother was gentle—not naturally warm, not easy—but softer like something had stopped scraping against his bones.

He snapped less.

His gaze didn’t feel as sharp.

His hands held you with less urgency, less hunger for control.

Still, his anxiety didn’t vanish.

It lived in the small things.

The way his eyes flicked toward the bedroom when he first walked in, searching.

The way his shoulders stayed tight until he saw you—until he saw you still there.

Then, every time, like clockwork: a loosening. A breath released. A quiet exhale that sounded like relief he didn’t want to admit.

And you… you kept space.

Not as punishment.

As caution.

You spoke in small pieces.

“How was work?”

“Are you hungry?”

“Do you want tea?”

Sometimes you laughed softly at something the television did. Sometimes he watched your mouth when you smiled like he was learning the shape of happiness again.

But there was distance.

A quietness between you that wasn’t peace so much as aftermath.

Today, two weeks later, he came home earlier than usual.

You were on the couch with your legs tucked under you, a blanket over your lap, palm resting on your belly the way it always drifted there now—unthinking, protective, tender.

The front door clicked.

You looked up.

Sukuna stood in the doorway holding flowers.

An assortment—wildflower-looking, imperfect, beautiful in a way that didn’t feel purchased for show. Like he’d picked them with his eyes instead of his pride. Soft purples and pale whites and small yellow blooms that looked like they had no business surviving, but did anyway.

Your breath caught.

He walked toward you slowly, like he didn’t want to startle something.

Like he didn’t want you to flinch.

“I saw them outside a shop,” he said, voice low. Awkward. Honest. “They… looked better than the stupid roses.”

You smiled gently, warmth blooming in your chest. “They’re beautiful.”

Sukuna’s eyes flicked over your face like he was searching for proof you meant it.

You leaned up—careful with your belly, careful with your soreness that still came and went—and he leaned down so you didn’t have to stretch. His lips brushed yours in a soft, quick kiss that didn’t demand anything. Just contact. Just a quiet I’m here.

“Thank you,” you whispered.

His throat bobbed. “Yeah.”

You took the flowers to the sink, found the vase, rinsed it out, filled it with water. Your hands moved gently, almost reverently, arranging them until they looked like they belonged in your home.

When you set them on the table, the room changed a little—like color had returned to a place that had been washed out by fear.

You turned back to him.

Sukuna stood behind you, hands in his pockets, posture too rigid, like he’d come home carrying something heavier than flowers.

You swallowed.

And then you said, softly, “Can we sit down and talk? About… two weeks ago.”

Sukuna didn’t answer immediately.

His jaw tightened once. His eyes flicked away like he wanted to pretend the memory didn’t exist, like if he didn’t look at it, it wouldn’t look back.

Then he nodded.

A small movement.

But real.

You both sat on the couch—space between you at first, the cushion holding its own breath. Sukuna’s hands rested on his thighs, fingers flexing once, then stilling. He looked straight ahead, not at you.

You watched him a moment.

Then you spoke carefully, like you were handling glass.

“I didn’t bring it up because I wanted to punish you,” you said quietly. “I brought it up because… I don’t want us to pretend it didn’t happen.”

Sukuna’s eyes shut for a second.

A breath in.

A breath out.

“I know,” he muttered.

You nodded slowly. “I was scared.” Your voice trembled, but you kept it steady. “I still get scared sometimes. Not because I want to be. My body just… remembers.”

His fingers curled slightly into the fabric of his pants.

“I don’t want you scared of me,” he said, voice rough. “I know,” you whispered. “And… I see you trying. I see you taking your medicine. I see you letting me have air. I see you taking the camera down. I see you giving me the pamphlet and the cash and telling me to go if I want to go.”

Sukuna finally turned his head enough to look at you.

His eyes were tired.

Not sleepy—tired like a man who’d been fighting himself every day.

You continued, gentle but clear. “I’m not leaving you,” you said. “I don’t want to.”

His breath caught.

You reached over slowly—giving him time, watching his face for any sign he couldn’t handle touch—and rested your hand on his knee.

“I meant what I said two weeks ago,” you murmured. “I don’t want to be a prisoner. And I won’t be. Not again. Not ever.”

Sukuna swallowed hard, gaze flicking down to your hand like it was something fragile and holy.

“And if that ever starts to happen again,” you said softly, “I will leave. Not because I don’t love you. But because I have to protect myself. And the baby.”

His shoulders tensed at the word leave—like his nervous system still panicked at it—but you held steady, thumb rubbing gently over his knee.

Then you offered him what he’d been starving for—not control, not surrender, but reassurance with boundaries.

“But as long as you keep your promise,” you whispered, eyes shining, “I won’t leave.” Sukuna’s throat worked. “My promise,” he repeated, like he needed to hear it out loud.

You nodded. “Taking your medication. Working on yourself. Letting me be a person. Letting me have choices. Letting me… breathe.”

His jaw clenched, and for a second you thought anger might rise—but it didn’t. Instead, his face tightened with something that looked like shame.

“I didn’t know how,” he admitted, voice low. “I didn’t—” He stopped, nostrils flaring as he fought for words he wasn’t used to needing. “When you’re not where I can see you, my head—” His fingers twitched. “It goes loud.”

You watched him, heart aching.

“I know,” you whispered.

Sukuna looked at you then—really looked—eyes dark and wet at the edges without spilling.

“I don’t want to be like that,” he said, voice hoarse. “I don’t want to… ruin this.” You nodded, tears gathering again but softer now, not sharp.

“You won’t ruin it,” you whispered. “Not if you keep choosing to do better.”

Sukuna’s shoulders shook once, barely. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head dropping like the weight of himself was exhausting.

Your hand slid up to his forearm.

“You’re not a monster for being sick,” you said gently. “But you are responsible for what you do when you’re sick.”

He flinched at the truth, but he didn’t deny it.

You leaned closer, voice quieter, almost intimate.

“I’m staying,” you murmured. “I’m here. I love you. I love you even when you’re scared. But you have to love me in a way that doesn’t hurt me.”

Sukuna turned his head, eyes locking on yours, and something in his face softened—something raw and sincere.

“I do,” he whispered. “I do love you.” You nodded, lips trembling into a small smile. “Then keep your promise,” you said.

He reached for your hand slowly, like he was asking permission, and when your fingers didn’t pull away, he laced them with his.

“Okay,” he said, voice quiet. “I will.”

You squeezed his hand once.

Not as obedience.

As agreement.

As a small, brave start.

The next day felt like stepping outside without armor.

Not because the air was colder, not because the street was unfamiliar—because you were alone.

Not alone in the world, not truly, but alone in the way that mattered: no Sukuna at your side, no heavy hand guiding you, no shadow leaning over your shoulder.

Just you.

A taxi idled at the curb, and you climbed in carefully, one hand drifting to your belly as if you could remind yourself—you’re not just you anymore.

You gave the driver the address from the pamphlet, voice soft and polite, and watched the city slide past the window in a blur of storefronts and scooters and morning light.

Your phone sat warm in your pocket.

Location on.

A pin on a map.

A tether you couldn’t quite call a leash anymore, but still felt around your ankle when you walked too far.

When you arrived, the building was modest—clean, bright, the kind of place that smelled like lavender hand soap and paper. The room for the prenatal group was upstairs. The door was open, and soft laughter drifted out like an invitation.

You hovered in the doorway for a second.

Your palms were damp.

Your heart thudded hard in your ribs.

You can do this, you told yourself.

And then you stepped inside.

There were a few women, all rounded in the same tender way, all glowing with that strange mix of exhaustion and excitement. Most looked around your age—mid-twenties, maybe early thirties at most. They sat on yoga mats and chairs, some cross-legged, some rubbing their backs, some sipping water from big bottles.

A woman at the front—warm smile, hair clipped back—looked up and brightened. “You must be new! Come in, come in.” Your cheeks warmed. “Hi,” you said, voice small. “I’m… I’m Y/n.”

A chorus of greetings met you immediately, gentle and welcoming.

“I’m Mei,” said one, scooting over to make room. “I’m Nari,” another offered, waving with two fingers. “Jia,” said a woman with a rounder belly who looked like she was further along, grinning. “Don’t be scared. We’re all a mess.”

They laughed, and the sound loosened something in your chest.

You smiled—timid, but real—and sat where they made space for you. Your hands fidgeted in your lap until the instructor handed you a booklet and said softly, “You’re safe here.”

Safe.

The word hit different when it wasn’t a command.

The class started gently—breathing, stretching, discussion about aches and cravings and how the body changed like it was building a new universe. The instructor asked each of you to share a little: how far along, how you were feeling, what you were struggling with.

When it was your turn, your throat tightened.

“I’m eighteen weeks,” you said softly. “And… I’m nervous a lot.” Mei nodded immediately, like you’d spoken a language she knew. “Same. I cry when my toast burns.”

The group chuckled.

You blinked, surprised by how quickly the room made you feel human.

Nari leaned closer. “What are you craving? Everyone’s craving something.” You hesitated. “Ice cream,” you admitted. “And… salty noodles.” Jia grinned. “Oh, you’re one of us.”

Someone else—Asha, with short hair and bright eyes—laughed. “I ate pickles with honey last week and my husband just stared at me like I was a different species.”

“Mine too,” Mei groaned. “He offered to Google whether I was okay.”

The room erupted into soft laughter.

You found yourself laughing too—quiet at first, like your voice didn’t remember how to take up space, then a little louder when someone made a joke about pregnancy brain and forgetting why you walked into a room.

As the class went on, the conversation became warmer, more personal. They talked about fear of labor, their moms, their partners, their worries about changing relationships.

Asha tilted her head, studying you kindly. “Do you have a partner?” You swallowed. You felt your cheeks warm. “Yes,” you said. “My husband.” The word tasted strange and comforting at the same time—like a lie that also felt like protection. “Oh!” Nari’s eyes lit up. “What’s he like?” Your fingers twisted together. You could feel the habitual instinct to keep your life private. To keep Sukuna private.

But you were here for air.

For friendships.

For something that belonged to you.

“He’s…” You hesitated. Then, quietly, you said, “He’s protective.” Asha smirked. “That’s code for ‘intense.’”

The room giggled.

You couldn’t help it—you smiled shyly. “Yes.”Mei leaned forward. “Show us!” Your eyes widened. “Show—?”

“A picture,” Jia said. “Come on, we’re pregnant, not saints.”

Your hands shook slightly as you pulled out your phone. You scrolled past your grocery list, past a photo of the wildflowers in their vase, past a blurry picture of your belly taken too early in the morning when you couldn’t stop staring at it.

Then you found it.

The mirror photo.

Your bare belly, round and soft, your face half-hidden by the phone—Sukuna behind you, taller than you, his head bent down, lips pressed to your skin like he was praying over the life inside you. His hand spread wide over your stomach, possessive but gentle in the captured moment.

You held the screen out.

The reaction was immediate.

Asha’s eyes went huge. “Oh my God.” Mei made a sound that was half laugh, half gasp. “Your husband is—” Nari slapped a hand over her mouth, blushing. “He’s… hot.” Jia leaned closer, squinting. “That’s not a husband, that’s a sin.” You felt heat climb up your neck so fast you thought you might melt into the mat. “Stop,” you whispered, laughing softly, embarrassed.

Asha fanned herself dramatically. “You’re telling me that man kissed your belly like that and then went to work?” You nodded, cheeks burning. “That’s not fair,” Mei groaned. “Mine kisses my forehead and then asks if we have enough paper towels.”

“Mine too!” Nari laughed. “He’s an engineer. He can build a bridge but can’t open a jar.”

They started pulling out their phones, showing pictures like a playful parade—men with kind eyes and soft bellies, men in polos and button-ups, men holding coffee mugs that said #1 Dad even though the baby wasn’t here yet. Suburban smiles. Practical shoes. The kind of men who already told dad jokes without realizing it.

They were right.

They looked like fathers-in-training.

Normal.

Safe.

You nodded along, smiling gently at each photo, praising their husbands the way you always praised people—sweetly, sincerely.

“He looks kind,” you said about one. “He looks like he’d make a good dad,” you said about another.

And you meant it.

Then Asha elbowed you lightly. “Show another one. I know you have more.”

Your stomach fluttered with nerves, but you scrolled and found the second picture.

Sukuna in the kitchen.

Shirtless.

Buff.

Forearms taut as he stirred something in a pan, jaw set in concentration. Tattoos visible where the light hit him. He looked like he belonged in a movie, the kind where the danger was part of the seduction.

You held the phone out again.

The room nearly combusted.

Mei actually squealed, then clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh my God—” Nari’s face went scarlet. “That’s your husband?” Jia laughed so hard she snorted. “Girl. You are blessed.”

Asha stared at the screen like she was witnessing a religious event. “Your husband looks like a sexy boxer,” she said, dead serious. Then she glanced up at you with a grin. “Or an ex-convict that I’d go on the run for.”

The words hit you like a spark in dry grass.

You froze for half a second.

Because your mind—your real mind, the one that carried truth like a bruise—immediately flashed the image:

Sukuna in the ward.

The gun.

The blood.

The way he’d walked out like rules were made of paper.

Ex-convict.

On the run.

Your cheeks burned hotter—not just from embarrassment, but from the strange, private irony of it. The fact that their joke was so close to the truth it almost hurt.

You laughed anyway—soft and breathy, a little too high. “Don’t say that,” you murmured, trying to sound playful. Asha grinned wider. “I’m just saying. If he told me to pack a bag, I’d be gone in ten minutes.” Mei sighed dramatically. “My husband would ask where we’re going and whether the car has enough gas.”

The group erupted into laughter again.

And you laughed with them—genuine, warm, a sound you hadn’t heard from yourself in too long.

But beneath it, under the lightness, something quietly pulsed:

The sweet ache of being seen as normal.

The strange safety of a room where no one knew the truth of your life—no wards, no trials, no blood, no locked doors.

Just you, a first-time mom among first-time moms, blushing over pictures like your world hadn’t once been built out of cages.

When the class ended, they gathered their bags and water bottles, chattering like birds.

Asha slung her tote over her shoulder and looked at you. “We’re going to lunch,” she said. “Come with us.” You blinked. “Lunch?”

Mei nodded eagerly. “There’s a little place down the street—nothing fancy, just noodles and dumplings. It’s like our thing now.”

Nari smiled warmly. “You should come. It’ll be fun.” Your hands tightened around your phone.

Your instinct was to say no.

To go home.

To keep your world small, so Sukuna didn’t have to feel it expand.

But you remembered the pamphlet. The cash. The promise. The wildflowers.

And you remembered your own words:

I won’t be a prisoner anymore.

You swallowed.

Then you nodded, shy but brave.

“Okay,” you whispered, and your smile returned, small and bright. “I’d like that.” And as you walked out with them—into sunlight, into chatter, into the simple miracle of being included—you felt something inside you loosen.

Not the location pin.

Not the fear entirely.

But the belief that you were allowed to have a life.

Even if it started with dumplings and laughter and strangers who didn’t know they were holding a runaway girl gently in their hands.

The little restaurant was tucked between a laundromat and a dim corner shop, its windows fogged from steam and warmth. Inside, the air smelled like broth and scallions and chili oil—comforting in a way that made your shoulders finally drop.

You slid into the booth with the other women, hands folding neatly in your lap while you tried to remember how to exist in a group without shrinking.

Asha nudged a menu toward you. “Okay, first rule—get dumplings. Second rule—if you cry, we pretend it’s the soup.” Mei laughed. “No, if you cry, we cry. It’s a package deal.” You smiled softly, eyes flicking down the menu, pretending you weren’t a little dazzled by how easy they were with you. How they spoke to you like you belonged here.

Then your phone buzzed in your pocket.

You didn’t even have to look to know.

Your stomach fluttered—equal parts fondness and nerves—as you pulled it out and saw his name.

Sukuna.

You answered quickly, keeping your voice gentle. “Hi.” His voice came through low and immediate, like he’d been holding his breath. “Where are you.”

Not a question.

Not quite an accusation.

A check. A pulse. An anchor.

You glanced at the women—Asha already smirking, like she could hear his tone through the screen—and you smiled anyway, softer, warmer.

“I’m okay,” you said. “The other pregnant ladies wanted to go to lunch after class. I decided to join. I’ll be home after.” There was a pause on the line, the kind where you could hear his thoughts grinding—habit and worry, control and promise wrestling in his throat.

Then his voice eased, just slightly. “I’m about to get off. I’ll pick you up. Don’t spend money on a taxi.” You blinked, surprised by how normal it sounded. Like a husband. Like a partner. Like a life. “Okay,” you murmured.

Another pause.

Then, quieter—rougher, like it cost him something—“I love you.” You held the phone a little tighter. For half a second, you froze—not because you didn’t feel it, but because the word still carried weight, still felt like a door that could lock behind you if you weren’t careful.

But you also remembered wildflowers.

You remembered medication bottles on the counter.

You remembered him kneeling, sobbing like a child who didn’t want to be left.

You smiled gently, voice soft as a blanket. “I love you too.” The exhale on the other end sounded like relief. “Text me when you’re done,” he said, and the call ended.

You set your phone down on the table, face warm.

Asha leaned forward immediately, eyes gleaming. “Oh, he’s protective protective.” You laughed quietly, embarrassed. “He just… worries.” Mei grinned. “Mine worries too, but mostly about whether the baby can hear him burp.” Nari giggled, sipping her water. “So—your husband. What’s his name?”

“Sukuna,” you said, almost shyly.

Asha made a sound like she approved of the syllables. “That’s a hot name.” Your cheeks burned. “Stop.”

“No,” Jia said, wagging a finger like an auntie. “Let her have it. If she’s carrying a baby and married to a man who looks like that, she deserves to blush.”

The server came by, and the table became a flurry of gentle chaos—everyone ordering dumplings, noodle bowls, broth, extra pickled vegetables. They asked you what you wanted, and you hesitated like you were afraid of choosing wrong, until Mei leaned close and whispered, “Pick what you crave. That’s literally the whole point.”

You ended up ordering soup dumplings and noodles with a broth that smelled like home you’d never had.

While you waited, conversation flowed in bright, ordinary rivers.

They asked how you were feeling, and you admitted you got tired easily. They nodded like they understood. They shared little aches and strange cravings and the weirdness of dreaming in third person. They laughed about baby names and argued over whether strollers were worth the money.

At one point, Asha leaned back and said, “Okay, we need your number. We have a mom chat.” You blinked. “A… chat?”

“Group chat,” Mei clarified, already pulling out her phone. “We send each other appointment reminders, cravings, memes, and emotional breakdowns.” Nari smiled warmly. “Mostly memes.”

You swallowed, something tender tightening in your throat, and you gave them your number with hands that trembled just slightly.

They added you immediately—your phone chiming with new notifications like little taps on the shoulder.

Mom Chat 💗 Asha: NEW FRIEND ALERT Mei: WELCOME Y/N!!! Nari: we’re getting dumplings again next week Jia: your husband still single? asking for science

You laughed—soft and real—and when you looked up, the women were smiling at you like they liked seeing you smile.

Food arrived in steaming bowls and baskets. The first bite of soup dumpling made you close your eyes, a quiet sound leaving you like a prayer.

Asha pointed her chopsticks at you. “Oh she’s happy. Look at her. She’s in love with dumplings.” You nodded shyly, cheeks full. “I am.”

They laughed, and you laughed too, and for a moment you forgot the feeling of walls.

Then, as you were halfway through your noodles, your phone buzzed again.

A text.

Sukuna: Outside.

Your stomach flipped.

You wiped your mouth carefully, heart thudding—not with fear, exactly, but with the awareness of him entering your new little pocket of freedom.

“I think my husband is here,” you said softly.

Asha’s eyes lit up like she’d been waiting. “Bring him in. I want to see if he’s real.” You stood slowly, one hand instinctively going to your belly.

Before you could even slide out of the booth fully, the door opened.

Sukuna walked in like he owned the air.

Tall—too tall for the doorway. Broad shoulders. Black shirt clinging to muscle. Pink buzzed hair catching the warm restaurant light. Crimson eyes sweeping the room with that sharpness that always made you feel seen and watched at the same time.

But when his gaze found you—

It softened.

Not completely.

Sukuna didn’t soften completely.

But it eased, the way a fist eased when it realized it wasn’t about to lose what it was holding. He walked straight to you, ignoring curious glances, ignoring the way the women at the booth suddenly went very still. He didn’t touch you immediately—like he’d learned that sometimes touch should be asked for, not taken.

Instead, he tipped his head down toward you, voice low. “You okay?” You nodded. “Yes.” He hummed, satisfied, and then his hand hovered at your lower back—not pushing, just there, present.

You turned to the table, cheeks warm. “This is… Sukuna. My husband.” The word made something in him flicker—pride, possession, something tender he’d never admit.

He gave them a short nod that wasn’t quite polite but wasn’t rude either. “Hi.” Asha looked like she’d been struck by lightning. Mei’s mouth fell open for a second. Nari blushed so hard you thought she might evaporate. Jia stared openly, no shame at all.

“Hello,” Mei managed, voice suddenly too high.

Sukuna’s eyes flicked over their faces, unimpressed, then back to you—always back to you.

He reached down, fingers brushing your hand. “You ready?” You nodded again. Asha cleared her throat, trying to sound casual and failing. “We were just—uh—adding her to the mom chat.” Sukuna blinked once. “Good.” Then, after a beat, gruffly: “Keep her busy.”

The way he said it wasn’t controlling.

It was… reluctant approval.

Like letting you have friends was a new skill he was learning with clenched teeth.

The server came by with the check, and Sukuna didn’t even look at it. He took it calmly, as if it belonged to him, and stood.

“I’ve got it,” he said.

Asha’s eyes widened. “Oh no, you don’t—”

“Yes,” Sukuna said, flat.

Mei stammered, “We can split—” Sukuna gave a small, humorless huff. “No.” You reached for his arm softly. “Sukuna—” He glanced down at you, and his expression softened again, just for you. “It’s fine.”

He paid for everything. All of it. No debate.

When he came back, you were already shifting carefully to stand, but your knees felt wobbly—pregnancy, exhaustion, the long morning, the emotional weight of being around people.

Sukuna noticed immediately.

He stepped close, hand settling at your waist with a firm gentleness, helping you rise like you were precious and not fragile.

You steadied yourself against him.

He leaned down and kissed your temple—slow, familiar, grounding. “Good?” he murmured, only for you.

You nodded, and the soft smile you gave him felt like sunlight.

Behind you, the women looked like they’d just watched something indecently intimate in public.

Asha’s hand flew to her chest. “Oh my God.” Mei whispered, “That was… unfair.” Jia fanned herself again. “I’m pregnant and still jealous.” You laughed under your breath, cheeks burning, and Sukuna’s mouth twitched—almost a smile, brief and private. He guided you toward the door, palm warm at your back, and as you stepped outside, the air hit your face cool and clean.

Your phone buzzed again—new messages from the mom chat already popping in like fireflies.

And for the first time in a long time, you felt something you didn’t recognize at first.

Not fear.

Not control.

Not even the sharp edge of hope.

Just… a small, steady sense of life unfolding—messy and real—while Sukuna stood beside you like a shadow that had learned how to be gentle in daylight.

The apartment was quiet when you stepped inside. Not the heavy quiet that came before storms—just the ordinary hush of a space waiting to be filled. Sukuna locked the door behind you with a soft click, and you slipped your shoes off carefully, one hand drifting to the wall for balance.

Your belly had grown enough now that bending felt different. Deliberate. Like your body was reminding you constantly: You're carrying something precious. Move carefully. You straightened and turned—

And found Sukuna standing in the middle of the living room, hands flexing at his sides.

He wasn't looking at you.

Not directly.

His gaze was somewhere lower—fixed, unblinking—and his chest rose and fell too fast, like he'd been running even though you'd only walked from the car.

Your stomach fluttered.

"Sukuna?" you said softly.

His eyes snapped up to yours, and the look in them made your breath catch.

Not anger.

Not control.

Something rawer.

Hungrier.

He swallowed hard, throat working visibly, and his hands curled into fists before releasing again—slow, deliberate, like he was trying to keep them from reaching for you without permission.

"I'm fine," he said, voice rough.

But he wasn't.

You could see it in the way his shoulders stayed tight. In the way his jaw clenched. In the way he shifted his weight from one foot to the other like standing still was unbearable.

He started pacing.

Three steps toward the kitchen. Stop. Turn. Three steps back.

His fingers twitched at his sides.

You watched him, heart thudding softly, and then you asked again—gentler this time, careful.

"Are you alright?" Sukuna stopped mid-step.

His back was to you for a second, shoulders rising with a deep inhale that didn't seem to help. Then he turned, and his eyes locked onto you with an intensity that made your skin prickle.

Not your face.

Your belly.

The soft swell of it beneath your sweater, round and full and undeniable now at nearly twenty weeks. His gaze dragged over you like touch—slow, heavy, possessive in a way that didn't feel like control so much as need.

And then you noticed.

The way his pants fit differently. The visible strain at the front, the hard line of his cock pressing against the fabric, thick and swollen and impossible to ignore.

Your cheeks burned instantly.

Sukuna's throat bobbed again as he swallowed, and his hands flexed once more—open, close, open—like he was fighting himself. "I—" His voice cracked slightly. He cleared his throat, tried again. "I haven't touched you."

It wasn't an accusation.

It was an admission.

A confession that sounded like it had been clawing at him for two weeks.

You stood very still, pulse fluttering in your throat. "No," you whispered. "You haven't." His jaw clenched. "I didn't want to—" He stopped, exhaling sharply through his nose. "I didn't want you to think I was… taking." The word hung in the air between you.

Taking.

Like he'd finally learned the difference. Your heart ached and warmed at the same time, a strange, contradictory pull that made your chest tight. "I know," you said softly.

Sukuna's eyes flicked back to your belly, and something in his expression shifted—darkened, softened, became almost reverent.

"You're…" He trailed off, then tried again, voice lower. "You're carrying my child." The way he said it—rough, possessive, awed—made heat coil low in your stomach.

You nodded slowly. "Yes." His hands twitched again. "I want—" He stopped himself, jaw working. Then, quieter, almost shy in a way you'd never heard from him: "Can I touch you?"

Your breath hitched.

He was asking.

Not demanding. Not assuming.

Asking.

You looked at him—really looked—and saw the tension in every line of his body. The way he held himself back like it was killing him. The way his cock strained visibly against his pants, the way his breathing stayed uneven, the way his eyes kept dropping to your belly like it was the only thing in the world that mattered.

And beneath your own caution, beneath the careful walls you'd built to protect yourself, you felt it:

Want.

You wanted him too. 

You wanted his hands on you. 

You wanted to feel close to him again. 

You wanted to remember what it felt like when his touch was gentle instead of desperate.

So you nodded.

Slowly.

Carefully.

"Yes," you whispered.

Sukuna moved immediately—but not fast.

Not the way he used to, all urgency and hunger that didn't wait for you to catch up. He crossed the space between you in three measured steps, and when he reached you, his hands hovered first—just above your hips, waiting, like he needed one more confirmation.

You didn't pull away.

His palms settled on your waist, warm and broad, and the touch sent a shiver through you that had nothing to do with cold. He exhaled—shaky, relieved—and his thumbs brushed over the fabric of your sweater, tracing the curve of your belly with something close to worship.

"Fuck," he breathed. "You're so…"

He didn't finish.

He just leaned down slowly, carefully, and pressed his forehead to yours. His breath was warm against your lips. His hands stayed gentle, holding you like you were something fragile and holy at the same time.

"Tell me if you want me to stop," he murmured.

You nodded, throat tight.

"I will," you whispered.

His eyes searched yours for a long moment—looking for fear, for hesitation, for any sign that you were only saying yes because you thought you had to.

But you weren't.

You were saying yes because you wanted this.

Because you wanted him, even though wanting him was complicated and messy and sometimes felt like standing too close to a fire.

Sukuna's mouth brushed yours—soft, testing, like he was relearning the shape of you. You kissed him back, slow and careful, and his hands tightened slightly on your waist before loosening again, like he was reminding himself to be gentle.

When he pulled back, his eyes were darker, pupils blown wide, and his voice came out rough and low.

"Bedroom?" You nodded.

He took your hand—not pulling, just holding—and led you down the hall.

The bedroom smelled like clean sheets and the faint trace of his cologne. Sukuna closed the door behind you, and the soft click of the latch made your pulse jump—not with fear, but with anticipation.

He turned to face you, and for a second he just stood there, hands at his sides, watching you like he didn't know where to start.

Like he was afraid of doing it wrong.

You reached for the hem of your sweater slowly, fingers trembling slightly, and his eyes tracked the movement immediately. "Can I?" he asked, voice rough.

You nodded.

He stepped closer and took over, hands sliding under the fabric, lifting it carefully over your belly, over your breasts, over your head. He set it aside like it mattered, like everything about you mattered, and then his gaze dropped.

Your body had changed.

Your breasts were fuller, heavier, sensitive in a way they hadn't been before. Your belly was round and soft, the skin stretched taut over the life growing inside you. You felt exposed—not in a bad way, but in a way that made you hyperaware of every inch of yourself.

Sukuna's throat worked as he swallowed.

"Fuck," he breathed again, and the word sounded like prayer.

His hands hovered over your belly, and you took them gently, guiding them down until his palms pressed flat against your skin.

Warm.

Rough.

Reverent.

He exhaled shakily, thumbs brushing over the curve of you, and then he dropped to his knees.

Your breath caught.

Sukuna knelt in front of you, eye-level with your belly, and his hands stayed on your hips—steady, grounding.

Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to your skin.

Soft.

Slow.

A kiss that felt like worship.

"Mine," he murmured against you, voice muffled and rough. "Both of you." Your fingers slid into his hair, and he made a low sound in his throat—something between a groan and a sigh. His mouth moved lower, trailing kisses down the swell of your belly, and his hands slid to the waistband of your leggings.

He paused.

Looked up at you.

"Can I take these off?" You nodded, cheeks burning. "Yes."

He peeled them down carefully, taking your underwear with them, and helped you step out of them one leg at a time. Then his hands were back on your hips, and he was staring at you like you were the only thing in the world worth looking at.

"Sit on the bed," he said softly.

You did, sinking down onto the edge of the mattress, and Sukuna stayed on his knees in front of you. His hands slid up your thighs—slow, deliberate—and he pressed them apart gently.

Your breath hitched.

"Tell me if it's too much," he murmured, eyes flicking up to yours.

You nodded, heart pounding.

And then his mouth was on you.

Soft.

Warm.

Gentle.

His tongue dragged over you in one slow, deliberate stroke, and your hips jerked involuntarily, a gasp spilling from your lips. Sukuna groaned against you, the sound vibrating through your core, and his hands tightened on your thighs—not hard, just enough to keep you steady. He worked you slowly, carefully, like he was savoring every taste, every sound you made. His tongue circled your clit in soft, teasing strokes, and when you whimpered, he did it again—firmer this time, more deliberate.

"Sukuna—"

"Tell me what feels good," he murmured against you, breath hot and damp. "That—" Your voice broke. "That feels good." He hummed in approval and kept going, tongue flicking over you in steady, rhythmic strokes that made your thighs tremble. Your fingers tightened in his hair, and he groaned again, the sound rough and desperate.

"Fuck, you taste so good," he muttered, pulling back just enough to speak before diving back in, mouth sealing over your clit and sucking gently.

You cried out, hips bucking, and his hands slid up to hold your belly—steadying you, grounding you, reminding you that he had you. The pleasure built slowly, a warm, heavy coil low in your stomach that tightened with every stroke of his tongue. Your breathing came faster, shallower, and your thighs started to shake.

"Sukuna—I'm—"

"Let go," he murmured against you. "I've got you."

And you did.

The orgasm rolled through you in slow, shuddering waves, your body clenching and releasing as you gasped his name. Sukuna didn't stop—didn't pull away—just kept his mouth on you, tongue working you through it until you were trembling and oversensitive and pulling at his hair weakly.

He pulled back then, lips wet and swollen, and looked up at you with dark, hungry eyes.

"Good?" he asked, voice rough.

You nodded, breathless. "Yes."

He rose slowly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and then he was leaning over you, one hand braced beside your hip, the other cupping your face.

"I want to be inside you," he murmured, thumb brushing over your cheek. "But only if you want it." Your heart thudded hard. You looked up at him—at the tension in his jaw, the restraint in every line of his body, the way he was waiting for you to decide.

And you realized:

He meant it.

If you said no, he would stop.

He would walk away.

He would let you have the choice.

So you nodded, voice soft but sure. "I want it." Sukuna's eyes fluttered shut for a second, relief and hunger warring on his face. Then he straightened, hands going to his belt.

He undressed quickly—shirt pulled over his head, pants shoved down and kicked aside—and then he was bare in front of you, cock thick and hard and flushed dark at the tip.

He climbed onto the bed carefully, settling between your thighs, and his hands slid under your knees, lifting them gently.

"Tell me if it hurts," he murmured, eyes locked on yours.

You nodded.

He lined himself up, the head of his cock pressing against you, and then he pushed in—slow, careful, giving you time to adjust.

You gasped at the stretch, at the fullness, and Sukuna froze immediately.

"Okay?" he asked, voice strained. "Yes," you breathed. "Keep going." He did, sinking into you inch by inch until he was fully seated, and then he stopped, forehead dropping to yours, breathing hard. "Fuck," he groaned. "You feel so good."

You wrapped your arms around his neck, pulling him closer, and he started to move—slow, deep thrusts that made you gasp and cling to him.

His hands stayed gentle, one braced beside your head, the other sliding down to cradle your belly as he moved.

"You're so fucking beautiful," he muttered, voice rough and awed. "Carrying my baby. Mine."

The possessiveness in his voice should have scared you.

But it didn't.

It made you feel wanted.

Cherished.

His.

You moaned softly, hips rolling to meet his thrusts, and Sukuna groaned, pace quickening slightly. "Is this okay?" he asked, breathless. "Am I hurting you?"

"No," you gasped. "It's good. Don't stop." He didn't.

He kept moving, kept filling you, kept murmuring praise and possession against your skin until you were trembling beneath him, pleasure building again in slow, inevitable waves. When you came the second time, it was quieter—softer—a gentle unraveling that left you breathless and clinging to him.

Sukuna followed moments later, groaning your name as he spilled inside you, hips stuttering, hands tightening on your body before loosening again. He collapsed beside you carefully, pulling you into his arms, and for a long moment neither of you spoke.

Just breathed.

Just held each other.

His hand settled on your belly, fingers splayed wide, and you covered it with yours.

"I love you," he murmured, voice rough and quiet.

You turned your head, pressing a kiss to his jaw.

"I love you too."

And for the first time in two weeks, the space between you felt less like a gap and more like a bridge.

its my birthday on saturday😭

@marcelinebtw @chososcupoftea @winkii @eli54sa @strawberryosaki @rumblehoneyy @ellsiedjarin @poopypantsstinkface @tojisunicornbraidd @it2muse3 @wildlycruelphoenix @kamisiag @blissingtaehyung @moe-moes-stuff @simplyspooky8 @attackonnat @confusedmomfriend @man1cslut @xunquish-blog @cherrycokeline @onlykuna @quietworld7 @grimm3r @moonlight-dara @tojis-ball-sack @metal-fl @ellsiedjarin @blissingtaehyung @darkkuna @achildofaphrodite @puttyly @sadlovergirlhere @loramae @mitown @whatitdodobby @3lliesrifle @dawnsoblivion @laceyvnilla @divvagal @n4namislover @nanamisprettyhousewife @lkukaknka @ayookeikooo @classycreationlight @leon-kennedys-wife1 @moonlight-dara @unlimited-impressions @swagalicious27 @moonlight52moonlight 

[suku-enthusiasts]

Our Personal Bubble || ryomen sukuna

here is a little fluff brain rot mwah

You had always liked your space.

Not in a cold way. Not in the dramatic, wounded sort of way people sometimes imagined when someone said they preferred being alone. You loved people. You loved your friends, your family, quiet dinners, soft conversations, and the occasional evening out when you had enough time beforehand to mentally prepare for it.

You simply liked silence too.

You liked reading on one end of the couch without someone leaning over your shoulder to ask what page you were on. You liked cooking with music playing softly and no one crowding the counter. You liked sleeping with your legs stretched out, your pillow cool beneath your cheek, and at least a small strip of mattress where no one else’s elbow, knee, or entire body had invaded.

You were sweet.

You were affectionate.

You were also deeply, peacefully introverted.

Ryomen Sukuna had appeared to be the same way when you first met him.

He was quiet. Severe. Difficult to approach. The kind of man who could spend an entire party standing in a corner with a drink in one hand and a look on his face that discouraged strangers from speaking to him. He hated small talk, ignored group chats, and once left a birthday dinner without saying goodbye because, in his words, “I had already attended.”

Naturally, you assumed he understood personal space.

You were wrong.

Horribly wrong.

Sukuna understood personal space perfectly well.

He simply did not believe yours applied to him.

The change had happened almost immediately after you started dating. Before that, he had been restrained. Controlled. He would sit beside you without touching, walk you home with his hands in his pockets, and offer you his jacket with the stiff seriousness of a man performing a legal obligation.

Then you kissed him for the first time.

After that, Sukuna became a problem.

If you sat on the couch, he either pulled you onto his lap or stretched out with his head resting heavily across your thighs. If you tried to move, he opened one red eye and stared at you as though you had violated a binding contract.

“Where are you going?”

“To get water.”

“There’s water here.”

“That glass is yours.”

“You can have it.”

“I don’t want your water.”

“Why?”

“Because you drank out of it.”

His expression would darken. “You kiss me.”

“That is different.”

“How?”

“It just is.”

He would stare at you for a moment, then tighten one arm around your waist before closing his eyes again.

“Sit down.”

“You’re bossy.”

“You’re moving too much.”

“You are literally lying on me.”

“Yes.”

That was always his answer.

Yes.

As though acknowledging the crime made it acceptable.

Cooking was worse.

Sukuna could have been in another room, occupied with something completely unrelated, and the moment you began chopping vegetables, he would appear behind you like an enormous, tattooed ghost. He would press against your back, wrap both arms around your waist, and rest his chin on your shoulder while you tried to use a knife safely.

“Sukuna,” you would say.

“What?”

“I’m cooking.”

“I can see that.”

“You are making it difficult.”

“I’m standing.”

“You’re hanging on me.”

“I’m barely touching you.”

His chest would be pressed against your entire back. His arms would be locked around your middle. His face would be buried against the side of your neck.

“Barely?”

“Yes.”

“You are six foot four.”

“Not my fault.”

“You are breathing in my ear.”

“That is generally how breathing works.”

You would turn your head just enough to glare at him.

He would kiss your cheek.

And somehow, inexplicably, that would become the end of the argument.

He followed you into the bathroom too.

Not every time. He had boundaries.

They were simply strange boundaries.

If you were doing your hair, he leaned in the doorway and watched.

If you were washing your face, he stood beside you and examined his own reflection like he had also suddenly developed a skincare routine.

If you were brushing your teeth, he brushed his teeth at the same time, even if he had already done it.

The first time you realized this, you had watched him reach for his toothbrush at nearly eleven at night.

“You already brushed your teeth.”

He froze with the toothpaste in hand.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“When?”

“After dinner.”

“That was earlier.”

“It was an hour ago.”

He stared at you in the mirror.

You stared back, toothbrush hanging from your mouth.

Then he squeezed toothpaste onto the brush anyway.

“You’re going to damage your gums.”

“My gums are strong.”

“That does not mean—”

He started brushing.

You narrowed your eyes at him.

His mouth foamed slightly around the toothbrush as he smirked.

You had realized then that he was not brushing his teeth because he needed to.

He simply wanted to stand beside you.

That was the thing about Sukuna.

To everyone else, he appeared profoundly uninterested in human attachment.

He did not hug his friends. He barely answered messages. He had once stared at a coworker who tried to pat his shoulder until the poor man quietly apologized.

But with you, he needed constant contact.

His hand on your thigh beneath restaurant tables.

His fingers hooked through your belt loop while you stood in line.

His palm resting against the back of your neck while you watched television.

His leg pressed against yours in bed.

If there was a way for Sukuna to be touching you, he found it.

Sometimes he invented one.

You were convinced that half the things he claimed required help did not.

“Come here,” he would say from the bedroom.

You would walk in and find him standing in front of the mirror with a perfectly reachable zipper at the back of his jacket.

“What?”

“Help.”

“With what?”

“This.”

“You can reach that.”

“No.”

“Sukuna.”

“My shoulder hurts.”

“You went to the gym this morning.”

“Exactly.”

You would sigh and walk toward him anyway, and the moment your fingers touched the zipper, his hands would find your hips.

“You are such a liar.”

He would meet your gaze in the mirror.

“Yes.”

At night, his clinginess became nearly unbearable.

Sukuna did not cuddle politely.

He did not simply place an arm around your waist and remain on his side of the bed like a civilized man.

He consumed space.

Every night, he pulled you against him until there was no air left between your bodies. One arm went beneath your neck, the other wrapped around your waist, one leg wedged between yours. Sometimes he tucked your head under his chin. Sometimes he buried his face against your hair. Sometimes he draped himself over you so thoroughly you woke up convinced a building had collapsed.

You tried reasoning with him.

“Sukuna, we have a king-sized bed.”

“I know.”

“You are using three-quarters of it.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You are on my side.”

“You’re on my side.”

“I went to sleep over there.”

“And now you’re here.”

“Because you dragged me.”

He would blink at you sleepily, hair messy, eyes half-open.

“You came willingly.”

“I was asleep.”

“Exactly.”

You had developed a system.

You let him cuddle you until he fell asleep. Then, once his breathing grew deep and his grip loosened, you carefully slipped from his arms and moved toward your side of the bed.

Most nights, it worked.

Sometimes, half-asleep, he followed.

You would wake up an hour later with him attached to you again, one arm locked around your waist like his body had detected the distance and corrected it without his permission.

It was ridiculous.

It was also, though you hated admitting it, a little adorable.

Sukuna, who looked like he would rather bite through glass than admit he needed anyone, slept best with his face buried against your neck.

Still, there were limits.

And that summer evening, with the heat hanging thick and unmoving around the house, you reached yours.

The air conditioner was working, technically, but it had been fighting a losing battle against the brutal temperature outside all day. The bedroom felt warm despite the fan turning overhead. The sheets were too heavy. Your skin felt sticky after your shower, and even the thin cotton sleep shirt you wore clung uncomfortably to your back.

You were exhausted.

You had spent the day running errands, answering messages, cleaning, and pretending the heat had not slowly drained your soul from your body.

By the time you climbed into bed, you wanted only darkness, cold air, and silence.

Sukuna came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, shirtless, wearing dark sleep pants low on his hips. He turned off the bathroom light and crossed the room, looking completely unaffected by the heat because the universe had favorites and apparently he was one of them.

He slid into bed behind you.

You felt the mattress dip.

Then his arm wrapped around your waist.

His chest pressed against your back.

One leg pushed between yours.

His face tucked against the nape of your neck.

You closed your eyes.

For approximately ten seconds, you tried to tolerate it.

Then his breath warmed your skin.

Your eye twitched.

“Sukuna.”

“Mhm?”

“You’re hot.”

His arm tightened.

“I know.”

You turned your head slightly. “Not like that.”

His mouth curved against your shoulder. “You should be more specific.”

“I mean your body temperature.”

“That sounds less flattering.”

“You are making me sweat.”

“You were already sweating.”

“You are making it worse.”

He gave a sleepy hum and pressed a kiss beneath your ear.

Normally, that would have softened you.

Tonight, it made you feel approximately twelve degrees warmer.

You shifted forward.

Sukuna followed.

You shifted again.

He followed again.

You stared into the darkness.

“Sukuna.”

“What?”

“You’re following me.”

“I’m lying down.”

“You moved.”

“You moved first.”

“Because you were on me.”

“I’m always on you.”

“Yes, that is the problem.”

He went quiet.

You felt a small, immediate stab of guilt, but you were too tired and too warm to soften the truth.

You turned carefully in his arms to face him.

His eyes were open now, faintly visible in the dim light.

You placed one hand against his chest.

“Baby,” you said gently, “can you please go to your side tonight?”

He stared at you.

Not angry.

Not offended.

Just still.

You continued, trying to keep your voice soft.

“I’m really hot, and I’m tired, and I need a little space to sleep.”

His eyes narrowed slightly.

“Space.”

“Yes.”

“From me.”

You sighed. “Not emotionally.”

He watched you for another second.

Then, without a word, Sukuna released you.

He rolled away.

You exhaled in relief, stretching your legs beneath the sheet.

Finally.

Cool air touched the back of your neck. The mattress no longer felt like an oven filled with muscle.

You closed your eyes.

Then you heard movement.

The mattress shifted again.

A second later, it rose.

Your eyes opened.

You turned over.

Sukuna was standing beside the bed.

You blinked at him.

“What are you doing?”

“You wanted space.”

“I meant go to your side.”

“I am.”

“You are off the bed.”

He looked down at the floor.

Then back at you.

“This is my side now.”

You stared.

He stared back.

“Sukuna.”

“What?”

“You’re standing.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“You requested distance.”

“I requested that you move twelve inches.”

“You did not specify.”

“I said your side.”

He gestured toward the empty strip of mattress he had abandoned.

“That is your side.”

“Then why are you on the floor?”

He folded his arms across his chest.

“You said you were hot.”

“I am.”

“You said I was the problem.”

“I said your body heat was the problem.”

“Same thing.”

“It is absolutely not the same thing.”

Sukuna looked away with the deeply wounded expression of a man who had been betrayed by the legal system.

You pushed yourself up onto one elbow.

“Come back to bed.”

“No.”

Your eyebrows rose.

“No?”

“You wanted space.”

“I have space.”

“Good.”

“Sukuna.”

He sat down on the floor beside the bed.

You stared at the top of his pink head.

This man.

This enormous, frightening, stubborn man.

He sat on the bedroom floor like an exiled dog.

You leaned over the edge of the mattress. “What are you doing now?”

“Sleeping.”

“On the floor?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to sleep on the floor because I asked you to roll over?”

He looked up at you.

“You said please.”

“That usually makes a request nicer.”

“It sounded serious.”

“It was serious because I was hot.”

“And now you’re not.”

You rubbed one hand over your face.

“Sukuna, there are other options between crushing me in your sleep and abandoning the bed entirely.”

He shrugged.

You could tell he was trying to appear indifferent.

He failed.

His shoulders were stiff. His mouth was set in a firm line. He looked offended, but beneath it was something almost embarrassingly soft.

He genuinely thought you did not want him near you.

The realization made your irritation fade.

Mostly.

“You’re being dramatic,” you said.

“You’re being controlling.”

“You were wrapped around me like a heated blanket.”

“You usually like it.”

“I do usually like it.”

His eyes flicked toward yours.

You softened your voice.

“I’m just tired tonight.”

He studied your face carefully.

Then he looked away again.

“Fine.”

He stayed on the floor.

You stared at him.

He stared at the wall.

The fan continued turning overhead.

Somewhere outside, a car passed.

You were about to reach down and physically drag him back onto the mattress when Sukuna suddenly leaned toward the nightstand.

You watched as he opened the bottom drawer.

“What are you doing?”

He ignored you.

His hand disappeared inside.

Then he pulled out a small bag of candy.

You blinked.

It was your favorite candy.

The kind you always forgot to buy for yourself. The kind he complained was too sweet while somehow keeping emergency bags hidden throughout the house.

Sukuna opened the bag.

The plastic crinkled loudly in the quiet room.

He took out one piece and held it up.

You stared at it.

He stared at you.

“What is that?” you asked.

“Candy.”

“I can see that.”

He extended his hand slightly.

You narrowed your eyes.

“Are you bribing me?”

“No.”

“You’re offering me candy immediately after I asked for space.”

“Yes.”

“That is a bribe.”

“It is a negotiation.”

You looked at the candy again.

Then at him.

His expression remained perfectly serious.

You took it.

His eyes watched as you unwrapped it and placed it in your mouth.

The sweetness bloomed across your tongue.

Sukuna waited exactly three seconds.

Then, in the calmest voice imaginable, he asked, “Can I cuddle now?”

Your heart broke.

Not dramatically.

Not painfully.

Just softly, all at once, under the weight of how ridiculous and sweet he was.

You stared at him on the floor, hair messy from lying down, candy bag in one hand, his entire intimidating body folded beside the mattress because you had asked for a little room.

He looked so serious.

So hopeful.

So stupidly cute.

You sighed.

“Oh, baby.”

His brows pulled together. “What?”

You reached down and grabbed his wrist.

“Come here.”

He stood immediately.

Too quickly.

You almost laughed.

Sukuna climbed back into bed, and before he could arrange himself around you again, you caught him by the shoulders and pulled him toward you.

He blinked in surprise as you wrapped both arms around his neck.

You hugged him tightly.

Not politely.

Not delicately.

You squeezed him until his cheek pressed against yours.

“There,” you murmured. “Happy?”

His arms came around your waist slowly.

“Yes.”

“You’re such a baby.”

“No.”

“You moved to the floor.”

“You asked for space.”

“You brought me candy to negotiate physical affection.”

“It worked.”

You pulled back just enough to look at him.

His face had gone smug again.

The softness had not disappeared, though. You could still see it beneath the smirk.

You lifted both hands and squeezed his cheeks.

His lips pushed forward.

His eyes narrowed immediately.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re so cute.”

His expression darkened.

“Stop.”

“You are.”

“I’m not.”

“You had emergency candy in the nightstand.”

“That was for me.”

“You hate that candy.”

“I tolerate it.”

“For me.”

“No.”

You squeezed his cheeks harder.

His mouth compressed between your palms.

“You’re adorable,” you said.

His muffled voice came out furious. “Take your hands off my face.”

“You’re my cute little clingy husband.”

“I will leave again.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I might.”

You released his cheeks.

He stared at you with deep offense, red eyes narrowed, face slightly pink where you had squeezed it.

You kissed one cheek.

Then the other.

His expression softened immediately despite his best efforts.

You smiled.

“There he is.”

“Who?”

“My sweet baby.”

“I’m older than you.”

“By one year.”

“And larger.”

“Much larger.”

“Then stop calling me baby.” You kissed the tip of his nose.

“No.”

He glared.

You grinned.

Then his arms tightened suddenly, and he rolled you beneath him in one smooth movement. You gasped, laughing as he buried his face against your neck.

“Sukuna!”

“You wanted to cuddle.”

“I did not say suffocate me.”

“You hugged me first.”

“I felt bad.”

“That sounds like permission.”

“It is not.”

He settled more of his weight carefully over you, still holding himself up enough not to crush you.

You were warm again.

Too warm.

His chest was a furnace.

His breath tickled your neck.

But now you could feel the way he smiled against your skin, satisfied and peaceful, as though the universe had been restored to its proper order.

You sighed.

“Can we at least compromise?”

“No.”

“Sukuna.”

“What?”

“You can cuddle me, but no leg trap.”

His thigh was already wedged between yours.

He moved it reluctantly.

“And do not put your whole body on me.”

He shifted half an inch.

“More.”

Another inch.

“Sukuna.”

He rolled onto his side and pulled you against his chest.

It was still warm, but less suffocating.

You rested your cheek against him.

“Better?”

He grunted.

“That means yes.”

“It means I’m tolerating your rules.”

“You love my rules.”

“I hate rules.”

“You make rules for everything.”

“Mine are correct.”

You smiled into his chest.

His hand moved slowly along your back.

The room settled around you again. The fan whispered overhead. The candy bag remained open on the floor beside the bed, one piece missing, the evidence of his absurd little peace offering.

After a few quiet minutes, Sukuna spoke.

“Do I bother you?”

His voice was different.

Lower.

Careful.

You lifted your head.

“What?”

He did not look at you.

“When I follow you around.”

Your heart softened again.

You shifted higher, propping your chin against his chest.

“Sometimes.”

His eyes snapped toward yours.

You laughed quietly.

“Not in a bad way.”

“That is exactly what someone says before saying something bad.”

“I like that you want to be near me.”

He watched you closely.

“I also like being alone sometimes.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you stand behind me every time I cook?”

“You could burn yourself.”

“I have never burned myself.”

“You could.”

“Why do you follow me into the bathroom?”

“You take too long.”

“You brush your teeth twice just to stand next to me.”

“That is dental responsibility.”

You smiled.

He looked away.

You touched his cheek.

“Sukuna.”

“What?”

“You do not have to be touching me every second to know I love you.”

His jaw tightened slightly.

“I know.”

“You’re saying that like you don’t know.”

“I know.”

You waited.

His fingers continued tracing slow lines along your back.

Finally, he sighed.

“You’re quiet.”

“I know.”

“You disappear into your own head.”

“I do.”

“And sometimes I can’t tell if you want me there.”

You stared at him.

Sukuna was not shy.

He was not insecure in the ordinary way. He walked through the world like it belonged to him and merely allowed other people to occupy portions of it.

But with you, beneath all the smugness and possessiveness and constant touching, there was something unexpectedly vulnerable.

He loved you so much that sometimes he did not know where to place it.

So he placed it everywhere.

Against your waist while you cooked.

Across your lap on the couch.

Beside you at the bathroom sink.

Wrapped around you in bed.

You leaned closer and kissed him gently.

“I always want you in my life,” you whispered. “I just do not always want you physically attached to my spine.”

His eyes narrowed.

“That sounds contradictory.”

“It is not.”

“It is.”

“You can sit beside me without sitting on me.”

“Why?”

“Because I am a person, not furniture.”

“You’re comfortable.”

You laughed softly and kissed him again.

He followed your mouth when you pulled away, stealing one more.

Then another.

“You’re impossible,” you murmured.

“You like me.”

“I love you.”

The smugness left his face.

It always did when you said it plainly.

His eyes softened, his hand moving up to cradle the back of your head.

“I love you too.”

You smiled.

“Even when I need space?”

He stared at you.

“Unfortunately.”

You pinched his side.

He caught your wrist.

“You’re aggressive.”

“You called loving me unfortunate.”

“You know what I meant.”

“I did.”

You settled back against his chest.

He adjusted the sheet over both of you and tucked you closer, but this time he left enough room for air to pass between your bodies.

Barely.

It was an improvement.

After another minute, you felt his breathing deepen.

His grip loosened.

You considered moving.

The old routine.

Wait until he slept, then carefully slip away.

You lifted your head slightly.

Sukuna’s eyes remained closed, his face peaceful in a way it rarely was during the day. One hand rested loosely at your waist. His hair fell over his forehead. His mouth, so often curled into a smirk or sharpened by irritation, had softened in sleep.

Cute.

Painfully cute.

You reached up and squeezed his cheek once more.

His eyes opened instantly.

“What?”

You smiled.

“Nothing.”

“You touched my face.”

“You’re cute.”

“Go to sleep.”

You kissed his cheek.

He closed his eyes again.

Then, without opening them, he tightened his arm around you.

“Don’t move.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I was.”

“You answered immediately.”

“Instinct.”

“Clingy instinct.”

He pulled you closer.

You laughed quietly.

The summer heat still pressed around the room. His body was still warm. You would probably wake up sweating at some point and regret every decision that had brought you here.

But for now, you tucked your face beneath his chin and wrapped one arm around his waist.

Sukuna hummed, satisfied.

“There,” he murmured sleepily. “Better.”

You smiled against his skin.

“For you.”

“For us.”

“Mostly you.”

He kissed the top of your head.

“You love me.”

“I do.”

“And I’m cute.”

You lifted your head.

His eyes remained shut, but the corner of his mouth had curved.

You narrowed your eyes.

“I thought you hated being called cute.”

“I do.”

“You just called yourself cute.”

“I said you said it.”

“That is not what happened.”

“Go to sleep.” You laughed softly and settled against him again.

A few minutes later, when you thought he had finally fallen asleep, his voice rumbled through his chest.

“There’s more candy in the drawer.”

You smiled into the dark.

“Is that another negotiation?”

“Maybe.”

“For what?”

His arm tightened around you.

“Tomorrow.”

HEHHEH I LOVE HIM

[suku-enthusiasts]

Hi! I saw your repost about the incest and pedo stuff, and omg! I'm glad to find out that you're also against those topics being used for the main purpose of arousing people. I mean it's kinda obvious that that's your stance on the discourse considering how well written and navigated the heavy topics that you have in your stories but still I didn't want to assume. But I digress, may you also share your opinions on how people also defend it or justify it by saying it's a way for victims to cope? It's completely fine if not! Also can I share my rather very lenghty thoughts on the topic? That's all!🫶

I have been reading books since the age of like six years old. I was reading at a college level at 13 years old. I graduated high school at 15.

I was in an advanced school for kids who essentially were advanced right. So I have read a lot of books in my life. I think I have read a little bit over 5000 books probably more. And yes, in a lot of books there are non-consensual scenes. There are scenes about being molested things like that right? which is normal because a lot of people write based off their experience or based off of other people‘s experience which is totally fine but writing something to the point of coming off as this is arousing is not OK.

Someone like me who was severely molested by a stepfather from the age of 7 to 14 years old, when I read books that had stories about having a relationship with your stepfather or your stepbrother or finding your sibling attractive. Those are books that I never let myself finish and couldn’t even bring myself to finish those kind of books or stories. Because finding your stepfather attractive and wanting him to fuck you or your step sibling or your blood sibling, that’s not a normal feeling there’s something chemically wrong with either people.

I’ve studied psychology. I’m very advanced in the field. I’ve been in the medical industry for eight years and I’ve seen a lot of things in life and one thing that is not normal is incest. that’s not feelings people have normally. So writing a story that is sexualizing that kind of thing it’s not normal either.

Because people like me who have seen this and who have personally experienced this in their lifetime, it makes me wonder if that person has kids. What would they do to their children because I know what it’s like firsthand to be abused by a stepfather and an uncle. It’s not arousing whatsoever, so I will not choose to write something and make it arousing on top of that for the sake of my readers.

I love my readers, but if one of my readers messages me and asked me to write a story based off of that they can Unfollow me immediately because I will not condone such behavior and such mindset that this is normal because it’s not normal. 

Now I’m understand non-consensual things in stories and books because unfortunately, that is normal that happens all over the world with nearly every single person that is alive. There is not one person I know in my life that has not been sexually assaulted or abused. Now does it mean that I make it arousing in stories that I write? absolutely not when I write about un consensual things of a character it is always a form of abuse and how that character it affected their life going forward but also how they grew from it and you see the growth you see the pain you see all of it. You see the character development, but I don’t make it arousing. I don’t go into explicit detail about what is happening to that character.

And people who have read my stories I don’t add a lot of graphic explicit sex scenes. I add maybe a couple within the entire story. I think I have a few pieces out of the many that I have that may have more sex scenes than others, but I am really am big on the plot and the storyline. I am not big on sex scenes and to be quite honest I don’t really like writing sex scenes. But I know in stories people do like a little bit of spice to it or it really helps develop the story better which I am OK with as an author I can be OK with writing a couple sex scenes, but I am not gonna write something that is traumatic and going into graphic detail about how someone is being molested or being raped. I wrote one story where I wrote one graphic scene about a character being assaulted by her own husband, and that was the most hardest thing I think I have ever had to write in my life and it’s the only time I have ever written something like that and I told myself that I would never write those things again that yes it’s OK to maybe insinuate something happens but writing graphic scenes like that it’s just not for me. I understand that sometimes in order for people to get the gravity of the story, but for me personally that is difficult for me to write.

I don’t wanna sit here and say that I shamed people for writing incest or stepfather stepdaughter crap but I do shame people for that because it is not normal. That is not a normal thing to write about and as someone who has studied psychology and has been in the medical industry for nearly 10 years. I can tell you that people who write those kind of things I would advise to go to therapy, and I will not be following that person and supporting their work.

I always advocate for people writing and expressing themselves because writing is such a beautiful thing, but incest is not normal and that does not need to be sexualized and it does not need to be arousing. And if I personally lose followers for feeling this way, then I’m OK with that because I know at the end of the day I am using my moral judgment to not sexualize something disgusting, and I am using my platform in a way that can make people feel safe and heard at the same time. 

Anyways there’s my rant😭😂

[suku-enthusiasts]

I do want to emphasize, I do NOT write incest or step sibling/parent things. As someone who was severely abused from a step parent, I promise you, those stories being written are not arousing, they are concerning and disgusting. I will NOT be taking request like that. 

[myneighborkoo]

im sorry but you will NEVER convince me that fics w dead dove / rape / pedophilia / incest etc is normal or in tandem w personal preference. it is very clearly fetish content that perverts within fandoms use to justify their degeneracy bc tell me why there r rapist!character headcanons???? like these people are obv making this content for weirdos to jerk off to and it kills me that this is so normalized within fandoms bc its “just content”, it’s always deeper than that and you’re just using fiction as an outlet so you don’t go to jail, you all should be put on a list

[f-tality0]

Sukuna w goons but like if I forgot to add smthjbg it’s cause it’s 2am buhbye

[suku-enthusiasts]

I got your toe pics btw 😏 also I love you're tats 😭 and you're literally bad as hell🤍

BWHAHHA YALL CRACK ME UP

[suku-enthusiasts]

Chapter Six || Teeth & Tenderness - R. Sukuna

ryomen sukuna x f!reader — sorcerer au

“Her hands once only knew ruin. Then she met a man monstrous enough to love the darkness in them, and together they built something savage, tender, and dangerous enough to survive the end of the world. But love born from blood never stays quiet for long.”

tw; death. ptsd. abuse. murder. graphic scenes. smut

masterlist | series masterlist | next

Any time you and Sukuna arrived at Jujutsu High, the mood between you only ever seemed to go one of two ways.

There was no middle with the two of you. No easy, quiet normal that lasted long enough for anyone else to believe in it.

It was always one extreme or the other.

Either the day was sweet.

Those were the days the students secretly prayed for.

You and Sukuna would step out of the car already attached to one another somehow—his hand firm at your lower back, your fingers hooked in the front of his shirt, your mouths finding each other before your feet had even fully crossed the gravel path. He would keep you close like he had forgotten the shape of distance, pausing in corridors to kiss you again, dragging you into empty classrooms for a few stolen minutes just to murmur something low in your ear that made your face go hot. He would take more breaks during training on those days, which the students noticed immediately and appreciated like it was a blessing from the gods. He would sit beside you on the grass instead of across from you. He would hand-feed you fruit from the cafeteria as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He would touch you constantly—your cheek, your waist, your hand, your thigh, the back of your neck—small private claims made in public with no shame in them at all.

Those were the easy days.

The soft days.

The ones where even Gojo knew better than to comment too much, because Sukuna’s temper was buried deep under something warmer and less violent, and you—despite all your sharp edges—looked almost peaceful.

Then there were the other days.

The fighting days.

Those were just as common.

Sukuna would pull up to Jujutsu High already looking aggravated, and before the engine had fully died, you’d be snapping at him about something. Sometimes it was because he told you no. Sometimes because he had left for a mission too early. Sometimes because you woke up angry and decided he was the safest place to throw it. It did not have to make sense. It only had to exist. And if it existed, you would take it out on him with the full dramatic violence of your nature.

More than once, the students had watched Sukuna drag you out of the car with you thrown over his shoulder like an angry cat in expensive silk.

You would be clawing at his back, biting at the air, screaming that you were going to skin him alive and wear his hide as a winter coat.

He, infuriatingly calm, would keep walking.

“Put me down!”

“No.”

“I’ll gut you!”

“Later.”

“I hate you!”

“No, you don’t.”

You would hit his spine with both fists.

He would keep carrying you anyway.

And then, not even an hour later, the same students would see you sitting sideways in his lap under a tree or on the edge of the training grounds, still sulking, still muttering that he was awful, while Sukuna peeled plums for you or handed you slices of fruit one by one. You would snatch them from his fingers with a growl and say, “You are not forgiven.” And Sukuna, because he understood you far better than anyone else ever had, would answer, “I know.”

Today had begun somewhere between those two moods.

You had not bitten him in the car, which was usually a good sign, but you had been in a sharp strange little mood all afternoon—restless, clingy, easily irritated, wanting him near and then snapping when he got too close, wanting his attention and then acting offended when he gave it too slowly. Sukuna had tolerated it with the patience of a man who knew that if he handled you wrong, he’d spend the next hour with his throat under attack.

So he had kept you nearby.

Training had ended not long ago. A few of the students still lingered on the edges of the grounds, talking, stretching, or pretending not to watch the horizon out of old habit. Yuta was a short distance away, half in conversation with Maki before she wandered off toward the equipment racks. Panda and Toge were closer to the main steps. Gojo was nowhere immediately visible, which usually meant he was about to appear at the worst possible moment. Sukuna stood near you with one hand resting absently against the small of your back while you looked out over the grounds with a faint frown.

Then you felt it.

Your body stiffened before your mind caught up.

The cursed energy in the air changed—thicker, colder, threaded through with something old and purposeful and wrong in a way that made the hair on the back of your neck lift. You turned your head first, then your whole body, eyes narrowing toward the sky beyond the trees.

You saw it before anyone else fully reacted.

A cursed spirit shaped like a grotesque pelican was cutting across the air toward the school, its wings wide and unnatural, its body stitched together from black cursed energy and half-living intent. It descended with sickening grace, and on its back stood Suguru Geto with some of his people behind him, robes and hair shifting in the wind, the entire image so calmly theatrical it might have been absurd if it were not so dangerous.

The training grounds went still.

Every conversation died.

Sukuna’s hand left your back instantly.

His whole body changed in one breath—posture sharpening, cursed energy waking under his skin, the lazy domestic warmth of moments before burning away into something colder and far more dangerous. Around you, the other sorcerers reacted fast. Yuta turned fully. Maki’s hand went to her weapon. Panda moved closer to Toge. Somewhere behind, footsteps broke into motion as others on campus began to notice the intrusion.

The cursed pelican descended lower.

Then touched down.

The thing’s claws dug into the earth with a wet crunch of torn sod. The wind from its landing stirred your kimono and sent your hair back from your face. Suguru stepped down first, elegant as ever, composed in that terrible way of men who believed entirely in the righteousness of their own destruction.

His eyes moved over the field.

Found Yuta.

Then found you.

And he smiled.

It was not a warm smile. Not kind. But it was beautiful in the way poison sometimes was—smooth, practiced, awful because it came wrapped in something almost gentle.

“Well,” Suguru said, voice carrying easily over the silence. “What a lovely surprise.” You bared your teeth without thinking.

Yuta went still beside you, his expression tightening at once with recognition and something older, heavier.

Suguru looked between the two of you as though he were seeing treasures laid before him. “You both possess gifts that this world does not deserve.” Sukuna moved in front of you in the same second Gojo appeared and stepped in front of Yuta.

It happened so fast it almost looked rehearsed—the two strongest men in the field positioning themselves between the vulnerable thing behind them and the threat advancing from ahead. Sukuna’s body blocked yours almost completely, broad shoulders squared, crimson eyes lit with immediate violence. Gojo stood looser on the surface, but the air around him changed all the same, easy posture gone taut with deadly attention.

Suguru’s smile widened at the sight of them.

“How predictable,” he murmured.

Gojo tipped his head slightly, voice deceptively bright. “Funny. I was just thinking the same thing.” Sukuna said nothing at first.

He didn’t need to.

The pressure rolling off him spoke more clearly than language. His cursed energy began to gather in dark threads around his body, the atmosphere near him tightening as if the world itself understood that if this went one inch further than he allowed, something monstrous would step fully into the light.

Suguru’s gaze flicked to Sukuna. “And here you are.” His tone held an old curiosity. Old knowledge. The strange frayed thread of a history that predated this moment by years.

“I heard rumors,” Suguru said. “I didn’t believe them. Not at first.” Sukuna’s mouth curled without humor. “Then you should’ve stayed away.” Suguru ignored the warning.

Instead, he looked at you again over Sukuna’s shoulder. “You,” he said softly, almost reverently, “have a power few in this age could even comprehend.” Your hands curled into fists at your sides.

Behind you, you could feel Sukuna’s awareness shift for the slightest fraction of a second—not away from danger, but enough to know where you were, to make sure you were still behind him, still breathing, still under his protection even while his attention remained fixed on the enemy ahead.

Suguru continued, “Life and death in the same hand. Creation and ruin. Do you know what you could become if you stopped letting lesser men fear what you are?” You glared at him, face twisting with disgust. “You talk too much.” That earned a low snort from Gojo.

Yuta stayed quiet, but the tension in him had become its own kind of sound.

Suguru’s smile shifted. “And Yuta. Still wasting himself among people who fear his potential.” Gojo’s grin returned, thinner and sharper now. “You really know how to make a sales pitch sound creepy.” Suguru let the jab slide off him.

“You both have gifts,” he said. “Gifts great enough to change the world with me.” Yuta’s jaw tightened.

You looked openly revolted.

Sukuna took one step forward.

Not much.

Enough.

The earth under his foot cracked. “You are not speaking to her again,” he said, voice low enough that everyone on the field had to lean into the threat to hear it properly.

Suguru met his gaze. “And if I do?” The dark fog around Sukuna thickened. Gojo, still smiling in that sharp white way of his, said without taking his eyes off Suguru, “Then we all get to have a very unpleasant afternoon.”

Suguru’s followers shifted subtly behind him, sensing the escalation. Curses stirred. The air around the pelican spirit warped with restless energy. Somewhere farther back, a student swallowed audibly.

Suguru tilted his head.

“You always were quick to violence.” This time it was Gojo who answered first, his tone light and dangerous all at once. “That’s rich coming from you.” Suguru looked at him briefly, then back to Yuta and you. “I am offering freedom.”

“No,” Sukuna said. “You are offering yourself a weapon.” Suguru’s smile did not leave, but his eyes cooled. “And you aren’t?” That struck the air like flint.

For the briefest second, the whole field seemed to hold its breath.

Then Sukuna laughed.

A short, ugly sound with no real humor in it.

“If I wanted her as a weapon,” he said, “you wouldn’t still be standing there talking.” Something flickered across Suguru’s face then. Acknowledgment, maybe. Or irritation. Or the recognition that whatever fantasies he had woven around you, they had arrived too late. You were not lost anymore. You were not alone. You were not unclaimed by the world.

And worst of all for a man like him, you were loved by something even more dangerous than himself.

Gojo’s smile sharpened as if he sensed the same realization. “You can go now, Suguru.”

Suguru did not move.

His gaze lingered on Yuta.

Then on you.

Then returned to Sukuna.

“This does not end here.” Sukuna’s eyes flashed. “It ends wherever I decide it ends.”

The cursed pelican gave a low, grotesque croak.

Wind shifted over the training grounds, heavy with the promise of violence not yet spent. Around you, everyone stayed taut, waiting to see which way the moment would break—toward blood, or retreat, or something in between.

And there on the field, with Sukuna standing before you like a wall built from hunger and devotion and rage, and Gojo before Yuta like a blade smiling at the dark, Suguru Geto looked at the two of you one final time as though measuring the shape of what he had come too late to take.

The drive home was silent.

Not the easy kind. Not the heavy warm quiet that sometimes settled between you and Sukuna after long days when words were unnecessary because his hand would rest on your thigh and your head would lean against the window and that would be enough. This silence was sharp. Sealed. The kind that filled the car so completely it made even the sound of the tires against wet pavement seem too loud.

Sukuna had not said a single word since leaving Jujutsu High.

Not to you.

Not to the road.

Not even under his breath.

His jaw had stayed tight the entire drive, one hand locked around the steering wheel, the other resting stiffly at his side. The muscles in his forearm had not relaxed once. The air around him felt wrong—too still, too tightly wound, like all the rage he had refused to let loose on the training grounds was now trapped beneath his skin with nowhere to go.

Even you did not press him.

That, by itself, said everything.

Rain had started somewhere along the way, first a mist, then a soft steady fall that silvered the windshield and blurred the world outside into dark trees, wet roads, and passing lights. By the time the gates opened and the car rolled through onto the estate, the rain had settled over everything in a cool gray hush.

Sukuna parked.

The engine died.

Still he said nothing.

You followed him inside in silence, your kimono brushing softly against your legs, the damp scent of rain clinging to the air as the door shut behind you. The house felt too quiet. Uraume had the sense to remain out of sight, or perhaps they had already felt his mood long before the car reached the drive and chosen wisely.

Sukuna stepped out of his shoes and reached for the tie at his collar.

You moved closer.

It was instinct by now, one you had learned without ever naming it. When he came home, you helped. You took his outer robe, undid what needed undoing, touched him in those small domestic ways that still startled you sometimes with how natural they had become.

Your fingers had barely reached for the edge of his robe when he pulled away. “I’m fine.” The words were clipped. Flat. Not cruel exactly. But hard enough that you stopped immediately.

Your hand stayed hovering there for half a second before you let it fall.

Then, because you could see how tightly strung he was and because something in your chest hurt at the distance of him, you reached again—smaller this time, only catching lightly at his sleeve. “Sukuna.” You said his name gently.

So gently that he looked at you.

That seemed to surprise him more than the touch itself.

Rain whispered against the house. Somewhere deeper inside, water moved through the garden stones. Sukuna closed his eyes for one brief second and took a slow breath through his nose before answering.

“I need to be left alone for a little bit.”

You went still.

He opened his eyes again, gaze fixed somewhere just over your shoulder rather than directly at your face. “I don’t want to fight,” he said. “And I need everyone to leave me alone.” The words were measured, like he had forced himself to choose them carefully so they would not come out worse.

Still, they struck.

You pulled your hand back.

Your fingers curled into themselves, clutching against your palm as if they needed somewhere to go. You swallowed once and nodded. “Okay.” That was all.

No snapping. No claws. No bitten threats. No immediate violence to cover the bruise of being turned away.

Just that quiet little answer.

It startled him.

You could see it in the way his eyes flicked to your face properly then, as if only now realizing you had taken the words exactly as they were meant and also not at all the way they had been intended. You were being gentle for once. Accepting the boundary. And because of that, the rejection sat naked between you instead of buried under one of your tantrums.

Your face gave almost nothing away, but Sukuna knew you too well now not to see it.

The hurt.

The small withdrawn shift in your body.

The way your shoulders tucked in, just slightly, like something tender had instinctively folded itself away.

For half a second, he almost said something else.

Almost reached for you.

But he was too angry, too wound tight, too full of the poisoned feeling Geto had left behind with his smile and his words and his eyes on you. He was in no shape to comfort anyone. Least of all in a way that would not break open into something uglier.

So he didn’t.

He turned and went down the hall toward his office.

You stood there for one long second after he disappeared, your hands still clasped together in front of you.

Then you turned the other way.

You went to your old bedroom.

The room still smelled faintly of cedar and clean linen, though you no longer slept there. Not really. It had become a place of old things. Folded clothes. Drawers half-full of garments Uraume had gotten for you before you began living full-time in Sukuna’s room. Small items that had once mattered simply because they were yours. The air inside was still. Safe. Empty.

You crossed to the closet and opened it, more for something to do than because you needed anything from it. Your hands moved over hanging fabric, brushed folded sleeves, touched the neat lines of order Uraume always kept there for you. You stood in front of it longer than necessary, staring without really seeing.

Then your gaze lifted.

To the box.

It sat high on the shelf, pushed toward the back, plain enough that anyone else might have missed it. But you knew it. Knew exactly what it was. Knew why it had been put there.

Sukuna had sealed away the most dangerous part of your cursed energy because the world was full of people who would rather kill what they feared than learn how it hurt. He had done it to protect you. To protect everyone else, too. You had accepted it because you had loved him enough to let him try.

But today had changed something.

Geto’s face.

The way Sukuna had gone silent afterward.

The dark pressure in him that had not eased once on the drive home.

Something was coming.

You felt it and you had spent too many years surviving the shape of coming danger to ignore what your bones already knew.

You looked over your shoulder first.

Listened.

The house remained quiet. No footsteps nearby. No movement in the hall. Rain against the garden. Distant thunder so soft it was more vibration than sound.

Then you dragged a chair beneath the shelf, climbed up, and pulled the box down.

It was heavier than it looked.

You set it carefully on the floor and knelt in front of it, breathing slowly through your nose. The seal threaded across it shimmered faintly under your fingers, intricate and strong and familiar. Sukuna’s cursed energy still clung to it. Protective. Restrictive. Absolute.

Your hands trembled.

Not from doubt.

From the strain of what you were about to do.

You placed both palms over the seal and closed your eyes.

Then you reached inward.

Not for the gentle bright side of your cursed energy, the part that coaxed life back into wilting things and stitched broken edges together. You reached deeper. Lower. Into the cold place. The starving place. The part of you that had once touched a man and watched him die. The part Sukuna had wrapped and buried and bound because it frightened the world and nearly frightened you too.

You pulled.

The seal resisted first, biting against your energy, then began to loosen under the specific shape of your will. You were patient with it. Quiet. No wasted force. No spectacle. Just a steady unwinding, thread by thread, until the dark locked portion of your cursed energy rose up to meet the rest of you like a shadow returning to its body.

Decay slid back into your system.

At once, you felt it.

The difference.

The balance of you righting itself in a way you had almost forgotten—life and ruin both humming beneath your skin, twin currents at last touching again. Your breath caught hard in your throat. The sensation was not painful, but it was overwhelming. Your fingers twitched against the floorboards. The room seemed sharper around the edges. Every living thing beyond the walls suddenly felt louder to your senses—the moss outside, the rain on the leaves, the tiny shifting pulse inside the roots beneath the garden stones.

And under it all, the old familiar darkness waited obediently in your palm.

Controlled.

Not wild.

Not now.

You opened your eyes and stared at your hands.

No visible change. No marks. No smoke. Just skin trembling faintly over the return of something too dangerous for ordinary people to imagine.

You did not smile.

You did not gloat.

You only breathed.

“I know,” you whispered to the empty room, though whether you were speaking to Sukuna in your mind or to yourself, you could not have said. “I know.”

Carefully, you sealed the box back up as best you could. Not perfectly—never as perfectly as he had—but well enough that unless he inspected it closely, he would not notice right away. You returned it to the shelf, moved the chair back, and stood there for a moment with your hands still shaking at your sides.

You had not done it to betray him.

You had done it because something in the air had changed.

Because Suguru Geto had looked at him and at you like pieces on a board.

Because you knew, in the deep ugly animal place that had kept you alive, that if something came for Sukuna, you would not survive standing there helpless behind the safety he built for you.

You left the room quietly.

The hallway felt cooler now. The rain louder. The whole house washed in that blue-gray light storms brought near dusk. You passed the office door without stopping. Heard nothing from inside. He was still there. Still alone. Still locked inside whatever storm Geto had left in him.

You didn’t disturb him.

Instead, you went to the room you now shared.

Inside, the futon had already been laid out. The air smelled like him—cedar, linen, faint smoke, clean skin, the warmth that clung to his pillow even when he wasn’t there. You crossed the room and slid open the shoji door that led out to the garden.

Cool wet air drifted in immediately.

The rain outside came down in soft silver lines, veiling the stones and darkening the moss until everything glistened. The koi pond rippled under it. Maple leaves bowed and shivered. Somewhere water collected and spilled in a rhythm so steady it almost sounded like breathing.

You left the door open.

Then you went to the futon and lay down on your side, facing the garden.

One hand stretched across the bedding until your fingers found Sukuna’s pillow. You touched it lightly at first, then curled your hand against the edge as though some part of him might be reached that way even when he was still behind another closed door.

The rain kept falling.

The house stayed quiet.

And eventually, with the fresh air brushing cool against your face and the low endless song of water filling the room, your eyes drifted shut. Your fingers remained resting on his pillow even in sleep, your body curled toward the space he would later fill, while outside the storm moved gently over the garden and inside your veins both halves of your cursed energy breathed together once more, waiting.

Sukuna came to bed long after the rain had settled into a softer, thinner hush.

You didn’t wake when he first entered the room.

At least, not fully.

Some part of you felt him there anyway—the subtle shift in the floorboards, the draft of cooler air as he closed the shoji to the garden, the familiar weight of his presence moving through the dark. He had bathed, because he always did when his mind was too crowded and his body needed the ritual of water to wring some of the violence out of it. The scent of rain still clung faintly to him beneath the clean smell of soap and cedar.

He moved quietly.

For all his size, all his power, all the menace he carried through the world like a second skin, Sukuna had always known how to be quiet in rooms that mattered.

He stood by the futon for a moment.

Looking at you.

Your hand was still on his pillow.

Your body curled toward the space where he should have been.

And even though you had fallen asleep after he turned you away, even though some part of him knew he had hurt you and left the bruise of it there without tending it, you had still lain down in his bed like you belonged nowhere else.

That knowledge settled in him with a weight he didn’t have the strength to examine.

So instead, he undressed in the half-dark, folded himself down beside you, and let the day finally drag him under.

Sleep took him hard.

Exhaustion always did when it won. There was no drifting with Sukuna, no graceful surrender. One moment he was awake enough to feel the warmth of the futon and the lingering shape of your body near his. The next he was gone, dragged into sleep by sheer depletion, his face losing some of its iron severity only when unconsciousness stole the tension out of it.

That was when you woke.

Your eyes opened slowly to darkness softened by rainlight, the room dim and silver-blue at the edges. For a second you just listened.

To the storm.

To the quiet of the house.

To Sukuna breathing beside you.

He had fallen asleep on his back, one arm thrown loosely across his stomach, the other near his side. His face in sleep always startled you a little. Not because it became gentle—it didn’t, not fully. But because something about the guard of him eased just enough that you could see the boy he must have once been buried somewhere under all that barbed wire and blood and silence.

You turned toward him carefully.

Your hand lifted and touched his face.

Just your fingertips at first, brushing the line of his cheek, the strong angle of his jaw, the skin near his temple where his damp hair had half dried against him. He didn’t stir. Only breathed, deep and even.

You leaned over him then.

Slowly.

And kissed him.

It was a soft kiss. The kind he would have teased you for if awake. No bite, no playful cruelty, no demand in it. Just your mouth resting gently against his for one lingering second, a tenderness so quiet it almost disappeared inside the dark.

When you pulled back, your throat hurt.

You sat there looking at him for a moment too long.

Then you slipped out of bed.

The floor was cool beneath your feet. The room felt enormous with him asleep in it, as though silence itself had stretched wider around his unconscious body. You moved carefully so as not to wake him, glancing back once before you left the room.

He hadn’t moved.

You went to your old room.

This time when you opened the closet, your hands did not hesitate. You dressed quickly in simpler clothes, the sort better suited for travel and hiding than for house life or soft evenings beside someone who knew the shape of your body too well. You packed a bag with practical movements—changes of clothes, what small things mattered, things Uraume had once taught you to keep near in case of necessity. Money too. So much money. More cash than anyone like you should have ever had in one place, all of it given by Sukuna with the rough dismissive ease of a man who never treated wealth as something sacred and had long ago decided you would never go without again if he could help it.

Your hands shook while you packed.

Not enough to stop.

Just enough to make each careful fold feel like something being broken.

When the bag was done, you slung it over your shoulder and stood in the middle of the room for one last second, looking at the life that had once been impossible for you—clean drawers, soft clothes, warm walls, shelter without fear.

Then you went to the front door.

You had just slipped your shoes on when Uraume appeared.

Of course they did.

You looked up and there they were at the end of the hall, pale and silent as moonlight, watching you with a face that had already understood too much before a single word was spoken.

For a second neither of you moved.

Then Uraume asked quietly, “Where are you going?” Your grip tightened on the strap of the bag.

You shook your head once.

Not because you wouldn’t tell them. Because if you said it too quickly, too plainly, you might break apart around it. “I gotta protect Sukuna,” you said at last.

Your voice was low. Rough with feeling you were trying not to let own you.

Uraume’s expression did not change, but their eyes softened with something sad and knowing.

You swallowed and looked down at your own fingers. “I ain’t always smart,” you said. “I know that. I’m not… literate like you. I grew up sleepin’ in dumpsters and eatin’ scraps and fightin’ like an animal.” The words came ugly because truth usually did. “But I got a heart,” you said. “And my heart wants to protect him.” Your eyes lifted again to theirs, bright now despite your effort.

“Even if it means I gotta hurt for it.” The house remained still around the confession.

Rain whispered against the walls.

You shifted your bag higher on your shoulder. “I have to go back into hidin’,” you murmured. “Maybe one day life’ll be kinder to both of us.” Uraume came closer then.

Not enough to stop you.

Only enough to stand before you like witness.

You reached out and touched their hand. Your fingers curled lightly around theirs for just a moment. “Take care of him.” Uraume looked down at your joined hands, then back up at your face.

And nodded. “I will.” Then, to your surprise, they stepped forward and hugged you.

Tight.

Not careful. Not ceremonial. A real embrace, firm enough that your breath caught. You stood frozen for one second before your arms lifted and wrapped around them too.

“Take care of yourself,” Uraume said softly near your ear.

Your throat closed.

You nodded against their shoulder.

Then you pulled away before you lost the nerve to leave at all.

Outside, the rain had eased to a mist.

The world beyond the house was dark and wet and silvered by the last of the storm, the gravel drive shining faintly beneath the estate lights. At the front of the house, a car waited.

Your mother was already there.

The trunk stood open, and inside were her bags packed neatly for travel. She had done exactly what you asked when you called her after Sukuna fell asleep—no questions that would slow you down, no pleas to stay, only the simple, immediate yes of a mother who had already lost you once and would not fail to come when you reached for her again.

She looked at you when you stepped outside, and whatever she saw in your face made her own tighten with grief.

Still, she said nothing.

Only opened the passenger door and waited while you climbed in.

The bag settled at your feet. The door closed. The inside of the car smelled like rain and old upholstery and your mother’s perfume. When she got in beside you, she reached across the center console and touched your hand.

You held still under it.

Then you looked up.

At the front of the house.

At the dark windows.

At the room where he still slept, unaware that the place beside him was already cooling, unaware that by morning your scent would be faint in the sheets and your money gone from the drawer and your old room empty again.

A tear slid down your face before you could stop it.

You did not wipe it away.

You looked at the house and whispered, so softly the words were almost only breath, “I love you, Sukuna.” Then you turned your face away before the house could become something impossible to leave.

Your fingers closed around your mother’s hand.

And in a voice already breaking, you said, “Let’s go, Mama.” The car pulled away through the mist and the wet quiet of the estate, carrying you farther from the house that had become your home, farther from the man sleeping inside it, while dawn still waited somewhere beyond the rain and love—once again—made itself known to you first as sacrifice.

When Sukuna woke, the first thing he noticed was wrongness.

Not loud.

Not immediate.

Just wrong.

The room was dim with the pale gray light that came before proper morning, the rain having passed sometime in the night and left the world outside washed clean and still. The futon was warm in places it should not have been, cool in others. The air held your scent, but not enough of it. Not fresh. Lingering.

His eyes opened fully.

He turned his head.

The space beside him was empty.

For a second he didn’t move.

Because sometimes you wandered. Sometimes you woke before him and drifted barefoot into the garden, or into the kitchen to bother Uraume, or into one of the other rooms because you wanted to bring something back to bed and then forgot what you were doing halfway there. He was used to waking and sensing you somewhere in the house like a low familiar pulse under his skin.

So he reached for that instinctively.

And found nothing.

Sukuna sat up.

Fast.

The room sharpened around him immediately. He looked toward the open doorway, toward the folded blankets, toward the faint impression your body had left on the futon. His hand moved across the bedding once, palm pressing into the place where you should have been. Cold enough now to tell him this was not recent.

He stood.

“Y/N.”

No answer.

He stepped into the hall. “Y/N.”

Still nothing.

The house was too quiet.

Not empty. Uraume’s presence was somewhere below, faint and steady. But yours—your strange split energy, your life and decay, your restless impossible pulse—was gone.

Something cold opened under his ribs.

He moved through the house quickly at first, then faster, calling your name in a voice that kept roughening each time the silence answered instead. He checked the sitting room. The garden corridor. The room that had once been yours. The bathroom. The engawa. Every place your body had made a habit of occupying. Every corner that still smelled faintly of you and offered him nothing.

By the time he reached the kitchen, his breathing had changed.

Uraume stood there at the counter, already cleaning.

The sound of cloth over wood stopped the moment Sukuna entered.

He didn’t waste time. “Where is she?” Uraume went still.

Slowly, they set the rag down.

That alone was enough to make the temperature in the room drop.

Sukuna’s eyes sharpened to something murderous. “Where.” Uraume turned to face him fully. Their expression was calm, but not unreadable. There was sadness in it. Resignation, too. “She left,” they said.

The words hung there.

For one second, Sukuna just stared.

Then his voice came out low and dangerous. “What.”

“Last night.” He took one step forward. “Explain.” Uraume did.

Quietly. Clearly. Every ugly piece of it.

How you had gotten up after he fell asleep. How you packed. How they found you at the door. How you said you had to protect him. How you believed leaving was the only way to do that. How you said maybe one day life would be kinder to both of you. How you asked them to take care of him. How your mother had been waiting outside. How you left with her before dawn.

Sukuna listened in utter stillness.

Only his hands gave him away—slowly curling into fists at his sides, knuckles whitening, tendons pulling sharp beneath skin.

When Uraume finished, silence crashed down.

Then Sukuna shouted. “WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP HER?” The force of his voice shook the dishes on the shelves. It struck through the kitchen like a physical blow, but Uraume did not flinch. They only held his gaze with the same eerie steadiness they always had.

“This is not a prison,” they said. “Every person is allowed to come and go.” That answer detonated something in him.

A plate sat on the counter within reach.

Sukuna grabbed it and hurled it across the room so hard it shattered against the far wall in an explosion of white ceramic. Shards rained over the floor. The crack echoed through the house and vanished into silence.

Uraume still did not move.

Sukuna was already turning away.

He crossed the hall in a blur and went straight to your old room. The door struck open hard enough to rattle in its frame. He went to the closet immediately, reaching high for the sealed box on the shelf.

The moment his fingers touched it, he knew.

The box still held the shape of the seal.

But not the weight of what had been inside it.

His whole body froze.

Slowly, very slowly, he brought it down and looked at it properly. The seal had been disturbed. Closed back up. Made to resemble what it had once been. But he knew his own work. Knew the exact shape of his cursed energy. Knew where the threads should sit and where they had been forced apart.

And beneath that, far worse—

The box was empty.

Not physically.

But spiritually.

The locked portion of your cursed energy was gone. Back where it belonged. Back inside you.

Sukuna felt it like a blade between his ribs.

Then he roared.

The sound ripped out of him so violently it shook the room. He threw the box across the bedroom, and it smashed against the far wall hard enough to splinter wood and burst the weak reseal entirely.

After that came destruction.

Fast.

Mindless.

Immediate.

He kicked through a chair and sent it flying into the dresser. He tore the small table beside the bed apart with one hand and flung the broken pieces into the wall. A lamp shattered. Drawers split. Wood cracked under the force of his rage. The room ceased to be a room and became a storm’s center, everything inside it reduced to collateral.

And then his body changed.

The shift into his true form came not with ceremony, but with fury.

His frame surged larger, heavier, more monstrous, cursed markings darkening as extra arms unfurled and his energy flooded the room in violent waves. The ceiling seemed lower under the weight of him. The walls groaned. The air itself strained around the sheer density of his power.

He stood there in the wreckage at seven foot seven, chest heaving, crimson eyes burning.

Angry.

Yes.

But anger was the easiest word.

He was hurt in a place nothing had touched in a very long time.

It felt like being stabbed somewhere no reverse cursed technique could reach. Like his heart had been split open and left there to bleed into the floorboards while his body stayed standing out of spite. He could heal flesh. Bone. Tendons. Organs. He could stitch a throat back together in seconds and regrow torn pieces without blinking.

But this—

This would not close.

Not with cursed energy.

Not with rage.

You had left him.

You had left thinking it was love.

That knowledge was worse than betrayal because he understood it too well. Understood exactly how your mind had worked its way there. How fear had twisted itself into sacrifice. How your love, still so young and so malformed by pain, had reached for the sharpest possible shape because that was the only one it knew.

And he hated it.

Hated that you had gone.

Hated that you had done it alone.

Hated most of all that some part of him had helped build the thought in you that he would be safer without you near.

A broken sound left him then—not quite a growl, not quite breath.

His hands flexed, claws scraping splintered wood from the ruined dresser. The room reeked of torn cedar, dust, and the fading remains of your scent. It was everywhere and nowhere all at once. In the clothes left hanging. In the pillow indentation long gone cold. In the absence that now had shape enough to choke on.

Uraume appeared in the doorway eventually.

They did not try to calm him.

Did not speak.

There was no point.

Sukuna stood amid the wreckage of what had once been your room, monstrous and shaking, surrounded by broken furniture and the remains of the seal that should have kept you safer than your own heart had allowed, while inside him something raw and human bled where no technique could reach.

It had been six months since you left.

Six months since the car pulled away from the estate in the wet hush of dawn while Sukuna slept with one arm thrown across the futon and your warmth fading beside him. Six months since you had chosen to disappear rather than risk being the blade someone else turned toward his throat.

A year since you met him.

Six months of marriage.

And not one day had passed in which you did not miss him.

Missing him had become its own weather inside you. Some mornings it was only a faint ache, something manageable, tucked down low beneath work and errands and the ordinary small survival of living. Other days it came down on you like floodwater. You would wake with his name halfway up your throat, or catch the scent of cedar and clean linen in some passing stranger’s coat and have to stop yourself from turning around. At night, it was worst. In dreams he always came back to you whole—warm and broad and still wearing that tired irritated look he had when you were being impossible. Sometimes he would only look at you. Sometimes he would hold your face in both hands and kiss you until your heart hurt from waking.

Then morning would come.

And you would still stay away.

Kyoto had taken you in quietly.

The little house you and your mother bought with cash sat on a narrow street lined with older homes and small gardens where everything bloomed in the spring like it had something to prove. It wasn’t grand. It wasn’t hidden behind walls or spread across acres of private land. But it was yours. Small kitchen. Low ceilings. Windows that stuck when it rained too hard. Floorboards that creaked in familiar places. A patch of earth out back that your mother coaxed into herbs and flowers. You both fixed it together, slowly, with careful hands and the sort of joy that comes from making a place livable after believing for too long that you didn’t deserve permanence.

Your mother worked at a nursing home down the road.

The residents loved her.

They called her gentle. Steady. They trusted her in that instinctive way old people sometimes trusted only those who had suffered enough to move quietly through the world. She came home smelling faintly of tea and antiseptic and old paper, with stories she only told half of because some griefs belonged to the people who carried them.

You worked at a florist.

The owner had hired you first because your hands were quick and your eye for arrangement was unsettlingly good. She kept you because every plant in the shop seemed to come alive under your care. Wilted stems recovered. Blooms opened fuller. Sick leaves brightened. Cuttings rooted faster than they should have. She would laugh sometimes and say you must have the gentlest hands she had ever seen.

Little did she know.

You smiled when she said it.

And by now, the smile no longer looked as wild as it once had.

Time with your mother had changed your speech in little ways. So had the florist shop. So had being spoken to gently, day after day, by women who did not demand you make yourself smaller in exchange for kindness. The rough edges were still there—you would always keep some of them—but the language of you had softened. You no longer sounded like every sentence had been hauled up out of an alley with your teeth. You spoke more clearly now. More carefully. You learned the shape of patience. Learned how not to brace before every conversation like it might become a fight.

But at night, alone in your room, the old ache always returned.

There was a drawer in your bedside table.

You kept the photograph there.

You and Sukuna on your wedding day.

Every time you pulled it out, your breath caught in the same place. He stood tall and terrible even dressed for ceremony, the lines of him too severe for softness and yet softened anyway by the way he looked at you. And you—eyes bright, mouth trying and failing not to smile too much, your body turned toward him like every part of you already knew where home had become.

You would stare at the photograph until your vision blurred.

Then the crying came.

Quietly, usually. You had learned how to do that too. How to cry without sound. How to fold your hurt in on itself so it did not disturb the walls. Tears would slip down your face and drip onto the bedding or onto the edge of the photo while outside the little house held steady around your grief.

And every time it happened, the plants wilted.

Not by choice.

Not because you wanted them to suffer for what lived inside you.

But your sorrow moved strangely through your cursed energy, and the life in the house always felt it. Leaves drooped. Petals folded in on themselves. The ivy by the window curled brittle at the edges. Even the herb pots in the kitchen bowed under the weight of what your heart could not hold quietly.

The first few times, it had terrified you.

Now it only made you weep harder.

And in the mornings, you and your mother would go room by room together, touching each plant back to health with soft apologies murmured under your breath.

“I’m sorry,” you’d whisper, fingertips brushing a limp petal.

Your mother, beside you, would revive the fern by the sink and say nothing at all, because some griefs were too old and too fresh to name every day.

You always said sorry to the plants.

Never to yourself.

Sukuna, meanwhile, was coming apart in public.

Everyone saw it.

At first, they only noticed the temper getting worse.

Sukuna had never been easy. Never patient. Never particularly invested in seeming stable when fury suited him better. But after you left, the anger in him changed shape. It stopped being a blade and became a storm. Less precise. More constant. More likely to strike for smaller reasons. The school felt it. The students felt it most of all.

Yaga took him off training them.

Not because Sukuna had failed at it. He was still one of the best they had. But because Yaga knew the look in his eyes too well now, knew the dangerous edge of a man trying to outrun grief by letting rage chew through everything else first. Keeping him around students while he was like that was not instruction. It was risk.

So Sukuna was sent on more missions instead.

That only made things worse.

He started drinking.

Heavily.

At first it was after missions, when the curses were dead and the night was long and the house too quiet and there was no one waiting to lunge at him in the hallway or climb into his lap with a fruit-stained mouth and tell him he was not forgiven. Then it became before missions too. A bottle in his hand, eyes flat, cursed energy sharp enough that no one dared comment. He would go out half-drunk and still obliterate whatever curse they pointed him at. It didn’t matter. His body knew violence too well to forget it just because his blood was poisoned.

More than once, Ijichi had to haul Sukuna’s unconscious body into the car after a mission because the bastard had gotten so drunk afterward that he passed out cold.

It was humiliating for everyone involved.

Mostly for Ijichi.

The first time it happened, Sukuna had still been holding part of a broken curse core in one hand, blood on his face, shirt ruined, passed out against a concrete wall with an empty bottle tipped beside him.

Ijichi had stood there in silence for a long full second, staring at the strongest sorcerer he knew sprawled like a felled god in an alleyway.

Then, because no one else was going to do it, he had sighed and dragged Sukuna into the backseat by sheer stubbornness and the grace of not being crushed under dead weight.

After the third time, Yaga stepped in again.

No more training.

No more missions for a while. “You need time off,” Yaga told him.

Sukuna had responded by telling him to go to hell.

Yaga, wisely, did not take the insult personally.

Still, the order stood.

And all around him, people watched a man who had once seemed indestructible become visibly more volatile by the week. Shoko stopped making jokes. Nanami said less and less around him. Even Gojo, for all his obnoxiousness, learned to needle from farther away.

No one said your name to Sukuna unless they absolutely had to.

No one wanted to see what might happen if they touched the wound too directly.

Then Suguru Geto announced the war.

Christmas Eve.

He did it with all the theater he loved—threats draped in ideology, promises of blood dressed up as cleansing, his cult and curses circling the announcement like carrion birds around something already dying.

The room where the announcement was shown fell still around it.

Gojo watched with that thin dangerous smile of his gone entirely. Yaga stood like carved stone. Shoko lit a cigarette immediately afterward. Kusakabe muttered a prayer to any god interested in intervening. Nanami only narrowed his eyes harder.

Sukuna scoffed.

Then, in the flat voice of a man who had no patience left for mad prophets, said, “He can suck my dick.”

It might have been funny in another room.

In that room, it was almost a relief.

Until Suguru, on the screen, smiled.

That smile.

Too knowing.

Too calm.

He looked directly into the camera as if he could see through it, and though his words were for everyone, something about the angle of his face made Sukuna’s spine go cold before the meaning even landed.

“You must be lonely,” Suguru said lightly.

Sukuna went still.

The room changed around him.

Yaga saw it first. Shoko second. Gojo not long after.

Suguru’s smile widened just slightly. “I saw your little wife living in Kyoto.” For one terrible instant, Sukuna forgot how to breathe.

Then he moved.

Too fast for anyone to stop, though Gojo half tried. The chair behind him crashed backward as he stood. Cursed energy surged off him in a black-red wave that sent papers sliding and the nearest weaker sorcerers back on instinct.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

His voice did not sound human.

Not fully.

Not with that much fury under it.

On the screen, Suguru looked pleased.

Almost amused. “Oh,” he said. “You didn’t know?” Sukuna took a step toward the projection as though distance itself might be ripped apart by sheer rage. “Where is she?”

Suguru only tilted his head.

Kyoto.

That was all he had given.

Kyoto, and the knowledge that you were alive there. That he had seen you. That while Sukuna had been drinking himself half to death and tearing through curses like a wounded god, Suguru had been close enough to lay eyes on you and then walk away smiling.

“Where.” The second demand came louder.

Shoko had gone very still. Yaga’s jaw tightened. Gojo was already moving subtly to block anyone foolish enough to crowd Sukuna from the side.

Suguru did not answer.

Instead, he let the silence stretch just long enough to become another cruelty.

Then he smiled again and said, “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

The projection cut.

The room erupted.

Sukuna shouted then—raw, furious, the sound blasting through the chamber so hard it rattled glass. He kicked the fallen chair across the room. It smashed into the far wall and splintered on impact. His cursed energy roared up around him with enough force to make the nearest sorcerers stagger back, faces pale.

“FUCK!” He turned like a caged thing, chest heaving, eyes blown wide with rage and something far worse beneath it.

Hope.

Terrible, vicious hope.

Because now he knew you were alive.

And because he knew, he wanted blood. Answers. Kyoto split open street by street if that was what it took.

“Where in Kyoto?” he snarled, not at anyone and everyone at once.

No one answered because no one had one to give.

Gojo stepped forward first, hands open in a gesture that meant very little and more than enough. “Sukuna—”

“Don’t.” Sukuna’s voice cracked like a whip.

Gojo stopped.

Sukuna was panting now, shoulders heaving with a rage too large to fit cleanly inside his body. His hands flexed at his sides as if already imagining Suguru’s throat there. His heart hammered against his ribs with such force it felt less like living and more like surviving impact.

Six months.

You had been alive.

In Kyoto.

Close enough that Suguru had found you before he had.

The thought nearly made him black out with fury.

He roared again, louder this time, and the cursed energy bursting out of him drove half the room back another step. Someone swore. Someone else dropped a file. Yaga said his name once, sharply, but Sukuna barely heard it through the red tearing across his vision.

All he could see was you.

Alive.

Somewhere in Kyoto.

And the grin on Suguru’s face as he withheld the rest.

The florist shop was quiet that afternoon.

Too quiet, really.

The kind of quiet that settled into a place when the lunch rush had passed and evening had not yet begun, when the air smelled thickly of cut stems, damp soil, and sweet blooms opening under the filtered light from the front windows. The little bell above the door had not chimed in nearly twenty minutes. Your boss had gone home early to check on her sister, leaving you alone to close up in an hour.

You didn’t mind being alone there.

Usually.

It gave you time to think with your hands instead of your head. Time to trim stems and change water and strip thorns from roses while your mind wandered somewhere softer. Your speech had grown gentler in this place. Your body, too. Even your hands seemed to remember they could create beauty without fear in them.

You were cutting roses when the bell above the door chimed.

Without looking up, you said, “Welcome in.”

The words came easy now. Polite. Warm. A far cry from the feral snap that had once lived in every greeting you gave the world.

Then you looked up.

And your whole body went rigid.

Suguru Geto stood in the doorway.

He looked almost elegant in the late afternoon light, dressed too neatly for the ugliness he carried. Dark robes. Calm posture. That same beautiful poisonous face, serene as if he had stepped into a temple instead of your place of work. The bell still swayed faintly above his head.

For one second neither of you moved.

Your fingers tightened around the pruning shears.

Suguru smiled.

Not broadly.

Gently.

That made it worse.

“Well,” he said softly, “there you are.” Your mouth went dry.

Every instinct in you sharpened at once. Your cursed energy stirred under your skin, decay and life both waking to the threat in front of you, but the first thing you thought of was not yourself.

It was your mother.

Suguru noticed the shift in your eyes.

Of course he did.

He took one measured step farther into the shop, hands visible, his tone almost conversational. “I’m going to advise you to come with me.”

You stared at him.

He kept smiling. “I have people outside your mother’s job,” he said, voice still maddeningly calm, “if you do not cooperate.”

The room went cold.

The shears in your hand trembled once.

It was not fear for yourself. Not first. It was the immediate sick drop of knowing he had studied you well enough to find the one pressure point that would work.

Your throat moved when you swallowed.

Then, slowly, you nodded.

Suguru’s smile warmed by a fraction, pleased by how quickly the leash tightened once he pulled the right place.

“Good.”

You set the shears down carefully so your shaking hands would not betray too much. You moved through the motions of closing the shop with a quietness that did not feel like your own—turning the sign, locking the register, dimming part of the lights, checking the back door, gathering your things with fingers that wanted very badly to become claws.

Suguru waited.

Patient.

Like a man who already knew he had won the first part.

When you locked the front door behind you, the street outside had gone strangely empty.

The cursed pelican waited in the alley beside the shop.

Its long grotesque body was half-shadow and half-feathered nightmare, too large for the space it occupied, dark eyes wet and intelligent in all the wrong ways. The smell of cursed energy rolled off it in a wave that made your stomach turn.

Suguru gestured.

You did not argue.

You climbed on because your mother’s life sat in the balance of your obedience, and you had already once chosen leaving over the person you loved to keep him safe. You knew how to swallow terror when it was the price of someone else breathing.

The cursed pelican launched.

Kyoto fell away beneath you in pieces—rooftops, narrow roads, temple lines, the evening light bleeding across the city in gold and shadow while your heart battered itself against your ribs the whole way. Suguru stood in front of you on the creature’s back as though this were some leisurely journey and not a kidnapping wrapped in silk.

You did not speak.

Neither did he.

Not until his temple came into view.

It rose from the earth dark and old and wrong, a place that had once meant prayer perhaps, now made into something else entirely by the people who moved inside it. Curses coiled in the air around it. Sorcerers loyal to Suguru passed through the halls like quiet knives. By the time your feet touched the stone floor inside, your palms were damp and your jaw ached from clenching it shut.

Suguru led you deeper in.

Then turned to face you.

His expression had lost that false gentleness now. What remained was colder. More honest in its cruelty. “I’ll make this simple,” he said.

You glared at him through the tremor in your body. “You have a choice.” He let the word hang for a moment as though either of you believed that.

“Help me bring an end to this world,” he said, “and create one worthy of people like us.”

Your face twisted.

“Or,” Suguru said, “die.”

The answer came before your fear could stop it.

You spat at him.

The saliva struck his cheek.

A beat of silence followed.

Suguru looked at you.

Then, very slowly, lifted a hand and wiped it away.

His eyes were flat now. “Unfortunate.” That was when the cursed spirits came.

He manifested them with casual ease, as if pulling violence from the air cost him nothing. They swarmed fast—twisted limbs, teeth, claws, bodies too wrong to be natural. You fought back at first. Of course you did. You always did. You lashed out with everything you had, cursed energy flaring, fingers reaching for life to twist or decay to unleash, but there were too many and too little room and you had come here under threat rather than strategy.

One slammed into your ribs hard enough to throw you into a pillar.

Another caught your arm.

A third tore across your back.

You hit the floor.

The beating became a blur after that—impact after impact, pain stacking too quickly to count, your own cries swallowed by the snarls of the creatures pinning and battering you wherever Suguru’s silent permission fell. Your lip split. Blood ran down your chin. One eye started swelling before you could even fully blink through it. Your body curled inward on instinct and still they found everywhere soft enough to bruise.

When it finally stopped, you were on the floor shaking.

Bloody.

Crying despite how hard you tried not to.

Your breath came in sharp broken pulls. Your palms scraped uselessly against the stone as you tried to push yourself up and failed. Blood dripped from your mouth to the floor below you in thin red strings.

Suguru crouched down in front of you.

He looked immaculate.

You looked ruined.

His gaze moved over your trembling body with cool disappointment. “Weak.” You bared bloodied teeth at him, but even that had become shaky.

He tilted his head. “And yet I will still have such fun using your ability.” Your stomach twisted.

You tried to crawl backward.

Suguru reached down and closed his hand in your hair.

Pain exploded across your scalp.

You screamed and grabbed at his wrist, but he was already dragging you, your body scraping over stone as he hauled you toward the next room with no more care than if you’d been laundry caught in a storm. Tears blurred your vision. You clawed weakly at the floor. Your legs kicked once, twice, useless.

He dropped you at Miguel’s feet.

Miguel looked down at you, expression unreadable in that sharp controlled way of people who had already decided not to question the cruelty in front of them because they served it.

“Tie her up,” Suguru said.

Miguel obeyed.

Your wrists were yanked behind you. Rope bit into the skin hard enough to burn, then tighter still until your hands numbed at the edges. More rope around your ankles. Around your upper arms. Enough to keep you contained, enough to make your whole body ache in fresh places every time you breathed too deep.

You shook the whole time.

Not because you had given up.

Because pain had made every muscle in you unreliable.

Suguru stood over you once it was done, looking almost thoughtful.

Then the night moved forward.

War spread outward in pieces from his command. Most of his people were sent to Tokyo and Kyoto to begin carrying out the plan, the same plan he had announced with all the drama of a prophet and all the rot of a butcher. The temple emptied in waves. Curses moved. Followers armed themselves. The air thickened with the shape of coming blood.

But Suguru did not go with them.

Not yet.

Because he had another destination.

Jujutsu High.

Yuta.

And you.

When he finally dragged you back up to your feet, your legs nearly gave out under you. He kept one hand locked around your arm to keep you upright, though there was no kindness in the gesture. Only utility. You were something he intended to carry to the battlefield because your existence itself was leverage now.

You stumbled beside him through the temple corridors, bound and shaking, your face streaked with dried and fresh blood alike. Every part of your body hurt. Your scalp still burned where he had dragged you. Your breaths came shallow because anything deeper caught on bruised ribs. Fear lived in your throat now, sharp and hot and impossible to swallow down completely.

Sukuna.

The thought of him came then, bright and painful as a wound reopening.

You had left to protect him.

And now you were being taken straight into the path of the war he would absolutely throw himself into once he knew.

Your body trembled harder.

Suguru noticed and smiled without looking at you.

By the time the cursed creature carrying you both cut through the dark toward Tokyo, you were half-folded into yourself from pain and dread. Bound. Beaten. Barely upright. The wind tore at your clothes and stung the open split at your lip. Below, the world moved unaware toward Christmas Eve, lights glowing, streets crowded, ordinary people still pretending the night would remain ordinary.

It wouldn’t.

Jujutsu High had already become a battlefield by the time Suguru brought you there.

The night air was cut through with cursed energy so dense it felt almost wet against the skin, thick with smoke, blood, torn earth, and the iron tang of something sacred being defiled in real time. The grounds were no longer the grounds you remembered—the place where students groaned through drills, where you sat in the grass eating cafeteria fruit while Sukuna corrected stances with insults sharp as knives. The training fields had been torn open. Trees split. Stone paths cracked. Lantern light flickered weakly through drifting ash and dust. The whole school seemed to be holding itself together by stubbornness alone.

And in the middle of it all, Suguru moved like a priest conducting a ritual of ruin.

Yuta and Maki were already there when he arrived.

Yuta had blood on his face and fury in his eyes, the kind that made him look younger and older all at once. Maki stood beside him with her weapon gripped so hard her knuckles had blanched, her body held in that low, predatory readiness of someone who had no intention of backing down even if death itself took one more step. Both of them were breathing hard. Both of them had clearly already been fighting. Both of them stopped the instant they saw what Suguru had dragged behind him.

You.

For one fractured second, the battlefield bent around that sight.

You were hanging half-upright only because Suguru still had a hand locked around your arm. Bound. Bloodied. Head lolling slightly with exhaustion and pain. Your body trembled uncontrollably, not from cold, but from the deep animal shock of being hurt too far, too often, in too short a span. Your lip was split. One eye swollen dark. Blood had dried in streaks over your cheek and neck, down the front of your clothes, into the rope biting into your wrists. Your legs looked unsteady enough that if he let go, you would fold to the ground immediately.

Maki’s face changed first.

Not pity.

Murder.

“What the fuck,” she breathed.

Yuta looked like something in him had gone ice-cold. His gaze moved from your wounds to Suguru’s face and stayed there with a stillness that was somehow worse than shouting.

Suguru smiled.

Because of course he did.

He loosened his grip just enough that your body sagged visibly, making the point as plainly as if he had spoken it out loud: look what I brought with me. Look what I can use.

You tried to stay upright.

Tried to lift your head.

Your body shook harder with the effort.

Maki took one step forward. “Let her go.” Suguru’s expression barely shifted. “No.” Yuta’s cursed energy rolled outward, heavy and wrong and enormous. “Get away from her.” Suguru looked between them with infuriating calm, as though he had arranged this confrontation down to the angle of every wound on your body. “You both care so much for what should have been useful. It’s a weakness.” Maki’s grip on her weapon tightened.

You made a small sound then—not quite speech, not quite breath—and Yuta’s eyes snapped to you with naked alarm.

That was the bait.

That was exactly what Suguru wanted.

He shifted you slightly, dragging you more fully into the line of sight between himself and the two younger sorcerers. Your knees buckled. A broken gasp tore out of you before you could stop it.

Maki moved.

Yuta moved too.

And Suguru’s curses surged forward in the same second.

The clash hit the grounds like an explosion.

Maki came in hard from the left, weapon flashing through the dark in a brutal arc aimed for Suguru’s shoulder. Yuta attacked head-on, cursed energy tearing around him in raw violent waves, his focus sharpened down to a single lethal point. Suguru released you only at the last possible second, letting your body drop sideways onto the broken earth so he could meet them both with infuriating grace.

You hit the ground and curled instinctively, ropes cutting into your skin.

Maki’s strike crashed into one of the curses Suguru threw between them, splitting it clean through the middle in a spray of black rot and dissolving cursed matter. Yuta came over the top of it, sword and energy both aimed straight for Suguru’s throat, but Suguru twisted and met him with a curse that rose like a wall of claws and teeth, forcing him back.

The fight became chaos immediately.

Maki slashed through two more manifested creatures in quick succession, moving with vicious efficiency, her body low and sharp and relentless. Yuta pressed harder, each attack fueled by a rage that made his cursed energy scream. Suguru kept giving ground only where it pleased him, deflecting, summoning, redirecting, never quite overextending, never quite letting either of them land the full force they wanted. And all the while, you were there on the ground, shaking, bloodied, trying to push yourself up and failing, a wound at the center of the battlefield no one could ignore.

Then the air changed.

Not gradually.

Violently.

A force slammed over the grounds so suddenly that even the curses staggered in place.

Black-red cursed energy tore through the night like a storm front made flesh. The pressure hit first, huge and ancient and furious enough to make the broken stones groan. Maki skidded back instinctively. Yuta turned. Suguru smiled before he even fully looked up, as if he had been waiting for this exact moment, for this exact entrance, like all his cruelty tonight had been crafted to draw one particular god into the center of his trap.

Sukuna landed in the ruins of the field like a falling execution.

One instant the space above them was empty.

The next he was there.

His sandals shattered stone on impact. Dust burst outward in a ring. His eyes found you immediately.

Everything else disappeared.

Not the curses.

Not Suguru.

Not the war burning elsewhere in the city.

Just you.

Bloodied. Bound. Trembling on the ground.

For one heartbeat, Sukuna did not move.

Then his body surged into true form.

The transformation was monstrous in its fury.

He grew upward and outward in one terrible violent motion, cursed markings darkening, extra arms unfolding, the sheer size and force of him making the battlefield seem suddenly far too small to contain what he was becoming. At seven foot seven, he looked less like a man and more like the memory of a disaster given flesh. The cursed energy pouring off him cracked through the air hard enough to split what remained of a nearby stone lantern. Grass flattened outward from the force of it. Even Maki and Yuta had to brace.

Suguru finally looked pleased. “There you are,” he said softly.

Sukuna did not answer.

He was looking at you.

At the ropes.

At the blood.

At the trembling he knew came when your body was past endurance and still refusing to collapse.

When he spoke, his voice came out so low it almost seemed quieter than it should have been. “You touched her.” It was not a question.

Suguru spread one hand. “She was uncooperative.” That was enough.

Sukuna moved.

The first strike was so fast that even Yuta lost it in the blur.

One moment Sukuna stood ten paces away. The next his fist collided with Suguru hard enough to send him flying through the remains of a training post and into the shattered edge of the outer wall. The impact blew splinters and stone outward in a violent burst. Suguru twisted in time to keep from being crushed fully, but blood still sprayed from the corner of his mouth as he hit.

Sukuna was on him before the debris landed.

He hit like something that had been waiting six months for a throat to break beneath its hands.

One fist. Then another. Then another, from too many arms, too much size, too much rage compressed into muscle and bone and cursed force. Suguru blocked the first two and evaded the third, but the fourth caught him in the ribs with a crunch that echoed across the ruined field. He retaliated instantly, manifesting curses between them and around them in a writhing surge of grotesque forms—serpentine bodies, clawed maws, long limbs snapping forward to restrain, tear, distract.

Sukuna ripped through them.

Literally.

One curse lost its head in his hand. Another was split down the middle by sheer brute force. A third tried to coil around one of his arms and was torn apart so violently its remains sprayed black across the dirt like oil. He waded through Suguru’s summoned creatures as if they were weeds choking a garden he intended to set on fire.

Maki, breathing hard, got to you first.

She dropped beside you on one knee and slashed through the ropes at your wrists with brutal precision. “Hey,” she snapped, voice sharper than fear, “stay with me.” You made a small broken sound.

Yuta came down on your other side, sword in one hand, the other reaching carefully toward your shoulder. “Can you stand?” You tried.

The attempt ended in a shudder.

Across the field, Suguru skidded back from another of Sukuna’s strikes, one sleeve torn, blood at his mouth, expression still infuriatingly composed despite the sheer violence hammering him from every direction. He lifted one hand and an enormous curse surged up from the earth between them, a bloated mass of teeth and bone and blackened flesh.

Sukuna met it head-on.

His claws dug into its face. His other hands caught its limbs. Then, with a roar that tore straight through the night, he split the thing apart from the jaws down.

The corpse of the curse collapsed around him in pieces.

He came through the remains drenched in black gore and fury.

Suguru attacked then in earnest.

No more leisurely evasion. No more pretty patience. He moved with the real dangerous grace he had always kept beneath the silk of his rhetoric, curses striking in coordinated waves around him while his own body flowed between openings with terrifying intelligence. He went for Sukuna’s joints. His throat. His blind angles. He used terrain. Distance. Summoned bodies. Diversions. He fought like a man who had spent years learning how to stand against monsters bigger than himself and survive by turning every weakness in the field into a weapon.

It still wasn’t enough to make Sukuna slower.

Only wilder.

One of Suguru’s curses slammed into Sukuna’s side hard enough to tear open flesh across his ribs. Another scored deep over one shoulder. Blood hit the dirt. Sukuna did not even seem to feel it. Reverse cursed technique flashed under his skin in hot bright pulses, knitting what could be closed while his body kept moving. He caught Suguru by the throat with one lower hand and drove him backward through the half-ruined stone of the old boundary wall.

The impact shook the school.

Suguru coughed blood and laughed at the same time. “You look terrible,” he rasped.

Sukuna slammed him again.

Harder. “You took her from me,” he said.

The words were somehow more frightening than if he had screamed.

Suguru’s fingers dug into Sukuna’s wrist, cursed energy flaring violently as another swarm of lesser curses burst from behind him and latched onto Sukuna’s arms, neck, torso—biting, clawing, trying to slow the crushing force around his throat.

It bought Suguru one second.

Maybe two.

He used them well.

His heel drove into Sukuna’s knee. His elbow snapped up into one of Sukuna’s jaws. He twisted with impossible precision, slipping partly free, and a curse with a spear-like limb rammed straight through Sukuna’s side from behind.

Maki swore under her breath from where she was half-hauling you up.

Yuta took one involuntary step toward the fight before checking himself, torn between helping Sukuna and staying with you.

Sukuna looked down at the spear through his side.

Then up at Suguru.

And smiled.

It was a hideous thing.

All teeth. No mercy.

With one brutal motion, he tore himself free of the impaling limb, caught the curse by its skull, and beat Suguru with its own body before hurling the carcass into a cluster of summoned creatures hard enough to obliterate all of them in one crash of blackened limbs and ruptured cursed matter.

The battlefield had stopped feeling like a school.

It was something older now. Something mythic and obscene. A place where monsters tore holes in one another over love, ideology, rage, possession, grief. The very ground under them no longer held shape. Stone was broken everywhere. Trees had been smashed down into splinters. The night itself seemed bent around the size of the violence.

Suguru wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at Sukuna through the ruin.

“I wondered,” he said, breathing harder now, “if she would still matter this much to you after all this time.” Sukuna didn’t answer with words.

He answered by becoming even more terrifying.

The fog of cursed energy around him thickened until the edges of his form seemed to ripple through it. He came forward like a storm with intent. Suguru summoned faster now, curses rising around him in grotesque ranks, some massive, some small and vicious, all rushing to meet Sukuna in a living shield.

Sukuna carved into them.

A hand through one chest. A kick that shattered another’s spine. Claws that peeled open a third from shoulder to stomach. He fought through the tide toward Suguru with such brutal inevitability that even watching it from the ground made your breath catch. It looked less like combat and more like an extinction event choosing a direction.

And still Suguru kept meeting him.

Kept bleeding and smiling and summoning and striking back.

Yuta and Maki had gotten you half-sitting now, though your body still shook so badly your teeth kept catching against one another. Blood ran warm down the side of your face. Your hands were free but useless in your lap. You could only stare.

“Sukuna,” you whispered once.

Too soft for anyone but yourself.

Out in the wreckage, he took a blow that would have pulped another man’s lung and gave back one that tore half the skin from Suguru’s side. Suguru answered with a curse that exploded at point-blank range, smoke and teeth and black fire swallowing both of them for one blinding second.

When the smoke tore apart, they were still standing.

Still moving.

Still tearing into one another with the kind of hatred that only comes when both men know there are things in this world worth destroying and each has decided the other belongs high on that list.

No victory yet.

Only violence.

Only blood.

Only the brutal unfinished promise of a fight that had not even come close to giving either of them enough.

You could not sit there and watch anymore.

At first you tried.

You really did.

Tried to stay where Maki and Yuta had half-propped you, tried to breathe through the blood in your mouth and the tremor in your limbs, tried to trust that Sukuna would tear Suguru apart and end it before the world asked anything more of you. But the fight kept going. Kept growing. Each strike sounded like bone and ruin and fury given shape. Each time Suguru smiled through blood, each time another curse lunged for Sukuna, each time Sukuna bled and healed and lunged again, something deeper in you kept twisting tighter.

Until you couldn’t bear it.

You pushed away from Yuta’s arm.

He reached for you at once. “Wait—” You stumbled to your feet anyway.

Pain ripped through your body so sharply your vision whited for a second, but you stayed standing by sheer will and the terrible new steadiness of your cursed energy now fully whole inside you. Maki turned, alarm cutting across her face.

“What are you doing?”

You didn’t answer.

Because you didn’t know how to answer what was happening in you.

Your body felt wrong.

No—larger than your body. Like something had cracked and the thing on the other side of the crack had always been waiting. Your skin had begun to hum. Not painfully. Not even violently at first. Just with a strange bright pressure that rose from your bones outward, a power so old and unshaped in you that for one horrific second you almost thought it might split you open entirely.

Across the field, Sukuna caught sight of you standing.

His expression changed instantly. “Y/N—”Suguru followed his gaze and in that same breath, you raised your hand.

You did not speak the words like other sorcerers might have, with practiced theatricality or control honed through years of instruction. Yours came out raw and ancient and instinctive, as if the earth itself was saying them through your mouth because it had waited far too long to be heard.

“Domain Expansion.”

The world vanished.

One instant there was ruined ground, torn trees, blood, broken lanterns, Maki’s sharp breath, Yuta’s shout, Sukuna and Suguru crashing into each other like opposing disasters.

The next—

White.

Endless, absolute white.

No sky.

No floor.

No horizon.

Just an infinite void so clean and blank it made the eyes ache to look at it. No sound existed there. Not the fight. Not breathing. Not the wind. Not even the pulse in your own veins. Silence so total it felt like being dropped into the center of creation before the world had remembered how to begin.

Sukuna landed in the white and turned at once, all four arms slightly spread, body taut with readiness. For the first time since he had arrived, confusion broke through his rage.

Suguru had appeared too.

But he could not move.

He stood frozen where the domain had caught him, body locked in place as though the void itself had become his prison. His eyes shifted. His mouth could still form words if he wished. But the rest of him belonged to you now.

Sukuna looked at him.

Then looked at you.

And went still.

You were glowing.

Not with fire. Not with cursed lightning. With something far stranger. Soft and terrible and holy in all the wrong ways. Your skin seemed lit from beneath by pale living gold, every wound on you made surreal beneath it, every streak of blood turned dark against the light rising through your body. And on your forehead, opened wide between your brows, was a third eye.

The other two were closed.

Only the one on your forehead was open.

Its gaze was unlike anything mortal.

Sukuna stared.

Even he—who had seen curses and gods and blood rites and every shape horror could take—did not know what he was looking at.

In the white silence, plants began to grow.

At first only tiny green shoots breaking up through nothing.

Then vines.

Roots.

Blooms too large and too pale and too ancient to belong to any earth he knew. They spread across the void with impossible speed, unfurling from emptiness as if life itself were responding to your presence in worship. Thick green vines coiled upward around Suguru’s legs first, then his torso, then his arms, winding tighter and tighter until the growth became restraint, became judgment, became the earth reclaiming something it had no intention of letting go.

Suguru could still speak.

He did not.

For once, even he seemed to understand that words had become irrelevant here.

You walked toward him.

Barefoot through the white.

Every step was soundless.

Sukuna didn’t move to stop you. He couldn’t have said whether it was because he trusted you or because this place was so wholly yours that even his monstrous instincts understood interference would be sacrilege.

You stopped in front of Suguru.

He could not even flinch.

Then, slowly, he looked into your third eye.

And screamed.

The sound shattered the silence like glass, though somehow it did not echo. It existed only once—raw, animal, ripped from a place deeper than speech. Whatever he saw there was not a vision meant for human language. It struck through him so completely that even his face lost all of its terrible calm. Horror cracked it wide open. Not fear of pain. Not fear of death.

Something worse.

Something he could not have named if the world depended on it.

You lifted your hand.

Touched his face.

And decay bloomed.

Not all at once. Not grotesquely fast. Worse than that. It moved with purpose. The skin under your fingers blackened first, then split into rot that raced in delicate branching patterns down his jaw, across his throat, under his collar, through flesh that had once been proud and living and self-assured. The vines around him tightened as though the earth itself were helping.

When you spoke, your voice filled the white void from every direction at once.

“The earth gave you life,” you whispered.

Suguru shook where he stood frozen.

“And you spread blood all over it.”

The rot deepened.

His breathing turned ragged, eyes still fixed on that impossible third eye above your brows.

“You must give your soul,” you said softly, “as sacrifice for the blood you spilled on innocent people.”

The words settled over him like sentence rather than threat.

Then the domain shattered.

The white vanished in an instant.

Sound slammed back into existence—wind, ragged breathing, the hiss of cursed energy, someone shouting somewhere too far away, the crackle of damaged ground underfoot. The ruined training field returned around you all at once, violent and dark and bloodstained after the unbearable purity of the void.

Suguru hit the ground.

Hard.

He was choking, shaking, one hand clawing uselessly at the earth as though trying to drag himself away from something no one else could see. His body convulsed in sharp broken tremors. Blood ran from his mouth. His eyes were wide and wild and unfocused, still trapped partly in whatever vision your domain had shown him.

Sukuna turned to you immediately.

But someone else arrived first.

Gojo landed near Suguru in a blur of white and cursed force, too late for the beginning, just in time for the aftermath. One look at Suguru writhing on the ground, one look at the state of you, one look at Sukuna in true form standing over the wreckage—and he understood enough.

His face hardened. “I’ll execute him,” Gojo said.

No jokes.

No teasing.

Just a cold promise flung toward the broken man on the ground.

Sukuna didn’t answer.

Because you were swaying.

The light had already started to leave your skin. The third eye on your forehead dimmed, then closed, fading back into the center of you like something retreating beneath water. Your knees softened. Your breath came shallow and thin. The domain had taken too much.

Sukuna was at your side before you hit the ground.

He caught you in all four arms, then shifted rapidly back toward his human form as he lowered himself around you, making it easier to hold you without crushing what was left of your strength. His hands were everywhere at once—at your back, your face, under your knees, against your hair—trying to anchor you to the world by touch alone.

“Stay awake,” he said.

Your eyes found his.

At once, all the fury in him broke.

You touched his face gently.

Your hand was trembling. Blood streaked your fingers. A tear slipped down your cheek and caught on the curve of your mouth.

“I missed you,” you whispered.

Your voice was so soft he had to bend close to hear it. “I missed you so much.” The sound that came out of Sukuna then was not a growl.

Not anger.

It was closer to a sob dragged unwillingly from the center of a man who had forgotten his body knew how to make such a thing. His forehead dropped to yours. He shut his eyes hard. A tear broke free despite him and slid down his face between you.

“Idiot,” he whispered, but the word was ruined by feeling. “Stupid, reckless—” You smiled faintly through the blood at your lip.

He cupped your face harder, desperate now, his voice rough and breaking around the edges. “Don’t ever do that to me again.” Your lashes fluttered. “I was protectin’ you.”

“You left me.”

The words came out like a wound reopening.

Another tear slipped from your eye. “I know.”

“You left.” His breath hitched once, violent enough that he had to swallow around it. “Do you know what that did to me?” Your fingers brushed his cheekbone weakly. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head against your forehead as if apology meant nothing now, meant less than the fact of your body in his arms, alive and broken and here. “You don’t get to disappear and come back covered in blood and say you’re sorry like that fixes anything.”

“I know,” you whispered again.

He looked at you then, properly looked, taking in every bruise, every split place, the exhaustion draining the fight from your body by the second. His face changed into something nakedly anguished.

“I’m here,” he said, as if saying it could pin you to life. “Do you hear me? I’m here.” You nodded once.

The effort cost you.

Sukuna brushed the hair from your face with shaking fingers. “You don’t leave me again.” A little breath of laughter almost came out of you, though it hurt. “Bossy.” His mouth twisted. “Shut up.” It was the closest he had to pleading.

You blinked slowly at him, your vision already beginning to blur at the edges.

“Sukuna.”

“What.”

“I still got your money.” For one shocked second, he just stared at you.

Then a broken laugh escaped him, wet and raw and disbelieving all at once. He pressed his mouth hard to your forehead like he could keep you conscious through force.

“Of course you do.” You looked peaceful for a moment then.

Too peaceful.

The fight had gone out of your body all at once, the terrible brightness of the domain gone now, leaving only a woman who had gone far past her limit and was finally letting herself fall. Your hand slipped from his face. Your lashes fluttered once more. “Sukuna,” you whispered again, so faint now he had to bend lower. “I’m here.” You exhaled softly.

Then your body went limp in his arms.

Sukuna’s whole face changed. “Y/N.”

No response.

His hand pressed to the side of your throat, finding your pulse, feeling it there—weak but present. Relief hit so hard it almost knocked the breath out of him. He gathered you closer instantly, cradling you against his chest with a care that looked almost impossible on him after the brutality of minutes before.

Around you, the battlefield still existed. Suguru still writhed somewhere beyond. Gojo still stood ready to end him. Maki and Yuta still watched, shaken and breathless and bloodied.

But in the center of it, Sukuna only held you.

One hand spread protectively over the back of your head.

His mouth pressed once to your temple.

And his breathing, though still ragged, finally began to slow around the unbearable fact that after six months of emptiness, after war and blood and loss and fury, you were back in his arms—even if unconscious, even if broken, even if the world around him still had not finished demanding its price.

@tobesocoldasyou @beereadzzz @unlimited-impressions @elladollie @marcelinebtw @chososcupoftea @winkii @eli54sa @strawberryosaki @rumblehoneyy @ellsiedjarin @poopypantsstinkface @tojisunicornbraidd @it2muse3 @wildlycruelphoenix @kamisiag @blissingtaehyung @moe-moes-stuff @simplyspooky8 @attackonnat @confusedmomfriend @man1cslut @xunquish-blog @cherrycokeline @onlykuna @dawnsoblivion @ngueyu @iynmwb-ivelle @cherry-peach-flavored @tinkspen @localfandomjumper @christansworld @ejk31 @jjktsworld

[suku-enthusiasts]

You know what I just realized I don’t think my friends truly know me LMFAO

I have one friend that probably knows me the best. She knows. I love writing fan fictions. She’s the only one of my friends that has access to it, she knows I’m a slut for Sukuna, that I love yaoi.

I’m genuinely sitting here and I don’t think any of my friends know that about me 😭😂

[suku-enthusiasts]

hi just wanted to say you’re literally so pretty!! also love ur fics

you guys are so sweet😭 I don’t see what yall see by ty🩷🩷🩷

[suku-enthusiasts]

Girl stfu yes you are😒

😭

[suku-enthusiasts]

🫪Ugh you’re so beautiful🫪

STOP NO IM NOT😭