You are a Forensic Pathology student on a scholarship that doesn’t rest nor sleep, and a campus employee with more uniforms than regular clothes.
It isn’t glamorous, it is simple, you like simple.
The MMA fighter — who you staple closed every now and then — is the polar opposite of simple.
He's also too persistent, too cocky and he keeps showing up even when you keep turning him down.
Who's giving in first?
Tags: Alternate Universe - College/University; Slow Burn; Slow Build; Slow Romance; Blood and Injury; Dead People; Eventual Smut; Angst; Harassment; Mahito is his own Warning; Sukuna is young and dumb; Jealousy; Bullying; Harassment; Idiots in love; sukuna is obsessed; we love obedient men
Ao3 link if you prefer!
art by avecot
(🥀) This arc is complete, 17 chapters.
Thank you all who commented, read, enjoyed, shared, etc! 💕
Ch1. How to staple a live exhibit
Ch2. How to Outlast a Grin Without Giving Ground
Ch3. How to Chart a Persistent Symptom
Ch4. How to Pronounce Time of Trust's Death
Ch5. How to Sit With Consequences
Ch6. How to Store Boundaries at 4ºC
Ch7. How to Chart Reckless in Ink
Ch8. How to Take a Hit and Not Waste It
Ch9. How to Guard What Isn’t Yours
Ch10. How to Want Out Loud Without Dropping the Clipboard
Ch11. How to Accidental Bench Sedation
Ch12. How to Hold Hair, Not Leverage
Ch13. How to Touch Without Ruining the Air
Ch14. How to Keep Your Hands Steady While Your Heart Learns a New Rhythm
Ch15. How to Be Soft in Public Without Dropping Your Edge
Ch16. How to Request Contact and Obtain Orders
Ch17. How to Win Boring, Pass Loud, and Celebrate Like an Idiot
Winter Break. How to Wear a Dress, Dance with a Wolf, and Decide You Want the Rest
You don’t remember when you became the person with keys, only that one day they were there — cold on a lanyard, heavy in your pocket, tapping your thigh like a second pulse.
You are a Forensic Pathology student on a scholarship that doesn’t rest nor sleep and a campus employee with more uniforms than regular clothes.
In the morning you put on a lab coat.
In the afternoon you wear a polo with a logo and the kind of ID that opens staff doors.
At night you pull on an EMT windbreaker that smells like lemon cleaner and coffee.
It isn’t glamorous, it is simple, you like simple.
Swap out a box before it’s empty because future-you will be grateful and panic is messy.
You write everything down because paper doesn’t argue. You keep the radio on your hip because emergencies don’t ask permission.
In the anatomy lab, the air has a bite even in summer.
Stainless tables hold their reflections, vents hum, and the overhead lights make the whole room feel like you’ve stepped inside a clean thought.
You prep stations for first-years who are going to pretend they’re fine and start shaking anyway, you learn their faces, the curious, the bravado one, the one who will cry later in the bathroom and then thank you next week for treating them like a person instead of a grade.
Professor Nanami comes in with his perfect tie and his measured voice and says things in a way that makes the room slower and smarter. He trusts you with the rest, you don’t show off, you just keep your hands steady and tell the truth.
Your one real friend is Shoko. Same track, same exams, same way of leaning on a counter and seeing the whole problem at once.
She always has gum, always has hand cream, always has the kind of blunt comment that lands like care.
She texts you “eat” and you do, even if it’s half a granola bar while logging temperatures.
You sit together on the floor behind a rolling cabinet when you need to breathe where no one can see it, you make each other laugh at the wrong moments and then stop because laughing near the donors feels like breaking a rule you haven’t written down.
People on campus call you Cadaver Lab Angel when they want something, Morgue Saint when they’re trying to be funny, Corpse Barbie and Corpse’s Bride when they think you can’t hear them.
They always need you later — when the lab opens for review, when study hall needs a signature, when someone throws up in a stairwell, when a cut won’t close and a confident boy suddenly can’t stop shaking.
In front of you they are respectful, behind you, they are what people are when they’re bored and trying to impress each other.
You would resent it more if it weren’t so predictable.
You do your rounds. Clinic. Compliance.
Ringside on fight nights because the athletes like to pretend they’re professionals and the university likes to pretend liability can be cleaned with a mop.
You don’t like the noise, the chest-thumping, the way the crowd pours all its ache into two people on a square of canvas, but you stand where you’re assigned, with a stapler, saline, gauze, and a towel rolled tight.
You don’t look at the crowd, you look at breath and eyes and how a person stands when they’re about to fall.
The first time you work a fight night this semester, you notice the lighting more than the people — The halogens are too bright, they make sweat look like it has an opinion.
The music on the speaker is something your brain refuses to hold.
You check the AED beside the tunnel and find the pads case slightly open.
You fix it.
You put your name on the checklist because if something goes wrong you want to know the last hands were yours.
You confiscate a vape from a boy with gray-blue hair blowing grape fog at the oxygen tank and say.
“No,” and, “Do you want to be the reason the fire alarm goes off?”
He rolls his eyes and smirks something about making friends. You log his ID for a thirty-day sideline ban and he wanders off like gravity is optional.
Uraume — white windbreaker, white nails, expression like snow, you adore their quiet — comes to stand near you. They manage cryotherapy, rehab, and the quiet, mechanical parts of keeping bodies in working order. You like them.
They carry silence the way you do, by choice.
“Full house.” they say, not looking up from their tablet.
“Full of what.” you say.
They allow a ghost of a smile.
“Ego.”
The second bout ends in a decision. The third is the one people came for.
You know because the temperature of the gym changes when he steps through the ropes, loud becomes pointed.
It’s not complicated. Ryomen Sukuna is hot, popular, and he knows exactly how much mileage both of those facts get him.
Pink buzz cut. Scar slicing the right brow. Two studs catching light at his lower lip. Tape round his wrists that makes his hands look ceremonial — he is here to hit things and be seen doing it.
He moves like the ring owes him rent, he scales every reaction in the room without looking at anyone directly.
Shoko calls boys like him highlight reels, you call them time thieves.
You have stapled him before.
Once in the spring — six neat bites across a cut beneath his hairline. Once last fall, a butterfly closure at his cheek because staples would’ve left a line he didn’t want.
He said thank you with that lazy mouth like it was a favor to you, and you said “No sweat,” in your professional voice and didn’t look at his lips again.
He is not your problem unless he’s bleeding.
Alas, he always bleeds.
His opponent is taller and throws long. The first round is feeling each other, the second is deciding, and by the third the whole room is holding its breath.
Sukuna’s shoulders are loose. He has patience you wouldn’t have guessed he learned anywhere that plays music this loud.
He slips a right, reads a weight shift, and makes something clean happen that knocks the other boy off balance. The glove seam kisses wrong. From cheekbone to brow, a red mouth opens where there wasn’t one before.
You know that sound, the crowd’s cheer gets a rougher edge when it sees blood.
The ref steps in.
The buzzer is a mercy for the boy on the other side.
You’re already moving. Training room door. Gloves. Headlamp. The tile is bright and the counter is clean because you left it that way.
He doesn’t wait for anyone else to steer him. He steps into the light and sits on the table like the world is a form and he knows where the signature goes.
“Bite this,” you say, rolling a towel and putting it into his hand. “Or bite your pride. One of them will bleed less.”
He laughs around the towel, eyes bright like you’ve joined a club you didn’t ask to join.
“You always this charming?”
“Only when people bleed on my floor.”
“Your floor?” He tips his chin when you nudge it. “Then I’ll pay rent.”
“You pay by sitting still.” You clean the line with saline.
He winces once when the sting hits, less from pain than from habit, and settles.
It’s a good cut — good because it’s clean and doesn’t gape, good because it will close neatly if you’re neat.
You are neat.
The stapler weight is familiar in your hand, the sound it makes is decisive.
You line edges to edges.
Click. Click.
The world inside the world goes quiet, the way it always does when you fix something small that mattered more than anyone watching knows.
“Forty-eight hours,” you say, taping. “No sparring. No shower until I clear you. If I see blood in the drains, Facilities will come after me and I will come after you.”
He spits the towel into his palm and grins.
Up close, the confidence is louder, but you don’t feel swallowed by it, you feel aware of your own pulse and the towel and the fact that he smells like cheap body wash and heat. He graduates his gaze slowly — your hands, your badge, your mouth — cataloguing without shame, like he always gets to.
“Thanks, Angel,” he says. He calls you that because everyone does. You don’t give him anything for the effort.
“Read your care sheet,” you say, slipping a card under the band of tape on his hoodie. “Yes, it’s boring. Boring is safe.”
“What if I like dangerous,” he says, too easily.
“Then talk to someone else,” you end the conversation.
Your radio crackles on your hip and the hallway becomes your next assignment.
Theta Chi, a faint.
You leave him sitting on the table, all coiled energy and bite marks of metal, and go.
You come back to the training room after three.
The gym is asleep, the tile hums, your notes are under the counter, exactly where you left them. You pull open the drawer for a pen and still yourself before swearing because he is there again, sitting on the same table like a stubborn reflection.
Hoodie up. Hands braced on the edge, ankles crossed. He looks like he has never had to wait long for anything.
“You shouldn’t be here,” you say, because rules are a railing and you hold them even when no one is watching.
“Neither should you,” he says, voice low. “But here we are.”
“I work here.”
He tips his face toward the card you gave him.
“I’m following instructions.”
“That card didn’t say, ‘Haunt the training room after hours.’”
“It said, ‘No shower,’ and I listened, still clean.” he says, like you should be impressed.
You are not.
“You don’t look damp.”
“I can do sponge baths,” he says. “Multitalented.”
You look at him, he looks back, uncomfortable with silence for the first time tonight.
The studs in his lower lip are small and mean, you are not a person who gets unsteady over jewelry, — you aren’t unsteady now — but you take in the fact of him the way you take in any other fact, the posture, the set of his jaw, the way he puts his weight where it makes him taller.
“Breakfast,” he says finally, as if he’s changing the subject to something practical. “After you get off. Or later. Whenever you don’t have to run.”
“I’m on call,” you say.
“After call.”
“I don’t do dates.”
“Then call it food. You still eat, right?”
It’s late enough that your habits are bone deep and your mouth is faster than your filters.
“Sometimes.” you shrug.
“Let me fix that.” He stands, not crowding you, just being as present as possible without touching.
He is taller than you because most people are, that doesn’t matter the way a lot of people think it does, what matters is that he doesn’t reach for your elbow, doesn’t put his hand on the counter next to you, doesn’t lean over you just to prove he can. He leaves you space, and for someone like him that is more serious than flowers.
“Don’t you have people lined up already?” you say, eyebrow cocked, tone dry.
“Yeah,” he says. “They’re not you.”
You hear the click in your own head where some chapter tries to start, and you close it.
You think about the bursar’s email reminder that says HELD FUNDS in sharp, cheerful font. You think about how compliance logs know when you were in the office. You think about how many hours you need this week to make math behave. You think about the girls from Kappa Alpha Theta who pretended you were invisible at the library, then laughed when you walked by, then pinged you at midnight the next day because their friend had fainted and they “didn’t know who else to call.” You think about Yorozu’s smooth mouth forming “Corpse’s Bride” and “Corpse Barbie” and how the other girls looked relieved they weren’t the ones being named.
They are respectful when they need you.
The rest of the time you are an unoccupied chair.
“No,” you say, simple. You don’t manage soft often, you manage firm. “I can’t afford you.”
He looks thrown for one breath. Not hurt — surprised, owled look. Then the mouth comes back, lazy, sharper. He smiles like challenges are chewable.
“I’m free.”
“You are never free.” you say, almost scoff, and you slide your notes into your bag. “And neither am I.”
You leave him there.
You don’t look back. You tell yourself you don’t care if he stays.
The door clicks, the night air gets in, and the campus looks like a photo taken with the flash off.
You wake up three hours later on the clinic cot and dream about quiet hallways and labels that stick the first time.
You shower in a staff stall and put your hair up and text Shoko a skull emoji because humor is cheaper than therapy, she replies with a coffee cup and “outside in five” and you love her in the way you love anyone who makes your day line up.
The lab at seven is full of bodies who haven’t learned their bodies yet, and there comes Shoko with two coffees and a bag of pretzels.
You stand shoulder-to-shoulder and run the morning like a show.
Open the sheet, talk about what a rib actually does, let Professor Nanami lay a hand on a clavicle with reverent precision and say “here” and make twenty people lean forward.
You redirect a kid who turns gray without turning it into humiliation.
Shoko catches your eye when someone says “Angel” like a spell.
You file the sound of it under “useful” and keep moving.
In the hallway afterward, Shoko flicks her wrist and shakes two tablets into your palm.
“Electrolytes,” she says. “You look bleached.”
“You’re beautiful,” you croon.
“I know,” she says, deadpan. “Clinic?”
“Then compliance. Then training center.”
She blows a strand of hair off her forehead.
“Eat something that isn’t coffee.”
You nod because you have an emergency banana in your bag.
You eat half of it at the clinic between an ankle wrap and a migraine that reminds you of storm windows rattling in wind.
You use your slow voice that means “you’re okay” without promising anything.
You write three referrals, one of them has a drawing of a smiley face in the corner because the patient needed it.
You don’t believe in smiley faces as a lifestyle, you believe in them as tools.
The compliance office is lit like someone believes fluorescent is a vitamin.
Ms. Akiyama, who runs the place with the calm of a predator who doesn’t need to chase anything that will come to her eventually, hands you a stack of film-review reports and a list of study hall absences.
You sit at your terminal and click through screens with the deep, non-exciting pleasure of seeing a system work because someone bothered to make it consistent.
You flag no-shows, you unfreeze an athlete’s account because she brought you documentation, you save receipts for everything.
You like receipts. You’re boring, yeah, get over it.
His name is in the film log again. Red.
You click to the details because habit is stronger than principle.
Watched thirteen minutes. Scrubbed. Closed.
You sigh.
Dumbass.
The system doesn’t lie and he doesn’t care that you can see it.
You flag him because you’re paid to be fair, while the database thinks about your input, someone knocks on the open door.
He fills the doorway the same way he fills the ring — like light changes to make him look better. You start to think they kind of do, but that’s not something possible according to the law of physics, so you let the thought go.
Clean hoodie, clean face, staples are visible if you know to look.
You do.
He doesn’t put his hands in his pockets, which is a small kindness, you note it anyway.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be,” you sigh, eyes back on the screen.
“Yeah,” he says. “Here.”
“Unfortunately for you, ‘here’ doesn’t need anything you’re selling.”
“I’m not selling,” he smirks. “I’m buying. I brought the thing where you tell me you don’t have time and I say ‘Okay, I’ll wait’ and then I actually do.”
You keep your voice level
“You have a red flag.”
“I have many,” he’s unapologetic. “Which one is today.”
“Film review,” you say. “Watch it. Don’t scrub. Don’t nap through it. Don’t assume someone else will do the thinking for you.”
“Is this the part where you threaten to freeze my account,” he says, almost happy.
“No,” you say. “This is the part where I decide to do it and then tell you after.”
He huffs a laugh.
Ms. Akiyama glances over her glasses and you can feel the room collecting data on both of you.
He shifts his weight, you don’t look up, you think he might leave.
He doesn’t.
“Okay,” he says finally. “Send me the link.”
“It’s in your email. If you ask me where, I’ll file you under ‘hopeless’ and move on.”
“Harsh,” he says.
When you don’t rise, he lets the smile drop half an inch, which makes him look younger and more dangerous at the same time.
“Eat with me.”
“No.”
“Walk with me.”
“No.”
“Let me stand here and watch you work.”
“That’s worse than both of the above,” you say, pinching the bridge of your nose like it would stop the headache with tattoos and red flags in front of you.
And the truth is you don’t hate it. That is not useful information. You go back to the screen and click, he is still in your peripheral vision, you refuse to drag the window to hide him.
When you stand to refill the paper in the printer, he steps out of your way without being told.
When you move back to your chair, he doesn’t sit in it like some boys do for no reason but power.
He keeps the doorway as an exit you can take without crossing him, you notice everything, you always have, you’re doing it now and you’re not sure what to do with the collected data.
He comes to cryo at nineteen hundred like a student who has been told twice and finally listened.
Uraume holds the door open with one toe and the kind of expression that doesn’t belong to any sorority or team or department.
You clean the staples with gentle pressure and he tips his face into your fingers without turning it into a scene.
Menace.
He whispers,
“Coffee later,” soft enough that only you hear it.
You say,
“Inventory,” and give him a stairwell and a time because you pick your ground when you can.
He shows up at one thirteen with two cups and a paper bag that smells like butter.
You’re counting gauze and checking expiration dates and writing down which med kit got a new pair of shears.
He sits one step below you so you’re the same height without discussing it.
“Croissant or protein ring masquerading as food,” he asks. “I will not be offended.”
“Croissant,” you say, because you are not a penance machine.
You eat while you write, and he watches the way people watch someone fixing something they didn’t realize needed fixing.
It’s quiet in a stairwell in a good way, nobody yelling, nobody on a phone, just the sound of a vending machine that will eat someone’s dollar later.
He doesn’t narrate, he doesn’t overplay, when he bumps his knee into the riser lightly, it’s more nervous tic than flirt.
That surprises you enough to look at him, and then you look away.
“Why me,” you ask suddenly, because you would rather get it over with than turn it into homework. You already have too much on your plate. “You could fill a room with people who want to be your problem.”
He takes a breath like he’s about to run and then doesn’t.
“I like how you talk to me,” he says. “You don’t perform, you look at what’s in front of you, you fix it or you say no. Everyone else tries to guess what I want, you don’t care.”
“I care about my jobs,” you deadpan.
“Same answer.”
“Not caring about you isn’t romance.” you didn’t think you’d ever need to say those words out loud.
“I don’t do romance,” it sounds honest. “I do choices.”
“That sounds like a threat,” you blink.
“It’s a schedule,” he says. “And you like schedules.”
You finish your list, you fold it and slide it into the kit, you stand because that’s what you were going to do, not because you caught yourself enjoying the conversation.
You are careful about cause and effect.
“I have to go.”
“Okay,” he says, taking it. “Study hall on Thursday. I’ll be there. If I’m not, freeze me.”
“I will,” you say, and he grins like that’s foreplay and you refuse to give the thought a chair.
The girls in Kappa Alpha Theta laugh too loudly the next day at the library door.
Yorozu is with them, graceful and bored and shining with the kind of polish that makes others try too hard.
Someone murmurs Corpse’s Bride as you pass, sing-song and cruel.
You don’t stop, you pretend you didn’t hear it even though the words hook under your ribs and hang there the rest of the evening.
They DM the clinic account at one a.m. two nights later because a friend passed out.
You come anyway.
You always come, it’s your job.
Thursday’s study hall breathes like a dog asleep.
He shows up on time, signs his name in print that would make a teacher proud, sits where you can see him, and actually reads.
He doesn’t try to catch your eye, which for him probably feels like penance.
You check the room, you make notes, you don’t stand near him longer than you stand near anyone else.
When he leaves, he stops in the hall, hands in his hoodie pocket, and says nothing for a full five seconds.
Then,
“Dinner.”
“I don’t have dinner,” and you hear Shoko in your head.
Don’t let him rearrange your brain.
“Food, then. My place. Plates, not paper. You can leave thirty seconds after you walk in. You control the door.”
You think of three reasons to say no and use two.
“I don’t mix my jobs.”
“This isn’t your job.” he raises a slit brow.
“You are.”
He raises a hand in a small surrender.
“Okay,” he says, and he looks annoyed for the first time since you met him. It sits badly on him.
“Tomorrow,” he adds, like he can schedule hope. “Or not. You’ll tell me when.”
Shoko catches you on the quad like a weather front.
“You said no,” she says, as if she’s been narrating from a hundred feet away.
“I did.”
“You want to say yes,” she says, because she has earned the right to talk to you like a mirror. “Do you need me to give you permission or take it away?”
You blow air out through your nose and taste the campus.
Cut grass, late coffee, hot sidewalks.
“Tell me what you know about him.”
“He’s annoying,” she says immediately. “He’s loud and everyone forgives him for it because he’s good at a thing they all like to watch. He sleeps around because he can. He shows up when it matters for people he calls his. He is not cruel unless you scare him first. If you say no and mean it, he hears it. If he doesn’t, I will put him through a recycling bin.”
“You won’t,” you say, but you feel relief anyway. And you know she would absolutely do it.
“I will,” she says. “Text me ‘home’ if you ever go to his room. Not because he’s dangerous. Because the world is.”
“I know,” you say. “I will.”
You do not go the next night.
You have clinic, and a call that turns into half an hour of sitting with a girl who can’t stop crying about nothing in particular and everything at once.
You keep tissues in your pocket for exactly this. You walk her to her dorm and pretend you aren’t already late for the last bus.
You jog anyway, and you get there as the driver closes the doors and then opens them again because your ID works on more than doors.
You thank him, he shrugs like your whole life is the kind of thing that happens on his route every night.
Sukuna starts showing up places you already are.
Not aggressively.
Not in a way that makes you get your keys out in your pocket.
Just — there, in the hallway when you’re rolling a cart, outside the clinic when you’re taking a breath on the ramp, in the compliance office with a question you know he could have asked someone else.
He has learned how much space is respectful, he has learned that jokes are wasted when you’re tired, he trims himself down to the parts that might work, reliable presence, food that isn’t terrible, not asking you to do anything but say yes or no.
You shut him down ten times in two weeks.
You do it clean. You do it without explanation after the first three tries.
You don’t owe him a monologue about scholarships or debt or your refusal to become a rumor that Yorozu would wear like jewelry, you owe yourself sleep and rent and a record that says you showed up where you said you would.
He keeps coming back, he’s not used to no, you can tell by how carefully he says it the first time he returns it to you.
You say,
“Not tonight,”
And he says, “Okay,” and doesn’t turn it into a performance.
It shouldn’t impress you. It does anyway.
Rumors put you and him in the same sentence before you decide if you’re comfortable with that grammar. The girls in Kappa Alpha Theta stop looking through you and start looking at you like you’re interesting against their will.
“Corpse Barbie got standards,” someone says in a hallway, too loud.
“Good for her,” someone else murmurs, honest.
You file both away.
People are both things at once, you learned that in your second month with donors and you learn it again every time the radio crackles and you sprint toward the sound of a problem.
Uraume doesn’t bring him up, you don’t either.
Once, after a session where he steps into the cryo fog and comes out pink and cursing softly, they hand you a wipe and say,
“You keep a good line.”
You say,
“Thanks,” and then you joke about a paper no one is asking you to write because it makes you feel less seen.
They watch you with their head tipped slightly like a bird listening for something under snow.
“Ask a friend if you ever want to know whether a person is safe,” they say. “Not a coworker.”
You nod. You already asked Shoko. You already believed her.
When he texts, it’s not paragraphs.
It’s, Study hall. Present. It’s, Watched all forty-five minutes. No scrubs.
It’s a photo of the signed film-review sheet with his name neat and a timestamp.
It’s a picture of a paper bag at the foot of the staircase, Left dinner on the third landing. If you don’t want it, toss it. Not poisoned.
You eat the food on a rolling cart between the clinic and compliance and save the bag because it’s sturdy.
You don’t text back and he doesn’t push. He makes it easy to pretend none of it is about him.
The night he tries again, he does it without an audience and without any of the swagger that makes people call him insufferable in group chats and magnetic in person.
He waits until you finish a call in a dorm lounge and pack your bag and put your hands in your jacket pockets.
He waits until you’re halfway to the door and then steps out of an alcove like he’s been a shadow learning manners.
“Walk me to the gym,” he says. “I’ll shut up.”
“You won’t,” you say, but you fall into step together because you were going that way anyway and because the path is lit and the geese have gone to bed and the campus feels briefly like a town that never learned what danger was.
He doesn’t speak, he kicks a pebble three times and then seems to decide that looks childish and stops.
When you get to the athletic center he stops with you under the awning and looks like he’s trying for a sentence that won’t get him thrown out of your orbit.
“I’m not going to stop asking,” he says. “I know that’s annoying. I hear it when I say it. But I like being near you and I don’t know why that has to be complicated.”
“It doesn’t,” your voice is not soft and not hard. It’s something you had to practice to get right. “It has to be mine.”
“Okay,” he says, and he backs up like you shoved him even though you didn’t touch him. “Okay.”
He opens the door and holds it until you go through.
He doesn’t follow you in. That shouldn’t count as anything and somehow it does.
You go home to a room that smells like laundry and textbooks and the cheap candles your lease pretends you don’t have.
You line your shoes by the door because order is a comfort you can afford, you text Shoko home and she replies with a skull and a heart and a “sleep, nerd,” you stand in your kitchen with the light off and drink water out of a measuring cup because you haven’t run the dishwasher and it feels like a metaphor you don’t want to write down.
You think about the girls whispering in a circle, the way respect on campus is often just debt waiting for a due date, you think about the first donor you uncovered and how your hands didn’t shake until you touched the cold terrycloth of the sheet and realized no one would judge you for moving carefully.
You think about Uraume saying ask a friend, not a coworker.
You think about Shoko’s stare when she says, Don’t let him rearrange your brain.
You think about how easy it would be to rewrite a rule for the night and then pretend you didn’t.
You put your phone face down, you put your keys where they always go, you get in bed, you catalog every muscle that will hurt if you don’t stretch in the morning, you tell yourself the story of your life in the shortest sentences you know.
You are here because you said yes to hard things.
You keep your scholarship because you do not fall asleep on your feet.
You are not a rumor.
You are useful.
You are loved by at least one person who will fight a recycling bin for you.
You can want something and still tell it to wait.
Outside, the sprinklers cough awake, and somewhere, a party chokes on its own volume and then finds a quieter song.
Your radio lies heavy on your nightstand like a promise.
He can wait. The world can wait.
Morning does not.
When it comes, you tie your hair, pull on the lab coat, and pick up your keys. The lanyard taps your thigh, the same pulse, the same weight.
You open the lab and the day opens with it, you uncover what needs uncovering and cover the rest.
You hold steady, you do not lose your place.
He will show up again. You know that. He is a person who keeps showing up.
You are a person who keeps showing up too, only for different things.
He doesn’t know it, but it’s the sameness that will undo you long before any grin ever could.
For now, the only thing you owe anybody is attention, you pour it into the work like water into a thirsty plant and watch it stand a little taller for it.
You do not see him that morning.
You don’t look for him.
You eat a banana and half a bagel and ignore a text that just says coffee? with a photo of a paper cup held in a hand you could identify in a lineup.
You reply to Shoko with a picture of the lab whiteboard and a caption,
We live in here now.
She sends back a picture of her notes and a caption,
Until we don’t.
You lean your hip into the stainless table and look at your list for the day, it is not romantic, it is not tragic, it is yours.
The last time you said you were done for real ended up being a lie, who could have predicted?
art by: @winterrbluess
Six | Eight
Seven — Will
You are seventeen.
The first thing you notice is the smell.
Sweat, smoke, cheap deodorant, something sour and sticky in the carpet. The kind of smell that clings to clothes and hair and regret.
Your neck hurts.
Your lower back aches like you slept half-twisted.
There’s a spring pressing into your ribs through the thin futon mattress, and someone’s elbow is jammed against your calf.
You open your eyes.
You’re in a stranger’s living room — one of those generic share houses with band posters half-torn on the walls and a TV that’s older than you are. The curtains are half-drawn, letting in a stripe of harsh morning light that cleaves right across your face.
Your jeans are half undone.
Your belt hangs lopsided, one loop missed.
Your shirt is inside-out.
One bra strap digs into your shoulder, the other is nowhere to be seen.
On the floor beside the futon is Sukuna.
He’s sprawled on his back like he got dropped there from a height and never moved again. One arm is flung over his eyes, forearm resting across his forehead.
His hoodie’s rucked up around his ribs, exposing a slice of skin above his waistband.
Hip bone, faint V-line, the edge of a tattoo you know better than the veins on your own hand.
His mouth is open, breathing loud, borderline snoring.
There’s a smear of your lipstick on his jaw, a blurred streak along the angle of his cheekbone.
His hair is a mess — pink everywhere, some of it stuck to his forehead, some of it smashed flat on one side.
You shift a little, propping yourself up on your elbow.
The movement makes your shirt pull.
You hiss.
Your nails have left marks along his back. You catch a glimpse when he shifts, hoodie riding up further, red lines, crescent scratches, a map of last night written in your handwriting on his skin.
You don’t remember all of them.
For a second, you just watch him.
He looks stupidly young like this. Mouth slack. No smirk, no sharpness. Just a boy who fell asleep where he dropped. No hoodie armor, no attitude, no gasoline poured on every situation.
Just Ryomen, with his ridiculous face and his impossible hair and the soft, vulnerable line of his throat.
Your phone buzzes under your hip.
You dig it out, thumb clumsy.
The screen is a graveyard.
Mom (12 missed calls)
Where are you?
Pick up your phone.
If you’re not dead, you are grounded.
I’m serious. Answer me NOW.
There are others, too — friends, group chats, blurry photos from last night that mean nothing and everything.
You scroll quickly past one of you with a cup held high, Sukuna in the background flipping the camera off.
Your stomach turns.
You nudge him with your foot.
“Hey,” you croak. Your tongue feels like cotton. “Wake up. You have to drive me home.”
He grumbles, an inarticulate noise from somewhere under his arm. His hand flails out, bats weakly at your ankle.
“Five more minutes,” he mutters, voice rough.
“Five more minutes and my mother will enlist the army,” you say. “Get up.”
He slits one eye open, squinting at the stripe of light, then at you.
His gaze drags over your face, your hair, your twisted clothes. Something lazy and satisfied curls in his expression.
“You look like shit,” he says.
“Thanks,” you say. “You smell like it.”
He snorts and closes his eye again.
You grab the nearest cushion and hurl it at his face.
It hits with a whuff, sending dust motes up in the air. He jerks, swears, blindly grabs the cushion and flings it back at you.
You block it with your arm, laughing despite the pounding in your skull.
“Up,” you insist. “Now. Before your car gets towed or ticketed or stolen by raccoons.”
“Let the raccoons have it.” he mutters.
“Then they’ll drive better than you,” you shoot back.
He groans, rolls onto his side, then pushes himself up with a wince. The hoodie rides up more, you get another flash of those angry, red lines on his back.
Heat crawls up your neck.
He catches where you’re looking and smirks, sleep-blurred but still cocky.
“Enjoy the view?” he asks.
You throw the cushion at him again. He snags it out of the air this time, then lunges.
He doesn’t give you time to scramble away. One second you’re on the futon, the next, he’s grabbed your ankle and yanked, dragging you off the mattress with a surprised yelp.
You hit the floor in a tangle of limbs, cheap blanket, and half-buttoned denim.
“Ow,” you complain, laughing because the alternative is crying.
He ends up half on top of you, knee between your thighs, one hand braced on the floor beside your head. The room spins a little from the sudden movement. His hoodie smells like smoke and sweat and that stupid cologne he thinks is subtle.
For a few breaths, it’s quiet.
His nose is buried in the curve of your neck, morning stubble scratching your skin.
You feel the puff of his exhale against your collarbone. His hoodie is soft at your jaw. Your fingers curl in the fabric at his back without you telling them to.
You wish you could stay like that for a while.
Forever, maybe.
You can't, though.
“We should move,” you say eventually, but it’s soft, lazy.
“Mm,” he says into your skin. “We should.”
He doesn’t.
You don’t either.
For a split second, it feels like you two could be normal if you tried hard enough.
The hangover, the mess, the missed calls — it all blurs at the edges. It’s just this, his weight, your warmth, the faint, sleepy hum in your blood.
His phone buzzes on the floor.
The sound slices through the fragile quiet.
He sighs against your neck, annoyed, but doesn’t move. The buzzing stops. Starts again. Longer this time.
Without thinking, you twist, reaching for it over his shoulder.
The screen lights up against the battered wood.
A girl’s name you know.
Your least favorite one.
The notification preview is flirty and too familiar.
last night was fun ;)
you alive?
Your stomach drops.
The warmth in your chest curdles into something cold and ugly.
You jab a finger at the screen.
“You wanna get that?”
He lifts his head, squinting at the phone, then shrugs.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, voice flat.
“Seems like it does.” you snap at him.
He pushes himself up onto his knees, sits back on his heels.
“She sends that every weekend,” he says. “She’ll live.”
“Oh,” you say, bitterness rising like bile. “Every weekend. That’s reassuring.”
He frowns.
“What’s your problem?”
“My problem,” you repeat, laughing once, sharp. “My problem is that while I was—” you gesture between you, vague and vicious “—this, she was doing whatever last night was, and now she’s sending you winky faces at eight in the morning.”
He rolls his eyes.
“She’s drunk-texting.”
“Still,” you say. “Maybe answer her. Let her know you’re not dead. Or busy.”
His jaw ticks.
“I said it doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” you throw back.
He stares at you for a beat, hair falling into his eyes.
“Why?” he asks. “You said we’re nothing, remember? Just ‘having fun.’”
You flinch.
You did say that.
In some other kitchen, some other night, when you wanted to sound cool and detached and not absolutely feral about him.
He sees it land.
“Thought you wanted casual,” he says. “Isn’t that the whole point? No strings, no labels, no getting mad when my phone buzzes.”
You push yourself up, back hitting the side of the futon.
“There’s casual,” you say, “and there’s you letting some girl use you like a spare battery and then still crawling into my—”
You choke it back, the word bed tasting wrong in your mouth in a stranger’s house.
“And you don’t?” he snaps back, sneering. “Texting your ex while you’re in my bed, that’s casual? Or just charity?”
Heat spikes in your cheeks.
“That was once.”
“Once that I know of,” he scoffs. “For all I know, you’re sending him selfies right now.”
You wave your phone at him, screen full of your mother’s rage.
“Yeah, I’m sure he’d love this.”
He snorts.
“He loved worse.”
You want to slap him.
You settle for words.
“At least he answers when I call,” you say. “At least he doesn’t vanish for three days and show up only when he wants something.”
“Oh, here we go,” he says, hands spreading. “The lecture. I forget to charge my phone for a weekend and suddenly I’m ‘vanishing.’”
“You weren’t at school. You weren’t at work. Nobara said you were at some party in the next town over. With her.”
You don’t have to say her. He knows who you mean.
The girl currently buzzing his phone like a wasp.
“So?” he says, dangerous quiet.
“So maybe I looked at that and thought, hey, maybe I’m not the only one he’s lying to,” you spit.
His eyes flash.
“I never lied to you.”
“You lie all the time,” you say. “By omission, by disappearing, by acting like this—” again, that razor gesture between your bodies “—doesn’t mean anything and then getting pissed when I talk to someone else.”
His face twists.
“I get pissed because you do it on purpose.”
You bark a humorless laugh.
“Oh, so it’s only fun when you’re the one making me jealous?”
“I don’t give a shit if you’re jealous,” he says. “I give a shit when you make me feel like a fucking placeholder.”
That lands like a thrown bottle.
You blink.
“I never—”
“You think I don’t see it?” he barrels on. “You looking at colleges, at towns with trains that go out, talking about ‘getting out of here’ like you’re not going to leave the second someone better shows up?”
Your throat tightens.
“Everyone wants to get out of here.”
“Not everyone thinks they’re too good for it,” he says.
Something inside you cracks.
“You think that’s what this is?” you demand. “You think I’m trying to be ‘too good’ for you because I don’t want to die in someone’s passenger seat?”
He flinches.
You don’t stop.
“You almost killed us,” you say. “You think I forgot that? You think I can’t still feel the guardrail in my teeth when I close my eyes? You think I don’t wake up sometimes and check if I’m still here because you’ve convinced me we’re immortal and I know we’re not?”
His mouth opens.
Closes.
The phone buzzes again on the floor.
Her name lights up, persistent.
You pick it up and toss it at his chest.
He catches it by reflex, fingers closing around it.
“Text her,” you say. “Text all of them. Tell them you’re free. Tell them I remembered I’m not obligated to be your crash test dummy.”
His grip tightens around the phone.
“That what you think you are?”
“I don’t know what I am to you,” you say, voice cracking. “And I’m starting to think you don’t either.”
You push yourself to your feet, head pounding, stomach roiling. You snatch your shoes from under the table, jam them on without untying the laces, nearly falling in the process.
Behind you, he stands too, slower. The room feels smaller, the air thicker.
“You want to go?” he says. “Go. I’m not keeping you.”
“That’s the problem,” you throw over your shoulder. “You never keep me. You just expect me to keep showing up.”
He laughs, a dry, ugly sound.
“And you do.”
“Not anymore,” you lie.
You make it to the front door. Your hand is on the knob when his voice hits your back.
“You walking?” he asks. “You look like you’re one wrong step from face-planting.”
“I’ll call someone,” you say, not turning. “Or I’ll walk. Or I’ll die in a ditch. Either way, you’re off the hook.”
“Don’t be stupid,” he snaps. “Let me drive you.”
You turn then, met by the sight of him in the doorway to the living room — hoodie half-zipped, hair a mess, phone still in his hand, jaw set.
“Why?” you ask. “So you can almost kill me sober this time?”
His eyes go flat.
“Fine. Don’t.”
Silence stretches, tight and hot.
You break first.
You always do.
“Ten minutes,” you say. “You have ten minutes before I leave without you.”
He rolls his eyes, but he’s already grabbing his keys off the sticky counter, shrugging on his jacket.
“Yeah, yeah. Princess demands a chauffeur. Shocking.”
You don’t correct him.
The car ride is quiet.
No music. No jokes. No aimless detours to stretch out the time.
The city is gray and washed out, early morning light making everything look harsher.
He grips the steering wheel with both hands this time.
You watch the way the tendons stand out in his forearms, the way his jaw clenches and releases.
You want to say something.
Thank you. I’m sorry. I hate you. Don’t text her back. Don’t text me either.
Every option tastes wrong.
You stare out the window instead, watching the same streets you’ve driven a hundred times slide by, suddenly foreign.
He pulls up half a block from your house, kills the engine.
For a moment, neither of you move.
You unbuckle your seatbelt. Your fingers shake.
“You’re grounded.” he says, breaking the silence.
“Probably.” you say.
“You’ll climb out the window anyway,” he adds, like he’s trying to drag you back into the familiar groove. “You always do.”
You look at him, really look, and see the boy under the bravado.
The fear there.
The certainty that no matter what you say, you’ll still come when he calls.
You open the door.
“I’m not.” you say.
He frowns.
“You’re not what?”
“Climbing out,” you say. Your throat feels tight. “Next time you throw rocks at my window. I’m not climbing out.”
He watches you for a heartbeat, red eyes narrowed, trying to gauge if you mean it.
“You will.” he says.
You step out of the car.
The morning air hits your face like a slap. Your house looms ahead, all closed blinds and unspoken consequences.
You shut the door with more force than necessary and don’t look back as you walk away.
You promise yourself you won’t climb back into his car next time.
You’re thirty-something and the rideshare smells like peppermint and new upholstery.
The app says it’s a five-minute trip to the client’s office. You slide into the backseat, laptop bag on your knees, blazer pulled tight.
The next second, the other back door opens.
Sukuna folds himself in, long legs bumping yours, knee knocking your knee. He shoots you a sideways look, mouth already curling.
“Morning, boss,” he says.
You don’t get out.
If you want to make a request, support my writing or prefer to read it on Ao3, the links are below:
✦ ｢ https://ko-fi.com/belimah ｣﹒｢Ao3 ｣ ✦
Not obsessively — just enough to keep your day from developing symptoms.
He shows up in the ways people with too much confidence show up, always leaning where doorways make frames, smiling like he invented it, acting as if rooms were built for his height.
You don’t adjust anything, you keep your clipboard, your clock, your rules.
The morning after the staples, he appears on the ramp with a split that doesn’t need you and a smirk that does.
“Check me,” he says.
“Get in line,” you answer, and point him behind a long-suffering sprinter with shin splints.
He waits. That’s new.
When it’s his turn you look, you don’t linger, you say,
“You don’t need me,”
And he says,
“Tragic,” like you canceled a holiday.
He’s flirting. You’re stapling time to your schedule.
“Still not your girlfriend,” you tell him calmly, setting the gauze.
“Devastating,” he says, perfectly polite.
“Two days, no heavy spar,” you add.
“Forty-eight hours,” he repeats back, good dog cadence.
He leaves without asking for bonus attention, and you realize you were braced for the ask.
You don’t relax.
You have finals in the future and a freshman with a dizzy spell in the now.
He tries the compliance office next, because athletes think paper is where attention lives.
You’re at the terminal, taking the slow revenge of uploading evidence when he slides into the next chair like a very large punctuation mark.
“Portal ate my film,” he says cheerfully.
“No,” you say without looking up, “you didn’t name your file correctly. Again.”
Dumbass.
“How do you know,” he asks.
“Because I know,” you answer.
You slide a laminated sheet toward him with the naming convention circled,
LASTNAME_TEAM_DATE.
“Follow the instructions. It’s free.”
He looks at the sheet, he looks at you, he could ask you to do it, boys have.
He doesn’t, he types.
You don’t watch, but you hear the small huff that means humility just skinned his knee.
When he stands, you point at the bin.
“Badge swipe before you leave,” you remind him.
He swipes.
“Do I get a sticker,” he asks, faux-hopeful.
“You get to be eligible,” you offer. “It’s like a sticker that pays rent.”
He laughs.
It’s annoying that you like the sound.
He tries proximity. A lot of them do.
You’ve learned to treat presence like a draft in the stairwell — annoying but harmless if you know where the cold is.
He finds you at the end of a shift with his bag on one shoulder and sweat still damp at his hairline.
The disastrous grin is back.
So is the charm that makes people turn their faces toward him without permission.
“Walk you,” he says.
“No,” you say, stepping past. “Your locker room’s that way.”
“No trouble,” he tries.
“I said no,” you repeat, without edge. “I don’t need an escort. I need five hours of sleep and a functioning coffee maker.”
He puts a hand to his chest like he’s been shot. Then he steps back — real back, not performative — and says only,
“Copy.”
You’re half a corridor down before you realize he used your word in your tone and didn’t twist it into a joke.
He tests jokes anyway.
You’re ringside for a scrimmage, he wins clean, for once.
When you tap the cut above his brow with two fingers and say,
“It’s nothing,” he says, “That’s what they all say,” and you look at him long enough to make the joke die in his throat.
“Be serious,” you deadpan.
He is.
It looks good on him.
You hate that you noticed.
You don’t tell Shoko he’s orbiting, she notices and tells you instead.
“He’s hanging around,” she says, walking beside you with her keys between her fingers and her murdery nurse aura dialed to low.
“He’s breathing air,” you say. “I can’t stop that.”
“I can,” Shoko says. She could. You know it. You squeeze her bicep with two fingers until she unclenches.
“I’m not hounded,” you say. “He’s testing fences. He can test them. They hold.”
“They better,” she mutters, eyeing his back in the hall like a target she’s memorizing for later.
Uraume finds you in the morgue, counts cooler bricks, and observes,
“He’s asking for baseline times.”
“I didn’t give him any,” they add dryly, as if you thought they would.
“Good,” you say, labeling. “He should use the portal like everyone else.”
“He will,” Uraume says. Then, after a beat, “He’s annoying. He is also trainable.”
“I’m not training him,” your brows knit together.
“I am,” they reply, like it’s a clinic rotation.
He finds you at a party you didn’t want to be at and tries something heroic and small, carrying your cooler.
“Put it down,” you say instantly. “Chain of custody. I’m not losing my license because you like to lift.”
He puts it down. He puts his hands up.
“Yes, doctor,” he says.
You’re not a doctor. Yet. You don’t correct him, mostly because it would extend the conversation.
“Get out of my work space,” you add as politely as you manage.
“Where is your work space,” he asks, looking around.
The entire city, his face says.
You point at the rectangle directly in front of you, he toes the line like he’s meeting an invisible fence for the first time.
“Like this,” you say.
“Like this,” he repeats, and stays there the rest of your shift — there, not here.
When a freshman tries to chat you up with a cut that’s more performance than problem, Sukuna doesn’t speak for you, he stands where he is and watches the air, not the boy.
You pretend you don’t notice.
Your nicknames multiply in places you don’t stand.
Corpse’s Bride, Campus Cherub, The Useful Ghost.
You file them to the mental drawer labeled Noise.
Yorozu’s laugh tinkles like a weapon in the middle distance, rich girls should come with warning labels.
You keep your stride, you keep your work.
He keeps showing up, different approach each time, like he’s studying a subject without syllabus.
He tries casual, you give him protocol.
He tries useful, you hand him policy.
He tries leaving you a coffee, you leave it sitting on the bench for an hour before drinking it when he’s gone.
It’s good. You do not say thank you. Yet.
He keeps failing to pass the first layer.
You keep making sure the first layer exists.
Layer one: your job.
It is a wall, not a door. He is allowed to look at the wall and admire the engineering. He is not allowed to scale it.
Layer two: your time.
It is a tight ring. He asks for it, you decline, he obeys, mostly. On a Tuesday, he asks for ten minutes at dawn and you say,
“No,” just to make sure the muscle still works.
Layer three: your body.
Untouched. He doesn’t push. You note that without letting it change your temperature.
Week two, he retreats a little. You think that’s that.
Good. You have exams.
You have a lab practical that eats hours like a god.
The campus hums at a pitch only people who live in basements hear. You forget about him on purpose.
He returns — quieter.
The grin is still there, but dampened. The lean exists, but outside the doorframe, not in it.
He brings a single page of film study to compliance with a real question and waits for the answer like a student, not a tourist.
The first time he says, “Thanks,” it doesn’t sound like a way into your jacket. It sounds like thank you, plain.
You nod. You allow yourself to think fine.
He fails again, spectacularly, by stepping into a spar he didn’t need to take and eating a hard right that makes your jaw hurt out of sympathy.
“Do you have a problem?” you ask, stitching like you want to sew the lesson into his skin. “It’s not brave to get concussed for applause.”
He doesn’t say I did it for you. He doesn’t say look at me.
He says nothing, jaw set, eyes on a corner brick. His hands are steady on his knees.
He nods at your instructions and leaves, shoulders tight with someone else’s noise.
He is not your patient when he’s out of your chair.
You let him go. You don’t watch him turn the corner. You put a sticky note on your own brain that says do not care and stick it over the part that wants to.
The small campus miracles, he starts swiping into film without a reminder, he finishes a fight with boring efficiency like you teach, he stops asking you to walk him and starts texting present when he arrives for treatment like a soldier reporting, not a boy bragging.
You ignore the texts. You pretend to be annoyed. You are half telling the truth.
Shoko eyes the changes with suspicion.
“He is either hunting for a new angle,” she says, “or he’s having a personality disorder. If he hurts you, I will wedge a key so far up his—”
“Shoko,” you say.
“—door he never opens it again,” she finishes, smirking. “What. Policy-friendly.”
You smother a laugh and tell her to go terrify someone who deserves it.
She grins and picks from a line.
He tries words again, carefully.
“You ever sleep,” he asks on a morning when you look like a semicolon.
“On Tuesdays,” you deadpan.
He nods, solemn, like he just learned a natural law.
He doesn’t offer to change it.
That’s the first time you think, maybe.
You notice the way he obeys without sulking. That’s rare.
When you say, “Sit,” he sits.
When you say, “Go,” he goes.
When you say, “Forty-eight hours,” he texts Uraume hold me accountable and you only know because Uraume says, without commentary, “I am.”
He keeps not passing the first layer, he keeps not sulking about it.
Your respect grows in secrecy like mold in a safe place.
End of week four, he asks you for a number. Not yours — minutes.
“Can I get five,” he says, standing on the far side of your invisible line, no lean, no grin, just the question.
“No,” you say.
“Copy,” he says, and leaves.
Five minutes later, your radio coughs and you jog and you do your job and you don’t think about him in the corridor, hands in his pockets, telling himself to keep the rules you didn’t say out loud.
Or maybe you do. Once. Then you shove it back where it belongs and lock the drawer.
He keeps trying. You keep declining.
You don’t change your schedule for him, only the way you notice it when he intersects with it.
It takes weeks.
He can’t even pass the first layer.
You feel strangely grateful for the existence of layers. That’s what keeps people alive— skin, fascia, the common sense between impulse and what happens next.
You learn his rhythm, unwillingly, the way he appears only where he belongs, the way he drains the performance out of himself in your spaces, the way your “no” lands without argument, like a bell he knows means stop.
You don’t reward the behavior. You also don’t punish it.
You let it be true.
He’s starting to like being around you.
You can see it in the way he leans less and listens more, in the way his posture becomes not look at me but I’m here. You keep your voice even and your hands busy and your door closed, because open doors get used as excuses and you will not be one.
You tell yourself you’re immune.
You tell yourself you’re counting him like a pulse to make sure it calms.
You tell yourself you’re above this. You tell yourself a lot of things.
He shows up, again, at dawn, with coffee he leaves on the bench like an offering to a weather system.
You drink it when he’s gone. You don’t say thank you.
He notices Kamo the way a big cat notices another shape on its ridge line — quiet, tailored, not afraid, just there.
Noritoshi is a study in acceptable angles, edges tucked into blazers, posture that never tries to borrow space, a face with the polite arrogance of old families who learned to whisper their money.
It galls him that this is what looks good beside you, it galls him more that it’s true.
Kamo lives near your work hours like a shadow that knows its place.
He doesn’t lean in doorways, he arrives on the dot, says what needs to be said, and leaves without being caught loitering in your oxygen.
He’s useful, he’s literate in scheduling apps.
He is, insult of insults, a man who understands that labels are not decoration.
You talk to him with your professional voice and your unprofessional mouth — the one that almost smiles when someone does their part correctly.
Kamo earns two of those in a week and Sukuna feels each like a jab he didn’t see.
He tells himself it’s not jealousy, jealousy is for boys who think anything can be stolen.
He prefers possession, then he remembers he doesn’t own you and has to use the lesser word, the one that makes him feel human and therefore ridiculous.
He does not stalk, this campus is a small terrarium, anything that moves enough times becomes chartable.
He sees Kamo at the compliance counter — the quiet exchange of a signed form, a brief nod, a line about a collective initiative that will be a headache for three departments and a relief for one.
He sees Kamo carry a box without trying to look strong, he sees you hand him a sheet with your cramped, neat writing and watch him read it like it’s not made of air, he sees, and the old muscle that made crowds an instrument twitches, wanting to play.
He doesn’t touch it.
What he does is yoke himself tighter to boredom.
His training gets mean and correct, he drills exit steps until his legs hate him, he runs hill sprints until lactic acid unclutters his head, he goes to sleep at hours that insult his history, he says “copy” to people who don’t deserve the courtesy because it keeps the habit alive for when you do, he keeps the cut on his cheek as a metronome, when it itches, he knows he’s about to want to perform, he scratches it, breathes, and does nothing.
The jealousy doesn’t vanish, it grows teeth and learns to sit.
He tries to be decent about it. He fails twice and fixes it.
First failure, a party he should have skipped for the optics alone, where Yorozu drifts in a dress engineered to make men bite their tongues and bleeds boredom when you don’t arrive.
She finds him at the edge of the room, takes a sip from a glass she doesn’t need and says
“Kamo looks good on your charity project. A matching set.” It’s the kind of line that used to be a treat — thin and nasty, tailor-made for the version of him who fed on mean.
He looks past her head.
“You were funnier when I was drunk,” he says, pleasant.
Her mouth clicks shut.
The room around them tries to grow a second head and show him applause, he leaves before it can.
Second failure, he catches Kamo and you at the corner of the ramp, all light and logistics, and his mouth is faster than his marrow.
“Assistant Dean’s pet,” he says when Kamo passes, and the second the word pet leaves his teeth he wants to backspace reality.
Kamo turns with the composure of a man who keeps letters of recommendation in his pocket, not as threats but as habit.
“Better than the donors’,” Kamo says, not even smug, just precise, and then he tips his head in a way that includes you and excludes Sukuna, that old rich skill.
Sukuna has to physically set his hand flat on his thigh to stop himself from applauding the hit, it was clean. Later he runs stairs until the urge to be a knife finds a more useful burn.
He takes the jealousy to Uraume because they are the only person who can weigh it without turning it into a morality play.
He goes in loud, because that’s still in him, pacing the corridor outside the morgue like a panther that memorized the tile pattern, hands too busy to be harmless, voice set to a layer beneath shouting, the one he uses when he needs a body to hear him in a ring.
“He’s everywhere,” he says, which is not true and feels true in the way irritants do. “He’s underfoot, he’s on the ramp, he’s multiplying by two during midterms.”
Uraume looks up from a clipboard, registers the weather, and returns their gaze to the paper as if refusing to reward the storm.
“Kamo is respectful,” they say. “And often right.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” he snaps. “He matches her tempo. He’s… beige. He’s… quiet.”
“You learned two new adjectives,” they say mildly. “Use them.”
“Ura,” he says, too familiar on purpose, because he knows they hate nicknames and he needs a reaction from something that won’t bleed. “If you’re going to play therapist, use the couch.”
“I don’t have a couch,” they say. “I have a slab. Lie down if you need to learn a lesson.”
He swears — creative, low, sincerely unprintable.
He lists the minute humiliations of the last two weeks, how you angled your body around Kamo so no freshman would see anything that could be turned into a caption, the way Kamo laughed once, very quietly, when you said something S-tier dry, the exact way the corner of your mouth moved, which he could sketch from memory with the light off.
He lists the things he has done to deserve better and the smaller, nastier list of the things he did that make him lucky to be allowed within eyesight.
When he runs out of air, Uraume taps their pen against the metal clip twice — their version of a gavel.
“Good,” they say. “You are jealous. You have learned a feeling.”
He glares. They continue.
“Here is your plan. First, you will not try to win by subtraction. You do not get to make the world smaller around her so that your size looks appropriate. If you do, you will find me standing between you and every room you value.”
“Not trying to sabotage,” he mutters, chastened in a way that makes him resentful and then ashamed for being resentful.
“Second,” they say, “stop admiring your own restraint. It leaks. She can smell it and it makes everyone exhausted. Being patient is not a gift you are bestowing. It is the bill you are paying. Bring exact change.”
He exhales.
“Fine.”
“Third, win in the margins,” Uraume says, and now there’s the angle he came for. “Places no one claps for. You already started. Maintain the standard. Do not carry a box to be seen, carry it to be done. Do not intercept a rumor because it lets you threaten someone, intercept it before it reaches air. Offer solutions no one will attribute to you. The correct outcome is that she keeps her scholarship and her sanity, your name does not have to be in the credits for it to be true.”
He nods because this is familiar.
He knows how to be good when the only proof is that nothing breaks.
“Fourth,” they add, “move like a bigger animal, not a louder one. Predators succeed because they pick when to chase, not because they are impressive. This means you wait, you accept crumbs, you do not ask for a feast. If she gives you ten minutes, you earn eleven by not asking. If she gives you a smile, you do not try to collect its twin that day.”
He wants to argue the metaphor on principle.
He knows it’s right. He closes his mouth.
“Finally,” they say, and the pen stops tapping, “assume he is worthy. Adjust your behavior as if that were true. If he is not, it will show without you teaching the class. And if he is, you can still win by being yourself correctly, which is louder biology, fine timing, and enough self-domestication to be allowed in public.”
“Allowed in public,” he echoes, dry.
Uraume’s mouth nearly smiles. Their kindness is always sharp.
“Do not mistake this for permission to be cruel where it is easy. Save cruelty for where it is structural.”
He bows his head — not much, just enough that they will see he’s listening. When he looks up again, they’re already back to inventory.
He hates and loves them in equal measure.
He tries to apply all this the next day and immediately has to reroute.
Kamo is at the clinic door when a pallet arrives with supplies for the EMT closet — collars, an oxygen tank cart that isn’t a relic, new AED pads.
Sukuna managed the donation quietly through three layers of bureaucracy, with wording that credited “Equipment Fund/Dept.” and not his last name. He hadn’t expected to be here when it showed, he also hadn’t expected Kamo to be the one initialing receipt with you, both of you laughing about how the new cart doesn’t scream like the old one.
He stands at the end of the hall and watches the right thing happen with the wrong witness, he doesn’t claim the moment, he doesn’t walk over to be thanked.
He turns on his heel and goes to film and writes down three notes he intends to actually practice.
He sees you later anyway, you find him, which he doesn’t deserve, near the end of his drills.
You don’t say thank you, you’ve never rewarded outcomes that way and he loves you for it, you hold up the clipboard like the law.
“New pads,” you report. “About time.”
“Equipment fairy,” he says, casual, as if he were exactly as surprised as you.
“Mm,” you answer, which is your way of saying I’m not spending my goodwill finding out who. Then, because you’re better than people deserve, you add, “Good job not dying, part two,” and adjust the hinge on the AED cabinet he tightened yesterday.
If you know, you give no sign.
He asks for a minute — one — and you give it without looking at the clock, which means you don’t feel hunted today.
He uses it like a miser,
“You look like you slept.”
“Don’t lie to me,” you say automatically, and he laughs, not because it’s a joke, but because it’s the kind of stone he could build a house on if he were allowed.
He behaves, he remains a small, useful weather system.
The campus slowly stops treating your name like a flavor. Yorozu tries to resurrect the rumor twice with a new coat of gloss and gets policy emails for dessert instead.
Mahito attempts a stunt at a tailgate — a blow-up doll in scrubs, a morgue label stuck to its chest — and finds the doll punctured within ten minutes and his own Instagram flagged by three organizations that make phone calls.
None of that has his signature, he hates that it feels good anyway.
He tries not to watch you with Kamo, he fails.
Tuesday afternoon, he ends up two lengths down the corridor while you and Kamo change a practice schedule for eligibility. You work beautifully together, it’s obscene.
He sees how you trade nouns, you say window, Kamo says registrar, you say compliance, Kamo says retroactive, and the to-do list edits itself like a good patient.
He learns a little just by not being in the room, it’s humiliating to learn anything from Kamo.
He loves that it helps you.
And then there is the thing he doesn’t plan for, you choose to talk to him about Kamo without knowing you’re putting a knife to his throat.
A dawn bench, the safer one, your thermos warm against your wrist. He sits where he’s allowed.
You watch geese argue about a puddle and say, academically,
“Noritoshi is nice.”
He swallows the immediate counterargument — nice is a brand — and says instead,
“Yeah.” His voice surprises him, no edge, no theatre.
“He’s not very patient,” you add, and this is the mercy of you, the angle you allow because truth matters more than flattery. “He wants things to move fast. He’s good at the paper. He hates the waiting.”
Sukuna’s mouth tries to smile. It fails, the scar pulls it into something more honest.
“He’ll hate me,” he says. “I am a seminar on waiting.”
“He’ll hate that I like it,” you correct, and sip.
The words hit him low and hard.
He leans his head back against the bench and says nothing because anything would be too much.
You allow him three more sentences because he’s behaved all week. He spends one on you.
“You look less hunted.”
One on himself.
“I’m running drills for the off-beat shot.”
One on the world.
“Tell me if I need to remove someone.”
“You’re not my bouncer,” you say, automatic and fierce.
“No,” he says, immediate. “I mean tell me who needs a conversation with their coach.”
You look at him for a count that would break lesser men.
“I’ll tell Uraume,” you say, which is fractional trust in a system that is not his and therefore the correct place for it to live.
He goes to his practice with breath that tastes like sober.
He moves with quieter feet, he puts weight in his hips only where tape suggests, he says good morning to a freshman who used to say corpse and now says excuse me and finds that he means it.
It’s an odd feeling, to be part of an environment that improves by degrees because he shuts up.
The first time he is alone with Kamo, it happens by accident, he steps into the corridor from a meeting with a compliance assistant who was thrilled to see a form filled without being chased, and Kamo is there, sliding a folder into his bag, collar open one button because humans deserve oxygen.
They share five seconds of silence that could rot or flower.
“Careful with your grip on the boxes,” Sukuna says finally, polite. “You’ll overwork your forearm and then pretend it’s elbow tendinopathy.”
Kamo blinks, then laughs, genuine.
“Advice from the enemy,” he says.
The word enemy should taste like blood.
It tastes like a court date that got moved far enough out that everyone could calm down.
“Advice from a man who prefers his medics uninjured,” Sukuna replies, without heat. Then, “She’ll run you over if you get in her way.”
Kamo’s smile does something complicated.
“So I noticed.”
Sukuna tips his head.
“Good luck,” he says, and means it more than he wants to.
He moves on, muscles tense with the effort of not doubling back and turning luck into a threat.
He asks for less after that, which is the only way to get more.
Once a week, ten minutes.
Once a day, silence on purpose when he sees you and your hands are already full.
When he texts dinner? and you send work, he replies copy and orders food to the training room for the student staff without attaching his name.
The pizza boxes arrive with a Post-it, for the zombies — not poisoned — eat.
He watches from a distance and hates that he knows which slice you’ll pick.
He hates that he’s right, he hates that this makes him happy
He decides to live with all three hates at once.
He keeps being cruel, but he picks what deserves it.
A boy who thinks the rumor was a great joke and tries to resurrect it near a bus gets his vocabulary narrowed to “sorry” and “coach.”
A booster who jokes about “scholarship thighs” near the donor gate gets a smile like a knife and a meeting with Risk that goes poorly.
Yorozu drifts too close one afternoon and purrs, “Still furniture?” and he answers, just as softly, “Still replaceable.”
Her eyes flash. She goes find someone else to bother.
None of it touches you, he is finally learning the difference between for you and to you.
Your little changes are the only grades he cares about.
One afternoon you hand him a roll of tape without looking up from a chart and say, “Forty-eight hours,” and he says, “Copy,” and you add, almost an afterthought, “Good work with Toji,” which sends a file folder of heat up his neck he has to disguise as exertion.
Another day you walk past and your hand — careful, gloved, precise — touches his shoulder for one beat to direct him left around a cart.
He feels the weight for an hour and then can finally laugh at himself for being a neon sign that reads touch-starved.
When he catches his reflection laughing he stops at once, like a man startled at being alive.
He never says Kamo’s name to you, he refuses to be that kind of boy.
He practices instead the art of seeing you with him and not subtracting his own dignity.
It doesn’t always work, he puts his jaw against his palm and breathes when you and Kamo huddle at a screen and your mouths both make the same small grimace over a spreadsheet.
He works it out later in the gym, he takes the new jealousy to Uraume and they hand him a folder labeled this again and he signs for it and does his homework like a man who finally understands that boring is not a punishment, it’s longevity.
On a night heavy with humidity and the smell of grass, he finds you half-laughing with Kamo under the overhang outside the athletic center.
The rain hasn’t started yet, the sky is a bruise.
You are holding a clipboard like an umbrella because you never not work, Kamo is describing an email from the registrar that sounds like a love letter to bureaucracy.
The laugh you let go is small and unwilling and beautiful.
He stops far enough away that you can pretend not to notice him.
He watches you finish your laugh, finish your sentence, finish your business. Kamo goes, you stand for a moment in that liminal air and he feels the stupid, animal tug to cross distance.
He does not. He waits.
You turn. You see him. You come.
“Walk you to the door,” he says, because this is the one risk he is allowed, and you nod with a face that pares it down to motion.
You don’t make him work for your yes tonight. You walk in step, he thinks of all the things he could say to tell you that going slowly is killing him and making him better at the same time, that he has never waited like this for anything that didn’t shout, that his envy for Kamo tastes like admiration mixed with salt, that if you chose Kamo he would lose, and be right, and still show up the next day to hand you tape.
He says none of it.
He says,
“Did you eat,” because he’s learned that if he can’t manage to love you sensibly he can at least manage you not fainting.
“Protein bar,” you say. “Shoko confiscated my gum.”
“Criminal,” he says, and you make a noise that could be a laugh if someone turned their head and decided to be generous.
He earns two of those in a week, he intends to keep the average.
At your door you stop.
He stops like someone put a hand on his throat.
You stare at him with the clinical interest of a scientist who wants to see if a rat will choose the left tunnel again now that it knows there’s no cheese.
He wants to joke about cheese.
He wants to make you smile bigger.
He wants to beat Kamo at a game that doesn’t have scores.
He ambitions none of it. He says,
“Good night,” which is becoming a muscle with memory.
You open the door, you hesitate, you look at his scar and then not at it like someone who refuses to let narrative cheapen biology.
You say,
“Morning,” and the scar pulls when he smiles because it won’t let him be pretty about it.
He spends the night hating the roof of his mouth for remembering your smell.
He wakes before his alarm and texts Uraume remind me to eat because he would rather be told what to do than waste a day in hunger that isn’t about food.
They reply eat and stop narrating and he feels something like gratitude, which he uses to lift a barbell correctly.
He sees Kamo again two days later, this time sitting beside you at a talk on research ethics, both of you asking better questions than the panel deserves.
He stands at the back like a tall regret and listens to you peel the euphemism off a slide, Kamo adds three citations, you nod once like a king granting mercy, Sukuna thinks about leaving.
He thinks about staying and learning also, he stays because leaving would be theater.
After, he takes the handouts Kamo lined up because Kamo line things up — of course he does — and he reads them in a hallway, leaning against nothing, and for the first time since the rumor was born he feels something that isn’t anger or hunger.
It is not hope, it is also not grace.
It is something low and animal and correct, you are worthy if you act like it.
He keeps acting like it, he keeps growing a shape around his worst instincts and calling it a frame, he keeps watching you work with a man who might fit you without trying to snap his antlers off at the base.
He keeps asking for ten minutes and using seven, he keeps making his way past rooms where his name used to be the reason the lights were on, he keeps waiting for the moment when you choose anything — him, not him, an empty hallway, a job in another city — and he doesn’t fall apart when it arrives.
In the meantime, he takes what he can have.
The way your voice drops at the end of a long day when you finally let any softness in, the precise deftness of your hands when you tape his wrist, the rare, devastating phenomenon of your mouth doing something that could be called a smile for more than two seconds, the knowledge that when he calls you you in his head it isn’t a trick he learned in rooms that liked his body, it’s a respect for the fact that you are not a metaphor or a prize or a place he gets to plant a flag.
You’re a person who works, and he is lucky to orbit your shift.
Jealousy still doesn’t leave, it becomes a species that can live at low heat without burning the house down.
When it growls, he feeds it discipline. When it paces, he opens the door and makes it run hills. When it asks him to cheat, he points to the bench and says sit.
It sits.
Sometimes it sits and stares at Kamo and he has to laugh at himself because this is what animals do when they have an enemy and a master at the same time.
He hates that the category fits, he loves that he chose the master.
Once, late, he finds you alone with a stack of forms and your brow folded the way it gets when you’ve been asked to be a trilogy at the price of a pamphlet.
He knocks on the frame, two knuckles, no words. You look up and he sees the exact moment you decide whether or not you can tolerate his face.
You wave him in, a flick, like letting a cat cross a threshold, he doesn’t dare call it progress, he offers to alphabetize.
You arch one brow like a weapon and then hand him a stack with a sticky, sort / sign here / don’t touch my coffee.
He sorts, he signs, he does not touch your coffee.
Kamo appears with an envelope at the end because of course he does, the three of you exist in the same air for a minute, nobody dies.
It is the best proof of life he’s had in months.
When he leaves, he doesn’t try to own the exit.
He says, “Copy,” as if you gave him an order you didn’t, you blink like a person trying not to be charmed, he accepts that restraint might be the only seduction he’s allowed.
He walks away and doesn’t look back because he has finally learned that yeses are not chased, they are earned and waited for.
On a night when rain thinks about starting but decides to get a drink first, he finds himself at the bench he’s taught his body to expect you at and doesn’t text.
He sits, he doesn’t practice speeches because he finally, truly, has none.
He practices breath, he practices being a shape you might want to sit near without having to manage.
When your shoes appear out of the dark and you sit exactly three inches closer than last week, he doesn’t move.
He says nothing.
He lets the quiet lay down over his chest like a hand.
He earns your “morning.”
He collects it, small as a coin, big as a promise, pockets it and goes to practice.
If Kamo walks you tomorrow, he will survive. If you wave at him across a hallway and hand the wave accidentally to Kamo, he will run hills and not text anyone. If you choose him, later, he will breathe carefully because good things require oxygen. If you don’t, he will stand on the ramp anyway and make sure boys say “excuse me” instead of “corpse.”
He is a predator learning patience in a campus that taught him appetite.
He is cruel to the right throats and gentle with the one that matters.
He is arrogant in the way that helps — confident that boring will beat spectacle over a long enough semester, that quiet will outlast laughter, that the bigger animal wins not by scaring prey but by knowing when to lie down and watch the field without moving.
He intends to keep watching, he intends to keep earning seven minutes at a time, he intends to keep being the person who takes a hit and doesn’t waste it.
He intends, absurdly, wonderfully, to deserve it when you hand him a smile like a small, bright verdict and let it stay on your face long enough that he can see his name in it without anyone else telling him what it says.
You work like the weather, steady, no surprises you can help. The lab opens at first light, the clinic carries the middle of the day, and the training room steals your evenings. In all of that, he’s a constant you don’t invite and can’t erase.
He gets reckless about it.
Two days after you cleared him for light work, he’s sparring in a back room that isn’t booked. You find him when a volunteer runner bangs on the clinic door saying,
“He’s bleeding, I think it’s him,” like the campus only has one person who bleeds in interesting ways.
It’s a brow again. Not as bad. He’s sweating through his shirt, angry at himself in a way you can read from the doorway.
You glove up. You don’t say,
“I told you so” because it’s not useful and you’re not a parent. You don’t soften either.
“Sit,” you say.
He sits.
“Eyes here.”
They lock to yours like he’s grateful for orders.
You clean, you close, you tape. His breath evens out. Yours stays level. He starts to say something like, I needed to… and bites it off before the sentence has a verb.
“Restrictions exist for a reason,” you say, trimming tape. “Follow them.”
“Yes.”
“No training till Monday. I’ll know if you ignore me.”
“I know.”
You step back and toss your gloves. He keeps his hands on his thighs like moving will make you leave sooner.
You do leave, but not because he’s waiting, because you’re done. The word done feels like a plank you can walk and step off without falling.
On your way out, you pass Mahito in the hall balancing a takeout soda on top of the AED cabinet, his grin already aimed like a slingshot.
“Safety queen,” he croons, pointing at your jacket. “You going to write me up for gravity?”
“Move your drink,” you say, turning the AED key in the lock to check the pads because you trust nothing that lives in public.
He leans in, all grape and gum.
“There she goes, our morgue doll. You miss a party to count batteries?”
You take the cup, hand it back to him, and shut the cabinet.
“Don’t block emergency equipment,” you say, and step past.
He wanted a face. You don’t give him one.
He watches your shoulder as you go like the answer might be written there and scowls when it isn’t.
“You’re no fun,” he calls after you, voice turning sharp when you still don’t react. “He’ll get bored.”
You don’t answer, why would you?
You have a bag to restock and a log to sign and a fight to supervise from the edge of the ring where your radio hears better than you do.
He notices everything you don’t give away.
He notices, too, that you do the work like it makes you feel okay, it’s not a secret, you’re not mysterious, you just don’t reroute yourself around his feelings anymore.
He keeps reaching anyway.
Not with speeches — he’s out of those.
With presence.
He sits in the back of study hall and really reads, he watches film all the way through and lets the system collect his small obedience, he texts like a metronome you could set your pulse to and ignore, present. on time. clearance at 1900?
When you answer the last one — approved — you do it because you have to, not because you want to speak to him, he must know the difference.
He keeps writing anyway.
One night you catch him doing handstands against the rec center wall like he’s trying to wring the energy out of his body.
You should tell him to stop. You don’t, because it’s not your jurisdiction and his wrists can live with his mood.
He drops, sees you, and wipes his face with the hem of his shirt. The tattoos map the cut lines of his body.
You look at the floor, not the ink.
“Dinner?” he asks, already braced for no.
“No,” you say, and even you hear how soft your voice isn’t.
He nods once and heads for the door like the work will save him if he lets it.
You live like the rumor engine isn’t in the room.
It is.
It spins faster some weeks. You hear your name in the wrong mouths, his in stranger combinations. The girls who collect outfits the way other people collect hours tell each other stories over sparkling water that has nothing to do with your life and everything to do with theirs.
You stop believing the stories can’t touch you, you stop letting that matter.
At a late afterparty in Kenjaku’s warehouse — a real one, with clean floors and good sound and lighting that flatters everyone — you’re there because Uraume asked you to keep an eye for an hour.
“Our staff is thin,” they’d said. “Your presence prevents chaos.”
You’d been writing emails in the clinic anyway, you said yes.
You stand by the bar with a clear cup of water and watch people behave.
He moves through the room like a shortcut he knows by heart. He doesn’t look for you and you appreciate that.
Yorozu, glossy and dangerous in a dress meant to be seen, plants herself in his path, leans in, her hand lands on his forearm like a claim.
“Dance with me,” she says, mouth shiny and sure.
He can do this with his eyes closed, the angle of his body, the laugh, the casual touch that tells a story back. He does the first two without thinking.
When her hand slides higher, his smile holds, but his shoulder turns in a way that breaks the line without making a scene.
“I’m cooling down,” he says easily. “Try Jogo. He’s dying for cardio.”
She laughs once, high, not because it’s funny.
“You’ve gone picky,” she says.
“I’ve gone tired,” he answers, perfectly charming, still magnetic.
He looks past her for the first time all night and his attention hits you like a flashlight. Yorozu follows the line and sees you standing there with your water and your disinterest.
Her mouth thins.
You walk a slow loop of the floor like you’re counting exits, he moves when you do, but not toward you.
Good.
You have bandages in your pocket and an ice pack thawing your fingers because this room doesn’t need romance, it needs management.
He tries after the event — at the loading dock, where the air smells like rain and trucks and the massage of bass is finally out of your ribs.
“Walk?” he asks.
“No,” you say. “Sleep.”
“Right,” he says lowly. “Right.”
He sticks his hands into his hoodie pocket and looks down for once.
The posture makes him look younger, which would be persuasive if you were in the mood to be persuaded, but alas, you’re not.
Uraume appears beside you with a neat stack of towels and a dry comment.
“He is impossible at the moment.”
“I’m aware,” you almost grin.
“Good,” they say. “He has decided suffering is a training plan. It is not. It is a mood. Please ignore the mood.”
“I am,” you say.
They watch your face too closely for comfort and then give you an out.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” they say, and it’s the closest to meddling they’ve come. “You’re competent and allowed to want things. Or not. Both are permitted.”
“I know,” You hear yourself and realize you needed to hear yourself. “Thanks.”
“Take water,” they say, and because they said it like an order, you do.
It doesn’t fix anything, it puts a buffer around the part that hurts and makes the noise tolerable for the rest of the night.
He doesn’t stop being reckless.
For once, it isn’t about you, it’s about him hating his own decisions.
He pushes sprints until he gags, he takes shots he shouldn’t, eats one, then works twice as hard at not letting his face show it, he goes too hard on the bag and splits three knuckles on his favorite hand.
You wrap them with the neat, firm pressure that makes tough guys relax on instinct, then he looks at your mouth, at your hands, anywhere but the middle.
Irritation lives under his skin like a rash, not at you, you can tell.
He’s mad at himself for being the person who made a mess without a plan to clean it.
“Stop trying to outwork shame,” you say, taping his fingers two-and-three together. “It doesn’t respond to cardio.”
He huffs something like a laugh and immediately swallows it.
“You’re cruel.”
“I’m fair,” you say. “Ice in twenty. Don’t skip it.”
Mahito chooses that moment to lean over the rail and drop a joke he’s been saving.
“Look at this,” he sing-songs. “Angel fixing her favorite doll. Gonna charge him by the centimeter?”
You don’t look up.
“You’re blocking the rail,” you say. “Move or I’ll have you removed.”
He wanted a flinch and he gets a policy, so he pouts, then spits,
“She’s no fun, Ryo. You should trade up.”
Sukuna’s jaw ticks. He says nothing.
Your non-reaction is better than a fight, it still needles Mahito, who likes the game only when he thinks he’s winning.
“Wow,” he says, trying again with a worse tone. “Guess the morgue wife finally ran out of smiles.”
You finish taping and pat the back of Sukuna’s hand twice in the impersonal way you do with everyone.
“Ice,” you repeat. “Twenty.”
You turn to Mahito.
“This is a workplace. Get off the equipment.”
He stares at your face, wanting to find anger there. You give him nothing. Kenjaku passes by like a quiet storm and says,
“Mahito,” in a tone that means not tonight.
He rolls his eyes and slides off the rail, thwarted by the absence of your reaction more than by the warning.
You don’t watch him go, just clean your scissors and your hands and your table. You do the job like it’s the only thing left that makes sense.
Sukuna texts less and shows up more.
Sometimes he drafts something and deletes it before sending, you can feel it by the way the next text arrives too quickly, like a cover.
You answer when the job requires it and ignore when it doesn’t, you’d think he’d stop by now, it’s been a while.
He doesn’t.
“I can be patient,” he says one night in the stairwell where he once taught himself to match your pace.
“I know,” you say, not looking at him, adjusting the number of gauze pads in a kit because you have a system and people live because you have a system. “Be consistent.”
He breathes out.
“That’s the plan.”
“Good.”
He’s angry about the plan, about the way consistency feels slow when his whole life taught him immediate results.
Some nights he wears it well.
Some nights it sits on him like a jacket two sizes too small.
He swears more, he fights with practice equipment like it owes him something, he walks into the clinic with a cut on his palm from a weight he slammed wrong and doesn’t ask for sympathy and doesn’t get any.
You clean, you close, you wrap.
He says thank you like a student who stopped being careful with please because he used too many in one week.
At a campus cookout you got roped into covering, he finds you by the first aid tent and hands you a bottle of water, then immediately takes two steps back like he expects to be swatted.
Yorozu peels off a cluster of admirers and slides in, all shine and edges.
“You’re such a mystery lately,” she tells him, reaching to straighten a non-existent crease on his shirt. He lets the touch land; he doesn’t offer another. “I miss the old you. The one who came when called.”
“Call someone else,” he says, charming, voice even, the kind of line that would be a flirt if the timing were different. “You should diversify.”
Her mouth goes bright and mean. “You’re boring now.”
“Maybe I needed the practice,” he says, and the joke is smooth enough that nobody not looking for the edge will hear it.
She does.
She lets her hand fall and turns away, bored again, which is easier to wear than refusal.
Later on, you start naming your weeks by where the rumor finds you.
Monday, it’s the ramp, the off-blue one with the bad light that makes everyone look tired, and two linebackers in hoodies lean against the rail like they’re waiting for a bus, except buses don’t make lewd eye contact.
They’re not your athletes, they know it and don’t care.
One opens with a whistle he probably thinks is playful, the other smiles with too many teeth.
“Yo, Cadaver Angel,” the teeth says, trying the nickname on your face like a hat. “Serious question. What’s he got that we don’t?”
You keep walking because corridors have physics and you enforce them.
“A compliance appointment in five minutes,” you say. “You should try having one.”
“I mean—” he lifts his chin, performs a laugh for his friend, “past the clipboard. Secret handshake? Skeleton key?”
“You’ll discover neither when you pass Biology 101,” you answer, not stopping, because stopping is oxygen and you’re rationing.
“Damn,” the first one mutters, not to you, to the hallway. “She’s cold.”
“Refrigerated,” the other says, pleased with himself. “Keep it fresh for the dead.”
You don’t flinch because you have years of practice not flinching. You also have a key ring and a schedule and friends who sharpen their affection into blades.
Your chest feels like a hand is closing on it and then letting go, over and over, as if your body is trying to mimic CPR on itself.
You keep pace, you do not allow the rumor to set the tempo.
You don’t tell Shoko because she will harvest someone’s cheek again and you will be the one with the form.
You don’t tell Uraume because they will draft another policy email and you’re already becoming too many memos.
You file it under Noise and under Cost and under I knew this would happen and you go to work, which is a better door than any of theirs.
Tuesday, it’s the compliance office.
A cluster of jocks line the counter pretending a broken printer requires witnesses.
“So it’s true,” one says loudly to nobody, to you. “Sukuna’s got the cheat code.”
You hold out your hand for their unsigned travel forms without comment. One of them, thinner ego, thicker wallet, tries a direct shot.
“What does he have that we don’t?”
“An appointment,” you say, because repetition teaches. “You’re late for yours.”
“Come on,” he prods, as if this is a flirting game that ends with the right line. “Answer and I’ll save you a seat in the good section.”
“Three letters,” you say. “GPA. Yours is under review.”
A laugh snorts out of someone’s nose. It lands like a slap, thin Ego reddens.
“You must be fun at parties.”
“Only the ones with exits,” you say, and point to the sign-in sheet like a traffic cop who loves her job.
You are not naïve, the rumor always favors the man in the story and stains the woman, it’s an old trick with new platforms.
Mahito performs it like a TED Talk on cruelty, Yorozu adds hashtags and fragrance, Jogo adds heat, Kenjaku calls it discourse and raises an eyebrow if you break decorum in the replies.
It grows hands everywhere you’re not, you learned long ago that you can’t amputate every hand, you can only keep your body and your job clean.
He’s there, though. That’s new and somehow not new.
Not standing in front of you — he learned that lesson with blood — but drifting at the edge of your days like a weather system that decided to be useful. He seems less angry, but no less intense.
He obeys what Shoko and Uraume told him with a thoroughness that would be funny if it didn’t comfort you.
He doesn’t speak unless you start.
He doesn’t stand within arm’s length unless you ask.
He doesn’t look at you when you are working, he looks at the floor and then the clock and then the door.
He leaves rooms when your name gets turned into plastic, he does not announce any of this with his mouth.
You see it with your eyes, which makes it count.
You don’t know why you like that it counts.
On Wednesday, you catch him intercepting oxygen, when a freshman, star-bright and soft at the edges, repeats corpse bride like it’s a spell that will make his friends laugh.
He says it near the training room, which is your air, and you are already walking toward him to collect the joke and dispose of it when Sukuna appears from nowhere like a doorframe.
He doesn’t touch the kid, he doesn’t need to and he knows it would become paperwork for you. He stands in the exact narrow space between the mouth and the next sentence and says, pleasant as the front desk at a bank,
“Put her name in your mouth again and I’ll help you find out what you sound like with a jaw wired shut.”
The freshman blinks as if someone turned the sun off and on. He tries to laugh and finds his throat has mislaid the sound. His friend tugs his sleeve like a lifeline and they go.
It should bother you that you liked how he said it, the precision, the unaccelerated control.
It does and doesn’t.
You don’t thank him. He wasn’t trying to earn your voice, he was removing trash from your hallway.
You patch an ankle, answer the radio, respond to a donor email with punctuation sharpened to pierce.
You make lists because lists keep you from drowning.
Your chest keeps doing that thing, squeeze, release, like a bad metronome you can’t shut off.
You tell yourself you are not grieving a thing you never owned.
You tell yourself grief is for families and patients and bodies tagged for the last time, not for girls who forgot their own rules for eight minutes in a campus grill.
He asks for minutes sometimes, the way he used to, only now he wraps the request in your language.
Ten? Dawn bench, other one.
If you say no, he replies copy and does not appear.
If you say yes, he shows up on time and sits two arm-lengths away like a man who learned a new sport late and intends to be good at it.
You drink coffee silently, you talk about practicals and about the schedule for film uploads because he insists on learning to treat time like medicine.
Sometimes you listen to him breathe because it turns your head down to a lower speed.
When the radio coughs you stand and he doesn’t try to attach himself to the next sentence.
He says present to the air, not to you, and you nod before you remember you’re not supposed to.
You can see a hint of a smile in his lips when you do.
Thursday, the rumor follows you into a stairwell.
Two boys — baseball, you think, there’s a way baseball holds a cap that gives it away — block the landing without thinking, the way boys learn to take space while they’re still getting praised for it.
“So the morgue has a velvet rope now,” one says, staring at your lanyard like it’s a ticket. “How much is the cover.”
“You can’t afford it,” you say, stepping through them, because it’s your job to model how physics works to people who fail science.
He reaches, not for you, for the lanyard — just a flick of his fingers like a child seeing something dangling and forgetting that it belongs to a person, and you stop moving without stopping, shift your weight, set your palm on his wrist with an exactness you saved for restraints.
He looks down and realizes you are not a rumor, you are muscles and bones and absolutely not interested.
“Hands,” you say. “Find your pockets.”
He finds them. His friend chuckles and then pretends he was coughing. You continue.
You feel your chest do the squeeze again, not pain exactly, just that stupid squeeze, the acknowledgement that your day used to contain fewer of these decisions and that the math of ignore it so it dies is being tested by boys who refuse to stop feeding.
Later, you hear that Sukuna had a conversation with their coach.
Conversation is too kind a word. It was a surgical strike done in plain, boring language, eligibility, liability, the magic of the phrase pattern of behavior.
He didn’t say your name, he said the words that make adults listen, program risk.
The boys run stairs until vomiting would be redundant. They don’t linger in stairwells anymore.
You see the effort, yet you do not forget that it’s patchwork sewn onto a wound he helped make.
Friday you finally sit long enough to feel tired instead of wired.
The bench under the library tree has your weight memorized. Shoko drops down beside you and nudges your shoulder with hers and says,
“Say the word,” like she has a dartboard with faces and is bored.
“I did,” you say. “You hit bullseye.”
She smirks, but the smirk has been less gleeful lately, more clinical.
“He’s learning to be dull,” she says. “Miracles happen.”
“Don’t call it that,” you say, because you have a petty streak and you like it mean.
“Fine,” she says. “He’s in remedial humanity.”
You rest your head back and let your eyes close for a count of four because counting keeps the bad thoughts from multiplying.
“The rumor still flavors everything,” you say. “It’s like cheap perfume. It gets in your hair.”
“Uraume is composing a sonata in policy emails,” she says. “Kenjaku is playing nice with Risk. Half the rich girls are bored now that there’s paperwork. The other half will eat their own when someone else blinks too slow at a party. You just have to outlast their attention span. Lucky for you, they have none.”
“Lucky for me,” you echo, and then you breathe like a person who just inhaled something that wasn’t smoke.
You don’t mention the squeeze in your chest, Shoko would put a stethoscope to your sternum and say something clinical and kind and it would break you because kindness is a lever, you are saving the breaking for a day without shifts.
Sukuna keeps trying in ways that occasionally feel like relief and sometimes like noise, depending on your blood sugar.
He asks walk? twice in a week and you say no both times because no is the only muscle you have that doesn’t fatigue.
He asks dinner? once and you send back just no because adding thank you would be a lie and you are trying to stop lying with politeness when the room is already full of lies.
He doesn’t push, he doesn’t rewrite the question, he just appears where you authorized him to and disappears where you didn’t. It should not help.
It does, in that quiet way that doesn’t demand acknowledgment.
There are moments — always when you’re too tired, always when the campus has turned down its noise because it cannot keep shouting forever — when his face enters your head without your permission and the squeeze in your chest becomes something that is almost ache, and that’s the worst one, because ache feels like a verb and verbs want objects.
You do what you always do with verbs you can’t afford — you shelve them, you tell yourself you are not the kind of girl who makes a diet out of maybe, you tell yourself you are fine, which is a word you hate and use on purpose like a bitter pill.
He is not idle, he is also not performing.
The difference sharpens over weeks.
You hear about him and Mahito not because he tells you but because buildings have vents that carry information.
Someone says Sukuna told him, “We’re done,” and the we sounded like a limb being removed, not a dramatic exit, someone else says he walked out of a party five minutes after a joke tried to take your name and turned it into ash by not laughing.
Yorozu posts less, when she does, there are fewer captions and more thirst traps aimed at nobody, Kenjaku starts showing up with a different set of boys who look like money and speak softly because they were told to.
There is an afternoon when the rumor tries a new trick and fails. Two girls in matching gloss block your path with delight weaponized into sweetness.
“We just want to know,” one chirps, “do you like—like—medical roleplay?” She giggles hard enough to be proud of herself. “Because like—”
Sukuna appears with such precise timing you wonder if he has a map of your routes pasted behind his eyes.
He doesn’t look at you, he looks at them with a flat smile you recognize as the before to a very bad time and says,
“If your mouth opens again, it will be to say ‘I apologize’ and then to ask the cashier for ice.” His voice is polite, almost gentle. It is terrifying.
They flush the way people do when their nervous systems are learning new pathways. They shuffle.
“S-sorry,” one says, and finds the floor valuable. You walk on, he walks away.
You don’t thank him because you are not thanking men for returning air you owned to your lungs.
You let yourself think good and useful and still your fault in one breath, which isn’t kind to your body but is accurate to your head.
You keep your rules.
At work, you treat him like any other athlete who learned to follow instructions late in the semester.
You inspect, you tape, you sign, you give forty-eight hours without inflection.
He says copy like a prayer.
You watch him keep his promises after he leaves your chair because promises are cheap and proof is not.
He earns the only currency he can earn now, boredom.
Your colleagues stop excusing him, they stop needing to, and it is a strange relief.
When you allow him to speak, it’s because you’ve done the math for the day and the margin is generous enough for three sentences. He uses them like a careful shopper.
“Can I walk you to the door,” he asks once, not home, not out, just the door.
And you say,
“Fine,” which is you being reckless, and he takes three steps behind and one to the left, which is him being careful.
“You shouldn’t have to push to make space,” he says, not looking at you.
“I’m strong; I can push,” you answer, which is the truth, and you both leave it there because adding sentiment would rot it.
Another time he says,
“Dinner?”
“I’m on call,” and he brightens like someone turned on a lamp.
“I’ll bring food you can eat out of a thermos,” he says, as if the trick to wanting less is finding the shape it fits into.
You almost smile.
You don’t.
“No,” you say. “Eat your own dinner like a person.”
He nods, a little chastened, mostly hopeful, and your chest does the squeeze because hope directed at you is a look you’ve trained yourself to distrust.
You are not a project.
You are not a reward.
You are a person who names things and labels things and keeps doors from closing on the wrong hands.
You are allowed to want.
You are more allowed to refuse.
One night you cut through the quad late and run into Mahito because the campus won’t grant you all your wishes at once.
He is leaning on a bench like a billboard for boys who haven’t grown out of cruelty.
“Hey, Officer Corpse,” he greets, too loud for the hour, drunk on attention or vodka or both. “I got a new challenge for you—”
You don’t stop.
“Declined,” you say, and keep walking, because turning your back on him is the only way you can afford to be brave without buying consequences you don’t have time for.
He raises his volume, may be about to say something engineered to make a room pivot, when Sukuna materializes out of the dark like a thing the night forgot it owned.
You’d think he’s following you but he knows better, and Shoko would end his free oxygen trial.
He stands between you and the next syllable, eyes not on Mahito’s hands but on his mouth as if he is personally going to sew it if needed, and says, with that old, nasty silk you recognize from the version of him who made problems disappear,
“Stay in your lane before I make you a cautionary tale with stitches.”
Mahito grins because he only recognizes one game, but he steps back because he recognizes outcomes when they arrive without theatrics.
“You got soft,” he taunts anyway. “All that furniture training.”
“Wouldn’t you like to find out,” Sukuna says, calm like a winter morning, and motions with two fingers toward the far side of the path like he’s moving a traffic cone.
Mahito stumbles into motion and you do not add to the moment.
You do not turn around, you walk to your building, swipe in, and register the way your lungs finally drop from your throat to their seats.
The rumor finds you less when he makes it expensive to say your name.
You accept the result, you don’t forgive the cause. You live with both realities because that is adulthood and you are already twice your age in hours.
You still think about him, of course you do. You are not stainless steel.
You are a person who once ate a sandwich with an arm across your shoulders and let relief do a small, forbidden thing to your muscles.
Your chest aches sometimes like a bruise you forget until you bump it. You don’t stop working because of a bruise. You learn to move around it until the tenderness becomes part of the map.
At the end of a long week, he asks for ten again, and you allow it because you’ve had three boys not say corpse today and that feels like interest paid on a terrible loan.
You meet at the other bench, the one that doesn’t hold ghosts
He sits where you have decided he can sit, you sip coffee that tastes like burnt hope and sugar, and he doesn’t fill the silence, which is the only reason you speak.
“You’re doing what Shoko and Uraume told you,” not a compliment, a chart note.
“Yes,” he says.
“It helps,” you add, and you watch the word land in his eyes and become some kind of fuel. “It doesn’t erase.”
“I know,” he says, and this is the piece that makes breathing easier, the I know that doesn’t argue.
He looks like he wants to ask for something and is demonstrating his new skill in not doing so.
You give him mercy because you behaved all day and there should be a reward for that.
“You can ask,” you allow, “if it’s small.”
He doesn’t move his body when he says,
“Walk you to the door,” like he thinks the request might spook you.
“Just the door,” you say, to make sure he understands that words are measured here.
“Just the door,” he repeats.
You stand, he follows at a distance that has become almost comfortable.
He doesn’t try to fill the path with sound, he doesn’t narrate his growth or apologize with his feet.
At the step he stops without needing to be told, and you turn because you feel like a person who can.
The cut on his cheek has softened into a line you could hide under your thumb if you were the kind of person who touched faces without gloves.
You aren’t, and you won’t. Not tonight.
Not because he is trying, not because he is handsome, not because the rumor has finally lowered its volume enough for your head to hear itself.
“Goodnight,” you say, which is a word you haven’t given him in months.
He doesn’t grin, he doesn’t make a joke, he inclines his head like a fighter to a judge he respects and says, “Morning,” because he can’t help himself, and for once the word doesn’t make you hate him.
It makes your chest do the squeeze again, but lighter, and then it lets go.
You go inside.
You do not cry in the elevator because mercy has been used up on the bench.
You lean your head against the stainless panel and close your eyes and let the building make its noises.
You text Shoko alive and Uraume hydrated because both of them will threaten to steal your lungs if you don’t, and then you brush your teeth and lay out your notes and turn off your light.
Outside, the rumor keeps crawling, hungry and stupid, looking for new mouths.
It will find them. It always does.
Inside, your phone does not buzz, he will not text without permission, he will ask again in a day or three because persistence isn’t a bug, it’s the only skill he ever honed.
You will say no nine times and yes on a day the bench feels like a safe place to sit.
ou will not call it grace, you will call it math, you will call it yours.
You fall asleep and your chest finally stops practicing grief and starts practicing breath, and in the morning, you get up and make a list.
You put his name nowhere on it, he shows up in the margins anyway, as heat, as silence, as a figure in the corner of the room who has learned how to be furniture without becoming a shrine.
You keep him there. You go to work.
You wait for the campus to choose a new story, and while it dithers, you live.
People keep trying to return you to the story they prefer, a girl who should be grateful for the attention the campus loves, a boy who should be free of rules because rules are for other people. You refuse. Your refusal is plain. It looks like timetables and forms and the way you don’t add softness to sentences that don’t need it.
Uraume corners you in the morgue on a Tuesday, both of you counting labels in an air that pinches your nose.
“You are operating at one hundred and fifteen percent,” they say without preamble. “That is not sustainable.”
“Is this a wellness check,” you ask, peeling a barcode.
“Consider it a professional observation,” they say. “Also a warning, he is insufferable. He pesters me now. This is unacceptable. Fix him.”
You snort.
“I don’t fix people. I fix cuts.”
“Then continue to fix cuts,” they say, dry. “And note, as a data point, that you did nothing wrong. Competence is not a crime. Wanting is not either.”
“Noted,” you say, and it is, and you find it funny that Uraume, of all people, feels like they should tell you that again.
You carry the sentence around all afternoon like something heavy that makes your posture better.
He is, indeed, unbearable that week — restless again, short with anyone who thinks they can replace you with a laugh.
He starts and stops sentences in your direction like a car teaching itself to drive stick.
When you treat him, he behaves, he looks you in the eye and absorbs instructions like an athlete meant to play a longer game.
When you walk away, he pulls his hood up and stares at the floor until he remembers how to move.
Study hall? you text once when the database pings your screen for attendance.
There, he replies, photo attached, his name, his time, the line neat, the proof boring on purpose.
Cryo? you text on a different day.
booked. 19:00. will not be late.
Good you send, and that’s it. You don’t send a smile. You don’t send a full stop.
He probably reads the lack like a Gospel.
Then again, the point is that you don’t have to care how he reads it, the point is that you know what you’re doing.
Mahito tries you again, because people like him don’t learn from silence, they keep testing to see if they can make a noise.
He kicks a doorstop out of the way so an emergency exit props open during a full house.
You move it back, he drags it out again when you turn, you don’t speak, you write his name in the violation log and hand Security the page.
He laughs too loudly, wants your eyes, you don’t hand them over.
“Hey, corpse girl,” he calls. “You can’t ignore me forever.”
“Watch me,” you say, not even turning your head, and the bored tone of it lands harder than any anger would have.
He curses under his breath and looks around for someone who will enjoy his joke with him. Kenjaku’s flat glance sends him elsewhere, which helps, which is annoying.
You prefer winning on your own.
Nights layer into each other, it isn’t better, it isn’t worse, iIt is workable.
You open the lab, you keep first-years standing.
You list your inventory as if it matters because it does, you accept a thermos from Shoko with an eye-roll she doesn’t take personally.
You sleep. Sometimes.
He keeps showing up. You keep your line. He keeps failing to breach it.
He keeps standing there anyway, like maybe the line will move on its own if he’s consistent enough and you’re tired enough.
It won’t, you know that, you think he might be learning it.
If he wants something different, he’s going to have to bring something you can’t get at the store and he can’t fake.
Until then, you’ll hold pressure where it’s bleeding and put names on everything that needs a name.
He can stand at the edge and practice patience, you can practice breathing in and out without adjusting to fit anyone else’s rhythm.
For now, that’s the only peace either of you can afford.
Penthouse borrowed from an alumnus who likes trophies — belts, degrees, boys who win on camera. Glass everywhere, a bar that looks like lab equipment, music that says money before it says melody.
Rich kids do rich-kid things, laugh too loud, spend other people’s patience, invent stakes where none exist.
Sukuna moves through it like he owns the lease on oxygen — like he always has. He wears money like second skin, body like proof he didn’t have to study to pass any test he cared about.
People pivot when he smiles, the ones who don’t, he forgets.
Yorozu drapes herself on the couch and on him by turns, all weaponized glitter and inherited venom. She wants heat, height, a view — he’s a good place to stand for all three.
They keep each other entertained because it’s easy, they’re both fluent in cruel.
They both know it’s not love, and if anyone says the word, they say it like a dare, not a promise.
Mahito is the opposite of quiet, he’s on the island with a bottle and a grin and an audience of boys who never outgrew the joy of breaking a thing they don’t have to fix.
Jogo laughs like a fire hazard, Kenjaku doesn’t laugh, they curate — everything about them says this is the atmosphere I wanted, and maybe that’s true.
“New game,” Mahito declares, palm tapping the marble.
He doesn’t need a mic, the room leans.
“Get past the clipboard.”
Sukuna swirls ice in a glass and pretends to be bored while Mahito thrives on attention the way wrestlers thrive on mats — give too much and he’ll throw you just because it’s fun.
“Which clipboard?” Jogo asks, lazy.
“The one with the campus morgue key ring,” Mahito sings. “The Cadaver Lab Angel. Corpse Barbie. Whatever they’re calling her this week.”
“Barbie doesn’t work,” Kenjaku says mildly. “She hasn’t got the posture for pretending.”
“Angel’s worse,” Yorozu purrs, rolling onto her back to look at Sukuna upside down. She smiles like it hurts other people.
“Angels don’t take out the trash when bored boys spill it.”
Mahito beams.
“See? Consensus. She’s a wall. No one gets past the badge unless they’re bleeding to death, and even then she makes you say please.”
Kenjaku’s eyes cut to Sukuna.
“He’s already tried with a smile,” they remark, amused. “Ryo doesn’t lose often. He did.”
Ryo. The nickname slides off him, he’s still learning which mouths can use it without sounding like a counterfeit bill.
“A kiss for a case note,” Mahito goads. “Win her, write it down, bring it back, proof of life. Get past the clipboard.”
“You’re disgusting,” Kenjaku says, tone affectionately clinical.
Sukuna watches the room react and realizes they’ve all already pictured this, him, any door, any head held close, any victory paraded like a pet.
They see body and money and assume the rest — they’re right often enough that he doesn’t have to choose the people who know his last name from the people who say it with their mouth already open.
“Do we need to give you a handicap?” Mahito asks, starving for yes. “No DM-ing. No donor box seats. No threatening to bleed on the carpet unless she comes closer.”
“Too many rules for a game,” Sukuna answers, lazy.
Yorozu props herself on an elbow and traces the edge of one of his shoulder tattoos with a nail.
“Try a different sport,” she purrs. “You’re bored. She isn’t. Go ruin that. Bring me a souvenir.”
“Her lanyard?” Mahito cackles.
“Her quiet,” Yorozu says, with more intent than the room catches.
Sukuna catches it. Yorozu loves to see quiet die.
He could leave it there. He should.
This is the genus he’s lived in too long — boys folding cruelty into charm and calling it gravity.
He’s good at gravity. He’s better at impact.
He tips back the glass and lets the burn hit.
“Watch me,” he says, because that’s the muscle that always fires first.
Applause, ugly and small and satisfied.
Jogo whoops, Mahito does something with the bottle that would get him thrown out of an adult party, Kenjaku’s smile looks like an experiment taking notes.
He could walk this back if he wanted. He doesn’t.
Part of him — old reflex — likes a clean objective.
Bodies are simpler than feelings, outcomes are cleaner when you don’t care who carries the mess.
Yorozu leans close.
“Want a map?” she whispers. “She posts hours like a saint. You want her when she’s tired — she doesn’t waste language when she is.”
“I don’t need a map,” he says, and he means it.
He also doesn’t mean what she thinks.
Because the truth is he’s seen you.
Not like that.
Like inventory.
A flash across a hallway, the lanyard and the step that says you’re not late because you don’t let late happen, the hair pulled back with violence, the hands that look tired in ways that don’t need pity.
The campus whispers about the girl who can staple with her eyes open and her mouth shut. The athletes, even the loud ones, say your name with a small respect they think doesn’t show.
He has a list of people he enjoys shoving.
You weren’t on it.
Not because you’re sacred.
Because you looked like there was no place to get a handhold.
Later, in a quieter room — Kenjaku’s bedroom turned coat check turned council chamber — Mahito presses.
“Rules,” he says. “No friends running interference. No cash. No gifts. No calls to donors. No bleeding on purpose.”
“Add film review,” Kenjaku says. “You’re not allowed to skip. If you chase the lab girl, you still show up for tape.”
“Don’t talk to me about tape,” Sukuna says, amused.
“Who’ll hold the leash,” Yorozu asks, flipping her hair into his face like a flag.
It smells like a product with an invoice.
He doesn’t mind it.
He also won’t miss it when it’s gone.
“I don’t need a leash,” he answers, which is the funniest lie in the room.
He needs twelve.
They shake on nothing. That’s how boys like this do it — gesture, grin, claim. Contracts are for people who can’t afford to break them.
He leaves early by his standards, he has two more parties he could hit.
He doesn’t.
The night feels loud in a way he can’t swallow. Fun used to taste better.
Down on the street, the air is cleaner.
He thinks about your lanyard again — how it sits on your sternum like a badge and a dare, and he thinks about Mahito’s laugh and Yorozu’s teeth and Kenjaku’s patient, bored attention.
He thinks about the way a room looks when someone who knows what they’re doing walks into it and makes everyone else smaller without trying.
He tells himself it’s a game, he tells himself it’ll be a weekend at most.
He tells himself a lot of stupid things, because he’s still the version of himself who believes he can win people like he wins rounds.
He doesn’t see you until the fight — blood on his mouth, light in his eyes, the world narrowed to a square — and you say,
“Bite a towel or bite your pride,” like you’re choosing the shortest path between two points.
He laughs because the line is cleaner than anything he’s heard all week, and you don’t laugh back, and something in him that runs on bets and bodies registers a new kind of math that doesn’t care about either.
Back at the afterparty where boys with expensive problems are still trying to invent stakes, Mahito raises a glass.
“Progress?” he says, shark-grinning.
Sukuna grins back, all teeth.
“Watch,” he repeats, because he hasn’t learned yet that the watching is the problem.
He’ll learn. But not tonight.
Tonight he’s still the version of himself who thinks quiet is a wall you break, not a place you earn.
Tonight he’s still rich enough to confuse desire with access and pretty enough that rooms forgive him for it.
He doesn’t know he’s already lost, because he hasn’t realized the prize he just put a target on isn’t your mouth or your bed or your time.
It’s your calm.
And taking someone’s calm is not a win, it’s a debt.
He will pay it with months.
He will call it growth.
He will call it love later when he has the language.
For now, he calls it hunger and points it at a door he hasn’t earned, swagger still on, money still speaking, worst friends in the world clapping like seals.
“Get past the clipboard,” Mahito chirps.
“Get past yourself,” Kenjaku says, but soft, and no one hears it.
Sukuna doesn’t either
He’s too busy being the weapon he forged for rooms like this, smiling like a promise, walking toward the part of his life that will break on contact and teach him how to hold anything worth keeping.
He doesn’t bleed much.
Shoko knew the depth to choose, and she chose one that sings instead of screams, a fine, burning line along his cheekbone that stings when sweat hits it, when he smiles by reflex, when he rubs his face with a towel and forgets for half a second that today he is not the person who gets to forget things.
It becomes a metronome. He washes his hands and feels it, he shirts up and feels it, he catches glass — storefront, gym mirror, the black shine of a switched-off phone — and there it is again, a thin red rule laid across a face that rooms used to forgive before he spoke.
He goes home the long way, because speed would be a mercy and he doesn’t deserve it.
Such a martyr, pathetic, really.
The city has the blank look it puts on after a storm, the campus does not
Rumor moves faster than weather here, and you can hear the wake of it as you cross the quad — the little sucked-in breaths, the laugh that flattens into silence when he gets within hearing, the way boys who love a spectacle tuck their phones away too slowly, like they want to be seen not watching.
He keeps his hands at his sides, he keeps his mouth closed. The cut complains, reminding him that Shoko put a leash on his face on purpose, to teach his smile it wasn’t welcome here.
He stands in his bathroom and stares at himself like an opponent who refuses to swing.
The light is too clean. He turns it down.
He wipes the line with saline and sterile gauze and hears your voice anyway, not here, not now, but hard as the edge of a tray.
Whatever you’re about to say, save it.
He is not used to obeying when he’s alone.
He obeys.
Drafts collect on his phone like dust.
I’m sorry looks small and lazy.
It wasn’t like that is a lie that would humiliate both of you.
Let me explain is the battle cry of fools.
He types and deletes until his thumbs ache, then sets the phone on the counter and steps back from it the way you step back from a dead lift that will ruin you if you’re dumb.
The mirror gives him his face and Shoko’s work. He doesn’t touch either.
That night he trains because he doesn’t know what else to do with a body he can’t be proud of. Pad work, footwork, the same three combinations until the boredom turns into a rhythm he can hide inside.
He stays past the hour that would impress anybody.
He stays until the gym empties itself down to one tired custodian and the sound of his breath.
His corner of the ring smells like rubber and sweat and every version of himself he has outgrown without throwing away. He tapes his hands slower than he ever has, thinking about the word you chose — pick a lock on a person — and how accurate it is if you say it in your calm, razored way.
He thought the dare was a door, and he treated it like one because doors open for him when he pushes.
You were a wall.
He is the one who broke.
He doesn’t text again. He doesn’t go to the grill. He doesn’t go near the anatomy building.
He walks long loops around places you could be, not because he fears the humiliation of being told no in public, — he deserves that — but because you told him not to follow and whatever else he is right now, he is not a man who needs another line on his face to learn a sentence.
He goes to film review and sits farther back than he likes, actually takes notes, checks his phone exactly once when it buzzes with the wrong kind of laughter from the boys who think friendship means blood money.
He mutes the thread, he doesn’t leave it.
Not yet.
He wants to know where the fire is while he still has water.
The rumor eats. It’s what rumors do.
Mahito feeds it with a gourmand’s delight, a quip in a hallway, a too-loud story whose nouns wiggle every telling, an anecdote about “clipboard speedruns” that grows a scoreboard and a prize.
Jogo laughs like gasoline whenever he can. Yorozu adds a garnish to the dish — charity, creepy, bride — and it hits the soft palate of the campus hard enough to stick.
Kenjaku doesn’t add anything in public, they don’t have to. Their silence is always a kind of authorship.
He feels their eyes wherever he stands in a room that has more money than oxygen.
He lies awake through two dawns, then sleeps hard through the third, and dreams of the way your hand flattened the napkin on the tray before you put it in the bin.
He wakes up with his cheek singing, and for the first time since he started winning anything that mattered to boys, he likes that he hurts where everyone can see.
It is a warning label he cannot tear off.
He waits a week.
It is not heroic, this waiting.
It’s a penance of the smallest kind, the sort that costs him only comfort, and he has stolen enough of other people’s comfort that any version of waiting feels like a discount.
He runs at odd hours, when benches are mostly empty, he packs his own ice after sparring and doesn’t complain when the student worker tells him to sit, he does not seek the camera or the corner where the donors sit.
He is not a ghost, he is a man whose volume was dialed to loud for years without him touching the knob, and he is learning that quiet is both a choice and a price.
He seeks Uraume because they are a fact.
You trust them with your pockets of oxygen, they will not let him perform at them, he does not want to perform. He wants orders.
They meet him where the morgue deliveries come in, because of course they do.
The loading bay is a weatherless box that smells like mopped concrete and steel.
Uraume stands where the grey turns into darker grey and crosses their arms, a still, narrow thing with the expression of someone cataloguing before cutting.
“All right,” they say. “Speak.”
He tells them the part that is his to admit without turning them into a confessional.
He tells them the dare, the language, the way the room ate it. He says Mahito’s name without spitting and Yorozu’s like a thing he should have been smart enough to identify as poison by smell. He says Kenjaku with the caution he reserves for fire codes.
He tells them he is not here for absolution.
He is here because he heard you say don’t follow me and obeying that while doing nothing else feels like laziness, not respect.
“What do you want,” Uraume asks when he stops.
“Instruction,” he says, and for once he isn’t lying. “If there is a chance that this is reparable, I need the list. If there isn’t, I need the list anyway so I can stop ruining the air she breathes.”
They tilt their head like a surgeon considering whether she needs one more suture.
“You cannot PR this,” they say. “If that is what you’re asking me, you may leave the way you came in. There is no speech, no grand gesture, no event. The boys you call friends gave you a ritual for humiliation. You will not invent one for recovery.”
He nods, and the cut reminds him that even agreement burns.
“You made her a spectacle,” Uraume continues, and the softness in their voice is carefully calibrated — a tone for teaching people who can still be taught. “Your first task is to make yourself boring. You will not be near her work. You will not look at her when she is working. You will not turn a hallway into a stage. If you cannot be near her without being a theater, you will not be near her.”
“I can be furniture,” he says automatically, and only realizes the cruelty of the metaphor when their eyes narrow in a way that looks like a verdict.
“Furniture is still about the person who bought it,” they say. “Try structure. Fences. Doorframes. The things that do their job by not insisting on being admired.”
They looks at the cut on his cheek and consider.
“The second task, remove the oxygen from the rumor where you can reach. That does not mean yelling at boys. It means changing the incentives. Leave rooms as soon as it becomes a topic. Do not stand in the photo. Correct when it is quiet, not when it is applause. Your friends love noise. Stop paying them in it.”
The word friends tastes worse than blood. He swallows it.
“Mahito will push,” he muses.
“Then Mahito will be lonely,” Uraume replies. “Third task. A single apology, once, and not a performance. Tell her you are sorry. Do not count the days until she says anything back. Do not narrate your transformation. Do not approach her workplace to audition for decency.”
He nods again.
It feels like he is learning footwork again at nineteen, humiliating, necessary, a new set of angles for a body that thought it knew geometry.
“Fourth,” they say. “Attend your responsibilities. All of them. Film review. Treatment. Rehab. Paperwork. The end of the rumor will not be that you loved her loudly enough in public, it will be that you consistently became someone whose behavior is uninteresting to gossip. She is on scholarship. You will respect what that costs her in hours by not requiring any of those hours.”
“I can do that,” he says, and it’s almost true as it leaves his mouth.
He will find out how true by whether he does it when nobody is watching.
Uraume’s gaze flicks to his face, to the place Shoko’s key turned into a lesson.
“And finally, accept that it may not work. That is the fix. If it only works under the condition that she forgives you by a date convenient to your calendar, you are still eating at a table you didn’t set.”
He sets his hands on the steel and absorbs the cold.
“Thank you,” he says.
It’s unusually hard to say the second word. He finds it anyway.
“I won’t make you responsible for this.”
“You can’t,” they say, and the faintest twitch at the corner of their mouth might be mercy, might be threat, might be both. “We will know you’re making progress when we forget you were loud.”
He leaves the loading bay and does not go looking for you.
He goes to film.
He sits in the light like a penitent.
He watches tape of himself from two weeks ago — the swagger, the sloppy extra shots thrown after a clean read, the way he glances toward the east corner where donors sit because he learned to eat applause like a food group — and he feels embarrassed in a way he has not felt since he was sixteen and realized money can make people pretend you are interesting.
He takes notes. He keeps them to himself.
Mahito finds him twice and tries to turn the apology in his pocket into a toy.
In the locker room, palms slapping the metal like percussion, he says,
“It’s not like she didn’t know who you were,” and laughs in the way that invites a chorus.
In a hallway, lifting his chin like a wolf, he says,
“You didn’t have to take it so personally, the joke is the joke,” and grins at the word joke like it’s a mirror that makes him look taller.
Sukuna says nothing where it could become a show. He says, quietly, eye-level and unamused,
“We’re done.” He says it without heat so the line is not something Mahito can light for warmth.
Mahito calls him names that will float around for a week and then sink. Sukuna does not hold court, he leaves.
The cut sings its thin, important song. He learns to like the music.
He sees you twice in that week.
Once across a lawn, your head bent to listen to a first-year, the lanyard lying quiet and important against your sternum.
Once at the end of a hallway where the training room breathes cold. You look at him the way professionals look at people whose chart they haven’t pulled, neutral, closed, not mean, just expensive.
He doesn’t earn even the smallest thing — no wave, no lifted chin — and the lack of it shames him more than Shoko’s key.
He keeps walking.
Another week passes like a slow burn, and he arranges — stupidly, bravely, exactly — to talk to Shoko.
He does not ambush her, he asks.
A text crafted the way he now understands requests should be crafted.
if you will meet me, i will keep it short. i owe you apology and i need instruction. i will not argue. name a place that belongs to you.
He expects no answer. He gets bench. sunrise. if you waste my oxygen i will steal yours and stands in his kitchen staring at the reply like it’s a verdict of temporary parole.
He shows up early and stands in the kind of cold that makes his breath visible, hands bare to prove he isn’t hiding anything.
Shoko arrives like morning with knives, hair up in the way it is when she plans to lift a body, expression a flat geography of contempt with no surprises.
“You have five minutes,” she says, sitting, not because she wants to, but because she knows power looks better when it’s not wasted on standing.
He sits at a distance you could call careful or cowardly. He thinks it’s both.
“I’m sorry,” he says, without oil or garnish. “For making her a rumor. For standing still while boys turned a person into a dare. For doing half the work in the wrong direction for years and calling it a personality.” He doesn’t look at the watch, the cut tells him every second anyway. “I don’t expect anything from you. I need you to know I heard you. I won’t go near her unless she starts the sentence. I won’t ask you to be a bridge.”
Shoko watches him like she watches vitals she doesn’t trust yet.
“No qualifiers,” she says at last, as if she’s surprised and doesn’t plan to admit it. “That’s an improvement.”
“I spoke to Uraume,” he adds. “They gave me homework. I’m doing it.”
“You will do it until you die,” she says, not as a joke, not as an exaggeration. As a baseline. “And you’ll do it knowing it might make no difference to her at all.”
He nods because he already heard that in Uraume’s voice.
“I’m still going to do it,” he says.
Shoko leans her elbows on her knees and studies his face. If she wanted to, she could tell him which muscles he overuses when he lies.
She doesn’t need to, he isn’t lying.
“I don’t care if you sleep or eat or win,” she says. “I care if she gets to keep her job and her quiet and her scholarship without having to run around your gravity. Do you understand that what you’re fixing is not a love story. It’s a workplace.”
“Yes,” he says. The word tastes like metal. “I am not looking for a second act. I am trying to stop being an outcome.”
“Good,” she says. She gestures to his cheek, which has stitched itself into a thin, angry line that will become a paler line and then a story. “Let that remind you where you learned to listen. If you come near her to show the line, I’ll give you another one across your mouth.”
“I won’t,” he says.
He doesn’t add I deserve it because that would turn the meeting into the kind of self-flagellation people find charming, and she would take the key to his face because of the sentence, not the sin.
“What are you going to do about your pack,” she asks, tone clinical again, sliding into the part of her brain that likes plans. “Mahito. Jogo. The rich girls with an investment thesis. Kenjaku playing god in a lab coat.”
“Stop being an audience,” he says. “Stop being a draw. Make it expensive to be near me if what you want is to say corpse with your mouth full. If they want me, they get my stare and my back. If they want my approval, they get the sound of the door.”
Shoko’s mouth tilts one degree toward something that isn’t a smile.
“Predictable,” she says. “Maybe even sufficient.” She looks at the horizon like she might put dawn on an IV if it were late.
“If she ever asks me what I think of you after this, I’ll tell her the truth I see. I will not advocate for you. I will not put softness in her head where your name is. I will not close the door either if I don’t have to.”
“That’s more than I have a right to ask for,” he says.
“You haven’t asked for anything,” she replies, and stands in that efficient way she has, like she’s finished with a machine and it had better keep running now that she’s touched it. “You can have another five minutes in a month if you haven’t made things worse.”
“I’ll be here,” he says, because it’s the only promise he can keep without breaking anything.
The sun clears the edge of the building.
She throws him a look that would freeze blood if it were wet and walks away, keys in her fist like a moral. He feels like he just completed a test that wasn’t graded and that, maybe, was the point.
After that he tries in the only way Shoko and Uraume have left him, the boring way.
He makes a checklist like a person who misses being coached, and he checks boxes not because the stroke of the pen redeems him, but because he’s found out he sleeps a little when his calendar looks like discipline instead of appetite.
He replaces flash with form.
He goes to film and takes two notes he will actually practice. He changes the way he moves in the ring on purpose — less flourish, more exit, less damage to make the same point.
He stops volunteering for the extra round that exists to gratify his ego.
When someone asks him why, he says,
“Because it’s stupid,” and the contempt in his voice is finally pointed at himself and not at the world.
He gets baseline checks without being hunted for.
He follows rehab prescriptions with the fervor he used to reserve for flirting, which turns out to be the same muscle in a different shirt.
He walks the campus like a person who used to believe he owned it and is trying to be a tenant. He keeps his eyes on the ground when you pass and doesn’t let his body do the stupid thing it wants to do, which is lean.
He says nothing in your direction except present when it is required of him to be present, and he says it to the person with the clipboard who is not you.
He smiles less. He laughs when it is earned.
He leaves rooms where your name comes out of unfriendly mouths. He declines afterparties by saying,
“I have film,” and he means it.
He unfollows Yorozu with a precision he wishes he’d had when he met her.
She sends seven texts, a voice note that sounds like laughter and a threat, and a photo that would have wrecked him last year.
He deletes it without opening it.
He sends back mutuals only; stop using her name and the only reason he doesn’t block her is because blocking would make more noise than he can afford right now.
He blocks her three days later anyway, when she posts a story with a clown emoji over a photo of a lab cart and a caption that says do not resuscitate.
Removal is a kind of quiet too. He learns to be good at it.
He leaves the group thread the next time Mahito types corpse bride into the air like he thinks he’s discovered a new word. Jogo drops three fire emojis as a goodbye and then two more when he realizes the joke isn’t landing. Kenjaku replies, noted, and that’s when Sukuna understands that everyone was watching him take this small-act test and waiting to see if he’d do the boring, correct thing or go looking for an applause-sized fix.
He feels like a freshman again, being graded on whether he knows how to carry a bag of ice without spilling it.
Days start overlapping in a way that looks like a life you can keep, morning runs when the quad is empty enough that the geese don’t feel the need to perform, training slots booked properly, film sessions endured then applied, compliance visits that are boring and short because he brings what was asked, signed and labeled.
He counts the absence of your voice where he used to count victories.
It is a worse and better way to wake up.
He sees you, here and there, because he lives in the same ecosystem as your job. Your existence brushes the edge of his vision like a thing the day is made of. He files the details he has no right to collect and collects them anyway, the way your hand rests on the spine of a clipboard when you are listening, the way you say copy and make the word sound like the document itself became true, the way you tuck a loose piece of hair behind your ear when you are about to tell a boy that his idea of brave is a kind of self-harm you can’t sign off on.
He learns to like the sick, sober feeling that hits him when you pass and do not look at him, it is the distance between liking and deserving.
He tries to apologize once, exactly once, the way Uraume said, not in a room that could become a stage, not in a hallway that hums, not ringside where the smell of blood makes everyone act like their worst version.
He waits until dawn, not the bench you sometimes use, — he does not have the right to that space — but the one by the north path that has no habit attached to it.
He says your name. You stop. You wait without giving him your face.
He says,
“I’m sorry I made you a story,” and your body at least moves one degree in the direction of acknowledging sound.
He adds,
“I won’t talk to you unless you start,” because Shoko is in his bones now, and then he sits down because he is shaking and he does not want to be standing in this sentence if it ruins you more.
“Good,” you say, and the word goes through him like a medicine that tastes bad because it’s working.
You walk. You don’t look back.
He watches the space you leave and thinks, this, too, is a fix — making yourself small enough that someone can pass without getting scraped by your edges.
He fails sometimes.
He is too close in a doorway one day because his head is full of footwork and not your rules, and you say, “Move,” and he does, so fast he almost trips.
He stares too long at your hands the first time you retape his knuckles after a spar he should not have taken, and you feel it, the stare, and go distant in that careful way that feels like an elevator door closing.
He thinks about putting his head through a wall, then does six hill sprints instead and discovers that lactic acid quiets the parts of him that think with their teeth.
Mahito tries one more time to make it a joke, this time near the end of practice when endorphins are high and defenses are down.
“How’s the cadaver wife,” he sings to nobody and everybody, and for one instant Sukuna sees the version of himself from six months ago throwing a punch and riding the ensuing chaos into an apology he doesn’t deserve.
He does not hit. He walks straight at Mahito, close enough that the kid can smell his sweat, and says, low and even,
“Stop saying her name like your mouth is a trash can.” Mahito cracks something obscene because that’s his only language, and Sukuna — calm, almost bored — grabs him by the back of the neck and turns his head toward the exit.
“Out,” he says. Not loud. Not performative. Just the word you use for a bad dog.
The room flinches around it.
Mahito yanks free, tries laughter, finds it doesn’t pick the lock this time, and leaves with a shrug that doesn’t fit him.
The cut on Sukuna’s cheek throbs, approving. He goes back to wiping his own corner.
He sees Noritoshi walking beside you after seminar one Wednesday, and jealousy does the stupid, reflexive thing in his throat, throws a little heat behind the tongue like a match struck just to see if it will catch.
It doesn’t. He is too tired to be jealous the old way, new jealousy turns into a run before he has time to light it. He converts it to laps.
He texts nobody. He tells no one.
He runs until the quiet inside him is big enough to stand in without knocking something over.
He adds small, invisible helpful things to the list — things that do not bear his name because if they did they would be a joke again, not a fix.
He fixes a loose bolt on the bench you prefer and tells no one, he notices the training room fridge runs too hot on the bottom shelf and moves the protein packs up without telling the student worker to thank him, he stands near the AED once, registers a pad set low, flags it to the right person, returns to his corner.
He is not a savior. He is not in charge. He is someone who used to think he had to be looked at to be alive.
He is learning to be alive in the pragmatic silence where you spend your days.
He stops answering invitations that have the smell of neon on them.
He still shows up where it matters, because disappearing wouldn’t be a fix — it would be a performance in another costume, he goes to the party where the good people play two sets and stands in the back, drinking water, nodding when he’s nodded at, declining the big laugh that used to be part of his signature.
He sees Yorozu across the room and feels nothing but a kind of clinical awareness that this is a person who taught him how easy it is to be a bad version of himself if the lighting is good.
He does not approach, he lets the set end, he helps stack chairs because there are chairs, not because someone is watching.
Time becomes something he measures in your absence and your “copy.” He starts to love the word the way people love “amen,” not because of faith, but because of finality.
He tells the truth, or he doesn’t speak.
He says “present” and means it, he says “copy” back to you exactly once when you hand him a schedule change that costs him a small pride, and the way your eyebrows don’t move at all feels like the grade he earned.
This is not a redemption arc he gets to narrate.
Shoko made sure of that with her key and her terms. Uraume’s loading bay speech took away the easy tricks — flowers, speeches, fights in bars that would look good in a story — and replaced them with chores.
He does the chores, each day is shaped by the same unglamorous verbs, show, sit, listen, change, leave, repeat.
He learns that obsession is a terrible engine but a decent metronome if you stop feeding it fireworks.
He writes one sentence to himself on the inside of his left wrist with a sharpie he’ll scrub off before training.
Do not turn her into proof.
On days when he almost speaks to you because the hallway is empty and the light on your face is kind and the dumb animal part of him thinks honesty is owed a stage, he looks at his wrist and shuts his mouth.
On the third week, the ink stains the cuff of his hoodie.
He likes that. He likes not being able to make it tidy.
There is a night he sits outside the anatomy building twenty minutes after it closes, not to wait for you, but because he needed to be near a door he cannot open.
He catches a reflection of himself in the glass — big, scarred, ridiculous, suddenly young — and he thinks, you liked being an outcome because outcomes can be measured. People cannot. Quiet cannot. The only things worth wanting are the ones that do not clap for you.
He stands. He goes home.
He washes his face gently, laughs once when the cut complains because the pain has become an honest friend, and lies down in a bed he made himself because he read somewhere that making your bed was the first lie people tell themselves on the days they plan to keep promises.
He sleeps badly and gets up when the sky thinks about turning blue.
He will try again tomorrow.
He will fail, a little, differently.
He will hold to Uraume’s tasks like a program for recovery, become structure; remove oxygen; apologize once; do the work; accept the cost.
He will keep offering you nothing you did not request, and when you say no, he will stop. He is slowly learning how to be a fence without feeling like he’s being erased.
He is wrecked and lucky. Wrecked because he did this to himself — because the dare learned his shape immediately and slid into it like a blade — and lucky because the cut across his face taught him where he keeps his pride, too close to his mouth, not close enough to his hands.
He tells the truth about that to himself in the mirror, and then he leaves for practice before the mirror can applaud him for it.
He sees you on the ramp one morning talking to a kid whose fear keeps knocking his words over, and the way you angle your body to be a wall to the wind makes him want to put his head down on a table and breathe.
He doesn’t.
He keeps walking.
He says nothing.
You do not look up.
He does his job, the boring way, he thinks — hopes— that this is how you win back the right to be furniture in someone else’s life, you stop trying to be furniture, you let their room exist without you, you wait, you act like a person in the meantime.
Day after day he keeps showing up, because that’s what he has, and because he has finally learned the correct use for the part of him that never quits, not harrying a closed door until it breaks, but standing where you can see him when you look and disappearing when you don’t.
He hates that it took a public humiliation for him to learn this.
He loves that he can learn anything at all that isn’t a combination of strikes.
He will keep learning until the lesson is either useful to you or only useful to him, both outcomes are better than the boy who walked into a grill and smiled like he had never been told no.
He won’t say “I love you” to the mirror, he will say “I’m sorry” to his schedule every morning and then behave like it.
He will let time do the slow, ungenerous work, he will hold still when it hurts, he will watch you work as if he were lucky enough to see it, not entitled to be part of it, and he will count the day a success if the only sentence you say to him is Present and he gets to answer Copy without wanting anything more.
He is doomed. He’ll take it.
He’ll take the cut, the rumor, the bench two distances away, the new quiet that used to feel like death and now feels like something living in the dark.
He is not finished, he should never be.
He goes to practice, he tapes his hands, he thinks about the fast, excellent way you flattened the napkin before you put it in the bin and imagines moving through the world with that kind of care.
He fails. He tries again.
He waits, not as a strategy, but as a consequence, because consequences are finally, mercifully, the only thing he trusts.
