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𐚁 ⸻ 𝐒𝐔𝐆𝐀𝐑 𝐏𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐒

𐚁 𝐍𝐄𝐑𝐃!𝐒𝐔𝐊𝐔𝐍𝐀 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐉𝐎𝐂𝐊!𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐑

tags: he's just intelligent af and she's a jerk, fem reader, college setting, modern au, sukuna has his tattoos, he also has piercings, he's a little condescending shit, she's also very arrogant, she's the frat party rat, colleagues to project partners to something else. sum: you're paired up with Sukuna, the weird quiet sharp nerd of your lit class, for your midterm project, but you have so much to do... like the parties, the volleyball team, and all of the things that don't involve being buried in books and boring ass researches, so you're pretty sure the big lonesome nerd will take no issue in doing it all by himself, right? wrong. art: @to00fu

𝐈𝐈𝐈 ⸻ 𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄 ⸻ masterlist | previous | next

You wake up in pieces.

Not all at once, not cleanly, not the way you usually do in your own bed with morning light and your phone somewhere nearby and the familiar weight of your own room arranged around you. This is slower, murkier. First there is the sense of being warm. Then the awareness that the warmth is uneven, heavier on one side of you than the other. Then the faint rustle of paper. The quiet click of keys. The stale-soft hush of a room deep into the night.

For a few seconds you stay still with your eyes closed, suspended between sleep and thought, listening.

The party is gone. The nausea is gone. The panic is gone.

Not vanished entirely in the emotional sense, because the memory of it is still somewhere in you, waiting to be examined once you are fully awake and capable of hating yourself properly for how careless you were. But the worst of the physical aftermath has receded. Your head does not feel split open anymore. Your throat is only faintly sore from vomiting. Your body is heavy in the normal, post-sleep way instead of the terrifying, drugged way it felt earlier.

Your mind, though, is still a little blurred at the edges.

You feel functional, but not sharp. Like somebody cleaned the glass and forgot the corners. Your thoughts come through with a slight delay. Your limbs obey you, but they still seem to belong to a softer, slower version of yourself. You breathe in and smell clean cotton, paper, old wood, tea gone cool, a trace of soap that is not yours.

Then you remember where you are.

Your eyes snap open.

Dark room, dimmed by a desk lamp rather than overhead light. Sukuna’s room. His bed. The blanket pulled over you. The giant sweatshirt still on your body, sleeves pushed up now because sometime in your sleep you must have gotten warmer. The water bottle on the nightstand, half empty. Your damp hair now mostly dry, spread a little over his pillow.

And there, at the desk, Sukuna.

It takes a second for the sight to arrange itself in your mind because he does not look like the Sukuna you know first. He looks like a version of him you were not meant to see. His shoulders are still broad enough to crowd the chair, but there is something slackened in the line of them. His head tips forward every few seconds as if sleep is tugging it down by force. One elbow is on the desk. His fingers still rest over the keyboard, but not with any real intent anymore. The laptop screen throws pale blue light up into his face, catching under his eyes, along the planes of his cheekbones, over the hard line of his mouth, which tonight looks less severe simply because he is too tired to hold it that way.

He is half asleep.

Actually half asleep, not pretending indifference, not merely quieter than usual. He is working himself past the point of sense right there in the chair while the room sits in the heavy silence of sometime after midnight. You do not know the exact hour yet, only that it must be late enough to make everything feel separate from the real world.

Your gaze shifts to the laptop. There are notes open, citations, the project file, lines half rewritten.

He did keep working. Of course he did, this infuriating nerd.

He probably dragged you out of a frat house, brought you here, made sure you showered, made sure you drank water, watched your breathing until he believed you were actually okay, and then returned to the project because the project exists and he does not seem built to leave anything unfinished while consciousness remains available to him.

The thought sits strangely in your chest.

You knew he was taking care of you before you fell asleep, in a sense. You felt it in the way he moved around you, in the water, in the medicine, in the stern certainty with which he decided you were staying. But now, seeing him like this, actually seeing the cost of that care on him, seeing that he did not just check once and then leave you to the night but stayed awake, kept working, kept watch, it lands differently.

You are spoiled, yes, you never denied this.

Arrogant too. Brave in the stupid, glossy way that comes from a life where consequences usually arrive padded enough to be survived without much damage. But you are not blind. You notice things. You notice when someone means the sharp thing and when they use the sharp thing to hide the softer one. You notice the difference between control for its own sake and control born out of worry. You notice when someone does something gentle in a way that is not sentimental, not performative, not dressed up for praise.

Sukuna worried.

There is no way around that truth now. No easy joke to fold over it. No smug reinterpretation. He worried and then he acted like himself through it, which means he barked orders and insulted your intelligence and treated your wellbeing like a logistical problem he intended to solve, but underneath all of that sat worry all the same.

You stare at him too long.

The room is quiet enough that your movement should not matter much when you push yourself upright, but it does. The mattress shifts. The blanket drags softly over the sheets. That tiny disturbance is enough. Sukuna’s head lifts instantly.

Not slowly. Not drowsily.

Instantly.

His eyes are on you in the same second, alert in a way that should not belong to somebody who was moments from sleeping face-first into a laptop. It is startling, how quickly he wakes toward you specifically, like some part of him never truly went under because his attention was still anchored here, to the bed, to whether you moved, whether you needed something, whether tonight was done being cruel to you.

You sit there with the blanket pooled around your lap and your hair a little wild around your face, and for a second neither of you says anything.

Then you blink and whisper,

“You should sleep.”

His expression shifts into a frown almost on instinct, like the words annoy him before he has fully processed them.

“You need more sleep than I do.”

“You are almost falling into your computer.”

“I am not.”

“You really are,” you say, and because your mind is still soft from sleep and drug residue and the weird honesty of the hour, there is none of your usual performance in it. No teasing edge. No bratty emphasis. Just plain truth. “You look like another ten minutes and your face is going to hit the keyboard.”

He leans back a little in the chair as if to prove the opposite. It does not help his case much. If anything, the movement only makes the fatigue more obvious. He rubs once at the bridge of his nose and glances at the screen like the project itself might step in and defend him.

“I’m fine.”

“You sound deeply unconvinced.”

“I sound correct.”

“You sound exhausted.”

He gives you a look then, one of those flat, displeased looks that normally would make you grin just to annoy him further. Tonight it only makes your chest ache in that strange, quiet way again.

“This is my room,” he says, and the words are familiar enough that they almost make you smile.

He has said variations of that so many times now. Half warning, half territorial instinct.

My room. My desk. My shelf. My notes. My bed, by implication, even while he kept letting you sprawl across it every evening.

“I know,” you tell him. “That's why you should sleep in it.”

His gaze lingers on you, searching your face as if waiting for the punchline. Maybe because you do not usually offer him things without making them difficult. Maybe because care from you is normally dressed in snark too. But you are too tired to perform tonight. Too fogged. Too honestly affected by the sight of him trying and failing to stay upright.

You glance at the empty space beside you and then back at him.

“I can scoot over,” you say. “You can take half your bed back.”

He does not move at your offer.

The silence that follows is long enough to make you wonder if you accidentally said something insane. Again. Maybe you did. It sounds normal in your own head, but your own head is not currently the most reliable authority. The room is too quiet, the hour too late, your body still too tender and loosened by fear and its aftermath. An offer like that is not neutral and you know it. You know exactly how it could be read on any other night, by anybody else, and the fact that you still make it means you are either much braver than usual or simply too tired to protect yourself from the shape of it.

Sukuna keeps staring.

Not in a heated way. Not even in an annoyed way. More like he is checking for insincerity and not finding it, which bothers him.

You are barefaced. Damp-haired still at the roots. Wrapped in his clothes and half tangled in his blankets and nowhere near practiced enough right now to build your usual little walls of expression. He can probably read all of that too easily.

You clear your throat.

“I won’t be weird,” you say, and immediately hate how that sounds.

One of his brows lifts.

You sigh into the embarrassment and force yourself to continue.

“I really just want you to rest. You keep telling me this is your bed, and you are the one currently ruining your spine in that chair while your laptop is seconds away from wearing your face as a hood ornament. I’m not… I’m not doing something. I’m just saying you can sleep. You should sleep.”

That earns the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. The ghost of a smile, maybe. Or maybe just amusement at your miserable attempt to sound casual.

“You’re babbling,” he says.

“I know. Please don’t make me more self-aware than I already am.”

His eyes stay on you another beat. Then another.

It feels like waiting for weather.

Finally he exhales through his nose, closes the laptop halfway — not fully, as if even now some part of him refuses to surrender the project completely — and pushes back from the desk.

The scrape of the chair against the floor sounds enormous in the room.

“Move.”

You almost laugh from relief, though the relief itself surprises you. You did not realize you wanted him to agree this badly until he does.

You scoot at once, dragging the blanket with you and pressing yourself toward the wall side of the bed. It is a narrow dorm bed at the best of times, definitely not designed for two people, and the mattress gives under your shifting weight enough to make you hyperaware of the smallness of the space. Suddenly there is a wall behind your shoulder blades and too much room in your chest for your heart to beat the way it decides to beat.

He stands there a second with the lamp still on, looking down at the arrangement you have made.

You have left him more than half, probably. You are practically against the wall, one arm tucked under your head, knees drawn in just a little on instinct. It must look ridiculous. Like you are trying to disappear into plaster rather than share a mattress.

He scoffs.

You know that sound by now. You know his scoff for stupid scholarship articles, his scoff for professors who overstate mediocre arguments, his scoff for your worst moments, your most obvious attempts to annoy him, the things he secretly finds amusing and refuses to reward properly. This one lands somewhere between all of those.

Then he reaches past you to switch off the lamp.

Darkness folds over the room immediately, soft and deep and close, broken only by the faint wash of light from outside sneaking around the edges of the blinds. You hear him move, the rustle of clothes, the low dip of mattress beside you, and then he is there.

Actually there.

Lying by your side.

You knew that was what you offered. You knew exactly what it meant in practical terms. But knowing it and feeling it are humiliatingly different things. The bed becomes very small very fast. The air changes. His weight settles into the mattress and changes the angle of your whole body by a fraction. Heat rolls off him almost instantly, stronger than yours, denser somehow, and the line of his presence beside you is impossible to ignore.

He turns onto his side.

Facing you.

Of course he does.

It would almost be easier if he lay on his back or turned away or made this feel less deliberate. Instead he faces you in the dark, one arm bent under the pillow, body a long shadow only inches away, and suddenly all your earlier bravery becomes much less convincing. Your back presses into the wall without your permission. Your eyes, traitorous as ever, go straight to him.

You can make out the shape of his face now that your eyes adjust. His hair darker in the low light. The pale catch of one piercing when he shifts slightly. The line of his nose. The quiet rise and fall of his breathing, still not fully relaxed even as tired as he is.

This is weird.

Not objectively, maybe. Not in some massive moral sense. Two exhausted college students sharing a bed for one night because one of them got drugged and the other is too stubborn to sleep in a chair is not the most scandalous thing to happen on campus by a mile. But for you, for your body, for your poor half-recovered mind and your disastrously attentive heart, it is deeply weird.

You keep staring.

You know you are staring. You still cannot stop.

His voice comes through the dark, low and roughened by sleep.

“Stop staring at me.”

You inhale sharply because you did not realize he was that awake.

“I’m trying,” you whisper back.

That is a lie.

Or not fully a lie. You are trying a little. Mostly you are failing. His face is right there, half in shadow, and there is something unfair about how intimate darkness makes it. In daylight, in his chair, at his desk, in the rhythm of your usual evenings, Sukuna is all angles and interruptions and cruel little remarks that keep too much softness from gathering between you. Here, like this, there is nothing to hide behind except low light and your own breathing.

He is quiet for a beat.

Then he says,

“You don’t need to try and enter the wall. Relax.”

You become painfully aware of your posture.

The wall is practically imprinted on your shoulder. Your knees are tucked tighter than they need to be. Your whole body is braced with the specific stiffness of somebody trying so hard not to touch the person beside them that they become absurd about it.

Heat climbs your neck.

“I am relaxed.”

“You are lying.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.” Even half-asleep, his voice carries that same maddening certainty. “I don’t move much while sleeping. You can stop acting like I’m about to maul you.”

That would be easier if you were afraid of being mauled.

You swallow and let some of the stiffness go. Just some. Then a little more. Your shoulders ease first. Then your knees. You inch away from the wall by what cannot be more than two inches, but on this mattress it feels like a declaration. The movement brings you a touch closer to him and suddenly the heat coming off his body is unmistakable.

It is ridiculous how warm he is.

Not feverish. Not uncomfortable. Just intensely alive in the coolness of the room. You can feel the difference between his side of the bed and the air beyond it. It wraps around the front of you in a way that makes your whole body too aware again, but differently now, less sharp and more strange. He's like a furnace. Comfortable as a fireplace in a cold winter.

He notices your face even in the dark, apparently, because of course he does.

“What’s with that expression.”

You blink once, confused.

“What expression?”

“The one you’re making.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do.”

Self-consciousness hits so suddenly it is almost funny. You are lying in his bed in his clothes with your hair a mess and your thoughts nowhere near as controlled as usual, and somehow you are still trying to bluff your way through a conversation with the only person on campus who seems physically incapable of missing anything.

You look away for half a second, then back.

Your voice comes out lower than intended.

“You’re really warm.”

The words leave you and seem to suspend there.

He does not respond.

In the dim light you can only just see his face, but even that is enough to tell when something genuinely catches him off guard. It is small. A pause more than an expression. The kind of stillness that happens when he expected sarcasm and got honesty instead.

He stares at you.

You stare back, suddenly too aware of your own mouth, your own pulse, the embarrassing softness of what you just said. Not flirtatious. You did not mean it that way. It just came out because it was true, because your body noticed before your pride could intercept it.

Sukuna keeps staring that one extra beat that makes everything around him feel heavier.

Then, like some half-feral creature encountering a problem it refuses to name, he lifts one hand and places his entire palm over your face.

Not hard. Not aggressively. Just there. Odd just like him.

His hand is so big it nearly covers everything from your brow to your jaw. The heel of his palm rests warm over your chin, his palm covers your nose and most of your face, his thumb angled near your temple, the span of his fingers splayed enough that the tips reach your hairline. It is absurd. Completely absurd. A deeply annoying, deeply strange thing to do.

A laugh bursts out of you muffled and helpless against his hand.

“Thanks,” you say into his palm, voice flattened by it but the smile is there, undeniable. “Very nice.”

He does not remove it.

That should make you swat him away. Roll your eyes. Call him a freak and twist his wrist until he relents. On any other night, maybe you would. But the warmth of his hand is immediate, solid, almost embarrassingly comforting. Big enough to blot out half your face, yes, but gentle in the pressure of it. Not pressing you away. Not shoving you down. Just... there, so so warm.

You leave it where it is.

You can feel his skin warming further against yours, the roughness at the base of his fingers, the faint trace of callus against your cheek. It is such a bizarre answer to what you said that you almost want to ask what the hell is wrong with him.

But your body seems to understand before your brain does.

He did not know what to do with your softness, so he answered in the oddest version of softness available to him. Not a sweet word. Not a normal gesture. His palm over your face like he is muting you by hand and somehow taking care of you at the same time.

Weirdo.

The word floats through your head with so much affection tucked into it that you refuse to inspect it.

You close your eyes under his hand.

The darkness was already deep, now it is warmer too, smelling faintly of skin and whatever trace of soap remains on him. His hand blocks some of the cool air from reaching your face. His body heat curls against the front of you. The mattress is narrow and firm beneath your side. The wall is still behind your back but further away now, your body no longer trying to disappear into it.

Your breathing starts to slow.

His hand remains where it is.

He does not tease you. Does not remark on the way you accepted it. Does not pull back after a second once the joke is made. He simply keeps his palm there as if this is now a reasonable arrangement between the two of you.

You smile a little under it.

The smile fades into something softer, sleepier. Your mouth parts with the next breath. Your body keeps loosening without asking permission anymore. The fear that clung to your nerves earlier is too far away now to reach you properly. In its place there is only this strange quiet, the too-small bed, the impossible warmth of him, the very real fact that he stayed.

Your thoughts wander in slow circles.

You think of the bathroom floor and try not to.

You think of his jacket around your shoulders.

You think of the way he answered the phone, too calm, which meant he was already furious.

You think of the way he looked in the doorframe.

You think of the absurd tenderness of being palmed in the face like an unruly cat chose you.

Your body sinks deeper.

Sleep comes not as a drop this time, but as a slow undertow. Your limbs get heavier first. Then the space between thoughts widens. Your lips part further on a sigh you barely hear yourself make. Somewhere in all of that your breathing shifts from alert to sleeping without ever formally telling you it has changed.

His hand moves eventually.

You are almost sure of it.

Not all at once. Not lifting cleanly away. More like the pressure changes. The broad center of his palm eases off your mouth and nose. His fingers slide slightly, careful enough that the movement barely registers except as a change in warmth. The heel of his hand leaves your cheek. Then, if you are not dreaming it, if your half-drugged mind is not inventing mercy where there is only drowsy accident, his hand settles differently.

Not over your whole face anymore.

Around it.

Cupping.

His palm against the side of your cheek and jaw, thumb resting near your cheekbone.

The gentleness of it is so unexpected that your whole body seems to notice even in sleep. Not enough to wake you, not enough to pull you all the way up again, just enough that some softer instinct inside you leans into it before you can help yourself. The pad of his thumb moves once, maybe twice, a slight brushing caress along your cheekbone that is so warm and careful and unlike anything you have ever felt from anybody that your nearly-sleeping mind cannot hold it properly.

You must be dreaming.

You tell yourself that in the last little flicker of consciousness you have.

You must be.

Then the tide takes you fully.

Morning does not arrive gently.

At first it is only brightness pressing weakly through your eyelids. Then the awareness of warmth again, but much stronger this time. Then the fact that your neck feels oddly angled and one leg is tangled in something that is definitely not just your blanket. Your mind climbs toward waking slowly, still sticky at the edges, and the first clear thought you have is that you are not where you usually are.

The second clear thought is that you are holding onto something.

Your eyes open slowly.

For one beautiful, ignorant second you do not understand what you are seeing. The room is washed in pale morning light. Sukuna’s room, immediately recognizable now. The desk. The vase. The chair. The laptop closed this time. The wall. The blinds letting thin lines of light across everything.

Then your own body resolves.

You are wrapped around Sukuna’s side.

Not delicately, oh no, that would be too easy to explain. Not accidentally in some subtle, defensible way. No. Thoroughly. One arm across his torso, your cheek against his chest, one leg hooked over his thigh, your body clinging to his side with the shameless commitment of a koala attached to a tree trunk.

You stop breathing.

Horror hits first because horror is easy and familiar and practical.

What the fuck.

Oh my god.

You jerk your gaze upward.

Sukuna is awake.

Very awake.

Lying flat on his back, one arm stretched stiffly above the blanket, the other trapped somewhere beneath or around you, impossible to tell from the angle. Every visible line of him is taut. Not strained exactly, but held. Controlled. Suspiciously motionless. Like if he moves one inch something catastrophic might happen — not to him, not physically, but in the atmosphere between you.

He stares at the ceiling with the expression of a man enduring an extremely strange military exercise without complaint.

The instant he feels you realize it, his eyes shift down to you.

Neither of you speaks.

It's a long, weird and tense moment right there.

Your entire body goes hot.

Not just your face. Your entire body. Heat floods through you so fast it almost makes you dizzy again. Because yes, you are clinging to him like a stuffed animal. Because yes, he is completely awake and has apparently been lying there not moving so as not to wake you. Because yes, his body under yours is solid and real and warm in a way that makes last night’s sleepy observation feel pathetic by comparison.

You scramble backward so quickly the blanket snarls around your ankle.

“Oh my God.”

Your voice comes out wrecked with sleep and humiliation. You push yourself up on your elbows, then your hands, trying to untangle yourself without kneeing him somewhere unforgivable.

“Oh my God, why didn’t you wake me up.”

He stays on his back a second longer, like he is waiting to see whether you are done panicking.

Then he turns his head slightly toward you, expression unreadable.

“You needed some more sleep.”

“That's— that's not a good reason!”

“It is the only one you’re getting.”

You stare at him in disbelief. His hair is messy from sleep. There is a crease in the pillow near one cheek. He looks tired still, though much better than he did at nearly two in the morning, and unfairly handsome in the brutal kind of morning light that should have been less forgiving. And he is acting as if you did not just wake up physically attached to half his body.

“I was sleeping on top of you.”

“Exaggeration doesn’t improve your situation, you know.”

“I was wrapped around you!”

That seems, finally, to make something flicker at the corner of his mouth. Not enough to be called a smile, that would be new. Just enough to suggest that underneath all that composure, some part of him is entertained by your suffering.

“You said you wouldn’t be weird,” he replies and you immediately wanna kill him and die.

You make a helpless sound somewhere between outrage and despair and bury your face in your hands for one second because there is no dignity left to preserve here. Not a scrap. You offered him half his own bed out of genuine concern and ended up glued to his side by sunrise like an emotionally damaged housepet.

When you lower your hands again, he has finally shifted enough to sit up slightly against the headboard. The movement is careful, as if he is making sure you have fully untangled yourself first. He does not comment on the way your cheeks are burning. Does not mention whether he woke during the night and found you there. Does not tell you if he noticed before you did. He only looks at you, calm and deeply infuriating.

“You look less dead,” he says.

That is so like him that you nearly laugh in spite of yourself.

“You have an incredible gift,” you mutter, “for making every tender moment revolting.”

“There has not been a single tender moment.”

You look at him.

Then at the morning light.

Then back at him.

He lifts one brow, daring you to argue.

You remember his hand on your face. On your cheek. That thumb against your cheekbone. The strange warmth of it. The softness.

Did that happen?

You cannot be sure anymore. Morning has the unpleasant power to make night feel half fictional, especially nights like that one, strung between panic and sleep and the blur of something nasty leaving your system. Maybe you dreamed it. Maybe not. Looking at him now does not help. His face gives you nothing useful. Only that same severe calm, only the slightest exhaustion under it, only the maddening sense that whatever gentleness exists in him has to be excavated from a quarry of pride and teeth.

Still, you ask before you can stop yourself.

“Did you sleep at all?”

He watches you a second longer than necessary, maybe recognizing the real question buried under that easier one.

“Enough.”

“That is not very convincing.”

“I don’t need to convince you.”

“Clearly not, since you seem thrilled to suffer for no reason.”

He looks toward the clock.

“It’s after nine. That no reason has a deadline.”

You follow his glance automatically and then groan because right, the project. The actual project. The one that started all of this. It is absurd that life can keep moving at all after a night like the one you had, and yet there it is, waiting, due date intact, indifferent to drugged drinks and near-misses and waking up wrapped around the most impossible man on campus.

You swing your legs carefully over the side of the bed and sit there for a moment, gathering yourself. The room is brighter now, the shapes of everything familiar again in morning light. Your body feels better than it has any right to. Tired, yes. A little tender. But not shattered. Not ruined. Not poisoned by lingering panic. The headache is gone. The blur is faint enough now that you trust your hands, your legs, your words.

Sukuna made sure of that.

The realization arrives quieter this time, less shocking than during the night but no less real. He made sure. He stayed awake. He monitored you. He shared the bed when you asked because he was too tired to argue and maybe because he knew you were not playing games. He did not wake you when you attached yourself to him in your sleep. He lay there and let you rest.

Something shifts inside you around that truth.

Not all at once. Not even in some dramatic click like you see in movies.

A small rearranging is what you get. Another piece of the image you made of him falling away.

You glance back at him over your shoulder.

He is watching you again, obviously. He always is.

“What,” he says.

You wet your lips.

“Thank you.”

He goes very still.

Not because gratitude shocks him. More because you are saying it now, in the bright and obvious morning, with none of the haze of the night to excuse it.

You make yourself continue because if you stop now you never will.

“For last night. For all of it. Getting me out of there. Making me stay. Not…” You look down at the floor for a second, then back up. “Not making it worse.”

His face changes by so little it would be easy to miss if you did not know him now.

Finally he says,

“Try not to do it again.”

You almost laugh.

“That’s your response?”

“That and you owe me breakfast.”

“There it is.”

“You expected nobility from me. That was your first mistake.”

The laugh comes anyway this time, quiet but real, and something in the room eases with it. He gets out of bed then, unfolding himself from the narrow mattress with sleepy stiffness he would probably deny if accused. He is all angles and quiet menace again in daylight, but your body remembers too much now to believe the whole performance.

Not that the menace is fake. Just that it is not the whole of him.

He crosses to the desk, lifts the laptop, checks something, then closes it again with finality.

“What are you doing,” you ask.

“Giving you ten minutes before I start insulting your lack of efficiency.”

“You are such a nightmare.”

“And yet you slept on me voluntarily, hm?”

You make a noise of outrage and grab the nearest pillow on reflex. He has already turned away, but you can see the satisfaction in the line of his shoulders all the same. He knows exactly what he just did to you.

You throw the pillow.

He catches it without looking.

Then he sets it neatly back on the bed and says,

“Ten minutes.”

You stare at him while your heart does one more humiliating little jump in your chest, less wild now, less frightening than during the night, but no less present.

Somewhere between the party and the bathroom and the car and the bed and his palm over your face and the morning light on his impossible composure, something changed. You do not know what to call it yet. You are not stupid enough to give it a name too soon. But you feel it all the same, moving just beneath your skin.

You stand slowly, still wrapped in his clothes, still carrying the warmth of his side in your body like a secret, and realize with a strange, sinking sort of certainty that going back to your old routine is not going to be as easy as you thought.

Because now you know what Sukuna looks like when he worries.

Now you know what it feels like when he chooses to take care of you.

And now, worst of all, you know how safe it feels to wake up tangled around him.

If someone asked you when it started, when you started to notice some changes, you would probably roll your eyes and say something dramatic like the moment you woke up wrapped around Sukuna like an idiot and realized he had let you sleep. Or maybe you would say it began in the fraternity bathroom, when his voice came through the phone too calm, too controlled, and you understood before he even found you that you were going to be safe.

If you were being honest, though, it starts in smaller places than that. In quieter ones.

In the stupid accumulation of choices you do not mean to make until one day you look at your own routine and realize you have been rearranging your life around a man you once intended to use for a grade and a kiss.

The first thing to shift is practice.

You are not giving up volleyball for a literature project and a giant asshole with a laptop. You are not insane. But you do start moving things where you can. You trade one conditioning slot with a teammate who likes early mornings more than any sane person should. You tell coach you would rather do one set of drills before class than after because you focus better that way, which is true enough that she accepts it without much suspicion. You start paying attention to how wrung out you feel after the more punishing sessions, how useless you become when your legs ache and your shoulders are tight and your brain wants sugar and sleep more than it wants nineteenth-century suffering.

At first you tell yourself it is about the grade.

You do not want to show up to Sukuna’s dorm limp with exhaustion and expect him to drag your half-dead mind through all the remaining work. That would be embarrassing now, in a different way than before. Before, laziness felt almost like a style choice, some bratty little game between the two of you. Now it feels more personal than that. Because now you know what he looks like when he is exhausted and still trying. Now you know what it means when he stays awake for you. You cannot, in good conscience, keep wandering into his room dead on your feet and hoping his intelligence will do the work of two people.

That thought annoys you.

Not because it is wrong, but because it means you have started caring in a direction that is difficult to joke away.

So you reschedule what you can. You eat a little better before going over. You stop pretending reading the assigned texts is a burden equivalent to war. You still complain, because complaining is one of your foundational rights as a pretty girl with opinions, but the complaining has changed. It no longer means refusal. It just means you are still yourself.

And you are, still.

You still walk through campus like it likes you. People still turn toward you more easily than away. Professors still soften half a degree when you smile and ask a thoughtful question. Boys still offer to carry things you do not need carried. Girls still loop their arms through yours and tell you gossip like you are a confessional booth with better hair. The rugby boys still greet you as if you are some patron saint of their chaos whenever you pass near the athletic center.

The difference is that lately, when they ask where you have been, you do not have the answer they expect.

They catch you one afternoon outside the gym after you finish stretching, all loud shoulders and ugly team hoodies and too much confidence for people who voluntarily get tackled for fun. Their captain is there too, broad and sun-reddened and always carrying himself like any room he enters should immediately become his. He grins when he sees you and spreads his arms as if your absence has injured him personally.

“There she is! We were starting to think you went respectable on us.”

You snort and adjust your bag higher on your shoulder.

“Respectable is a disgusting accusation.”

“Then where have you been?” one of the others asks. “You used to crash our parties at least often enough to remind us women existed.”

“Please,” you say, deadpan. “As if you need reminding.”

The captain puts a hand over his chest.

“That was cruel. I asked a sincere question.”

“No, you didn’t. You asked in a rugby way, which means badly and with too much volume.”

That gets the expected laughs. They bend easy around you. They always have. Big men are often oddly simple when you know how to angle your voice just right. A little mockery, a little charm, a look that says they are being ridiculous but not dangerously so, and they become eager to take whatever role you hand them as long as it still lets them feel like men.

You know this. You have always known it. You grew up learning what kinds of smiles lower shoulders, what kinds of teasing can turn a tense interaction playful, what kinds of glances make boys trip over themselves trying to impress you. You do it without thinking now. Most days it feels harmless. Some days it feels like power. Some days it feels like an old language you speak because everyone expects it and it is easier than resisting.

The captain hooks his thumbs into the pockets of his hoodie and asks again,

“Seriously. Where have you been?”

You shrug.

“Busy studying.”

That makes them howl.

Not because they think you are stupid. Quite the opposite. The reaction is immediate admiration, theatrical and easy and annoyingly genuine.

“See, that’s why she’s smarter than all of us.”

“She’s going to graduate with honors and leave the rest of us in the dirt.”

“I always said she had her priorities straight.”

“If only she’d apply those priorities to improving her beer pong aim.”

You grin despite yourself.

“My beer pong aim is emotionally intuitive.”

“Your beer pong aim is trash.”

“Study harder and maybe you’ll learn nuance,” you tell him, and lift your chin in a little parting gesture. “I have to shower. Try not to destroy public property while I’m gone.”

They laugh again. Someone says, “Smart girl,” with the kind of open, admiring tone that makes the whole exchange dissolve into easy warmth. None of them presses. None of them imagines your studying involves sitting on Sukuna’s bed with your shoes kicked off while he tears apart an academic source and you argue about whether a character is tragic or simply insufferable.

If only they knew.

The thought almost makes you laugh as you walk away.

Because yes, if only they knew.

If only they knew you are not just showing up anymore. You are helping.

Actually helping.

It starts in the most humiliatingly simple way — you do not want to feel stupid in front of him more often than necessary.

Sukuna has this infuriating habit of muttering things under his breath that are too interesting to ignore and too contemptuous to let pass without comment. At first you only half-listen, the way you would eavesdrop on weather. Then one night he says, almost to himself,

“This entire section is pretending class is not the real reason she gets punished for desiring anything.”

You are sprawled on his bed with your notebook open, highlighter uncapped, actually reading for once. The sentence lands hard enough that you push yourself up on one elbow.

“What do you mean?”

He does not look back.

“What do you think I mean.”

“I think you are annoying and unclear on purpose.”

“That is not an answer.”

You sigh and sit up properly, your hair falling over one shoulder.

“I think you mean the moral language is fake. Like they call it a punishment for desire, but really they are punishing the fact that she wants outside the role she is allowed.”

He turns halfway in his chair to look at you. Really look now. Not with surprise exactly, he knows you are intelligent. More like recalibration.

“Yes,” he says after a second. “That.”

You hate how much satisfaction that gives you.

After that, it gets easier to join in. Not because the work gets easier, but because you stop pretending distance is a virtue. When he mutters about a critic overreading symbolism, you ask why. When he says a poem’s speaker is full of shit, you ask in what way. When he shoves a book toward you and tells you to read page one hundred and twelve because the author is actually useful there, you roll your eyes and read it anyway, then end up arguing over two sentences for half an hour.

Your involvement starts to leave marks on the project that even you can see.

The file gets thicker with your comments. Your notes become less decorative and more usable. You start showing up with articles you found yourself, not always the right ones, but sometimes good enough to earn a nod instead of a correction.

Once you bring an essay that is genuinely valuable and Sukuna reads the abstract in silence, then says,

“Finally. Proof you are not just ornamental.”

You throw a pen at him for that.

He catches it. Of course.

Then there is the library conversation, which in hindsight should have stayed a fantasy.

It starts because you get tired of the dorm room sometimes, tired in the sensory way rather than the emotional one. His room is comfortable now in a way that feels dangerous to admit because you're getting used to stay there, to spend time with him there. Too comfortable. The bed. The smell. The routine of arriving after practice or class or dinner and settling into his space as if you belong there just a little.

You start worrying, without saying it out loud, that maybe you are becoming too used to it.

Too used to him at his desk.

Too used to being looked at by him in the private rhythm of his own room.

So one day while you are both working and the afternoon light is slanting across the desk and he is three seconds from calling an entire field of criticism useless again, you say,

“We could go to the library tomorrow.”

His typing stops.

That by itself tells you a lot.

He turns slowly in his chair and squints at you like you have suggested arson.

“Why.”

You shrug as if the suggestion is casual, because it kind of is.

“Because normal students study in places other than your cave.”

“This is not a cave.”

“It is a little bit a cave.”

“It has windows.”

“So does prison.”

That earns a flat stare.

You grin.

“My point is that maybe a change of environment would be nice.”

“For whom.”

“For both of us.”

“No.”

You kick lightly at the edge of his mattress with your foot.

“You didn’t even consider it.”

“I did. The answer is still no.”

“Why.”

He turns back to the laptop.

“Because people are irritating.”

“You are around people in class.”

“That is class. There are rules.”

“You are around people in whatever sport you claim to practice and refuse to name.”

“That is different.”

“How.”

He finally looks over his shoulder.

“Because there I am allowed to hit things. And people.”

You laugh so hard you have to cover your mouth for a second.

Still, you keep pushing over the next couple days. Not relentlessly — small comments, suggestions, teasing remarks about his territorial habits, questions about whether he is ever going to let the world see him voluntarily.

Eventually, partly because you are annoying and partly because he has started taking your actual participation more seriously, he gives in with the expression of a man agreeing to surgery without anesthetic.

“Fine,” he says one afternoon. “One time.”

You clap a hand over your heart.

“Growth. I’m witnessing growth.”

“You are witnessing my patience dying.”

“Same difference.”

So the next day you meet at the library.

He arrives looking like he regrets being born.

That part would be funny even if you did not know him, but because you do know him now, because you can already read his moods in the set of his shoulders and the exact amount of tension in his jaw, it becomes almost endearing. He stands just outside the entrance, backpack slung over one shoulder, coffee in hand, eyes narrowed at the building as though it has insulted him and his whole lineage just by being there.

You wave from the steps.

He walks up with all the enthusiasm of an execution march.

“This better be worth it.”

“It’s a library, not trench warfare.”

“It is full of undergraduates.”

“So is your dorm.”

“My dorm contains only one undergraduate I am obligated to tolerate.”

You smile sweetly.

“I feel cherished.”

He looks at you, then at the doors, then at you again as if weighing whether it is still possible to leave. In the end he follows you in.

The library itself is fine at first.

Quiet enough. Bright enough. Smelling of paper and carpet and whatever industrial cleaner all institutions secretly share. You find a table on the third floor near a window, tucked far enough into the stacks that foot traffic is light. You spread out books. He opens the laptop. You steal his coffee for one sip and nearly choke because he still drinks it too strong.

He says,

“That is theft.”

You cough and hand it back.

“That is punishment.”

For almost an hour it goes well. Better than expected, even. Maybe because the library version of silence is different from his dorm. Less intimate. More neutral. You can hear pages turning somewhere nearby, the low squeak of cart wheels, the occasional whispered conversation several stacks over.

Sukuna is still Sukuna, of course. Still muttering when he dislikes a sentence. Still marking passages with vindictive precision. Still correcting you whenever you get sloppy. But you are focused too, and the project is close enough to finished now that everything feels more exact, more purposeful. You are doing finishing work, smoothing the argument, tightening the presentation notes, checking citations.

At one point you catch him already rewriting a paragraph you drafted and say,

“Hey.”

He does not stop typing.

“What.”

“That was mine.”

“It was weak.”

“That is so rude.”

“Doesn't make it less true.”

You lean over and scan what he changed.

Dammit. It is better.

You hate that.

He notices your expression without needing to look.

“You’re sulking.”

“I’m evaluating.”

“You’re sulking because I fixed it.”

“You could at least pretend you hate editing my work less than you do.”

His mouth twitches.

“I don’t hate editing your work.”

You lift your brows.

“I hate that you are making me say kind things in public,” he amends.

You laugh quietly enough not to earn a librarian’s glare.

By the time you leave, the sun is lower and both of you are a little frayed in the satisfying way that comes from actual intellectual work. You pack slowly, stretching your wrists, stacking books, talking in low voices about one final point you still want to sharpen tomorrow. There is a little convenience store just off the library entrance, and on impulse you insist on boba because you have earned it.

Sukuna says boba is for children and weaklings.

You make him come anyway.

He buys one for himself after pretending he will not.

You choose a sweeter one. He chooses something darker and less cheerful, which you tell him is deeply in character and he tells you to mind your own damn drink.

The cups are cool in your hands when you step outside. The seal film is tight and slightly fogged from the temperature difference. You stick the straw through yours with a satisfying pop and take the first drink while you walk. Sweet, cold, perfect after dry library air. Sukuna is beside you with his own cup in hand, bag over one shoulder, moving with that same quiet self-possession he always has in public. People look at him. They always do. Some because he is large enough to demand it, some because of the tattoos, some because his face is impossible to ignore once seen. More than one glance slides from him to you and back again.

You are used to that now too.

Used to being seen near him sometimes. Used to the assumptions people might make. You do not think too hard about which assumptions those are because the answers would probably annoy you.

You are halfway down the path toward the residence halls when chaos steps out of nowhere wearing a rugby hoodie.

At first you do not register him beyond shape and movement. Just a big body angling toward yours from the side path, broad enough to interrupt the flow of walking without quite touching either of you. Then your brain catches up. Rugby captain. Same one from outside the gym. Same shoulders, same self-important gait, same face that always looks like it has been told yes too often.

There are others behind him.

Three, maybe four. Also rugby, probably. Hanging back just enough to pretend they are not part of whatever this is while obviously being part of it.

Sukuna stops because there is a person in his path.

You stop because he does.

For one second you are only confused. The captain plants himself there like this is a dramatic movie confrontation and not a university walkway between the library and the dorms. He looks at Sukuna, not you, with that special kind of righteous stupidity only men full of secondhand rumor seem able to achieve.

“I heard,” he begins, too loud already, “you’ve been going around blackmailing girls into hanging out with you.”

Your brows furrow so hard you actually feel it hurting.

Sukuna does not move. He does not even blink at first. He just stands there with the boba cup in one hand, unreadable in the way that means danger only if you know him.

The captain keeps going, because men like him always think the first stupid sentence deserves a sequel.

“And dragging them back to your dorm because you’re too much of a freak to get girls any other way.”

The world seems to stop for one deeply stupid heartbeat.

Then, before you can help it, the words leave your mouth.

“What the fuck.”

Your voice comes out sharp enough that even the guys behind him shift a little.

You look up at Sukuna instinctively. From the side, his face gives you almost nothing. Almost. But his hand on the boba cup has tightened. Not visibly enough for strangers, maybe. For you, yes. You see the pressure in his fingers, the minute change in the plastic. It is the only sign you get that the words landed as hard as they should have.

You do not need to defend him. The rational part of your brain knows that. You are a girl with a sweet drink standing between two men built like sports injuries. If one of them decides to throw a punch, your opinion is not going to stop the impact.

Still, your mouth works before fear does.

“Cut the crap,” you say. “He wouldn’t do anything like that.”

The captain finally looks at you, like he forgot you were there or maybe expected you to stay ornamental while he performed whatever savior fantasy this is.

“You don’t have to pretend, doll,” he says, and the pity in his voice is so offensive you nearly laugh. “We already know what’s going on. You don’t have to keep hanging around him because he’s got something on you. If he’s blackmailing you, just say it. We’ll handle it.”

For one bizarre second you genuinely wonder if maybe you are still having some kind of delayed bad reaction because there is no way this conversation is real. No way this idiot has assembled a little posse and ambushed you outside the library because a bunch of girls started gossiping and his male savior instincts got a hard-on.

It is too absurd. Too stupid. Too perfectly male in the worst possible way.

You feel almost lightheaded from the force of it.

“Where,” you ask, very carefully, “did you even hear something this stupid?”

He puffs up a little, as if being questioned is an invitation to become more heroic.

“People are talking.”

“Then people are morons.”

“Look, you don’t have to cover for him.”

That does it.

You step forward before you fully decide to. One second you are at Sukuna’s side, the next you are between them, nearly sandwiched by pure bad judgment and indignation like a damn chihuahua between two wild buffaloes.

You jab one finger right into the captain’s chest because sometimes men need physical punctuation to understand a sentence.

“Cut. The. Crap,” you tell him, steepled finger poking and punctuating your demand on his chest. “And stop talking shit you know nothing about.”

He looks down at your finger, then at your face, and for the first time tonight seems to realize you are not playing along in any version of this fantasy. That you are not grateful. Not secretly relieved. Not waiting to be rescued.

Sukuna is silent behind you.

You feel his eyes drop to the top of your head from where he stands. You do not need to look to know it. The awareness is physical all the same, a line of attention down your spine.

The captain takes a half-step back.

Not much. Enough.

You keep your finger there another beat just to make the point, then you lower your hand and go back to Sukuna’s side with a furious exhale, heart beating harder now less from fear than from rage. The whole situation is so humiliating on his behalf and insulting on yours that you can barely see straight.

You open your mouth to say something else.

Sukuna beats you to it.

“The problem with men like you,” he says, voice low and almost bored, “is that you talk too much shit and fold immediately when a pretty girl bats her eyelashes at you.”

The insult lands with surgical precision.

You hear it happen in real time. The ego wound. The hit straight to whatever pathetic structure is holding the captain upright. Because yes, men are fucking stupid. Not all of them, maybe, but enough of them, and especially this kind.

Loud boys with teams behind them and muscles as their first language. They can tolerate being told they are wrong. Sometimes. They can even tolerate being publicly corrected if the tone is soft enough. But call them easy. Call them weak in front of the girl they meant to impress. Call them susceptible. Suddenly they remember violence because it is simpler than feeling small.

The captain’s face changes.

You see it a half-second before he moves, which is still not enough time to stop anything.

He swings.

Everything that happens next splits into flashes.

Your boba cup leaving your hand because shock makes your fingers open. The cold splash against the pavement. Sukuna’s cup dropping too. The thud of both plastic lids bursting and pearls scattering like stupid little black beads across the ground.

Sukuna’s arm hauling you back hard enough that your body stumbles behind him. The rush of air where the punch should have connected. The captain’s momentum carrying him just slightly too far because he aimed for a face and found empty space.

Then Sukuna moves.

Not wildly. Not angrily even, not in the messy way most people think of fights. He moves with horrifying economy. One hand catches the captain’s wrist after the missed punch. The other finds his elbow. There is a pivot — sharp, controlled, efficient — and suddenly the captain is no longer a man throwing a punch but a body being folded by someone who understands leverage too well.

It happens so fast your mind arrives late.

One blink and the captain is bent forward.

The next and his arm is behind his back at an angle that makes your own shoulder hurt in sympathy.

By the time the rest of your thoughts catch up, he is already on the ground. Stomach down. Face twisted toward the pavement. Sukuna’s knee planted hard against his lower back. One hand controlling the trapped arm, the other braced with such calm precision that the whole thing looks almost casual.

It clearly is not casual for the captain.

The sound that comes out of him is more outrage than pain at first. Then pain joins it. His free hand scrabbles against the ground once. Uselessly.

You stare.

It costs Sukuna nothing.

That is the most shocking part. Not the violence itself. You already knew, abstractly, that he could hurt people. You already knew his body was not decoration. But seeing it like this, seeing how little effort it takes him to immobilize someone larger than most men, someone used to throwing his weight around, is another thing entirely. There is no strain in him. No sloppiness. No adrenaline-fueled chaos.

Just control. Complete and immediate.

The other rugby guys rush forward then, suddenly very alarmed now that their captain’s masculinity is face-down on the pavement.

You find your voice before they can turn it into something worse.

“Grab your idiot captain and get the fuck out of here,” you snap, louder than you expected your voice could go. “Before I report every one of you for assaulting students outside the library.”

That stops them better than fear would have.

Maybe because fear would challenge them. Authority is different. Rules. Reports. Student conduct. Real consequences that involve paperwork and coaching staff and maybe suspension if anyone decides to be serious. Their faces change the second the word assault lands. The confrontation stops being a guy thing and becomes an institutional one.

They hesitate.

Sukuna does not.

He keeps the captain pinned with exactly the same calm as before, gaze on the others now, cold enough that even from the side it makes the air feel thinner.

One of the boys — shorter, less committed-looking than the rest — puts both hands out slightly in a placating gesture.

“All right. All right. We’re going.”

“Then pick up your trash,” you say, furious enough not to care that the phrase is childish. “Including him.”

The captain hisses something from the ground that does not form words properly because Sukuna shifts the angle on his arm by what cannot be more than half an inch.

That sound, finally, seems to persuade everyone that dignity is no longer recoverable here.

Sukuna lets go only when the other boys are close enough to take over. He removes his knee from the captain’s back and releases the arm in one fluid movement, then steps away at once. No theatrical shove. No last kick. No threat. He simply lets the man have his own body back once it is clear the lesson has landed.

The captain rolls onto one hip, clutching his shoulder and elbow with his good hand, face twisted with pain and humiliation. He does not meet your eyes. He does not meet Sukuna’s either. The others haul him up between them in a haphazard cluster of wounded pride and muttered curses.

You lift your chin and say,

“Go.”

This time they do.

Just like that. The whole ugly spectacle dissolves into retreating backs and a limping captain and the scattered remains of two obliterated boba teas on the pavement. The path goes quiet again in the strange, embarrassed way public spaces do after brief violence. A couple students at the far end pretend not to stare. Somebody exiting the library slows, senses trouble is over, keeps walking.

You look at the mess on the ground.

Then at Sukuna.

Then at his hand, flexing once at his side now that the adrenaline part is done, though he would probably kill you for calling it adrenaline.

“Are you good,” you ask.

The question comes out softer than everything else did.

He looks at the ruined drinks, then at you, then toward the direction the rugby boys disappeared.

“I’m not entertaining your ideas anymore,” he says. “I’m sticking to research in my dorm.”

You actually almost laugh, the absurdity of that being his first concern colliding with the leftover shock in your body. Your pulse is still too high. The image of him dropping that man is still flashing in your head. And here he is, acting like the real casualty is the failure of public studying as an institution.

“That is your takeaway?”

“Yes.”

“That didn’t scare you even a little?”

He lifts one shoulder.

“Should it have.”

You do not answer because the truthful answer is not flattering to anyone involved.

What scares you is not that he handled it. It is how easily he handled it. How fast. How completely. How the sight of his arm dragging you behind him is now engraved somewhere low in your body alongside all the other inconvenient things he has done to you.

You walk again because standing there is stupid now.

The path toward the residence halls feels different afterward, charged with the awkward aftertaste of conflict. Your hands feel too empty without the boba. You keep rubbing one thumb against your other palm because your body has not fully remembered how to calm down yet. Sukuna walks beside you with the same broad, quiet stride as always, which annoys you because it emphasizes how much steadier he is than you.

After a few moments you say,

“Did that kind of thing happen to you a lot?”

He does not answer immediately.

The pause stretches. You know enough by now to let it. Pushing him when he is deciding whether to hand you something real rarely works. Better to let him turn the thought over and choose his own level of mercy.

So you wait.

Your footsteps sound too loud in your own ears. Somewhere across the quad somebody is laughing. A bicycle passes behind you. Life resumes with terrible indifference.

Finally he says,

“I’m used to idiots.”

You glance at him.

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“No,” he agrees. “It wasn’t.”

Another few steps.

Then,

“I’m used to violent people too.”

The words are simple enough. Flat. But something under them opens anyway.

You look straight ahead again because looking at him while he says something like that feels like too much. You are not sure why. Maybe because you know he is not just talking about rugby captains. Not just about random men posturing on walkways.

He means something older than that. More lived-in. Something that shaped the way he carries himself through rooms, expecting hostility before curiosity, contempt before understanding.

He keeps speaking before you can decide whether to respond.

“People like him,” he says, “people like the rugby boys, the frat boys, half the campus — people like you — grew up making people like me feel like freaks.”

It lands hard enough that you nearly miss a step.

He says it without looking at you. Without heat. That somehow makes it so much worse. If he spat it at you, you could defend yourself. If he turned it into an accusation, you could argue nuance. You could say you never did that exactly, never cornered somebody on a walkway, never started rumors about blackmail, never played vigilante with male ego and gossip. But he does not frame it as a crime. He frames it as a category.

People like you.

And that is true.

Not in detail. Not in intent. But in type.

You are exactly the kind of person the world has always bent toward. Pretty. Social. Appropriately feminine when it suits you, appropriately sharp only when it is entertaining. The kind of girl around whom boys puff themselves up and other girls form constellations. The kind of person who belongs everywhere by default and only has to notice exclusion when it chooses to.

The kind of person who could, very easily, laugh at the wrong boy in high school and make his entire week hell without ever knowing the scale of what she did.

You swallow.

The lump that forms in your throat is immediate and ugly. Not because you think he is accusing you personally of his whole life. He is not. That would somehow be easier. No, what hurts is that he is right in a way larger than blame. You come from the side of the world that teaches people like him what it means to be seen as wrong before they speak.

And yes, there is irony in it now. Fate is such a bitch. A stupid project, a lazy bargain, one party gone wrong, and suddenly you are walking across campus with the exact kind of man people would have warned you away from years ago while he quietly tells you that people like you built the cage he grew up in.

You go quiet.

It feels like the only honest thing to do for several steps. You need the silence to think and you hate that he gives it to you without making it easier.

Because the truth is complicated.

You were not cruel in the ways other people were cruel. You were not the leader of any social firing squad. You did not go out of your way to isolate boys who looked strange or talked differently or moved through the world like it was always one inch too hostile.

But you also did not need to. That is part of the problem. People like you do not have to actively wound in order to uphold the shape of the room.

Sometimes you only have to belong to it.

The realization tastes bitter.

When you finally speak, your voice is quieter than usual.

“I’m sorry.”

He turns his head enough to glance at you.

You stare stubbornly ahead because the apology feels too raw to survive eye contact.

He says nothing.

You try again, hating how inadequate it sounds.

“I don’t even know exactly what I’m apologizing for. I just…” You breathe out slowly. “I think I mean I’m sorry for being the kind of person who made that true.”

The sentence sits between you.

It feels clumsy and incomplete, but you do not know how to make it better. There is no elegant way to apologize for a category. No clean phrasing for I did not mean to be built by a world that bruised you and rewarded me for not noticing.

Sukuna is quiet long enough that you begin to regret speaking at all.

Then he chuckles.

Briefly. Softly. Not unkindly, which somehow embarrasses you more than cruelty would have.

You look at him then, startled.

He is not laughing at you exactly. More at the whole strange situation, perhaps. At your earnestness. At the fact that you, of all people, are now walking around apologizing to him for social architecture while his hand still probably remembers the shape of some idiot’s elbow.

By the time you reach the turnoff toward your buildings, the tension has changed again. Not gone. Just absorbed into the larger, stranger thing the two of you have become to each other over the past weeks.

You slow to a stop outside the path that splits toward your residence hall.

Next week suddenly feels important. The finishing touches. The end of the project. The fact that all of this — every study session, every bickered paragraph, every strange hour in his room — has been moving toward an ending whether you wanted to think about that or not.

You adjust the strap of your bag and say,

“I’ll meet you at your dorm tomorrow.”

He nods once.

“We start on the finishing touches.”

Another nod.

You hesitate.

Then, because apparently you are incapable of letting sincerity die cleanly, you say it again.

“I’m... really sorry.”

This time you do look at him.

He looks back, unreadable in the dimming light. Tired, maybe. A little sharper around the edges after what happened. Still carrying himself with that unnerving composed violence that now lives in your mind next to the sight of him half-asleep at his desk, next to his hand over your face in the dark, next to waking up wrapped around him like a fool.

Before you can decide whether the second apology was unnecessary, he lifts one hand.

You go very still because you don't know what's going on.

He places his entire palm over your face.

Exactly like that night.

The warmth hits first. Then the absurdity. Then the recognition.

You freeze for half a heartbeat because memory is physical and immediate, because his hand is once again too large and too sure and somehow gentler than it has any right to be.

Then your body remembers before your pride can interfere.

You relax into it.

The laugh that escapes you is small and helpless and pleased in spite of yourself.

Weirdo.

“Thanks,” you say, voice muffled under his palm. “Very nice.”

That gets him.

Not visibly much. But enough. Enough that you hear the air shift around his next breath, enough that you know he remembers too, remembers the dark room and the narrow bed and your face under his hand. For one second the whole day collapses inward around that private little gesture, turning it into something that belongs only to the two of you.

Then he takes his hand away.

You miss the warmth immediately, which is mortifying.

So you giggle instead, because that is less revealing than standing there looking like the loss of his hand on your face constitutes a genuine emotional event.

He gives you one of those long, unreadable looks that always makes you feel like he sees too much and says too little.

Then he turns toward his own building.

You stand there another second watching him go, backpack slung over one shoulder, hands empty now that both your drinks are decorating a path outside the library, body moving with that same controlled certainty that somehow looks different to you every time now.

Less frightening. More honest. Or maybe just more complicated.

When he disappears inside, you finally turn toward your own room.

The walk back feels oddly quiet after everything. Your body has fully come down now from the confrontation, leaving only the residue of it in your nerves. You can still picture the captain on the ground. Still feel the quick panic of being yanked behind Sukuna. Still hear the way he said people like you as if he had already thought about that category far more than you ever had.

Your hall is warm when you enter.

Too warm, like all student housing. Someone down the corridor is playing music too loudly through a speaker with no bass. A door slams, laughter erupts from somewhere near the communal kitchen. Ordinary life presses around you again in all its small, stupid detail.

You unlock your room and step inside.

For a few moments you do nothing except set down your bag and stand there in the half-light, shoes still on, mind moving too fast and too slow at once.

The project. The library. The rugby captain’s face. Sukuna’s hand. The apology. The category he put you in. The one you belong to whether you like it or not.

You peel off your shoes and sit on the edge of your bed.

Your room feels different tonight in a way you cannot quite define. It feels... not wrong, maybe just a little thinner. Less interesting. You have gotten too used to his space, maybe. Too used to the smell of his tea, the sound of his keyboard, the precise meanness of his voice when he catches you cutting corners. That thought should alarm you more than it does. Instead it settles over you with a strange kind of inevitability.

You think about tomorrow’s finishing touches.

About the fact that after the project ends there will be no natural reason to show up at his dorm every evening.

That thought lands more painfully than you want it to.

So you get up before it can sit too deeply, wash your face, brush your teeth, change into something soft and familiar. You move through the motions with the steadiness of habit, but your mind does not leave the walkway outside the library. It circles back again and again to different parts of the exchange.

Not just the fight. Not even mainly the fight.

The sentence after.

People like you.

You sit with that one longest once you are under your own blanket with the light off and your room finally dim.

You think of high school. Of college. Of every boy who stood wrong in the social frame and got turned into a joke before he opened his mouth. Of every time you laughed because everyone else did. Of every time you did not laugh but did not object either. Of every version of yourself rewarded for fitting so well into spaces that would have bruised someone else on entry.

You do not think you were cruel.

You also do not think innocence lives where comfort does.

That is a harder thing to hold. Less flattering. More adult, maybe. You are not sure. You only know that Sukuna does not say things carelessly when they matter, and that if he handed you that truth, even briefly, it means he wanted you to sit with it.

So you do.

Your phone buzzes once on the nightstand. You turn your head and squint at the screen. A message. From him.

Bring the notes on Browning. Yours are less terrible now.

A smile breaks across your face before you can stop it.

It is such a Sukuna thing to say that the whole ache of the day shifts around it. Not gone. Never gone, you fear. But altered. Made livable.

You pick up the phone and type back.

That’s the closest thing to praise I’m ever getting, isn’t it?

The reply comes after a minute.

Probably.

You laugh quietly into the dark.

Then, because you cannot help yourself, you type,

Thanks, very nice.

There is no answer after that.

You stare at the screen for a second longer anyway, smiling like an idiot in the dark where nobody can see you.

Then you set the phone aside, turn onto your side, and let your eyes close slowly.

Tomorrow you will go to his dorm again.

Tomorrow you will start to finish the project you once planned to dump on him entirely.

Tomorrow you will sit beside him with your notes and your arguments and your changed schedule and your inconveniently active conscience and try not to think too hard about what happens after.

Tonight, though, you let yourself keep one thing simple.

You are going to sleep.

And somewhere across campus, Sukuna is probably doing the same — with his laptop shut, his room quiet, and perhaps, if the world is feeling generous, the memory of your face under his hand still warm in his palm.

Smile like you do Come around again This presence of mind Perspective can lend Take take take You give and take How’s it gonna feel when You break break break This thin veneer The air of indifference you make

Tell me how Tell me when I'll ever tire of you here And I could comb this town For years and years And never find a gaze That’s quite as clear Clear as you

Sing to me at night And put me to sleep A lucid lullaby My heart you would keep Hold hold hold You hold me here In your palm with fingers curled Told told told I told you my dear That you would be my world

And you could quench All of my thirst The drink is sweetest When it's sour first

Polite Fiction · Portrait - EP · Song · 2013

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