HEAD CANON| NANAMI AS YOUR LOVER WHO BROKE YOUR HEART
Part 3 (Finale): The truth
Note: English isn't my first language so might contain mistakes. Might be ooc. Suggestion to Read part 1 and 2 before continuing this is you're new. #ANGST warning
If we get a hundred likes on this post as well, I'm going to post an epilogue of this series. Tell me do we need it???
Part 2 isn't getting as much attention as first guys, helpp •́ ‿ ,•̀
SUGGESTION TIME!!! Which character should I do next? And do we need angst or a happy ending???
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The reality is your body overworked itself. You maximized all your powers at once and your body wasn't strong enough for that. You were never trained to use your full powers. Your body wasn't used to bearing that much power. So naturally, when you used your powers all at once without ever knowing what they were or what they did, your body lost all it's strength. Your brain cannot take the after effects.
"Y/n.. y/n keep your eyes open. Look at me. You will be fine." Nanami says still in that composed tone but the way he's holding you betrays the hints of how desperate he is now.
"Nanami.." your voice breaks out in choked whispers, every word coming out with drops of blood. Even breathing has become hard now.
You reach out for his arms, your fingers weakly holding them, your eyes barely opened, tears prickling at the corners.
"Why.. why did you do that? What ..did I..lack?"
"Why was I not enough?" There. That question. The question that has been eating you alive all these months finally out now.
And Nanami? He wasn't even trying to stay composed anymore. He's holding onto you so tightly, his head dropped lower and tears falling down his eyes. God, you were enough for him. More than enough actually. You were all he ever loved and wanted.
"You were enough, y/n.."
"..then why? Your voice sounds so broken it feels like stabs to Nanami's heart.
The reason he did that wasn't because he stopped loving you.
It was because he loved you too much.
Ever since he entered your life, you had slowly stopped caring about proving yourself. The cruel words of others no longer affected you because you had someone who accepted you exactly as you were. You no longer pushed yourself as hard as before because, with Nanami beside you, you finally felt enough.
But to Nanami... that wasn't enough.
Every time he saw people look down on you, every time they called you weak, he wished you would prove them wrong. Not for their sake, but for yours. He wanted you to become stronger—not because he was disappointed in you, but because he wanted you to survive and to prove yourself.
And somewhere between that..
Was fear.
Grade One sorcerers don't retire.
They die.
Nanami knew that better than anyone.
He knew that one day, his own death would come. And when it did, he was terrified of what it would do to you.
He knew how deeply you loved him.
He knew you would break.
And he couldn't bear the thought of leaving you with that pain.
So he made the decision that broke him the most.
He chose to leave.
He believed that if he walked away, you would stop relying on him. You would grow stronger. You would learn to protect yourself, even if it meant hating him for the rest of your life.
The woman you had seen that day was never someone he loved.
She was simply the owner of a small bakery he visited regularly. After injuring her shoulder, Nanami recommended her to a doctor and she had asked Nanami to accompany her there because she trusted him. There had never been anything more between them.
When you misunderstood what you saw, he wanted to explain.
He wanted to tell you the truth.
But then he thought it was the right moment. He wanted to leave you anyway so be it like this.
If he cleared the misunderstanding, he knew he would never be able to leave you. And if he had to break up with you himself, he knew he wouldn't have the strength to do it. Hearing those words coming out of his mouth would have left you devastated and he couldn't hurt you like that, not even in his dream.
So he stayed silent...
...and walked away.
Not because he had stopped loving you.
But because he loved you too much.
Yet in trying to protect you, he had done the very thing he feared most.
He had broken your heart.
And now, as he held your fragile body in his arms, he realized that leaving you hadn't protected you at all.
His biggest fear was losing the person he loved, and in trying to protect her from that future, he became the reason she spent months suffering—and still couldn't save her in the end.
The truth is Nanami never stopped loving you. Everyday he woke up with the thoughts of you and every night he went to sleep with imagining your face. But he thought it's better this way because to him, it looked like he finally protected you by keeping them away. But seems like he was wrong. He hurt you then and you are hurt now too. Him leaving didn't change anything because either way you got hurt.
You were left brutally heartbroken when he left you and now you were the one dying too. Again the irony. How he once used to think he'd die and you'll be crying over him is now actually you dying and him breaking.
As he finishes telling you the real reason finally, you could only manage to let out a weak smile. "Idiot.."
"Look at me. Stay. God, I never once hated you. I still hate myself for hurting you like that but please, please stay with me. Please y/n.. please I need you..."
The man who never showed overdramatic emotions or lost his composure was now holding you desperately and begging the heavens to save you, to give you life.
"Please, y/n.. I love you.." and as those words left his mouth is you taking your final breath. That smile still staying on your face because during your last hitch was those words coming in your ears and in your last moments you finally know that the man you still loved after all that never really stopped loving you.
You couldn't say those words back but god and heavens knew you never fully stopped loving him. And as Nanami sat there, holding your lifeless body against his chest the tunnel fell silent. For the first time in his life, the man who always kept his composure cried without restraint. And as your soul reaches the sky, you linger a moment longer, looking at him with a smile and quietly promising to yourself that you'll look after him for all the years he'll live forward.
TIME SKIP:
Nanami lived for another forty-five years after that.
Every single day, he carried your memories with him.
He never married.
He never loved another woman.
Partly because he was afraid it might disturb your soul...
But mostly because his heart had always belonged to you.
There was simply no room for anyone else.
On the days when exhaustion weighed heavily on him, a gentle breeze would suddenly brush past him.
It always felt as though you were quietly comforting him.
And on the nights when regret, guilt, and longing became too much to bear, one particular star always seemed to shine a little brighter than the rest.
As if you were telling him...
"It's okay."
"I'm still here."
Those small moments were enough to bring a rare smile to his face.
Nanami continued moving forward with life.
But every night, before closing his eyes, he carried one silent wish in his heart.
To see you again.
Somehow...
That hope alone was enough to let him sleep peacefully.
And then...
One quiet night, as he slowly closed his eyes to rest, it felt as though Heaven had finally answered his prayers.
He saw a bright figure and a face that was even beautiful that it already was and her face now had angelic features. He takes her hand as she extends hers to him, he gets up from bed and follows after her to wherever she was leading him. And together they move forward to big steel, magnificent gates. And when they two finally stepped inside, hands in hands?
Nanami took his final breath.
A peaceful smile rested upon his face.
The woman he had longed to see for forty-five years had finally come to take him in his last moments. To bring him home.
Together...
You stepped into eternity.
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End of part 3 >.<. Please tell me how was this for my further writings.
👀 Did you guys guess which drama reference was given in time skip?
Check out my TikTok as well, I'll be posting oneshots there. @Lemonhihi_
unfortunately thought of nanami and higuruma while listening to this </3 part one of damned.
two palm trees in the sand; kento nanami
things to know; one-shot with an upcoming pt. two, fem!reader, canon jjk verse: the shibuya incident (timelines and events will be a bit off), lowercase intended, suggestive language, some medical terminology, implied sexual content,,, no smut here, super fluff at the start :'), super domestic, no use of y/n, heavy topics,,, like seriously dead dove do not eat. ANGST, implied drug (ab)use, implied abuse, slight marital problems, pregnancy, miscarriage (graphic), mcd, suicide, implied murder at the end?, death in general honestly it's jjk guys, grief, lack of religious belief/doubting religion, SO MUCH ANGST, pretend nanami didn't implode for this fic's sake pls, as you can tell i listened to damned when this came to me, not proofread.
kento nanami is the love of your life.
he is everything you've ever wanted in a man. patient, kind, considerate. he made it his life's mission to make sure you knew you were cherished and loved by him, if no one else.
growing up, you were surrounded by poverty, drugs, abuse, and death. your parents were selfish individuals who thought a child would fix their tainted relationship. spoiler alert: a child made it worse.
your mother overdosed intentionally, and your father was on something all the time—very much alive, but a deadbeat you still shared shelter with.
jujutsu was your way out. that is where you met kento. he was the light at the end of your dark, seemingly never-ending tunnel.
you two had known each other since second year. after knowing and loving him for four years, you two got married.
kento built a life soft enough for the both of you and ensured neither of you would ever have to return to the world of jujutsu.
he worked so hard for it. ever since both of you had decided to leave jujutsu life behind, you no longer had the financial support. he worked relentlessly—went in early, came home late, worked so much overtime, and always went above and beyond to get to the position he is in now.
he absolutely hated it. you would ask about his day when both of you got back from work and hear nothing but complaints about his coworkers and his former boss.
adjusting to capitalist life was tough for you too. luckily, you had extra schooling alongside jujutsu as a plan b and fuck, you'd be screwed if you hadn't done that.
you both knew exactly when you wanted to leave jujutsu society. it was after yu passed away on a mission with kento. you had a rude epiphany that night: jujutsu society was an unforgiving, remorseless, cruel, corrupt hierarchy that could not be changed without revolution.
you wanted to leave immediately with no notice, but kento had convinced you to stick until graduation. after all, you two had one more year left. all your losses would be meaningless if you were to stop there.
thankfully, that hard work did pay off. it had to. you two lived comfortably in a beautiful home you both designed and constructed together.
besides the labouring effort, he made you feel treasured in small gestures that meant the world to you. he bought you flowers every week, made you tea every morning without asking, always insisted on cooking you dinner because he knew how much you loved his food more than your own.
he always noticed the minute details. he fixed the collar of your cardigan because it always bothered him, noticed the slightest limp in your walks when you had a tiresome day at work, would call you back in if you forgot to kiss him bye for the day.
your marriage was a fairytale come to life.
so, you knew when it had began to grow stale, it was at the hands of jujutsu society.
kento had owed satoru a favour. you're not sure what your husband had received from that six eyes freak for it to amount to kento returning back to jujutsu high, but it must've weighed heavily.
your former upperclassman, suguru, had declared war on jujutsu high. as ridiculous as this was, you could never blame him. neither could kento.
you pleaded with him, begging him not to go back, regardless of what he requested from satoru, but there was no changing his mind.
ever since then, dinners were quietier, phone calls and texts felt like a pained chore, dates and sex became non-existent. your domestic life had been shattered, with jujutsu society being the culprit.
one night, kento came home to couples therapy and counselling brochures sitting on the dinner table instead of food. that was when he realized how hurt and distant the two of you were becoming because of his decision.
he embraced you into a warm hug—one you hadn't felt for two months, the same time he had been helping out at jujutsu high. you both had an extensive, very lengthy conversation about your marriage. you realized you didn't actually need to go to therapy or counselling because your problems had vanished as soon as kento became aware of your indifference.
he affirmed you constantly, making you feel like the most important woman in this universe. you were starting to feel okay with kento's affiliation with jujutsu high as he swore he would always be safe, and if anything came in the way of him coming home safe, he would never touch that high school's ground again.
months had passed, and you two were once again madly in love with each other. dinners had become lively, phone calls and texts updating each other throughout the day became frequent, dates and sex were overwhelmingly passionate.
you two had started trying for a baby. you were hesitant at first—worried about your career, your relationship with kento, and birthing a child in a world like this. you wanted to be a mother, but you were terrified—terrified you would let your child down and turn out like your own mother.
but, after taking one look at kento fast asleep beside you, you suddenly became sure. you were the most secure woman on this planet, and it was all because of your husband. you wanted kento to be the father of your children. you couldn't imagine it any other way.
two weeks had passed, and your period had not come. you took a good five or six pregnancy tests with kento, making sure to absolutely confirm you conceived. it was the happiest day of your life, right after your wedding.
the weeks went by quickly, you were already at your thirteenth week. both of your recorded ultrasounds were normal. your closest friend, shoko, was practically begging you to let her do ultrasounds off record so she can see your baby; those ultrasounds were also normal. your child with kento was normal and healthy.
you and kento were giving out halloween candy to trick-or-treaters when he got a call.
"you're kidding me, right?"
satoru was on the speaker, "nope. they're holding thousands of civilians hostage for me. the school and higher ups are trying to arrange something, so just keep an eye on your phone. they may call you for backup."
"no, no, no." you chimed in. "absolutely not."
"i'm irritated too," satoru started. "but it's not up to me–"
"isn't it though? satoru, can't you just put a stop to this by showing up? you're the strongest sorcerer alive, aren't you?"
kento muted the phone call. "baby, it's thousands of people. on halloween. he'll need backup."
"ken, you promised me."
"hey," he cupped your face. "i assure you, i'll be safe. i'm sure satoru can handle it on his own. it's just in case."
"if it's that safe, i'm coming with you."
kento sighed. "no. you're not." he unmuted satoru, who was talking this entire time, unaware of the fact that the line was muted. "satoru, tell her it'll be fine."
"it'll be fine. i'm the strongest after all."
"see?" kento pulled you in to kiss your forehead. "what time is it? almost 7:30pm. i'll be back by midnight. latest 12:30am. right, satoru?"
"damn straight."
"alright, i'll head down in a bit. see you soon."
"bye nanamiiiinnn~" kento ended the call.
you looked out the window. the wind was blowing orange leaves around. "the weather's getting chilly. i've completed my first trimester and don't have to go to any appointments for six weeks. we should go on a vacation after this, baby. like a push present with the push yet. we deserve this."
kento was ironing his work shirt when he chuckled. "i agree. i was thinking malaysia."
"mmmm," you helped him put his shirt on. "malaysia sounds nice."
"i'll book us a flight when i come back home tonight."
he leaned down to give you a kiss. his lips were soft against yours. you wrapped your arms around his waist, forcing him to come closer, and he cupped your face with both his hands.
he kissed you the way he always had—slowly, patiently, like there was nowhere else he'd rather be. his thumbs traced gentle crescents along your jawline as he tilted your head slightly, deepening the kiss. you made a small sound in your throat, rising up on your tippy toes to meet him. he responded with a low hum against your mouth, his tongue curling around yours.
when he finally pulled away, his eyes were still closed, memorizing the moment. "i'll be thinking about that all night," he murmured, his thumb brushing over your kiss-swollen lower lip.
"you think satoru can wait a bit longer?" you looked up at him with puppy eyes and looked over to your bed.
"are you trying to seduce me?"
"is it working?"
"yes. yes, it is. this is how we ended up with this angel." kento let out a soft laugh before stealing another kiss from you. "there's nothing more i'd rather do, but i'm running late, my love."
"fine, whatever. we'll just have one more thing to do before booking those flights." you pressed your forehead against his chest, still holding him, not ready to let go. "come back home quickly," you whispered.
he kissed your temple, then your hairline, "12am."
——
you didn't realize how anxious you were until your phone rang. you were in the midst of stress cleaning your kitchen when you got a call from kento.
"hi honey."
"hey baby," you answered back in relief. it was 9:27pm. maybe satoru had kept his word and handled it on his own. "coming back now?"
"i wish," he sighed on the other end. "satoru got sealed."
"what?!" you exclaimed. "what do you mean sealed?"
"it looked like suguru. i don't know. it definitely wasn't suguru though. suguru was executed. you could just tell. pale body, matted hair, voice distorted. i think some deranged entity took over suguru's dead body."
"like that kid you're always talking about? yuji?"
"sure," he replied. "something like that. i think he used his body to catch satoru off guard and seal him into a prison realm. the whole thing is sickening."
"fuck." your heart dropped. not only because of how fucked up the entire scheme was, but also because you realized: kento isn't backup anymore—he's on the front lines.
"i think this may take longer than expected. still banking on midnight though." you could tell he was frustrated. "i shouldn't have come."
"well, i hate to say i told you so... but, i told you so." you tried not to overthink it. "baby, just come home. i don't feel good about this."
"and let these kids handle it? i don't think so," he replied. "they'd be running around like chickens without heads."
you began pacing without realizing. "do you need me to–"
he cut you off. "no. don't even think about stepping near shibuya right now."
"ken–"
he refused. "i promise, it'll all be fine."
"you promise?"
"promise." he sounded so sincere. "go to sleep, honey. i'll keep you updated. i love you."
"i love you too."
you still felt uneasy. you were right to feel that way.
just a little after 11:10pm, you received a call from shoko. you stared at your phone, blank, not even wanting to know what awaited you on the other line.
you picked up.
"hey–"
"i need you to get here as soon as you can."
you tried to breathe. "is kento okay?"
"i don't want you to panic." too late. you already were. "i want you to know i tried my best. i really did. just– just come down here, please?"
before you could process anything, you got into your car and drove yourself to jujutsu high. you hadn't been there in six years. you didn't want to be here.
kento was transported from shibuya back to tokyo to avoid another potential suguru/kengaku situation from happening. you easily found your way to shoko's infirmary; you were always in there during your years at jujutsu high.
shoko stepped out emotional. you had never seen her like this before. you don't blame her, considering the series of events she had also gone through—her dead best friend being used for evil, her other best friend being sealed for an indefinite amount of time, and now her other friend, your husband, being on the brink of death.
"there's too much damage. he's exsanguinating. my reverse cursed technique could only do so much. i started massive transfusion. fuck, i even tried reboa, but he's hemorrhaging at a rate i cannot control."
"shoko. real words, please."
"internal bleeding. he's bleeding to death."
you didn't hear anything else she said. you remember her sniffing while holding back tears, and remember her staying right outside the room, but nothing else.
kento was barely conscious, but still alive. it seemed shoko had managed to prolong the inevitable.
"mrs. nanami," he greeted. "what are you doing here?"
"sho called me." you sat down next to him. "how are you?"
"i'm great now that my wife is here."
"ken," you looked down. your back hunched over, hair covering your face completely, trying your hardest to remain strong and not cry in front of your husband. "i can't do this without you."
"sure you can," he smiled, holding your hand a little tighter. "you're the most resilient person i know."
the tears started spilling and your voice began to crack. "you promised me."
"i know, i'm the worst." he chuckled before groaning in pain. "come lay beside me."
you obeyed and slipped carefully onto the narrow bed, mindful of the tubes surrounding him. the mattress dipped beneath your weight, and he instinctively shifted just enough to make room, the way he always had whenever you climbed into bed after him at home.
you tucked yourself against his side, resting your head lightly against his shoulder. you listened to the uneven rhythm of his breathing, committing every rise and fall to memory.
for a long moment, neither of you spoke. you simply existed together, as husband and wife, pretending the heart monitor was rain tapping against the bedroom window, and this hospital bed was your own.
one of his arms, weakened but stubbornly determined, found its way around your waist. "listen to me, okay–"
"no."
"go on that push trip to malaysia." you shook your head. he continued, "it's beautiful this time of year. not nearly as beautiful as you but–"
"don't do this to me."
"honey, please let me talk." he paused for a bit, ensuring you wouldn't cut him off again. "thank you. you'll find us there. two palm trees in the sand, remember?"
for your honeymoon, you and kento decided on a tropical destination, of course. during an excursion on the beach, you and kento wandered off from the rest of the group by accident and came across a secluded area on the beach.
it was well kept, as if it were a tourist spot, but completely empty. all there was were two palm trees in the sand. they were sturdy, growing intertwined with one another, clearly not placed intentionally as a tourist trap—something you had never seen before.
you decided it was a perfect representation of you and kento.
you gripped onto his hand like you were afraid to let go. truthfully, you were. "two palm trees in the sand."
kento's smile was as warm as it always was. "i love you, honey. now please, i'm dying for a kiss. literally."
you didn't want to entertain his humour this time, but giggled through your tears anyway. "shut up."
you leaned over him, your trembling hand cradling his cheek as though you could hold him here by touch alone. he lifted his head only slightly to meet you, the effort visible in the faint crease between his brows.
the kind of kiss shared after long workdays, before falling asleep, while waiting for the kettle to boil—quiet little reminders that home had always been the person in front of you.
his hand rose with strained effort, cupping your jaw one last time. His thumb brushed beneath your eye, wiping away a tear before it could fall. you kissed him again, silently begging time to stop.
"i love you too, you bastard."
you watched him slowly close his eyes, still smiling. you thought he was just resting.
"ken?" you barely let out. "ken, baby?" you shook him and received no response. "shoko!"
shoko rushed in again, just to hear that obnoxious noise and a flatline on the screen.
he was gone.
she took a deep breath in, and out.
"time of death: 12am."
——
a week had passed since your husband passed away. no. a week had passed since your husband was killed.
the silence in your home was deafening.
every evening, your hand still reached for the light switch just before 6pm, expecting to hear the front door unlock moments later. you still caught yourself listening for the familiar sound of polished dress shoes against hardwood floors, waiting for him to announce that he's home.
he never did.
his reading glasses remained folded neatly on the coffee table beside the novel he would never finish. his favourite mug still sat in the drying rack because you couldn't bring yourself to put it away. the beautiful bouquet of flowers he'd bought you the week before shibuya had begun to wilt in the vase. you changed the water anyway, out of habit.
hope, grief—you weren't sure which one it was anymore.
some mornings, you woke before your alarm and instinctively rolled toward his side of the bed, searching for the warmth your husband always offered without complaint. every cool morning, you'd burrow beneath his arm until he laughed and called himself your personal heater. now, your hand met nothing but sheets that had no fighting chance against the morning chills.
you weren't taking good care of yourself. all of your friends were busy with the aftermath of the shibuya incident and a new start of some darwanian apocalypse called the culling games. you didn't care to learn about it. you had no family besides your late husband, kento.
unknowingly, and unintentionally, you had deprived yourself of prenatal care. you weren't eating enough, you forgot to take your vitamins, you weren't getting an adequate amount of rest, and your mental well-being had plummeted to rock bottom.
you didn't realize you were neglecting yourself until you went to the bathroom and felt heavy cramps you hadn't felt since middle school.
the anxiety you had been feeling had caught up to you. you were having an anxiety attack.
when you looked down and wiped, you were spotting bright red and brown, with some tissue.
you immediately grabbed your phone. "something's wrong." you could not stop crying. "shoko, something is wrong."
"okay. fuck," she muttered under her breath. "deep breath in... and out." shoko instructed. "in... and out."
you tried your best, but your sobs did not allow you to regulate your breathing. "i don't know what this is. why am i bleeding?! i've never been pregnant before but this sure as hell isn't right."
"nothing is wrong. i'm sending ijichi over right now."
you couldn't walk. you were in pain and your eyes had been swollen nearly shut by the time ijichi got there. you were wheeled out of your house and into the infirmary, where shoko thoroughly performed another ultrasound on you.
shoko knew.
she knew before even doing the ultrasound. she still wanted a second opinion anyway and sent over the ultrasound imaging to her most trusted radiologist.
she stared at the screen with their findings, not knowing how to break it to you. her poker face was usually perfect—completely neutral—but the worry was seeping through the cracks. you looked over at her screen and read the bolded words that you knew, deep down, you were going to have to face, but still dreaded.
"second-trimester fetal demise."
"i'm so sorry." shoko held your hand. "second-trimester fetal losses can have an underlying medical cause, even when we can't identify it. chromosomal abnormalities, infections, placental issues, cervical insufficiency. it could have been anything."
"i lost our baby."
"you did nothing wrong."
"i lost our baby."
"nothing you did caused this."
"i lost our fucking baby," you shouted, breaking down into broken sobs once again.
"don't say that." shoko pulled you into a hug. you were too distraught to realize shoko's single tear dropping onto your scalp. "please don't say that. you didn't love your husband too much."
"i lost my final gift from him."
shoko shushed you again, reminding you to breathe. "you still have your memories. as long as you have those memories, you haven't lost anything."
"that's so easy to say, sho."
shoko exhaled. "i know. but i need you to know that."
because the remainder of your tissue would not pass, you had to get surgery. the moment you recovered, you needed to get away. you could not live amongst the reminders of him anymore. it was a fresh wound a knife had kept twisting into.
you fulfilled your husband's final request by going to malaysia. instead of enjoying, you had gone to buddhist temples to find inner peace.
you couldn't.
religion had always been a touchy subject for you. you didn't believe in gods, nor divinity as a whole. it was always so culty to you. you believed that if there was a divine figure, they wouldn't put their disciples through such pain and hardship. you were tired of everyone telling you to turn to a god or deity.
kento would have agreed.
he was also more spiritual than he was religious.
you found a beach with some palm trees and scattered his ashes into the ocean water. you sat criss-crossed on the sand, listening to the waves speak to you the entire night and caught a flight back to tokyo the same morning.
you came home to your empty house, no longer full of light. the halls were gray, and dust accumulated on your floors and photo frames. you hadn't hired someone to take a look after your home during your week-long trip because you knew you had to distract yourself by cleaning.
while dusting off the pictures of you and your husband, you had come back to a thought you had when you were younger: jujutsu society was an unforgiving, remorseless, cruel, corrupt hierarchy that could not be changed without revolution.
kento nanami was the love of your life, and you were going to avenge him.
no mercy, no pardon for stolen time.
this is so depressing, like fuck... what was i thinking. anyway,,, WALK EM DOWN READER. ya know, like, yuji walk em down itadori. no? ok bye
Warnings: Funeral/Memorial · Severe Grief · Survivor’s Guilt · PTSD · Dissociation · Flashbacks · Postpartum Mental Health Crisis · Maternal Detachment · Traumatic Birth Aftermath · Body Horror · Surgical Scarring · Suicidal Ideation · On-Page Suicide Attempt · Self-Harm With Razor · Blood · Emergency Medical Response · Sedation · Psychiatric Rehab · Coma · Infant Distress · Heavy Angst.
A/N: Here's my 14-page apology.
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Ch 31: Thirteen Days of Rain
The rain on the thirteenth day wasn’t just a storm.
It was a soft, grey exhalation that misted the air and turned the freshly turned earth of the Jujutsu Technical Institute’s private memorial grove into dark clay. It made the ash from the incinerated debris cling stubbornly to polished black shoes and the hems of somber kimonos. Salt had scrubbed the visible battlefield clean, but the scent of ozone and grief lingered, heavier than the damp earth.
The ceremony unfolded with the quiet precision of deep-rooted sorrow. No ministry officials. No flashing cameras.
Just rows of polished black granite nameplates, stark against the wet green, outnumbering the living by a devastating margin. White-robed monks chanted sutras, their voices a low drone against the rhythmic, hollow tock… tock… tock of the mokugyo wooden fish drum—a heartbeat struggling against silence.
Jin stood apart.
A solitary figure beneath the weeping sky, his black umbrella remained furled at his side. Rain slicked his hair, tracing paths down a face carved with a loss too vast for tears. His black coat was meticulously buttoned, except for the very top one—fastened one hole askew.
No one remained to notice or to gently correct it.
His whole family—Sukuna, Choso, Yuji, Kaori, and the orphan named Uraume Sukuna had claimed—was erased in a single night.
Jin didn’t kneel on the sodden prayer mat. Didn’t murmur the sutras.
He simply placed a single, laminated photograph at the base of the large, collective headstone bearing their names. It was old and rain-warped, the colors bleeding at the edges.
Sukuna caught mid-snark, half-smirking.
Choso, tense but present, glancing sideways.
Yuji, beaming with an innocence untouched by death’s proximity.
Kaori, head thrown back in laughter, her hand resting on Jin’s arm in a moment frozen before oblivion.
Junpei, offering a shy smile from the corner.
Uraume, unreadable.
A silent testament to a world extinguished. Near it, Junpei’s wind-up dinosaur lay discarded in the mud, its gears jammed mid-step, rust already blooming on its plastic hide. His mother hadn’t come. The bottle offered no armor thick enough for her anymore.
Behind Jin, the ritual continued.
Nanami stood rigidly in the second row beside Gojo, both in impeccably tailored but subtly wrinkled black suits. Nanami’s gaze was fixed on the nameplate reading Takuma Ino.
Ino’s parents, frail and bewildered by the hidden world their son inhabited, stood nearby, receiving murmured condolences Nanami couldn’t bring himself to offer.
Beside Ino’s name was Hajime Kashimo.
No family claimed him. Only colleagues. Friends.
Shoko moved like an automaton.
Her hands, usually steady, trembled faintly as she lit stick after stick of incense, the fragrant smoke curling upwards only to be flattened by the damp air. Her face wasn't aged; it was hollowed, polished smooth by shock, a mask of eerie calm over a churning abyss.
Utahime stood close, her presence a silent anchor, but Shoko’s eyes stared through the ceremony, fixed on the patch of churned earth like she could still see them fall: Sukuna’s final ward; Choso’s eyes stuck on his family even as his life bled out into the mud; Yuji’s form cleaved apart; Ino shielding someone, Junpei’s smile freezing mid-expression, Kashimo’s grin dissolving into stillness, and Kaori already gone.
She lit a cigarette, the flame flaring in her shaking hand, but didn’t bring it to her lips. It smoldered, forgotten, between her fingers.
Shoko couldn’t bring herself to look at Suguru’s grave. Neither could Gojo.
He’d told Kusakabe to not bring the students.
Yaga and Ijichi were talking in whispered hushes.
Two headstones stood unnervingly bare of caskets: Fushiguro Megumi and Fushiguro—his mother’s name etched beside his. Only their names carved onto a shared black tablet.
Before it, a single, scorched piece of metal plating—salvaged from Megumi’s exosuit—lay like a broken shield.
Beside it, a sealed envelope, fat with legal documents, was addressed simply to her. The deed to Fushiguro Sentinel Security Solutions, all his houses, properties, and assets.
His will. His final, wordless apology and provision.
She stood before the empty graves.
Barefoot on the cold, wet grass, heedless of the mud. The stark white hospital bracelet was still cinched tight around her wrist, a glaring reminder of the month stolen from her. Her hair hung loose and lank. Her face was slack, devoid of expression, eyes wide and unfocused, staring at the names as if sheer will could unravel the reality they represented.
One hand was pressed flat against her ribs, fingers splayed over the thick ridge of scar tissue beneath her black dress—a permanent, silent mouth below her navel where her children had been violently extracted.
A constant, physical echo of the lives that cost so many lives.
To her right stood Haibara’s casket.
Polished wood. Empty. A necessary fiction. The real Haibara—her Haibara—lay entombed in a sterile medical facility, breathing but gone.
A prisoner behind his own eyelids. They buried the symbol today.
Breathing wasn’t living.
The last time she’d seen him conscious, she’d spat accusations. Liar. Manipulator. Hiding things.
He’d just smiled that infuriating, insane smile, eyes holding a sadness she’d been too angry or too scared to see.
Didn’t know she’d never see it again.
Her hand twitched towards the empty casket, fingers curling into a claw before she snatched it back, pressing the knuckles hard against her scar.
The scream stayed locked behind her teeth, a silent vibration shaking her frame.
Behind her, the twins they never got to see fussed.
Emi, in a tiny, somber hakama, tangled her fingers in the trailing end of Gojo’s black blindfold, her wide mismatched eyes taking in the strange, sad gathering.
Kaito, silent and solemn beyond his days, burrowed his face against the dark wool of Nanami’s coat.
There was formula in sterile bottles. Diapers changed with efficient tenderness. A beautiful cradle in the sunniest guest room.
But no lullabies hummed. No names cooed with affection.
At night, their cries for her pierced the heavy silence of the house.
Sometimes she left the room. Sometimes she walked out the front door, returning hours later, damp and shivering, wordless.
Gojo and Nanami never asked her to stay, offered platitudes, or tried to fix her.
They were simply there. A quiet, unwavering presence in the ruins of their shared life. Anchors in her silent storm.
As the monks' chanting faded and the mourners—husbands included, so she could have a moment to herself—began to drift away in hushed clusters, Jin slowly approached her.
She was still standing by Megumi and his mother’s empty grave, the thick envelope containing his company, his legacy, clutched in her hands like a live grenade.
“I didn’t really know them,” she whispered, her voice raspy from disuse, cracking on the words. “A day. Less, maybe. I didn’t even know your name until… after.” She couldn’t look at him, her gaze fixed on the carved names that meant nothing and everything.
Jin looked down at the collective stone bearing the names of his entire world. Sukuna. Choso. Yuji. Kaori. Uraume. Junpei.
Syllables carved into cold rock. An ocean of absence.
He nodded slowly, a movement heavy with infinite weariness. “Sukuna was… complicated. Capricious. Cruel, often.” His voice was surprisingly gentle, devoid of blame. “But if he chose this… if he fought for you…” He met her haunted eyes for a fleeting second. “…then he must have had a reason he believed in. Deeply.”
A choked sound escaped her. She wanted to believe in that reason, in some shred of meaning. She feared she was the unworthy vessel for such catastrophic sacrifice.
Didn’t know if she could ever bear the weight of it.
The grounds emptied further.
Monks packed their drums and incense burners. A weak shaft of sunlight, brief and apologetic, pierced the clouds, illuminating the polished lid of Haibara’s empty casket before vanishing again.
Shoko remained.
Rooted near the patch of earth that was her personal hellscape. Utahime stood a respectful distance away, a silent pillar of support Shoko couldn’t yet lean on. The cigarette burned down to her fingers; she only noticed when the heat bit, flinching and dropping the stub into the mud.
As the sun dipped low, casting long, distorted shadows across the memorial stones, their wife walked the short distance to Megumi’s empty grave.
The friend who never lied.
The one whose mother had offered her the only unconditional love she’d ever known, a balm against her own family’s cruelty.
She sank to her knees in the cold mud, ignoring the damp seeping through her dress. Her hands, pale and trembling, dug into the soft earth beside his nameplate.
It wasn’t deep, just enough to leave ragged crescent moons in the dark soil. The rich, loamy smell of it filled her nostrils, the smell of endings.
“Megs,” she breathed, the name barely a sigh on the damp air.
A plea. An apology. A goodbye.
No answer came.
Only the sigh of wind through the nearby pines, bending the reeds at the edge of the grove.
And then, faint but piercing, carried on the evening quiet from the direction of the Institute’s main building—the thin, hungry wail of a child. Kaito or maybe Emi. Needing. Calling.
She didn’t rise.
Didn’t turn towards the sound. Didn’t move towards the husbands who waited, patient and shattered in their own ways, or the children whose very existence was a wound.
But her shadow, cast long and thin by the dying sun, slowly turned on the wet grass. It stretched across the earth, past the empty graves, pointing like an accusation, or perhaps a plea, towards the distant building where the cries originated.
And there it stayed, a silent, yearning silhouette etched onto the rain-darkened earth, caught between the unbearable weight of the past and the terrifying, unwelcome pull of the future.
---
Four Months of Static
The silence in the penthouse wasn't peaceful.
It was a physical presence, thick and suffocating, absorbing sound like the ash that had clung to the funeral grounds. Winter rain lashed the floor-to-ceiling windows of Tokyo, a grey smear against the vibrant city lights far below—lights that felt like they belonged to another planet.
She sat at the vast, obsidian desk in Megumi’s—her—home office.
Financial reports glowed on one monitor; schematics for next-gen cursed energy dampeners flickered on another. A live feed from her own gaming conglomerate’s Singapore headquarters played muted on a third. Trillion-yen decisions scrolled past eyes that saw nothing. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, unmoving.
The only sign of life was the faint tremor in her left hand, resting near the mouse, and the stark white hospital bracelet, now frayed and grey, still encircling her right wrist.
A reminder.
A month stolen.
A lifetime of guilt earned.
Across the room, in a playpen bathed in the sterile glow of security monitors, the twins stirred.
Four months old.
Emi gurgled, a bubble of spit forming on her lips as she batted at a mobile of swirling, harmless cursed energy orbs Gojo had conjured.
Kaito, quieter, stared intently at a patch of sunlight on the carpet. As he focused, the sunlight warped, bending unnaturally towards his tiny outstretched hand—a nascent, terrifying mimicry of Limitless manipulation.
Nanami, standing vigil near the door, his ever-present Ratio subtly assessing the fluctuation, didn’t react outwardly.
Inside, a cold dread settled deeper. They were growing too fast. Too powerfully.
And she… she was receding.
Gone was the woman who’d meticulously planned nurseries, debated schools, and dragged her husbands to absurdity. The woman who’d lit up boardrooms and livestreams with razor-sharp wit and infectious passion.
That woman had died on the battlefield, carved open alongside her friends.
What remained was a ghost in designer black, moving through meetings and motherhood with chilling, detached efficiency.
She signed contracts. Approved budgets. Attended mandatory board calls via Slack, her image flawless, her voice a monotone recitation.
The media buzzed—"Ice Queen CEO Cracks Under Dual Empire Strain?" "Where is the Gamemaster?"
Speculation ran wild about the famously private, powerful polycule.
Photos surfaced occasionally: Gojo, sunglasses firmly in place but shoulders slumped, carrying one of the kids in a sling; Nanami, looking older than his years, pushing a stroller through a private park, Emi’s tiny hand gripping his finger with surprising strength.
But never her, not with them.
At home, the silence was deafening.
She moved like a sleepwalker. She moved it around when food was placed before her. Slept, or lay still, in Megumi’s penthouse.
The master bedroom, with its view she’d once loved, felt like a tomb.
The twins' cries, sharp and demanding, would pierce the quiet. Gojo or Nanami would move instantly, murmuring soft comforts she couldn’t hear.
Sometimes, she’d flinch, her hand instinctively pressing against the scar beneath her ribs—the physical mouth that had swallowed Megumi, Haibara (in every way that mattered), Sukuna, Choso, Yuji, Kaori, Junpei, Ino, Kashimo, and even Suguru.
The scar seemed to pulse with remembered agony when the cries echoed.
One evening, Nanami found her standing in the doorway of the room they now used for the twins. Emi was fussing in Gojo’s arms. Kaito lay in his crib, small face screwed up in concentration. The mobile above him wasn’t moving. Instead, the individual components—soft stars and moons—were vibrating violently, held in stasis by an unseen force field, miniature Ratios locking them in perfect, unnatural stillness.
Nanami’s breath hitched. It was terrifyingly advanced.
"She's hungry," Gojo said softly, jiggling Emi, his usual flippancy replaced by a profound weariness. He glanced at her. "Do you…"
Her eyes, flat and empty, slid from the vibrating mobile to Gojo’s face—not a flicker of recognition for him or the crying child.
She turned and walked away, back to the silent expanse of Megumi’s penthouse, leaving Nanami staring at the unnervingly precise stasis field generated by his four-month-old son.
Why did I save them?
The thought wasn’t new.
It was a worm, burrowing deeper every day. Megumi was gone, lied about being able to handle it. Haibara lied about coming back. Even Megumi’s mother.
They died for… this? For children who killed everyone who mattered?
The love she’d felt, the fierce, impossible protectiveness at their conception, curdled into a bitter, corrosive hatred.
If not just for the twins, but for herself. Her decision. Her survival.
The corporate titan who commanded armies of developers and security personnel felt utterly, devastatingly powerless against the tide of her own despair.
The weight of Jin’s words—"he must have had a reason"—felt like a crushing judgment.
What reason could possibly balance these scales?
Shoko’s silence was different.
Sharper. More fractured.
Utahime had moved into Shoko’s apartment, a constant, worried presence.
Shoko functioned mechanically.
Went to the morgue. Performed autopsies. Filed reports.
But her hands shook slightly now.
The smell of antiseptic sometimes triggered violent flinches.
And the nights… Utahime would wake to Shoko rigid beside her, drenched in cold sweat, eyes wide and unseeing, a silent scream locked in her throat.
Sometimes she’d whisper names: "Choso… the artery… too deep…" or "Kashi… I couldn’t… couldn’t put him back together…" or simply, "So much blood… everywhere…"
She’d never been in frontline combat.
So the sheer, visceral horror of that day, the scale of the loss she’d witnessed and been powerless to stop, had seeped into her bones.
Her refuge—the sterile, controlled environment of healing—had become a minefield of triggers.
Utahime held her, murmuring useless comforts, feeling Shoko tremble like a plucked wire.
The CEO knew.
They didn’t speak of it.
Their grief were different islands in the same desolate sea.
But sometimes, during the rare moments both were at the institute for mandatory check-ups (Shoko checking her scar, the wife enduring perfunctory psychological evaluations she lied her way through), their eyes would meet in a hallway. A flicker of shared, unbearable understanding. A silent acknowledgment of the abyss they both skirted. Then they’d look away.
The breaking point came on a Tuesday.
Unremarkable. Grey.
The twins had been particularly fractious. Emi’s cries had taken on a shrill, discordant quality that seemed to vibrate the air, a nascent Infinite Void-type sensory overload manifesting as inconsolable distress. Kaito, perhaps reacting to his sister or sensing the suffocating tension, had made Nanami’s meticulously organized bookshelf tremble with unstable gravitational pulses. Gojo had contained it, but the effort etched new lines of exhaustion on his face.
The wife had retreated to Megumi’s bathroom—her bathroom now, once a sanctuary of deep, cold soaking tubs and expensive lotions.
Now just another cold, tiled space.
She stared at her reflection in the vast mirror.
The hollow eyes. The too-sharp cheekbones. The woman who commanded trillions looked… broken. Empty.
The scar beneath her silk top throbbed.
The cries from the nursery of her own penthouse, muffled but persistent, felt like shards of glass scraping her nerves.
Jin’s face flashed in her mind.
Sukuna’s words to her that day before the shooting—“Would you let them die?”
Megumi’s empty grave. Haibara breathing but gone.
Innocent people. All of them. Gone.
For what? For these… things that cry and break the world?
The thought wasn’t sudden. It was the culmination.
The logical endpoint of four months of silent erosion.
The hatred, previously directed outwards, turned inwards with devastating finality.
My decision. My fault. I shouldn’t exist. They shouldn’t exist. End it.
Calmness descended. A terrible, clear calm.
She moved with methodical precision, the kind she used to dismantle a competitor’s strategy.
She locked the bathroom door. Ran a bath—steaming hot, clouding the mirrors.
The scent of her favorite bath oil, unused for months, filled the air, a cruel parody of normalcy.
She didn’t undress.
Just opened the mirrored cabinet. Past expensive serums, nestled beside hair ties, was a single-edge razor blade Megumi had kept for emergencies, a relic from a time when "emergency" meant a snagged hem.
She took it out. The metal was cool and familiar.
She sat on the edge of the deep tub, the steam warming her legs. Stared at the blade. Then at the thick, ropy scar visible above the waistband of her pajamas.
The source of all the pain. The symbol of the cost.
She didn’t hesitate.
With a surgeon’s focus born of utter despair, she drew the blade diagonally across the inside of her left forearm, from elbow to wrist. Deep. Deliberate.
A gasp escaped her, more surprise than pain at first. Then the burning fire ignited, followed by a terrifying warmth as the blood welled, dark and swift, running in thick rivulets down her arm, dripping onto the white tiles, vivid against the steam.
Red. Like Choso’s blood on her hands. Like the battlefield. Like Shoko’s PTSD.
She watched it pool, mesmerized by the spreading crimson stain on the pristine tile. The pain was distant, secondary to the profound sense of release.
It was working. The static was finally stopping. The guilt would end.
She leaned back against the cool porcelain, eyes drifting closed, the scent of jasmine mixing with the coppery tang of blood.
Gojo felt it first.
A subtle gut feeling.
A sudden, chilling quiet, cutting through Emi’s fading cries.
His Six Eyes, constantly scanning his environment on a subconscious level, snapped into hyperfocus. He saw it—the blood, the absence.
The vibrant, complex signature of his wife’s life force… flickering. Dimming. Rapidly.
"Kento!" His voice, usually so controlled, ripped through the penthouse like a physical thing, raw with a terror he’d never known.
He teleported, bypassing the nursery door Nanami was emerging from, slamming his shoulder against the locked bathroom door of Megumi’s penthouse.
The reinforced wood splintered like balsa wood under the force of Limitless applied with desperate violence.
The scene hit him like a physical blow.
The steam. The cloying lily.
The shocking arterial red stark against white tile and porcelain.
Her arm draped over the edge of the tub, blood dripping steadily into a growing pool. Her face, pale as marble, tilted back, eyes closed. Peaceful. Too peaceful.
"NO! NO, NO, NO!"
The scream tore from him, primal and broken.
He crashed to his knees beside the tub, slipping slightly in the blood, his hands flying to her arm, pressing down hard above the deep, terrible gash with fingers suddenly clumsy.
"Look at me! LOOK AT ME!"
His voice cracked. Her eyelids didn’t open.
Her life force pulsed, weak and fading, under his frantic touch.
Nanami was there instantly, face a mask of ashen horror, all stoicism obliterated.
He saw the depth of the cut, the angle, the sheer volume of blood already lost.
"Pressure! Keep pressure!" he barked, his voice tight with panic, ripping his own shirt sleeve off with a savage tear.
He shoved the wadded fabric hard against the wound below Gojo’s hands, adding his own desperate pressure. Then grabbed a nearby towel to put on top.
But blood still soaked through instantly, warm and terrifying.
"Teleport to Shoko. NOW!"
He roared, though he knew Shoko was barely functional herself.
Gojo, tears streaming down his face unchecked, didn’t hesitate as he grabbed her and held Nanami’s arm with blood-slicked hands.
They vanished in a blink, reappearing seconds later with Shoko, pale and trembling, barely upright but already moving.
"Shoko! She’s… she cut… BLOOD! A LOT!"
Gojo laid their wife on the nearest cot, both hands now pressing down with bruising force on her arm, chanting her name like a broken prayer, his Six Eyes locked on the terrifyingly faint flutter of her sinking heartbeat.
"Stay with me! Please, please, please stay with me! The twins… they need you… I need you…"
Nanami, applying brutal pressure to the wound itself, met Gojo’s terrified eyes over her limp form. The strongest sorcerers in the world were brought to their knees, powerless against the enemy within their own home.
The only sounds were Gojo’s ragged sobs and the drip of blood into the red pool on the floor.
The static hadn’t stopped. It had become a deafening roar of despair.
Their carefully constructed world of power and love had fractured beyond recognition.
The path forward was a dark, uncharted void.
---
The Memory & The Scream
The world was warm.
Sunlight, thick with dust motes dancing like tiny frantic sprites, streamed through blinds perpetually half-closed against the afternoon heat. The air hung heavy with the competing scents of pizza cooling in the box on the floor, the faint ozone tang of overloaded electronics, and Haibara’s dubious "mountain breeze" body spray that smelled suspiciously like pine-scented cleaner.
She—a teenager, barefoot, wearing a faded grey Linkin Park tee that swam on her frame and jeans ripped more from wear than fashion—was wedged between a stack of old Shonen Jump magazines and Haibara’s laundry hamper (currently serving as a side table for half-empty soda cans). Her focus was laser-sharp, knuckles white on the cheap, slightly sticky plastic of the third-party controller connected to the humming monstrosity under the small CRT TV. The screen flickered with the pixelated chaos of Contra.
"Die, you pixelated fool! WHY WON’T YOU DIE!" she shrieked, thumbs mashing the fire button with furious intensity as her commando sprit sprayed bullets across the screen.
"Language, Cookie!"
Haibara, seventeen and vibrating with the energy of a caffeinated ferret, laughed from his sprawled position beside her. He wasn't the gentle senior everyone in school thought he was. He had sharp, dark eyes that missed nothing, perpetually messy brown hair falling into his face, and a grin that promised mischief or mild property damage, sometimes both. He deliberately jostled her elbow with his own.
"Wouldn’t wanna corrupt Megs’s pure little ears, would we?" He shot a look towards the desk chair.
Megumi, young but already cultivating a world-class scowl that could wilt plants, sat rigidly upright, his own controller held with precise, economical movements. He expertly navigated his character through a hail of enemy fire, his expression impassive.
"Your pathing is predictable," he stated flatly, eyes glued to the screen. Only the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth betrayed anything when her frantic spray finally caught his character mid-jump, sending it pixelating into oblivion. "Hn. Lucky shot, baka."
"Not luck, skill!" she crowed, triumph momentarily eclipsing the sticky heat. She jabbed an elbow playfully into Haibara’s bicep. "See? Told you I’d smoke him this time!"
Haibara caught her elbow before the second jab landed, his fingers warm and calloused. "Sure, Cookie. Whatever narrative helps you sleep at night."
He held her gaze for a beat, the usual mischief momentarily replaced by something more observant, almost… assessing.
Before she could decipher it, the smirk snapped back. "Maybe Megs just choked 'cause he realized you actually remembered the Konami code this time." He aimed a knowing smirk at Megumi.
Megumi’s scowl deepened. "Shut up, Haibara," he muttered, resetting the console with a sharp click. The familiar jingle of the boot-up screen filled the brief silence. "Tank. Best of three."
The moment passed, swallowed by the comforting, familiar rhythm of their trio.
The unspoken things weren't romantic tension but the bedrock of their dynamic: Megumi’s quiet, intense competence; Haibara’s chaotic charm that somehow always steered them clear of actual disaster (mostly); and her own fierce, stubborn energy that refused to be cowed by either.
The scent of congealing pizza grease, Haibara’s dubious spray, Megumi’s faint, clean scent like rain on concrete, and the hot-plastic smell of the overworked console—it was safety.
It was uncomplicated belonging. It was home.
"Best of three? Prepare for annihilation, Megs," she declared, grabbing her controller again, a stupid little grin spreading across her face. "Haibara, you're on snacks. More Mountain Dew. Stat."
Haibara groaned like a drama school dropout and unfolded himself from the floor. "Slave driver." He ruffled her already messy bun as he passed, dodging her half-hearted swipe with practiced ease.
The console’s main menu loaded, its title screen promising "999,999 GAMES!"—a blatant lie they all knew well. The games themselves were a clunky, repetitive mess of blocky green tanks moving across a featureless beige grid.
Yet, it became an epic battle. Megumi employed ruthless, efficient strategies, picking off her tanks with sniper-like precision. She preferred building iron walls all around and just camping over all-out aggressive assaults. Haibara, back with the sodas, provided running commentary that was equal parts absurdist humor and tactical sabotage aimed at whoever was winning.
"Cookie, your left flank is more exposed than a noodle in a typhoon! Megs is gonna flank you like a ninja badger!"
"Ninja badgers are statistically improbable, Haibara."
"Tell that to your soon-to-be-exploded heavy tank, Megs! Cookie, CHARGE THE HILL!"
Laughter, genuine and loud, punctuated the electronic bloops and explosions. Sweat beaded on her forehead, sticking strands of hair to her skin. The controller felt slick in her hands. She was losing, badly, Megumi systematically dismantling her forces, but the sheer, stupid fun of it, the heat, the company, the normalcy, was everything.
During a brief ceasefire while Megumi meticulously repositioned his artillery, Haibara leaned back against the couch, taking a long swig of his soda.
He wasn't looking at the screen.
He was looking at her, at the fierce concentration on her face as she scowled at her dwindling tank battalion, at the way her brows wrinkled slightly in frustration. The usual manic energy around him had settled into a quieter, more thoughtful hum.
"You know, Cookie," he said, his voice softer than usual, cutting through the electronic battle sounds. It wasn't loud, but it carried a weight that made her glance away from the impending tank doom on screen. Megumi paused his movements, his gaze flicking towards Haibara, his expression unreadable but attentive.
Haibara met her eyes. The sharpness was still there, the knowing glint, but softened by something else. Something almost… wistful?
"You can't stay here forever," he said, the words simple, devoid of his usual teasing lilt. He gestured vaguely, not at his messy room, but at the feeling of it, the bubble of sticky summer safety.
"This... it's good. Real good." He offered a small, genuine smile, tinged with a sadness she couldn't place.
"But your big, messy, annoying life? It's out there waiting. Gotta get back to it." He took another sip of his drink, his gaze holding hers. "Wouldn't be fair otherwise."
The words landed softly, but with a strange finality.
Get back to it? Back to what?
This was her life. Pizza, stupid games, Meg’s scowls, Haibara’s chaos.
Confusion flickered across her face, momentarily displacing the frustration of losing.
Before she could formulate a retort, demand what he meant, or shove him for being weirdly serious, Megumi launched his final assault.
“Game over,” he said flatly, as her last pixelated tank burst into flames on-screen.
The transition wasn't gentle.
It was a violent tearing, a record scratch across the soul.
The warmth vanished, sucked away into a void.
The sticky heat, the greasy pizza scent, the ozone and cheap spray, Megumi’s quiet victory, and Haibara’s strangely soft words—gone.
Replaced by a biting, sterile cold that seeped into her bones.
The chaos of pixel explosions and Haibara’s dumb commentary shattered, replaced by a single, high-pitched, unrelenting pulse:
beep… beep… beep….
It drilled into her skull.
The smell of teenage boys and melted cheese obliterated by the overwhelming, acrid sting of antiseptic and something metallic—blood? Her own?
Haibara’s cluttered, sun-drenched room dissolved under the glare of fluorescent lights, white and pitiless.
It wasn't light; it was an assault.
And the faces… the faces anchoring her world… those faces weren’t there.
Gone.
Instead, looming over her, distorted and terrifyingly wrong through a haze of disorientation, was a man.
Stark white hair like bleached bone. A face ravaged, streaked with tears that caught the cruel light. Eyes, wide and frantic, filled with a desperate, shattered relief. His mouth moved, shaping words that were drowned out by a roaring static in her ears. His hand, large and startlingly warm, gripped her arm just below the elbow.
Where’s Haibara? Where’s Megumi? Why is HE here? Why is he CRYING? Why is he TOUCHING ME?
The memory—the heat, the laughter, the pixel bloodbath, Haibara’s cryptic but gentle "Gotta get back to it"—was still so vivid.
It was the only reality that mattered.
It had been real.
This wasn’t.
This white, humming hell.
This stranger, weeping.
This maddening beep.
He hadn’t woken her.
He’d ripped her out.
Panic detonated.
No thoughts, only that primal, flailing terror of a sanctuary lost.
"NO!"
The scream tore from her throat, raw and guttural, scraping against something tender inside. It felt like tearing stitches she didn’t know existed. She lashed out with a surge of adrenaline-fueled strength. Her fist connected hard with Gojo’s chest.
"GET OFF ME! LET GO OF ME!"
Another blow, blind and frantic, to his shoulder.
"YOU RUINED IT! YOU WOKE ME UP! GIVE THEM BACK! LET ME GO!"
Her voice cracked, hoarse with anguish and disorientation.
Gojo didn’t shield himself. He absorbed the blows like they were absolution from a life without her, his face crumbling further, tears flowing freely now, mingling with the look of utter devastation.
"Sweetheart… please… it’s me… you’re safe…"
His voice was a broken whisper, drowned beneath the torrent of her terror, the relentless beep—a siren in her head.
Shoko materialized beside the bed like a ghost.
Efficient. Robotic.
But her eyes—
Not cold. Worse. Hollow.
Like she’d locked away something that was starting to leak through.
She didn’t speak. Didn’t try to calm her. Didn’t acknowledge Gojo’s tears or her screams.
Simply reached for a pre-filled syringe on a nearby stainless steel tray. Her hand, the hand of someone who saves lives, trembled. Barely.
Enough to be missed—unless you were Nanami. Unless you were trained to fear the smallest cracks, only if he hadn’t had to go home to look after the twins.
She swabbed the woman’s arm. Cold antiseptic burned through the last of Haibara’s memory.
The wife thrashed, wild-eyed, twisting away, scanning the room past Gojo—desperate for someone else’s scowl, for the flickering CRT screen, for someone else’s maniacal grin.
"NO! Don't! I was winning! He said… LET ME GO!"
The plea was ragged, drenched in a childlike desperation that tore at the air.
Shoko’s expression remained a mask of chilling detachment. The emptiness in her gaze was absolute. With swift, clinical precision, she inserted the needle and depressed the plunger.
The sedative hit like a lead blanket.
The screams choked off into wet, ragged gasps.
The frantic struggle against her husband, weakened, limbs turning to liquid lead. The vivid, desperate colors of the memory—the dusty sunlight, the green tank grid, Megumi’s melancholic and Haibara’s soft, sad smiles—began to bleed away, dissolving into the sterile, soul-crushing white of the infirmary.
The frantic beep… beep… beep… of the monitor began to slow, deepening into a sluggish, rhythmic thud.
Gojo laid her back down, his forehead rested against the cold metal bed rail beside her now-limp hand, his shoulders shaking with silent, wrenching sobs.
Relief warred with a new, suffocating layer of helpless grief.
She was alive, breathing, but where was she? Trapped in a pixelated summer with ghosts, screaming to stay.
Shoko stared down at the sedated woman, then at the syringe in her still-trembling hand.
Then, as if out of it, placed it back on the tray with meticulous, almost obsessive care. Her gaze drifted past Gojo, past the bed, towards the infirmary window, but she wasn't seeing the cityscape.
She was seeing blood soaking into ash, Choso’s vacant stare, the stillness of too many forms.
Her jaw tightened, a minuscule, involuntary spasm the only sign of the silent scream trapped within her own crumbling vault.
Without a word, without a glance at the weeping man or the woman lost in chemical limbo, Shoko turned and walked out of the room. The heavy door sighed shut behind her, leaving only the slowing monitor, Gojo’s muffled sobs, and the devastating echo of a dead boy’s nickname hanging in the antiseptic air.
The silence that descended wasn't peace.
It was the quiet before the next inevitable storm inside two broken minds.
It was the suffocating quiet of two worlds shattered and the terrifying uncertainty of what could possibly be rebuilt from this.
---
The Necessary Exile
An hour later, the antiseptic stillness of the infirmary was broken only by the slow, steady beep… beep… beep… of the monitor and Gojo Satoru’s silent vigil.
He hadn’t moved from the chair beside the bed, his forehead still pressed against the cool metal rail, fingers loosely curled around his wife’s sedated wrist, as if anchoring her to this reality from one he couldn’t reach.
The white bandages stark against the skin of her forearm were a brutal reminder of the chasm that had opened beneath them.
The door hissed open softly.
Nanami stood there, his clothes slightly rumpled, shadows like bruises beneath his eyes. He looked exhausted; the weight of the last four months—the grief, the fear, the constant, low-grade terror of his children’s burgeoning, unstable power, and now this—etched into every line of his face. He’d just come from the penthouse nursery, where Emi’s cries had finally subsided into hiccuping sobs under Kaito’s unnerving, watchful silence. The air in that room still hummed with residual, dark energy.
Gojo didn’t lift his head, but his grip tightened infinitesimally on his wife’s wrist. "Kids?" His voice was hoarse, scraped raw.
"Sleeping. For now," Nanami replied, voice low and gravelly. He stepped fully into the room, gaze sweeping over their wife’s unnaturally still form, the IV line, the bandages. His expression, a flicker of pain crossing his normally stoic features.
He then looked pointedly at Gojo. "Satoru. A moment."
Gojo finally lifted his head. His eyes, usually hidden behind blindfolds or radiating mischief, were red-rimmed, swollen, and filled with a desperate, wounded animalistic intensity.
"Not leaving her," he stated flatly, the words thick.
Nanami didn’t argue. He simply nodded towards the doorway. "Utahime is here. She needs to speak with you. Now." His tone, a quiet command of a man who had reached his limit and knew immediate action was required.
Gojo’s gaze flickered past Nanami.
Standing just outside in the corridor, illuminated by the harsh fluorescent lights, was Utahime. Her face was drawn, pale, but her eyes held a steely resolve that contrasted sharply with Shoko’s terrifying emptiness. There was grief there, deep and profound, but also determination. She met Gojo’s gaze steadily, inclining her head slightly.
A low growl rumbled in Gojo’s chest. He looked down at his wife, her face peaceful in drugged oblivion, worlds away from the girl screaming for Haibara and Megumi. Leaving her felt like tearing off a limb.
"Whatever it is, she can say it here," he muttered, his voice tight.
Nanami stepped closer, lowering his voice further. "Satoru. Look at her. Look at Shoko."
He gestured subtly towards the corridor where Shoko likely was, in another room or lost in her own silent hell.
"This infirmary… this place… it’s a battlefield triage center. It’s not equipped for this. For them. They need more than stitches and sedatives. They need…" He struggled for the word, a man uncomfortable with the language of broken minds. "...specialized care. Hear her. Outside. Now."
The raw command in Nanami’s voice, so rarely used against Gojo, cut through the fog of Gojo’s grief-fueled stubbornness. He saw the absolute exhaustion, the bone-deep worry in Nanami’s eyes. He saw Utahime’s unwavering, serious stance.
With agonizing slowness, he uncurled his fingers from his wife’s wrist, placing her hand gently back on the sheet. He stood, his tall frame unfolding stiffly, radiating tension like a live wire. He cast one last, lingering look at his wife’s still face, then followed Nanami out into the corridor, shutting the infirmary door softly behind him.
Utahime didn’t waste time. "Gojo," she began, her voice firm but not unkind. "We need to talk about where they go next. Shoko and your wife."
Gojo’s eyes narrowed, the protective fury instantly reigniting. "They go home. With us. Where they belong."
"They can’t!"
Utahime stated bluntly, meeting his glare without flinching.
"Look at what just happened. She regressed completely, attacked you, screamed for people who are dead. Shoko…
She’s barely functional. Shoko wasn’t a warfront sorcerer. Now, she dissociates, has night terrors that shake the building; she can’t even look at a scalpel without flinching. The twins…"
She hesitated, glancing at Nanami.
"Their energy is volatile, unstable. It’s a trigger. A constant, overwhelming reminder of the cost. The environment is toxic for their healing. They need safety. Real safety. A place designed for this level of trauma, away from… everything."
Gojo bristled, his cursed energy crackling faintly in the sterile air.
"She didn’t attack me. She was scared. And what are you suggesting? Locking them away? In some… some insane asylum?"
The word was spat with venom. He whirled on Nanami.
"And you agree with this? You want to send her away? After everything? How could you even consider it, Kento? You hover, you watch, you fuss; you were even ready to kill me for her… and now you want to ship her off?"
The accusation was sharp, laced with betrayal.
Nanami didn’t react to the barb. He met Gojo’s furious gaze, his own filled with a weary, painful resolve.
"I want her to live, Satoru. Truly live. Not just breathe or just exist in this… shell, haunted and hurting. And I want our children to grow up knowing their mother, not fearing her breakdowns or being confused by her absence. What’s happening now… it’s unsustainable. It’s killing her slowly. It’s killing us."
He took a breath, the admission costing him.
"Hovering isn’t working. Protecting her physically isn’t enough. Her wounds… Shoko’s wounds… they’re not just physical."
Utahime stepped forward. "It’s not a prison, Gojo. It’s a normal place. A highly specialized, discreet rehabilitation center. Think of it as…intensive healing, but for the mind and spirit. I’ve spent the last months vetting it discreetly. It’s not some… Maya-Yorozu situation. This is different. Run by a small, dedicated team, including former sorcerers who understand our world’s unique traumas. Non-curse users, but specialists in severe PTSD and dissociative disorders. Heavily warded. Private. Secure."
She pulled a thin tablet from her bag, scrolling quickly.
"I have testimonials. A sorcerer who witnessed an entire team wiped out by a special grade, catatonic for months. He spent a year there. He teaches meditation at Kyoto Tech now. A non-sorcerer spouse who developed severe psychosis after a curse attack targeted their family. She’s back home, managing. Rehabilitated, not just sedated."
She looked up, her gaze earnest. "They don’t just lock people away. They help them find their way back. They have therapies… things we can’t provide. A structured environment without triggers. Space to breathe. Real help."
Gojo stared at the tablet, then at Utahime, then at Nanami. The furious defiance was still there, warring with a dawning, horrifying understanding. He pictured his wife waking again, screaming, lost in a past he couldn’t access. He pictured Shoko, jumping at shadows, her healing hands trembling. He pictured Emi’s cries triggering another collapse, Kaito’s unstable power flaring in response. He pictured the slow, grinding erosion of their family under the weight of unhealed trauma.
Sending her away felt like a monumental failure, a betrayal of his promise to protect her. But keeping her here… was it protection, or a slower death sentence?
His shoulders slumped, the fight draining out of him, replaced by a crushing wave of helplessness and grief. He leaned back against the cold wall, running a trembling hand through his disheveled white hair.
"How long?" he whispered, the word barely audible.
"It’s not a sentence, Gojo," Utahime said softly. "It’s treatment. As long as they need. Months, likely. But they can have visitors. Regularly. You, Nanami, the twins when they’re stable enough. I’ll be visiting Shoko constantly."
Nanami added, voice low, "We won’t abandon her, Satoru. We’ll be there. Every step. But she needs professionals. She needs… what we can’t give her right now."
The silence stretched, thick with the weight of the decision. The beep… beep… beep… from inside the infirmary seemed louder. Finally, Gojo closed his eyes, a single tear tracing a path through the grime on his cheek. He gave a minute, almost imperceptible nod. Nanami rubbed his arm comfortingly even though he was scared too.
---
Three days later, under a grey, drizzling sky, two discreet, unmarked vehicles with heavily reinforced windows and subtle barrier talismans etched onto their frames pulled away from Jujutsu High.
Inside one, sedated but not unconscious, sat Shoko, staring blankly out at the passing cityscape, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, knuckles white. Utahime sat beside her, holding one of those hands, murmuring quiet reassurances Shoko didn’t seem to hear.
In the other vehicle, similarly sedated but slightly more aware, was the wife.
She wore soft, comfortable clothes, not hospital garb. Her gaze was distant, unfocused, but not actively panicked. Nanami sat beside her, his presence a solid, quiet anchor. Gojo sat in the front passenger seat, his head turned away, watching the raindrops streak down the window. He hadn’t spoken since they helped her into the car.
The facility, when they arrived hours later, wasn’t imposing.
Nestled in the wooded, misty foothills north of Tokyo, it resembled a modern, minimalist ryokan more than a hospital. Low buildings of warm wood and pale stone blended into the landscape. Gardens, meticulously maintained but wild at the edges, promised quiet paths. The air smelled of damp earth and pine, clean and calm. The wards hummed softly, a constant, low-level protection that felt more like a shield than a cage.
Their rooms were adjacent, spacious, and serene, with large windows looking onto private gardens. No harsh lights. No beeping monitors. Just quiet.
The transfer was smooth, handled by staff who moved with calm efficiency and spoke in low, respectful tones. Gojo and Nanami stayed until she was settled in bed, her eyes already drifting shut under the lingering sedation. Gojo brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, his touch feather-light, his expression a mask of anguish. Nanami placed a small, familiar stuffed Totoro and a Blobfish plushy from the twins' room on the pillow beside her head.
Neither spoke. Words were useless here.
They left as the late afternoon shadows lengthened. The drive back to Tokyo was silent, heavy with a different kind of emptiness.
The rhythm of the rehab was slow, deliberate. Days blurred into weeks.
The CEO and Shoko rarely spoke, not out of animosity, but out of a shared, profound exhaustion and the vast desert of unspeakable things between them.
But they always sat together. Existing in a parallel silence, sharing meals in the light-filled communal dining room, walking the garden paths at different times, sitting in the quiet lounge overlooking a koi pond.
Then a bond formed in the quiet hours.
When the night terrors came for Shoko—sudden, violent flinches, strangled gasps, her body rigid with unseen horror—it was the CEO who would appear at her doorway, sitting on the floor beside Shoko’s bed, a silent presence in the dark until the tremors subsided and Shoko’s breathing evened out into something resembling sleep.
Shoko, in turn, during the wife’s dissociative episodes—where she would sit for hours, staring at a wall, lost in some internal labyrinth—would gently guide her away from the wing where the playful sounds of visiting children (other patients' families) sometimes drifted.
The innocent laughter was a shard of glass in both their raw psyches. Shoko would lead her to the quiet meditation room or the empty art studio, a silent understanding. They were anchors in each other’s storms, wordless lifelines in the sea of their shared wreckage.
Visits became lifelines.
Nanami came most often, every couple days, always bringing the twins.
The journey was long, but he was unwavering. He’d sit with his wife in the garden, Kaito on a blanket beside them, intently studying the patterns of leaves or the flight of a bird with an unsettlingly focused gaze that sometimes seemed to bend the light around the object. Emi, held securely in Nanami’s arms, would babble and reach tiny hands towards her mother.
Their mother flinched every time, her gaze often distant, resting somewhere past them.
But sometimes, when Emi’s babbling took on a particularly plaintive tone, a flicker of something—pain, confusion, or a ghost of recognition—would cross her face.
Nanami never forced interaction. He simply existed beside her, a solid presence, talking softly about mundane things—the twins' progress, the weather, a new bakery near the penthouse. He was rebuilding a bridge, plank by silent plank.
Utahime was a constant for Shoko.
She’d bring books Shoko used to love, play quiet music, or simply sit with her in companionable silence, knitting or reading. Shoko rarely reacted overtly, but the terrifying emptiness in her eyes slowly, slowly began to recede, replaced by a weary, fragile awareness.
Sometimes, Utahime would find Shoko watching her, a faint, almost imperceptible softening in her expression. Progress measured in microscopic increments.
Gojo came less frequently.
The burden of leading the fractured jujutsu world was immense. The fallout from the battle, the power vacuum, the need for sweeping reforms—it demanded his presence constantly.
When he did come, it was often late, bearing extravagant, impractical gifts—rare imported fruits, absurdly soft cashmere throws, a miniature, intricately detailed replica of the console she’d played on with Haibara and Megumi.
He’d try to fill the silence with his usual bravado, stories of bureaucratic battles won, new recruits causing havoc. But the energy felt forced, brittle.
His eyes never left his wife’s face, searching for any sign of the woman he knew, desperate for a flicker of recognition.
Sometimes, she’d look at him, a faint frown creasing her brow, as if trying to place a familiar face from a half-remembered dream.
Other times, she’d look straight through him, lost in the static. He’d leave each visit looking more haggard than when he arrived, the mantle of the "strongest" a crushing weight when faced with the one battle he couldn’t win with cursed energy.
In a place where the shattered pieces were held carefully, given space, and slowly, painstakingly, the terrifying work of reassembly could begin.
Two women sat in silence, one holding the other through the long, dark nights, navigating the minefield of their broken minds, waiting for a dawn they couldn’t yet imagine.
A/N: Don't worry, I won't hurt the reader from now onwards, only fluff.
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Series Masterlist [Tumblr/Ao3] | All Works Masterlist
Pairings: Nanami Kento x Reader, Toxic Gonana, Ryomen Sukuna x Reader (if you squint really, really hard).
Summary: Quarter-close leaves Nanami coming home later, more tired, and harder to read, while his wife realizes work is no longer the only thing consuming him. One midnight call from Gojo turns an already rotten week into something much worse. Canon-divergent setup: Nanami stayed in finance, but he never fully got out of the jujutsu world. Sukuna has already been lodged in him for some time before this fic begins, and Gojo has been involved in managing that situation off-page. The story starts in the middle of an existing problem. WC: 5.6K.
Warnings: Workplace abuse/corporate exploitation, blood and injury, body horror, physical intimidation/restraint, coercion/blackmail, emotional manipulation, unhealthy relationship dynamics, non-con (not with the reader & not described but is implied), possession/bodily autonomy violation, canon-typical violence, major character death, grief, murder. [It is not described in too much detail, though.] MDNI.
A/N: I’ve had the "What if Sukuna possessed our male wife?" idea sitting in my to-do list forever. I meant to write it as a Fight Club movie but more corporate, and then it spiraled into whatever this became. Also, I wrote this in one go after being awake for ~30 hours.
By 10:30 PM the floor had gone ugly.
Half the lights in Marunouchi were off. The other half were the wrong kind: strips of white over the trading desks, green and amber numbers crawling over glass, and the cold pulse of Bloomberg terminals left awake like watchful animals. The cleaners pushed their carts around the perimeter without looking at the men still sitting under the light.
Nanami sat with his suit jacket off, tie loosened, and cuffs dark at the wrists. The knot in his throat had moved lower over the past month. Tonight it sat behind his sternum, hard and hot, like a boulder someone else had left in him.
His managing director stopped at his desk without greeting him. "Yamada’s family office is nervous,” the man said. “You’re getting on the train to Osaka at 6.”
Nanami kept his eyes on the numbers. “The deck isn’t finished.”
“Then don’t leave before it is.”
“It’ll be 4.”
“Then leave at 4.”
Nanami looked up.
The man smiled with only the corners of his mouth. Mid-fifties. Expensive watch. Yellowed eyes. He kept one hand in his trouser pocket when he wanted to sound relaxed and the other flat on people’s desks when he wanted them to feel owned.
“You’re a smart man, Nanami. Don’t make me explain hierarchy to you again.”
“You want the Osaka meeting, the Yamada revision, and the Singapore memo before dawn.”
“I want the work done by the man who told me he was built for pressure.”
The hand lifted off the desk. The smile stayed.
“You got married, didn’t you? Mortgage now. Stability. Men get soft when they think they’ve built something outside the office.”
Nanami said nothing.
His boss bent a little closer. “The firm isn’t your mother. Nobody pays you to be tired. Finish the work.”
He moved on.
The floor swallowed him.
For a while there was only the terminal glow and the small dry click of Nanami’s mouse. Then, behind his eyes, somebody laughed.
Not in his ear. Not in the room. Under the bone.
“Kill him.”
Nanami’s hand stayed on the mouse.
“The old one first,” Sukuna growled. Then the white-haired bastard.
Nanami dragged a cell formula across 6 columns.
You let lesser men spit in your face all day. I could tear his jaw off with your right hand before the cleaners reached the lift.
Nanami saved the file, stood, and walked to the washroom at the end of the corridor.
The mirror over the sinks caught him in pieces. Blond hair flattened from too many hours under office air. Skin gone pale under fluorescent white. He opened his collar with one finger and pressed his palm into the place beneath his ribs.
The mark there had changed again.
It had started as a bruise the size of a coin, a dark pressure point under the skin where the finger had gone in and stayed. Now black veins ran outward from it in a branching fan, thin as ink cracks beneath glass.
He felt his throat closing up suddenly.
Leaned over the sink and spat blood.
It hit porcelain in a narrow red thread.
“That’s new,” Sukuna said.
Nanami rinsed the sink clean, stood straight, and buttoned his collar.
The phone in his pocket vibrated.
He looked at the name and answered on the second ring.
“You’re late,” Gojo jeered. Nanami could hear his feet impatiently tapping.
“I can’t get out of work.”
“It’s still Thursday.”
Nanami looked at the stall doors, the grey tile, and his own face in the mirror. “I have multiple deadlines.”
“Leave.”
“No.”
A breath. Cloth moving over a receiver. Traffic somewhere on the other end.
Then Gojo’s voice went flat.
“If you miss tonight, I call the school. They drag you in alive if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, the higher-ups make an example out of you before your wife gets through breakfast.”
Nanami closed his eyes.
“Or I’ll spare them the paperwork and kill you myself.”
“You use her every time.”
“It works every time.”
Nanami hung up.
He went back to his desk, sent three emails, exported the Osaka deck, and booked a car for midnight. At 11:40 PM he put his jacket on, took the private elevator down, and stepped into Tokyo with the taste of blood still in his mouth.
The apartment smelled like rice and soap.
His wife had left the kitchen light on. The rest of the place was dark. Two bowls sat covered on the counter. A note beside them, written fast.
Heat it. Don’t pretend you already ate.
Nanami stood with one hand on the back of a chair.
The room was small. Rental. Good station. Thin walls. A low shelf of books under the window. Her cardigan over the sofa arm. A ceramic dish by the entrance full of coins and train cards and the keychain she kept breaking and replacing.
Sukuna went quiet as soon as Nanami had crossed the threshold.
He always did in her vicinity for reasons Nanami didn’t know nor cared to find out.
Not because of any barrier she had. No cursed energy. No technique. No training. She just moved through the apartment like it belonged to the living.
She came out of the bedroom barefoot, hair loose, sleep at the corners of her eyes. She stopped when she saw the clock on the microwave.
“You came back before 2 AM.”
“I said I would.”
“You said that Tuesday too.”
He took his coat off. “I’m here now.”
She looked at him for a long second and came closer. Her fingers went to his collar. Familiar warmth underneath. She touched it, then frowned.
“You’re hot.”
“It’s the office.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
He touched her wrist once, just above the pulse.
“I have to go back out.”
The look she gave him had no drama in it. That made it worse.
“At 1 in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“For office?”
“No.”
That made her hands still.
He took a sealed envelope out of his briefcase and set it on the table between them.
“If anything happens to me at work, call the lawyer whose card is inside.”
She stared at the envelope, then at him. Her sleepy eyes now panicked.
“Kento, what are you talking about?”
“Keep it.”
“What happened?"
“Nothing.”
The apartment was quiet enough that he could hear the fridge motor kick on.
She did not raise her voice. She did not ask the same question twice. She pulled the envelope toward her and set it beside the rice bowls.
“You’re frightening me, baby.”
Nanami took his watch off and laid it down carefully beside the note she had written him.
“I know.”
She stepped into him then, sudden and hard, arms around his waist before he could decide whether to permit it. His body locked on the first beat. Then it gave.
He put one hand behind her neck.
Sukuna stayed quiet in his head.
Her cheek was warm through his shirt. She spoke into the fabric.
“If this is some noble husband routine, I don’t want it.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then stop leaving me with paper.”
Nanami’s hand tightened once at the back of her neck.
“I’ll try.”
---
That was all he had.
After Suguru, Gojo kept the apartment in Azabu because nobody on the records could connect it to him.
The building had concierge staff, imported stone in the lobby, art nobody looked at. The unit on the nineteenth floor had almost no furniture. A sofa. A low table. Floor-to-ceiling glass. City lights laid out below like circuitry.
Nanami entered without knocking. Gojo was standing by the window with his blindfold off and a drink in his hand.
“You’re bleeding.” Gojo set the glass down.
The room changed when he crossed it. Not because he moved fast, but because everything in him was built like an oncoming thing. Height, reach, confidence, and that ugly natural ease gifted to men who had never been physically denied anything in their lives.
“Sit.”
Nanami stayed standing.
Gojo smiled. “That stubborn act stopped impressing me weeks ago.”
“You threaten civilians to get me here.”
“I threaten one civilian. Don’t dress it up.”
Nanami took his hoodie off and folded it over the arm of the sofa. Gojo watched him do it.
“Shirt.”
Nanami undid the buttons.
The skin over his ribs was turning bad. The black lines had spread low across his abdomen and up toward his chest. There were days they looked like bruises and days they looked like something rooting through him from the inside.
Gojo’s mouth lost its shape for half a second.
Then it was gone.
“You should have told me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Take the rest off.”
“No.”
Gojo stepped in close enough that Nanami could smell the alcohol on him. Sweet. Clean. Disgusting.
“Don’t make me repeat myself.”
Nanami held his gaze. Gojo held it back.
Neither moved.
Then Gojo lifted a hand and pressed hard into the mark beneath Nanami’s ribs.
Pain cracked through him, white hot and immediate. Nanami’s shoulders jerked. His hand hit the chair edge.
Inside him, Sukuna laughed.
“There he is.”
Gojo kept his fingers there, cursed energy bright and surgical, cutting into the place where the foreign thing sat lodged inside the body that refused to split open for it.
Nanami’s breath went rough.
“Still think you can manage this alone,” Gojo muttered.
“Been managing.”
“You’re worse.”
Nanami slapped Gojo’s hand away. “I said I’m managing it!”
Gojo grabbed him by the throat and leaned closer. His voice dropped. “You don’t get to die because you’re tired of being handled.”
Nanami’s face went still.
From outside, traffic moved like a bloodless river under the windows.
Gojo’s hand left his throat. But he did not step away.
“You come here once a week. You answer when I call. You go to work, you come home, and you do not let that thing get one inch more than it already has.”
“It won’t.”
“That isn’t confidence. That’s arrogance.”
Gojo took the blindfold from the table and tied it on Nanami. “When you stop being useful, the school will kill you. Until then, you’re mine to manage.”
He said it like policy.
Gojo unbuttoned his shirt with careful fingers.
“Then manage faster.” Nanami was too tired for Gojo’s blackmail; all he was still working for was so his wife wouldn’t be homeless after he was gone.
After all, his body wasn’t meant to house Ryomen Sukuna.
---
By quarter close the office stopped pretending to be modern and became what it was.
Men asleep in conference rooms with their ties around their necks. Analysts brushing their teeth in the disabled washroom before market open. Senior staff conducting humiliations in glass boxes with the blinds half-drawn. Women walking to the copier with their heels in their hands at 2 in the morning and putting them back on before dawn so the floor looked disciplined.
Nanami worked through all of it.
He rode the first train to Osaka, revised the numbers in the car, pitched the family office, came back standing, and went straight to a compliance call where his boss asked, in front of twelve people, whether marriage had affected his aggression.
He answered the question. He did not answer the insult. He still had his pride.
At 4 that afternoon his boss stopped at his chair and dropped a draft agreement on the desk.
“You’re taking this home.”
“I’m not billing midnight again.”
“Then don’t bill it.”
Nanami looked up.
The man’s voice softened. That was always worse.
“You have a reputation for discipline. Don’t damage it now. You think there’s somewhere better to go at your age. There isn’t. The market is full of men who can stay awake and lie with a straight face. I picked you because you looked honest. Don’t become expensive.”
He tapped the job agreement with one finger.
“There are clauses in there that would be unfortunate if a wife ever had to read them after an inquiry.”
Nanami’s expression did not change.
“You’ve been placing personal assets,” his boss said. “Quietly. Nicely. Shares, beneficiary amendments, a little apartment search in Setagaya. You think nobody sees. I see everything on this floor that costs money.”
The finger lifted.
“If you mean to leave, leave after I’m done with you.”
He walked away.
Under Nanami’s skin, Sukuna stretched.
“Now.”
Nanami stood so quickly the chair rolled back and hit the partition.
A few heads turned.
He took the agreement, the file from his drawer and followed his boss into the emergency stairwell.
The door slammed shut behind him.
Concrete. Painted railings. The hum of building air.
His boss turned, irritated first, then annoyed.
“What!”
Nanami handed him the agreement.
“You threaten my wife again, and I’ll break your spine.”
The man stared at him, then laughed once.
“Look at you.”
He stepped closer.
“This is why men like you need the office. Without structure, you’re just another violent little animal in a suit.”
Nanami’s hand closed around the stair rail.
Sukuna’s voice came up under his heartbeat.
“Take the head off first. He won’t finish the sentence.”
His boss leaned in, breath stale with coffee.
“You’re not special, Nanami. You’re just marketable. When that goes, I’ll have your seat filled before your security pass dies.”
Nanami hit him.
Not with cursed energy or with the thing inside him.
His own hand. His own shoulder behind it.
His boss went into the wall hard enough to leave a dull print in the paint. Skull cracked. Blood came out of his nose at once.
The man made a sound, small and shocked. He had forgotten bodies worked like that.
Nanami grabbed him by the front of the shirt and held him there.
The black lines under his own skin burned.
“Do it.”
His boss’s feet slipped on the concrete. He looked, finally, afraid.
Nanami bent close enough for the man to smell the venom in his throat.
“You will transfer the Yamada account. You will sign the compensation adjustment. You will stop speaking my wife’s existence out loud. If you use her again, I’ll come back and finish this in the stairwell where nobody important can hear you.”
He let go.
The man hit the wall, then the landing rail, breathing through his mouth.
Nanami opened the door and stepped back into the office.
No one asked why there was blood on his cuff.
---
That night he brought home the signed transfer forms.
His wife sat at the table in one of his old shirts and her own sweatpants, reading through the apartment papers with her mouth slightly open.
“You already put the deposit down.”
“Yes.”
“When.”
“Last week.”
She looked up at him over the top page.
“You bought us an apartment without telling me.”
“I secured one.”
“That isn’t better.”
He took a seat across from her. The table between them was crowded with documents now. Mortgage preapproval. Beneficiary forms. Insurance amendments. A neat stack of things that would keep her indoors and fed and legally protected if his body stopped obeying him.
Her fingers rested on the papers.
“You look terrible.”
“I know.”
“You smell like smoke.”
“Stairwell.”
That drew the smallest flicker at the corner of her mouth. Then it was gone.
She set the papers down. “Are you leaving me?"
“No.”
“Are you dying?"
Nanami looked at her.
Sukuna, quiet until then, opened his eyes somewhere deep and watched.
Nanami reached across the table and turned the apartment plan toward her, tapping the bedroom window.
“Morning light,” he smiled, small and domestic. “The station’s six minutes. The walls are thicker. Safe neighborhood."
Her face changed very little. He had loved that from the start. He had loved that she never performed understanding when she did not have it.
“You didn’t answer.”
“No.”
It was not the truth. It was what she could survive tonight.
She stood, came around the table, and sat on his lap facing him, knees on either side of his legs, taking his face in both hands as if he had come back from war and thought he could pass for uninjured under bad apartment lighting.
“You’re burning.”
“I’m tired.”
“You say that every day like it explains anything.”
He looked at her mouth, then up at her eyes.
“It explains enough.”
She kissed him once, slow then angry.
---
The call came at 2:13 AM.
Gojo answered before the second ring ended.
Nanami’s voice was quiet.
“Come get it.”
Gojo was already standing.
“Where?”
“Office.”
“What happened?"
A pause. Breathing. Something wet.
“I finished the transfer.”
Gojo was dressed and out the door before the line cut.
---
The trading floor was dark when he arrived. Security let him up because money trained people not to ask the right questions. Nanami was in a conference room at the end of the corridor, seated upright at the table with both hands folded over a stack of signed documents like he was waiting to begin a meeting.
There was blood in the seam of his mouth.
Gojo shut the door behind him.
Nanami looked at him once.
“You took your time.”
Gojo crossed the room in three strides and got a hand to Nanami’s throat, then chest, then the mark beneath the ribs.
The cursed energy there was wrong.
Not unstable.
Ending.
Gojo’s voice dropped into something stripped bare.
“How long?"
Nanami’s head tipped back against the chair.
“Long enough.”
“And you said nothing.”
Nanami’s mouth twitched. Not a smile.
“You weren’t interested in answers. You were interested in blackmail because you are too much of a coward to go after the man you actually want in your bed.”
Gojo didn’t rise to the bait; instead, his hand stayed pressed flat to Nanami’s ribs, energy pouring in, cutting, sealing, forcing. It slid off blood and failing tissue and something older and filthier buried in the core.
Sukuna opened one eye through the slits under Nanami’s, then a mouth appeared, stretched with a vile grin.
“Too late.”
Gojo hit the table so hard the wood cracked under his palm.
“Shut the fuck up!”
The eye closed. But the mouth bled.
Nanami’s breathing had gone thin. He turned his head with effort toward the documents. “Top file. Insurance. Shares.”
Gojo did not look away from him. “Don’t you fucking dare, Kento!”
“Keep her out of it.”
“I said don’t.”
“She gets the news tomorrow.”
Gojo bent close, furious now in the way only powerless men ever were. “You don’t get to hand me chores and leave.”
Nanami’s gaze settled on him. Clear. Exhausted.
Almost kind, which made it crueler.
“You were always going to lose this one.”
Gojo’s jaw locked.
The glass walls of the conference room broke with Gojo’s frantic scream.
Nanami spoke once more, barely above breath. “Don’t let them take my body.”
Nanami hadn’t said it to Gojo, but Gojo took it anyway.
Then it was over fast.
A small hitch in the chest. A final spill of blood at the mouth. The hands loosening over the file. The face settling into its ordinary severity as if the body had decided to stop pretending there was any work left worth finishing.
Gojo stood with one hand on the dead man’s ribs.
The room was very still.
Morning pushed a weak grey line into the edge of the glass.
Gojo looked at the stack of papers, the careful signatures, the apartment file squared exactly to the table edge, the beneficiary forms clipped in order, and the lawyer’s card tucked on top where a civilian hand would find it first.
Gojo dialed, the call was picked up immediately.
There was a small silence on the line, then her voice.
“Who’s this?"
Gojo looked at Nanami’s body and at the blood drying in the cracked grain of the conference table.
He took a breath and asked her where she was and if he could hand over something of her husband’s.
Nothing else.
Because there was nothing else he could say that would make sense.
She gave him an address in Setagaya.
Gojo reached the apartment a little after six. The corridor still smelled faintly of damp concrete and somebody’s breakfast rice. He stood outside her door with Nanami’s envelope in one hand and the lawyer’s card tucked beneath his thumb.
When she opened, she looked smaller than the room had made her sound over the phone.
Slip dress. Hair pulled back badly and already coming loose. No makeup, no slippers, no performance. She had Nanami’s caution in the way she kept one hand on the door and most of her body behind it.
“You’re his recent associate.”
Not a question. She had already decided that was what he was.
Gojo gave her the envelope first. “Recent enough.”
She looked at the handwriting on the front, and everything in her face changed at once. He saw the recognition land. Nanami’s hand. Nanami’s neat pressure. Nanami’s habit of leaving order behind him wherever he thought he might not return.
Her fingers tightened around the paper.
“What happened?"
Gojo did not answer at the door. “You should sit down.”
She let him in because Nanami’s writing was in her hand and because terror made civilians do practical things first.
The apartment was exactly the kind of place Nanami would have kept without admitting he cared about it. Clean sink. Shoes paired neatly. A cardigan over the back of one chair. Two bowls on the counter washed and turned upside down to dry. The domestic life of a man who never gave anybody enough of himself at work and had still found somewhere to put the rest.
Gojo stood in the center of it and hated him all over again.
She sat at the table, the envelope already torn open. The insurance packet slid out. The beneficiary forms. The apartment papers. The list of account numbers and passwords Nanami had written in that disciplined hand, each item aligned to the right margin as if grief could be handled by formatting.
Her breathing went uneven.
“What is this?"
Gojo set the lawyer’s card beside the papers. “If the company starts stalling, call Higuruma Hiromi. Don’t waste time arguing with their first adjuster. Make them move immediately.”
She looked up sharply. “What happened to my husband?"
Gojo took off his sunglasses.
That always unsettled people more than the blindfold. There was something indecent in letting them see his eyes when they had already braced themselves for distance.
“He died at work.”
The words were clean. Yet, she had no place to put them.
He watched her try.
Her hand left the papers and went to her mouth. Then her throat. Then nowhere at all. Her chair scraped once against the floor when she stood too fast and nearly knocked it over, and she caught herself on the edge of the table with the same hand that still held Nanami’s envelope.
“No.”
Gojo said nothing.
“No.”
The second one tore on the way out.
She bent over the table as if she had been hit there, one hand splayed over Nanami’s careful stack of documents, the other covering her face too late. Her shoulders started to shake. The sound that came out of her after that was low and animal and humiliating. The kind people only made in rooms they thought were private.
Gojo had heard women cry before. He had heard men do it too. He had heard dying people do worse.
This one pleased nothing in him.
He watched anyway.
She lowered herself back into the chair because her knees had gone weak. Tears were running down through her fingers. Her voice came broken through her hand.
“Did he say anything?"
Gojo thought of the conference room. The blood on the table. The final stubborn line of Nanami’s mouth even after death had finished with it.
Don’t let them take my body.
“He left this,” Gojo lied because he did not feel for this wretched woman, nor would he ever give her the body back. He’d known Nanami first. He’d been left behind. He would have dragged Nanami back if this wrench hadn't been holding him back. Because Nanami was all Gojo had left, he wouldn’t have fallen even if Gojo would have.
“That isn’t what I asked.”
He looked at her properly then.
The grief had made her open in all the places Nanami had kept protected. Red around the eyes. Mouth shaking. One side of her hair stuck damply to her cheek. Even like this, she still had the insolent thing Nanami had died wrapped around: an ordinary life, ordinary hands, an ordinary table, all the quiet choices he had never given Gojo.
Nanami had been dying and had still spent his last strength on mortgage papers, insurance clauses, and a civilian’s future.
Not on Gojo.
Not once.
Her breathing went ragged. “How did he die?"
“At work.”
“You already said that.”
“He collapsed.”
That was truer. Still not true enough.
She stared at him through tears, and for the first time there was fear in it that had nothing to do with death.
“You don’t sound sorry.”
Gojo’s mouth moved faintly.
“He spent his last week arranging your accounts, your apartment, your legal contacts, and your insurance coverage down to the decimal place.” He tapped the top file once. “Feeling sorry wasn’t really his style.”
She wiped at her face angrily with the heel of her hand. “Leave.”
He did not move.
“I said leave.”
Gojo looked around the apartment again. The dish of keys by the door. The tea tin on the counter. The note under a magnet on the fridge in Nanami’s hand reminding her to call the building manager about the bathroom vent. Evidence everywhere of a man who had split his life in two and given the living part to somebody else.
“You were the only thing he protected properly.”
Her hand dropped from her face. “What..”
“He let his boss use him. Let the company grind him down. Let the city have him in pieces.” Gojo’s voice stayed level. “He gave his body to work, his time to paperwork, and whatever was left after that landed here.”
She pushed her chair back and stood. “Get out of my house.”
Gojo lifted one hand.
The city sound outside the apartment went out all at once.
Traffic, hallway noise, the faint rumble from the train line three blocks over. Gone. Not muffled. Erased.
She froze.
Gojo stood very still in the center of her kitchen and let the curtain settle into the walls, the ceiling, the floorboards, sealing the room until nothing inside it could reach the neighbors and nothing outside it could matter.
Her eyes moved once to the windows, then back to him.
“What are you?"
“Nothing you would understand.”
He stepped toward her, and she stepped back so fast her calf hit the chair.
“Stay away from me.”
He ignored it. The apartment had become too small for polite distance. Too full of Nanami. Too full of the life Nanami had chosen instead of him.
“He left me with your paperwork. Even dead, he made me useful to you.”
Something in her face sharpened despite the tears. Her voice thinned.
“What were you to him?"
Gojo stopped just in front of her.
The answer was nowhere he could say it.
Not colleague. Not friend. Not lover, not even when he had been taking that body by force of circumstance and threat and meanness and called it management because the real word would have made him sound smaller than he already was.
Nanami had never once confused obedience with love.
Gojo reached up and caught a strand of tear-wet hair where it clung to her cheek, smoothing it back with the same hand he had used on Nanami’s cooling body. She flinched so hard her shoulder hit the cabinet behind her.
“Nothing he kept.”
Her breath caught.
Then she understood enough.
“You sick—”
His hand closed around her throat before she finished it.
Pinned her against the cabinet and felt how quickly a mortal pulse leapt under frightened skin.
He leaned close enough that she could see the hatred properly.
“He died choosing you,” he spoke softly. Apartment, insurance, lawyer. Every last tedious line pointed to you. He would not even leave you badly.”
She clawed at his wrist, her face turning blue.
Gojo’s expression did not change. “So I thought I’d take the only thing he died for.”
The hallway light by the door flickered.
Gojo did not look away from her immediately. He felt it first: a wrongness in the air, old and filthy and sudden.
Then the dish by the entrance rattled.
Coins jumped. Keys struck ceramic.
Gojo turned.
The apartment door was still locked.
Something stood in the narrow strip of hall beyond the kitchen, just past the edge of the living room light. Bare feet on the wood. Suit trousers. Belt. Torn white dress shirt hanging open in strips from a broad chest gone white with death and marked over now in thick black bands and jagged lines that cut across collarbone, throat, jaw, cheek.
His face, but not at peace anymore. Not closed. Not human in the way she knew it.
The mouth curved first.
Her husband’s body had someone else inside it.
Gojo let her go.
She dropped against the cabinets, coughing, one hand flying to her throat, the other reaching blindly for the counter behind her.
For one suspended second nobody in the room moved.
“So that’s what he meant.”
Ryomen Sukuna stepped into the kitchen.
Tore off Nanami’s ruined shirt with one arm. The black markings climbed over the muscle of the chest, down the abdomen, and into the waistband. His blonde hair had come half loose from whatever death and revival had done to it. Blood was still dried darkly at one corner of his mouth.
He looked at Gojo once. Then at the hand Gojo had just had around her throat.
The smile changed.
Gojo’s posture altered in an instant. Technique rising. Shoulders set. Infinity about to climb back over skin and air and space.
Too slow.
The first slash took his wrist off at the joint before the barrier between bodies fully came up. It hit the floor still open, fingers curled from the interrupted reach.
The second opened him from the side of the throat down across the chest.
No sound left the apartment. The curtain held.
Gojo staggered back into the table, blood hitting the insurance packet, Nanami’s final signatures, Higuruma’s card. His eyes widened with something uglier than pain.
He looked from Sukuna to her and understood, at the very end, that Nanami had slipped him one last humiliation: even this body was no longer his to keep.
Gojo tried to raise his infinity.
Sukuna was already there.
He drove him down hard against the table edge. Wood split. Papers jumped. The third slash was small and exact and deep enough that Gojo’s body stopped trying to continue.
The strongest sorcerer in the room died with Nanami’s paperwork under his blood.
Sukuna straightened.
The apartment smelled metallic now. Hot. Fresh. The morning light at the window had gone brighter without warming anything.
She had slid down the cabinet to the floor. One hand still at her throat. The other braced flat on the boards beside her. She was staring at Nanami’s body wearing those marks, at the chest she knew, the mouth she knew, the crimson eyes she did not.
Sukuna turned to her.
He did not step closer.
For a moment he only looked.
Not with pity or even interest that could be called human. He looked at her the way a predator looked at a boundary stone it had already agreed not to cross.
The binding vow sat bright and hard behind his teeth.
He left her breathing.
Left her untouched.
He bent once, picked Higuruma’s card up from the blood-splashed papers, and set it back on the cleanest corner of the table.
Then he dragged Gojo’s body out.
The corridor outside still held the shape of morning. Somebody farther down was unlocking their bicycle. A child laughed in another apartment. The city had not noticed anything.
He tipped Gojo’s body toward the back-alley side of the building. It dropped with a wet crack, the sound rang grotesque in the narrow space. It sang to Sukuna, brief and amusing.
He had aimed it well. The body landed on the raised railings, skewered cleanly so nothing pointed back toward her.
The bars protruding from the rat’s throat brought him a flicker of a fleeting feeling he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Satisfied, he turned.
Behind him, the curtain broke and sound rushed back into the world.
Sukuna took the stairs instead of the lift. Bare feet silent on concrete.
Inside the body, beneath the marks and the revived ruin of muscle and bone, Nanami said nothing.
He had made the bargain in the instant Gojo’s hand closed around her throat.
Everything after had been simple.
The body for her life.
The silence for her safety.
Sukuna rolled Nanami’s shoulder once as he descended, testing the joint, then clicked his tongue.
“For a man who lived in ties and meeting rooms,” he said into the quiet between them, “you were not such miserable lodging.”
Nanami did not answer.
Sukuna’s mouth pulled wider.
“At least you know how to shut up.”
He stepped out into the street bare-chested in Nanami’s body, morning traffic starting to move around him, and did not look back.
A/N: Do you think Gojo deserved it? Or should Sukuna have carried you off into the sunset? I fear Sukuna doesn't hate wife.
All dividers are from @saradika-graphics, and the header's from Pinterest here.
Standing in front of the mirror in the frilly pajamas Nanami picked out for you, you hold a shirt up to your chest, squinting at the reflection.
Pink or white? Which did Nanami like better?
You plod down stairs, breakfast time. Nanami would want something light, soup with tea.
If you brought it up to his bed, would he be happy? Would he smile at you with those kind eyes?
Nanami would be leaving for work soon, which makes your heart pound in your chest. You make sure the phone he gave you was charged, so that he could call you on his break if you wanted.
He kissed you before he left and called you his special girl.
day 1:
You feel like someone's sitting on your chest, ropes bind your arms down. A man at the edge of the bed, blonde, big.
If you bit your tongue down and died, you wouldn't have to live through whatever he was going to do.
As his head turned, your thoughts splintered, such soft brown eyes. How could you leave a world with something so beautiful in it?
day 2:
Beautiful and cruel
Cruel when he bound your wrists, cruel when he put a tracking collar around your neck, cruel when he forced food down your throat when you refused to eat.
He said he'd be watching you; he picked you out after watching you for a bit, learning you.
day 11:
Sometimes you wonder if that's why you weren't afraid of him anymore; he knew you so well, he could lure you into dropping your walls, a laugh, or a smile.
But he couldn't quell the rebellion inside you.
You would find a way out of here if it killed you.
day 56:
It still hurts to sit down, but maybe you deserve it. He looked pretty hurt when you shoved the fork into his thigh and darted out the back gate.
He was getting more lax with you; he left it unlocked
today:
Nanami would be leaving for work soon, which makes your heart pound in your chest. You make sure the phone he gave you was charged, so that he could call you on his break if you wanted.
He was always hard to wait for him to come back from work, but you could be his good girl and do it. You were his good girl
Quarter-close leaves Nanami coming home later, more tired, and harder to read, while his wife realizes work is no longer the only thing consuming him.
One midnight call from Gojo turns an already rotten week into something much worse.
--------------------
Canon-divergent setup: Nanami stayed in finance, but he never fully got out of the jujutsu world. Sukuna has already been lodged in him for some time before this fic begins, and Gojo has been involved in managing that situation off-page. The story starts in the middle of an existing problem.
--------------------
Warnings: Workplace abuse/corporate exploitation, blood and injury, body horror, physical intimidation/restraint, coercion/blackmail, emotional manipulation, unhealthy relationship dynamics, non-con (not with the reader & is not described but is implied), possession/bodily autonomy violation, canon-typical violence, major character death, grief, murder. [It is not described in too much detail, though.]
Inspired by Fight Club but derailed into Black Mirror. WC: 5.6k.
hiiiii im bby buuny, and im a writer. i mostly write JJK-inspired fics, but feel free to request whatever. this blog will mostly focus on some darker themes, such as yandere characters and hybrid au's.
