sum: In an attempt to evade Satoru Gojo from finding him, Asiri becomes Sukuna's vessel — that is until he's recovered all twenty of his fingers and is strong enough to face the Honored One alone.
It doesn't seem so bad, right? Wrong.
In order for Sukuna to assume control of the body, Asiri has to go under. So he must drown her in his soul every time he wants to do what he does because the concept of cooperation is alien to him.
Asiri experiences this drowning as his memories of his misdeeds dressed up as her nightmares.
One night, however, he doesn’t drown her. More than that, he allows her to join him in the mission he decides to interfere with.
He’s making her worse, she’s making him softer.
cw: Canon-Typical Violence, Violence, Innate Domain Sex, Double Penetration, Anal Sex, Vaginal Sex, Inappropriate Use of Sukuna's Stomach Mouth, A lot of bickering, a lot of bantering, he doesn't let Asiri do things alone he's ANNOYING, he's also never shutting up, but he has double cocks so it's okay, Asiri should stab him sometime.
an: HI HELLO EVERYBODY IT IS I, THE MF INCAPABLE OF NOT MAKING AN ONESHOT INTO SOME UNHOLY ENORMOUS STORY! YAY!
This was Muse's request and it took me unholy amounts of time and drawings on a white board and insanity driven moments because I wanted to portray Asiri and Sukuna the best way I could, and if I failed to do so, I'm gonna kms 🙂↕️💫 jokes aside I loved writing them, I love Asiri (special mention to Zara my dear that does not exist in this story but exists in my heart mwah) and I love how she and Sukuna are always bickering like an old married couple. I hope you like it, Muse, and I hope it delivers everything you thought it would 🥹
Instead he steps through the shallow retreating water toward the throne. Bones crack faintly under his feet. The stormlight paints the hard planes of him in silver and shadow. Asiri watches none of it steadily. Her eyes keep slipping half shut. The world feels too far away and too vivid all at once.
At the foot of the throne, he finally lowers her.
Not into the water. Onto the broad stone step before it.
She sways.
His hand is there before she can fall sideways.
Annoying. Infuriating. Necessary.
Asiri lifts her head enough to look at him properly. At the four crimson eyes still fixed on her. At the way power hums in the air around him, richer now, deeper. At the terrible calm settling back over his face now that the finger is his again.
She wets her lips. Her mouth still tastes foul.
“You could have drowned me.”
“I could have.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why?”
There it is. The dangerous question. The one she has been carrying since the ruined storehouse, since the moment she woke dry instead of gasping under black water.
Sukuna’s gaze narrows.
“I am not required to account for my choices.”
“No,” Asiri says quietly. “But you are actively avoiding this one.”
A lesser man might flare. Might turn cruel to cover the thing being pointed at. Sukuna only goes still in that profound way of his, like the pause before a storm front breaks.
Asiri should stop, she knows better, but alas.
“You know what it does, don’t you?” she says slowly, testing. “Every time you drown me, you know.”
He says nothing.
The silence stretches.
She also knows better than to expect confession from him. Knows better than to expect apology. He would rather let the sky split open than yield that much softness plainly.
Still, she watches his face and sees it — the minute shift around the eyes, the set of his mouth too tight for indifference, the old fury turning inward because she has named a thing he wanted left in shadow.
“Your nightmares are… tiresome,” he says at last.
Asiri stares.
Then she barks out a disbelieving laugh.
“That is your answer?”
“They make you weak when you surface.”
There. There it is.
So baldly put. So ugly in wording. So naked in meaning that for a second she cannot speak at all.
Weak when you surface.
He has seen.
Of course he has seen.
He lives in her bones. He knows the tremor in her hands, the shiver in her breath, the way she curls up afterward and pretends not to be afraid to close her eyes again. He has known all along.
And tonight he could not bear it again.
The thought strikes deeper than she expects. It goes under pride, under flirtation, under the sharp bright banter she uses to keep so much of herself defended. It finds the soft hidden center she does not show anyone and presses there.
She covers it at once, because she is herself, and Asiri always has something to say.
“So,” she says, voice still rough, “you are capable of concern. How revolting.”
Sukuna scoffs.
“Do not mistake practicality for tenderness.”
“I would never accuse you of tenderness. You’d have me executed.”
“I would… consider it.”
“Liar.”
His eyes flash.
Her own mouth curves before she can stop it.
He looks at her for another long moment. Then he steps in, sudden, massive, unavoidable.
One hand closes around hers — the one still gripping his wrist as if some frightened part of her never received the message that the danger has passed. He does not pry it loose. He simply folds his fingers through hers properly, thumb pinning over her knuckles.
Another hand settles at her waist.
Another cups her cheek.
The last rests broad and warm at the base of her spine.
And then she is pulled flush against him.
The contact knocks what little breath she had managed to steady right back out of her. Chest to chest, thighs bracketed by his for a moment, one of his knees sliding between hers as Asiri feels, with dizzying clarity, how much of the night has been held in suspension between them.
The mission. The blood. The refusal to drown her. The way they moved together in the clearing. The way he held her above the black water while the power settled and the domain shook around them.
All of it here now, hot and unspent.
She should say something clever.
What comes out is,
“That throne remains hideous.”
Sukuna’s mouth twists.
“And yet you continue to climb all over it.”
“Only under duress.”
“Lying to my face? Bold brat.”
“Someone has to humble you.”
“You have never humbled me a day in your life.”
Asiri leans in until her forehead nearly brushes his.
“Keep telling yourself that, Masoyi.”
The title drips with mockery.
His grip at her waist tightens.
There is the answer.
She knows him. He knows her. Beneath all the cruelty and the clawing selfishness and the endless mutual provocation, there is this awful, dangerous fluency between them.
She knows exactly how his temper frays. He knows exactly when her bravado is hiding a bruise she will not speak aloud. She knows the particular stillness that means he is listening more than he pretends. He knows the tilt of her chin that means she is frightened and refusing to give the fear a public name.
Tonight she knows something else too.
That somewhere inside his monstrousness, her softness has made a home.
The knowledge is ruinous.
It is also dear.
He lowers his head.
The first touch of his mouth to hers is almost restrained.
Almost.
It is not gentle, but it is measured, as if he is giving her room to turn away. She does not. She never does when it is like this — when all the fighting has burned down to something hotter and quieter, when his attention narrows until she feels like the only fixed point in the whole impossible domain.
Asiri lets go of the last tight knot in her chest.
His mouth is warm, hungry under control, shaped by the same old arrogance that marks everything he does.
He kisses like he argues and like he fights, it’s certain, consuming, as if the outcome was decided before the first contact and only the pleasure of proving it remains.
She answers him with both hands braced against his torso, feeling the brutal architecture of him under her palms — pectoral, rib, oblique, the rise and shift of muscle beneath tattooed skin.
His hand on her cheek slides into the locs of her hair.
His thumb at the hinge of her jaw presses lightly enough to tilt her head where he wants it.
The hand at her lower back spreads, fingers splaying as if he could hold her more completely by covering more of her.
Asiri exhales into his mouth and feels him smile against her lips.
Smug brute.
She bites his lower lip for it.
A low sound rolls out of him — not pain, not surprise, something darker and far more pleased, something you would expect to hear from a very content tiger’s version of a domestic cat’s purring.
His stomach maw laughs under them, a horrible intimate vibration against her middle that would once have startled her and now only makes heat curl low in her belly.
They kiss again. Longer. Less careful.
His possessiveness comes alive by degrees. It’s not rough for the sake of it.
Simply more.
More hand at her waist, drawing her closer until there is no room for air. More pressure at her back. More insistence in the angle of his mouth, the drag of teeth at the edge of hers, the way all four of his eyes stay fixed on her even when she has to pull away for breath.
Asiri’s hands roam lower without permission from the sensible part of her mind. Down his chest. Across the hard planes of his stomach. Brushing his stomach’s maw. Over old scars. Over ink. Over the impossible strength of him.
His body goes taut beneath her touch.
There is satisfaction in that. Dangerous satisfaction. The kind that makes her lift her chin and say, softly,
“You see? Soft.”
Sukuna stares at her like he is considering eating her alive.
“You are making yourself very bold tonight.”
“You are making yourself very obvious,” she says, badly containing a smug smile.
One of his brows lifts.
“Obvious?”
“You woke me instead of drowning me. You let me fight beside you. You held me above the water.”
His hand in her hair tightens just enough to warn.
“And now,” she murmurs, because some part of her enjoys living at the edge of cliffs, “you are looking at me like you do not know whether to kiss me or threaten me.”
He kisses her again, harder, maybe to shut her up. Still, he does not kiss her like a man who has calmed down fully.
He is steadier than he was moments ago, steadier than he was in the wake of violence and fresh power and the long hunt, but steadier for Sukuna is not the same thing as restrained.
The finger has settled into him, yes. The world is no longer splitting at the seams around their shared soul, of course. The domain is no longer shaking itself apart under the pressure of another reclaimed piece of his body, sure. But all that force has not vanished. It has only changed shape.
Now it lives in his hands.
In the way they gather her.
In the way his mouth keeps returning to hers as though he has discovered some fresh greed and, for once, intends to indulge it slowly.
Asiri feels it in every place he touches. Not rough for the sake of roughness, not the kind of thoughtless urgency that leaves bruises before it leaves meaning, but a heavy, claiming intensity that seems to say she has already been chosen and the only thing left now is the pleasure of proving it over and over again.
One broad hand is once again folded around hers, their fingers laced in a way that should feel absurd on him and somehow does not. Another remains cupped at her cheek, thumb dragging once across the corner of her mouth before sliding back into her hair.
The lower set have settled once again where he seems to like them most tonight, one spanning the narrowest part of her waist, the other moving lower, gliding with patient purpose to the back of her thigh.
Asiri feels the shift in him before she understands it fully.
Then his palm presses under her leg and he draws her up.
The breath that leaves her is embarrassingly soft.
She hates that he notices immediately, and hates even more that he smiles into the next kiss because of it.
“Do not start looking so pleased with yourself,” she mutters against his lips, but the protest comes thin, all edge and no weight, and they both hear it.
Sukuna makes a low sound that is not quite a laugh and not quite a hum, something far more self-satisfied than either.
The hand beneath her thigh slides higher, joining the other, and suddenly she is lifted clean off the step in front of the throne, her legs parting around him out of instinct before settling where he wants them.
Her knees bracket his hips. Her calves slide behind him. Her weight goes into his arms and his body accepts it without effort.
Asiri has told him before that he is unbearable.
She has also told him, on a very different night, in a very different mood, that being carried by him is infuriatingly pleasant because he never does it like he is burdened. Never with that theatrical martyrdom men sometimes affect to make a woman feel grateful for her own body.
Sukuna lifts her the way a storm lifts roof tiles — because it can, because there is no world in which she is anything remotely too much for him.
Now, with the black water low and restless and the throne at his back, he begins walking with her in his arms.
Asiri’s fingers curl reflexively into his shoulders.
The laugh rises in her throat before she can stop it.
“That thing is still ugly,” she repeats, — because her mind can’t really go anywhere else at the moment or she’s embarrassing herself as he carries her — glancing toward the throne as it looms closer, all stacked bone and pale skull and stone veined dark with old age and older horror. “I know I’ve said it already, but it remains true every time I look at it.”
Sukuna does not even spare it a glance.
“Your taste has always been provincial.”
“My taste is excellent. Your furniture is deranged.”
“It is a throne.”
“It looks like a warning.”
“It is a throne,” he repeats, this time with enough amused patience to make the word sound like she is the unreasonable one.
Asiri presses her mouth into a line, as if that might hide the smile threatening again. It does not. He sees it anyway. Of course he does. His upper right hand leaves her thigh long enough to brush a loose curl back from her temple, calloused knuckles grazing the side of her face so lightly the touch almost vanishes before she can fully feel it.
Almost.
That is how it has been all night. Nearly one thing, nearly another. Never gentle in any ordinary sense, never sweet in the language most people would use, and yet full of these tiny impossible mercies that would mean nothing from anyone else and everything from him. Waking her instead of burying her. Letting her stand beside him. Holding her above the water. Carrying her now as if there is no question where she belongs in the wake of what they have just done.
He reaches the throne and lowers himself onto it in one smooth movement, not separating them at all in the process. The arrangement of their bodies simply changes. Stone and carved bone replace his hands beneath her for an instant, then he pulls her back over his lap, straddling him properly now, and all the heat between them comes rushing into clearer focus.
Asiri has never understood the mechanics of innate domains. She has stopped trying, mostly because every answer Sukuna gives is either mocking or incomplete, and because their soul-space obeys a logic that does not ask permission from her understanding.
Clothes exist here, though they do not always match the waking world. They change, shift to other pieces. Sensation blooms here with a vividness that often feels more real than the body outside. Touch bites deeper. Fear echoes louder. Relief can turn almost unbearable with its intensity. Pleasure too, she has learned, because once a thing reaches the soul it does not have to travel through nerves first. It simply is.
As if the domain, or maybe Sukuna himself, caught on her dwelling, the clothes they are donning have changed at some point. A beat. A blink of an eye.
From her outside’s — her outer body’s — clothes she earns a yukata, or maybe a softer piece of clothing that reminds her of a robe which envelops her body perfectly. And Sukuna, from being shirtless in his hakama, earns his usual yukata, both clothes colored in a deep indigo that Asiri learned he enjoys too much for how many pieces of clothing he has in variations of that tone. Both his and her clothing pieces carry minimal darker embroilment barely showing flowers and cranes
She thinks of all that for half a second before Sukuna’s mouth returns to hers and thought dissolves.
He kisses her with intent now, not merely hungry but focused, as though something in him has fixed on a conclusion and intends to arrive there with absolute certainty. The hand at her cheek slides to her throat, not squeezing, just resting there for a moment with quiet authority before traveling lower. The one at her waist traces the side seam of her clothing, then slips beneath the fabric at her back and finds skin.
Asiri shivers.
The shiver seems to please him more than it should.
“Do you need to look like that every time?”
She asks, even as her eyes are already falling half-closed.
“Like what?”
He asks it against her mouth, and the words are half eaten by the next kiss.
“Smug.”
“That is impossible.”
“There must be some limit to your vanity.”
“You keep discovering there is not.”
She wants to say something cutting. Something nimble. Something that would put that self-satisfied expression in its place. Instead one of his lower hands drifts over the back of her thigh again, sliding higher beneath the layered cloth of her domain-born garments and the answer leaves her entirely.
He notices that too.
The bastard notices everything.
His stomach maw is no less awake than the rest of him. Asiri feels the shift of it against her lower body before she feels anything else, the strange flex and eager anticipation that always seems just a beat ahead of reason when he gets like this.
The wide mouth stretches into something very like delight, and then the great tongue slides out, hot and wet and shameless in its enthusiasm, and the first contact falls between her legs and rips a sound from her throat before she can stop it.
Sukuna catches that sound with his mouth at once.
The yelp does not vanish so much as turn molten between them. He swallows it down, lips parting over hers, the hand at her jaw tilting her face where he wants it while the others keep her secure. One firm along her back. One supporting beneath her thigh. The last still holding her hand until his fingers finally unwind from hers, only so he can take hold of her other side and steady her with more certainty.
He learns fast, even in things he ought not need to learn.
He knows the rhythm of her breathing before she fully gives it to him. Knows the particular way her body tenses when she is startled and the different way it yields when she stops pretending she is not affected.
The great tongue below moves with awful purpose between her folds, and Sukuna makes a satisfied, low sound against her lips when he tastes the immediate evidence of how ready she already is for him.
“You always taste so fucking sweet.”
The sound of his voice, low, whispered, goes straight through her.
Asiri breaks the kiss only enough to glare at him.
That, too, is ruined by the fact that she is very obviously not convincing.
His expression turns obscene with smugness. It would almost be insufferable if she did not know him so well. If she did not know that underneath the visible arrogance there is something darker and more private moving through him tonight. Relief, perhaps, at having her here instead of beneath the water. Excitement, certainly, because the fight lit him up and the finger only made it worse.
But also that other thing.
That impossible thing she has only just begun to name.
He is taking care.
In his own language. In his own monstrous, possessive dialect. Still.
She hates that this matters to her.
She hates that it matters as much as it does.
The tongue below her moves again, and this time the glare she tries for collapses outright. Her fingers clutch at his shoulders, nails catching slightly in the fabric draped there.
Sukuna laughs softly against her mouth, letting the sound rumble through both of them.
“Oh, be quiet,” Asiri says, breathless enough that the command comes out ruined.
“I have not said anything, songbird.”
“You are thinking loudly.”
“That is because you are proving me right.”
“As though that is a novelty.”
“It is when you are this eager.”
The heat that floods her face would be humiliating if the rest of her body were not already too warm to separate one form of it from another.
She shifts against him in a restless attempt to reclaim ground and only makes things worse for herself. Sukuna’s hands tighten. Not enough to hurt. Enough to hold. Enough to guide the movement into something slower, fuller, more deliberate against the plane of his great tongue, letting her grind herself against it, letting it slick her up in saliva and letting the narrow tip of it tease and breach her entrance until her breath goes thin and the world outside his body seems less and less important by the second.
The storm rolls above them still, calmer than before, but matching her mood in a beautiful way. Somewhere beyond the endless edge of the domain the waking world continues on in ignorance as well. Some ruined compound still stands with blood on its stones. Some mountain path still carries the fading trace of Gojo’s search, the one he did not finish in time.
All of that should matter more for them. Asiri knows it should.
Right now it does not.
Right now there is only this terrible throne and the terrible king draped over it and the even more terrible fact that her body has learned him too well. Fighting beside him does this to her, she realizes. The adrenaline, the trust forced under pressure, the ugly intimacy of shared danger. It leaves her keyed open in a way that ordinary peace never does. Every time they finish a mission like this, every time she comes through the other side still breathing and turns to find him looking at her with that bright dangerous attention of his, something in her lights all over again instead of dimming.
He knows.
She knows he knows.
That is why he is so pleased now.
Asiri draws back enough to see his face and there it is, exactly as expected — that sharp little smirk, all satisfaction and private delight.
“You are insufferable,” she murmurs.
“You keep climbing into my lap. What does that say about you, hm?”
“You lifted me.”
“You stayed.”
Her answer catches. Not because she lacks one, she never lacks an answer, but because he is right and they both know it.
Sukuna’s eyes linger on her a moment longer, taking in her mouth parted from the last kiss, the flush high on her cheeks, the way her breath stutters every time the tongue below drags slow and certain where it wants. Then one of his hands slides up her spine and his fingers find the fastening of her clothes.
Asiri goes very still.
Not afraid still. Not even hesitant still.
Briefly aware again of the oddness of this place, this body inside a body, this domain that translates want into form as readily as it translates fear into water.
Maybe she’s a little grateful her clothes are not the ones she wore in the waking world — some softer version of a robe and underlayers the domain has draped over her because apparently even souls are not spared modesty unless Sukuna chooses otherwise.
He opens them as if the question has already been settled.
No fumbling. No hurry. Just the simple fact of his hands knowing what to do. The knots loosen. Fabric parts. Cool storm-air brushes the newly exposed line of her shoulder and chest. His gaze follows the movement of his own hands, unhurried and thorough, and the look on his face does something catastrophic to the center of her.
Asiri swallows.
He sees that too.
“Still pretending this is beneath your dignity?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says immediately.
“Poorly.”
“Shut up.”
His mouth brushes hers once, not even a full kiss.
“Make me.”
The answer should be sharp. She has a dozen ready by now. Instead the hand at his shoulder travels upward into his unruly cherry-blossom-pink hair, holding there, and when she tilts his face back down to her own the next kiss carries more of her in it. More heat. More invitation. Less pretense. Sukuna reacts at once, like a thing that has been waiting at the threshold and needed only the smallest sign to cross it.
The tongue below leaves her just long enough for her to miss it before it returns with renewed, delighted purpose. Sukuna’s breathing deepens. The hand at her back spreads wider. The other begins tracing idle, maddening patterns over the skin he has uncovered, circling softly enough the swell of her breast, feeling her nipple pebble and her skin goosebump, but not enough to satisfy, just enough to keep her aware of every inch he is not touching yet.
Asiri feels the hard lines of his body beneath the loose white hakama more clearly now, the hard living heat of him pressed close under the layered cloth. He is already wound tight. The fight did that. The finger did more. But this — this is what finally turns the intensity into something focused enough to burn.
She shifts again, no longer pretending it is accidental, pressing her wetness better against his clothed bulge, dragging only slightly.
The reaction in him is immediate. His mouth opens against hers on a rougher breath. One hand leaves her back and slides down, down, along the curve of her side and her hip and the underside of her thigh until he can gather her more securely against him.
The throne groans faintly beneath them.
Asiri almost laughs at the absurdity of that. Even his horrifying bone monstrosity of a seat seems to object to the pressure of him when he is like this.
Sukuna lowers his forehead to hers for one charged second, their breathing tangled.
Then he reaches for the front of his hakama between their bodies.
Asiri’s eyes drop before she can stop herself, and she’s already biting faintly the inner side of her lower lip.
The white cloth has done a terrible job of disguising anything. It hangs low enough that the shapes of him has already been obvious, heavy and rigid beneath the fabric, made worse by the fact that there are two of him and both are very clearly beyond patience at this point.
Still, seeing his hand close around the front fold and drag it lower sends a fresh wave of heat through her. He does it without ceremony, only enough to free what he wants freed, letting the rest of the garment stay around his hips in a careless white spill.
The sight of him has never stopped affecting her, no matter how many times they have ended up here.
Ancient monster, impossible body, beautiful in the kind of way beauty becomes dangerous once it exceeds ordinary scale. Tattoos everywhere. Muscle everywhere. Hunger everywhere. And this too, this shameless stark evidence of how much he wants her now, how hard the night has wound him, how little distance remains between violence and desire in him.
Asiri’s breath catches softly, her beautiful dark eyes widen just a fraction.
Sukuna hears it.
He looks up at her with a slow, wicked satisfaction that makes her want to slap him and kiss him again in equal measure.
“You stare,” he drawls, voice velvety and tone smug.
“I am… evaluating a threat.”
“There is no threat here.”
She gives him a look.
“That is an outrageous lie.”
His grin flashes, big, pointy canines that make her heart flutter a bit.
“Then perhaps a welcome danger.”
Before she can answer, he raises her more securely, guiding her with hands that are suddenly all purpose. Her knees press into either side of the throne. Her hands spread across his broad shoulders to keep balance. The domain-born remnants of her clothes have already been pushed open and aside enough that there is very little left between them now but heat and intent.
Asiri has had enough time inside this strange shared life to lose whatever fragile innocence once existed in her understanding of him.
She knows his body.
Knows the way he fits no ordinary category, the way excess seems almost built into his design, as if one body could not contain everything he is without becoming more than anyone sensible would ask for.
She knows what it means when he looks at her like this, when all four eyes go dark and intent and utterly fixed on her face rather than on what his hands are doing.
He likes watching her understand. Likes the exact moment knowledge becomes anticipation and anticipation becomes surrender.
He aligns both of them with the same infuriating confidence he does everything.
Not asking because in some important hidden way the asking has already been done in a dozen other forms tonight — in the waking, in the fight, in the black water waltz of them, in the hand she never let go of and the mouth she keeps coming back to and the fact that she is still here, still over him, still reaching for him when anyone sane would have fled long ago.
Asiri’s fingers flex over his shoulders, sliding just a tad up to the curve of his broad neck.
Their eyes meet.
Then she sinks down.
The first press of it draws a broken breath from both of them.
Not pain exactly, not the kind that alarms and hurts and urges her to flee, but the old fierce stretch of taking too much of him and making room for even more. Every single time it surprises her how complete the sensation is, how there is no half-measure anywhere in him. The feeling of being filled by Sukuna is always absolute. It forces awareness outward to every edge of her. Makes her too conscious of her own breathing, her heartbeat, the way her muscles have to slowly yield and adjust and accept what cannot be taken in carelessly.
He does not rush that either.
Which is another thing she hates and loves in equal measure. The world calls him impatient because it is easier to name the visible edges of him than the buried ones. But Sukuna, when he wants to savor something, is capable of terrible patience. Of a focus so complete it can feel like worship if she lets herself be stupid about it.
He lets her settle at her own pace. One hand firm at her hip. Another broad at the small of her back, the pads of his fingers brushing, dragging slowly, circling and drawing absent shapes as if coaxing her into letting go and let herself get lost in him. The upper pair returned to their preferred places now, one cradling the side of her face with infuriating tenderness, the other smoothing once over the bare skin of her shoulder before sliding down to her waist again.
The pain of the stretch only dulls when both of his cockheads go past the tight rims of muscles. Upper one into her cunt, lower one into her ass. Always like that. She always takes all of him, never less than that — because she takes all he offers, greedy little thing that she is.
Asiri stops when she reaches that place where he is fully seated inside her and there is nowhere left to go but deeper into feeling. For a few breaths neither of them moves.
The domain seems to hush around them.
She can hear the low rasp of his breathing. Feel the answering tremor in him, tiny but unmistakably there, the effort it takes to remain still while she adjusts to his girth, to his size.
Sukuna closes his eyes for one second, then opens them again and fixes all four on her with a look so openly hungry it would be almost indecent if there were anything left between them capable of pretending at modesty.
His mouth finds hers again.
This kiss is different.
Not the first blaze of heat, not the smug victorious one from moments ago, not the rough devouring relief from the shrine steps. This one is lower, deeper, thickened by the fullness between them and by the mutual pause they have both silently agreed to take.
It has a strange tenderness to it, though tenderness is still not the right word for him. It is too soft a word. Too mild. What he gives her is not softness. It is intensity without impatience. Want held still long enough to become almost unbearable.
Asiri melts into it before she realizes she is doing so.
His teeth close lightly on her lower lip at the end of the kiss, a small sharp sting that makes her catch her breath. Sukuna exhales something dangerously close to a purr, the sound dragged up from deep in his chest by the sheer satisfaction of having her wrapped around him like this.
The hand at her face trails downward, thumb skimming her chin before settling at the side of her throat.
“Asiri,” he says, and her name in his mouth right now sounds like ownership, like warning, like prayer said by the wrong kind of god.
She answers by moving her hips, a dragged, sensual sway.
Slowly at first.
There is no coyness or tease in that movement — it’s just that anything faster would be impossible to survive without losing the shape of herself entirely.
She rises only a little, then sinks again, learning the rhythm of him all over despite already knowing it, because every time is somehow different and every time his body takes her new in some small disastrous way.
A soft sound escapes her, half breath and half moan.
Sukuna’s eyes darken further.
He helps almost immediately — not taking over, not yet, simply guiding. One hand presses at her hip when she should slow, the other lifts slightly at the back of her waist when he wants more from the next movement.
He does everything with that infuriating certainty, as though he has a clearer map of her body than she does. Sometimes she thinks he might.
The pace builds by degrees.
The first moments are all heat and stretch and the slow gathering pleasure of friction paired with relief. Then it becomes something else. Something more consuming.
Asiri’s hands leave his shoulders only long enough to drag down over his chest, nails tracing the hard lines there, leaving those red angry marks in their wake before climbing back upward to hold on again.
Her forehead dips briefly to his. Then his mouth is at her jaw. Then lower, at the side of her throat where her pulse lives, and the path of his kisses is so deliberate it feels like he is writing something there with scorching lust and teeth and breath.
He bites, lightly at first.
The sensation flashes through her.
Asiri gasps and her hips stutter.
Sukuna makes that pleased sound again and does it once more, firmer this time, at the slope where neck becomes shoulder. Not enough to break her skin. Enough to mark. Enough that she will feel it here even if the waking body bears no sign at all.
“Terrible,” she breathes, though her fingers are already in his hair and her body is doing absolutely nothing to retreat.
“You are welcome.”
“That was not gratitude.”
“It should be.”
She laughs once, breathless and incredulous, because truly no one alive or dead speaks like him and survives being serious about it. The laughter breaks into another softer sound when the angle shifts and suddenly the slow measured pace they had begun with gives way to something with more momentum behind it.
His hands tighten, guiding her more surely now as two of them settle on the plush of her ass, helping the rise and fall, the drag and return, until her pulse is racing and the throne beneath them seems to hum and complain a bit with the heated rhythm of it.
Up and down.
Up and down.
The movement becomes less cautious, more instinctive. The pleasure deepens from hot to overwhelming in beautiful increments. Asiri feels it travel through her center, then outward to her ribs and throat and fingertips.
She feels it in the way her breath can no longer decide whether to come as a laugh or a gasp. In the way her nails keep dragging over his skin, leaving vivid red trails that seem to fascinate him each time she makes another. In the way Sukuna’s own restraint begins to visibly strain, his jaw tightening, his lower hands digging into the flesh of her ass and hips with enough force to leave half-moons if the domain cared to preserve them.
His mouth moves from her shoulder to her jaw again, then to the hinge of it, then back to her lips. He kisses her between every sharper breath, between every more forceful lift of her body and return. It is impossibly intimate for him. That is what unsettles her most nowadays. Not the heat, not the violence of sensation, not even the fact that the domain seems to dim and brighten around them in time with what they are doing.
It is how intimate he makes it.
How he refuses to let this become merely physical, even though he could. Even though it would be easier for both of them if he let it stay simple.
Instead he keeps her face tipped toward his with one hand whenever he wants to look at her — and she feels as if he constantly wants her eyes with those four carmine ones boring into them. He keeps taking her mouth as though that is as necessary as anything else happening between them. Keeps burying those tiny impossible clues into the shape of the night until she cannot pretend anymore that this is only the aftermath of a good fight and reclaimed power.
No.
It is that, yes. It is hunger and adrenaline and the strange bright relief of survival. But it is also something ritualistic already, something moving toward pattern. A bond they are making not with vows or sweetness or the civilized language of ordinary love, but with repetition and trust and heat and the frightening comfort of being known completely by the wrong person.
The thought shivers through her.
Maybe he feels it, because Sukuna draws back just enough to look at her fully. Her hair is half wild around her face. Her lips are swollen from kissing. Her shoulders and throat are flushed. She knows what he sees because she can feel all of it from the inside and because the expression that answers in him is almost reverent in its greed.
Asiri, dizzy and breathless and still moving over him in that building rhythm, almost smiles.
His hands shift.
The next guided descent steals the rest of the word right out of her mouth. Asiri closes her eyes on a shaky breath. Sukuna watches her through it, not looking away, and there is a smugness there still, but also that other deeper thing — the one that has lived under the entire night and is finally too obvious for either of them to dodge.
He likes this.
Not just the pleasure. Not just her body answering his. Not just the relief of power after danger.
He likes this specifically.
The way she ends up in his lap afterward. The way banter melts into kisses. The way violence leaves them both too lit up to sleep and too aware of each other to pretend it means nothing.
A ritual, she thinks.
Definitely not gentle. Never neat. But a ritual all the same.
The realization makes her move more deliberately. Less like she is being guided, more like she is choosing every part of it now. Sukuna notices instantly. His grin flashes wider. One of his hands slides from her hip to the back of her thigh, urging her higher, then drawing her down again with almost maddening slowness before letting the pace build once more.
Asiri bends forward and bites at his shoulder in revenge for his expression. His laughter is low and warm and entirely too pleased with her. She drags her nails down his chest after, and the new red tracks blooming there make something possessive and proud unfurl inside her that she had not expected and does not examine too closely.
They are making each other different.
That is the dangerous truth of it.
He has made her sharper, less frightened of her own appetite, more willing to stare down the ugly things in herself without flinching.
She has made him patient in places he never intended to become patient. Attentive in ways he would never admit aloud. Willing, impossible as it is, to spare her the black water when the cost finally became too visible even to him.
He is making her worse.
She is making him softer.
And somewhere in the middle they have both stopped pretending not to enjoy it.
The pace turns harder after that, as if naming it even privately changes the air. Sukuna’s control frays just enough to show in the set of his mouth, in the rougher breaths, in the way his hands no longer merely guide but begin taking more of her weight and moving with undeniable hunger behind every lift and drop. Asiri lets him. Her head falls back once, exposing her throat, and he bites there too, at the side this time, then soothes the sting with his tongue and his mouth before returning to her lips.
The storm above them flashes white.
The throne does not groan now so much as seem to welcome the pressure of them, old bones and stone built to witness exactly this kind of unholy devotion.
Asiri’s muscles are beginning to tremble with the effort and the pleasure of it. Sukuna notices that as well, because of course he does. One arm slides more securely around her back. Another keeps its grip at her thigh. He changes the angle again, almost imperceptibly, but enough that the next motion tears a raw helpless sound from her. She hears his answering grunt and the sound alone nearly undoes her.
Her fingers clutch at his shoulders, then climb to his hair again, diving in the softness of it. She drags him back to her mouth, kissing him hard enough to feel his smile disappear into something darker. His mouth opens under hers. The kiss turns deep and hungry and just a little unruly. When they break, both of them are breathing hard.
Asiri rests her forehead to his.
“You are a menace,” she breathes, though the words barely hold shape.
“And you are not nearly frightened enough of that.”
“I fight beside you. Fear lost its dignity a long time ago.”
The answer pleases him more than it should. She can feel it in the way his arms tighten around her and his cocks twitch deep inside her. In the one slow kiss he places just under her jaw like a seal pressed into wax.
Then, against her skin, low and rough with want, he purrs,
“Good.”
Asiri shivers and keeps moving with him, letting the rhythm carry both of them higher into that bright, consuming place where the domain seems to pulse around the edges and every breath feels too small for what it needs to hold. Her body is no longer stiff with the remnants of fight or pain or the terrible force of the swallowed finger. All of that has become this instead.
This relentless heat. This almost unbearable need. This intoxicating certainty that however wrong the rest of the world might name them, here they fit in all the ways that matter.
When the intensity finally crests and breaks through her, it feels for one instant as though the storm overhead has fallen straight into her spine.
Her whole body locks, then shudders. Sukuna swallows the sharpest sound she makes with another kiss, one hand fisting in her hair, the others holding her through it with a steadiness that borders on possessive reverence.
He follows not long after.
She knows him too well not to hear it in the torn edge of his breathing, in the sudden violence of stillness before the release, in the way all four eyes fix on her as if he means to burn the sight of her into some private ancient chamber of himself.
When it hits him it comes with a low sound dragged out of the deepest part of him and a tension through all that enormous body that makes her cling tighter for the sheer force of it.
Afterward they do not separate.
Not immediately. Not for a while.
The storm above quiets to a low rolling growl. The black water below the throne settles into slow heavy movement, lapping at the stones lazily. Asiri remains where she is, collapsed half against him, still straddling his lap, her cheek to his shoulder now because it is easier than holding herself upright without trembling.
Sukuna’s hands have changed again. No longer guiding. No longer demanding. Simply there. One broad palm moving lazily up and down the line of her back. Another resting warm and firm over her thigh. One in her hair, occasionally combing through the damp locs there with surprising patience. The last spread over the small of her back, keeping her close without any need to prove he can.
Asiri’s breathing evens out by degrees.
She should move. She knows she should. Should sit up properly. Should say something cutting and clever and reclaim at least a shred of the balance she has lost over the last hour. Instead she chooses to remain draped over him, listening to the slow thunder of his heart under her ear and the quieter distant echo of her own through the same body in the waking world.
The quiet between them is different now too.
Full.
No space for awkwardness or emptiness.
Dense with everything the night has already said and everything neither of them has the temperament to state plainly.
Sukuna breaks it first because he’s through and through, an asshole.
“You claw like a cat.”
Asiri, eyes still closed, lets out a dry soft laugh.
“I’ll take that as praise from the man that acts like an overgrown grouchy feline.”
“It was a complaint.”
“You are still covered in my handiwork, so your complaints feel unconvincing, Masoyi.”
His hand in her hair tightens just enough to count as warning — as if he meant any threat by that.
“You are too proud for your size.”
“I’m proud exactly enough of all of my doings, thank you very much.”
“I am also proud of your doings.”
“I’m never letting you take this back.”
That earns her a breath that might almost be fond exasperation from anyone else and is something far rarer from him. His hand on her back resumes that slow pass again, as if he cannot quite stop touching her now that the fever of the moment has broken.
Asiri lifts her head enough to look at him.
He is still beautiful in that terrible ruined way of his. Hair mussed. Mouth swollen. Red marks scored over his chest and shoulders where her nails dragged. The sharp lines of his face less severe now that satisfaction has taken some of the edge from them. All four eyes boring into her as soon as she moves, because even at rest he does not stop watching.
He notices her scrutiny and one brow rises.
“What.”
The answer comes out of her before she can decide whether to keep it.
“You look… less insufferable after, I’d say.”
His expression goes flat with offended dignity, and he huffs briefly.
“Impossible.”
Asiri smiles, slow and tired and very pleased with herself now.
“Like a tiger after eating. Soft, undisturbed.”
He stares at her for a long moment.
Then his mouth curves, just enough. Dangerous. Knowing. Entirely too handsome for a man who has done everything he has done in this life.
“If this is softness,” he says, “you would not survive kindness.”
She laughs properly then, and the sound seems to please him in some deep private place because his gaze changes all over again.
Not hunger now. Something more wicked and less loud.
Want returning in a new shape.
Asiri sees it and feels her own body answer with exhausted warmth rather than fresh urgency. Her thighs ache pleasantly. Her lips still tingle. Her bones feel loose at last after the violence of the mission and the finger and the climb into this.
She could drift here, she thinks. On his lap. In his arms. In the black-hearted center of the one place in the world that should not feel safe and somehow, impossibly, has begun to.
The thought is dangerous enough to sober her.
She leans back just slightly, enough to search his face.
“This cannot become a habit,” she says, and hears even as she says it that what she means is not I don’t want it.
What she means is I want it enough to be afraid of it.
Sukuna, damn him, hears that too.
His hand rises from her thigh to her face, thumb brushing slowly under one eye where the last of the earlier tears from the finger’s pain had dried without her noticing. He looks at her as if she is a question he solved hours ago and has been waiting for her to catch up.
“It already is, little bird,” he says matter-of-factually, without arrogance or mockery.
Asiri’s breath catches.
Because yes.
Yes, it is.
They are already doing it.
The fighting, the bickering, the black-water reprieves when he can stomach them, the heated aftermaths that leave them less sharp-edged with each other for a little while afterward. The terrible mutual adjustment. The ritual they have been building without naming.
Mission, survival, clash, heat, collapse.
Over and over until now it has become its own kind of language.
She looks at him and sees that he knows it too.
The admission lodges somewhere deep.
Her answer, when it comes, is quieter than either of them usually allow.
“That seems unwise.”
Sukuna’s thumb pauses at her cheek.
“Most worthwhile things are.”
She studies him, almost suspicious of the sentence because it sounds too much like wisdom and not enough like the unrepentant brute she knows.
Then again, this is the same man who notices when she resurfaces shivering. The same man who would rather bite his own tongue off than call concern by its proper name. Contradiction lives in him like blood.
“You are corrupting me more by the minute,” she says at last, because it feels safer to return to the line they have already spoken once tonight, safer to anchor themselves in something half teasing and half true.
Sukuna’s eyes lower briefly to her mouth, then rise again.
“You were never a saint.”
He shifts her then, not to move her away but to settle her more comfortably against him, one arm braced under her thighs again, another across her back so that her spine rests against the curve of the throne and his body at once. The motion is too practiced already. Too natural. As if somewhere in him he has accepted the shape she takes in his arms and no longer fights the fact.
Asiri exhales and lets herself be arranged.
“And I,” he says after a moment, voice lower now, “am aware of what you are doing to me.”
The words fall between them with astonishing weight.
Sukuna does not look away. Of course he does not. He makes confession sound like challenge, truth sound like a thing with teeth.
Asiri wets her lips.
“Which is?”
One corner of his mouth lifts.
He does not answer immediately, because why would he. Instead he studies her with infuriating care, like a man deciding how much to reveal and hating that the question exists. The hand at her back resumes its slow path, once, twice.
Finally he says,
“You make me indulge inconvenience.”
“That is a very cruel way to describe affection.”
“Who said affection?”
She stares.
Then she laughs under her breath, because really, truly, there is no one like him.
“You are hopeless.”
“You are too hopeful.”
“You are terrified of saying anything plainly.”
His upper hand slides to the nape of her neck. Firm. Intimate.
“I have said enough.”
He has.
Any other man could drape himself in poetry and make promises until dawn. Sukuna gives her fragments. Practicalities. Half-insults. Thinly disguised admissions. And because he is who he is, because every one of those fragments has cost him something to let loose into the air, they land harder than softness ever could.
Asiri looks at him and knows.
Knows what he cannot quite shape. Knows what sits inside all the gestures he refuses to call tender. Knows that the black water did not rise for her tonight because he could not bear watching her come back from it one more time. Knows he will continue to be horrible in a hundred ways because that is his nature, and that none of it changes the fact that when it matters, when it truly matters, his arms close around her first.
She leans in and kisses him again, not hot this time or urgent, just sure.
Sukuna receives the kiss with a quiet that means more than a reaction ever could. His hand slides up into her hair again. His thumb rests at the base of her jaw. He lets her set the pace of it, perhaps because he has finally understood she is not withdrawing, perhaps because he has had enough victory tonight and can afford one small surrender. When the kiss ends, he does not chase her mouth immediately.
He only looks at her.
Asiri smiles faintly.
“You are getting softer by the day,” she murmurs to him.
His gaze narrows. His upper lip twitches in that false irritation she learned how to read.
“And you are getting insufferably perceptive.”
“I have always been perceptive. You were simply too arrogant to notice.”
“On the contrary. I noticed. I chose not to reward it.”
“There it is again,” she says. “As though praise from you is treasure.”
“It is.”
That startles a laugh out of her.
“God, you are an impossible man.”
“And yet you are still here, wrapped around me.”
His contentment and arrogance are endless, and the look on his face is to die for — if smugness was a person, it would wear Sukuna’s expression.
She is, though. He’s right.
She is still in his lap. Still in his arms. Still held in the center of the domain that once terrified her every single time she entered it and now has begun, against all reason, to contain some of the most intimate moments of her life.
There is blood on the memory of the night. There is a compound left ruined in the waking world. There is another piece of him reclaimed and settled under her skin and through his soul. There is danger waiting at dawn and Gojo somewhere beyond it and all the ugliness of tomorrow already preparing to arrive.
And still.
Here.
With him.
It makes no sense.
Asiri has long since learned that the truest parts of her life with Sukuna rarely do.
She lets her head settle back down against his shoulder. This time when she does it, he shifts just enough to make the position easier, tilting his body so the angle suits her better. Again that tiny impossible practicality. That monstrous version of care.
She smiles into his warm skin without meaning to.
The domain grows quieter around them. The storm slows. The black water, denied her tonight and perhaps still sulking for it, laps softly at the base of the throne like something patient and disappointed. Bone gleams pale in the dark. And far beyond the visible edge of the innate space there is the suggestion of dawn pressing against the waking body, not here yet but inevitable.
Asiri should dread going back.
She does, a little.
The waking world is harder on tenderness, even the crooked brutal kind they make. But she also knows the difference now. Knows that there will be no drowning when they leave this place tonight, no black water swallowing her just so he can walk the world unbothered.
The knowledge rests deep and warm inside her, heavy as a secret.
Sukuna’s hand drifts lazily over her arm now. Up and down. Once more through her hair. She nearly falls asleep to it, ridiculous as that is.
Then he says, very near her ear,
“Do not think this absolves you.”
Asiri blinks one eye open.
“Absolves me of what, exactly.”
“Your attitude.”
She lifts her head enough to give him a long suffering look.
“My attitude is one of my best qualities.”
“It is your loudest flaw.”
“It matches yours.”
“It exceeds mine.”
She laughs outright.
“That is rich.”
His mouth curves.
“You were bickering with me while covered in blood.”
“You were enjoying it.”
He lifts one shoulder minutely under her.
“Perhaps.”
The admission is tiny. As usual, it feels enormous.
Asiri studies him a little longer, then lets out a quiet breath and rests against him again. Her voice is soft when she speaks next.
“I did not hate tonight.”
Sukuna’s fingers pause in her hair.
She almost regrets saying it, because it sounds too vulnerable, too open, too easily misunderstood. Not that she liked the killing. Not that the bloodshed sat well with her. It does not. Some part of her will always look back on the compound and the torn bodies in the gravel and feel unease coil low in her stomach. But the rest of it—
Waking dry.
Fighting beside him.
Hearing him tell her with his body that he trusted her to stand there.
Being held above the water instead of drowned beneath it.
This.
She did not hate this.
Sukuna resumes stroking slowly through her hair.
When he answers, his voice is lower than before, stripped of almost all mockery.
“Nor did I.”
That settles somewhere even deeper than the rest.
Neither of them speaks for a while after that.
There is no need.
The domain holds them. The throne holds them. Sukuna’s body, vast and warm and still half-vibrating with the reclaimed power of his finger, holds her most of all.
Asiri lets the silence stretch because for once it does not feel empty. It feels inhabited. Full of everything they have managed without saying and the few dangerous truths they have let slip through anyway.
Eventually she murmurs,
“You know this will make us both worse.”
Sukuna’s hand leaves her hair only so he can tilt her chin and make her look at him again. There is no smugness now. No taunting. Only that terrible steady certainty of his.
“Yes,” he says.
“And you do not care.”
“No.”
She searches his face, maybe hoping to find the line where reason lives. She should have known better.
A smile touches her mouth despite herself.
“You are an awful influence.”
His thumb drifts once over her lower lip.
“And you are a persistent one.”
The answer satisfies her more than it should.
Asiri closes the small distance again and kisses him one last time, slow and lingering, tasting storm and blood and the strange private calm that has settled over both of them. When it ends she remains close enough that their noses nearly brush, her breath mingling with his.
Outside this place the night is ending.
Inside it, for a few final stolen moments, they remain exactly like this — too close, too warm, too aware, his arms around her, her weight in his lap, the aftermath of danger having turned once more into something intimate and ruinous and impossible to mistake for anything temporary.
A ritual, then.
A terrible one.
A beautiful one.
The kind of thing that, once begun, only deepens.
When the time finally comes for the domain to thin and the waking world to call them back into blood and bone and all the consequences waiting there, Asiri knows what will happen the next time there is a mission, the next time danger leaves them both lit from the inside, the next time the black water waits to see whether Sukuna will offer her to it or not.
She’s fairly sure this is not the last dance they had together.
The forestry road curves uphill. The compound waits beyond a gate made of steel mesh and old wood, half-hidden beneath cedar shadows. Wards cling to the posts. Not elegant ones. Functional. Ugly. The kind made by people who believe enough layers of fear can become skill if pasted in the right order. Talismans flutter under the rain, their ink bleeding at the edges, but the cursed energy beneath remains taut.
Asiri studies them through Sukuna’s senses and her own. That, too, is strange. Sukuna sees cursed energy like meat, structure, weakness, density. Asiri feels it like weather.
To him the barrier is a poorly stitched hide stretched across the entrance.
To her, it is a pressure change, air before a storm, the headache that comes before thunder.
“There are six people near the outer yard,” she thinks. “Three at the gate, two on the roof, one inside the watch room pretending his breathing is quiet.”
Sukuna’s attention flickers toward her.
She preens inwardly.
“What? You are not the only one with eyes. Mine are simply prettier.”
“Your eyes are presently mine.”
“Borrowed. Don’t become attached.”
His presence brushes against the back of her mind, rough with satisfaction he does not bother to disguise.
“You hid the range of your perception.”
“I didn’t hide it. You never asked.”
“I should carve open the part of you that thinks technicality is victory.”
“And yet here we are, me being technically victorious.”
A thin wire runs from the left gatepost to the fence, nearly invisible under rain. Not a mundane tripline. Cursed. It hums with the promise of alarm.
Their right hand rises.
Sukuna means to cut.
Asiri catches his intention and recoils.
“Wait.”
The hand stills.
It happens so fast that both of them notice.
Sukuna has stopped because she asked.
The realization lands between them like a dropped blade.
Asiri feels his anger flare at once, hot and embarrassed, though he would flay her verbally for calling it embarrassment. She presses forward before he can punish the moment by doing something needlessly ugly.
“That wire feeds back through the western post and into the roof charms. If you cut it, the alarm runs inward, not outward. You will get inside, yes, congratulations, terrifying man, but they will move whatever you want before you reach it.”
“You saw that?”
“I felt it.”
“You could have mentioned this before I wasted my hand in the air.”
“I was busy admiring how dramatic you looked.”
“Asiri.” He warns. Third time in one day.
“Fine. Let me do it.”
“No.”
“Sukuna, let me do it.”
“No.”
“You do not even know what I am about to do.”
“You are about to do something imprecise and smug.”
“I am about to do something delicate and smug.”
He growls inside her skull, and her toes curl in the mud from the sensation. Not fear exactly. Not anymore. Her fear has learned to braid itself with anticipation around him, and she has decided not to examine that tonight, or perhaps ever.
Sukuna’s grip on the body loosens by a fraction.
Not enough to give her control.
Enough to let her reach.
Asiri exhales through their nose. Her cursed energy stirs low in the abdomen, then higher, spreading through the chest, down the arms. It has always answered like weather arriving from far away.
In another life, another era, it came with drums, songs, a full moon over festival fires, the bright astonishment of being seen before being ruined.
In this life, it comes under a stolen coat in the rain with the King of Curses pressed against her soul like a storm-cloud that learned arrogance.
She sends a thread of charged mist from their fingers.
Sukuna’s cursed energy wants to sharpen it into a blade. She resists.
“No cutting,” she hisses. “For once in your very long life, have some grace.”
“I have grace.”
“You have precision, that’s not the same.”
The mist coils around the wire without touching it. Asiri lets it breathe. Lets it learn. The alarm charm tastes her energy and, for a dangerous second, thinks to scream. She hums softly inside the soul, not with the mouth but with memory. A griot’s trick. A performer’s persuasion. A small song made of pressure and timing. The mist vibrates at the same frequency as the ward, then slips beneath its notice like a dancer crossing behind a turning crowd.
The wire goes slack.
The roof charms dim one by one.
Sukuna says nothing.
Asiri tries very hard not to grin.
“You may praise me now.” She smirks, smug as promised and expected.
“No.”
“I accept admiration in many forms. Silence is not one of them.”
“You will trip over your own pride before the night ends.”
“My pride has excellent balance and so have I.”
The body moves.
Not like before.
Before, when Sukuna controlled them, Asiri felt herself dragged behind each gesture like a shawl caught on a thorn. Tonight she is in the movement. She does not choose every step, but she understands them as they happen. His weight shifts through her hips. Her lighter frame adjusts differently than his instincts expect. He compensates with irritation. She compensates with commentary.
He scales the fence in a smooth rush that makes her stomach drop, fingers finding holds where none should exist. At the top, one of the roof guards turns.
Sukuna’s technique flashes.
Asiri knows the shape of Cleave now. It’s not sight, it’s simply decision and intent.
A line drawn through the world with absolute belief in separation. The guard opens before the sound reaches him, body folding in a spray that the rain instantly tries to soften.
Asiri flinches.
Sukuna notices.
Of course.
“We have killed before,” he points out.
“You have killed before. I have been present under protest.”
“You tore Zenin Takeshi apart with your own storm.”
Her anger spikes so violently that the rain around them pops with static.
“Do not use him as an example to make yourself comfortable.”
“I am never uncomfortable.”
“Another ugly lie.”
He drops from the fence into the compound yard. Mud splashes. The second roof guard sees the body land and fumbles for a whistle. Asiri feels Sukuna prepare another cut, annoyed and effortless.
She moves first.
Not fully and not without him. But she reaches through the shared arm and flicks two fingers upward. The rain between the body and the roof turns white for a blink. Lightning leaps not from the sky but from every wet surface at once, a net of charged veins. It catches the whistle, melts it, then strikes the guard’s shoulder hard enough to fling him backward through the roof tiles. He vanishes with a crash into the room below.
Sukuna stills.
Asiri stills too.
The yard echoes with broken ceramic.
“That,” she says, forcing calm over the tremor in her mind, “was less messy.”
“He is still alive.”
“I noticed.”
“You missed his heart.”
“I aimed for his shoulder, not his heart.”
“Why?”
“Because he was holding a whistle, not a child’s severed head.”
“He will alert the others by screaming.”
“Not if you move quickly, mighty King. I assumed you could handle urgency. Was I wrong?”
The insult works exactly as intended. Sukuna surges forward with a grin that pulls at their mouth, all teeth and pleasure.
She feels the delight in him, not merely at violence, but at being challenged without being weakened. It moves through the body like heat. It makes her want to laugh and curse him in equal measure.
The watch-room door slides open.
A man steps out with a talisman blade in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He takes in the body beneath the yard lamp — Asiri’s brown face, rain tracking over her slightly flushed cheeks, the black marks beginning to surface along her skin where Sukuna’s presence presses too close to the visible world. His eyes go wide, not at her, but at the mouth that appears along her cheek, curved in a smile that is not hers.
Sukuna uses her mouth this time.
“Run,” he says.
The man obeys for three steps.
Then Sukuna takes his legs.
Asiri recoils at the wet collapse, but not as badly as she once would have. That frightens her more than the blood spraying. There was a time she would have doubled over, sick and furious, shouting at Sukuna until he mocked her for wasting air.
Tonight her stomach turns, but her mind also notes the corridor beyond the open door, the shadows moving behind the papered windows, the pulse of the object deeper underground.
He is making her worse.
The thought arrives with no drama, which is why it hurts.
She thinks of all the things that once horrified her cleanly.
Blood on tatami. A corpse hidden behind a festival stall. A man’s last breath. The first time she watched Sukuna eat without any apology. The first time she did not look away fast enough.
She is not numb now — she refuses to grant herself that mercy. She feels everything. She simply keeps moving despite it all.
What does that make her?
Sukuna hears the question because he is too close not to.
“It makes you alive, brat” he says.
“Do not answer thoughts I did not give you.”
“You think very loudly.”
“You listen greedily.”
“I am trapped inside you. Your moral whining is difficult to avoid.”
She should snap back. She wants to. But the man on the ground is sobbing, clutching at what remains below his knees, and Asiri’s throat tightens. She hates him for being there. She hates Sukuna for doing it. She hates herself for understanding why.
The man is reaching for a charm at his belt.
Sukuna notices.
Asiri notices too.
This time, she does not tell Sukuna to stop.
Cleave passes through the man’s throat.
The sobbing dies in a gurgle and ceases altogether.
The rain becomes the loudest thing in the yard.
Sukuna’s presence turns toward her, intent and bright.
“You allowed that.” He muses.
“He was reaching for an alarm charm.”
“You could have stopped his hand,” he drawls and there’s some kind of challenge in his tone.
“I could have.” Asiri agrees with a lump on her throat that is soon swallowed.
“But you did not.”
Asiri looks through their shared eyes at the dead man. Her mouth is dry. Her heart is not racing as fast as she expects. That seems unfair.
Shouldn’t the body protest? Shouldn’t the soul buckle?
Instead she feels a miserable clarity, and underneath it something darker.
Relief that the sound stopped.
Her voice, inside, is smaller than she wants.
“Do not look so pleased.”
“I am exceedingly pleased.”
“You are a real bad influence.”
“I have been called worse by better people.”
“That is not the defense you think it is.”
“I am not defending myself. I am admiring my work.”
She turns on him inside the soul, though the body continues through the gatehouse corridor with his long, predatory confidence fitted awkwardly into her smaller frame.
“I am not your work.”
She seethes.
“No,” he says, after a pause that is almost thoughtful. “You are not.”
The answer disarms her so thoroughly she nearly misses the curse lunging from the ceiling.
Sukuna does not.
Their body twists.
A wet, pale thing drops through the dim corridor, mouth split too wide, fingers jointed backward. Its cursed energy stinks of the room it was born from — fear cultivated, fed, and stored. Not a wild curse. A kennel curse. Something bred in captivity for men who think controlling horror makes them less afraid of it.
Asiri’s anger finds a cleaner target.
“Oh, that is vile.”
Sukuna’s grin widens.
“Now you sound like me.”
“Do not insult me while I am agreeing with you.”
The curse snaps toward their face.
Sukuna raises a hand, but Asiri floods the corridor with fog before he cuts. Thick, warm, storm-charged. The curse passes into it and shrieks, its body flickering as illusionary lightning strikes from inside the vapor. Not enough to kill. Enough to confuse. Enough to make it think there are ten bodies in the corridor instead of one.
Sukuna takes advantage beautifully.
He moves through the fog with the pleased efficiency of a butcher in a familiar kitchen. Dismantle slices the curse into pieces too precise to be called hacking. Asiri feels his technique pass through her cursed mist and alters its charge around each cut, making the fog cling to the curse’s fragments so they cannot re-form.
The curse dies in segments.
For a breath after, neither speaks.
The cooperation hangs there, undeniable.
Sukuna breaks it first because he is Sukuna.
“Your fog is less useless when you stop using it to hide.”
“It is not for hiding. It is for disorientation, concealment, suffocation, misdirection, temperature control, and, when I am feeling merciful, dramatic entrances.”
“You forgot fleeing, brat.”
“I didn’t forget. I simply omitted.” She shrugs.
“You fled through fog in Nagano, I recall it well enough.”
“I strategically relocated through fog in Nagano.”
“You fell down a drainage slope.” He points out.
“Because you startled me by opening an eye in my palm!” She snaps.
“You screamed.” He sounds a little too amused for Asiri’s taste. “And landed in garbage.”
“I have forgiven myself.” She ends it.
“I have not.”
Despite herself, Asiri laughs.
It comes through their actual mouth before either of them can stop it.
The sound bounces down the corridor, bright and terribly out of place among blood, fog, and dying talismans. Sukuna freezes the body. Asiri freezes inside it. For one vulnerable instant, laughter leaves her open.
Then a door slams somewhere below.
Voices erupt.
“What was that?”
“Gatehouse is down!”
“Move the relic. Now.”
Sukuna’s delight returns in full.
“There,” he says.
Asiri gathers herself around the ache the laugh left behind.
“They called it a relic.”
“They are fond of small names for great things.”
“You mean one of your fingers.”
“Yes.”
“Why is it here?”
“Because men with more courage than sense believed they could bargain with Gojo by offering him bait.”
Asiri’s stomach drops.
“They contacted him?”
“They attempted to.”
“That is an important detail you might have shared before we walked inside.”
“I did not want to listen to you panic all the way.”
“Becoming aggressively practical is not panicking.”
“You threatened to bite through your own finger when you first learned who Gojo was. I will keep my first statement.”
“It was a reasonable response to unreasonable information.”
The body descends a narrow stairwell, bare feet silent despite the boots because Sukuna refuses to obey ordinary physics when hunting.
The air grows colder underground. Concrete replaces wood. Fluorescent lights buzz behind wire cages. The smell changes too — antiseptic, mold, old talisman ash, sweat.
Asiri feels rooms opening around them, each containing a different wound. Curses behind reinforced doors. Tools on metal trays. A bloodstained chair with straps. Shelves of jars clouded with fluid.
Her breathing catches.
Sukuna feels the catch and slows by half a step.
It is so slight no one else would see it. But Asiri lives where the decision starts. She feels the restraint before the body shows it.
That is the third time tonight.
No drowning.
A stopped hand.
A slowed step.
She does not know what to do with the evidence of his care, if care is the word, if the word does not burn up from the indignity of being placed near him. Sukuna is not gentle. He is not good. She does not think softness redeems a blade from being sharp. But he knows the smell of rooms like this on her soul. He knows what white walls and restraints do to the place behind her ribs.
His voice enters her carefully enough to be almost offensive.
“Do not fracture now.”
Her pride rises on instinct.
“I was not planning to. I have an itinerary.”
“Mm, you are shaking.”
“The body is shaking. Perhaps you are cold.”
“I do not get cold.”
“You do in my body if I say so.” That’s petty and untrue, yet she doesn’t want to be wrong, nor she wants him to see through her — even though she knows very well all four of his eyes know every inch of her soul.
“Asiri.”
There it is again.
Her name. Bare.
Her eyes sting, which is insulting. The tears do not fall. She would evaporate them with cursed energy before giving either of them the satisfaction.
“I am fine,” she mutters. “I’m functional.”
“Liar.”
“It’s what we need right now, so it will suffice!”
For once, he does not argue.
They continue.
At the bottom of the stairs, a curse user waits with a spear made from bone and wrapped in sutras. He is younger than Asiri expects. Not young enough to earn her mercy automatically, but young enough that her heart makes the attempt without permission.
His hair sticks damply to his forehead. His hands tremble around the weapon. Behind him, another man in an embroidered robe is unlocking a vault door with frantic precision, muttering about containment seals.
The young one sees Asiri’s face and hesitates.
Not because of Sukuna.
Because of her.
“You are the vessel,” he says, voice cracking around fear and disbelief. “They said you were suppressed.”
Asiri feels Sukuna prepare to speak with her mouth, no doubt something designed to peel the young man’s nerves raw. She shoves hard against him from inside.
“Let me.”
“No.”
“He is looking at me.”
“He is looking at his death.” Sukuna hisses.
“He is looking at me.” Asiri barks and that’s final.
Sukuna’s impatience scrapes against her. Then, astonishingly, he gives her the mouth.
Asiri inhales.
Her own voice emerges softer than she intends, but steady.
“Move aside.”
The young man’s grip tightens.
“I can’t do that. If he gets that finger, if he grows stronger, do you understand how many people could die?”
Sukuna’s amusement curls around her spine.
“Let me answer him.”
Asiri ignores him.
“Do you understand what the people here are doing?”
“They are trying to stop him.”
“They are feeding curses in cages below this floor. They are cutting open people they call compatible. They are making offerings of bodies while pretending the word research keeps their hands clean. So please do not stand in front of me and ask if I understand death.”
His face twists.
“You think he is different? He’s a curse!”
“No.” The answer hurts, but she refuses to make it pretty. “I think he is honest.”
Sukuna is silent.
The young man’s eyes flick to the black markings curling along her cheek.
“That is enough for you?”
Asiri’s laugh comes out brittle.
“No. But it’s something. And tonight something is what I have.”
The older man at the vault finally turns.
“Do not listen to her. The vessel is compromised. Kill the body if needed — Satoru Gojo can extract the remains.”
For a second, all Asiri hears is the rain above them, though it cannot possibly reach this far underground.
Kill the body.
Extract the remains.
She feels her expression change.
Sukuna feels it too.
His delight does not flare this time. Something else does. A wrath so cold and immediate that even Asiri’s anger steps back from it.
“Ah,” he says inside her, very softly. “There it is.”
The young man looks sick.
“Master Ikeda, she is still a person.”
“She ceased being a person the moment she became a vessel," the old man spits that word like it's poison.
Asiri smiles.
It is not Sukuna’s smile.
That frightens the older man, she can feel it.
“How convenient for you,” she speaks and there is a tad of venom enthralled in her words. “Does that happen often? People ceasing to be people right when you need permission to hurt them?”
The older curse user snaps a talisman between two fingers.
“Restrain her.”
The young man moves too late, and he does not move toward her. He turns, horrified, perhaps to stop his master, perhaps to argue. It does not matter. The talisman ignites. Chains of cursed script erupt from the floor and walls, streaking toward Asiri’s limbs.
Sukuna begins to cut.
Asiri says,
“No. Mine.”
So he lets her.
Not fully. Never fully. But enough.
Thundercloud Dream rises.
The air thickens with black vapor. Lightning hums beneath her skin, turning pain into direction.
The chains strike her wrists, ankles, throat — and pass through fog. For half a second her body becomes something less obedient than flesh, edges blurred by storm and illusion. She slips forward, not teleporting exactly, but following the path lightning would take if lightning were a woman with a grudge.
She appears behind the older man.
He jerks around.
Asiri drives their palm into his back.
Not Sukuna’s technique. Hers.
Electricity blooms through the older curse user’s nervous system with such precision that his body locks upright. His eyes bulge. His mouth opens, but no sound escapes. She feels every point of contact — wet fabric, ribs beneath, the frantic flutter of a life that has spent years authorizing pain from a safe distance and now cannot negotiate with its own muscles.
Sukuna murmurs,
“Kill him.”
Asiri’s hand trembles.
The young man stands frozen near the vault, spear lowered.
He is staring at her as if she is the monster and the answer at once.
The older man’s thoughts brush against her cursed energy in panicked fragments.
She thinks of the people in the rooms behind them.
She thinks of waking in alleys after Sukuna’s violence and hating him for making survival feel like complicity.
She thinks of the fact that this man would dissect her and call it necessary.
Her voice comes out low.
“Sukuna.”
“Yes?”
“If I do this, do not make that smug sound.”
The silence inside her is almost reverent.
Then he says,
“I would not dare.”
A lie.
But a beautiful one.
Asiri releases the lightning.
The older curse user burns from the inside without flame. Not cleanly. Not kindly. His body jerks once, twice, then collapses in a heap that smokes against the concrete.
The smell is terrible. Her stomach lurches hard enough that Sukuna has to steady the body against the vault door.
For a moment, she thinks she might be sick.
Sukuna does not mock her.
That is almost worse, she will think later, when she has the mind for it.
The young man drops his spear.
It clatters across the floor.
“Please,” he says, breath shallow, eyes shining with terror. “I didn’t know about the lower rooms. I swear I didn’t. They told us this was containment, that the sacrifices were already dead, that the vessel was gone. I thought—”
“Stop,” Asiri says, because every word from him is a weight and she cannot hold many more. “Do you have keys to the cages?”
He nods quickly.
“In the watch office! There are override seals, too, but if you break the main array, some of the curses might get loose.”
Sukuna’s interest perks.
“Let them.”
Asiri answers without moving her mouth.
“No.”
“They will kill the remaining vermin.”
“They will also leave this place and kill whoever lives downhill.”
“You are making assumptions.”
“I am using basic reasoning. You should try it when blood is not available.”
“To release captive curses into a building full of curse users is efficient.”
“To release starving curses bred from pain into the countryside is monstrous.”
“I am monstrous, you have said so yourself.”
“I’m aware. I live here.”
The young man watches her face as silence stretches, not knowing that an argument is taking place behind her eyes.
Asiri turns their head toward him.
“Run uphill to the road, then into the trees. If you warn anyone, if you take one step toward a phone, if you try to be clever because guilt has made you brave, he will find you.”
The young man swallows.
“He?”
Sukuna takes the mouth just long enough to smile.
“Me.”
The boy flees.
Asiri lets him.
Sukuna allows it, though displeasure radiates from him like heat from stone. She waits for the lecture. It does not come. Instead he turns the body toward the vault.
The door is thick, layered with seals, old blood worked into the hinges. Inside, something pulls at them.
A finger.
His finger.
Asiri has felt one before. That is the beginning of all this, after all. This one calls differently now that Sukuna is awake in her, a grotesque homing instinct through marrow and soul. It wants to come home. It wants to be eaten. It wants reunion with the part of him lodged beneath her heart.
She rests their hand against the vault.
“Will it make you harder to contain?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Will Gojo feel it?”
“If I devour it carelessly.”
“Can you do anything carefully?”
“I have kept us out of his reach for weeks, have I not?”
“You also threatened a train conductor because he asked for a ticket? The bar is a little low, Sukuna.”
“He asked twice.” He frowns.
“You hadn’t bought one.”
“His assumption and persistence were offensive nonetheless.”
She presses her forehead lightly to the vault door. The metal is cold. Her reflection warps in it, her own eyes shadowed by Sukuna’s markings, her mouth set in a line too tired for twenty-something skin.
She looks like herself.
She looks like him.
She looks like a third thing neither of them has agreed to meet for the time being.
“If you become stronger,” she muses, “will you drown me worse?”
“No.”
The answer comes too quickly again.
She closes her eyes.
“Do not lie to spare my feelings. I hate that.”
“I do not spare feelings.”
“You spare mine sometimes.” She comments lowly.
Silence.
It is so complete that she opens her eyes.
Inside, on the black shore, Sukuna is standing closer than before. Not at the water’s edge now. Near her. Close enough that she can see the faint movement of his tattoos, the tension in his lower left hand.
His expression is not gentle.
But it is not cruel.
“You are too frayed after,” he says.
The words strike harder than insult.
Asiri’s face heats.
“I am not fragile.”
“You are.”
“I survive it well enough, don’t I?”
“Survival does not make a thing unbroken, little bird.”
Her throat closes.
There are many things she can answer. Too many.
She can tell him he has no right to speak of brokenness when he is usually the one holding the hammer. She can tell him she was broken before him, by men less honest and rooms less ancient. She can tell him fragility is not the same as worthlessness, though she knows he did not say it was. She can tell him she hates him for noticing how she trembles when he gives the body back, how she pretends to be busy cleaning blood so he will not see her eyes, how she talks and talks and talks because silence after nightmares feels like being underwater again.
Instead she says,
“That was a very rude way to say you are worried about me.”
His lip curls up.
“Do not push your luck.”
“I will push whatever I like. I have just killed a man. I am feeling emotionally complex and therefore entitled to be annoying.”
“You are always entitled to be annoying.”
“As praise goes, that is terrible, but I accept it.”
“I did not praise you.”
“You implied consistency, which honestly is practically devotion from you.”
His eyes flash.
“Open the vault at once, woman.”
“Changing the subject because you are losing? That’s cliché.”
“Open it before I do something that upsets your delicate ethics.”
“My ethics are robust, unlike yours, that are dead.” She snaps back.
“They limp.” He presses.
“They dance.” She raises an eyebrow, defiant.
“Badly.”
She knows he’s being petty, but she gasps, scandalized enough that for a brief second grief loosens its grip.
“Now that was cruel. I am an excellent dancer. You know this. You saw me dance before you ruined my life.”
“I improved it.” His grin makes it seems like he believes his absurd words.
“You possessed me, like a fucking demon.”
“You were going to die.”
“I am still deciding whether that counts in your favor.”
“You swallowed me.”
“Under duress.”
“You chose.”
“I chose the least immediate death in a room full of men discussing my organs.”
“And now you stand here alive, stronger, less naive, and with better company.”
Asiri stares at him across the inner shore.
He stares back, unashamed.
Then, because he is impossible, because he is arrogant enough to recast catastrophe as courtship, because some terrible part of her finds this so like him that affection rises before judgment can stomp on it, Asiri starts laughing again. A tired, cracked laugh that hurts her chest and makes the real body lean against the vault.
Sukuna looks at her as if she has done something far more alarming than kill a curse user.
“You're absurd,” she says.
“You are hysterical.”
“I'm not hysterical. I'm coping.”
“Poorly.”
His face changes.
Only slightly.
The mouth softens first, almost imperceptibly, then his eyes. It is gone quickly, buried beneath impatience, but Asiri sees it. He knows she sees it. His irritation returns too late to hide the evidence.
Asiri turns back to the vault.
“Fine. We do this together.”
“I do not require—”
“Together, Sukuna. Or I flood your inner shrine with every song I know, and I know very many. Some of them have choruses.”
A beat.
“You would not.”
“I'm a griot. Threatening oral tradition is very serious business.”
He exhales, and the sound passes through their shared lungs.
Then his cursed energy coils around hers.
Asiri almost loses focus.
It is not like before, when he overrides. This is not drowning. This is his power aligning with hers, massive and dark, edged enough to cut thought, but held — held — around the storm she gathers.
The feeling is so intimate she wants to slap him. It is like having another hand close over hers from inside the skin. Not restraining. Guiding? No. She refuses guiding. Accompanying, perhaps. Matching her pressure where the seals resist. Lending weight where her lightning needs force.
The vault door groans.
Seals ignite one by one.
Sukuna’s technique slices through the locking array at the exact places Asiri’s charged mist reveals.
She senses what he cannot — the hidden loops meant to trigger a signal if severed.
He cuts where she opens.
She bends where he strikes.
The metal heats beneath their palm.
Concrete cracks around the hinges.
The door falls inward.
The room beyond is small and cold.
The finger rests on a pedestal wrapped in silk, blackened and rotten looking, radiating malice so dense the air around it seems bruised.
Talismans crawl across the walls. A bell hangs above it, silent. The moment the door opens, the bell begins to tremble.
Sukuna steps forward.
Asiri grips him from inside.
“Carefully.”
“I heard you the first time.”
She sucks her teeth.
“I am saying it again because I enjoy living.”
“Your trust wounds me, brat.”
“Good. Build character.”
Their hand reaches for the finger.
The bell rings once.
Far away, impossibly far and impossibly near, something answers.
White pressure.
Cold brilliance.
A presence like distance collapsing.
Gojo.
Asiri’s entire soul flinches.
Sukuna’s reaction is immediate.
Awareness sharpened to a killing point. He seizes the finger, rips it free of the talismans, and for one second the whole compound screams. Wards ignite. Doors slam open below. Curses howl in their cages. Thunder cracks hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling.
“We need to leave,” Asiri urges. “Right fucking now!”
Sukuna lifts the finger toward their mouth.
“Not here.” She chides him, unbelieving.
“He is not here yet, there is time.”
“He felt it already, you know it, you felt it too!”
“Let him.”
He’s smug. Asiri feels like she’s talking to an overgrown sentient cat refusing to let go of something very important that belongs to someone arriving at any second now.
“Sukuna.”
He pauses.
There it is again — her voice stopping him.
Asiri does not waste the miracle.
“If you eat it now, he follows the flare straight to us. If we leave, if I wrap it in storm and you suppress the resonance, we get distance before you do your revolting little snack ritual.”
“It is not a snack ritual.” He starts, although this is the worst time possible for such discussions.
“You’re about to eat a mummified finger like it’s a fucking breadstick”
“It is mine.” He raises his brows across the shore as if this would make the whole thing less revolting.
“That makes it worse! Breadsticks at least taste good.”
“You swallowed one.”
“Under duress,” she repeats, louder.
The compound shakes again.
Sukuna growls, but the finger lowers.
“Move!”
This time, he gives her the legs.
Asiri runs.
Not like him. Like herself.
She is smaller than he was in life, lighter, built for rhythm rather than brute force, but the body is strong with both of them in it. She takes the corridor at a sprint, lightning gathering under each step. Sukuna cuts down two curses that burst through a side door before she has to slow. She throws fog behind them, thick, charged, filling the hallway with false bodies peeling off in different directions.
A curse user turns the corner with a bow drawn.
Sukuna raises their left hand to kill.
Asiri sees the woman’s face, the shock, the uncertainty, the way she glances toward the lower rooms as if she, too, has only just understood the shape of the place she guards.
“Do not!” Asiri pleads.
The arrow flies.
Sukuna snarls and tilts their head just enough for it to slice past their ear. Blood warms the side of their neck. His patience snaps.
Asiri moves with him this time.
Not to stop.
To alter.
Cleave takes the bow, the woman’s fingers around it, and a slice of wall behind her. She screams and drops, alive but no longer armed. Asiri stumbles at the sound.
Sukuna catches balance with a curse under his breath.
“You are slowing us!” He barks at her, furious.
“She can still run. She has feet!”
“You are fucking infuriating.”
“And yet you keep me awake and witnessing your mess. Keep going!”
The words come out before she measures them.
Sukuna says nothing.
They reach the stairwell as alarms finally begin to wail, a mechanical scream layered with spiritual chimes. Asiri hates the sound immediately. It crawls into her teeth. She floods the stairs with fog and lightning, not attacking anyone yet, just blinding, confusing, making the space belong to her. Sukuna feels the architecture through the vibration of the body’s feet and cuts through the landing above before guards can form a line.
They emerge into the yard.
Rain hammers down now, no longer mist. The sky has opened under Asiri’s temper. The outer wards flare blue-white, then red, trying to lock the compound shut.
Sukuna laughs.
It is her mouth, her voice, but his joy.
Asiri should hate it.
She does hate it.
She also feels the laugh climb into the storm and shake the clouds.
“We break the eastern wall,” he says.
“No,” she answers. “Too obvious.”
“Obvious works when nothing can stop you.”
“Gojo can.”
A flash of irritation.
“Do not say his name as if invoking a god.”
“I say his name as if identifying a problem. You should try naming problems. It saves time.”
“I know my problems.”
“Do you? Because one of them is your emotional constipation, and I have not heard you acknowledge it.”
They are sprinting across the yard while bickering like an old married couple. A curse bounds after them on six limbs, head split into petals of teeth. Sukuna cuts two limbs away. Asiri calls lightning down through the exposed metal fencing and drives it into the curse’s spine. It collapses, twitching.
Sukuna sounds almost breathless with amusement inside her.
“You choose this moment?”
“This moment is what I have!”
“Your priorities are deranged.” He scoffs.
“My priorities are surviving, evading Gojo, insulting you when necessary, preventing rural casualties, and maybe finding dinner if the night improves.”
“Dinner.” He sounds a bit incredulous.
“I am hungry! You forget you need to eat food when possessing me!”
“We are being hunted and you are thinking about snacking?”
“And? Digestion doesn’t pause for plot.”
“You are not eating after seeing that storage room.” He says and she bristles because how dare he speak as if he knows her that well?
“I will eat out of spite.” She retorts through gritted teeth.
He seizes the body for a powerful leap over a drainage ditch. They land hard. Asiri’s knee twinges. He absorbs most of the impact before she can complain.
Another piece of evidence. Four times, now.
She stores it away like contraband.
Instead of the eastern wall, Asiri drives them toward the old maintenance shed near the tree line. She had noticed it earlier from the truck, half-collapsed, roof rusted through. Sukuna does not question her until she throws their shoulder into the door and finds the buried service tunnel beneath a rotted mat.
He looks through her eyes at the dark opening.
“Hm.”
She glows with smugness.
“You may praise me now.”
“No. You are simply becoming useful.”
It lands too warmly.
He realizes.
She realizes.
For a second even the alarms seem farther away.
Asiri clears her throat.
“Terrible praise, but better than nothing. I’ll allow it.”
“Generous brat that you are.”
“I am known for mercy.” She smiles as they descend into the service tunnel.
It is narrow, damp, and full of roots pushing through cracks in the concrete. The darkness is almost complete. Sukuna sees well enough, but Asiri sends tiny flickers of lightning through the moisture beading along the walls, a dim blue pulse to mark the path.
Behind them, the compound roars with confusion, bodies, curses, chaos.
Ahead, the tunnel slopes down, then curves north under the fence line.
Sukuna holds the finger wrapped in silk against their chest.
Asiri can feel it pulsing.
“Suppress it,” she says.
“I am,” he grits.
“More.”
“If I suppress it more, I suppress you with it.”
That makes her pause.
“Oh.”
His tone sharpens.
“Not so bossy now, mm?”
“Shut up. I am annoyed that the situation is technically considerate.”
“I can remedy that.”
“You cannot. I have already perceived it. Too late. You have been caught being careful.”
“I should have drowned you.” He grouses, but she’s already victorious. The words have no force.
Not enough.
Asiri walks them through the tunnel, and for a while neither speaks.
The quiet is not empty — it is full of the night behind them, the dead and living they left in pieces, the finger in their hand, Gojo’s distant pressure like a storm made of light searching the horizon. It is full of the strange shape of shared control.
Asiri feels Sukuna in every movement, not as a theft but as a second pulse. He feels her too. She knows because when her ankle rolls slightly on loose concrete, his energy braces before she can fall. When his instinct turns toward an old side exit, she catches the draft and corrects him toward the newer break in the tunnel wall where rainwater carries the smell of open air.
They are becoming fluent.
That scares her.
Not enough to stop, though.
At the tunnel’s end, they climb into a ravine choked with wet grass and broken branches. The forest rises around them, black, breathing.
Far behind, the compound lights flash through the trees. Farther still, beyond ordinary senses, something shifts in the world.
Sukuna goes still.
Asiri does too.
The pressure is not here, not yet, but it has turned toward them more fully. Gojo has felt the flare, perhaps not the exact location, but enough to begin narrowing the night. The air tastes suddenly bright, like snow before it falls.
Sukuna’s rage coils.
Asiri’s fear follows and obviously he notices it immediately.
“He will not touch you.”
The words are so immediate she cannot breathe around them.
Not us.
Not the finger.
Not me.
You.
Asiri stands in the ravine with rain running down her face and blood drying at her ear, and she feels something in her threaten to open. She shoves pride against it quickly, both hands, all her weight.
“Very possessive for someone who regularly throws me into nightmare water.” She mutters in a ridiculous attempt of not feeling what she is definitely feeling.
“I am the only one allowed to torment you.”
“What’s with the sudden romantic vibe?”
“There is not a drop of romance in my statement.”
“It sounded like something a jealous mountain would say to a village before causing a landslide.”
“You compare me to a pile of dirt now?”
“You are old, stubborn, and hazardous to settlements.”
He laughs.
This time he lets it happen.
Their body laughs in the rain, standing among wet grass and broken branches while alarms wail in the distance and the strongest sorcerer alive turns his attention toward them from somewhere beyond the night. The laugh is low, rough, too big for her throat, but hers threads through it, lighter, disbelieving. It feels wrong. It feels alive.
Asiri wipes rain from their cheek with the back of their wrist.
“We need distance,” she notes.
“We need altitude.”
“Can you behave if I fly? Can you avoid wrestling control away from me midair because your pride gets itchy?”
“Perhaps.” That’s probably the best she will get for now.
“That’s not a bit comforting,” she says but she knows she will budge.
“I was not trying to comfort you.”
“You keep doing things badly and pretending they do not count, but they do.”
The sudden call out shuts him up.
She smiles despite everything.
The storm gathers above them at her call. Not the full rage of it. A low ceiling of charged cloud rolls over the ravine, masking their cursed energy under natural thunder.
Sukuna wraps his presence tight around the finger, compressing its pull until it becomes a hard, hot coal against their sternum.
Asiri opens the wind.
It lifts around their body, tugging at the coat, the scarf, the damp curls that have worked loose near her temples. For a moment, she feels the old dance in it — feet on festival earth, hands cutting air, drums speaking to the blood. Grief moves with her. So does violence. So does Sukuna, dark and attentive, wrapped through her ribs like a second spine.
She rises.
The ravine drops away.
Trees become a black sea beneath them.
The compound shrinks behind, flashing red through rain. Asiri keeps them low enough to avoid the clean skyline, fast enough that the wind stings tears from their eyes.
Sukuna does not take control. He adjusts around her, lends strength where the current bucks, cuts loose branches before they strike, suppresses their energy when her anger flares too bright.
Half a kilometer becomes one. One becomes three.
The white pressure does not vanish, but it blurs.
Asiri exhales.
“See?” she says. “Delicate and smug.”
“You will be even more insufferable after tonight,” he says and for once it sounds not harsh. She can swear there is a hint of amusement in his tone.
“Maybe you deserve it.”
“Undoubtedly.”
That answer is too honest. She nearly falters in the air.
Sukuna steadies them without comment.
They land near an abandoned roadside shrine at the edge of a mountain path. The place is small, moss-eaten, with a cracked stone fox staring through rainwater as if deeply unimpressed by both of them. Asiri lowers the body to the ground beneath the shrine’s shallow roof.
Her knees ache. Their hands are shaking now that motion has stopped. Blood has dried under the nails. Mud cakes the boots. The stolen coat is torn at the sleeve.
For the first time all night, Sukuna recedes enough that she can feel the body as mostly hers.
Mostly.
Not abandoned nor drowned.
Shared.
The finger remains in their right hand.
Asiri looks at it and makes a face.
“I know this is culturally complicated for you, but that is disgusting.”
“It is power.”
“It is a rotten, nasty, ugly ass finger,” her eyes squint as if it would make the finger more tolerable when blurred.
“It is my finger, brat.”
“It has been separate from you for a thousand years. At this point it’s an artifact with delusions of intimacy.”
He appears beside her in the inner world, not across the shore now, but near enough that when she turns inward she finds him seated on the black stone, one knee raised, watching her with an expression too satisfied to be trusted.
“Eat it,” he orders.
“Don’t say it like that,” she grimaces.
“I am not asking you to chew it.”
“Thank the merciful heavens for small blessings,” she deadpans.
“We do this carefully. You will keep your storm wrapped around the intake. I will take the brunt of the flare.”
She studies him.
“Will it hurt?”
His brows lift.
“Me?”
“Don’t be obtuse on purpose! I am tired and armed with weather, I’ll shock your ass.”
A pause.
Then he says,
“Yes.”
Asiri hates that one honest syllable more than a dozen evasions.
She looks down at the finger again. In the real world, rain drips from the shrine roof in uneven lines. The stone fox watches them unchanged and unaffected by her dismay.
Life continues with offensive calm.
“You could have drowned me for this part,” she sighs. “Just saying.”
“I could still.”
“But you will not, right?”
His face gives nothing away.
But he does not contradict her.
Asiri sits under the shrine roof, back against damp wood, and lets the storm coil inward. Around the finger first, then around the hand, then through the throat. Sukuna’s cursed energy gathers beneath hers, vast, dark, waiting.
She lifts the finger.
“Say please,” she murmurs.
His eyes flash.
“Do not test me while holding a piece of my soul.”
“It’s because I am holding it that I feel powerful enough to be irritating.”
“You feel powerful because you are.”
That steals the breath straight from her.
He seems irritated with himself the moment it leaves him, but he does not take it back.
Asiri’s eyes burn again.
This time, one tear does escape, hidden quickly by rainwater. Sukuna sees anyway and his expression shifts, something ancient and violent turning toward the tear as if he might kill it for daring.
She laughs wetly.
“You are so terribly bad at this.”
“At what?”
“Being kind.”
“I was not being kind. I am never kind.”
“You were. Badly.” She insists.
“Eat the finger, Asiri.”
“See? Terrible.”
But she does.
It is awful.
Disgusting.
Not the physical act.
Sukuna spares her more of that than she expects. The finger dissolves into cursed energy the moment it crosses the threshold of the mouth, dragged inward by the part of him waiting beneath her sternum.
The taste is still there — bitter, old, like ash steeped in blood. Nasty.
Asiri chokes once, and Sukuna clamps down around the reflex — not to silence her, but to keep the power from spilling outward.
Then the flare hits.
It is not pain like a wound. It is expansion. A room forced to become a palace in one breath.
They are inside.
Inside the unholy sacred place where their souls meet.
Asiri falls to her knees on the edge of the black water, coughing around pain that still has no shape. Above her, the sky of the domain is vast and wrong, all dark cloud and bruised light bleeding. The throne rises ahead from a field of bones and old ruin, bovine skulls stacked into obscene grandeur, white against the dark like something excavated from a nightmare and polished for a king.
And there he is.
He sits at first upon nothing and then is standing before she can mark the movement, enormous and magnificent and terrible. Four arms. Four eyes. Tattoos flowing over a body built like calamity given human symmetry only because the world lacked a better vessel for him. His stomach maw grins wide with sharp teeth, tongue flexing once in anticipation or hunger or both. His white hakama hangs low on his hips. The black haori is absent tonight — bare skin and ink and old scars glow dim under the stormlight.
The awe of seeing him in his full outrageous self never leaves.
Neither does the danger.
The black water is rising fast around her calves.
Pain still wracks through her in aftershocks, each wave making her vision blur. The finger’s power is tearing through them, being absorbed, claimed, settled into the old monstrous architecture of him.
Usually this is where she drowns.
Usually the water takes her under and his power has the domain to itself. He can manage it, she doesn’t need to be there to witness.
Tonight, before the water reaches her waist, Sukuna is there.
The black water rises, not to drown her this time, but because the whole inner world is shaking.
Asiri cries out.
Sukuna is there.
One immense arm hooks around her back. Another catches under her knees. He lifts her bodily out of the rising black water as if she weighs nothing at all.
Asiri gasps and clutches at him without meaning to. Her fingers knot in the front of his hakama. Her forehead nearly hits his collarbone.
The water surges higher below them, black and slick and hungry.
It does not touch her.
Sukuna holds her above it.
The realization comes slowly through the pain. Through the shaking. Through the terrible reordering force still rumbling in her bones.
He is not letting her drown.
He is not letting the water have her.
The storm overhead cracks once with silent lightning. The entire domain trembles under the power settling into him. Sukuna plants his feet wide and does not move. He simply holds her.
His body is heat and iron and fury.
His teeth are bared, not at her, but at the force of his own returning power.
“Hold your storm,” he snarls.
“I am trying, you overgrown calamity!”
“Try better,” he tightens a fraction his arms around her.
“I hate you a little for this,” she blurt out amidst the havoc.
“No, you do not,” he responds and he sounds too sure.
Probably because he knows he’s right.
She wants to laugh. She wants to scream. She does both, perhaps.
The real body arches under the shrine roof, lightning cracking through the air around it in delicate, branching lines. Asiri wraps the flare in thundercloud, muffling it beneath layers of storm, illusion, rain, wind.
Sukuna compresses from within. For one terrifying second, the power pushes toward the sky anyway, toward the distant white attention.
Then Asiri sings.
No words at first, just sound — low, shaking, pulled from somewhere older than language, older than fear.
A griot’s voice under a mountain shrine in a country that once made her foreign and dead and reborn.
The storm listens.
Her soul listens.
Even Sukuna goes still around her, because he remembers the first time he heard her sing, and the memory arrives now without blood dressing it into nightmare.
Two arms around her body. One hand at the back of her head, shielding. One arm under her knees. His stomach mouth snarling at the rising water as if daring it to climb further.
Asiri’s breath stutters.
She is still shaking, but not in terror now. Not like before. The trembling is exhaustion stripped bare. Too much pain. Too much cursed energy. Too much relief she does not know how to name.
Her hand slips from his clothing to his wrist.
She does not let go.
Sukuna looks down at her. The expression on his face is unreadable to anyone else. To her it is not gentle exactly. Not soft. It is far rarer.
Protective.
Possessive in a way that has learned restraint for one narrow, impossible person.
His thumb brushes once along the side of her face. Just once.
“You are alive,” he says.
Asiri tries to laugh and gets only a weak breath out.
“Thank you for the update.”
His upper right hand tightens minutely at her waist, either in annoyance or relief. With him those two things often overlap.
The black water heaves, then begins at last to settle. The violent tremors through the domain ease. The pressure in her bones stops climbing and starts, grudgingly, to find its new shape.
The flare folds inward.
The bells quiet.
The lake lowers.
When the last shock passes, she sags against him.
For several moments there is only rain.
Then Sukuna says, low against the top of her head in the inner world,
“You did well, songbird.”
Asiri is too exhausted to make a proper show of deflection.
“That praise sucked less, but still needs improvement. You nearly killed us with your horrible finger.”
“You insisted on commentary throughout.”
“You needed it. Your rituals lack warmth.”
“My rituals have survived centuries without your warmth.”
“And look how lonely they became.”
His arms tighten again.
Asiri feels it and does not mention it. Some mercies should be quiet. Even hers.
The real body breathes under the shrine roof. Their pulse slows. The white pressure in the distance drifts uncertainly, searching along false trails of storm she has left scattered through the mountains. For now, Gojo does not find them.
The first thing Asiri learns about drowning is that water is rarely water.
It is not always cold.
That is something people who have never drowned inside someone else’s soul do not understand.
Sometimes the water is warm, almost kind, a heavy dark thing closing over her face with the tenderness of a hand meant to soothe a fever.
Sometimes it tastes like iron, incense, old rain, temple smoke, meat cooked over coals, blood drying under fingernails.
Sometimes it comes with sound — chanting, screaming, wet laughter, a blade passing through bodies with such ease that her sleeping mind mistakes it for silk being torn.
In Sukuna’s soul, it comes disguised as heavy smoke.
As a mouth full of ashes.
As rain falling upward through a burning village.
As a woman’s scream getting caught in a butcher’s wet laugh.
As a child’s ankle bracelet chiming once, then never again.
As a banquet hall where the walls breathe and the meat on the plates has fingers.
He never lowers her into darkness gently. There is no mercy in the way he takes his own body back from hers. There is no warning except the pressure behind her eyes, the sudden cold at the base of her skull, the old, awful understanding that she is about to be swallowed by something older than language.
Sometimes Sukuna drags her under so abruptly that she has no time to argue.
Other times he lets her see it coming.
Asiri comes to think that this is worse, because it gives fear time to wrap its sharp claws around her throat before closing them like a vice — or like a steel collar.
There is always a moment before he takes control, a pause within the place where her soul and his meet. She has come to think of it as a shore, though that gives it too much softness.
There is no sand. There is black stone, slick and shining beneath a red sky with no stars. There is a lake that does not ripple unless Sukuna wants it to. There is a shrine across the water that cannot decide if it wants to be ancient or butchered open. Bones hang from its eaves. Bells sway without wind. Sometimes a door opens there, and she hears chanting in languages she does not know but understands anyway, because Sukuna’s memory does not require translation.
It simply enters her. It makes itself at home. It sits at her table and eats from her bowl.
He is usually waiting for her on that shore.
Big, four-armed, monstrous in a way that long ago stopped frightening her in the simple sense. He frightens her in complicated ways now. Ways that have names she refuses to give because names make things easier to summon. His tattoos move with the tension of his body. His red eyes watch her as if she is both an irritation and a prized knife he keeps finding in the wrong drawer.
The first time he pulled her under, she clawed at him. She remembers that with a humiliation so bright it still burns. She had bitten his wrist, shouted curses she had not known she still knew, spat at him in her father’s tongue, her mother’s tongue, Japanese, anything sharp enough to cut.
He had laughed.
He had laughed because he was cruel, but also because she had surprised him, and Sukuna loves little more than being surprised by something that has teeth.
Then the lake rose.
It climbed her ankles, her knees, her waist. She had thought she could stand against it by sheer stubbornness, as if pride had buoyancy, as if anger was a raft.
Sukuna had watched her realize otherwise.
The water had closed over her mouth mid-insult, and he had caught her chin in one hand with that broad, awful patience of his.
“You may continue scolding me below the surface,” he had said. “I assure you, I will not listen there either.”
And then she was gone.
Not asleep. Not unconscious. Gone into the deep part of him where memories swim like things with blind eyes.
She had dreamed of villages carved open, of hands reaching for mercy and finding him instead, of a child crying in a field while flames crawled through rice stalks, of a monk praying without words because his tongue was already missing.
She can bear pain.
She can bear fear if she has enough time to dress it properly, braid gold through its hair, powder its face, call it strategy, call it patience, call it something refined enough to survive court.
But drowning in him strips her down to the thing she is beneath all that music and quick mouth and lifted chin. When he pushes her under, she is no griot. No storm-tongued woman. No proud little foreign girl who learned to smile with a blade behind her teeth.
She is just scared.
She hates him for knowing it.
She hates him for doing it.
Every time Sukuna seized their shared body, he left her there with the refuse of his history.
The dreams were not always the same, but they all belonged to him.
They wore her fear because fear was convenient.
They dressed themselves in faces she loved because cruelty knows how to tailor itself.
By the time he gave the body back, she would wake gasping in whatever place he had deposited them. Sometimes a rented room with peeling wallpaper. Sometimes a bus station bathroom with blood rinsed clean from her hands but not from beneath the nails. Once, the rooftop of a shuttered school while morning light warmed her cheeks and the far-off sirens sounded bored.
Sukuna is mean in ways that enter rooms before he does, but his meanness is not clumsy. He does not flail. He does not strike blindly. He knows where to place a blade. He knows the small differences between words that bruise and words that maim.
Asiri is not so skillful in cruelty. She has too much softness hidden under all that noise.
He knows this.
It is obscene, how well he knows this.
The first sign that tonight something is wrong is that Sukuna does not drown her.
Asiri wakes inside herself.
That should not be possible on nights like this.
Usually, when he wants the body for something that involves an unholy amount of violence, there is a moment — sharp and almost polite in its cruelty — when the world inside her begins to tilt. The edges of her consciousness go soft. Sound narrows. Light thins. Then comes the water.
Always the water.
Not real water, not in the way rivers and rain are real, and yet her lungs never seem to understand the difference. It rises black and heavy in the dark of their shared soul, swallowing her ankles, knees, waist, throat. It pours through her nose and mouth and ears. It drags her down through nightmares that wear his face, his hands, his laughter, his murders. Sometimes they steal details from her instead — the scrape of rope on skin, the heat of a stranger’s breath too close, the helpless animal knowledge of being small in a world that never asks before it takes.
His horrors find hers and knot themselves together until she cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
Then she disappears.
Then he goes.
When she comes back, she always knows. Her hands shake. Her teeth chatter even in warm rooms. Her muscles feel as if they have been left outside in winter. There are nights when she sits on the floor afterward with her knees drawn to her chest and tells herself she is only tired, only weak from the effort of being a vessel, only overthinking, only dramatic, only—
Only not going to cry over Ryomen Sukuna, of all things.
He doesn't comments on it some times.
He only watches with that ugly old intelligence of his, as if he can see every little betrayal of her body and is filing them away for some inscrutable purpose.
Sometimes she hates him for how clearly he sees.
Sometimes she hates herself more for how impossible it is to hide from him.
But sometimes he had some remark waiting for her.
“You drool when you sleep.”
“Your threshold for horror is disappointing.”
“Do not look so betrayed, songbird. I have done nothing to you that I did not warn you I would do.”
Asiri always answered because silence feels too much like surrender, and she is very fond of keeping herself intact through words.
“I hope your next vessel has hay fever.”
“You could have simply asked, you ancient wound with opinions.”
“You are very ugly when you pretend not to care.”
The last one had made him still for a breath longer than usual.
She had regretted it immediately, which was infuriating, because he had deserved worse.
He deserves worse as a rule.
He deserves holy water, a locked room, someone patient enough to sit across from him and list his faults in alphabetical order until even his arrogance becomes tired. But she remembers his silence after her insult. She remembers how the mouth on his stomach had tightened.
She remembers being angry at herself for noticing.
Tonight, though, the water does not come.
Asiri opens her eyes to darkness and stillness and the low scrape of fabric.
It has been a long day, although days have become slippery things since she swallowed what she should have burned. Time folds strangely around a curse lodged under the breastbone. They have spent the last week moving through the narrow arteries of rural Japan, always away from Gojo Satoru’s notice, always under roofs that do not ask questions. Sukuna is not whole yet. That fact sits between them with all the grace of a knife left on a pillow. He hates needing to hide. He hates needing her body. He hates that Gojo exists with enough power to make caution a necessity instead of an insult.
Asiri tries not to enjoy that last part too much.
She fails often.
The body is hers when night falls. She knows because she can feel the ache in her thighs from walking, the sting on her palm from where she cut herself climbing through a rusted fence. Her braids are tied back carelessly, not the way she does it. He has yanked them into a knot at the nape because he finds beauty secondary to utility, which means he has no sense and less taste, and on top of that are hidden beneath a scarf.
She is in a place that is definitely not her room.
She sits in the back of an abandoned delivery truck on a road that no map should trust. Beyond the smeared windshield, cedars lean toward each other like old women sharing things they should not say aloud.
The rain has turned soft, almost misty, silvering the road and the heaps of wet leaves gathered near the tires.
A paper charm sticks to the inside of the windshield.
She has been trying not to look at it.
It is not one of hers. She does not use ofuda unless someone insists, and even then she complains because the paper always tears wrong.
This charm belongs to the people in the compound half a kilometer uphill, tucked behind old forestry gates and a sign warning about landslides. Sukuna says the place is a storehouse.
Asiri calls it a slaughter shed, because the air tastes like old panic from here, and there are certain kinds of silence that only grow around suffering.
He wants something inside.
He has been restless since sunset, moving beneath her skin with the quiet scrape of claws along a door. She feels him in the back of her throat, in the heat behind her eyes, in the twitch of her right hand where his technique always wants to bloom sharper than thought.
He has not told her what he seeks. He rarely tells her anything in a straightforward line.
Sukuna treats information like meat — portioned out according to appetite, usefulness, and whether withholding it will annoy her.
She presses her thumb into the cut on her palm until pain clears the fog at the edges of her mind.
Inside, far beneath breath and bone, the shore waits.
Asiri finds herself standing there while the body remains folded in the delivery truck. This double-awareness has grown familiar enough to offend her. She stands on black stone in the inner world wearing the same damp clothes as outside: boots mudded at the soles, trousers tucked in, a dark sweater under a coat that still has someone else’s name stitched into the collar. She stole it two towns ago and felt very guilty about it, which Sukuna found hilarious for several hours.
The lake is still.
Too still.
She narrows her eyes.
Across from her, Sukuna stands near the water’s edge, arms folded, eyes turned toward the shrine as if he has been waiting for a guest he resents.
“You are late,” he says.
Asiri plants her hands on her hips because the gesture gives her shape.
“Late? To being drowned? Forgive me, my lord, I was fixing my hair for the occasion. I know how much you enjoy ceremony.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. It is not the expression he wears when he finds something truly funny. That one is worse and brighter. This is thinner.
“You are in a mood.”
“I am in your soul. The mood came with the accommodations.”
“Your complaints are losing invention.”
“Your soul is losing novelty. There is only so much one can say about damp rock, bones, and your tragic commitment to making every room look like a threat.”
“Were I interested in comfort, I would not have chosen you.”
She gives him a look sweet enough to rot fruit.
“You didn’t choose me. I swallowed you because three men in robes were trying to decide whether my corpse would be more useful intact or dissected, and I made a quick decision under pressure. Do not rewrite history because it flatters your ego. It is already overfed.”
His gaze shifts to her fully.
There it is. The attention. Terrible, total, heavy as weather before lightning splits it. Asiri keeps her chin high, although the sensitive, ridiculous part of her wants to check if she has gone too far. She hates that part. She would like to take it out back, give it a firm lecture, and make it carry water until it learns dignity.
Sukuna’s nostrils flare in amusement.
He smells it. Of course he does. He always smells the little falter under her pride, the worry tucked under the barb.
“You are fretting,” he says.
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“I am considering whether your head would look better separated from your shoulders. That isn’t fretting. That’s interior design.”
“You wonder if you wounded me.”
Asiri’s mouth shuts.
The shore seems to sharpen around them. From outside, rain ticks softly on the truck roof. From inside, a bell swings once beneath the shrine eaves, though no sound follows.
Sukuna watches her with an expression that has ended dynasties.
She lifts her brows.
“Did I?”
He laughs through his nose, not loudly, not kindly.
“You presume much.”
“I asked a question.”
“You asked because the idea bothers you, soft-heart.”
“Many ideas bother me. The jujutsu elders bother me. Gojo Satoru’s blindfold bothers me. The fact that convenience-store eggs come wrapped in that much plastic bothers me. You are not special because I am irritated by your existence.”
“You are lying.”
“Yes, but I am doing it with a lot of elegance.”
That earns her a real smile, small but edged. Sukuna turns his head toward the water.
Usually, this is when it begins.
No warning beyond the slight bend of his fingers, the old violence in his patience. The lake will blacken further, if that is possible, and reach for her like something obedient. Her muscles already tense in preparation. She hates that he can feel it. She hates that the body outside mirrors it, one foot pressing into the truck floor, shoulders tightening until the stolen coat strains.
Sukuna remains still.
A minute passes.
Then another.
Asiri glances at the water, then at him.
“Are you malfunctioning?”
His eyes slide toward her.
“Mind your tongue.”
“I am minding it. It is exactly where I want it, doing what it does best.” Her suspicion gathers itself into something more dangerous than fear. “Why have you not done it?”
He says nothing.
She tilts her head.
“Do you need me to step closer? Should I make it easier for you? Perhaps I should hold my nose and dive in myself like a polite little vessel.”
“Asiri.”
Her name in his mouth stops her better than any threat.
Not because it is soft. It is not. Sukuna could say a prayer and make it sound like a curse. But he rarely says her name without ornament. Usually she is brat, girl, songbird, soft-heart, troublesome thing, little storm, some new insult polished into affection he would rather rip out his own tongue than call affection. Asiri is too bare. It arrives without armor.
She looks at him for a long moment.
Outside, thunder mutters somewhere far off. It could be ordinary weather. It could be her.
Her voice lowers despite her best efforts to keep it bright.
“What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“You say that as if I have never watched you ignore a missing rib.”
“I have no ribs to miss here.”
She sucks her teeth in disapproval of his insistence in being difficult on purpose.
“Don’t be clever when I’m trying to interrogate you. It makes me want to throw things.”
“Do you not always want to throw things?”
“God forbid a woman be passionate”
“You are undisciplined.”
“I’m both, and I contain multitudes.”
His eyes narrow faintly, but not in anger. He studies her, and she feels herself being read with the intolerable intimacy of someone turning pages in a book she never agreed to open.
She hates it.
She wants him to stop.
She also wants to know what he finds.
That is the worst part of this bond — the wants that do not belong neatly to survival.
Sukuna looks away first.
Asiri blinks.
He looks away first, and the world does not end. The lake does not rise. The shrine does not split open. But something shifts beneath the black stone, something old and pressured, and Asiri’s throat tightens before she can mock herself out of it.
“You are tired,” she says, quieter.
“I do not tire.”
“You are bored, hungry, entertained, displeased, amused, offended, and occasionally dramatic enough to shame a theater troupe, but not tired. Yes, I know the speech.”
His mouth twists.
“Then stop asking foolish questions.”
“That was an observation, not a question.”
“Yet, you hope I will answer it.”
“I hope for many things. A clean bed. Food with actual seasoning. One day without someone trying to kill me because of you. A very heavy object falling on Kenjaku. You being direct for once.”
“You would not know what to do with directness from me.”
“I would have it framed.”
There is another silence, and this one has more teeth than the last.
Outside, the body inhales.
Sukuna’s presence presses closer under the skin, but he does not take. He does not seize the muscles, the hands, the mouth. He stands beside the dark water as if held there by something he refuses to name.
Asiri’s anger, which has kept her warm for weeks, loses some of its clean shape.
She remembers the last drowning.
Not in full. Her mind has wrapped cloth around parts of it, the way hands cover a wound before looking. But she remembers enough. She had dreamed herself small and barefoot on a battlefield that belonged to him. The sky had been white with ash. Bodies lay arranged by no one’s mercy. Sukuna’s memory had given her his hands, not hers, so when she reached down, four arms moved. When a man crawled toward her, begging, she felt not pity but a savage, old boredom that was not hers.
Then the man’s face became Amadou’s.
Her brother’s eyes.
Her brother’s mouth.
Her brother asking why she had let him die.
She had woken screaming into her own fist because Sukuna had returned the body to her in an alley behind a pachinko parlor. He had said nothing for almost an hour. That was how she knew he had seen it too, through the place where their souls touched.
Later, he told her the dead use whatever face opens the wound fastest. He said it like a lesson. He said it like cruelty had weather patterns, and she was foolish for complaining about rain.
She called him a monster.
He answered,
“Yes.”
Not defensively. Not proudly. Simply.
As if that had ever been enough.
Now he will not drown her.
Asiri looks at the water, then at his profile.
“Is it because of last time?”
“No.”
“You’re answering too quickly.”
“You are thinking too slowly.”
“Finally, I was worried tenderness had killed your spirit.”
His eyes cut to her again, bright with irritation.
“Do not mistake restraint for tenderness, woman.”
Asiri steps closer to the lake. The black surface reflects neither of them.
“Then what shall I mistake it for? Strategy? Laziness? Indigestion?”
“I can still put you under.”
“But you haven’t.”
“I may yet.”
“But you haven’t.”
“Asiri.”
She smiles without humor.
“You keep saying my name like it is supposed to make me behave. I have disappointing news.”
“You have never once behaved without being cornered.”
“I behave when people ask nicely.”
“No, you preen and pretend compliance while planning how to turn politeness into a weapon.”
Her smile becomes real despite herself, and she hates that he sees that too.
“That is very observant. I feel kind of exposed.”
“You should. You are dreadful at hiding from me.”
“I hide many things from you.”
“Name one.”
Her first answer rises so fast she nearly chokes on it.
That sometimes, after he drowns her and leaves her to dream his atrocities, she reaches for him when she wakes.
Not physically. She has more pride than that, thank every god listening.
But inwardly, blindly, some frightened animal part of her stretches toward his familiar violence because at least it is known. At least it belongs to the same darkness that hurt her. At least it is not the faceless room with straps and talismans, not the white-haired man she has never met but feels in the distance like winter sunlight over a blade, not the elders who speak about vessels as if bodies are jars and souls are inconvenient sediment.
She cannot say that.
So she sniffs.
“My skincare routine.”
Sukuna stares.
“It is elaborate and private,” she says. “You are not invited.”
His laugh breaks out before he can smooth it down, low and unwilling. It moves through the inner world and the real body both, a vibration in her ribs. Asiri feels it from the inside, and something in her chest loosens. Only a little. Enough to be dangerous.
“Foolish woman,” he murmurs.
“Rude corpse.”
“I am not a corpse.”
“You are a historical problem.”
“And you are a mouthy little vessel who should be grateful I have not sunk her to the bottom and gone about my evening in peace.”
“There would be no peace. You would miss me immediately.”
His eyes darken.
There. Another step too close to something neither of them can afford.
Asiri’s smile falters at the edges, and this time she cannot quite hide it. He notices. His expression changes by almost nothing, but she knows him well enough to see when the blade turns flat.
Outside, a branch scrapes along the side of the delivery truck.
Both of them listen.
Not to the branch.
To the cursed energy moving beyond it.
Asiri feels it before her conscious mind shapes it into anything — a thin pulse through the rain, concealed poorly beneath layers of wards.
Someone near the gate. Two someones. No, three. Human. Sorcerers, or close enough. One carries a curse-object wrapped in talismans so dense they make the air taste chalky.
Sukuna’s attention shifts.
The softness, if it was softness, vanishes behind hunger.
“There,” he says.
Asiri’s lips part.
“That is what you came for.”
“You need not concern yourself.”
“Oh, how generous. Unfortunately I am concerned by many things that decide to happen inside my body.”
His smile returns, sharpened.
“Not for long.”
The lake trembles.
Asiri braces.
This is the moment. This is where habit wins, where whatever strange hesitation held him snaps under the weight of appetite.
She waits for the water to rise, stomach clenched, fury already assembling itself into the speech she will deliver when she wakes hours later covered in consequences.
The water shivers again.
Then stills.
Sukuna’s jaw tightens.
He looks murderous, which is not unusual, but the direction of it is. Not at her — not entirely, at least — but at himself, though Sukuna’s pride would rather chew off one of his own hands than admit such a thing.
He turns from the lake and walks past her toward the invisible seam between soul and body.
“Stay out of my way,” he says.
Asiri stands there, stunned enough to let him take three steps before she follows.
“Excuse me?”
He does not slow.
“You heard me.”
“You really aren’t drowning me.”
“Your talent for stating the obvious has improved.”
“So you aren’t taking control?” Asiri pushes, suspicious.
“You are accompanying me.”
The words land like a dropped blade.
Asiri blinks at him.
Then she laughs, once, disbelieving.
“That is the worst invitation I’ve ever received.”
“It is not an invitation.”
“No, I gathered that from the absence of charm.”
“You will survive.”
“That is not the part I’m worried about, Sukuna.”
He tilts his head.
And there, finally, is that flash again — small, gone almost before she names it. Not hesitation, because Sukuna does not hesitate. Not guilt either, she doubts he has ever worn that skin properly. But something adjacent to restraint. Something she has seen only in the moments after resurfacing, when her hands shake and her breath catches and she insists she is fine, and he stands a little too still.
Asiri’s mouth closes.
Something unsettles inside her chest. It is not pity. She refuses that word. It is not softness either, though that is closer. It is the quiet, dangerous recognition of a wound being touched by another wound and both pretending not to notice.
He does not want to drown her tonight.
It is so absurd that she nearly rejects it at once. Ryomen Sukuna, unable to bear a thing? Ryomen Sukuna, making allowances? Ryomen Sukuna, looking at her trembling afterward and deciding there is a line somewhere he would rather not cross again tonight?
Impossible.
And yet.
She glances at his face. At the set of his shoulders. At the extra eyes that refuse to meet hers all at once.
Her voice, when she finds it, is lighter than she feels.
“You know, if you wanted company, you could simply admit I’m delightful.”
Sukuna snorts, offended by the very architecture of the sentence.
“Your vanity is exhausting.”
He turns as if to leave, which is answer enough.
The inner world buckles.
Sukuna has, in fact, surfaced.
A tremor of pure offense runs through her before fear has time to dress itself.
Oh, so now he can take her body without shoving her face-first into his private sea of horrors?
How considerate.
How fucking generous.
How unlike him to discover manners only after weeks of using her soul like a stone dropped into a well.
Her vision is not hers, but she sees through it.
For a heartbeat she considers refusing out of sheer self-preservation.
She considers the danger, the body count he mentioned only by implication, the certainty that the finger will bring out the ugliest corners of him. She considers Gojo’s presence somewhere in the distance, all white light and amused violence. She considers the old instinct in her that wants safety, quiet, a door barred from the inside.
Then she considers the black water.
The drowning.
His memories wearing her face in dreams.
And the fact that tonight, for whatever impossible reason, he has left her standing.
She squares her shoulders.
“Fine.”
Sukuna pauses.
She lifts her chin.
“Do not make that face. I’m not doing it for you.”
“Of course not,” he says.
“I’m doing it because if you manage to evade Gojo without me, you’ll be unbearable tomorrow.”
“I am unbearable every day.”
“There are levels.”
Now the smile comes properly, brief and sharp on one side of his mouth, and it does something indecent to the hard knot of dread in her stomach. It makes it loosen. It makes it warm.
She resents that too.
The delivery truck rushes back around her, catching back her attention — damp upholstery, cold metal, rain ticking, the stale smell of old cardboard and mildew.
Their body rises before Asiri chooses to stand. One hand catches the edge of the open rear door. Boots land in mud with a soft, wet sound. The body moves with Sukuna’s certainty, but Asiri remains there, eyes open behind the eyes, breath shared instead of stolen.
It is awful.
It is intimate.
It is the closest thing to cooperation he has ever offered, and he has offered it with all the warmth of a man throwing a bone to a dog.
Asiri immediately hates that she feels honored.
“No,” she says aloud, or tries to.
The mouth does not move.
Sukuna has the body’s tongue.
Her tongue. Their tongue. The unfairness is so profound it nearly makes her dizzy.
Inside the body, she slams the heel of her spiritual hand against whatever passes for his shoulder.
“If I am awake, I get speaking privileges.”
Their body walks through the rain toward the compound gate.
Sukuna answers without using the mouth, his voice filling the chamber behind her ribs.
“You would alert them.”
“I can whisper.”
“You do not know how.”
“That is an ugly lie. I have whispered many times.”
“When?”
“When speaking to babies, grieving widows, sleeping cats, and once to Uraume because I was asking whether you were always this unpleasant in the morning.”
“What did they say?”
“That you improve by noon. I think they were being charitable.”
“Uraume is loyal.”
“Uraume is a liar with excellent posture.”
The body pauses near the tree line.
For one absurd second, Sukuna almost laughs with her mouth. She feels it gather in the diaphragm, a pressure shaped like amusement, and then he crushes it before it can escape. Asiri goes warm with triumph anyway.
“You almost laughed,” she says.
“I almost removed your ability to perceive joy, too.”
“That’s a confession.”
“That is a warning.”
“A weak one.”
He ignores her, which is exactly what he does when he does not have a better answer.
