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𐚁﹒﹒﹒♡ ൺɑsteɾlist ♡
𐚁﹒This is how it all began~! 𐚁﹒Sugar baby treatment. 𐚁﹒Riling Sukuna up after class! 𐚁﹒His office hours are hers to enjoy, or so she says. 𐚁﹒The moment things start to fall apart. 𐚁﹒He notices, because he always does.
🌸; art by: @death-warden my beloved
🎀 ; Sukuna notices, because he always does. 🌸 ; art: @/tenobeee on X 🧁; masterlist
Sukuna notices the change before he understands it.
At first it registers only as the absence of irritation, which is its own kind of irritation.
Satomi usually makes herself known in ways both deliberate and constant. She stays late under weak excuses that fool nobody. She appears at his office hours without warning and acts as if she is granting him the privilege of being bothered. She sends him messages that are half demand, half bait, telling him to pick her up, to look at something, to answer, to stop ignoring her, to pay attention. She takes up space easily, speaks with intention, laughs when she wants the room to turn toward her and sharpens when she wants it to pull back. She is never quiet by accident. Even when she says little, she does it in a way that asks to be noticed.
Then, over the span of a few weeks, she begins to disappear in increments.
Not all at once. That would have been obvious.
It starts with her leaving too soon after class.
Usually she lingers. Not in ways anyone could call indiscreet, not unless they know where to look. She waits for others to gather their things, drags out the end of her packing, glances at him when nobody else is paying attention. Sometimes she finds a reason to ask a question she already knows the answer to. Sometimes she says nothing at all and only stands near enough to make him feel her there while the room empties.
She likes testing how long it takes for his patience to fray. She likes watching it happen.
Then she stops.
Class ends and she is already on her feet. Her bag is over her shoulder before the last student near the aisle has finished standing. She leaves with the others instead of after them. Her gaze stays on the door or on her phone or on the girl walking next to her. Never him.
The first time it happens, Sukuna thinks nothing of it. She is a student. She has a schedule. She is allowed other priorities. He is not so pathetic that he requires a performance after every lecture.
The fifth time, he notices.
By the second week, he notices enough to become annoyed.
She no longer shows up at office hours just to lean against the frame of his doorway and say something aggravating in a pretty voice. She no longer sends him messages from the library demanding he buy her coffee if he expects her to survive his workload. She no longer appears near his car at the end of the day and acts as if it is his job to know she needs a ride. When she does message him, which is rare now, it is brief and almost impersonal. Fine. Busy. Later. She has never used language with him so sparingly before.
The lack of trouble changes the shape of his days in stupid, noticeable ways.
He hates that he notices.
Sukuna sits through faculty meetings with one leg crossed over the other and his phone facedown on the table, and still some part of him keeps expecting it to light up with her name and some demand that pretends not to be an invitation. He walks into his office between lectures and catches himself glancing at the spare chair because she has a bad habit of appearing in it with her legs crossed and his pen in her fingers. He leaves campus in the evening and half expects to find her outside the building, tapping her heel and rolling her eyes because he took too long.
Nothing.
He tells himself the silence should be a relief.
Instead it crawls under his skin.
Like rumors crawl.
He hears some of it in the teachers’ room before he pieces together that it matters.
Not much. Not direct. Faculty gossip never arrives whole. It comes shredded by disinterest and cowardice, shaped into things people can repeat without having to own them.
Somebody says there is been nonsense spreading among the students again. Another says young people live for petty cruelty and boredom. A woman from another department mentions, with the lazy distance of somebody commenting on weather, that one of Professor Nanami’s girls has had rumors going around. Someone else asks which one. The answer is vague. Tall one. Pretty one. Blue eyes. Then somebody says, oh, the clever one.
Satomi.
Sukuna hears her name and lifts his eyes from the stack of exams in front of him.
The conversation does not stop, but it shifts under his attention the way rooms often do when he bothers to let people feel he is listening.
The details are not particularly clear. A rumor, apparently. Something personal. Something about identity. Students being nasty. Girls in the restrooms. Boys acting like rejected idiots. The usual.
One older lecturer tuts in false sympathy and says that generation is obsessed with labels. Another mutters that privacy does not exist anymore. Somebody says it is probably exaggerated. Another says no, I heard there was something to it.
Sukuna thinks, briefly and without much heat, that if people know Satomi is trans then they know. So what.
In his head, it ends there.
What is there to piece together? She is a woman. She is his. Neither fact should be open for debate by strangers with too much spare time. It does not occur to him, not then, that others might not let it sit with the same indifference. It does not occur to him that Satomi may not feel the same hard contempt he would. He knows she hides certain things. Knows she keeps her personal life guarded with almost everyone. Knows she likes control over how she is perceived. But knowing facts about her and understanding the shape of her fear are two different things, and fear is not something she has ever handed him plainly.
So he dismisses the chatter.
He should not.
Later, when he thinks back on those days, what irritates him most is not that others were stupid. That is expected. It is that he was not paying close enough attention to how stupidity lands differently when it is aimed at someone already living inside scrutiny.
He notices the rest in retrospect. The details gather once he knows where to place them.
Satomi does not eat with the same group anymore. Not properly.
There used to be a small orbit around her at lunch, fluid but consistent. Maki when schedules aligned. Miwa more often than not. Sometimes Momo, sometimes another girl or two from a different seminar. Satomi at the center without seeming to force it, because people like looking at her and listening to her and provoking her. She makes a table feel chosen simply by sitting there.
Then that changes too.
He sees her only occasionally in the courtyard during the break period. Sometimes she is with one girl. Sometimes two. Never the larger loose group that used to gather around her. On some days she is alone, eating nothing, pretending to read.
Other times he does not see her at all.
Once, from the faculty window that overlooks the side path between the language building and the humanities wing, he watches her turn the corner too sharply and nearly collide with a cluster of students. Three girls, two boys. One of the girls says something. Sukuna cannot hear it through the glass. Satomi’s shoulders go rigid for exactly one breath, then she walks on without stopping. The students look after her. One of the boys laughs. One girl smacks his arm. The whole thing lasts no more than a few seconds.
It irritates him all afternoon.
By then he is already aware that her attention in class has shifted.
Not her performance. Never that. Satomi is still sharp enough to answer before most students finish thinking. She still knows the material better than half the room. If anything, her answers get cleaner. More stripped down. Less playful. She no longer uses wit as garnish. She gives him the exact thing he asks for and then looks back down at her notes, as if she resents the air between them.
She also stops looking at him when he is not speaking to her.
That is the detail that finally settles into him as wrong.
Satomi is vain enough to enjoy being watched and bold enough to do some watching of her own. Not crudely. Not often enough to be caught by people who do not know what to look for. But he knows. He knows the particular weight of her attention, the quiet insistence of it. He knows when she is tracking him through a room out of defiance or fondness or need. He knows how she looks when she wants something and is deciding whether or not to make him work for the privilege of giving it to her.
Now she keeps her eyes away.
Sukuna begins to test it.
He says her name in class more often than necessary. Calls on her for material he could easily extract from someone else. Asks follow-up questions he knows she can answer. Waits for the moment she must look at him to respond.
Each time, her gaze rises, fixes on him, gives him what he wants, and drops away again the second she is allowed.
No challenge in it. No spark.
He starts hating the room when it happens.
By the time she misses a first class, he is already in a bad mood.
He does not look for her immediately. That would be absurd. Students miss lectures all the time. They get sick, oversleep, lose track of deadlines, decide on temporary stupidity, then return with excuses and visible regret.
Still, as he takes attendance with his eyes rather than the roster, the empty seat lands too sharply in his mind.
He teaches anyway.
The next lecture she attends, she says nothing after class and leaves before he reaches the second sentence of what should have been a correction on her paper. He watches the door shut behind her and decides he will let her have whatever sulk this is.
Then she misses another.
Then another.
By the time he checks his phone between lectures and sees that she has not answered the message he sent the previous evening, something ugly has already begun to collect low in his gut.
Where are you.
A simple question. No reply.
He sends another hours later.
You miss again and you explain.
Nothing.
He could call. He does not. Not yet. Something in him resists the shape of chasing her when he still does not know if there is anything to chase.
He asks nobody at first. Pride, perhaps. Or caution. He has no interest in making her absence into a public inquiry that invites curiosity. Whatever exists between them functions because it is contained. He will not be the one to loosen the lid.
Then she misses office hours she herself had asked about three days earlier.
That is when the edge of concern finally cuts clean through annoyance.
Sukuna sits in his chair after the last waiting student leaves, glances at the clock, then at the half-open door. Satomi would usually have entered without knocking by now, full of some bad attitude and a question she could have asked by email. The room stays empty. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. The evening on campus deepens outside his window. Nothing.
He takes out his phone.
You’re testing my patience.
Sent. Delivered. Not read.
He stares at the screen longer than he should, then locks it and slips it back into his pocket with all the restraint of a man who would rather crush something.
The first useful answer comes from Miwa.
Not because he seeks her out in any dramatic way. He simply catches her by the vending machines after one of his classes, small shoulders tucked in, hands wrapped around a canned tea she has not opened yet. She startles when he says her name. Most students do. He has that effect. Miwa more than most.
“Professor,” she says, standing straighter at once.
Sukuna studies her face for a second. She is quiet, observant, the sort who notices more than she advertises. Satomi tolerates very few people closely. Miwa is one of the rare ones. That alone makes her useful.
“Where is she,” he asks.
Miwa blinks once.
“Who.”
He gives her a look.
She folds immediately, not out of fear exactly, but because pretending otherwise would be insulting both of them.
“Satomi?” Miwa grips the can a little tighter. “I don’t know.”
“Try harder.”
She wets her lips, glancing down the hall and then back to him.
“She’s been ignoring us.”
Us.
Good.
That means she has not singled him out for avoidance. The conclusion should soothe him. It does not.
“How long.”
“A few days.”
“A few,” he repeats flatly.
Miwa lifts her eyes again. There is worry in them, plain enough to make him stop pressing quite so hard.
“I messaged her. Maki did too. She said she was fine, then stopped answering.”
The answer lands badly.
Sukuna says nothing for a beat.
Miwa, perhaps because she mistakes his silence for openness, adds quietly,
“She’s not acting like herself.”
No. He has gathered that much.
“Did something happen?”
Miwa hesitates.
That hesitation tells him enough that his whole attention narrows.
“What.”
She lowers her voice.
“There were rumors.”
He says nothing.
“People were talking about her. About… personal things.” Miwa swallows. “I think someone may have told her something.”
His face does not change. He is practiced enough that it never has to. But something under his sternum turns hard and cold.
“What did they say?”
“I don’t know exactly.” Miwa looks miserable for not knowing. “Satomi didn’t tell me.”
He nods once. That is all. No thanks, no dismissal.
Just a gesture that ends the exchange.
Miwa lingers.
“Professor.”
He looks at her again.
“She’s really not okay.”
Sukuna lets that settle. Then he says,
“I heard you.”
Miwa nods and leaves with her tea still unopened.
From that point on, the days sharpen.
He messages Satomi again that night.
Answer me.
No reply.
The next morning she misses class.
So does the following afternoon.
He gives her five days.
Not because he enjoys generosity, but because five days is enough time to determine whether this is retreat or collapse. Enough time for fever to break, for panic to dull, for stubborn girls to stop licking their wounds in private and come back swinging. Enough time for her to make contact if she intends to remain in command of herself.
Five days and every class missed.
Five days and every message unanswered.
Five days and no appearance anywhere on campus except the briefest recorded exit from her dorm building for food and then back again. Five days and she ignores her friends too. Maki messages him once, a rare and unpleasant overlap of their separate concern, only to ask if he has heard from her. He does not answer Maki, because he does not care to start whatever line of questioning would follow.
By the third day he has already set people on it.
Sukuna’s money does not come from teaching.
The university salary is useful only in that it gives him routine, access, a legitimate face to wear over other operations, and a reason to keep certain worlds overlapping just enough. His real income comes from channels far older and more dangerous than academia. Men answer him because he owns too much of what feeds them. Information arrives because he expects it to.
Access exists because he pays for it, built it, or took it.
He does not need much.
Dorm entry records. Camera timestamps. Confirmation she is inside. Confirmation she is not alone. Confirmation there has been no hospital call, no ambulance, no obvious emergency. Confirmation that, yes, she has barely left and no, she has not had visitors except a girl once, likely Maki, carrying a convenience store bag.
He tells himself this is precaution.
It is also the only thing that keeps him from ripping the door off her room on the fourth day, but he knows the girls visited her with food and drinks, and left at night empty handed.
By the fifth, his restraint is gone.
He leaves campus later than usual, after a meeting he does not remember hearing through. He goes home only long enough to change out of the charcoal suit he wore to lecture and into black trousers and a black turtleneck under a dark cardigan, something that reads less like professor and more like the man he becomes once formal obligations end. The clothes sit cleanly on him. Expensive. Simple. Controlled. He would look overdone at most dormitories. He does not care.
The drive is quiet and too short.
He parks, cuts the engine, and sits for one breath with both hands resting on the wheel. He listens to the silence of the car. Measures the pulse at his throat. Lets the anger settle into a useable shape.
Then he gets out.
The campus housing building is bright in the ugly institutional way all student living is bright. Fluorescent hallways. Bad flooring. Doors too thin. Young people passing with wet hair, textbooks, half-empty laundry baskets, faces that register him and then look away fast. He moves through it untouched, each step precise, the building’s cameras catching his image from corners he already knows.
He knocks once on her door.
Nothing.
He knows she is inside. He checked before coming. More than that, he can hear the shower running beyond the wall, a steady rush of water behind wood and tile. He imagines her in there and the first image his mind offers is so dark it sours the inside of his mouth — blood diluted at a drain, pills on the sink, wrists, heat, collapse. Satomi is dramatic, proud, and fragile in places she guards with claws. He has never thought her foolish enough to hurt herself that way, but five days of silence peel certainty apart.
He does not knock again.
His hand goes to his pocket and closes around the copy of her key.
She gave it to him in a mood halfway between teasing and affection sometime during the second month of whatever this arrangement is. He remembers the look on her face, chin raised as if daring him to make fun of her for the gesture. For emergencies, she had said. Or for when you finally stop pretending you don’t like when I’m in your space.
He had taken the key, slipped it onto a separate ring, and never once used it.
Until now.
The lock turns easily.
He opens the door and steps inside.
Her dorm room is warmer than the hallway and smells faintly of steam, soap, and something sweet that has long gone stale. The curtains are mostly drawn. One lamp on near the desk. The room is neat in the surfaces that matter and chaotic in the details that reveal strain — clothes folded but not put away, half-finished cups, skincare on the sink counter visible through the cracked bathroom door, papers stacked too precisely to be genuine tidiness. Her bag lies by the bed as if dropped there days ago.
The shower is still running.
He crosses the room in three steps and pushes the bathroom door open.
Steam hits him first, dense and hot enough to make the air feel thick. The mirror is fully fogged. The tiles shine wet. The water comes down in a punishing stream from above, far hotter than it should be. Through the blur of it he sees her shape.
Satomi is folded into herself under the showerhead, arms wrapped tight around her own body as if she is trying to keep it from falling apart. Her back is to him at first, narrow shoulders shaking. Pale skin flushed bright from the heat. Long wet hair plastered pale against her spine and chest. She is crying hard enough that he can hear the breaks in her breath even over the water.
He freezes for exactly half a second.
Not because of her body. He has seen her in too many states for that to matter. Not because of nakedness. That is irrelevant beside the sight of her curled inward this completely, reduced to trembling and heat and effort just to keep standing.
She senses him a second later. Turns her head. Sees him.
Her blue eyes go wide with horror, shock, and something so raw it looks like pain caught in the act of trying to hide.
“Sukuna—”
He reaches past her and turns the shower off.
The sudden quiet is violent. Water still trickles from her hair, from her shoulders, down the lines of her body. The room fills with the sound of her breathing instead, ragged and wet.
“Don’t,” she says immediately, voice shredded. “Don’t look at me.”
She tries to cover herself more tightly, wrists crossing over chest and stomach, chin turning away, shoulders caving in with shame that arrives so fast it feels rehearsed. The motion slices straight through what is left of his restraint.
Sukuna catches both her wrists before she can hide behind them.
Not harshly. Firm enough to stop the movement, gentle enough not to startle her worse.
She jerks once against his grip, more from panic than resistance. He lowers her hands slowly, carefully, moving them out of the way not because he cares about seeing but because he refuses to let her turn herself into something that must be hidden from him.
Her face stays angled away.
“Look at me,” he says.
“No.”
Her voice cracks on the word.
He does not repeat himself. Instead he eases forward and wraps both arms around her.
The effect is immediate.
Satomi is soaking wet. The heat of the room clings to her skin, and the water soaks through his cardigan and shirt in seconds, spreads cold along his chest and stomach beneath the remaining warmth of her body. She is all tremor and breath and damp hair against him. He pulls her in until there is no distance left, until her forehead brushes his collarbone and her knees stop that small shaking attempt to hold themselves rigid.
She makes a broken sound at first, offended by the contact and relieved by it in the same breath.
“You’re getting wet,” she mutters, as if that is the part of this he should mind.
The sentence is so absurd in this moment that something almost like tenderness cuts clean through his anger.
“I noticed.”
She still refuses to lift her face. He lets her have that much.
One of his hands slides to the back of her head, fingers threading through the heavy wet strands there, holding without forcing. The other settles low at her back, palm broad and warm against skin heated too far by the water. He rubs once, slow and steady.
Her breathing stutters again. Then, just as quickly, shifts.
The resistance goes out of her with painful speed.
Both her arms come around his torso, tentative only for an instant before they tighten. She clings. Not delicately. Not seductively. Not like the teasing thing she usually is with him. She latches on with the humiliating urgency of someone who has been hurting alone long enough that touch becomes an answer before pride can interfere.
Her face presses into his chest. Through the soaked fabric he can feel the shape of her mouth against him, the warm exhale there, the way she breathes him in with desperate, exhausted greed. He knows his cologne. Knows the brand because he chose it for the fact it stays subtle even after a long day, dark and clean and expensive without being cloying. Satomi has teased him about it before, calling it unfair that a man like him should smell that good. Now she inhales it like she has been deprived.
He tightens his arms.
There is nothing hurried in the hold after that. Nothing performative. He simply keeps her there. Lets her cry into him until the worst edge burns itself down.
Time stretches strangely in the steamy bathroom. He does not count minutes. He counts the smaller things instead. How her grip changes. How the sobs stop tearing through her and become shaky breaths. How the tension in her shoulders eases by degrees. How the frantic heat of panic leaves her muscles and something more fragile takes its place.
By the time she speaks again, her voice is low and rough from crying.
“I’m sorry.”
He looks down at the crown of her head.
“For what.”
“For this.”
He gives the answer no softness because softness would insult the weight of it.
“Stupid thing to apologize for.”
Her fingers curl once in his wet shirt. That is all. But he feels it.
After another minute, when he is certain she can stand without swaying, he says,
“You intend to tell me what happened.”
It is not phrased as a question. He does not care to pretend.
Satomi only makes a small sound against his chest, something too muffled to parse.
He glances toward the counter, toward the towel hanging there, then back down at her bent head.
“You’re spending the weekend at my apartment.”
She stiffens just slightly, enough to show she heard.
“You can pack,” he says. “Or I’ll do it for you.”
Another beat. Then a weak nod against his chest.
Good.
He does not move yet. Neither does she.
It becomes clear, in the stillness after decision, just how badly she has missed contact. Not sex, not flirtation, not the sharp pull-and-push they usually perform around each other. Simpler than that. More humiliating. She has missed being held by someone who does not ask anything from her first. He can feel it in how completely she settles. In how quickly her body chooses his as the place to stop fighting.
That realization makes something cold sharpen behind his ribs.
Someone did this.
Not in some grand tragic way. Not a single catastrophic act. Cruelty is rarely that clean. But someone, likely several someones, drove her into five days of silence and locked doors and scalding showers hot enough to redden her skin. Someone got inside the precise places where her pride and fear are knotted together and pulled until they tore.
He thinks of Yorozu.
Miwa had not known details, but she had known enough to look sick when looking at the girl during those days. That is enough for now.
Sukuna keeps one hand at the nape of Satomi’s neck and the other spread against the damp curve of her lower back and allows himself exactly one private thought about Yorozu and what fear can be taught to a careless mouth.
Then Satomi speaks again, so quietly he barely catches it.
“Sukuna.”
He hums once.
When she lifts her face at last, it is only partway. Enough for him to see her eyes, swollen and bright from crying, lashes wet and clumped, mouth soft and miserable. The sight punches harder than it should. Satomi is used to assembling herself into beauty before anyone gets a chance to see her unravel. Right now she is giving him what the rest of the world does not get.
“Do you think,” she begins, then stops.
He waits.
Her eyes flick away. Shame moves across her face so plainly that he already knows he is going to hate the question before she finishes it.
“Do you think I need surgery,” she asks, each word small and scraped raw, “to be a real woman?”
The entire room goes still inside him.
Anger arrives first, immediate and blinding, because the question itself is evidence. Somebody has been inside her head with filthy hands. Somebody has taken one of the oldest cruelties in the world and pushed it between her ribs until she believed it worth asking aloud. There are answers he could give in anger. There are names he could demand right now. There are vicious promises lining up behind his teeth.
He does not let a single one of them out.
Sukuna knows enough, if not always gracefully, to understand that this is not the moment for his rage. Rage would only make the question heavier. Would make her feel foolish for voicing it.
Right now she needs certainty so steady it does not shake even when his anger does.
He slides one hand up and under her chin, lifts her face fully.
Her eyes try to evade his and fail.
“No,” he says.
One word. Calm. Flat. Certain.
She just stares at him.
He keeps his voice level.
“You are a real woman.”
Her breath catches.
“You have always been.”
The tears well again instantly. He sees them gather in those too-bright blue eyes, held there by the force of her trying not to lose control all over him again.
He goes on before doubt can interrupt.
“You don’t need to carve yourself open for other people’s comfort. You don’t need permission. You don’t need proof.” His thumb rests still against her jaw. “The only thing you need is to know it and stop letting idiots tell you otherwise.”
Her mouth trembles.
He should probably stop there.
Instead he leans down and kisses her.
Softly, because anything else would be cruelty. Gently, because her face is still wrecked from crying and the room still smells of salt and hot water. His mouth meets hers with no hunger in it, only the deliberate pressure of reassurance made physical. A brief touch. Warm. Firm.
Enough to settle something without asking for more.
When he pulls back, she looks stunned.
Good.
He would rather leave her stunned than spiraling.
“Dry off,” he says.
It takes her a second to move. When she does, it is with the strange carefulness of someone returning to her body piece by piece. She reaches for the towel on the rack. Wraps it around herself. Pats at her face, then her hair, then stops halfway through as if remembering he is drenched too.
Her eyes widen in sudden practical concern that would almost be funny under any other circumstances.
“You’re soaked.”
“Nothing gets past you.”
She makes a face, faint but real. Better than crying.
Then she starts fussing.
It is the most Satomi thing she has done in days, he suspects. Dragged out of a breakdown only to turn immediately toward the fact his cardigan is clinging wetly to him. She tells him he cannot stay in those clothes or he will catch something, which is nonsense on multiple levels, but he lets her say it because the cadence of complaint sounds more like her than the broken whisper from before.
She ushers him out of the bathroom with the towel clenched around her and directs him to the chair by the desk. He pulls off the cardigan first, drops it over the back. Then the turtleneck, wet fabric peeling from skin with mild annoyance. Satomi, now in an oversized sleep shirt and shorts dug out from a drawer, goes rummaging until she produces one of her hoodies and hands it to him with a look that dares comment.
It is pale pink and clearly hers. Smaller through the shoulders than anything he would choose for himself, but large enough to fit because she likes things oversized. There’s a stamp on the back that reads ‘Babygirl.’ with some glitter and curvy font.
He takes it.
She watches while he pulls it over his head, then seems satisfied in a way that makes the room feel less wrecked.
By then she has begun packing.
Not much. Just enough for two days, maybe three if he decides she is not stable enough to return sooner. She moves with mechanical efficiency at first, opening drawers, choosing clothes, toiletries, chargers. Sukuna stays seated and watches. Not because he doubts she can handle the task, but because if he stands too soon he might start doing it for her, and she already looks close to humiliated enough.
The room is quiet except for zippers and fabric.
At one point she pauses with a folded sweater in her hands, staring at nothing. Sukuna says her name once. She blinks, nods, and keeps moving.
When she is nearly done, he says,
“Phone.”
She looks over.
“What.”
“Take it.”
She glances toward the nightstand where it lies face down.
“I know where it is.”
“That wasn’t the instruction.”
A faint, exhausted irritation crosses her face. Good. He still prefers irritation to vacancy.
She retrieves the phone and tucks it into her bag.
Then she hesitates.
Sukuna reads the hesitation before she speaks.
“What.”
“My friends.”
The words are small again, uncertain in a different way now. Concern instead of shame.
He leans back slightly, considering her.
“Which ones.”
“Maki. Miwa. Momo. They’ve been messaging.”
“Then you send a message.”
She holds his gaze.
“You tell the good ones you’re not home,” he says, “but you’re safe and you’re eating.”
A strange look passes over her face. Half gratitude, half disbelief. As if she expected him to dismiss the matter entirely or sneer at her concern for them.
He nearly does sneer then, but only because she is underestimating him, which offends his pride.
“They worry,” he adds, flat enough to keep it from sounding kind. “No reason to make them do it more.”
That gets the ghost of a smile.
She types while perched on the edge of the bed, thumbs slower than usual from fatigue. He does not ask to read what she sends. He only watches the shape of her calm return in small increments as three brief messages go out. One to Maki. One to Miwa. One to Momo after a pause, perhaps because she knows Momo will make a whole event out of any news. Her phone starts vibrating almost immediately with replies.
She looks at the screen, exhales through her nose, then turns it facedown again.
“Done.”
“Good.”
He stands then, takes her bag before she can reach for it, and gives the room one last glance. Laptop closed. Curtains drawn. Bathroom door open to let the steam out. Wet towel slung over the chair. All the signs of a life temporarily paused. He locks the door behind them.
The walk back through the dorm feels easier only because she is beside him now and not hidden behind wood and silence.
She says nothing until they reach the car.
Once she is in the passenger seat, belted in and staring out through the windshield, he can see the exhaustion catching up to her in full. She holds herself upright by force. The crash after panic always comes like that. Sudden. Absolute. Her face, stripped of makeup and freshness, looks younger than it does on campus. Not childish. Only unguarded. More obviously tired.
He starts the engine and drives.
Traffic is light. The city after dark blurs past in clean lines of storefronts, signals, reflected lights on damp pavement. Inside the car the air is warm and quiet. Sukuna keeps one hand on the wheel, the other loose by the console. Satomi sits curled slightly toward the door at first, hugging one arm with the other as if habit still has not fully released her from the shower.
He lets the silence sit.
About ten minutes in, she shifts and turns her face toward the window more fully. The streetlights moving over her features reveal that she is not crying now. Only thinking. The kind of thinking that can become dangerous if left too long in the dark.
“Did Yorozu touch you,” he asks.
Satomi goes still.
He keeps his eyes on the road.
“No,” she says after a moment.
“Did she talk to you.”
A pause.
“Yes.”
His fingers tighten once on the wheel.
“What did she say.”
Another pause. Longer.
Then Satomi says, in a voice too controlled,
“You don’t need the whole thing right now.”
He could demand it. Could pin the details down, one by one, until he has enough to build a response out of them. But he hears the strain in her answer. Hears the edge of collapse still waiting there if pushed wrong.
So he says only,
“I’ll get it anyway.”
She lets out a tired breath that is almost a laugh and not quite amused.
“You are terrifying.”
“Yes.”
That, finally, earns a real sound from her.
Brief. Dry. Better.
He drives the rest of the way with one part of his mind on the road and another on names and possibilities. Yorozu first. The rejected boy rumor Miwa mentioned second. Whatever faculty heard and repeated in fragments third. He does not need to explode publicly.
Public consequences are rarely satisfying enough. He only needs facts, leverage, timing.
By the time they reach his building, he already knows whom he will call after Satomi is asleep.
His apartment is quiet when they enter.
It is the kind of quiet money buys properly. Thick doors, high enough ceilings, no neighbors stomping above, no hallway chatter seeping in. Clean lines. Dark wood. Controlled lighting. Everything in its place because he likes it that way and because nobody else lives there often enough to disrupt the order unless he allows it.
Satomi has disrupted it before in small ways.
Hair ties left on the sink. Books stacked by the couch. Face cream beside his shaving kit. A mug abandoned on his counter and retrieved only after he sent her a photograph of it with the caption take responsibility for your crimes.
Tonight he is grateful for the traces.
They make the space less severe when she needs that.
Satomi toes off her shoes at the entry without being asked. He sets her bag down by the bedroom door she usually uses and turns on the warmer lights rather than the overheads. She stands in the middle of the living room for a moment, barefaced and slight in her sleep clothes and one of his hoodies over them now, looking as if she is not fully certain she is allowed to occupy the air here again.
Ridiculous.
Sukuna gestures toward the kitchen.
“Sit.”
She obeys this time with no smart remark, choosing one of the stools at the island and curling her hands around the edge of the counter. He opens the refrigerator, starts pulling together the fastest useful meal available. Rice reheated properly, not microwaved to death. Salmon from the previous night. Pickled vegetables. Miso soup he keeps portioned because routine matters. He moves through the kitchen on habit and control, listening behind him to make sure she stays there.
She does.
Halfway through plating the food he glances back and finds her watching him.
Not with flirtation. Not with the slow heat she usually likes to build when he is using his hands for something else.
Just watching.
Quiet. Tired. A little dazed by being taken care of against her will and then not minding it.
“Stop staring,” he says.
“You’re cooking.”
“Yes.”
Her mouth shifts faintly.
“I like when you cook.”
He gives her a look over his shoulder.
“That obvious.”
“You’re bossier in the kitchen.”
“Eat the food and keep your opinions to yourself.”
That earns another small smile. He would like more of those before the night ends.
He sets the plate in front of her and watches until she takes the first bite. Only then does he move to make himself something separate. Not because he needs dinner — he already ate badly between obligations hours ago — but because sitting across from her with a drink while she picks at food will only make her more self-conscious. Better to normalize the table by doing something with his own hands.
At first she eats slowly, as if her body has forgotten the point. Then hunger remembers itself. Not greedily. Satomi is too well mannered even exhausted for that. But steadily. Enough to loosen the line between his shoulders.
When the soup is done he sets it beside her. She murmurs thanks without looking up, the word soft and automatic. He does not answer. He does not need to.
After a few minutes he says,
“You’ll tell me when you stop wanting this to be private.”
She looks up.
“The rumors,” he says. “The girl.”
Satomi lowers her chopsticks. The appetite fades from her face and becomes caution again.
“You mean when I let you go ruin people’s lives.”
“I mean when you stop pretending silence helps.”
The correction lands. She looks down at the soup, then back to him.
“I know it doesn’t help,” she says quietly. “I just… couldn’t handle people looking.”
Sukuna leans one hip against the counter opposite her.
“They already look, you like the attention, and you produce yourself for it.”
“I know.” A humorless laugh escapes her. “That’s part of the problem.”
He studies her for a long second.
“Then we fix where it matters.”
She absorbs that without responding, perhaps because she is too tired to challenge the we.
Good.
When she is done eating, he sends her to shower again — properly this time, not skin-boiling and folded in on herself. She starts to protest that she already showered. He informs her that standing under scalding water while crying is not hygiene, it is self-punishment, and she should learn the difference. She glares weakly at him from the hallway and goes anyway.
While the water runs, but gentler now, he makes two calls.
The first goes to a man who handles student records and petty leverage when asked. The instructions are simple — everything on Yorozu by morning. Academic standing, family, complaints, finances if there is anything stupid enough to use, names of who she talks to, and confirmation of where she was and with whom the day Miwa mentioned.
The second call goes elsewhere. Broader. Less legal. The rejected boy rumor too. He wants the name. Wants to know who has been spreading what and how far it has traveled. He wants details not because he enjoys them, though he does enjoy knowing the shape of prey, but because once he acts he does not like loose ends.
By the time he ends the second call, the anger in him has gone colder, cleaner.
The bathroom door opens.
Satomi steps out in fresh clothes and damp hair, skin no longer reddened by abuse. She still looks tired enough to sleep standing, but the wildness is gone from her face. She notices his shirt discarded over the arm of the couch and frowns.
“You’re not wearing the hoodie.”
“I changed.”
He did. Back into one of his own shirts once the wet things were dealt with. She seems to approve of this, though she only nods and walks closer.
The moment she reaches the living room, he sees the hesitation again. The pause before deciding where to put herself.
Bedroom. Couch. Distance. Nearness.
Sukuna makes the decision for her.
“Come here.”
She goes.
When she is close enough, he lifts a hand to the side of her neck, fingertips at the damp line where hair meets skin. Her pulse is steadier now. Still fast. Not panicked. He lets his thumb rest there, grounding them both to the fact she is here, upright, and no longer alone.
“You sleep here tonight,” he says.
Satomi’s mouth softens in a tired, crooked little smile.
“I figured.”
“Genius even after missing so many classes.”
She glances toward the bedroom, then back at him.
“Can I ask you something without you getting mean about it.”
“No.”
Her eyes narrow.
“That defeats the point.”
“Ask.”
She sighs, but the sound lacks heat.
“Were you worried?”
He looks at her.
It is a stupid question. Not because the answer is no, but because worry is too small a word for the black thoughts that arrived when the door did not open and the shower ran too long and he imagined a body behind it.
He does not give her any of that.
“Yes,” he says.
Her gaze shifts down, then up again. The answer seems to do something to her, though she does not comment on it. She only leans the smallest fraction closer into his hand at her neck, as if she cannot help it.
He lets her.
When they finally go to bed, he expects distance at first. Some stubborn attempt on her part to reclaim dignity after the bathroom, after the tears, after the question she asked him in a voice barely louder than breath.
He is wrong.
The second the lights go down and the room settles, Satomi turns toward him and presses herself along his side like she has done this a hundred times and never once with as much need. One arm over his waist. One knee hooked half over his thigh. Face buried against his shoulder. Her whole body asks not to be sent away.
He wraps an arm around her and that is the end of it.
It does not take long for her to start drifting. Exhaustion has teeth. It pulls her under fast once safety finally exists around her. He feels it in the way her grip loosens, then tightens once in sleep reflex before easing fully. Her breathing evens. Her body grows heavy and warm against his.
Sukuna stays awake.
He lies there in the dark of his own room with Satomi asleep against him and listens to the city under the windows and the steady quiet of the apartment. His hand remains on her back. Every so often he drags it once, slowly, from shoulder blade to waist. She settles deeper each time without waking.
His mind does not soften with the room.
It sharpens.
He thinks of her in the shower, arms crossed over herself, unable to bear being seen. Thinks of the question about surgery. Thinks of five days of her alone with whatever those girls and boys and whispering idiots shoved into her head. Thinks of faculty chatter and his own mistake in dismissing it. Thinks of Miwa saying she is not acting like herself. Thinks of how quickly Satomi gave in once held, which means the isolation had gone on too long already.
Then he thinks of Yorozu.
The next morning will come. Information will arrive. Facts will replace guesswork. He will act from there. Perhaps not dramatically. Perhaps not visibly. But thoroughly.
He is too old and too practiced to confuse rage with efficiency.
Still, in the dark, with Satomi breathing against him, he allows himself one simple conclusion.
Anyone who made her ask whether she is real has made a very stupid choice.
Sometime after midnight she stirs.
Not fully awake. Just enough to shift, to make a soft unhappy sound, to press closer. He feels her hand spread against his chest, searching in sleep for proof of something solid.
He covers it with his own.
She quiets immediately.
By morning, when the sun edges pale through the curtains, she is still there, soft, face resting against his chest, cuddling against him as he keeps holding her tight.
That matters more than he would ever say aloud.
also i'm on twitter by the way. just as a heads up. more text posts might fall there if they're fleeting thoughts.
nanagego enjoyers hear me out
I've been obsessed with nanagego so I was just making up scenarios in my mind as always until I had this fic idea that I really want to bring to life
this is what I came up with:
- transmasc satoru and suguru
- established relationship/married stsg
- stsg want a baby and they ask nanami to be their sperm donor
- nanami is a gentleman so he wants to take care of suguru while he's pregnant
- they create such a strong bond that they ask nanami if he wants to be present in the baby's life
- he does, so now nanami moved in and suguru gave birth to twins and they're three dads trying to figure out this new life together
- and of course they'll eventually fall in love with nanami and nanami with them (but make it a little slow burn for funsies)
I don't know if I could handle writing it on my own, especially with how little I know about having a baby, but if anyone would want to help me out in this endeavor please reach out!
🎀; Satomi figures out Sukuna really rich the first time he tells her not to look at the prices. 🌸; art: @winterrbluess 🧁; masterlist
They’re in one of those minimalist department stores that smells like money — quiet music, too much glass, mannequins wearing things worth more than her monthly rent. She stands in front of a display of skirts, one fingertip grazing the hem of something black and soft that she absolutely cannot afford.
Sukuna watches her from a step back, hands in the pockets of a long, dark coat. In the bland mall lighting he looks almost respectable, donning wire-rim glasses, button-down shirt, that quiet tone that makes idiots think he’s just a grumpy academic. The tattoos are hidden. The temper is on a leash.
The eyes are not.
“You’re doing the math in your head, brat.” he says. His voice is low enough that it doesn’t carry past the rack. “Stop.”
“I’m not,” she lies.
He huffs, studying her face.
“You always chew your cheek when you are.”
Her jaw freezes. She glares at him over her shoulder, pale hair swinging.
“It’s called budgeting, old man. Some of us have to think before we buy things.”
“Don’t call me old man in public.” He steps closer, the faintest brush of his chest against her back as he reaches for the price tag she’s failed to sneak a look at. “And you’re not paying. I am.”
He doesn’t even flinch when he sees the number. Just flicks the paper between two fingers, looks down at her with that flat, unimpressed stare that makes undergrads shrink in their seats.
“Try it on,” he says. “That one. And the red one you’re pretending not to want.”
She backpedals immediately.
“Sukuna—”
“That’s not ‘yes, sir’.”
Her lips press together. She’s bratty enough to push, but she’s also very aware of the weight of the credit card he palmed at the entrance, the way staff started treating them differently the moment they clocked the watch on his wrist, the shoes, the coat. She knows he’s comfortable, she just doesn’t know how comfortable.
She also knows what he did to her back in her apartment last week when she argued about letting him pay her phone bill.
She swallows and snatches the skirt off the rack.
“Fine.”
He smiles, slow and sharp.
“Attagirl.”
In the mirror of the fitting room hallway, they look wrong together in all the ways she likes — him tall and dark and solid, her small and bright and leaning into his orbit like she can’t help it.
His hand sits easy at the small of her back as he steers her to the changing booth, thumb pressing once, possessive, like a brand she can’t see.
“Don’t take forever,” he says, and there’s a double edge to it. “I’m not patient.”
“Since when?” She rolls her eyes, stepping into the tiny cabin. “You’ve been putting up with my bullshit for months now.”
“Don’t make me reconsider.” he calls through the thin door.
She laughs, all soft and delighted, and the sound hooks in his chest.
He shifts his weight, leaning against the opposite wall, expression smoothing into something neutral for any staff walking by. Inside, he’s replaying the entire last week in fragmented flashes — her legs over his lap on his couch, the way she sprawled across his sheets afterward, how she wrinkled her nose when she first saw the view from his apartment like she couldn’t decide if she was impressed or suspicious.
“You live here?” she’d asked, incredulous, taking in the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city spread out in glittering lines below.
“Where’d you think I lived,” he’d said, tossing his keys in the bowl by the door. “Under your dorm bed?”
She’d snorted, then gotten distracted by the fancy coffee machine. She didn’t ask where the money came from.
Most people don’t. They see the university title, the publications, the occasional guest lecture on some documentary. ‘Consultancy’ covers a lot. Nobody spends too long wondering what a man like him does when he leaves campus after his last class.
Satomi doesn’t, either. She just takes the spoiling and growls when he teases her about it.
The curtain rattles, snapping him back to the present.
“Don’t laugh at me,” her voice warns. “If you laugh, I’m not coming out.”
He can hear the fabric swish as she moves inside, the clumsy tap of one boot hitting the little bench. He imagines her balancing on one foot, yanking tights straight, skirt sliding up her thighs, hoodie riding high. Heat flickers low in his gut. He inhales, slow.
“I haven’t seen you yet,” he says. “What would I be laughing at, exactly.”
“Your own face when you do.” she mutters.
The curtain parts a crack, then a little more. She steps out, hands fisted in the hem of the hoodie like she’s considering bolting back in.
The skirt fits like pure sin. Simple black, mid-thigh on anyone else, but rather higher on her perfect, long model-like legs. The tights are semi-sheer, a whisper of skin beneath. Her hoodie is still on, but it makes the whole thing worse somehow, the oversized top swallowing her shoulders so that all that’s left is long leg, tiny waist, flush blooming on her cheeks.
“Well?” she demands. “Say something, professor.”
The title on her tongue hits him harder here than it does in the classroom.
He lets his gaze rake down, slow and unhurried, not bothering to hide it. She shifts under the scrutiny, weight going to one hip, knees pressing briefly together before she remembers herself and plants her feet again.
“Turn around.” he says.
She scoffs, but she does it, spinning in a quick circle. The skirt flares, then settles. From behind, it’s worse — just enough fabric to cover what it needs to, nothing more.
He can see exactly how high it will ride when she sits, how it will bite when he pulls. How hard it will be not to yank it off her and ruin the gift as soon as they go back to his place.
He exhales through his nose.
“You’re not wearing that to my class.”
She spins back, scandalized.
“What? Why not?”
His eyes snap to hers.
“You know why not.”
Her mouth opens, then closes. She stares at him, a slow grin creeping across her face as comprehension dawns.
“You like it,” she says, delighted. “Oh my god. You really like it.”
He gives up on hiding it, it’s pointless when she looks at him like that.
“That’s the problem.”
“That sounds like a you problem.” She steps closer, until there’s only a handspan between them, sun-sweet perfume drifting up. “So what, you’re going to buy me expensive skirts and then ban me from wearing them where you have to see?”
“Exactly.”
Her brows shoot up.
“Possessive much?”
“Bratty much,” he returns.
They glare at each other for a beat. Then she laughs, shoulders shaking, and the tension softens into something warmer.
“So where can I wear it?” she presses, eyes gleaming. “If not to your class.”
He leans down, lowering his voice so it’s barely more than a breath between them.
“On my time.” he says. “In my place. When there isn’t a campus policy and four walls full of witnesses between me and what I want to do to you for acting up.”
Her inhale is sharp, audible. Color floods her neck. For a moment, the store, the mirrors, the distant murmur of other customers all fall away. It’s just his hand coming up to lightly pinch the hem of the skirt, the pad of his thumb brushing the fabric right above her thigh, a promise made and not kept. Yet.
Her eyes drop, then come back up, pupils blown wide.
“Then you better buy it,” she murmurs. “And the red one, too.”
He laughs, low and genuine this time, and taps her hip with two fingers.
“Get back in there before I forget we’re in public.”
She flashes him a wicked little smile and disappears into the booth again, curtain swishing shut.
He leans back against the wall, pulls out his phone under the guise of checking the time. Instead, he opens their chat.
buy it. don’t argue.
He hits send.
There’s a muffled fumbling, then the soft buzz of her phone inside the cabin.
A second later, a reply pops up.
yes, sir 💋
His jaw twitches, half a curse catching under his breath. Somewhere between the marble floors and the polite salespeople, his life took a turn he did not see coming — history professor by weekdays, yakuza lieutenant by most late nights, sugar-daddy with a sugar-baby student sending him emojis while trying on designer skirts on his credit line by… whenever.
He should stop. He knows that.
He should push her away, untangle this mess before it knots beyond fixing.
Instead, he tucks the phone away and waits, already mentally planning which bottle to open when he gets her back to his apartment, which lecture he’s going to give her about “respecting her elders” when she inevitably spends the taxi ride home with her hand on his thigh, grinning like she owns the world.
He would give her the world if she asked for it, that’s the main issue.
He’ll spoil her again.
Like he always does.
The money is blood-warm and easy.
The girl is not.
She’s trouble, soft, loud and bright and impossible.
He presses the back of his head against the cool wall, closes his eyes for a second, and lets himself think, very quietly, that he likes it that way.
Tear You Apart
cw: sukugo; trans masc satoru, vampire sukuna, true form sukuna, period blood, blood play, blood drinking, sukuna eats satoru out on his period, and inappropriate use of sukuna's stomach maw. art by @outdmilk
Satoru has bled through two pairs of sweats and a towel before he admits defeat.
He’s curled on Sukuna’s couch with a heat pack clamped to his belly and a hoodie rolled up to his chest, trying not to think about the way his body feels wrong, heavy, pulled downward.
Like gravity isn’t just dragging at his organs, it’s dragging at his fucking gender too.
He keeps checking the throw blanket for stains, wouldn't want to ruin Sukuna's stuff. He keeps pulling his knees closer, like he can hide from his own blood.
Sukuna lounges at the other end of the couch like he owns not just it, but everything on it.
He’s pretending to watch the movie.
He’s very bad at pretending.
“You’re doing that thing,” he says suddenly.
Satoru flinches.
“What thing?”
“That.” Sukuna’s fingers flick lazily at Satoru’s thigh. “The ‘if I make myself very small, maybe I’ll disappear’ thing.”
“I’m not.” He absolutely is. He pulls the blanket higher anyway. “I’m just… tired.”
Sukuna hums.
The sound is low, resonant, something that belongs in a chest much bigger than the one he’s wearing right now.
A cramp claws through Satoru’s abdomen, sharp enough to steal his breath. He hisses, curls around it, knuckles whitening in the fleece.
“Is it always that bad?” Sukuna asks, brows knitting together.
“Sometimes worse,” Satoru mutters into the blanket. “Sometimes better. Today’s the—”
He stops himself before he says worst. He refuses to give this stupid biology that much power out loud.
Sukuna shifts, the couch dipping as he moves closer.
The brush of a knee against his hip, the weight of an arm draping over the back of the couch, claws — currently blunt, thank God — ghosting near his shoulder.
“Why are you embarrassed?” Sukuna asks, and he says it like a genuine question, not mockery.
That’s somehow worse in Satoru's mind, just because he gets to be the one trying to explain it.
Satoru feels his face flare hot.
“Because it’s gross?”
“Blood is gross?” Sukuna sounds vaguely offended, red eyes narrowing slightly.
“That’s not—” Satoru digs his fingers into the bridge of his nose. “You know what I mean. It’s… this kind of blood. It’s different.”
Sukuna goes quiet.
The TV throws blue light across his profile, shadowing his mouth, catching at the sharp angle of his cheekbone.
He looks like a painting of a man who should not be left alone with you in a dark room.
“Who told you that?” he asks.
Satoru lets out a small, humorless laugh.
“Everyone? Media? School? Bathroom graffiti? Take your pick.”
He shrugs, the motion tight.
“You grow up with all that and it sort of buries itself in your brain, you know? ‘Dirty.’ ‘Unhygienic.’ ‘Hide it.’”
“And the dysphoria thing.” Sukuna says, matter-of-fact.
The word lands like a pebble in a pond, ripples spreading through Satoru’s chest.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “That too.”
Sukuna leans in. Satoru can feel the coolness of him now, the way the air changes temperature around his skin.
“I don’t find you disgusting,” Sukuna mutters very close to his face. “None of you. Not this. Not anything.”
Satoru snorts, because if he doesn’t, he’ll probably cry and that would be painful and pathetic.
“You literally drink blood.”
“Exactly.” he says as if that proves his point.
There’s something strange about him now. Satoru turns his head a bit, squinting.
Sukuna’s pupils are blown wider than the dim room should warrant, swallowing almost all of the red. The tattoos at his wrists look darker, ink crawling a little closer to his fingers with every slow beat of Satoru’s heart.
Oh.
Right. Vampire.
Satoru’s stomach drops and swoops at the same time.
“You can… smell it, can’t you.”
“Smell it,” Sukuna agrees. “Hear your pulse fight it. Feel how the air tastes heavier.” He tilts his head, looks like he's salivating, but he's studying Satoru’s face. “You’re in pain. I like the blood. I don’t like the pain when I'm not the one causing it.”
Satoru stares at him.
“That’s… weirdly sweet.”
“Don’t say that.” Sukuna grumbles. His eyes flick down, to where Satoru’s bare thigh peeks from under the blanket. “May I?”
The question scrapes something raw and tender in Satoru’s chest. Consent, like it’s not even a question that he could say no.
His first instinct is to clamp his legs together and never open them again. His second is to imagine Sukuna between them and short-circuit entirely.
His third — quiet, shy, tired of hating himself — is maybe I want to know what it’s like to not feel disgusted.
Satoru swallows.
“You’re not going to… y'know, freak out? Or think I’m—”
“If you use the word ‘dirty’,” Sukuna warns, “I’ll bite you just to prove a point.”
Satoru chokes on a laugh. It breaks the last of the tension in his shoulders.
“Okay,” he says. His voice comes out smaller than he intends, but it’s steady. “Just… don’t look at me like I’m some kind of buffet, yeah?”
Sukuna’s mouth curves, slow and sharp.
“You’re exactly a buffet, brat.” he says, and then, softer, “but you’re mine. That’s different.”
He shifts down the couch, fingers skimming along Satoru’s shin, then his knee.
The blanket slips.
Satoru forces himself not to grab it back, not to bolt for the bathroom.
Sukuna is careful, deliberate, moving as if Satoru is something fragile in his hands and not someone who can snap a neck with cursed energy.
Satoru shuts his eyes when Sukuna’s shoulders settle between his knees.
He tries not to think about everything that’s happening.
Tries to focus on the sound of the TV, on his own breathing.
It works for about three seconds.
Then Sukuna exhales against the inside of his thigh and Satoru’s thoughts scatter like startled birds.
His brain runs in useless circles — this is insane, and you’re on your period, what are you doing, and he’s going to see everything and never touch you again.
Except Sukuna makes a low, wrecked sound, like hunger and reverence tangled up together, and any version of “he’s going to be disgusted” just… doesn’t match what Satoru is hearing.
“Fuck,” Sukuna mutters against his skin, voice already different — rougher, layered with something deeper that sits wrong in an ordinary human throat. “You have no idea how good you smell.”
Satoru’s hand flies down, tangling in pink hair without meaning to.
“You’re supposed to be reassuring me, not saying things like that,” he says, but it comes out breathless.
“I am reassuring you,” Sukuna drawls like he's intoxicated. “You’re not disgusting. You’re driving me insane.”
He peels Satoru's boxers down, slowly, careful — like he could lose control if he hurried that simple motion.
Satoru almost thanks him for not licking his bloodied underwear like someone would do after peeling the lid off a greek yogurt, but all he does is bite his lower lip down and hold his breath, heart pumping blood to his face and neck as Sukuna lowers himself back between his legs, big cold hands fixing the back of his knees over his broad shoulders.
He hums and slides his tongue between Satoru's folds in a slow, long motion, taking his time, tasting him — consequently coating it with blood and slick because there is no way in hell Satoru can manage not to get aroused near his man.
He groans in that way he does only when he's feeding or fucking Satoru, and the sorcerer doesn't know if he hides his face or close his eyes, but he does none of those things — he's too mesmerized to look away.
Sukuna sinks his face finally and he eats out like he's actually craving everything Satoru has to offer. And oh that feels so, so good in ways he would never imagine.
Satoru jerks his head back and moans, bucking his hips once against Sukuna's mouth and the vampire growls, squeezing tighter the grip on his hips.
He's focused. Too much. It's like watching a predator feasting after starving for a long, long time — interrupting him would be unimaginable unless you have a death wish.
And Satoru would never want him to stop either, being so sensitive, hot and bothered, he feels his eyes rolling back at each stroke of Sukuna's tongue. The vampire sucks diligently his clit, his folds, he laps at his entrance and tonguefucks Satoru without a warning, granting him a mewl and a yelp along with the sorcerer's fingers closing and tugging at his pink hair.
The world narrows to warmth and pressure and the distant awareness that Sukuna is losing his carefully maintained humanity one thread at a time.
The nails at Satoru’s hips sharpen, digging in just enough to sting.
Something in the cadence of his breathing shifts, doubles.
Satoru is so busy trying to keep it together that it takes him a moment to realize what’s changed.
The hand now on his thigh is not one hand anymore.
It’s subtle at first, the way the weight changes, the way a second thumb presses into the softness just above his knee.
Then there’s another grip at his hip, stronger, pinning him, and another bracing at the small of his back, pulling him closer. And another sliding carefully two big fingers at his entrance, slowly probing, cautious not to hurt him before sliding in.
That's— that's too many hands.
Satoru’s eyes snap open.
For a second, he doesn’t move.
Can’t.
He just sees the broad pink shoulders between his legs and then farther down — an extra elbow where there absolutely shouldn’t be one, the ripple of muscle under ink as a third forearm flexes. And a forth, on the other side.
His gaze climbs, tracing tattoos that are thicker now, darker, like someone took a pen and pressed harder. They crawl up Sukuna’s neck, across his jaw. The side of his face he can see bears more lines than before, curling toward a second pair of eyes that hadn’t been there an hour ago.
“Uh.” Satoru says intelligently.
Sukuna freezes.
It’s so complete Satoru can hear the quiet pop of the movie’s dialogue under the massive silence.
Four hands tense on him at once.
When Sukuna looks up, raising his torso and almost dragging Satoru with him, he finally gets the full effect.
Four eyes. Two glowing like fiery coals, two slitted thinner underneath them, all of them blown wide and wild.
One mouth open, lips and chin slick with red that doesn’t look like it came from a glass bottle, teeth too sharp to be human.
For a heartbeat, Satoru can see the hint of another mouth lower, just at the edge of the hoodie, something flexing in his abdomen like it wants to open.
This is not the man who jokes about late fees at the video store.
This is the thing from the stories, the old nightmare without a pulse.
Sukuna’s expression is carefully blank, which is how Satoru knows he is braced for the worst.
“Don’t scream,” Sukuna says. His voice is doubled now, a second tone trailing under the first like a shadow. “I’ll stop. I’ll—”
“Holy shit!” Satoru blurts.
Sukuna goes very, very still.
Satoru’s heart is beating hard enough to shake his ribs, but the panic he expected… isn’t there.
His body is buzzing, yeah, but not with fear.
His mind is trying very hard to catalog every new detail all at once.
Four hands on him.
Four eyes on him.
The sheer size of him, even half-shifted, barely fitting between his legs.
The way the couch looks suddenly too small for what he’s becoming.
Somewhere far away, Satoru hears his own thoughts, loud and clear.
Oh. Oh no. That’s—
He swallows, staring down at Sukuna’s ruined mouth, at the smear of red he should probably not be looking at this intently, at the way the extra hands flex like they don’t know what to do with themselves.
His brain supplies, helpfully — bend me, break me, on the couch, in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the bedroom, in the bath in the garden—
Heat floods him that has nothing to do with cramps and he feels slick and arousal pooling between his still open legs. And of course Sukuna can smell it.
Sukuna’s brows twitch.
“You’re not… afraid.” he says slowly, almost careful.
“I mean, I am,” Satoru says, because he’s not a complete liar. “Just not of… this. Of you.”
He drags one shaking hand up, fingers hovering for a second before committing.
He cups Sukuna’s cheek — one of them, anyway — thumb brushing over a line of ink that wasn’t there this afternoon, right under the second pair of eyes.
The skin is cooler than a human’s, but not unpleasantly so. The bone under his touch is solid, real. Sukuna’s eyes flutter, all four of them, like he doesn’t know where to look.
“This is your real face, right?” Satoru says. “You, uh, trust me with it.”
The hunger in Sukuna’s gaze flickers, tangled with something more vulnerable and raw.
“You’re bleeding, you're so fucking sweet, and taste so good—” he says, as if that explains everything. “I’m not… good at pretending when I’m like this.”
“Good,” Satoru says, surprising himself with how steady he sounds. “I don’t want you to pretend.”
He watches the words land. Watches the way Sukuna’s shoulders ease, just a fraction, the way two of his hands shift to hold Satoru more securely, not like he’s restraining him but like he’s anchoring him.
“You’re ridiculous,” Sukuna mutters. “You should be running.”
“Why would I run,” Satoru says, “from the guy who just made my brain switch from ‘I’m disgusting’ to ‘I want him everywhere’ in under five minutes?”
Sukuna stares up at him like Satoru has just flipped the axis of the earth.
Then — slowly, carefully, like he’s handling something more dangerous than any curse — he smiles.
It’s not human.
It’s too wide, too full of teeth, two of his eyes narrowing in predatory delight while the other two soften.
“Say that again.” he says.
“Nope,” Satoru answers immediately, flushing to his ears. “You heard me the first time. Don’t be greedy.”
“Oh but I am.” Sukuna rumbles, and all four hands tighten on him as if to prove it.
Satoru takes a breath. His body still hurts, but the pain feels different now, threaded through with something fierce and alive. Pleasure turning it all more bearable.
He lets his knees fall open a little more.
“Keep going.” he says, and there’s no apology in it this time. No shame. Just trust and lust, plain and reckless.
Sukuna’s eyes flare.
He lowers his head again, and the rest of the night blurs into sensation and the echo of thoughts that Satoru will absolutely not admit out loud as Sukuna relishes in his taste and takes him to the brink of insanity and back over three times.
When Sukuna is finally done, satisfied with himself, Satoru is a crying, sobbing, overfucked and grateful mess that forgot about his pain at some point during the second and third orgasm and the overstimulation. Sukuna's face is also a mess, but a different one.
He is kind enough to clean his face up and also clean Satoru up, before joining him again on the couch, and cuddling him with all four strong, big arms.
He's not warm and fuzzy, not when he hasn't fed with enough blood to keep him hot, but he's comfortable enough to have Satoru lodging his face under the sharp jawline and snoring within a few seconds of snuggling, nonetheless.
Satoru wouldn't trade that for any warm blanket nor soft mattress in the world.
He decides to ask again for it when the house is quiet and Sukuna is already half-monster.
It starts simple, Sukuna is sprawled in the armchair, shirt half-open, extra lines of ink just beginning to crawl over his skin like something alive. It’s that in-between state he sometimes slips into when he’s relaxed and a little hungry, when his control loosens at the edges — two arms, then three, then four, like his body keeps remembering what it actually is.
Satoru is on the couch, upside down, feet on the backrest, hair hanging toward the floor, phone hovering above his face.
He’s not reading anything.
He’s just thinking about teeth.
And mouths. Plural.
And the way his chest did that stupid tight-hot ache the first time Sukuna had fully shifted without meaning to and looked up at him like he was already bracing for disgust.
Satoru still remembers the exact moment his brain had gone — oh, you’re beautiful and throw me around like a ragdoll in the same breath.
He drops the phone onto his face, groans, and sits up.
Sukuna’s gaze flicks over lazily, one pair of eyes at first, then the second set opening like an afterthought.
“You’re noisy.” he says.
“You’re ugly,” Satoru fires back on instinct, then catches the way Sukuna’s mouth twists, defensive, and realizes what he’s actually picking at.
“Wait, no!” he corrects immediately, sliding off the couch. “You’re not. That was reflex. I’m an idiot.”
“News.” Sukuna says dryly, but his shoulders are tighter, posture less lazy.
The third arm he hadn’t even been using curls closer to his body, as if to hide.
Satoru stops in front of him, bare feet on cool floor, oversized T-shirt brushing mid-thigh and nothing under it because why would he wear anything under while Sukuna was literally right there?
His heart is hammering for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with fear and everything to do with curiosity and love.
He sets his hands on Sukuna’s knees. Four eyes drop to him at once, and god, that still does something wild to his insides.
“I want to see you,” Satoru says.
“You are seeing me.”
He shakes his head.
“No. I mean… all of you. On purpose this time. Not because you got distracted with my blood and went full cryptid in the middle of things.”
Sukuna’s mouth flattens. One of his hands — normal, for now — clenches on the armrest hard enough that the leather creaks.
“You’re asking for my true form.” he says slowly, like he’s giving Satoru a chance to hear what he’s saying and back down.
“Yes.” Satoru’s fingers tighten on his knees. “That.”
“Why.”
Because you looked like you expected me to scream.
Because someone probably did, once.
Because there is no part of you I don’t want.
Satoru lifts one shoulder.
“Because I like you,” he says simply. “All of you. And I want you to know that. Not just the version you think won’t scare me.”
For a long moment, Sukuna just watches him.
Then he exhales, a long, slow hiss, like steam leaving something under pressure.
“You’re going to regret this.” he mutters.
Satoru’s mouth quirks.
“Promises, promises.”
He feels it earlier than he sees it before his eyes — the way the air changes, pressure dropping and thickening all at once. The room seems to tilt around Sukuna as his body unfolds.
Muscle swells under skin, shoulders broadening, spine lengthening as if someone is dragging him up by invisible hooks.
Ink surges, black and heavy, racing across his chest, down his arms, blooming over his throat. Fingers split, multiply — hands become four instead of two, four arms, each set of hands tipped in claws that look made for tearing.
And then the part Satoru still isn’t fully used to, even in glimpses, the skin of Sukuna’s abdomen rippling, parting, opening on a second mouth lined with teeth, lips curling in a grin that mirrors the one above.
Four eyes, two mouths, four arms.
Still Sukuna.
More Sukuna.
He is vast like this, wrong by human standards in every way that makes Satoru’s pulse leap.
Sukuna sits hunched in the chair only because the room is too small to contain him properly, he looks like he should be carved into a temple wall, worshipped or feared or both.
Every line of him says predator.
Every line of Satoru says please.
“Holy shit.” Satoru breathes.
Sukuna’s jaw tightens.
“If you—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Satoru cuts in.
He steps closer, until his knees press the chair. He tilts his head back, meeting all four eyes at once.
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“Liar.” Sukuna says, but his voice has that echoing quality again, layered, the second tone curling under the first, and there’s a crack in his armor that wasn’t there a moment ago.
Satoru lifts his hands, slow, deliberate, so Sukuna can stop him if he wants.
He doesn’t.
Satoru touches the nearest forearm, fingers tracing the curve of muscle, following a band of ink until his hand is almost dwarfed by the span of Sukuna’s palm.
He feels the faint tremor there, barely perceptible, like this — the permission — is more unnerving than any fight.
“You’re so strong like this,” Satoru says. “You know that’s hot, right?”
Sukuna makes a strangled sound that might be a scoff.
“You’re hopeless.”
“Maybe,” Satoru says easily, and slides his hand down, over the swell of Sukuna’s chest, to the ridge where the second mouth sits.
It moves under his touch, teeth glinting, a slick tongue flicking out once in a reflexive taste of the air. Satoru’s breath catches.
His brain produces an instant, vivid image of what that would feel like lower—
He swallows hard, heat spreading under his skin.
“You’re not a monster to me,” he says, fingers resting lightly near the maw. “You’re you. This is just… more you. I like more you.”
Sukuna’s mouth twists into something almost disbelieving, almost fond. His stomach maw mirrors it, lips pulling back over razor edges. Two of his hands come up, huge and careful, framing Satoru’s ribs in a loose cage.
“You’re playing with fire.” he says quietly.
“Good thing I’m already burned,” Satoru says, and then he leans in, closing the distance to Sukuna’s mouth.
The kiss is messy from the start. Sukuna always kisses like he’s tasting, like he’s taking inventory — breath, tongue, the small needy sounds Satoru refuses to admit he makes.
Now it’s more intense, four hands pulling him in, setting him on Sukuna’s lap like it’s the only natural place for him to be.
Satoru goes willingly, knees bracketing Sukuna’s hips, his bare sex against his abs and the hem of his sweats, fingers digging into tattooed shoulders for balance.
The armchair protests, cushioned wood creaking under the added weight.
Sukuna breaks the kiss just long enough to rasp,
“Last chance to change your mind.”
“You’re the one who should be careful,” Satoru pants, forehead pressed to Sukuna’s, all four eyes inches from his own. “I’m going to be insufferable about this. ‘My boyfriend the terrifying ancient vampire deity who I happen to find ridiculously hot’—”
He yelps when one of Sukuna’s hands smacks his ass, the others tightening around his waist and back, pinning him very efficiently.
“Shut up,” Sukuna growls, but there’s no real heat in it, only fraying control.
Satoru laughs, high and breathless, and then Sukuna kisses him again, cutting it off.
He feels surrounded.
That’s the only word for it.
Four hands, two mouths, four eyes watching him like he’s the only thing in the room that matters.
Every place Sukuna touches him, he feels claimed, every place he isn’t touching yet throbs with anticipation.
Satoru pulls back just enough to speak, lips brushing Sukuna’s.
“Use all of you,” he whispers. “If you want. You don’t have to hold back for me.”
For a heartbeat, nothing moves.
Then something in Sukuna snaps.
It’s not violent — not in the way Satoru has seen him in battle — but it is absolute.
The last threads of restraint burn away. Hands reposition him easily, firmly, like he weighs nothing, one spans his lower back, one pins his hip, one cradles the back of his head, and the fourth slides down, slow and possessive, to hook behind his knee and drag him open.
“Satoru.” Sukuna nearly growls, and there is so much in his voice that Satoru’s chest aches with it — hunger and want and something fierce and terrified that sounds like mine.
Satoru cups his face, all thumbs and fingers and too much emotion.
“I’m here,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere. Show me how much you want me.”
Sukuna’s lower mouth parts in a sharp, eager grin. Warm breath ghosts against Satoru’s skin, the hand on his hip sliding up to bunch the big t-shirt over his belly, Sukuna slowly pulling his body up so the maw breathes and brushes lower, lower, as he yields to the press of those hands, letting himself be guided back, down, into the cradle of Sukuna’s body.
The first thing he clearly registers is the sensation of being held from every angle, pinned and safe and entirely exposed to someone who could devour him in more ways than one — and the way his own heart answers with wild, unreserved trust.
Then Sukuna’s hunger finds him, hot and overwhelming, and thought dissolves into sensation, his fingers clutching at broad shoulders, his mouth catching on Sukuna’s in gasping, desperate kisses between waves of pleasure.
Satoru undulates his hips while the big, hot and delicious appendage laps against his cunt, collecting and smearing his slick and its saliva as it rubs in delicious rhythm between his folds, pressing flat on the aching nub and ripping moans and curses from Satoru's mouth — those who are immediately swallowed by Sukunas lips crashing against his, in that messy, hot kiss.
The bigger muscle's tip probes at some point the slit in Satoru's sex and he shivers and arches his back and lets out the most obscene moan, startling himself and Sukuna both.
"Filthy little whore of a boy." Sukuna whispers.
"That's your boyfriend." Satoru purrs against his lips.
He breathes deeply once, twice, and slowly the tongue wiggles its way into his cunt. Sukuna holds both his thighs with ease, the strong grip of two big hands moving the sorcerer's body with enough skill to have him bouncing, fucking himself as the muscle split him open lusciously.
Satoru's moans and whimpering are enough to have Sukuna breathing heavily, a low growl, a brief snarl and the restraint pulled taut. Satoru knows very well those sounds — he knows very well his boyfriend, so he breaks the kiss and tilts his head to the side, offering his pulse without slowing down the movements of his hips.
Sukuna's four crimson orbs flare and the pupils blow even wider, darkness engulfing almost entirely the red rings, his breath hitching and Satoru's hands going from his shoulders to his hair do the merciful act of pulling him in, letting his vampire bury his face in the crook of his neck and shoulder.
He feels lips, tongue, sharp teeth rasping against soft skin. Sukuna gives him a moment to regret, he doesn't, — never did — and he sinks his teeth in. The pressure comes first, then the sting, the pain, flesh gives, blood flows, Sukuna feeds and increases the way his maw tongue fucks into Satoru.
He can barely register anything anymore, it's too much. The tongue, the movements, him managing to rub the flat of the muscle on his clit as the tip remains buried inside him, moving, thrusting, hips swaying, teeth and warmth in his neck, soothing tongue making the pain bloom into pleasure. The warmth coils inside his stomach and lower, the familiar sensation taking his body and mind, and soon enough he's writhing and spasming under the big beat's grip, being held down and forced down until he's calm, until he rides down his orgasm to the point of eyes fluttering shut and breath easing.
Sukuna stops feeding before Satoru can feel the cold sweat breaking and the need to vomit — he learned how to read his boyfriend and his limits.
A stroke of his tongue on the wound is enough to stop the blood flowing out.
Later — much later, when his legs are jelly and his voice is wrecked and he’s boneless against an inhumanly broad chest — Satoru drags his face up from the hollow of Sukuna’s throat, squints blearily at him, and manages.
“Still not a monster.”
Sukuna huffs, all four eyes heavy-lidded, arms banded around him like he’s a hoard the dragon has finally claimed. “You’re delirious,” he murmurs.
“Deliriously into you,” Satoru corrects, and drops a lazy kiss at the corner of his bloodied mouth.
Sukuna’s answering smile — both of them — is sharp and soft at once.
“Good,” he says, and holds him closer.
If you want to make a request, support my writing or prefer to read it on Ao3, the links are below:
✦ ｢ https://ko-fi.com/belimah ｣﹒｢Ao3 ｣ ✦
@ossifrageyes @frenzied--flame @crescent-canine
🎀 ; the moment things start to go wrong, they just don't seem to stop. 🌸 ; art: @/TAKKIYURI and @/cucci0294 on X 🧁; masterlist
The rumors start small enough that Satomi almost convinces herself they do not count.
That is the worst part of it later, when they swell and spread and begin to stain everything they touch. It does not begin with one spectacular humiliation she can point to. It does not begin with a public confrontation, or a note slipped under her door, or somebody shouting across a classroom.
It begins the way rot begins — somewhere low and hidden, somewhere nobody bothers to look until the smell has already set in.
At first, life goes on.
She keeps taking Sukuna’s class because, if she is honest, she would probably take anything that man taught. History, yes. Political theory, sure. Comparative historiography, if he felt like ruining everybody’s lives for a semester. She had signed up for the subject because she liked it, because she is good at it, because she likes reading, likes patterns, likes the push and pull between event and interpretation. Then she saw him on the first day and the whole thing acquired a second, much worse, much more distracting layer.
She is not ashamed of that part.
He is hard to miss. He is nearly two meters of broad shoulders, dark clothes, old money taste and mean silences, with a face that looks cut from something less forgiving than the people around him. Even when he is standing still behind the lectern, there is a kind of force to him, as if he is holding himself in one place by choice and not because the room can contain him.
Most professors either want to be liked or want to be respected by him. Sukuna seems interested in neither. He only wants the class to keep up.
That, more than the sharp mouth and the body under fitted shirts, is what gets her at first.
Not softness. Not charm. Not ease.
Competence. Precision.
The dry, cutting intelligence of someone who has no patience for laziness and even less for stupidity performed as personality.
It becomes a game after that.
One she starts. One she enjoys. One he pretends not to.
She dresses carefully for his lectures without ever making it look like she dressed for him.
Skirts that are a little shorter than strict necessity. Sweaters that soften her shoulders. Blouses that make her look neat, sweet, expensive. Hair done, gloss on, rings chosen with care.
Feminine in the way she has taught herself to be feminine, not because femininity is fake on her but because she knows too well how much of womanhood is read through effort. There are girls who can roll out of bed in an oversized hoodie and still be taken for what they are.
Satomi has never had that luxury, at least not in her own head.
She is tall. That fact never changes. She can contour, trim, soften, perfume, posture, stretch one leg and tilt one hip and laugh just right, and at the end of it she is still one meter eighty-five of expensive bone structure and long limbs.
Beautiful, yes. She knows that. People tell her enough. Men look. Women look too, sometimes with envy, sometimes with appraisal. She can make them swallow their assumptions whole with one smile. But beauty does not erase vigilance. It only hides it better.
So she builds herself every morning and goes to class shining.
And people buy it, because most people want to buy the first thing they see.
At first, half the room takes her for exactly what she knows they take her for — another pretty rich girl coasting on her face and her last name. Gojo helps in that regard.
Money is a language everyone reads.
She lets them think what they want. Lets the boys glance too long. Lets a few girls dismiss her. Lets the room settle around her image before she begins to disturb it.
When she starts speaking up, the surprise is almost funny.
The first time she answers one of Sukuna’s harder questions, there is a beat of silence after she finishes, the kind that happens when people are recalculating a person in real time. She watches it happen from inside her own skin. One boy in the back looks annoyed. A girl two seats over blinks at her as if she has just watched a decorative lamp solve an equation.
Sukuna only stares at her for half a second longer than usual, then nods and keeps going.
That is enough.
After that she answers more. Not constantly. She is too clever to overplay it. But enough.
Enough that the pattern becomes undeniable.
Enough that the room begins to understand she has actually read the material, and not just the assigned material but the supplementary papers too.
Enough that Sukuna starts waiting a fraction longer before answering his own questions, because he knows she might have something better than the room.
They all start calling her little Gojo genius in the lazy, affectionate way students build hierarchies for one another. It should annoy her. Mostly it does not. She has heard worse from people with less right to name her.
None of that is the problem.
The problem is that the rest of her life exists around this one.
At dinner break, she usually eats with the same girls from class. It is not exactly a friend group in the childhood sense, not the kind of intimacy where people braid one another’s hair on dorm floors and cry over exes and borrow shirts without asking, but it is comfortable. Miwa is there most often, soft-spoken and observant, the kind of girl who notices what others say and what they choose not to. Momo, when she is not busy. Two other girls from their year who orbit between groups but always seem to drift back to Satomi’s table because she knows where the better food is and because she can always be counted on to say something funny when everyone is tired.
That first night, nothing looks different. The cafeteria is too bright in the ugly institutional way all university cafeterias are. Trays scrape. Someone drops a fork and curses. There is always a smell of frying oil threaded through everything, even the fruit.
Satomi has a smoothie and half a sandwich she will probably not finish because she has been anxious all week for reasons she cannot name and anxiety makes her appetite petty.
One of the girls is halfway through a story about a professor from another department when she says it.
“So, this is stupid,” she starts, laughing before the sentence is even out, “but somebody told Hana that you used to be a dude.”
The table reacts before Satomi does.
There is immediate noise. An offended kind of disbelief. One girl snorts so hard she nearly chokes. Another says, “What?” like the word itself is ridiculous. Momo rolls her eyes and mutters something about people being bored and evil at the same time. Somebody else, kinder, says there is no way. Says Satomi is just tall. Says people are weird about tall girls. Says people will say anything to make themselves interesting.
And then, because cruelty often dresses itself in admiration, one of them laughs and says,
“Please. Satomi’s a real girl, a perfect doll.”
It is meant kindly.
That almost makes it worse.
Relief hits first. Relief so fast it hurts. Relief that they are rejecting it, refusing it, laughing it down before it can gain footing. Relief that nobody at the table is looking at her like she has become unfamiliar.
Then grief comes with it, so quickly on relief’s heels that her body cannot sort one from the other.
Because that is the thing, isn’t it. They dismiss the rumor because it sounds impossible, because her face and clothes and voice and makeup and softness make the thought absurd to them. They defend her by saying there is no way. No way she would ever be a man. No way she could ever have been one. No way what is true about her could fit inside the person they like.
The smoothie suddenly tastes too bitter and seems too cold.
She smiles. She has practice. She tips her straw between her lips and shrugs like it is all equally idiotic. Says people on this campus need hobbies. Says the rumor mill is starving. Says if she had ever been a man she would at least hope she had been richer then too.
The girls laugh. The conversation shifts. On the surface, it is over.
Inside her, something has started vibrating.
The worst part of fear is that it makes time sticky. The next few days cling to her. Every glance lasts too long. Every whisper somewhere behind her shoulders feels like it could be her name.
Rumors happen. Campuses are full of bored people and rejected boys and girls who need something tastier than coursework to chew on. Somebody says one thing, somebody else repeats it, and then it dies. She has spent years surviving worse than college gossip. She knows how to keep moving. She knows how to make herself untouchable by acting like nothing can stain her.
Still, when she goes to the restroom after lunch, she checks the mirror longer than usual.
She sees what everyone else sees first — long pale hair, gloss still intact, waist nipped in by the tailored shirt she chose on purpose, skirt cut just right, legs endless in black tights, collarbone showing, mouth pretty and composed. A beautiful girl. A woman. Satomi.
Then her eyes go mean.
Too tall. Too broad in the shoulders if she stands wrong. Hands she sometimes still hates. Jaw saved by careful angles and years of work and money and pain. A voice she knows how to place when she is calm and fears when she is not.
She splashes cold water over her wrists. Fixes her lipstick. Walks back out.
She starts noticing things she might not otherwise have noticed. A boy looking away too fast. Two girls stopping their conversation when she enters the bathroom. A pause after she introduces herself to someone from another lecture section, as if the name and the face and whatever they have heard are being tested against each other.
She tells herself this is how paranoia works. Not as a lightning strike but as a lens. It takes ordinary life and makes it unbearable by sharpening all its edges.
She keeps going. Keeps dressing. Keeps answering questions in class. Keeps letting Sukuna look at her with that measured, annoyed patience he only seems to have for her.
He notices, she thinks, that something is off. Once, when she interrupts him to add a point about a reading, he studies her too long after she finishes, not with suspicion but with concentration, as if he is trying to place a sound he heard under the rest of the room’s noise.
She looks away first. It irritates her that she does.
Then, a little under two weeks after that first cafeteria conversation, the rumor comes closer.
She is leaning against a wall outside lecture, flipping through notes on her phone, when a girl she barely speaks to approaches her with that falsely casual posture people get when they have decided they are being brave for asking something cruel.
“Hey,” the girl says. “Can I ask you something weird?”
Satomi does not even look up immediately.
“You’re already asking.”
The girl laughs in a thin way.
“No, I just— some people were talking, and I thought it was probably bullshit, but—”
Satomi raises her clear blue eyes then. The girl falters a little, perhaps because Satomi’s face is too composed, perhaps because she realizes at the last second that gossip looks uglier when it has to stand in daylight.
“Is it true,” the girl asks anyway, lowering her voice as if discretion can save her from being disgusting, “that you used to be a dude and then, like, transformed?”
The word almost makes Satomi bare her teeth.
Transformed?
As if she had cocooned herself and crawled out under fluorescent light. As if womanhood on her is a special effect. As if the years of knowing, hiding, wanting, planning, risking, changing, grieving, insisting can be flattened into something out of a bad movie.
For one wild second she imagines saying something so mean the girl cries.
Before she can, someone from behind calls her name sharply.
It is Maki, already holding up a stack of printouts she clearly does not need help with. Her face is flat, but her timing is exact.
Satomi understands the rescue immediately.
She offers the girl a small, cold smile that never reaches her eyes.
“Looks like your question’s going to stay a mystery.”
Then she steps away.
Maki says nothing about it while they walk down the hall. She just keeps pace beside her, shoulders squared, expression unreadable. Satomi loves her a little for not making it gentler than it is.
Only when they reach the stairwell does Maki glance over.
“That girl is stupid.”
Satomi snorts, grateful for the bluntness.
“That is one word for it.”
“You okay?”
“Yes,” Satomi lies.
Maki watches her for one extra second, then nods once.
“If you need somebody hit, let me know.”
That gets a real laugh out of her, brief and cracked at the edges.
“Very normal thing to say.”
“I’m very normal.”
Satomi touches Maki’s arm once before they split off in opposite directions. It helps more than she wants to admit.
But something has changed now.
Not externally, not in any way she can point to and prove, but in the atmosphere around her. In pauses. In glances that go a second too long. In the quick hush that follows when she turns a corner and walks into a cluster of people who were definitely talking about something they do not want her to hear.
She starts to notice who looks, and how.
She starts to hate every open space on campus.
She stops going to Sukuna.
That is how she thinks of it in her own head, plain and ugly and true.
That should have been enough warning.
That should have told her what direction things were moving in.
Instead she keeps hoping the rumor will burn itself out.
She stops going to Sukuna as much.
Not class. Never class. She still attends, at first, because Satomi does not give that part of herself up easily. She dresses well. She answers questions. She lets the room remember she is clever, because beauty draws attention but intelligence commands it.
If they are going to look, then they will look at someone brilliant.
But the hidden hours with him disappear.
She stops taking the path behind the language building where he sometimes corners her with a hand at the back of her neck and a mouth made cruel by restraint.
She stops slipping into his office after everyone has gone.
She stops answering the brief messages that mean come here.
She stops lingering when class empties.
Stops baiting him.
Stops smiling like the room belongs to her.
From the outside, she tells herself, it is subtle.
From the way Sukuna looks at her by the end of the first week, it is not subtle at all.
He notices everything. He always has.
That is not a deliberate strategy at first. It is simply that she cannot bear more scrutiny than she is already under, and being with him, even in secret, requires a kind of openness she cannot access while the rest of campus feels like a room full of people listening at a door.
He messages her once after class, something short and characteristically rude about whether she plans to keep vanishing before he can talk to her. She stares at the text until the words blur. Tells him she is busy. He sends back a single thumbs down, which is so unlike him that she almost laughs and almost cries instead.
He notices that she no longer waits for the room to clear before leaving. He notices that she keeps her eyes on the board instead of on him. He notices that she is still sharp when he calls on her, but not playful. That she dresses beautifully and somehow more defensively, higher necklines one day, heavier makeup another, as if she is trying to armor herself out of skin.
He notices, and his patience with the rest of the class gets worse.
The first time he snaps at someone for misreading a text, the room goes so quiet Satomi can hear the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead.
She keeps her face neutral and writes notes she does not need.
After class, he says,
“Gojo.”
Her spine goes stiff before she turns.
The room is almost empty. A few students still gather bags and laugh too loudly by the door. No privacy. No safety.
“Yes, professor?”
The title lands between them like a blade. His mouth hardens.
“You missed office hours.”
“I was busy.”
“With what.”
She almost smiles at the audacity. Almost.
“My life.”
His eyes narrow, red and mean in a way that usually thrills her. Today it only exhausts her. He studies her face like he can peel back skin and mood both.
Then someone brushes past on the way out, and the moment closes.
“Don’t waste my time,” he says flatly, and looks away first.
Satomi leaves with her head high and has to lock herself in a bathroom stall three floors down because her hands will not stop shaking.
She hates that he can still do that to her.
That even now, with all this ugliness climbing up the walls of her life, one sharp look from him can split her clean through.
The rumor mutates by the second week.
Miwa is careful by nature. She does not rush people. She does not make theater out of concern. Miwa does not traffic in gossip. She listens more than she speaks, keeps her hands folded around tea cups, blushes when too many people look at her at once. When she says something, it is because she has had to decide it is worth saying.
That is why Satomi knows, before a word is spoken, that what she is about to hear matters.
They are sitting in the library near the back, not quite together, just near enough to count. Miwa has her laptop open. Satomi has been staring at the same page in her textbook for twelve minutes and absorbing nothing.
“Satomi,” Miwa says softly.
Satomi hums without looking up.
“I heard something.”
There is no point pretending she does not know what kind of thing.
She closes the book.
Miwa worries the edge of her sleeve between her fingers.
“I was in the vending machine hall yesterday,” she says. “There were three boys from Professor Nanami’s section talking. One of them said the reason you turned him down last month was because you were obviously really a guy. And guys aren’t into other guys.”
For a second Satomi says nothing at all.
The stupidity of it is almost abstract.
It is so aggressively, proudly stupid it circles around into insult by sheer force. Not only is he cruel, he is unimaginative. Not only does he want to punish her, he wants to do it in a way that makes his own fragility central.
Heat flashes through her, immediate and white.
Miwa glances at her then, worried.
“What,” Satomi says.
Miwa winces.
“I know.”
“No, say it again. Slowly. I need to understand how somebody survives to adulthood with a brain like that.”
Miwa bites back a small smile, but worry wins out.
“I’m sorry, Sato.”
Satomi leans back in her chair and presses her fingers to her forehead. Anger comes easier than fear for a moment, blessedly hot and clean.
Rejected. That is what this is built from.
Some idiot gets turned down and decides the problem cannot possibly be that Satomi simply did not want him.
No, it has to be something else. Something humiliating. Something he can weaponize. Her refusal translated into an injury that needs punishing.
Of course.
Of course it is a man.
She laughs once, bitter and quiet.
“Dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”
Miwa nods.
“Do you want me to tell somebody?”
That lands harder.
Somebody. And then what? An advisor. A dean. A conduct office. A report with her name on it and questions and forms and eyes. People asking what happened, what exactly was said, how long has this been going on, is there any truth to it, would you like to disclose—
“No,” Satomi says immediately.
Miwa looks stricken. “But—”
“It’s not worth it.”
It is. They both know it is. Harassment always is. But worth and survivable are not always the same thing.
Miwa’s face folds in on itself with helpless anger.
“They shouldn’t get to do this.”
Satomi looks at her then, really looks, and sees the sincerity there. Not pity. Not fascination. Outrage on her behalf.
Something in her chest softens painfully.
“They shouldn’t,” she agrees.
Miwa lowers her voice further.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
No.
“Sure.”
Miwa clearly does not believe her, but she nods anyway.
Satomi loves her for that too, a little. For not forcing care into a shape Satomi cannot bear. Loves that there are people who hear cruelty and do not immediately convert it into background noise. Loves that someone is standing beside her, quiet and angry on her behalf.
She cannot let Miwa fight this for her. If it becomes a confrontation, it becomes a spectacle. And if it becomes a spectacle, she loses control of the story completely.
So she makes a joke. Not a very good one, but enough to loosen Miwa’s shoulders. Enough to get through the walk. Enough to postpone the feeling of her own skin no longer being reliable shelter.
By the time she gets back to her dorm that night, she is tired in a way sleep does not fix.
After that, Satomi starts moving around campus like prey that has learned the map of the forest too late.
Not visibly. She still walks straight. Still dresses well. Still answers in class. But inside, her body is all alertness now. She listens for laughter behind her. Watches the way groups of boys go suddenly interested when she passes. Starts choosing restrooms farther from the busiest halls. Starts ducking invitations. Starts going back to her dorm earlier, doors locked, curtains drawn.
She has spent years building herself into someone people want to look at. Now every glance feels contaminated.
It gets under her skin in ways she hates admitting.
She changes clothes three times before lectures because some part of her has started believing that if she can get femininity exactly right, exactly convincing, exactly effortless, maybe nobody will dare say it again.
Then she hates herself for even thinking that, because she is not trying to become a woman in the eyes of strangers.
She is one already.
Their doubt does not alter the fact.
And still she stands before the mirror and adjusts the fall of a skirt and the tilt of a chin and the pitch of her hello.
Her family would laugh if they saw it. Or maybe not laugh. Maybe just nod, like they had predicted all along that being her would always be labor.
The memory of them comes back easier on bad weeks.
Her mother telling her to sit with her knees together. Her aunt saying softly, almost kindly, that girls like Satomi need to be careful not to overdo it because then people start noticing. Her father looking at her once after hormones had softened her face and saying, with the detached cruelty of a man observing weather,
“At least now you’re less embarrassing from far away.”
From far away.
Satomi keeps moving anyway.
The harassment changes shape after that.
It becomes sweeter on the outside.
More curious.
More feminine, which somehow makes it feel more dangerous.
Men, at least, are simple in their hostility. They posture. They laugh too loudly. They want witnesses.
Women like Yorozu know better.
They know how to make cruelty intimate.
Satomi knows Yorozu by sight before she knows her by name.
A girl from class, one of the ones who always seems to be listening when Sukuna speaks as if the act itself should count for intelligence. Pretty in a polished, almost aggressive way. Curvier than Satomi, shorter, with a face that would be soft if not for the constant tension in it. She has the look of somebody used to ranking herself against other women on instinct and resenting whichever one comes out prettier.
Satomi has caught her looking at Sukuna before. Not subtly. Not with the complicated, private hunger Satomi feels.
With ambition. With the certainty that the right kind of woman can eventually wear any man down.
The bathroom incident happens on a Thursday.
Satomi has gone in between lectures to wash her hands and fix her gloss. She is tired, not sleeping well, and the fluorescent mirror is crueler than usual. She can see the strain at the corners of her mouth. The faint drag under her eyes. The way stress makes her stand taller, stiffer, as if she can brace herself against being seen wrong.
The bathroom is empty when she enters.
It is not empty when she turns to leave.
Yorozu comes in a minute later, smiling. Not warmly. Not even socially. Just with the precise upward shape of a person who has decided she is enjoying herself.
Satomi recognizes trouble too late. The door swings shut behind Yorozu with a soft click. She walks to the sink as if she belongs there, as if this is nothing, as if they are about to have the kind of mundane conversation women have in bathrooms every day.
“Hey,” Yorozu says, meeting Satomi’s eyes in the mirror. “Have you heard the rumors?”
Satomi dries her hands slowly.
“I don’t pay attention to gossip.”
Yorozu laughs under her breath.
“That usually means yes.”
Satomi turns to go around her.
Yorozu shifts into her path.
The movement is small — not dramatic, just enough, just deliberate enough that the room changes shape around it.
Satomi stops.
Up close, Yorozu smells expensive and sharp, floral perfume over powder. Her smile widens a fraction when she realizes Satomi is not going to force past her right away. There is pleasure in it. In the tiny domination of making another woman pause.
“I’m just curious,” Yorozu says. “Are they true?”
Satomi says nothing.
Not because she is ashamed. That is what burns later, after the whole thing is over. Not shame. Not really. Fury that silence is so often the only tool a girl has when truth is dangerous and lies are humiliating.
She does not want to lie. She does not want to perform denial for someone who has no right to ask. She also does not want to hand this stranger the softest part of herself just to watch her step on it.
But Yorozu reads silence the way cruel people always do: as a confession owed to them.
Her face changes in an instant.
The satisfaction in it is ugly.
“Oh my God,” she says, almost delighted. “It’s true, isn’t it? You really are a guy who thinks he’s a girl.”
The sentence lands like a slap across her face.
Satomi feels heat flood her so fast it makes her dizzy.
Hands first. Face. Chest. Her whole body goes hot with anger and disgust.
She locks her jaw and hears herself say, very clearly,
“Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Yorozu does not step back. She steps closer.
That is the thing Satomi will remember later when she is lying in her dark room trying not to think. Not just the words, but the invasion. The way Yorozu keeps coming. The way her smaller body can still make the room feel less navigable.
The way mean girls understand that menace does not require size, only certainty.
“I know enough,” Yorozu says.
Satomi holds her ground for exactly two more seconds. Then Yorozu advances again and Satomi’s back touches tile.
Cold wall. Warm face. Trapped in a room built for ordinary things.
Yorozu plants one hand beside Satomi’s shoulder as if she owns the space. Tilts her head. Studies her like an object she has finally earned the right to inspect.
“I’ve seen the way you look at Ryomen-sensei,” she says.
The use of his name in her mouth makes Satomi want to bite.
Yorozu’s lip curls.
“It’s disgusting.”
Satomi goes still in a way that has nothing to do with submission. It is shock first, then a terrible blankness. As if the body, faced with too many threats at once, has decided to leave the room and let the mind manage what it can.
Yorozu keeps talking, her smile goes bright and vicious.
“You’re disgusting,” Yorozu says. “Do you actually think a man like him would ever want something like you?”
Satomi opens her mouth. Nothing comes out.
“A cultured man,” Yorozu continues, “an educated man, a handsome man, and you think he’d waste his time on a tranny?”
There it is.
Ugly and deliberate and spoken with pleasure.
Yorozu looks at her like she has won something.
“When he finds out you’re not a real girl,” she says, voice dropping almost fondly, “you think he’s still going to be so patient with you?”
Not a real girl.
Each word hits like metal. Not because Satomi believes Yorozu. Not because she thinks this girl knows Sukuna better than she does.
But because all these phrases have ancestry.
They come from somewhere older than Yorozu, older than campus, older than this bathroom.
Not because it is new. Because it is old enough to have grooves worn into her.
She has heard versions of it from family, doctors, strangers online, classmates in high school, one ex-friend who had cried while saying it as if grief could disguise cruelty.
She has survived every version.
But hearing it here, on campus, in a bathroom she uses every week, from a girl who sees her lipstick and her class notes and her laughter and still decides she is counterfeit — it lands somewhere raw.
Her mouth goes dry.
Not real. Not enough. Not woman. Not welcome.
Every line of them is worn smooth from use.
Satomi cannot seem to get air right.
That is the strangest part. She is not crying. She is not arguing. She is not fighting. She is simply no longer fully inside herself. The bathroom is suddenly too bright, too loud and too silent.
She can see the entire scene as if from above — Yorozu leaning in with hatred polished into elegance, Satomi against the wall in a neat cardigan and gloss and gold earrings, both of them framed by mirrors that repeat the image into the distance.
She thinks, absurdly, that she looks calm.
She could break her nose.
The thought comes flat, cold.
She knows how. She is taller, stronger than she looks, and furious enough to make it messy. One good hit. Blood everywhere. Screaming. Conduct office. Police maybe. A whole campus with one more story about Satomi Gojo losing her mind in a women’s bathroom.
Her fingers curl uselessly around the strap of her bag.
Yorozu mistakes silence for weakness and keeps going.
“I hope you know your place,” she says. “And if I ever catch you in the women’s bathroom again, I’m filing a report with the principal.”
Principal. As if they are children. As if Satomi is trespassing in her own life.
Satomi should say something. Should push back. Should laugh in her face. Should at least tell her to go fuck herself. But for one awful stretch of seconds she cannot access her own voice. She can only stand there and listen and feel each word hammer deeper.
Something inside Satomi drops straight through her.
Not because a report is guaranteed to destroy her, though maybe it could. Not because campus is full of perfectly coherent policies designed to protect her, because she knows better than to trust institutions on paperwork alone. But because of what it means. Because with one sentence Yorozu has reached past insult into threat. Into the suggestion that access itself can be revoked. That Satomi can be taken out of the ordinary life she has built and held up to scrutiny like contraband.
Yorozu smiles when she sees the hit land. Satisfaction again. That little bright glint of a bully who has finally found where the blade goes deepest.
Yorozu steps back at last.
Satisfied.
That is the worst part. Not even angry anymore. Satisfied.
She smooths her skirt, glances once more at Satomi’s face, and leaves.
The door clicks shut behind her.
Satomi stays where she is.
That is all. No spectacle. No witnesses. Just enough damage and then the exit. The luxury of leaving someone else to stand in the ruin of it.
For a long time she cannot make her body move. The wall is still cold through her sweater. Her hands hang wrong at her sides. There is a buzzing in her ears like bad electricity. She stares at the sink, the paper towel dispenser, the scratched metal of a stall door, and none of it looks quite real.
Then her knees threaten to give, and that is enough to force her upright.
Bag on shoulder. Check the stall doors though she already knows the room is empty. Walk to the sink. Grip the edge of the counter so hard her knuckles pale beneath foundation. Stare at the woman in the mirror.
Her lipstick is intact. Her eyeliner sharp. Her hair smooth. Her face composed in that eerie, dead way it sometimes gets when she is holding too much.
For one second she hates the reflection because it looks untouched.
Then she hates herself for that too.
She walks out of the restroom on instinct alone. Down the hall. Down one set of stairs. Past people she does not see. Out across the quad. Off campus.
She has a lecture in forty minutes. She does not go.
No one stops her. No one knows.
She skips her next class. Then the one after.By the time she reaches her dorm room, her feet hurt. She kicks off her shoes just inside the door and locks it twice.
Then she stands in the center of the room like she has forgotten what rooms are for.
Small bed. Desk by the window. Sweater over the chair. Makeup bag open. Textbooks in a stack. Her life, neat and temporary and college-small.
She sets her bag down too carefully.
Then she goes to the bathroom and scrubs her hands again. And again. Soap, water, rinse. Soap, water, rinse. Like she can wash language off skin.
The third time, she catches herself braced over the sink and breathing too fast.
“Stop,” she tells herself softly.
Her voice sounds wrong in the tiled room. Too high. Too thin. Too frightened.
That almost breaks her more than Yorozu did.
She presses both palms flat to the counter until the panic passes enough for her to stand upright again.
The rest of the evening folds inward.
Messages arrive. She sees notifications, does not open most of them. Akari asks if she is coming to dinner. Maki sends a link to an article and then, twenty minutes later, just the word alive? Miwa sends a heart and then nothing else, which is somehow the kindest thing anyone could do.
One email arrives from Sukuna in the early evening.
Missed class.
No greeting. No signature. Just that.
Satomi stares at it until the letters blur.
Then she closes the laptop.
The next morning she does not go out.
She tells herself it is just one day. She needs a day to settle. One day without eyes. One day without hallways and rumor and the risk of running into Yorozu at a sink again.
She silences her phone and stays in bed until noon fully dressed in one of Sukuna’s old shirts she never gave back because he had left it on her chair weeks ago and she had stolen it like a magpie.
It smells like her detergent now. Not him. She is weirdly grateful for that.
Around noon she forces herself up, makes coffee she does not drink, sits at her desk, opens a reading, stares at it, closes it again.
Every sound in the hall outside makes her flinch.
Laughter. Doors. Someone dragging a laundry basket. Someone calling to a friend. Campus life going on around her as if she has not just been shoved a step outside of it.
When she finally checks her phone, there are more messages.
Maki: You’re skipping and I’m judging you. Maki, five minutes later: Also if you’re dying tell me first. Miwa: I can bring you notes. Unknown number that is very much not unknown to her: Go to class.
Her heart gives a stupid, painful kick.
She does not answer any of them.
She showers in water hot enough to sting and stands too long under the spray because it is the closest she gets to disappearing safely. When she gets out, the mirror is fogged over. She wipes a small circle clear with her palm and regrets it immediately.
Without makeup, without clothes, without the daily work completed, her body feels louder to her. Not wrong. Never exactly wrong anymore. But loud. Demanding to be witnessed by the cruelest part of her own mind.
Too tall.
Ribs visible in the wrong places from stress and poor eating.
Hips still not enough on bad days.
A body she has fought for and loved and hated and funded and injected and disciplined and taught and clothed and cared for.
A body that has taken her years to inhabit with something like peace.
She stares until the self-loathing starts to gather, then turns away.
That night she dreams of home.
Not this campus room or Sukuna’s office or any place where she has built herself. Home-home. Family home. Her aunt’s hands fixing the collar of a dress Satomi had been so proud of and saying, in that soft voice adults use when they are about to say something they think will help, “You need to be more subtle, sweetheart. If you force it, people start looking for what’s underneath.”
She wakes up sweating and furious and nauseated.
She does not go to class the next day either.
By the third day, absence becomes its own problem.
Anxiety does not shrink overnight. It breeds. It wakes before she does and sits on her chest. The thought of campus makes her stomach twist so hard she has to get out of bed and kneel on the floor until the nausea passes.
She imagines every possible version of return.
Walking into class and feeling the room know.
Entering the bathroom and finding somebody watching.
Hearing laughter behind her that may or may not be about her.
Getting called into an office.
Seeing Yorozu in the hall and knowing that the girl now holds a version of Satomi in her mouth that she can spit wherever she likes.
She cannot do it.
So she emails a professor from another course and says she is sick. She does not email Sukuna. She cannot bring herself to write anything to him that would survive his eyes.
The room is starting to smell like someone living badly. Sweet wrappers. Stale fabric. Fear, probably, if fear has a smell.
She keeps the curtains mostly drawn. Watches the slice of outside through a gap. Students moving on the path below. Bikes, backpacks, coffee cups, lives continuing with no pause for her private collapse.
She showers once because not showering makes her feel less human than she already does. Stands under hot water and presses a palm over her mouth when she starts crying without warning. It is not elegant crying. Not the sort that improves anybody’s face. It is furious and ugly and silent.
When she gets out, she does not look in the mirror anymore.
Messages accumulate, they never stop.
Momo: Did you die. Another from Miwa: Seriously. Say something.Unknown Number: Class isn’t optional because you’re pretty.
That one actually makes her laugh, one broken sound in the dark.
Then, a while later, another from him.
What happened?
She puts the phone down and curls on her side around the ache in her own middle.
What happened is that she got reminded, all at once, that being loved in private does not protect her in public. That she can be held and wanted and looked at like she is the only girl in the room, and one mean woman in a bathroom can still reduce her to trembling silence. That she has built herself so carefully and still other people feel entitled to pry open the seams and inspect the work. That one rumor can turn every ordinary act into a threshold: class, lunch, hallway, bathroom, door.
What happened is that she is tired.
Tired of being brave in the exact ways nobody will ever reward. Tired of calibrating her voice and posture and smile. Tired of deciding, a hundred times a day, whether truth is safe, whether silence is safe, whether either of them has ever really been safe at all. Tired of the way people say they do not care and then care exactly when it can hurt you most.
On the fourth day she gets up only because somebody knocks.
For a second her whole body goes rigid. She thinks stupidly of administrators, of reports, of Yorozu somehow already having done it, of the knock at the door that always comes in bad stories right before everything gets dragged into the light.
Miwa’s voice comes through the wood, hesitant but unmistakable.
“Satomi?”
Relief is almost as painful as panic now.
Another knock. Firmer, not Miwa.
For one stupid second she thinks conduct office.
Complaint. Bathroom report. They came faster than she expected.
Then Maki’s voice comes through the wood.
“Open up before I kick it.”
Satomi does not open the door right away. She looks around the room first, at the evidence of collapse, and feels a sharp flare of embarrassment.
Then she unlocks it and opens it only partway.
Miwa takes one look at her face and the careful, neutral expression she had clearly prepared falls apart.
“Oh,” Miwa says softly.
Satomi hates that sound. Not because it is pity, exactly. Because it is recognition. Because Miwa can see enough in one second to understand that this is not a stomach flu and not a dramatic absence and not some silly romantic fight.
Miwa is besides her carrying a bag from the convenience store. She holds it up a little awkwardly.
“I brought you drinks,” she says. “And notes. And I bullied Momo into not coming because she would have kicked your door in.”
Maki takes one look at her and her mouth flattens.
“Jesus.”
“Wow,” Satomi says. “Great bedside manner.”
“You look terrible.”
“Thank you.”
Maki holds up a paper bag.
“I brought food.”
Satomi stares at it, then at her. She almost smiles.
She lets Miwa and Maki in.
Maki shoves the bag into her hands and walks in without waiting to be invited, because boundaries are things she respects only when people are not crumbling.
She takes in the room in one sweep: curtains half closed, laptop shut, untouched coffee mug on the desk, laundry basket full, Satomi in an oversized shirt and no lipstick, eyes bruised with exhaustion.
“You’re not sick,” Maki says.
“No.”
“You’re hiding.”
Satomi shuts the door behind them.
“Very perceptive.”
Maki turns.
“Do you want us to go?”
The question is so straightforward Satomi nearly cries from it.
“No,” she says, softer than intended. “Stay.”
So they stay. They sit on the floor because the chair has too many clothes on it and the bed feels too intimate for a conversation Satomi has not agreed to have. Satomi opens the bag and finds convenience store rice balls, fruit, canned coffee, gummies.
The stupid practicality of it almost makes her laugh.
Miwa hands over the drinks. Goes through the lecture notes first because it is easier. Safer. Sukuna assigned a paper. Comparative lit boy got roasted by another professor in class.
Momo called Yorozu a lizard under her breath loud enough for half the table to hear. Life, still moving. Details, still trivial.
Satomi eats because being watched kindly is somehow more effective than any amount of self-discipline.
After a while Maki says,
“Did somebody say something to you?”
Satomi keeps unwrapping the rice ball even though it is already open.
Maki does not push again. Good. Good.
Then Satomi hears herself say,
“Yorozu cornered me in the bathroom.”
The rest comes out in pieces. Not elegant. Not linear. She cannot make herself repeat every word exactly, especially not the slur, but enough gets said. The threat. The disgust. The part about Sukuna. The bathroom report.
Maki listens with her whole body still, Miwa seems a little shocked.
By the time Satomi is done, shame has soaked through her all over again. Saying it aloud makes it real in a different way. Makes her sound weak. Makes her sound fragile.
Maki’s jaw works once. Twice.
“I’ll kill her.”
Satomi laughs, startled and cracked.
“No, you won’t.”
“I’m considering it.”
“She’s not worth prison.”
Silence stretches.
Then Satomi, staring at the label on the bottle in her hand, says,
“She threatened to report me.”
Miwa goes completely still.
Maki looks at her then, really looks, and some of the violence in her face gives way to anger of a different sort. Protective. Helpless.
“You need to report it.”
Satomi’s stomach drops again.
“No.”
“Satomi.”
“No.” Her voice sharpens before she can help it. “I know how this goes.”
Maki does not flinch.
“Not if you do it right.”
Satomi looks away.
“There is no right way to hand over your life to a room full of administrators.”
Silence.
Then, quietly, Maki says,
“That’s fair.”
The acceptance disarms her more than pressure would have.
There it is. Said aloud. Real now in the room, not only in Satomi’s skull.
Miwa says a curse word so quietly it almost disappears.
“You didn’t deserve that,” Miwa says.
The sentence is so simple Satomi almost breaks on it.
Because of course she knows. Rationally, intellectually, politically, all the good sharp ways. She knows. She could write an essay on gendered cruelty and social policing and the mechanics of exclusion. She could dismantle Yorozu’s worldview in five clean pages with citations.
But knowing a thing in theory is not the same as surviving it while your own body is the subject under discussion.
“No,” Satomi says, and her voice is suddenly unsteady. “I didn’t.”
Miwa reaches over, very carefully, and takes her hand.
It is not a dramatic gesture. Not rescue. Not salvation. Just contact freely offered, without inspection, without hesitation.
Satomi looks down at their hands and feels something in her chest start to come apart.
She cries then, finally and fully, bent over herself while Miwa sits close and says nothing foolish.
No it will all be okay, no everything happens for a reason, no at least. Just presence. A hand. A quiet room. The dignity of not having to perform composure for one person.
When the crying passes, it leaves her wrung out and embarrassed and raw.
Miwa waits until Satomi has drunk half the tea before she says,
“What do you want to do?”
Satomi laughs weakly.
“Disappear forever?”
Miwa does not laugh back.
“Besides that.”
Satomi leans her head against the wall. Thinks.
“I don’t know,” she says at last. “I know what I should do. Report her. Get ahead of it. Be righteous and brave and educational.”
“But?”
“But I’m tired.” She rubs a hand over her face. “And I hate that that’s the answer. I hate that I’m even considering letting her get away with it. But the thought of turning myself into a case file makes me want to crawl out of my own skin.”
Miwa nods slowly.
“Then don’t decide today.”
Satomi looks at her.
“You don’t have to pick the brave option this second,” Miwa says. “You just have to pick the next one.”
The next one.
It is such a small framing, such a humane one, that Satomi could kiss her for it.
The next one is easier to imagine than the whole future.
The next one, as it turns out, is opening her phone after Miwa leaves.
Satomi’s throat tightens painfully when she thinks about the next one being related to college anyway.
“I just— I can’t do the whole thing. Not with school. Not with people already watching. Not with—”
Not with Sukuna.
She stops there.
Maki notices, but she only says,
“Okay.”
It is such a simple mercy that Satomi can barely bear it.
Maki and. Miwa stay another hour.
They talk about classes. About a professor who tripped over his own bag. About a vending machine that ate Panda’s money. About anything but the shape of Satomi’s pain until it is easier to breathe around it.
When they are gone, the room feels larger and lonelier at once.
Satomi brushes her teeth, washes her face, climbs into bed with her phone in hand, and stares at Sukuna’s unread messages.
There are three now.
Missed class. Attendance matters. Open your phone.
She almost laughs at that last one.
Instead, she types and deletes six different replies before sending nothing at all.
Sleep comes in broken pieces.
The fifth day is worse because she knows staying in the room has crossed from recovery into surrender.
She gets out of bed anyway.
She puts on a bra. A skirt. A blouse. Sits before her vanity mirror and starts her makeup. Concealer, foundation, powder, brows. Her hand is steady until liner, then shakes so badly she has to wipe the first attempt away and start over.
Half-painted, she stops.
Stares at herself.
Sees not progress or beauty or discipline but performance. A stage costume. Yorozu’s voice slithers right back in, pleased and poisonous.
Not a real girl.
Satomi puts the eyeliner down.
Then she knocks over the whole tray with the back of her hand.
Bottles rattle across the desk. A compact cracks on the floor. A brush rolls under the bed.
The burst of noise shocks her still.
For a second she just stands there, breathing hard, one eye done and one bare, looking like a woman split down the middle.
Then she undresses slowly. She doesn’t remember when she started crying, but by the time she’s under scalding hot water, she’s shaking and sobbing and hugging herself as if to keep her body from pulling in every direction.
She misses the days where she would feel at least a resemblance of normality. She misses the days before the rumors, when she could laugh and sass people and smile like she meant it. She misses the days when she could cross and uncross her long legs in front of Sukuna and then have his body pressed against hers when no one else was there to witness, complaining about her manners while kissing her neck anyway.
She misses Sukuna.
Yorozu’s words aren’t true, Sukuna knows who she is, what she is, and he enjoys her all the same. Never once he hesitated. Not even the first time, as if she was naturally… a girl. She is naturally a girl.
She just can’t wrap her mind around it anymore.
She presses her nails against her skin, still hugging herself, marking crescents on already reddened skin. The bathroom is completely fogged already. Someone knocks on her door again, but she ignores it, choosing instead to keep soaking in hot water and self pity for a little longer.
a/n: that gif was absolutely necessary, yes.
🎀 ; Sukuna's office hours are, as she already said multiple times, reserved for her. ☕; art by: @hiimkira___ 🧁; masterlist
The campus looks different in the late afternoon, when most people have already convinced themselves they’ve done enough for the day and gone home.
The courtyard that’s a chaos of bodies at noon is half-empty now, benches occupied by lone stragglers scrolling their phones, a couple of study groups murmuring over printouts. The sky outside Sukuna’s office window is already starting to turn that pale, tired blue that means evening is coming whether he’s ready or not.
He is never ready for office hours.
He sits at his desk anyway, because that’s part of the ritual. Glasses on. Shirt sleeves rolled to his forearms. A pile of essays to the left, a smaller, more hopeful pile of graded ones to the right. Red pen between his fingers. The clock ticks above the door in the most obnoxious way possible.
On the corridor side of the door, a printed sign taped at eye level reads:
OFFICE HOURS – TUES/THURS 16:00–18:00 Knock. If there’s no screaming, you may enter.
He’d added the screaming line as a joke. Students took pictures. Administration pretended not to see.
The only sound now is the faint hum of the air conditioning and the occasional shuffle of paper when he turns a page.
He reads a line that makes his left eye twitch.
“‘The Shinsengumi were basically like the Avengers but with swords,’” he mutters under his breath. “I should start charging for emotional damages.”
He writes a neat no in the margin and moves on.
He’s midway through an especially tortured paragraph about modernization when footsteps approach, heels clicking in a rhythm that his body recognizes before his brain does.
He doesn’t look up right away. He’s learned.
You don’t feed wild animals by acknowledging them too fast.
There’s the faint rustle of someone stopping to read the sign on his door.
A pause.
Then a single knuckle raps three times, bright and confident.
He already knows who it is.
No one else knocks like they’re doing him a favor by showing up.
“Come in.” he calls.
The handle turns, the door swings open.
Satomi Gojo slips into the room in a swirl of cool air and the smell of something savory.
One hand holds a paper bag from the noodle place just off campus, grease darkening the bottom. The other pushes her sunglasses up onto her hair, pale eyes blinking in the dimmer, yellow office light.
His office is not big.
A desk, two visitor chairs, a bookshelf that’s doing its best, a narrow couch along the opposite wall that has never once known a purely academic use.
The window behind him looks out over a slice of trees and concrete and the edge of the main quad.
She fills the space like she owns it.
“Sens—” She catches his look, tiny, private, and amends herself. “Professor.”
He sets his pen down.
“You’re not on the sign-up sheet.”
“There’s a sign-up sheet?” She crosses to him in a few quick steps, the hem of her skirt fluttering around her thighs. Today it’s pleated navy, paired with a white button-up that is technically within dress code and practically a distraction by design. Skinny tie, loose knot. Knee-high socks.
He has strong opinions about who let her walk out of her apartment like that.
“Yes, Gojo, there’s a sign-up sheet,” he says. “It’s that big sheet of paper you ignored when you breezed past the queue last week.”
“Oh.” She sets the takeout bag on a clear strip of desk that didn’t exist until she made it. “Well, good thing I brought a bribe.”
He stares at the bag.
Steam curls from the small vent holes, carrying the familiar scent of broth and soy and fried garlic.
His stomach, which has been fueled by coffee and resentment since noon, makes a quiet, traitorous sound.
“Bribery is unethical.” he deadpans.
“But effective,” she counters, flashing him a grin as she drags one of the visitor chairs closer without asking. “Besides, you didn’t eat anything during lecture. I could hear your stomach from the back row.”
“You were in the front row.” he points out.
She shrugs, dropping into the chair, swinging a leg over the other so her knee-tilt slants toward him.
“Echoes.”
He doesn’t bother hiding the way he looks at her.
They’re alone, door closed, and the last time he tried to pretend professional distance in this room she ended up on that couch, tears in her eyes from laughing at him when his phone rang with some old gangster ringtone and ruined the mood.
Her hair is up today, high ponytail, few strands loose around her face. Her lipstick is a soft gloss rather than the dangerous reds she wears when she’s in the mood to start fights.
She looks younger like this, but the way she watches him — chin tipped, eyes bright, sly little smile — reminds him she’s not a kid and hasn’t been for a long time.
He reaches for the bag.
“If this is cold, I’m revoking your participation grade.”
“If it’s cold, it’s your fault for making me wait outside.” She rests her elbow on the edge of the desk, keening in closer as he unties the knot. “I could have walked in earlier, but nooo. You were doing your scary marking face.”
“You mean my normal face.”
“No, your normal face is hot.” She smiles sweetly when he glances at her. “The marking face is like that, but with more homicide.”
He doesn’t dignify that with a reply. He simply pulls out two containers and sets them between them, rummages for chopsticks.
“Are any of your questions about history,” he asks, “or is this strictly a feeding-the-old-man mission?”
“First of all, you’re not old,” she says. “You’re… prime. Vintage. Like expensive whiskey and… whatever the hell they sell in those stupid glass bottles in your kitchen.”
“Insightful analysis,” he says dryly. “Second of all?”
“Second of all, I do have a question.” She rips open the chopsticks with her teeth, because of course she does. “I just haven’t made it up yet.”
He stares.
She laughs, bright and unbothered.
“Relax, professor. I’ll ask something smart eventually so you feel like this isn’t a total waste of your time. Until then, eat.”
He should send her away. He knows this. Office hours are for students who are struggling, or panicking, or too nervous to ask things in class.
They’re not supposed to be for… whatever the hell this is. Noodles and flirtation and the kind of familiarity that would get them both in trouble if anyone saw it.
Instead, he shifts the essays out of splash range and digs into the food.
She’s right — he was hungry.
They eat in relative quiet for a minute or two. The clock ticks. Somewhere down the hall, someone laughs too loudly. A printer whirs to life and dies somewhere in the building’s guts.
Satomi watches him over the rim of her container with narrow, assessing eyes, like she’s cataloging his micro-reactions to the food, the stress, the day.
“How bad is the pile?” she asks eventually, tipping her chin toward the essays.
He snorts.
“On a scale from ‘mild disappointment’ to ‘war crimes,’ we’re solidly at ‘I should start drinking.’”
She winces in sympathy.
“That bad.”
“You’d be surprised how many of your classmates think the Meiji period happened in the 1600s.”
She pulls a face.
“Ew.”
“Exactly.”
She twirls noodles around her chopsticks, then pauses, looking thoughtful.
“Did you really only eat coffee today?”
He gives her a look.
“What part of my schedule suggested a leisurely lunch.”
She makes a dissatisfied noise and leans back in her chair, stretching her legs out, the toe of her shoe nudging his shin lightly.
“You’re going to die of stress at fifty and I’m going to have to haunt your department chair.”
“Assuming I live to fifty.” he mutters.
She frowns, studying him again.
Sometimes he forgets how sharp she is under the theatrics.
She sees more than most of his colleagues do, even if she doesn’t understand what she’s seeing.
“That a threat or a promise?” she asks softly.
He deflects.
“You’re nosy.”
“You’re evasive.” She sets the container down and lets her hand fall casually onto his knee under the desk. “I win.”
Her fingers are warm even through the fabric of his slacks. He pretends not to notice, turning a page in the top essay with his free hand, red pen poised.
“So,” she says brightly, as if she hasn’t just started creeping her hand higher. “About the paper. If I wanted to compare the Restoration to post-war reforms, would that be too much for the length?”
“Depends if you’re capable of staying on topic for more than three sentences,” he says.
The words come out mostly level, despite the way his nerves light up where her palm curls.
“I am capable,” she protests. “I just get… bored.”
Her hand slips another inch. His jaw tightens.
“Hold.” he says, a warning disguised as an instruction.
She smiles.
“Are you talking to my hand or my thesis.”
“Both.”
She laughs under her breath, delighted. Her thumb makes a small, idle circle against his thigh that is nowhere near innocent.
This is how it always starts with her.
Not with grand declarations or sudden pounces, but with little lines crossed one at a time.
A touch that lingers a beat too long.
A question that dips just under the surface of appropriate.
A look that burns.
“Seriously, though,” she says, and to anyone listening through the door she sounds like any earnest student. “Can I anchor it on continuity rather than change? Everyone else will write about change. It feels boring.”
“That’s because it is.” He forces his tone into its usual dry cadence, the one that makes students sit up straighter. “Continuity angle’s fine if you can support it. Less focus on ‘wow, everything was different’ and more on what stayed the same underneath the policy shifts. You’ll need strong primary sources.”
“You say that like you didn’t see my last bibliography,” she says, smug.
“I did,” he admits. “It gave me false hope for your cohort.”
Her fingers dip in a little squeeze that is absolutely intentional.
“False hope,” she repeats with a little mock-sad sigh. “Tragic. Maybe I should… restore your faith.”
She’s leaning forward now, elbows on the desk, tie hanging loose.
The corner of her mouth quirks.
The overhead light catches on the gloss on her lips.
He knows that mouth.
Knows the way her breath hitches when he presses his thumb into the hinge of her jaw, knows how she sounds when—
He cuts the thought off before it finishes forming.
“Gojo.”
“Yes, professor?”
“Behave.”
“I’m literally asking about my paper.”
Her hand isn’t.
It’s restless now, tracing a slow path toward the inside of his thigh and back. Not high enough to be undeniable, not low enough to be plausible deniability.
The kind of touch that is made entirely of suggestion.
“This is an academic meeting.” he reminds her.
“Uh-huh.” She looks entirely unrepentant. “And I’m being very academic.”
“You’re one more inch away from me failing you for ‘gross misconduct,’” he says.
She gasps, exaggerated.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
He arches a brow.
“Try me.”
Her eyes spark, challenge accepted.
“Okay,” she says, and stands up.
He watches her walk like he’s watching a storm form on the horizon.
He knows the pattern now — the slow build, the pressure change, the sudden crash.
She rounds the chair from behind, palms grazing his shoulders in a feigned stretch, fingers kneading once as if she’s just being helpful.
“You’re tense,” she notes, voice near his ear.
“Because I’m surrounded by children all day,” he says.
“I’m not a child,” she counters. “Remember?”
Her hands slide down, a trail of heat through cotton, moving over the curve of his shoulders, fingertips catching briefly at the top button of his shirt. Then she steps around to his side, wedges herself between him and the desk in that insistently casual way of hers.
The chair is not made for two people. It protests with a faint creak as she perches on the arm, then, without waiting for permission, turns and settles herself squarely in his lap.
He exhales, long and slow, like maybe if he gets all the air out, the tension will go with it.
It doesn’t.
“Satomi.” He uses her given name like a leash.
She wiggles a little to get comfortable, absolutely not helping.
“What?” she says, all wide-eyed innocence. “There’s no one waiting. It’s your time. I’m your favorite student. This is efficient.”
“You are not my favorite student.”
“I’m your favorite headache, then.”
Hard to argue with that.
He should push her off. He should stand up, put space between them, deliver a speech about boundaries that he doesn’t really believe in when it comes to her.
Instead, his hands find her waist almost on their own, fingers spanning the narrow curve of it, thumbs resting just under the ribs of her shirt.
He can feel her breathe, the rise and fall, quickened now that she’s where she wanted to be.
“Last time you did this,” he says quietly, “we nearly got caught.”
“Last time you did this,” she corrects, “you forgot to lock the door.”
“I reminded you to lock it.” he says. “You ignored me.”
She leans back against his chest, the back of her head resting briefly against his shoulder. Her ponytail brushes his jaw.
“Semantics.”
“Not semantics. Survival instincts.”
She laughs, the sound buzzing through her into him.
“Relax. It’s dead hour. Everyone’s either in the cafeteria or pretending to study. Who’s going to wander into the history department?”
A cynical voice in his head mutters — Someone with bad timing and a worse sense of direction.
Out loud, he just grunts.
Her weight settles more fully into him. The chair creaks again in protest. His knees part slightly to accommodate her. She takes advantage of that, letting her thighs fall open just enough that the hem of her skirt rides higher, the backs of her legs brushing against his.
He can feel the warmth of her, the solid presence of her body right where his self-control is thinnest.
His fingers dig into her sides in a grip that’s not quite gentle.
“Stay still,” he says.
“You say that like you don’t like it.” she purrs.
He doesn’t answer, she can feel exactly how much he likes it. All she has to do is shift a little more, and—
There’s a knock on the door.
Three brisk taps.
Not loud, but in the thick silence that follows it they might as well be gunshots.
Satomi freezes.
Sukuna’s grip tightens reflexively, holding her in place for a half-second before his brain catches up. His heart jumps in a way that has nothing to do with her body and everything to do with the immediate mental image of the Dean walking in to find his prized, problematic student seated squarely in his lap.
The knock comes again.
“Professor Ryoumen?” a tentative voice calls from the other side. “Do you have a moment?”
He recognizes the voice — one of his second-years, perpetually anxious, the type who reads every footnote twice and apologizes to furniture when he bumps into it.
“Shit.” he breathes.
Satomi twists just enough to look up at him, eyes wide, half-thrilled, half-terrified.
“Oh my god.”
“Under.” he says.
“What?”
“Under the desk.” His voice drops into that tone that brooks no argument, the one he uses in class when the noise level threatens to spiral. “Now, Satomi.”
She swallows, then nods.
There’s no time for sulking or dramatics, she slides off his lap in a fluid, silent motion that speaks of practice, plants her hands on his thighs for balance, and ducks down.
For a moment, everything is chaos — her shoulder bumping his knee, the swivel chair rotating a little, her ponytail catching on the armrest. She stifles a giggle, the sound escaping through her nose instead.
He plants his feet, grabs the edge of the desk with one hand to stop the chair from spinning, and clears his throat.
“Just a moment,” he calls, trying to sound bored rather than like he’s hiding contraband.
Under the desk, Satomi is a warm presence between his knees, pressed close to him by the cramped space. The underside of the desk is a forest of cables, power strip, the faint smell of dust and paper. Her hand lands lightly on his knee as she gets her bearings, fingers curling.
He can feel her looking up at him even before he glances down.
Her eyes are huge in the dimness, lips parted, a flush high on her cheeks.
To anyone walking in, he’ll look like he’s just sitting there, maybe a little stiff from grading.
He feels anything but.
He mouths, Behave, at her.
She grins.
Of course she does.
He drags a breath in, lets it out slow, and pitches his voice into that clipped, professional range again.
“Come in.”
The door opens a crack, then wider. A head pokes in — a bespectacled kid with a backpack almost bigger than he is, hair slightly damp like he rushed there from the rain.
“Uh, Professor Ryoumen? Sorry to bother you. I saw the sign and…” He trails off, taking in the sight of his instructor at the desk, papers spread out, food containers pushed aside. “Are you busy?”
“Office hours,” Sukuna says. He keeps his hands on the surface of the desk, nowhere near his lap. “What do you need, Tanaka?”
Under the desk, Satomi’s hand leaves his knee.
He knows that shouldn’t make his pulse spike.
It does anyway, because where else is it going to go in that tiny space?
Tanaka steps fully into the room, door clicking shut behind him.
“It’s about the midterm essay,” he says, clearly having rehearsed this. “I was looking at your comments and I— I didn’t quite understand what you meant by ‘you’re summarizing the textbook, not engaging with it.’”
“Sit,” Sukuna says, gesturing to the empty chair, grateful for the excuse to focus on something else.
The chair legs scrape lightly as Tanaka drags it closer to the desk and sits, setting his backpack at his feet. He pulls out a slightly crumpled paper from a folder, smoothing it anxiously.
“Here, um. Page three.”
Sukuna reaches for the essay, flipping to the indicated page.
The red ink stands out starkly against the black type, his own handwriting looping in the margins.
Under the desk, soft fabric grazes his calf as Satomi shifts to avoid Tanaka’s feet.
Her hair brushes his knee.
He grits his teeth, determined to ignore every neuron screaming at him about how close she is.
“When I say ‘summarizing,’” he says, forcing his eyes to stay on the paper, “what I mean is that you’re repeating what the author says without adding your own analysis. For example—”
She chooses that moment to let her hand return to his leg.
Higher this time.
Fingertips ghost along the inside of his knee, then up, slow and deliberate.
His grip tightens on the edge of the paper. The red pen presses harder, leaving a tiny puncture.
“—this paragraph.” He clears his throat. “You write, ‘The government implemented X reforms in order to stabilize the economy.’ That’s… technically true, but it’s also something any reader could get from the textbook. What I’m looking for is—”
Her fingers trace a lazy path up his thigh.
She’s careful, infuriatingly so, staying just shy of anything that would force him to jerk away.
The heat of her palm bleeds through fabric, a quiet, insistent reminder that she’s there.
“What you’re looking for is…?” Tanaka prompts, earnest eyes fixed on his face.
“Context,” Sukuna says, very precisely. “Argument. Why did they choose those reforms and not others? Who benefited. Who didn’t. You’re smart enough to do more than paraphrase.”
Tanaka’s shoulders relax a little at the unexpected compliment.
“So I should… bring in more of my own argument.”
“Exactly.” He taps the margin with the pen. “You skirt around some good points here. Don’t hedge. Commit to a position and defend it.”
He’s talking to Tanaka.
He could just as easily be talking to himself.
Under the desk, Satomi’s hand moves again, a slow slide back down, then up, testing. She knows his tells by now — the way his breath hitches, the slight flare of his nostrils, the flex of his jaw.
She’s watching for them, gathering data, cataloging the effect she has on him with scientific thoroughness.
He refuses to give her the satisfaction of anything obvious.
He leans back in his chair, ostensibly to look more relaxed, really so his legs can angle in a way that corrals her movements.
His knee presses lightly against her shoulder, a wordless, enough.
She… does not take it as enough.
But she pauses, at least, her palm flattening against his thigh in a hold that’s somehow both chastened and possessive.
Tanaka asks a few more questions — about sources, about citation style, about whether it’s acceptable to reference a documentary if he can’t find the original interview transcript.
Sukuna answers them in clipped, efficient sentences, each word measured against the electric awareness of the girl under his desk.
Her hand keeps testing.
Up, then down. Fingertips brushing on the apex of his thigh, then sliding slowly inwards.
At some point she’s grazing her perfect manicured nails on the hard, aching bulge caged by his pants.
His nostrils flare and he nudges her shoulder once again with his knee — again to no expected result, since it earns him instead the delicious pressure of her palm right in the ridge of his cock through his pants.
He disguises a deep breathe with a yawn and Satomi needs to bite her lower lip to muffle a little chuckle as she slides — tortuously, but with the right pressure — her hand up and down, palming that bulge as it hardens to its limit.
From Tanaka’s perspective, this is a perfectly normal, if slightly awkward, meeting with a slightly intimidating professor.
From Sukuna’s perspective, it is an exercise in self-control.
Because Satomi replaced her hand with her face — nuzzling his clothed cock, both hands settled on the insides of his thighs as he fights for his life to keep his flat expression. Lips pressed into a flat line as she lets her hot little breathes seep through the fabric and reach his painfully caged erection. He can feel how much his cock is leaking on his boxers. The deep inhales she takes make the cool air send shivers down his spine, and the slow, hot exhales makes him want to shove his cock so far down her throat she won’t be able to talk for a whole day.
He keeps stone-faced, impassive.
By the time Tanaka says,“Thank you, professor, this really helps,” Sukuna feels like he’s run a marathon while sitting still.
“No problem.” he sounds normal. He’s almost impressed with himself. “Bring me a clearer thesis next draft. The bones are there.”
Tanaka nods vigorously.
“I will. Thank you again.” He rises, collects his bag. “Um. Have a good evening.”
“You too.”
The door opens.
The hallway noise filters in for a second — someone wheeling a cart, muffled conversation, a distant ringtone. Then it swings shut.
Silence.
Sukuna doesn’t move for a count of three.
One, to make sure Tanaka isn’t coming back.
Two, to listen for any other footsteps.
Three, because he needs a second to collect the fraying wires of his patience before he looks down at the person currently wedged between his legs and his professional ruin.
When he does, Satomi is looking up at him with the smuggest expression he’s ever seen on a human face. Mouth pressed against his hard bulge — lips clean from the gloss she had the decency to lick off before pulling that shit.
“You,” he rasps, “are going to be the end of me.”
She bites back a laugh, teeth catching her lower lip.
“You did great,” she whispers. “Very professorial. Ten out of ten for composure.”
“Get out from under there.”
“Aww.” She pouts, but starts untangling herself from the cables, careful not to bump his desk. “And here I thought I was helping you practice talking under pressure.”
“You were not helping.” he says.
“I was… enriching your experience.”
“Satomi.”
She finally manages to extricate herself, unfolding from the cramped space and rising to stand between his knees.
There’s dust on one side of her skirt, a faint smudge at her temple from where she must have bumped the underside once.
She looks road-roughened and pleased, like a cat that’s just escaped a too-small box.
He stares up at her, hands wrapping around her thighs automatically to steady her. Her skin is warm under the socks, her breathing a little faster than normal.
Despite all her bravado, her pupils are blown wide, adrenaline still humming through her.
“That was insane,” she says, in the tone of someone describing a rollercoaster they fully intend to ride again. “My heart was in my mouth the whole time. Although I preferred something else in it. I thought for sure he was going to, like, drop something and go reaching under there.”
“Yeah,” he mutters. “Me too.”
“And you were sooo calm,” she continues, relentless. “If I didn’t know, I’d think you were bored.”
“Years of practice.” he says.
Her smile falters for half a second at that — a flicker of something like curiosity, like suspicion, passing over her face.
He sees it, and immediately regrets the wording.
“Practice?” she echoes, slowly.
“With idiots,” he says, before her brain can run any further. He squeezes the backs of her thighs lightly. “Holding a straight face when undergrads tell me the Meiji Restoration took place in the Edo period. Don’t get ideas.”
She squints at him, searching his face for cracks. He gives her nothing but his usual exasperation.
Whatever she sees satisfies her enough for now. The moment passes. Her grin returns, quick and bright.
“Well,” she says. “You passed the stress test. Should I design a few more for you?”
“No.” he says immediately.
“Yes,” she corrects. She shifts her weight, leaning forward until her hands rest on the arms of his chair, effectively caging him in.
From this angle, the overhead light makes a halo of the loose strands around her face.
Gods, she will be the death of him.
Fucking profanely angelical brat.
“You want me to stop coming to your office hours?”
His answer is immediate and honest.
“No.”
“Then don’t complain.”
“I reserve the right to complain about everything.”
She laughs, leaning in until their noses are almost touching.
“That’s fair.”
Her breath fans warm against his lips.
It would be nothing, to tilt his head the slightest degree and close that last bit of distance. To kiss her the way he wanted to when she first walked in, takeout bag and trouble in her eyes.
The door is shut. The hallway is quiet.
Office hours are technically still running, but no one else is lined up.
He should still say no.
He never has, not really, where she’s concerned.
“Satomi.” he says, and there’s a warning in it, soft around the edges.
“Mm?” she hums, smiling.
“This is my workplace.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You were under my desk just now, nuzzling my cock.”
“It was educational.” Her smile turns wicked. “I learned about… continuity and change.”
He huffs despite himself.
“That’s not even clever.”
“I’m not trying to be clever,” she says. “I’m trying to kiss you.”
That, at least, is an intention he understands.
He gives in.
His hands slide up from her thighs to her hips, fingers curving around bone and fabric.
He pulls her that last inch closer and meets her halfway.
She tastes faintly of broth and that stupid bottled tea she likes, sweet and a little bitter. Her hands tighten on the chair arms, then slip up, one curling around the back of his neck, the other bracing on his shoulder.
She makes a small sound into his mouth, something soft and relieved, like she’s been holding her breath for hours. He really wishes he could just leave with her and solve both of their achings at once.
A different kind of tension starts to uncoil in him, the threads of stress loosening under the familiar pull of her.
He keeps it contained for now. No messy angles, no wandering hands beyond the safe span of shirt and waist again.
If anyone burst in now, they would still be in trouble, but not in the kind of trouble that involves formal hearings.
He pulls back before it can deepen into something hungrier — because he knows he’s always starved for her.
She chases him a millimeter, lips parting on a question.
He presses his forehead to hers briefly.
“Enough, baby.” he murmurs. “For now.”
She opens her impossibly blue eyes. There’s a flicker of disappointment, quickly smothered by something softer.
“For now.” she echoes, accepting the boundary even as she makes a mental note to test it later.
He lets his hands fall away from her hips, smoothing down the wrinkle in her skirt where his fingers bunched the fabric.
It’s a small, almost tender gesture, at odds with the sharp lines of his face.
She notices.
“You know,” she says, stepping back just enough to hop up onto the edge of his desk, nudging the empty containers aside with one heel, “most professors use office hours to talk about assignments.”
“I did talk about assignments,” he points out. “To Tanaka.”
“Yeah, but you never talk about them with me.” She swings her legs, heels tapping lightly against the desk. “You talk to me about… other things.”
“Such as how you’re going to fail if you keep pulling stunts like that,” he says.
“Am not.” She grins, tipping her head. “I’m going to ace your class and you know it. Then you’ll have to find another excuse to keep me around.”
He doesn’t say — I don’t need an excuse.
Instead, he reaches for the red pen again, twirling it between his fingers like a cigarette.
“You’re going to rewrite that section of your essay,” he says. “The one on the syllabus.”
She groans.
“Now? I brought food.” her lips become a pout and her tone is that stubborn whine he secretly loves “I brought entertainment. I brought—”
“Trouble.” he supplies.
“Exactly.” She pokes his shoulder with her toe. “And instead of appreciating my efforts, you’re giving me homework.”
“That’s literally my job.”
“Your job sucks.”
“And yet you chose my class.”
She looks at him for a beat, and in that beat the theatrics slide aside and something unguarded peers out.
“I didn’t choose it because of the syllabus.” she says softly. “I chose because the teacher is so fucking hot I couldn’t stop thinking about him.”
He looks away first, eyes dropping to the essay stack.
The red pen stills.
“Rewrite the paragraph,” he says. “Bring it tomorrow. I’ll look it over before you turn in the final.”
She rolls her eyes, but there’s a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
“Yes, professor.”
The title sounds different in here than it does in the classroom. He lets it pass.
She hops off the desk, smoothing her skirt.
“Are your office hours still on for another half hour?”
“Yes.”
“Any other students coming?”
“Not unless they want to knock and get yelled at.”
“Hmm.” She glances at the couch, then at him, then at the closed door. Her grin returns, slow and mischievous. “Then I guess we can talk about… continuity, later.”
He gives her a look that says he knows exactly what she’s planning and that he’s going to pretend he doesn’t until it’s too late.
“Go home, Satomi.” he says.
She leans over, steals one last quick kiss, then straightens.
“You’re coming over after, right?” she asks with a hint of hope, as if he could ever deny her.
“If I survive the rest of these essays.” he says.
“You will.” She moves to the door, hand on the knob, then pauses, glancing back over her shoulder. “And when you do, I’ll restore your faith in humanity.”
“That ship sailed a long time ago.”
“Then I’ll restore your faith in something else.”
He doesn’t ask in what.
He has a pretty good guess.
“Go.” he says again.
She opens the door, peeks into the hallway, then slips out, closing it behind her with a soft click.
The silence that follows is different from the one before she arrived.
It’s thicker somehow, full of her lingering presence — her perfume in the air, the faint warmth on his lap where she sat, the scuff on the floor where her chair scraped.
He blows out a breath, leans back in his own chair, and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Insufferable girl.” he mutters.
There’s no heat behind his words.
His phone buzzes in his pocket.
He pulls it out, expecting a text from her already — some emoji-laden message about noodles and “10/10 performance under pressure, professor 😘”.
Instead, the name on the screen is not one she’ll ever see, a contact marked with a single kanji that doesn’t appear in any of his public life.
He glances at the closed door, at the stack of essays, at the faint dust smudge on the edge of the desk where her sock brushed.
For a moment he sits at the crossroads of his two worlds, one hand still faintly smelling of takeout, the other holding a phone that connects him to rooms with no windows and men who don’t ask questions twice.
He answers.
A low voice on the other end starts talking about schedules, about shipments, about a meeting later that night in a part of town Satomi never has to think about.
He listens, responds in monosyllables, eyes unfocused on the campus outside his window.
When he hangs up, the essays are still there.
The clock still ticks.
The smell of broth still lingers.
So does the memory of her hand on his knee under the desk, steady and sure even as someone else sat meters away, unaware.
He picks up his pen, pulls the next essay from the pile, and starts reading.
Later, after office hours end and the building empties, he’ll leave by the back stairwell, cut through the shadows, and slide into the backseat of a car with tinted windows.
Later, he’ll go where his other name carries weight, where respect is measured in loyalty and fear rather than grades and title pages.
But tonight, after all that, he’ll still end up in a cramped apartment with bad insulation, Satomi in nothing but one of his shirts and her lace panties on the couch, takeout cartons on the table, her bare feet on his lap as he massages them because he’s incapable of not spoiling his brat.
She’ll complain about deadlines. He’ll complain about idiots.
They’ll both pretend this is simple.
For now, he underlines a sentence that misuses “modernization” and writes in the margin.
Good idea. Needs more backbone.
The same could be said for him, he thinks.
Or for both of them.
He smiles, just a little, and keeps going.
