#or it does but not without a lot of bumpy steps

[sinfulwrites]

Could u mabe do a nsfw alphabet for asa bc i love my beautiful bug babygirl🙏🙏🙏🙏 +i love ur writing oml

Hello there anon! Thank you so much!!

While my requests are closed, I simply can't say no to a bug man request. I love and value all my fellow Asa enjoyers.

Here you are! I hope you enjoy it!

Asa Emory NSFW alphabet

 A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

You won’t be wrapped up in his arms after Asa has finished with you, at most he will lay beside you and allow you to nestle into him. That’s the nicest he can be.

After sex, Asa likes to go over all the marks he left on your skin. Any irritation on your ass or thighs from the spankings, the red bumpy skin along your neck and shoulders from his bites, the scratch marks down your back and legs from his nails. He will run his fingers along them and press into any that make you flinch. 

He will not help you bathe, he will instead order you to. Even if your legs haven’t gotten strength back, he will pull you to your feet and make you go into the bathroom and clean up. All while he watches you.

If he has done enough damage to cause bleeding, he will disinfect the area and bandage it after you have cleaned up. He wants you to scar, not run around with infections. 

You will be locked back up in your trunk afterwards. If you were good enough to earn a bed outside of the trunk, you will be chained to one of the bed posts. Good luck earning such a luxury.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

To Asa, the human body has a lot to love. He is a shameless pervert for boobs, but he also is keen on legs. He is a penis enthusiast, and any man with broad shoulders and muscle can get him going. But when it boils down to it, no matter who you are, you have something he likes. Why do you think he chose you?

Now, on himself, Asa has nothing he could say he liked. Sure, he has strong arms and legs, he has a rather nice ass, some have said he has a nice chest. It's nothing he would write home about.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

In the heat of the moment, he will always cum inside.

If he wants to degrade you, he will cum on your face, or on your back. 

If he's feeling especially mean, he will cum in your clothes and make you wear them for the rest of the day. Don't try and change, it'll only make him do it again, and this time with more consequences. 

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

When he was younger, Asa would frequent sex bars. This is where he found his love for BDSM. If anyone were to find this out, they'd quickly be dealt with. Asa doesn't need people spreading the word of how slutty he was in his youth.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

You couldn't find someone more experienced in sex than Asa Emory. 

In terms of BDSM, he was practically a master. He knows how to bend someone to his whim without even trying. He knew how to hurt someone enough to make them beg for more. He knew how to make someone throw away their morals and self respect just so he could step on them even more. 

With a long history of sex partners, it's no surprise he is so experienced. If any of his students or colleagues heard about this, they probably wouldn't believe it. 

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

As a bondage fiend, any position where you’re bound underneath him is his favorite. 

Being hooked up to a sex swing is also a big favorite.

Without any ropes or cuffs, his next go to is doggy style.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

Asa is the poster child for the word buzz kill. No laughing or fooling around here.

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Asa is rather hairy under all of his clothes. Arm hair, chest hair, a lovely treasure trail, and of course he is hairy in the pubic area. While this is the case, he maintains his hair, often trimming it up before it gets out of hand. Like a trimmed hedge.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

He is not romantic.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

Every so often, when the mood strikes him right, Asa will jerk off. Most of the time, though, when he is horny he prefers to indulge with another person. 

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

BDSM, and to the extreme. Gags, ropes, chains, clamps, blindfolds, whips, you name it. He has it.

Dom/Sub dynamics are also high on his list. He, being the dom of course.

While he carries himself as a composed, respectable man, he is a shameless voyeur at heart. He tends to lick his lips as he watches. 

If you’re on your period, expect him to be between your legs for most of its duration. Your blood will be a mock face paint for him. 

Asa has a marking kink, and while you won’t be seen by the general public, he likes to remind you who owns you with a bite on the neck. It will bleed.

Asa has a preference for anal. 

Overstimulation is also a big one. He likes to make you beg for him to stop touching you after you’ve had multiple orgasms in a row. The answer is no.

On the opposite spectrum, he also loves to edge you. Make you beg for release. Whichever mood he’s in that day, it’s still pure sexual torture.

Spanking. The more marks on your ass and thighs, the better.

Choking. His hands always seem to find their way around your neck to give it a squeeze. Most times it threatens to be too tight. 

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

Asa prefers to keep his sex contained to his specific space in either his home or his hotel. These spaces are typically decked out to the max with his toys and restraints. He doesn’t like to be far from them.

Every now and then, though, the couch will do. He’s got restraints hidden under it.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

If you are sassing Asa, or simply giving him a hard time, it fuels his motivation to put you in your place.

If you’re on your period, he is like a feral dog chasing a bitch in heat. It’s the most sexually active you’ll ever see him.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Don’t call him master. Call him sir.

His line is at scat. 

He would prefer it if you did not puke on him. If you do though, it’s not the end of the world. But it’s certainly the end of sex.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

With Asa, you’re the one giving. Your place is on your knees between his legs, and he will make sure to remind you if you forget.

When you're giving Asa head, be prepared for him to grab your head and fuck your throat. It's his favorite.

He will eat you out on your period, though. It’s like a reward.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

Rough and drawn out. Sex is not a one and done event with Asa, you will be with him for hours at a time without a moment to rest. Only after he is finished will you get the chance to catch your breath. 

By the time you are done, you will be sore and will be covered in bruises. Don’t forget the bite marks.

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

Quickies with Asa are very rare, if not nonexistent. As stated, he prefers long, drawn out sessions. One orgasm isn’t enough for him. 

If you’re not his captive, and the mood strikes him, he may drag you into a quickie. It may still be an hour long, though. 

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

Asa loves to push limits and see how far he can take it with you. 

As long as the risk doesn’t include outing himself to the public, he would be willing to take it. 

With all the toys he has and the filthy thoughts in his head, you will be his sex guinea pig, so to speak.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

His personal record is five orgasms in one day. 

In terms of endurance, Asa has trained himself well not to cum prematurely, he can practically cum on command. Rest assured, you will have cum multiple times before he has once.

Let that be a gauge of how long sex lasts.

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

Asa practically owns a sex shop with the amount of toys he has.

Dildos, vibrators, anal toys, BDSM gear, even down to things he has made himself, he has it. And he is not afraid to use them. He will use them.

Asa is not shy to use toys on himself, but that is usually when he is on his own. Now and then, he may use a cock ring on himself with you. Just because he enjoys it. 

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

It’s borderline torture with how much teasing he will do to you. You will be sobbing and begging before he finally gives you relief; if you’re lucky.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

He is less of a moaner, and more of a talker. Talking down to you while he fucks you is his go to.

“Look at you taking my cock so easily. Slut.”

“You didn’t even try to stop me. Disgusting.”

While he doesn’t moan, he will growl. Especially when he cums, but also if you do something to disappoint him. If you hear it, you’re in trouble. 

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

This is a man with two jobs; an entomology professor and an exterminator. 

While his extermination job is purely to scope out new victims, it is nonetheless, a job.

While this could lead one to think he is well off, he typically blows all his money on his hoarding- I mean, collecting. 

With his night hobby at the hotel, along with a busy day schedule, he typically forgets to eat and sleep. You’d never know it by looking at him, though. 

Asa hand makes all of his traps, leading one to the conclusion that he is experienced with welding and iron work, along with carpentry and electrical work. He is very handy.

He has a long list of talents one wouldn’t expect. You didn’t think he could knit, could you? Think again. 

This man suffers from several mental illnesses. The trauma of his childhood certainly haunts him and keeps him awake. His horrible insomnia also doesn’t help his mood. 

Thanksgiving is a very bad time for him. You will not be able to find him. Don’t even ask about his plans to celebrate; there are none. 

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

Asa is pretty average when it comes to length, coming to 6 inches. Though he is slightly thicker than the average size. Don’t worry though, he knows exactly how to use it.

Asa is also circumcised. 

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

While Asa is a sex fiend, it’s typically only on his own terms. His libido is quite low, meaning you will probably only get it from him now and then. Unless the mood strikes. 

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

Asa is never one to fall asleep after sex unless he was truly that tired beforehand. 

You’d never know the answer though, as you’re usually locked back in your trunk after he is done. 

If you’re not a captive, you’re sent on your way once you’re cleaned up. Or he leaves if he is at your place. 

Having two day jobs along with a long night hobby, his sleep schedule is already all over the place as it is. Who knows when he actually fits in time to sleep.

[imonthemoonitsmadeofcheese]

Destinytober24: Day 26 - Divine

Link to Ao3 if you prefer to read it there

Dust and rocks crunched under the Drifter's boots as he approached Eris Morn at her station on the Moon.

Eris's lip quirked up into a smile when she heard the sound. He was making noise as he walked on purpose to let her know he was there. She knew his gait instantly.

"Drifter." She addressed him, wondering if he had waited until the last Guardian had transmatted away and, if so, how long he had been waiting. It could not have been long or she would have smelled him.

"Hey, Three-Eyes! Came as soon as I could. What’s this mysterious thing you need me to see?"

Eris stepped toward him and clasped his hand in hers warmly.

"It is in a cave in the Anchor of Light. There will be Fallen on the way. May we take your Sparrow?"

"Yeah we can do that. We’ll have to snuggle, though. And it may be a bit more bumpy than you're used to."

"I am accustomed to walking."

"Right, well, this will definitely be faster than that. Wanna ride shotgun or drive?"

"I would prefer to drive."

"Ha. You say that now, but you might regret that."

. . .

A few moments later Eris was frowning as the Drifter climbed in behind her. It was a tight fit but that was not the source of her displeasure. The Sparrow engine made a grinding noise as she tried to turn the ignition. The vehicle lurched to the side but did not move forward.

"How is this even remotely tolerable to you?"

"Well, up until now I’ve been the only one that’s had to deal with it, and I’m used to it."

"It doesn’t even start."

"It starts, you just have to jiggle it a bit, give me your hand."

He put his chin as close to her shoulder as he could without pressing it into the Hive chitin on her pauldrons and reached around her, wrapping his gloved hand around her own.

"Like this." He jiggled and then twisted the switch hard. The engine begrudgingly kicked in and began to rumble in an unstable fashion.

"It sounds as though it is about to fall apart."

"I mean, you’re not wrong. We could walk."

"No. You will shoot and I will drive."

"You got it."

She pushed the accelerator and felt the vehicle churn as it responded, only to have to course correct to avoid driving them into a rock wall.

"Why does it pull to the left?"

"Ah yeah, that." He said in her ear as they picked up speed. "I’ve been meaning to fix that but I never got around to it. I’ve just gotten used to compensating for it."

"I’ve seen you build functional machines out of garbage. You have the competency. Why have you not fixed this?

"There’s this old saying, the cobbler's children have no shoes."

"People who make footwear abuse their children?"

"Nah, it’s just you do something all day every day and then you neglect that thing for yourself. You do it too. Like a lot."

"I doubt that."

"Yeah? How much rest and self care do you do when I’m not around, unofficial therapist of the Vanguard?"

"Hmmm… Two on your left.'

"On it."

The Drifter shifted behind her and his scout rifle began to fire.

. . .

"Well this sure is a spooky cave."

"You should see the Hellmouth sometime." Eris' glowing orb hovered above her hand as the Drifter followed.

"I’ll pass. Wha-"

Eris caught him as he began to slide down a rough incline. Gravel and dust continued past where his boots had stopped. They slid into a dark pit.

"Tread carefully."

"I am treading carefully. I just can't see in the dark like you."

"Take my hand. I will guide you."

The path was winding and steep but Eris' grip was firm and he did not slip again.

After a few minutes the cave opened up into a larger chamber.

"Here. This is what I needed you to see." She held her Ahamkara bone up high. Its light was largely swallowed by the surrounding darkness.

"You may wish to add some flame to the Soulfire," she added.

The Drifter snapped his fingers and a flaming coin appeared between them. He held it in front of him.

"Moondust… am I seein' what I think I’m seein?"

"I believe so."

"Is this some kind of joke?" he asked as he walked forward. "Someone pulling a prank on you?"

"Unlikely."

A large sigil was scratched into the floor. A four-lobed flower. Eris’ symbol, the Bane of the Swarm, the same one she had on all her charms and wore on her chestplate. It was several feet in diameter. The scratches were uneven and deep, as though they had been made by claws.

The Drifter walked across it to what could only be a stone altar at one end of the cavern. He held the flame in his hand up to the knee-high figure in the middle of the altar presiding over the room.

It was a rough-hewn effigy of a human figure made of stone. Crude armour made of rotting Hive chitin had been affixed to it with distinctive pointed pauldrons at the shoulders. In one hand it held a sword carved from bone with a very distinctive knife-point perpendicular to the blade affixed to the tip of it. A spherical green stone was in the other hand. In the figure's face were three finger-width holes containing small green stones.

"Huh. How’d you even find it?"

"I was led here."

"Led? By what?"

"A Thrall."

"Come again?" He looked back at her.

"It groveled to me and did not attack."

"What happened to it after you got here?"

"It left. Still groveling. Backwards out the way we came."

"You didn’t think they were trapping you in here?"

"It would not have ended well for them if they had."

"Huh. So they are worshiping you now?"

"I do not know. It is a shrine, but… Hive worship is usually some form of death: theirs or someone else’s."

"I mean, you were a god to them."

"I was."

"Have you showed this to anyone else?"

"I wanted your thoughts first."

"I mean, it’s certainly new behaviour that’s for sure. Do you think you can… control them?"

"The lesser Hive are easily controlled magically for short periods of time. They will cower to anyone with sufficient power."

"But for more than that? If they worship you, do you think they'd like… do what you want, long-term?"

"Doubtful. I have no way to receive their tithes. Their own worms would devour them."

"Wild. Has it changed since you were last here?"

"Hmmm… perhaps there is more detail? I cannot tell for certain."

"I wonder what would happen if you… leave them something here."

"I don’t know what I would leave, or why."

"Well, they wanted you to see it. Maybe something to… I don’t know… acknowledge them?"

"And what might accomplish that?"

"I mean, I’m just grasping at straws here but… nah that’s a terrible idea never mind."

"Speak."

"That’s a statue of you, right?"

"Mmhmm"

"It’s just, Hive are really into bodily fluids for some reason… usually pullin’ them outta other people, mind you… but… maybe smear some of your eye goo on the statue’s eyes maybe? Sorta like… peeing on it, without actually, you know, peeing on it? Claiming it in a way?"

"Crude, but… there is internal consistency in your logic… and it works within the principles of contagion magic. Very well."

Eris pulled her hand out from under her Ahamkara bone. It remained hovering beside her. She removed the gauntlet from her left hand and reached up to her cheek, sliding the tips of index, middle, and ring fingers through the paracausal tears flowing from below the bandage she wore around her eyes. Then she stepped forward and placed those fingers into the three eye-holes of the statue, drawing them down to leave dark streaks on the stone.

Hissing echoed through the tunnels.

"Uh." The Drifter held up his flaming coin, looking around nervously.

Louder hissing seemed to answer the call of the first.

Eris tugged her gauntlet back on and summoned her orb to her hand. "We should leave."

"Yeah."

"Stay close." She drew her sword.

"Don’t have to tell me twice, Sister." He moved behind her, his coin in one hand, his hand cannon in the other.

"Of all the things to call me." Eris began leading him back the way they had come.

"Fine, Lover."

"Hmmm…"

"Hmmm yourself," he said near her ear as the hissing seemed to swirl around them. "You’re smiling. I can hear it in your hmmm."

"Hmmm…"

They heard the sounds of claws scrabbling along stone in the distance.

"Faster," Eris said and began to move more quickly.

The Drifter matched her pace. "Can you make a portal to get us out quicker?"

"If necessary, although it would also make plain our position."

They heard more hissing coming from behind them. It was louder.

"Oh I think they already know we’re here."

"But which ones, I wonder."

"Let’s not stick around to find out."

"Agreed."

A dead Eliksni lay beside the Drifter’s sparrow when they emerged from the mouth of the cave. Its entrails had been ripped out. Its limbs were splayed in an unnatural configuration.

A wrench was still clasped tightly in one three-fingered hand. It held a wire rifle in another. The ammunition cartridge had been spent. A Marauder cloaking device had been pulled off of its belt and smashed. Bits of its other two hands were still embedded in the sparrow itself.

"Uh… " The Drifter looked down on the dead body with confusion.

"They protected your sparrow ."

"That's unfortunate," he said dryly. "It wasn't worth dying for. "

"I'm sorry. If it's any consolation we probably would have had to defend ourselves from it on our way out."

"Maybe. Still sucks."

"Yes."

The Drifter crouched down and pulled the dismembered fingers out of the vehicle. He dropped them into the hole in the middle of the corpse.

"Looks um… displayed," he said, Trust dangling from his fingers as he examined the body.

"An attempt at communication."

"Ghost!" The Drifter's ghost appeared at his shoulder. "Scan that." The ghost began to do as he asked.

"Maybe we can get them to communicate less violently?"

"Doubtful," Eris answered him. "This is the Hive."

The Drifter's eyes flickered to the empty tunnel mouth and then returned to the corpse.

"House of Devils." He muttered looking at what was left of its clothing. "That's weird. You ever seen House of Devils on the Moon?"

The Drifter's ghost emitted its single tone to announce it had completed its scan and disappeared.

"I am not certain. I do not believe so. I thought the House of Devils operated primarily on Earth"

"So did I. Never seen 'em on the Moon but you hang out here more than I do."

Hissing and scratching echoed up through the tunnel mouth. It sounded very close.

Eris mounted the sparrow and after a couple of tries, got it running.

"Are you coming?" she asked him.

The Drifter nodded. He paused to fold the dead Eliksni's four arms over its chest cavity and covered its head with what was left of the tattered cape bearing the sigil of its house.

"Best I can do." He told the corpse before standing and climbing on the back of the sparrow behind Eris. "Let's go."

The Sparrow made a grinding sound and lurched. Eris growled at the controls. The engine coughed and sputtered.

The Drifter reached down and picked up the wrench from the dead Eliksni. He gave the sparrow a sharp smack with it just in front of Eris' left knee.

The Sparrow's engine roared to life. Eris sighed and began driving them back across the lunar surface to Sanctuary.

Link to the entire month's worth of prompts on Ao3, posted daily.

[butterscotch-goat]

heyy haha hi twirls hair do you have any Elijah fun facts or perhaps Lucy

OOOOOH LET ME SEE WHAT I CAN COME UP WITH!! Thank you so so so so so much for asking aaaa <33

Alright!! Eli!!!!!

-their nose is naturally hooked, but it's bumpy and lopsided because it has been broken!! he has been in a fair share of fights, never starting them, but they've gotten pretty good at ending them all things considered

-i have given them the title "The Apostate" :]

-they would go to church with Martha because it would make Grace too existential and scared but Martha didn't like going anywhere alone, sooo

-he tried to teach Martha to read but gave up; Martha got too frustrated (she learns eventually, thanks to Beatrice!)

-they know how to sew! fixes his own clothes and stuff

-Grace offered to try and heal his foot before but he politely declined; it's a part of him that he's accepted

-Grace's trial and execution was the front page story for a hot minute, so he had to shout about his best friend's death and sell biased & inaccurate stories about it so he could get paid :"]

-occasionally refers to Martha as "Marty" (Beatrice parallel BEATRICE PARALLEL)

-after Martha disappeared they started learning piano. He didnt get far though because he couldn't stand going in the church (to use the piano), especially without Martha

-when Martha returns, the only thing she could bring back of Grace was a jar with her heart in it (since her body got Dissected as fuck, chopped up to study n stuff) and anytime Eli is over at Martha's house (Martha kept it on her windowsill (where else is she gonna put it lol)) he like,, greets Grace's heart? I used to do this with an urn, it's a thing I swear. he would greet her heart,, he'd say hi to Grace, idk man.

-He and Martha still celebrate Grace's birthday; they set her heart jar on a table in front of a pastry or something. They don't take it very seriously (they need some lighthearted moments in their life god let them joke about their trauma please)

-after The Plot, Eli often goes with Martha on her (every-other-year-ish) visits to Aster and Beatrice. Beatrice and him get along very well (because of course they do) while Aster kind of scares him, but it's all good :]

-this one doesn't happen anywhere near the plot, only happens when hes like an adult n stuff but I think it's funny so...Eli COULD NOT keep a straight face at his Lavender wedding with Martha. Martha was more composed but Eli was NOT helping her keep it together Lol. After the fact he makes fun of Martha for being a terrible kisser (THIS IS SILLY GUYS PLEASE IM BEING SILLY)

Lucy time!!!!! Silly little guy!!! Pathetic man!!!

I'm reaaallllyyy struggling with the whole Dawn rework (ask Sen and he'll tell you,, I'm struggling so bad) so I don't have much at the moment. BUT I'LL TELL YOU WHAT I DO HAVE!!

As of writing this, Lucy WILL be a lot more active in the plot!! He's looking to prove he's still a powerful demon, so he goes with Gene to hunt down Frappe (and Dawn by associatio). He does, in fact, suck at his job though, so if anything he probably slows them down,, but that's okay...

Uhhh random stuff GO!!

-his glasses were accidentally stepped on by Ronnette when she was trying to wake him up one time (he passed out on the floor) but Lucy would rather DIE than go to the optometrist again so he's dealing with a cracked frame right now

-Lucy hates Juno almost as much as he hates humans,, but like he's never gonna hate anyone as much as he hates humans so (sorry Dawn, he wants you to perish so bad)

-Lucy is so sure that he's a MASTER at blending in with humans. He is not. He and his garish purple vest, unkempt And uneven long ass hair, and a shirt that's either A. Probably Gene's and therefore too big for him, or B. His shirt that has an entire sleeve missing. He doesn't remember where he lost the sleeve but he hasn't gotten around to getting a new one yet BUT HE WILL SOON GUYS TRUST (it has been 5 decades at LEAST)

-as of writing this I think I'm gonna make it so demons can actually control/choose what their humanoid form looks like, and I think Ronnette would pick on Lucy a lot for making his humanoid form so scrawny.

Uhhh I don't have anything else,, here's some Eli doodles WEEE (featuring his section of a bunch of character profiles I impulsively made in my sketchbook with NO PLANNING WHATSOEVER???? WTF IS WRONG WITH ME)

[spinoskingdom875]

Everyone gathered at Empire City Park for the Solar Eclipse. They sat down with picnic baskets and drinks waiting for the Eclipse to begin. Tails: Here you go. He handed everyone a pair of glasses. He gave one to Marine. Marine: Woo! This is gonna be a ripper! Sonic: Thanks, pal. These are some cool shades. Tails: And they're perfect for protecting our eyes when looking up at the Eclipse. Trikey: What will happen if we look at the eclipse without these? Tails: Well, the brightness would damage your vision, and you would go blind. Trikey: Oh dear. Then I'm glad you made these, so we can look at the Eclipse without hurting our eyes. Tails: And I have a pair for your new friend. He grabs a pair of solar glasses and hands them to Bumpy. Tails: So, you're Bumpy, correct? Bumpy: Uh-huh. Amy: When did you two first meet? Trikey: We first met in the forest, and we started playing hide-n-seek. And we also run around and pounce on each other. Bumpy: It was really fun, and now, I made a new friend, and hopefully more here. Amy: Aww, that's so sweet. We'll be glad to be your new friends. Bumpy: Aww, thanks!

Several minutes went by, and the sky began to dim. Eggman and Sage came by, and Cream introduced Trikey and Bumpy to Sage. Trikey was surprised to see the young girl. Trikey: Mr. Eggman, you never told us that you're a daddy. Is she your daughter? Eggman: Heh-heh, you could say that. She's not actually human, but she does have the feelings and emotions of one. She's Artificial Intelligence. The baby dinos were confused. Bumpy: Artif... Trikey: Artifishy... Bumpy: Uh, what does that mean? Eggman: Well, she's a type of fancy computer, and has the ability to perform tasks like thinking and learning, that would require the intelligence of living beings, such as you. Trikey and Bumpy: Whoa. Eggman: It's complicated, I know. That's why I love being an evil genius. Bumpy: Wait. He's a bad guy? Trikey: Yes. He builds lots of robots and uses them to fight against Sonic and his friends. Bumpy Gasped. Trikey: But he seems like a good papa to all of them, even Sage. Bumpy: Well, it's so nice to meet you, Sage. Sage: It's nice to meet you too, Bumpy, and Trikey.

They walked up to Tails who was on his Miles Electric. Trikey: Um, Tails? What is the eclipse about again? Tails: It's when the Moon passes between the Sun and our planet. It prevents the sun's light from reaching the Earth. He shows them a demonstration of an Eclipse on his Miles Electric. Tails: So, when the Moon is in front of the Sun, its shadow would cause the sky and our environment to get darker. Trikey: So, it will get dark down here? Tails nodded. Bumpy: Ooh. It sounds scary. Trikey: Yeah. Sonic: I wouldn't worry about it. Sure, it does get dark, but think about it like its nighttime. Knuckles: Then when it's over, the Moon will move out of the way, and the sky will light up again. Bumpy: Really? Sonic: Yeah, it'll be great moment. Trikey and Bumpy felt better.

Everyone continues eating lunch. Trikey introduced Bumpy to everyone, including Tikal who was also at the park sitting on a bench. They all chat as the sky becomes dimmer and dimmer. Vanilla: Oh. It's almost here. Be sure to put your glasses on, okay dear? Cream: Yes, Mama. We will. Marine: Hmm. Marine looks around the park. Marine: There are too many trees here. Should we find a better spot, or is this good enough? Charmy: Let me see, he puts on his glasses and flew across the park. He calls out to them by the park's steps. Charmy: How about here? Tails walks up with his device. Tails: This is perfect, and there are no trees above us. So, we got a good view. Tikal: Look, up there! The moon moves in front of the sun as the sky gets darker. Sonic: Glasses on, guys! Everyone puts on their glasses and heads for the stairs. Sonic: Hey, doc. You sure you don't need a pair? Eggman: Nah, I'm good. I modified my frames to withstand the eclipse's intensity. Sonic: Okay, then. Let's head over there and enjoy the show. They gaze up at the moon covering the sun, the light still leaking through. They all looked up in awe. Trikey and Bumpy hugged each other, still a little nervous. Tails held on to his Miles Electric, looking at the Solar Eclipse in the sky. The sky is now pitch black, the whole park is in total darkness, as lights flicker on throughout the city.

Marine: Crikey. That's a bright one, that is. Sonic whistles. Sonic: Isn't this quite a sight? Knuckles: Yeah. Tikal: This is incredible. I've never seen anything like it. Trikey: Me neither. Bumpy looks down. Bumpy: Trikey, look! They both looked to see fireflies flying around the park. Trikey: Why are they out all of a sudden? Bumpy: I guess they're confused because the eclipse makes everything look like it's nighttime. Marine: Don't forget about the crickets and cicadas. Them buggers can be pretty noisy at night. Sonic: They're thinking it's the evening since the sky is dark. Tails continues to make calculations on his device. The Solar Eclipse continued for several minutes. The sky remains dark. Afterward, the moon would move, and the sun's light would appear once again. The shadow departed over the park and the city. The whole area lit up.

Tails: Okay. You can now take off your glasses. They began to remove their solar glasses. Amy: Wow. That was amazing! Tikal: It was interesting. I'm glad I came to the park. Sonic: Yeah, what a show it was. Cream took hers off. Cream: It's over you two. You can take those off now. Trikey and Bumpy removed their goggles. Knuckles: What do you think? Trikey: That was... Awesome! Bumpy: Yeah! It actually does feel like it's nighttime! When will it happen again? Tails: Well, for this country, it would take about 20 years. Trikey and Bumpy: 20 years!? Cream: Wow, that's really a long time. I would be like Mama by then. Trikey Yeah, I would be like my mommy too. That really is a long time. Tikal: Well, let's be thankful that we were here to witness it. Eggman: Indeed. It is a once in a lifetime experience. Be glad that it happened, because it will be a long time until another Solar Eclipse will occur. Tails: Well. I feel like this will be a moment we'll never forget. Everyone agreed. Sonic nodded. Sonic: I hope the others got a good view though. Bumpy: There are more friends? Cream: Yes. And we'll be glad to introduce you to them. The baby Ankylosaur smiled warmly.

NOTE: Don't re-upload my pictures anywhere without my permission, please. Thank you.)

[chickensoup-4-mysoul]

herculean (drrr x f!reader) - chapter 32

chapter 32 - missing

synopsis: an unexpected obstacle makes itself known.

word count: 4,698

warnings: canon-typical violence

"trouble on my left, trouble on my right i've been facing trouble almost all my life my sweet love, won't you pull me through? everywhere I look, I catch a glimpse of you,, trouble - cage the elephant

At some point, as the winding road extended further and further, fluorescent street lights were replaced with trees and shrubbery. The beams of headlights emitted the only light for miles. A tall street light would occasionally appear, but it would stay completely dark. Perhaps this area had not been tended to in a while, or more likely, the electricity had purposely been shut off to diminish any suspicious activity. Eventually, the trees suddenly parted, revealing a tall, drab building. Once upon a time, it might have been some sort of factory or manufacturing establishment, hinted by its height and long windows. Now, it was most certainly abandoned. Many windows were cracked or wholly bashed in. The brick was waning in the very late stages of decay. Even the front entrance appeared to be completely caved in; a wide, open entryway residing where there once were tall doors.

The silver car skids to a clumsy halt across the cracked asphalt ground. The minute that the headlights flick off, everything is shrouded in complete darkness. As the two men step out of the vehicle, their eyes take a moment to adjust. For a moment, all they can fathom is the deep blue of the starry sky. Brigall does not pause to account for the time, instead clamoring towards the trunk to the best of his ability.  Isaac fishes through his coat pocket before procuring a flashlight. As both men reach the trunk, Brigall snatches the flashlight away from the man, gesturing for him to open the trunk. Isaac quickly complies, popping the lid open and revealing its contents. 

Your body had clearly been ruffled by the bumpy ride, but you were still intact; and unconscious. 

“Should we tie her, sir?”

“No use, she’ll just break out of them. I’ll have to administer the dose just as she gains consciousness. This serum is only temporary, and I can’t risk her regaining her memory before we’ve gotten her back to the lab.”

Isaac scoops your body up with ease, tossing you over his shoulder and slamming the trunk closed with one hand. Led by a small pool of light, the men traverse into the abyssal entrance of the warehouse. Upon entry, their feet kick up layers of months-old dust, flurrying into the air and invading their lungs. Brigall doubles over with a nasty cough, briefly obscuring the rays emitting from the flashlight. In a flash, Isaac’s hand is in front of him, holding a handkerchief from his coat pocket. The doctor snatches it thanklessly and presses it over his face. 

“That damn informant!” His voice is muffled as they move deeper into the space. 

From their position, they narrowly miss the sound of two more vehicles pulling into the lot. Both drivers, without any communication, make the clever choice to come to a slow, quiet stop. In an instant, the lot is filled with a multitude of bodies.  

Mikado and Anri stare up at the building, memories flooding their heads from the last time they had inhabited it. So much changed because of that night. To return to the setting of it all felt almost premature, considering where they resided in their respective journeys. But another thing was sure about that moment…you were there for them. With how little you understood of what was truly going on, you charged into the fray to support them in their time of need. Now it was their turn.

Nobody bothers to even close the van doors behind them as the group gathers. Everyone clocks the familiar, and now empty, silver car in front of the building.

“Ok, so what’s the plan?” Walker is the first to speak up in a poorly hushed tone, sensing the need to be conspicuous. 

“We don’t know what leverage they have, if there are weapons involved. We’re unfortunately unarmed.” Kyohei contemplates, eyes trained on the entrance to the building.

“Speak for yourself,” Erika chimes in. Kyohei shoots her a side eye, but makes no further comment.

“There were only two people in the car, right? We have advantage in numbers.” Saburo circles around his vehicle, quietly shutting all of the doors.

“That’s if they’re not meeting more people here. Who knows what kind of operation this is?” Kyohei mutters.

“Well, we’ve gotta do somethi-- Shizuo !?” Everyone follows Walker’s line of attention, leading them to the tall blonde who was currently stalking toward the warehouse. For such a strong man, he certainly made a lot of distance without being noticed. Before anything could be done to stop him, he had already breached the front entrance. 

He has to remove his sunglasses to gain some semblance of vision. Pools of moonlight melt through widened divots in the ceiling. What immediately stands out to him, though, is the moving ray of light closer to the back wall. His adjusted eyes make out two bodies, and after further inspection, one more body thrown over one of their shoulders. The sight lights him aflame with rage. The group’s carefully crafted cover is effectively blown by a vicious roar.

“You BASTARDS! I’ll kill you!”

The noise immediately draws everybody through the door. Celty, slowly wheeling in on her bike, presses an exasperated palm to the forehead of her helmet.

“Wh-what!?” Brigall bristles at the sudden appearance of so many people. What spikes his fear most though, is the blonde….bartender…standing in the middle of the room, staring him down with chilling animosity. In the blink of an eye, the wild man is sprinting towards him, long legs carrying him at an inhuman speed. The flashlight slips from his grasp and he fumbles for it in panic. He sends a frenzied glance to the taller man beside him, who remains oddly stoic. 

“Why are you just standing there, you imbecile!? Do something! ”

“My apologies, doctor.” Isaac nods, flipping your body off of his shoulder with one arm, before draping it over Brigall’s. The sickly man receives you clumsily, almost dropping you upon reception. Mere seconds exist in the space between the pair and the rapidly approaching blonde. Isaac takes three calm steps, positioning himself a few paces in front of Brigall. The more he can make out the men’s faces, the more Shizuo snarls. He pulls his elbows back, prepared to reel his arms into a violent strike. 

What should sound like skin against fabric-covered skin instead releases a solid clap of thunder. The force of the blow kicks up several layers of dust, so suddenly that a large cloud materializes around the two bodies.

The group looks on with bated breath. Through the dust and darkness, it’s impossible to make out what exactly occurred. For a moment, they are overcome with a subtle sense of relief. It appears the whole operation would be easier than expected, what with Shizuo’s sake. 

The dust settles, and everyone squints, expecting to see one body standing, and another crumpled on the ground. However, as the last of the cloud slowly dissipates, jaws drop and gasps resound.

Because there, cloaked in surprisingly bright moonbeams, were two standing silhouettes.

Shizuo’s limbs quake, his teeth clenched and eyebrows twisted. Wild brown eyes stare into cool, unaffected green. Where tremors moved through Shizuo, the body across from his remained completely still. The two men were locked in a grapple, bodies poised offensively. A confused breath leaves Shizuo’s mouth, anger momentarily replaced by pure astonishment. Then astonishment gives way to recognition, then comprehension. In one suspended second, the heat drops back in. His lips curl into a bitter sneer.

“I…I get it.” His graveled voice wavers with effort. “‘S’not just her. Yer churnin’ these guys out!? Huh, Doctor !?”

His fury suddenly shifts to the man behind Isaac. Said doctor still stands in the same spot, paralyzed with fear. With a new burst of energy, Shizuo shoves past Isaac in a B-line toward Brigall. He only gets a few steps ahead before two arms cage him around his shoulders. “Hah!?”

“You’ll have to get out of here, Doctor. I will take care of it.” Isaac commands coolly. Brigall seems to snap out of his stupor. He hurriedly slips through the door beside him, sloppily maneuvering your body along with him. The sight only ignites Shizuo further.

“Like hell, you will!” He suddenly bends at the torso, disorienting the man behind him before slinging him over his shoulder. Isaac’s body tumbles onto the ground before him. He does not stay down for long, tucking his legs beneath him and quickly regaining his bearings. Shizuo clicks his teeth in annoyance. His ears perk at a low whirring from behind him, that grows into a high-pitched screech. A dark figure appears in his peripheral.

“Looks like we’re tag teaming this one.” He doesn’t even need to look at Celty to know of her presence. Isaac is unperturbed at the idea, eyes scanning the small group of people.

“I apologize.” His low voice bounces off of the high walls. “The doctor has very important plans to tend to. I must not allow any vagrants to get in the way….at any cost.” 

Shizuo stretches his neck to the side, his vertebrae releasing a few quiet pops. His knuckles follow shortly after. He fixes Isaac with a dangerous stare, an almost wicked smile playing on his lips. “ Any cost , huh? Then I won’t hold back either. No hard feelings!”

The end of his sentence breaks off into a grunt as he takes another charge at Isaac. This time he throws a fist, aiming to land a hit on the man’s face. Isaac narrowly dodges, grabbing Shizuo by the wrist and yanking him off balance. The blonde quickly recovers, using his low position to swing a leg at his ankles. The kick lands, but appears to do little damage.

The men devolve into a series of hits, kicks, and dodges. Their bodies move so fast that it’s often hard to distinguish which body is which, something that even Celty starts to struggle with as she searches for a way in. Each landed blow holds so much force that small clouds of dust explode from every hit.

“Doesn’t look like we’ll be of much use in this fight.” Saburo mutters.

“Much as I hate to feel useless, you’ve got a point.” Kyohei sighs. “But we can’t just stand here, that guy in the labcoat has (Y/N). We’ve gotta find a way to him.”

“Not sure I wanna take a chance sneaking past that guy,” Walker nervously gestures at the rapidly ensuing battle. “Or getting caught in the crosshairs…”

Shizuo’s back collides with a pillar, sending metallic tremors up through the ceiling. His eyes hone in on a decaying rod of scaffolding beside him. Isaac charges at him, preparing to sink a fist into his stomach. Suddenly, a hunk of metal appears before him, swinging in an arc before colliding with his side. The momentum forces his body into the wall beside him. In his brief incapacitation, spiraling shadows appear at his feet. They rise up his body, wrapping around his torso and encasing his arms. Celty’s shoulders bob in something akin to a relieved sigh. 

“Now!” Erika shouts. The van gang and Raira kids take the opportunity to make a break for it. Their running feet carry them toward the same doorway that Brigall had disappeared through. For a moment, Isaac’s cool exterior dissipates, a low growl slipping through his gritted teeth. His legs, free from the apprehension of Celty’s shadows, suddenly bend into a preparatory stance. He jerks his torso backward, pulling the string of shadows taut and jerking Celty a bit in the process. Feeling her weight give, Isaac’s shoulders reel in a sharp circle. 

Still knocked off kilter from his prior movement, Celty is completely taken off guard by the strong yank from the other end of her shadows. It happens so quickly, she doesn’t have time to sever the connection before she’s flung from her bike and through the air. Her lithe body moves in an arc before pummeling the ground right in the path of the others. The sudden obstacle stops them all in their tracks, looking down at Celty in shock. Anri and Mikado run to her immediately, concern etched onto their baby faces. 

The shadows holding Isaac dissipate upon impact. At his first moments of freedom, he bursts into a sprint toward the invading bodies, intent on putting them at a farther distance. Shizuo is in his path in the blink of an eye, using his body as a wall. He spares a warning glance at his companions. 

“Don’t get too close.”

It’s the most attention he could give them before diving back into the fray. Despite Anri and Mikado’s concern, Celty was quickly back up on her feet, seemingly unscathed. Good to know that, even if she had a head, that helmet would do a pretty good job of preserving it. She quickly ran back into the fight, now with a fire under her butt from being taken off guard. For the others, however, Shizuo’s warning was most likely better heeded. 

“We can’t get anywhere while they’re stuck in this stalemate,” Kadota grunted in frustration.

“We need something to tip the balance!” Erika’s eyebrows were set in a deep furrow, her fingers scratching her own chin in contemplation.

“...or someone.” Anri’s soft voice suddenly chimes in, taking everyone off guard. For a moment, everyone just stares at her, puzzled at what she could mean. She nervously scans the crowd of people, starting to regret speaking up. The only eyes she doesn’t meet are Mikado’s, whose attention is fixed on his phone as he rapidly taps on its keyboard. He momentarily meets her gaze, before his lips curl into a smile of understanding and determination. She returns it, her brown eyes twinkling with resolve. Mikado turns to the rest of the group.

“I think we’ve got an idea.”

...

You don’t realize you’ve lost consciousness until you regain it again. Vitality engages your senses and when you command your fingertips to wiggle, they listen. As you take in the vast, breezy darkness around you, a frustrated grunt bubbles from your lips.

“You’re back!”

Once again, a voice materializes behind you. Tension seizes your shoulders. Something stirs and sizzles in your gut at the mere timbre and enunciation. You don’t even have to turn to look at her, just her existence is enough to piss you off. You stew in the following silence, willing yourself to lose consciousness again and abandon this state of purgatory.

“Silent treatment, huh?”

“Just shut up.”

Your words are gruff and graveled; improper. Your brain starts comparing your voices without your permission. You know that if you turn around, your brain will do the same with your faces; your bodies.

“If that’s what you want.”

You roll your eyes before letting your eyes fall shut. A forced, slow breath washes over your body. It’s just like falling asleep, you think to yourself. Just fall asleep.

It’s too empty. Too quiet. You try to imagine soft blankets and warm sun, but the breeze carves goosebumps into your frustratingly bare skin. The more you will your muscles to relax, the more they tingle with pins and needles. You let out a frustrated huff. 

“Not working, huh?”

It’s a reflex when you shoot an indignant glare over your shoulder. You don’t catch yourself in time and you lock eyes with her; you. She simply returns your gaze, a seemingly immovable simper etched onto her face.

“Am I supposed to become you again or something? Is that what this is? That asshole turn me back into his little puppet?” The words shoot out of you with little thought, spurred by the desire to push away; to hurt. She was much too soft. Too welcoming. It made your skin itch. “How long until I absorb you back into my system?”

You’ve turned back away from her now. A moment passes with no response. You click your teeth in annoyance. “What, now you’ve got nothing to say??”

The silence continues. Refusing to look back at her, you resign to crossing your arms and stewing in the frustration. You were growing so, so tired. Who knows what’s happening to you now--what’s going to become of you. And now, on top of it all, you’re standing face to face with the girl you once were? The life you once had? Was your brain not fucked up enough? It was all so unfair--all such…

“Bullshit.” Even in the low murmur of your voice, a crack sneaks its way through. Your nose and eyes tingle in a familiar, unwelcome way. Could you cry in your own subconscious? As tears breached your lower lashes, it felt as though they evaporated upon release. There was no trickle down your cheeks or clumping of your eyelashes. Just a stinging feeling, clenched jaw, and heavy swirling in your chest. Just your luck, you couldn’t even cry.

Abruptly, that weight in your chest explodes. Instead of destruction in its wake, it only leaves behind warmth. A bright warmth that continues to spread. A gasp rises from the pits of your belly at the feeling. Your fingers graze your own sternum, and for a moment, flashes of red-feathered darts fill your mind. You don’t look down, too fearful of what you might see. Your breaths are short and high in your chest, doing little to provide your lungs with the fuel they truly needed.

“Breathe…deeply.”

Your heart starts at the new voice. Your body acts on its own, taking a long breath that you can feel low in your belly. Tears still well up and evaporate, but your body begins to feel light.

“Good.”

It’s a different voice from before-- completely different. A man’s voice. Low, graveled, soothing. Familiar. 

You can’t will yourself to be angry at the calming effect it has on you—not when your body finally begins to settle into this fuzzy feeling.

“I don’t want to see you.” You say helplessly, voice soft yet solid. It’s made of the hearty, silky air that fills your body with each deep inhale. 

“That’s alright. But I was hoping you’d recognize who I was.”  Even without turning around can you envision his dark, stern gaze. Your brain subconsciously removes his beanie, leaving his eyes and face completely unobscured. Your face scrunches into a troubled furrow. It feels like a bittersweet cycle just to speak to him. Relief, then shame, then affection, then longing.

“I do.”

“Good. Now, what’s all this about being a puppet?”

Your skin bristles. You don’t like hearing those words uttered by his voice. It brings to life all of the scenes you’ve created in your head. The worst-case scenarios that you spent every day running away from. You gulp down the rising cotton in your throat.

“I’m probably going to lose my memory again. Lose everything I had. And turn back into her.”

“Who?”

“You know who. The one you’re really friends with.”

He doesn’t grant that a verbal response, just an even hum.

Silence ensues. You don’t possess enough concept of time to know how many minutes pass by. It leaves you itching. Another goosebump reappears on your arm for each second you don’t hear his voice again. Strain racks your body as you resist the urge to turn around. 

“I’m going to miss you guys,” You finally sigh.

“We’ll miss you.” You shake your head.

“Not me.” None of it is real. He’s not really there, standing behind you—but the pure relief you feel is palpable. It’s thick in your bloodstream and potent in your every exhale. To say all of this and have someone listen. You heave a bitter laugh. “I’m just some fucked up kid.” 

“I don’t get it.”

You almost look back. “…what?”

“You’re you. I’m standing here and I see you. I don’t know who else you’re talkin’ about.”

“Bullshit!” His silhouette briefly enters your peripheral before you catch your mistake and turn forward again. “You can’t say that. I’m clearly not the same person.”

“Aren ’t you?” Something breaks mid-sentence, sounding almost like a technological glitch. Your inner ears adjust around the foreign sound. Low gravel layers over soft high pitch. 

“K-Kyohei?”

“I see the same person.” 

Once again, the voice has changed. A smaller sound. It takes rearrangement within your ears to attune to it. This voice, you also recognized. Suddenly, the feeling of comfort is overtaken by embarrassment.

A girl a decade younger than you. How could you possibly seek asylum? You were supposed to be that for her . Now, you were too caught up in your own baggage to be there for anyone. What would she really say if she saw you as you are now, pitiful and brooding? She’d probably decide never to depend on you again.

“I don’t want to talk anymore.”

“I told you the same thing, once. Remember?”

“S’different, Anri.”

“How different? There was so much you didn’t know about me. I thought when you knew the whole truth, you’d abandon me.”

Your eyes widen at her words. Comprehension creeps into the back of your brain until you grasp what she’s trying to say.

“Y-you’re still the same person, Anri. Your past didn’t change that. You still look the same, act the same, sound the same! There’s been a whole part of me missing, don’t you understand!?” 

Against your will, your voice creeps up in volume. You’re too buried in your own shame to stop yourself.

“But how much was really missing?”

Once again the voice splits into two, layering and divulging until one sound comes out on top. It’s harder to distinguish between the two female voices, but one holds more confidence over the other. A playful lilt that would normally leave your heart feeling lighter.  

“Where does the real you end, and the other you begin?”

Something pauses within you. You can almost physically feel the cogs of your brain stop turning.

“I…”

“‘What a ridiculous question!’ That’s definitely what you’re thinking. But have you really thought about it?” Erika’s voice continues in your silence. Still, no words grace your dumbfounded mouth.

“…Can you try?”

...

The entire interior of the warehouse was obscured by a cloud of dust. It grew difficult to take a breath that wasn’t closely followed by an unforgiving cough. 

Kyohei buried his face into his jacket, using his collar as a makeshift air filter. His eyes scanned over the group behind him, all doing the same thing with their shirts and jackets. This wouldn’t do at all. The longer they sat here, they not only risked losing (Y/N), but also flirted with a nasty case of black lung. Still, the brawl a few yards away had not let up. Surely, not too much time had passed--but each wasted second felt like an eternity. 

“Kkh--!” A sharp choking sound echos through the air, accompanied by a heavy, unforgiving thud. Shizuo’s body collides with the stone wall. His recovery is slightly more sluggish than his past ones, a detail everyone in the room is acutely aware of. Still, he hurtles toward Isaac once more, harboring no intention to slow down.

“This isn’t good,” Saburo murmurs. “If Shizuo goes down, the balance is tipped against us for sure. There’ll be no chance!”

Celty provides as much support as she can from the outer bounds. The Dullahan would be no match if she were to go against Isaac hand-to-hand, so she uses every opportunity to restrain Isaac with her shadows. It’s earned Shizuo a few extra blows, but between him and Isaac, the blonde was looking worse for wear. Even Shizuo Heiwajima’s strength seemed to have its limits.

As for Isaac, the man had hardly broken a sweat. Despite taking on two powerful beings at once, his own strength had barely started to falter. Everyone watched him in horrified astonishment. Where had such a powerful man come from? 

“Like (Y/N).” Erika says suddenly. The others turn to her at the confusing declaration. They find her with widened eyes, jaw open with realization. 

Cogs turn in numerous brains in an attempt to catch up. Isaac…Like (Y/N)? His strength... her strength. The other man’s lab coat. Shizuo’s immediate recognition, and the animosity that immediately followed…

“...S’not just her. Yer churnin’ these guys out!? Huh, Doctor!?”

“We’ve got to get her out of here.” Kyohei’s voice is ignited with a new sense of severity. He eyes Mikado sharply. “How’s that idea pannin’ out, Mikado? Window of opportunity’s closing real fast!”

“Any second, just a bit more time!” Where one would expect desperation in Mikado’s face, they would only find pure tenacity.

“The first opening we get, we’re goin’ after her--no hesitation!” Kyohei’s command banishes whatever hopelessness had begun to creep in. 

But that resolve did nothing to tip the balance of the ongoing battle. Shizuo sloppily throws a punch at Isaac’s side, which the latter easily evades. Overextended and thrown off balance, Shizuo’s center of gravity shifts, throwing him off kilter. Isaac seizes the opportunity, wrapping his arms around the bartender and gripping him in a headlock. 

“B-bastard…! Gkkh-!” Shizuo’s fists beat at the strong arms that begin to cut off his airflow. He thrashes in an attempt to throw the body off of him. The force jostles the butler’s grip, but he doesn’t let up, determined to conclude the brawl for good. 

Celty revs up Shooter, rapidly closing the distance in a desperate attempt to rescue her friend. She skids across a raised slab of cement in the ground, lifting her front wheel and sending her soaring through the air. The perfect trajectory presents itself, her bike hurtling straight towards Isaac’s exposed and vulnerable head. 

Just as the tires are about to leave tread marks on the man’s face, Celty’s efforts are evaded by a swift duck. Isaac completely drops his body weight, throwing himself to the ground and taking Shizuo’s body with him. The blonde is left kicking and scrambling for purchase, losing any of the remaining leverage he’d had. Celty lands roughly onto the cement, managing to keep her balance atop her motorcycle. Her tires continue to burn across the ragged floor, the sheer momentum overpowering her brakes. 

In her motion, something whips past her. In the blur and commotion, she can’t distinguish what it is--only that it’s big. Huge , even. It practically trades places with her, tearing through the darkness towards the two struggling men.

Isaac’s stoic countenance is disrupted by a minute, triumphant smirk as Shizuo’s thrashing begins to weaken. Relief overtakes him as the man’s broad shoulders begin to sag. 

“The doctor will be happy to hear of my besting you…I am his greatest creation, after a--GH!”

Isaac’s gravelly, even drone is disrupted by a choked wretch. His vision briefly flashes as his body is roughly snatched from its position on the floor. He hovers in a moment of suspension before his back collides with something stony and solid.

Everyone jumps at the sound that, compared to the previous noise, was particularly violent. A rumble reverberates through the space, accompanied by creaking metal and crumbling stone. The group stands from their huddled position on the floor, eyes trained at the ceiling in fear that something was beginning to collapse. 

Thankfully, the roof remained intact. What had really taken damage was the pillar adorning the furthest back wall. A thin crack ran through the top, branching out into several fractures toward the ground. At the very bottom, though, was most of the damage.

At the bottom, the pillar was almost completely caved in, a large, deep crack left by Isaac’s body. Said man still resided there, the most incapacitated he had been up to this point. His body twitched with effort, signaling that he was still cautious. Despite his efforts, he remained pinned to the wall--a single, meaty hand gripped around his throat. From where the group is standing, a large, familiar silhouette covers Isaac’s body from complete view. The silhouette doesn’t move, except for a tilt of the head over his shoulder.

Even through the dust and darkness, they recognize that wide, sturdy smile.

“Sorry am late.” Simon’s voice strikes a relieved chord in every chest in the room. “Took a minute to close up shop.”

[mister-e-muss]

The last time I posted something about my backlog, it was just a quick thing about setting a record for myself. I figured I’d make this sort of thing regular, and give my thoughts on the games I play at the same time.

.hack//G.U. Last Recode

I’ve wanted to get into .hack ever since Kite and BlackRose made appearances as guest characters in Project X Zone all the way back in the early 3DS days. I can’t say that I regret this at all.

This collection lasted me about 50hrs. I will say though, that these games are best played in short bursts. Wailing on the enemies until they’re ready for you to use a Rengeki on them is fun, but it can get repetitive very fast. Combat itself doesn’t become as fun as it could be until Vol. 2, where you can actually change weapons without going into the menu.

As for the narrative, I found the setting of [The World] fascinating in concept, but not the best aged in terms of visuals. The characters however, were a delight the whole way. Haseo is a great protagonist in that, he’s an asshole, but not an unbearable asshole. If you enjoyed Neku in TWEWY, you’ll probably enjoy Haseo.

Star Ocean: First Departure R

Full disclosure: I got this game because it was on sale and the Sci-fi/fantasy vibes called to me.

If you don’t have a tolerance for older ARPGs, then you might want to avoid this one, as its age does begin to show. That said, it’s not nearly as ages as it might seem.

The skill system was very engrossing, with level ups and new skills happening very fast. There were a few difficulty spikes, but I feel like part of that was on me for not engaging with the item creation/customization until a little over halfway through.

Finishing this left me wanting more in the best way. I can’t wait for November and Star Ocean 2.

Trails in the Sky FC

My experience with the Trails series has been a little bit. . . Bumpy. As someone who only owns a Switch and an HP Notebook laptop, the series hasn’t exactly been very accessible. Near the start of my sophomore year of college, I downloaded and played a demo for Trails of Cold Steel 3. I was, to my mild surprise, only slightly lost about the world and characters. I enjoyed my time with Cold Steel 3 but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. After finishing that game, I decided to play as much of the series as I could before diving into Cold Steel 4. This was my first step for this.

The Trails series�� reputation for deep world building is entirely deserved. I was surprised at how much space this game’s world has. As an example: there’s an orbment shop in one of the towns where a third story counter can be seen. There’s no reason to go there, not even any sidequests, but if you talk to the NPC there, he’ll explain that the third story is where they handle repair requests. It’s a small detail, and the developers didn’t have to make that extra room, but they did, and the world feels more real because of it. Even the magic-science techno-babble tends to make a degree of sense!

The gameplay is as solid as you could want from a turn-based rpg. The Arts and Crafts are great levers, and I never felt too weak for the enemies in any given area. It took me a while to realize that Arts using two turns was a benefit rather than a drawback. Using the cast times to manipulate the turn order is great fun.

I will say though, that I miss the additions of Master Quarts and Breaks that later games brought to the series. They’re not quite necessary, but they did bring a lot of good to the series.

Charting through the rest of the series is going to be a blast if this game is any indication!

[heresmaitake]

Reflections on a Random Wednesday

Lately, my emotions have been all over the place, up and down, feeling more sensitive than usual. I'm typically a homebody, content in the comfort of my own space, finding peace in my solitude. But lately, it's like I've become so inseparable from my house that I start to worry a bit. I mean, I can go a whole ten days without stepping outside, especially with my work being from home and all. Is it strange, or is it normal to feel like this sometimes?

I've been trying to figure out why I've been feeling this way. Could it be stress catching up on me, hiding behind my everyday routines? Maybe my body and mind are trying to tell me something I haven't quite caught onto yet.

As much as I'd love to be a wise, always view life positively, happy-go-lucky person, let's face it, I'm just your average Joe. Sure, I've become wiser and wiser over the years, like we all do with age. But staying positive all the time, especially when you're feeling low, is easier said than done. I do look up to those wise people from Ted Talks who seem to have it all figured out, inspiring me to be like them. But for now, I'll stick to being me and facing whatever life throws my way.

You know that saying that life is full of ups and downs, right? Sometimes you're on top of the world, and other times you're stuck at the bottom, waiting for your lucky break. Someone once said to me that in life, we get lucky with so many things, but there are times for everything. If you haven't achieved what you dream of, even though you work hard for it, it's not a missed opportunity, it's just not your time yet. Soon enough, if you keep working hard, praying hard, and dreaming hard, it's going to be your time. I cried ugly tears hearing this because I've failed many times in my life, but then I've been lucky with so many things. My current situation sometimes makes me wonder why it's so hard to achieve this certain goal of mine when I've already done and continue to do my best, sacrificing a lot in the process. Why is the road so bumpy? But maybe it's just not my time yet. If I continue to work hard, maybe it will be my turn, right?

I often find myself reflecting on my journey so far. Each stumble, each moment of doubt, has shaped me into the person I am today in ways I never imagined. It's funny how life works, isn't it? One moment, I'd be questioning everything, and the next, I'd be filled with a new determination to keep pushing forward.

In all those moments of doubt, I remind myself of the times I've overcome obstacles that seemed impossible to pass through before. It's kind of cringey to say it myself, but I guess I learned a mindset of resilience, telling myself, "It's okay to feel uncomfortable, sad, or all over the place right now because it'll eventually pass." It's like when I hit a creative block while working, you know? I keep telling myself that inspiration will come if I just keep at it, just like it always does. I've learned that something that's hard for me today may become a piece of cake tomorrow, so I just need to keep working hard and keep trying. But even with this mindset, there are still days when I face these challenges while crying 😢😂.

So here's to pushing forward, even on the toughest days, knowing that brighter moments will come soon. Let's keep striving, dear humai, keep believing, and keep chasing your dreams, one step at a time.

Anw, here is my song of the day:

[heartliar]

Winnie turns to John with a frown on her face, she didn't want to walk home anyways. But she didn't want to stay somewhere that she felt people ( John's dad ) didn't want her to be there. She also didn't want to be seen as a threat to either of them while she was there, now that she knows that her dad hunts them. Maybe Trevor has an agreement with them? Yeah! SURE! Does Trevor even know? oh my god, her head was racing. She didn't like the feeling. The first time she ever did drugs wasn't even as bad as this. ( but she never did those again )

"I-I still love you too, John..." Winnie gently shuffles forward in her bare feet crunching the rocks on the pavement. Having gone barefoot for the majority of her life, always nice to be outside without shoes on. That's what you do when you want to feel NATURE! Plus she just didn't like shoes when she was younger.

She can see that Ben's eyes had changed their look at her, not at all serious or stern. She feels a little bit calmer now, that there's not a werewolf angry at her or uncomfortable with her being there.

"John," Winnie takes his hand when he would growl towards his dad, hand gently tugging to get his attention. That wasn't the first time she had heard that.

"I'll go back inside, John. Come on," she gently squeezed his hand then, calmer now but still on edge in the back of her mind. It was a lot, on her mind and brain, not including her emotions. After almost being killed in the forest, to John and herself being intimate to the information of werewolves and hunters. It nearly made her sick.

Tugging John along, she walked back up to the house and steps inside letting her feet rest a bit on the not bumpy floor. She sets her stripper type heels beside the door and tugs John's shirt down a bit over her thighs. Not that she feels self conscious, but his dad seemed to be doing this out of the kindness of his heart.

"Has my dad tried to hurt you?" she questioned towards Ben. "Is that why you don't like him? Are you scared he'll hurt John?" Trevor doesn't like John at all, but he knows that he makes Winnie happy so he tolerates him. "... he doesn't know I'm here."

“Winnie! Wait!” John runs down stairs with her “don’t leave like this.. let me drive you home please..” his lips setting in a thin line as he waits for her to turn around and face him “it’s not safe to walk home alone after.. well, after what happened earlier in the camp, I.. I don’t care what my dad says I just.. I still love you. And I never.. never think of you or- or your father as danger to us. I’m.. I’m sorry. Please let me drive you home” he worries his bottom lip between his teeth, a physical pain squeezes his heart thinking his ‘girlfriend’ walks home like this. What kind of boyfriend he’d be?! No matter what his father said, they’re still a couple and nothing, nothing can separate them. Even the supernatural shit like werewolves!

That somehow explains why her dad hates him.. but still, Winnie is the love of his life. God, he so badly wants to pull her in his arms and be the source of comfort for her now but with how things went down, John knows better than letting her have some space.. not pushing her but staying around to offer his everything whenever she wants and if she doesn’t want to stay at home, then he can drive her..

“kid.. come back inside” this time it was his dad saying that sentence, John turns his head so fast almost breaks his neck, eyes going wide. Dad really wants Winnie to stay? Right after he just dropped the bomb on them? Right..

He doesn’t notice the possessive growl that leaves his chest. Ben shakes his head, looking tired “stay down, son. I don’t want to hurt your girl, God’s sake..” then looks at Winnie again “you shouldn’t go home now. Let’s return back inside and we can talk more about it..” he sighs “us being enemies doesn’t make me let you walk home like that, now, get your ass inside, both of you..”

[irvingmachin]

Just how much Should You Minimize Home Painting Expenses?

When the wall surfaces within your home appear like they require a detailed scrub or cleansing, the simplest point to do would be to provide a fresh layer of paint. If you choose to do the task on your own, the painting will certainly not cost a lot. For this reason if you are worried regarding the home paint costs and if you desire to do it yourself, you have to think about the advantages and disadvantages of getting the job done by yourself.

Hire It Out

This is what the majority of people choose to do. However if you desire to conserve cash, after that you may wish to give it a shot. Firstly, you need to determine if you have the required abilities to do the task. There are some homes that have high ceilings and that will require some special skills along with devices. As an example, you will certainly need high ladders, step-ladders, drop cloths, scaffolding etc. An additional vital variable is the time variable and if you don't have the required time then you may not be happy with the outcomes.

Expense Factor

There are some paint business that charge per space and there are the others who charge per square foot. While you might really feel that working with a professional may be a costly event, the entire task will certainly take place efficiently when you allow a specialist do his work. Included in this, you do not have to spend time and power going to home improvement facilities and gathering products and info. All you need to do is to simply select the paint shades resting within the convenience of your home and after that hire a specialist painter to do the job.

Cutting Corners

Although getting the job done yourself can aid bring down the home painting costs, you will certainly need to make sure that you don't botch it up. A messy task will be easily recognizable and the end outcome might be fairly aggravating. However if you just have a couple of walls or couple of tiny areas to paint, then you might simply go ahead and do it yourself.

Wall surface Coating

Besides the paint, one needs to consist of the interior and exterior wall surface finishes while calculating the home painting costs. A finishing is an added safety layer that can help prevent your walls from being harmed. While you do the painting, it is crucial that you spend a bit a lot more to make sure that your walls are well secured. The walls tend to get damaged when the covering is not done. While there is no physical damage, the damage is usually as a result of modifications in the ambience too the setting. The natural elements such as hailstorm, snow, rain and sunlight can have adverse results on your newly painted walls. For this reason, it would be far better to spend a bit more to get the interior along with the outside coatings done.

It does not assist to simply minimize the home painting prices yet you have to make sure that the money you have invested in paint, does not enter vain.

Home painting can be an enjoyable job that can include in the value and appearance of a space. It will certainly help to make sure that the ideal things are done to guarantee that a space can be properly repainted without the paint obstructing of anything else.

It will be extremely important to see to it that a great floor covering is utilized around the entire area. The most effective thing to do is to get rid of all carpets and various other materials on the floor that can trigger a bumpy surface. A flat surface is required so a proper flooring covering can be applied.

The following pointer to make use of is to see that large items are gotten rid of from the area. In the event that a particular big product like a bookshelf or piano can not be removed it will help to relocate that thing to the central part of the space. An appropriate cover should also be made use of on that item. This is so no paint products can obtain onto it.

It will certainly be very vital to see that the electrical switch plates and covers are gotten rid of from the wall surface. This is needed so the room can look its ideal, https://www.vashiatvhod.com/services-item/boqdisvane-remont-na-vhodove/ and aid obtain people to distinguish between the shade of the wall and the shade of a plate or cover. Bewaring around the areas where these covers were located in will certainly be important when paint.

The last idea is to ensure that each and every single point is removed from the wall surface before paint can begin. Any pieces of artwork that will be reapplied can be returned into their old places. Nevertheless, the nails and other materials that support them ought to be removed in addition to those things. Doing so can assist to develop a smooth wall that will certainly be very easy for a person to paint over.

[chickensoupleg]

(This entire thing is me projecting free to ignore-)

He hates this.

Billy glowers at the ceiling, stripped down to his boxers and nothing else as he stands because laying down must have done something, it had to have been.

Today was fine. Nothing out of the ordinary, every single thing he’s done was within the rational, manageable things that he can live with without feeling uncomfortable.

He was fine until an hour ago, because his body hates him and decided to turn his skin red and puffy along his entire body save his face. It felt like it was in his ear. Earlobe, yeah, whatever that happens.

But in it? Did the universe just hate him. It must, because this sucks a whole lot of wet egg.

It started when he was laying on the bed, which is why he was standing. He doesn’t know what it was on this bed, but it was on this bed. The reasonable thing to do is toss them in the wash but-

The itches. Ugh. He hates it. Billy can feel it. He’s not dying, he thinks he knows what dying would feel like, but it sure feels like he wants to just crawl out of his skin, scratch it all out and just tear away the sensation crap it feels so bad this sucks so much Billy hates having sensitive everything.

Who thought this was a good idea, making his skin this sensitive to every texture ever. He did everything right, he knows he did. Didn’t eat anything that would cause it, didn’t wear anything that would cause it, didn’t touch anything that would cause it.

And yet here he stands, looking like a cherry pie. He needs to take the sheets down to the washer. Clean out the bad whatever it was that made his skin red alert on him. He laid on this bed earlier with no problem, but right now? Oh, now it had a death wish on him.

It's on his neck. All of it. Not in it, thank the lord, but it was still just as itchy as a lot of him decided to be.

Instead of moving and doing what he needs to be doing to rid of whatever hates him, he’s staring at the ceiling like it was an accomplice, and he’s not moving. No, no instead he’s standing still in just boxers and trying to ignore the spiky feeling that makes him want to scratch it more and more.

It’s just gonna look like his legs. He knows it. Billy has already looked down there and saw the raised even lines that sat on the bumpy everything else because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. It was itchy, and he itched it.

Billy was still itchy. Is it in his mouth? It better not be in his mouth, or he’ll scream and break a toe on the dresser.

That would be bad. In the back of his mind he knows the rash has to go away, because that’s what it does. Goes away. That’s what it did last time, that’s what it will do now.

It doesn’t feel as bad as everything else he’s gotten on this body, but the aches at least fade after the initial blow even if it don’t look too pretty.

Rashes continue to make their presence known. His brain is telling him it’s itchy, and it’s taking up everything not to unconsciously reach down and do it.

He sucks in a breath. Scratches at his inflamed neck. Glares at the bed like it kicked his car. Throws his hand down.

Turning, he stomps into the bathroom because he can’t take this anymore and need relief. He took an antihistamine because that’s what people do when they’re itchy, they take meds to remove the itchy.

Yeah, did not work, he’s still itchy and it burns. He turns on the shower cold and steps underneath it.

Ahhh, better. Billy glares at his feet, ignoring his bright red thighs and the huge splotch that took up his sides and some of his chest.

His hands remain balled at his sides. He won’t scratch his skin off that way.

Billy stays there for at least five minutes. Any longer and he’s just running the water bill up. He shuts the shower off and stands there. Drying is too much right now, and he knows he’ll just use the towel to itch his skin.

Natural drying it is.

Once he wasn’t risking soaking the bathroom floor he steps out, walking around and just trying to ignore the itch.

Billy can’t wait for it to go down. Maybe then he’ll remember about the sheets and how it has a vendetta against him and drown it. Then it will be peaceful until inevitably it happens again.

Which will happen again, and the cycle start all over. Billy laughs to himself. Hates his skin’s sensitivity, he truly does.

Great, now it’s on his scalp. Just be over already. Please.

Oh, he despises this so much.

No it's in his ear IT'S IN HIS EAR AUGH-

[kookies2000]

*Someone asks what's Hunter's favorite thing about Willow.*

Zeno: Their friendship! 😁

Also Zeno:

Me:

Yeeeeeeeeeeeesssssss.

[funtimebunnyblog]

How do you think the Pillar Men (more specifically, Kars) would react to an s/o... that's a Hamon/Ripple user? I feel it'd be rather conflicting for them...

You know what they say, dear Anon, "Opposites attract"! 🤔😅 I always like this kind of problem in fics!

Please enjoy! 🥰❤

Pillarmen with an s/o who is a Hamon user...

(Under the cut for length!)

Kars:

•Out of all of the Pillarmen, it's safe to say that Kars is the one with the most narrow view on Humans; let alone the ones able to wield the gift of Hamon.

•So, as you can imagine, the road to becoming the apple of his eye is a bumpy one.

•There will be a lot of hatred involved before you and him even get to a sort of love/hate stage.

•Hell, he has put it across to his own companions for Millennium that ALL users of Hamon are enemies and must be disposed of at ALL costs if they had any hopes of gaining what they wanted.

•But, in the end, it was inevitable. You somehow fell for him and he somehow fell for you, despite all this.

•For you, and ONLY you, Kars makes this exception to his one rule.

•As your lover, Kars does his best to look past your Hamon and focus on what else makes you the person he has come to adore.

•Your likes, dislikes, interests, hobbies and any other talents you may possess (besides the obvious) will interest him. He'll ask to hear all about them when you and him are together.

•This knowledge is vital to Kars as he is a man to spoil you with gifts and anything you like as he is too caught up in his work to properly devote much time to you if any.

•Other than that, don't be surprised if he also has questions on your Hamon and what makes it tick.

•Be prepared, as he will undoubtedly want to study your abilities (for his own gain in defeating the lower Hamon users in his way) but he will seek your consent on it first.

•Despite your drastic differences in morals and abilities, Kars will respect you as highly as he does his companions and will love you endlessly without question.

•Just don't get your hopes up on perhaps convincing him to defeat other Hamon users like yourself in a more Humane way and obtain the stone more peacefully. Having a Hamon user as a Mate does nothing to butter him up in that category!

•Kars did things his way and his way alone, he didn't give a damn on how many people he had to step on to get there, and if you didn't like that he would only encourage you to turn your head.

Esidisi:

•Admittedly, the gift of Hamon is something that has secretly interested Esidisi for as long as it has been a threat to him.

•He'd even go as far as to say that he admires the ability and perhaps a handful of the most powerful users he's encountered (and slaughtered).

•His devotion to Kars and his shared quest for Ultimate power, however, has made every Human in his way his immediate enemy.

•Things changed, of course, when you came into the picture.

•Like Kars, Esidisi makes this exception for you and you alone but that doesn't mean that he will seek Kars' approval before initiating a full relationship with you.

•It was rare that Esidisi would think to engage in something so openly against Kars' wishes but this was also an exception on his part. You had better consider yourself lucky.

•Despite this, Esidisi will take some care to be sure you don't get caught in the others affairs (especially if you aren't in the favour of his oldest companion) but ultimately because you are Esidisi's chosen lover no harm will befall you.

•Esidisi is a passionate man. With every bit of spare time he can get a hold of in between his missions for Kars in obtaining the stone, he makes sure he spends it exclusively with you.

•He'll satisfy you in every way but still leaves you craving more when forced to depart.

•He might even go so far as to bring you back something nice he found while he was out.

•Unlike Kars, he might want to know a little more about your Hamon just for the sake of his own interest (not his own gain). He respects you enough not to exploit you like that.

•Like Kars, however, do not think to even try and sway him from doing what must be done to those ill-fated souls who stand in his way.

•Esidisi has a job to do, he has his own goals to achieve and he can't make everyone happy in doing so.

Wamuu:

•This may come as a surprise to you but to Wamuu, it doesn't really matter to him personally whether you are a Hamon user or not.

•Hamon was just a battle tactic, a practice, no different from his own practices really.

•To him, only strength mattered. And because he found himself attracted to you, that meant that you had great strength indeed!

•However, this will prove to be a problem because he knew very well his Masters didn't share the same views as him on strength. Especially when it came down to the Hamon Tribe and its Warriors.

•If anything, Wamuu might just attempt to keep his relationship with you hidden from them all together.

•Wamuu wouldn't dare go against the wishes of his Masters and he knew very well that they would disapprove of this union. So as long as they didn't know this and he was doing his job of working to find the Red stone, everyone could be happy.

•Wamuu's encounters with you will be brief and fleeting because of this. No time for sweet nothings and romancing!

•He brings you gifts and likely only has time to exchange a few words before taking off as to not raise any suspicions and he hopes that is enough to satisfy you as much as it does him.

•But what is done in the dark will always come to light.

•Be warned, when Kars and Esidisi do find out about Wamuu running around with a Hamon user of all people under their noses, their disapproval is more than evident and Wamuu will be properly punished; no ifs ands or buts about it.

•Despite this, Wamuu will plead with them to spare you. It's the one thing he dares to ask of them!

•Chances are, since Wamuu has made his choice on making you his Mate despite their views, you will be spared but you are now under their strict watch and control. You will have no say in this.

•Look on the bright side, at least this way Wamuu will be able to spend more time with you and it won't be behind anyone's backs.

•The Warrior will undoubtedly ask you to spar with him and implore you to use your Hamon on him at that; don't you dare hold back! He uses your abilities to polish up his own skills.

•Wamuu will hate to see you unhappy (which you probably are in this situation) and he will do anything to make you at least a little happy but he has no say in this either, really.

•His love for you is deep and true, Hamon user and "enemy" or not. You complete him in ways no one else can.

Santana:

•Unlike the others of his kindred, Hamon is something entirely new to Santana. Something strange, exciting even.

•He's absolutely intrigued with the phenomenon. How does it work? How did you come by this? Are you the only one who can do the things you do?

•This is one of the reasons Santana decided to take you as his Mate in the first place, as it was clear to him that you were some sort of evolved form of Human and therefore more appealing to him than any other ordinary and unevolved Human.

•Expect many questions, Santana's eyes burning into you as more and more tumble out past his lips in deep, broken English.

•There will be much poking and proding and examining on his part too. Don't get upset if he tugs questioningly at your clothing (especially any Hamon conducting articles you happen to be wearing) as he's just trying to learn!

•He wants to watch you use it. He wants to see the lengths you can use it. He wants to feel it against him despite its danger just for curiositys sake.

•In turn, you may ask him any questions you have about him and his inhuman abilities. (Tread lightly if you question him on his kin, however!).

•It will become no secret that Santana is a possessive Mate. You are a special Human and therefore special to him and this made you are his and his alone.

•Even if you can defend yourself (which you undoubtedly can), you will never have to while you're with him as he will destroy everything he deems a threat to you.

•And that will include other Hamon users that come too close to his abode; don't think it won't!

•Though a little possessive, you are not his prisoner. You are allowed to explore his Home as much as you like, though he would prefer to travel with you when you do.

•He does his best to remember you have a much more complicated diet than him and will often go out to hunt and drag Home something specifically for you.

•Apart from his many questions about your Hamon, Santana is also quiet. So quiet it's awkward at points, offering little more than a "Hmm," or a grunt on the norm.

•You had best not get your hopes up on him being overly chummy and chatty with you so this is something you will simply have to get used to.

•Like his estranged companion Wamuu, Santana has the ability to sense if you are unhappy with your situation and will put an effort into making you happy.

•Despite your obvious differences in species, your Hamon is something that actually makes Santana feel more alike to you.

•More alike to him than even his own kind.

[kashimos-hajime]

the colour yellow | jjk

summary: “You once said love manifests the most twisted curses. I never thought of it that way before, but I’m starting to think you’re right.”

WARNINGS: ANGST!! hanahaki disease but not an au, HOSPITALS, DEATH, DESCRIPTIONS OF DISEASE, UNHEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS, pining, unrequited love, complicated feelings, its just sad. there are some light-hearted moments, and happier/softer aspects in the ending but it is generally sad in the ‘what could have been’ department pairing: gojo satoru x fem!reader, past geto suguru x fem!reader, mentions of satosugu word count: 29.9k lmao

a/n: i just needed to get the hanahaki out of my system. it did not work. i took liberties w the timeline because idc about actual jjk canon in this fic thanks. 

playlist for this fic

crossposted on ao3 x

Your Innate Technique always gave you a green thumb. Meaning, similarly enough to Yaga, you could plant cursed energy into objects.

Where it deviated, Satoru knows, is the type of object. Plants—trees, leaves, flowers. 

Ironic, he thinks numbly as he walks through the hospital. Shoko had told him that at this point it was palliative care until you died—nothing else would work. Cursed energy only fed your sickness, and even her technique could not heal the damage fast enough. Stupid. Idiotic. Cruel.

Cruel. That was the word.

He hadn’t seen it himself but from how his old friend had described it, it could only be cruel. 

His footsteps tap along the linoleum floors, urgent, but not too fast. A part of him dreads what he will see—his mind swirls with the possibilities, and of guilt.

Why didn’t he just come sooner? Why did he think it was okay to wait, to dismiss Itadori when he said you’d been checked in for your coughing fits?

“She’s strong. She’ll be fine,” he had said. Itadori’s small frown. “A little feather in her throat isn’t going to knock her down.”

Why? Why? Why? Why did he say that?

Because it had to be serious to put you in the hospital. For fuck’s sake, you were still that teenage girl who stood outside his dorm window in the middle of a thunderstorm to bring Fushiguro a birthday present before you left for a curse expedition a thousand years ago, and the woman who welcomed him into your home unprompted on December 24th, your cheeks dry, lips pressed in a brave smile.

You had held him tight enough he could not see the blood, scrubbed him in a bathtub, ran your fingers through his hair until the sweat and grime was gone. You took care of him because he knows the belief that no one should be left behind to suffer alone has been engrained in you since the day he’s met you.

He should’ve known. A girl abandoned for being cursed had turned into woman with a saviour complex who’d barely even think about telling him you were dying. 

Dying, of all things, from a disease no one knows how to cure. And you’re a sorcerer.

He could’ve laughed. The irony is enough to make him smile.

Your room’s in a tiny corner of the hospital, down the hall from a nurse’s station, and as he walks through, he can see the grey sunlight streaming through the window, glaring against his glasses. He lifts them to rub the heel of his hand into his eye.

He doesn’t want you to worry when you see him, and mostly, he needs to stall. His heart is in knots in his chest, and he spots a chair beside the door with your name in the plastic slate, so he sits down. His knees feel gummy and he leans forward, the visitor’s pass clipped to the front of his shirt hanging. 

Satoru tugs the glasses off his face, fits his palm over his brow and squeezes his eyes shut. It’s chilling in this dead end, and he swallows tightly. Everything tastes so dry as he looks up and shoves his hand underneath the sanitizer dispenser, rubbing it all over his hands just so he has something to do.

After a few minutes, he gets up and sets a hand on the knob. 

It can’t be as bad as he’s imagining. At most, you’re a bit sick, but you’ll still be spritely, warm in the lips and with arms outstretched and, “Satoru, finally!”

He opens the door. 

You’re sitting hunched over in bed. Silhouette outlined by the white-grey sunlight from outside your hospital room, you’re trembling as you hold onto a receptacle. An IV is hooked to your arm, a hospital gown is barely hiding anything, and it feels immoral to even look so Satoru doesn’t. Instead, he pauses by the doorframe and closes his eyes for a moment as your gaze flashes to him. 

He feels it, to be honest. The heat of your stare until it is wrenched away by a violent cough you instinctually muffle by your palm, blood splattering over your hand, soft, velveteen purple petals falling from your lips and into the receptacle in your lap. 

You’re supposed to have a green thumb.

Vines bend to your will if you command it, you can summon forth thorns to impale your opponents, send thick creeping ivy to barricade a doorway. It doesn’t matter if there is no greenery in your immediate area. At the sweep of your hand, the ground could rumble with the sound of trees twisting their gnarled roots into feet to march at your command.

Just as long as they’re within range and you’ve touched them in the past few hours, they’re yours.

So, why can’t you stop this?

Plants are supposed to listen to you, right? As he stares at your shaking body on the bed, curved over the plastic tub, thick globs of bloodied spit drip from your lips and soaked purple blossom petals entwine with your life essence. His heart plummets to his chest. You retch, spit, choke, and every sound stabs him in the chest as he takes a weak step forward, hand stretched out limply.

Your name flutters, barely leaves his lips before you’re looking at him again, a bit of a mortifying image but nonetheless.

Even so, you smile, despite the blood painting your face, the exhaustion morphing your body. You look like you haven’t slept in weeks, and your hands shake around the receptacle. You look battered, bruised along the arms where the needles keeping you filled with antibiotics, medicine you need, had punctured you.

And still, you’re beaming at him. He thinks he’s going to be sick.

“Hi, Satoru.”

His hand falls. Eyes wide, he cannot take another step. You wipe at your lips, tossing the tissue into the trash before pushing the plastic receptacle onto the table and swinging your legs off the bed.

“Don’t—“ he croaks but you don’t listen, sliding your feet into slippers and grabbing your IV stand to take a step towards him. Your knees nearly give in but you stick out a hand before he can rush to catch you. Then, you’re pushing yourself up and walking over to him. It’s more of a shuffle, but Gojo finds he can’t care as you land on his chest, hands pressing into his back.

You’re a bit cold in his arms, and he wraps himself around you, trying to rub the heat back into your skin as you shudder, but your heart is still racing as it always does around him, and you…

You’re the type of person who can shift how the air feels and looks to his Six Eyes with your smile or your tears or your frown, and in that moment, the air bleeds yellow with your joy. It’s so bright in his soul that it makes his heart skip as you shift on your feet against him, hands sliding down so your arms can circle his waist and haul him closer. 

“Gojo Satoru turning off his infinity for little ole me,” you murmur, voice raspy, as he closes his eyes, cradling your head. Without another word, he sinks into you. “Talk about the world ending.”

Why didn’t you just call him? Why did you let him stay away for so long? He doesn’t want to ask why it’s happening, or how. He already knows you’ll just lie. But he wants to know if you think so lowly of him that you thought you didn’t matter to him.

After Suguru…

How could you think that? He’s screaming inside his mind as he touches your back, feels the faint protruding ridges along your skin when he pushes down. It makes your spine a bit more pronounced along the knobs, your shoulder blades a bit bumpy, but otherwise, it’s almost normal. One wouldn’t even be able to tell without touching you and actively searching for it. How could you think I don’t care?

This isn’t the work of a cursed spirit, that much he knows. It seems much more seductive, sneaking yet unhurried in its nature. This is agony in effigy. There’s something rotten inside you, but he can’t tell what it is. The energy is everywhere.

You pull back to look up at him with a soft smile, then tap his nose and tell him to join you before turning around and climbing back into bed with energy that betrays your earlier fits. You grab your robe that you’ve left on your bed before getting up again and walking around, shrugging the fabric back onto your shoulders.

He sits down in a visitor’s chair that is still cold.

“It comes and goes,” you explain first with your new, croaky voice, stretching your arms above your head and rubbing your neck. It doesn’t look painful, but you clear your throat a lot to see if it helps. So far, nothing. “So, it’s just like a really bad coughing fit, to be honest.”

“How long has it been going on?” Your hip cracks and you let out a relieved sigh. Satoru arches an eyebrow as you animatedly stretch your face. “What are you doing, silly?”

“It got worse a few weeks ago, enough that Nanami insisted I check myself in around two weeks ago?” you say, after counting on your fingers. Satoru’s heart plummets. “But it’s levelled out since I’ve been moved here and off-campus. And I’m stretching. When I get back out there, I have to remember how to emote.” You flash him a bedazzling grin and a bit of the weight lifts off his shoulders as you swallow down another cough. This time, it’s successful and you only let out a short, raspy breath before shaking it out.

You aren’t even doing that bad. 

The blood, the flowers, that must’ve been just a bad bout, but otherwise, you seem quite normal.

That’s what he tells himself, and he believes it.

With relief, he stretches out his legs, leaning his head back on his hands. Your room’s pretty nice—much nicer than an average hospital room. Plants on the windowsills, some get-well-soon cards and a desk in the corner filled books that you look like you haven’t even begun to read, some paintings hanging off the walls. 

You wave a hand to grab his attention again.

“Don’t look,” you chastise, tying the robe around your waist. “Some of these are works in progress.”

“So Itadori and Shoko were just exaggerating,” he assumes. You look up at him, quirking an eyebrow. “If you’re attempting to paint, I know all that’s happened is that you’ve lost your mind.”

“Shut up.”

“Well, they made it out as if you were dying. If it’s just a lung issue, they could probably just fix it and we can get back to exorcising curses and making fun of Fushiguro’s teen angst,” he says, crossing his legs at the ankles. You step over them to go to the window and examine your plants, and he eyes you in his peripheral, watching you inspect one of the leaves before looking next at some blooming flowers. You don’t answer, and the grey light makes you look melancholy until you shrug.

“The doctors say I need to rest, save my strength and all that,” you finally say vaguely. “And don’t make fun of Fushiguro.”

“I’d never do that.”

You tilt your head and arch an eyebrow skeptically before flicking his forehead with a sharp donk. “I’m not above slapping the shit out of you.” He opens his mouth to argue and you hold up a finger, shutting him up. “And you can’t hit back as revenge. Ill hospital patient rights.”

“You can’t take the moral stand. Vengeance has no gender bias,” he exclaims, sitting up but you merely smirk, leaning over and shoving your face into his space before turning your head to present your cheek. His eyes widen as you poke your own face tauntingly.

“Do it, then.”

Gawking for a moment, Satoru stares but you only wink and he pushes you away lightly. You stumble a bit and he jumps to his feet to catch you but you manage to right yourself up, shooting him a foul glare. He glares back in response.

“Well, obviously, I wasn’t going to actually slap you,” he says, indignant.

“So you pushed me instead? Gojo, in your words, you are the strongest. You never know how to control the strength you push out.”

“Yes, I do!”

“One time, you patted Megumi on the back and you sent him into the pavement.”

“He was nine.”

“It still happened!” you cry, although an impish smile is already curling at your lips and it isn’t long before it spreads to Satoru, warm bright yellow and enough that it absolves any of the remaining pain in his body as you straighten up, holding onto your IV stand for support. The metal rattles a bit as the wheels roll. Your feet brush the ground. You lift your head up wretchedly.

It’s almost like that weakness sobers you.

The expression that overtakes you frightens Satoru to fucking death. 

His face feels like it numbs, staring at the darkness that seeps the light away. You stare at the metal pole your fingers are wrapped so tightly around, and then you look at the bag hanging there, clear and round and soft to your touch as you straighten up.

“Satoru,” you say softly.

“Yeah?” His voice is so quiet he’s not sure he even speaks. He can’t remember the last time you had looked so dispassionate at anything in his life. Even death had left its mark—black frowns, long streaks underneath your eyes.

Your apathy is dark purple, an endless void colour. 

“When I die, make sure Shoko’s the one who cuts me open to find out what’s wrong with me.”

Something prickles at his fingertips. He touches your shoulder and half-thinks his fingers will go right through you.

“You’re not going to die,” he insists firmly. “It’s just a bad cough.” You look up at him and blink. Then you touch your lips and shudder down another cough.

“We all die.”

“It’s not your time, yet.” His fingers dig into your shoulder. You don’t even wince even though you’re clenching his jaw but he can’t find it in himself to loosen his hold. It feels like the Jaws of Death. A crocodile’s bite.

So much for not being able to control his own power.

“It’s just a bad cough.” He ignores everything Shoko had said. Sometimes she’s wrong—sometimes, it’s not even that bad. He’d just seen it, hadn’t he? You were stretching, jumping onto your bed, acting like nothing was wrong.

Palliative care? As if you needed it—

You blink, then, and look at him. Stare at him as if you’d never said those words, and he had never reached out. 

You jerk your shoulder out of his grip. It stings more than it should.

“Right. But I’m just saying. You know how you always say I’ve got a few screws loose. It just makes sense someone will wanna crack me open to see what was going on up there and I want it to be her.” 

You smile, and the yellow cancels out the purple. 

Colour theory. 

But Satoru doesn’t smile back.

“What about the flowers?” he asks after a while. You’ve climbed back onto bed and he’s sat back down. You’re blowing into a spirometer, and every time, without fail, the ball shoots up to the top, clattering against the plastic. He watches, hoping that the next time, it’ll do the same thing again.

You stop and look at him. “What about them?”

“Is it some optical illusion? Why are they in your throat?”

“That’s a harder nut to crack,” you muse. “I don’t really know. It’s like when you’ve got food in your esophagus and you’re trying to cough it up so it doesn’t feel stuck anymore except it keeps building up. That only started a few days ago, though, so maybe, someone drugged me or something.” He doesn’t laugh and you frown. “Not funny?”

He shakes his head. “It’s freaky.”

.

He sits on the bench on campus. 

He’s cancelled classes because he didn’t come up with a standard lesson plan and his students are glad to have a Monday afternoon off, even if they’d never say it to his face. In truth, he’d spent the whole weekend at the hospital until he reeked of antiseptic and pollen. 

You coughed up five petals, and without fail, a nurse would come in hourly intervals to collect them. Shoko came once, to check up on you and to collect the samples. If she was surprised Satoru was sitting in the corner on his phone, she didn’t voice it.

“She’s not even doing that bad,” he says to the air, more accusatory than anything. The woman standing by him doesn’t answer and sits down beside him uninvited. Turning to look at her, his eyes narrow behind his blindfold. “You said she needed palliative care until she died. The doctor said she could leave tonight.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive concepts,” she informs, not looking at him. Shoko looks a bit out of place in the warm colours of the garden. Half a corpse herself. Waif-like. “The doctor’s letting her relax in the comfort of her own home before she dies. That’s all.”

“She’s not going to die.”

She snorts. “Denial isn’t a good colour on you.” The words could’ve been delivered colder. Satoru is grateful that they weren’t. 

Shoko rests her hands on her knees, tilts her head up, and sighs. Her long hair is like warm chocolate in the sunlight, spilling down her arched back from the knot she tied. “If you have any idea on how to fix this, I’m listening with both ears.”

“I don’t even know what it is,” he says. “Coughing and flowers? I’ve never heard of a sickness like that before.”

“Nanami pointed out that it could be a curse someone placed on her. I don’t know why, but it’d be an explanation.” Satoru spreads his legs, plants an elbow on his knee and leans forward to look at the ants travelling along the cobblestone before his shoe. “It manifested on some negative emotion lingering inside her and it’s growing every day, but she won’t budge.” Shoko sighs. Her purple eye bags look worse in the sunlight, but he would never tell her that. “Maybe you’d have a better chance digging into her. With Geto gone, there’s no one else to ask, is there?”

“What about you? What happened to girls and their little secrets?” he jokes, trying to ignore the ache that begins to bloom in his chest. Shoko eyes him wryly.

“I have suspicions, but there are some things girls don’t ask other girls,” she retorts. “It’s never been my business anyway. My job is to treat her, and I’ve given her options. It’s up to her to take them. Grief is a birthing ground for curses, and if she’s letting them feed on her freely, you know what fate is waiting for her.”

With that, she gets up and leaves as quickly as she arrived. Satoru swallows the smell of flowers and feels sick.

.

Monday night, Satoru pulls up his laptop and looks through, searching up words he can string together in a coherent sense to get the answers he wants. As rare as it probably is, some research wouldn’t hurt, would it? Some curses had a trademark affliction—maybe this one does, too.

So he searches up flower coughing to see if there has ever been a record of strange deaths that have made the news. If not, he’ll go to the jujutsu databases, but for now, maybe some publicity could put some answers to this question.

He is surprised when one of the first results is flower coughing disease. 

When he hits enter, the white screen blasts into blue irises with numerous results all repeating the same two words.

HANAHAKI DISEASE

And Satoru reads, and reads, and reads. He reads two weeks to three months, he reads unrequited love, and removal, and disappearance of romantic feelings and capacity for romantic love.

He reads fictional disease and wonders how much of it really is fictional. 

His phone pings with a text, and he grabs at it, tilts it just enough to get a glimpse of the screen. It’s from you, and he hasn’t read a text from you in so long he almost doesn’t recognize who it’s from except he does because… who else could it be?

[Greenbean] 11:02 PM

hey!!! guess whos finally fucking free oh my god

ugh out of the hospital and forgot how actual air smelled like lol bitch im so hungry i could eat a zoo

Letting his phone clatter, he sighs and rubs his face roughy, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment before snapping his laptop shut and getting up. His phone buzzes again and he reaches for it blindly, the screen lighting up as he goes to bed.

[Greenbean] 11:03 PM

we should get smth to eat!! i wanna go to that new ramen place in ikebukoro

[Satoru] 11:03 PM

fine but you good???? who picked you up from the hospital? still insulted you didnt let me tbh

also what did the doctor say???

[Greenbean] 11:04 PM

bc ur a menace who doesnt know how to drive 

he said itd get worse before itd get better so still gotta go for checkups but yeah dont worry and nanami came bc he didnt trust me not to try and walk home lol but he did buy me dinner

wasnt enough though!!!

…

[Greenbean] 11:06 PM

ok but fr does he think im insane

clearly id flash some skin and hitch a ride duh

…

[Greenbean] 11:10 PM

youre just gonna leave me on read? yikes

[Satoru] 11:12 PM

i was getting ready to sleep silly

and yeah ill come pick you up on saturday for lunch?

[Greenbean] 11:15 PM

sorry making instant noodles rn but yeah that sounds fine

wait youre sleeping so early lmfao

[Satoru] 11:16 PM

im old :/

  [Greenbean] 11:18 PM

u sure are

(image sent)

look!!! my babies are still alive!!! idk how but miracles do exist im tellin ya

[Satoru] 11:24 PM

inumaki, maki, and fushiguro broke into ur home to water them but dont tell them i told u

[Greenbean] 11:24 PM

wtf

[Satoru] 11:25 PM

yeah idk when but i think u teaching inumaki how to pick locks has opened up too many possibilities but also its really funny thanks

now go to sleep u need to rest

[Greenbean] 11:28 PM

whos gonna make me lol youre not my dad

[Satoru] 11:29 PM

lol 

remember how i can teleport 

lol so cool

[Greenbean] 11:30 PM

dude

wtf

fine 

goodnight hoe </3

[Satoru] 11:31 PM

goodnight knock off poison ivy <3

.

“You’ve looked better,” Shoko says. Satoru raises his head wearily as he pushes off the wall. Shoko’s holding a cup of coffee, her lab coat fresh on her shoulders and eye bags looking more printed on rather than natural swelling. Satoru can’t help but feel the same exhaustion. “Definitely looked worse. What do you want? It’s early.”

“Have you ever heard of Hanahaki disease?” he asks. She shakes her head, and he pulls up the page on his phone and hands it to her. She takes it from him and her eyes scan the screen as he continues, “It’s this fictional disease, something that stems from unrequited love, and I think it could be related to whatever she’s experiencing.”

“I thought you were set on willing her to survive,” she replies dryly, shooting him a quick look and adjusting the coffee in her hand. “But this is definitely one of your stranger theories.”

Satoru ignores that last part. “It’d make sense. With her Cursed Technique, maybe it manifested in a way that links to it.”

She pushes into the office, setting the coffee on her desk and sitting down. Satoru sits down on the exam table closest and leans forward eagerly as she continues to read the page, scrolling down occasionally before scrolling back up and sighing. “This is a stretch. The timeline doesn’t match up to what this is saying.”

“This is a curse. It doesn’t have to follow fiction.” His body feels sore, janky even, everywhere. He barely got a wink of sleep last night and he knows he’s paying for it, now. “Hell knows life rarely does, anyway. But the symptoms matches too well, doesn’t it? The flowers—you’ve done scans, haven’t you?”

She deliberates his words carefully as she looks to the file cabinet and pulls out a binder. Satoru catches a flash of your name on the spine before she moves her coffee and his phone out of the way to flip it open.

“The scans we’ve taken have only just begun to show small growths in her trachea,” she allows, “and we don’t fully understand how cursed energy affects our bodies, so I suppose it could be something like Hanahaki, if the negative energy stemming from December 24th was what brought this on or if these symptoms started when we were still students, but she’s been experiencing shortness of breath a few months before Christmas.” Satoru’s lungs squeeze the last of the air out of them at that, and a cold sweat drops down his spine as she hands his phone back to him. “It only started getting worse Suguru’s death, which meant there had to have been a trigger before that.”

In the back of his head, he hears your voice, light and yellow, saying a few weeks. It got worse a few weeks ago. 

“Worse?”

“The first petal fell some time after Christmas. It’s been a slow, but steady progression since then. Sometimes, it’s two or three. When it’s not a good day, there can be as many as seven to ten.” Shoko switches on the lamp on the corner of her desk and adjusting the direction of the white light before flipping the page. “But if we can find the original trigger and alleviate that pressure it’s putting on her, we could buy her more time.”

“So it’s been nearly six months since the first petal,” he says. Shoko nods. Satoru is grateful for the blindfold—she can’t see how blank everything looks on his face. “It said sometimes, the disease can last for eighteen months.”

“As you said, this isn’t a fairytale.” She half-spins on her chair to face him and leans back into it, crossing one leg over the other and jiggling her knee. “I saw that one of the solutions is excise the growths at the cost of the attachment. That was one of the options I gave her when the growths first appeared. She said she wanted more time before she could decide.”

He frowned. “Why?”

“Because she’s smart, and likes to push her damned limits. And if this is truly the basis of the curse”—she gestures to Satoru’s phone. Her expression flickers—“those flowers are feeding off cursed energy. Cutting them out would remove those negative emotions, but at a cost of something else. Maybe whatever feelings she has regarding the trigger.”

Satoru looks down at his phone. It feels heavier than a thousand cinderblocks in his clammy hands. His fingers are numb as his screen dims and finally locks itself. Pressing the button, it illuminates again to reveal a picture of a cactus you gave him for his birthday years ago, blooming with delicate purple petals. 

His heart rends. That cactus is long dead now.

“But, Suguru’s dead.” 

“That’s why I asked you to ask her,” Shoko mutters. 

Turning to her binder again, she picks up a pen and clicks it, lowering it to the paper before pausing, and Satoru looks up as she stares at whatever words are printed into the page distantly. A strange affliction is on her face, almost tormented, and Satoru is not-so-kindly reminded that before Suguru and Satoru, Shoko was your best friend first. 

“Tell her how idiotic she’s being,” she enforces quietly. “The longer it lives, the more permanent damage is inflicted. With the unpredictable nature of curses, that won’t take long and by then, it’ll be too late to consider removing it.”

.

Saturday comes too fast, yet not fast enough. By the end of the week, Satoru is all but finished with teaching, and is waiting outside your apartment, leaning against the car as he scrolls through his phone. He’s done a bit more research on this Hanahaki disease, but even the word makes him shiver with the implications. 

“Satoru!” Turning, he catches you loping easily towards him. You’re dressed in billowy, wide-legged dark mint green pants and a pretty white top that makes you look more nymph than human, with a canvas tote bag hanging off your shoulder. You flash him a smile as you fiddle with the fabric tie at the waistband of your pants nervously. “Hi.”

“Hey. Hope you don’t mind I brought Ijichi along for the ride since someone claims I can’t drive.”

“You don’t have your license, sir,” Ijichi says wearily as you bend over to wave through the window. "It would be illegal for you to be on the road in any capacity—oh, hello, ma’am. It’s nice to see you doing so well.”

“Thanks, Ijichi. I think I’m doing better after getting out of there,” you say as Satoru opens the car door for you and he smirks, eyes crinkling behind his sunglasses. You straighten up, looking at him before poking his chest and it’s almost just like the good ole days as you break out into a grin that crinkles your entire face. “What’s with you being a gentleman? It better not be because I was in the hospital.”

“Of course not,” he admonishes. “I wouldn’t dare dream of being polite to you of all people.” Still, he sidesteps and sweeps his arm, gesturing for you to climb in first which you do, exhaling a bit shakily as you settle in and slide over. By the time he’s settled in beside you, you have a fist over your lips and you’re clearing your throat testily.

A worm of unease wriggles into his stomach as he clips in his seatbelt, pulling the lapels of his unbuttoned green shirt free from the strap. Legs spreading, he lets his hands fold in his lap as Ijichi begins to drive them to their destination. You’ve lowered your hand by now, looking out the window, and it’s not bright enough that Satoru can read your expression on the glass.

It’s clear you don’t want to talk about it, but still, that nagging feeling bites at him as he rolls the divider up between the backseat and the front—a mock of privacy.

“The place we’re going to gives me the same vibe as that family-owned restaurant we went to when we were students. The one in Kagurazaka,” you say after a while, turning back to look at him. You’re wearing a bracelet that jangles when you move your hand to adjust the seatbelt across your chest. “I think you’ll like it.”

“Have you been?”

“One time, before I checked in,” you tell him, smiling still. “It was really good. The perfect last meal.” Satoru does well enough to hide his frown at your choice of words as you meet his eyes. “You know, you can ask. I’m not fragile.”

“I don’t have anything to ask,” he lies. “I’m just glad you’re out of the hospital.”

“Me, too. I’ve missed so much and it drove me insane. Yaga-sensei insists that I don’t work until I’m sure I’m feeling better,” you add. “But to be honest, there’s nothing much that can be done to make me feel better.”

“I see. So you’re still coughing up flowers?”

“Petals,” you correct, “and a bit. Don’t worry. It’ll get better soon.” You wave a hand and turn to look out the window and Satoru’s appetite all but vanishes. He doesn’t know why you’re so intent on lying to him about the severity of your condition, but as your knee jiggles relentlessly the whole car ride with unbridled excitement, he wonders if you’re even aware of how sick you could be. 

His Six Eyes scan your body for signs of a curse. Normally, those plagued have their little burdens hanging off their shoulders, prying their head open, biting into an arm or leg, but he finds yours lives inside your chest, just barely hidden by the yellow light brimming from your body as you reach forward to lower the divider and talk to Ijichi.

They reach Ikebukuro before they’re dropped off after Satoru insists on walking the rest of the way.

“Give us some privacy, Ijichi! We both know you’ll just eavesdrop for the juicy details,” he exclaims loudly, leading to the man to blush furiously, stuttering that he’d do no such thing, and earning Satoru a smack on the back of his head, knocking his sunglasses askew.

“Thanks for the ride, Ijichi,” you say warmly as if you hadn’t slapped a concussion into Satoru. The Assistant Director dips his head. “See you later!” With that, he drives off and the two sorcerers are left in the busy street. Satoru looks around curiously, but you tug him along up the main road of the district and immediately turn right into one of the smaller streets. A few cyclists race past, as well as cars, but the traffic seems relatively slow despite it being the weekend. There are people walking along the white lines separating the lanes, chatting merrily as you lead him to the restaurant.

“I forgot how actual sunlight felt,” you sigh, stretching your arms high above your head as if to touch the wind breezing through. Inhaling deeply, you close your eyes. Satoru waits for you to begin to cough, and you hold it in, throat tensing a bit. 

He looks away, and pretends he doesn’t hear your sharp exhale, the soft cough you try to muffle with your hand. Instead, he looks at their surroundings, traces the green roads, watches a man park his bicycle and take the plastic bags out of the basket before rushing into a store. The air smells faintly of smoke, and Satoru waves in front of his face to see if it’ll help dispel the scent, but it’s so engrained with the hint of meat, honey, sweets, and flowers, that he can’t.

“I saw Suguru here once,” you tell him suddenly. He blinks, head snapping to you, and you’re already regarding him with a faint smile, eyes a bit dimmer. The warm yellow energy has faded to a burnt orange as you look ahead. “A year or two after he left. It’s why I moved closer a few years ago. I guess I had this weird hope that I’d see him again, but I never really did.” A faint grin graces your lips again, as if you’re not even aware you’re smiling. Fondness overtakes you. “I think about him a lot these days.”

“Me, too.”

“Of course,” you chuckle a bit, rubbing at the back of your neck. “I’m being insensitive.” 

“No, you’re not. He meant a lot to you, too. I don’t own him, or his memory.”

“I know, but he was still your best friend.” Unbidden, a voice in Satoru’s voice finishes it for you. My one and only. 

“Did you guys talk about anything?”

“Not really anything important,” you say, shrugging, but by the way your eyes shift in the light, glimmer differently, he knows you’re lying. He knows it’s none of his business, but a part of him hungers for new parts of Suguru and it’s powerful enough to take control of his tongue.

“Nothing’s not important. He was a wanted criminal.”

“I think we both know somehow that part never mattered to us.” You look at him, and run a thumb under the strap of your bag. “To any of us. But…” You tilt your head to him and your smile grows tender. “…since you asked, we talked about us. He told me about what he wanted, the kind of world he was determined to create. He paid for my dinner, kissed me goodnight like it was normal, and then he was gone. Never saw him again until last December.”

It shouldn’t sting as much as it does. 

He remembers that day ten years ago in Shinjuku. The coldness in which Suguru had looked at him. He can’t imagine that same poison directed at you. He couldn’t even imagine Suguru looking at him like that in the first place until he did.

“Are you the strongest because you’re Gojo Satoru or are you Gojo Satoru because you’re the strongest?”

“I used to have nightmares about it,” you continue distantly. “Because I could’ve left with him, but I didn’t. And I could’ve killed him, but I didn’t do that either.”

“If you want to kill me, kill me. There’s meaning in that, too.”

Satoru’s chest tightens. His heart feels rotten to the core. “I didn’t, either, until I did.” You smile a bit more, at the irony. “Would you? Have gone with him, that is.”

“I didn’t, so what’s the point in debating it?” you ask before shrugging thoughtlessly and answering anyway. “I think tackling curses at the source is important. I just didn’t like the way he was doing it. If I thought I could somehow change his mind, just a bit, on his methods, maybe, but by then, he was too far gone.” 

Your eyes, chips of glinting sunstone, mellow as a cyclist trills at them with a bell to get out of the way. You step out of the way, away from Satoru for a moment, before returning to him, and when the back of his hand brushes yours, he’s startled at how cold your skin is. 

Satoru is quiet as he absorbs all of this. He doesn’t really know what to say, and you don’t prod him for a reaction as they turn the corner again. 

“It’s just over there,” you say, pointing to a small restaurant, people milling by the door. There’s a sign hanging over the door, off-white with black kanji painted on and your arm falls. “There’s a line. Huh.”

“We can wait,” Satoru says when they stop at the edge of the crowd. “I don’t mind.”

“Okay. I’ll go put our names in then come back.” You disappear into the crowd for a moment before resurfacing and joining his side again, something in your hand. “It should be, like, fifteen minutes. I said the bar was okay.”

“That’s fine.” Shoving his sunglasses up into his hair, he cracks his knuckles and migrates to the wall. You follow, and he slouches against the concrete pillar. You adjust the tote bag against your body and lean against the other side just around the corner. Their elbows brush, and you tilt your head to look at him, smiling. Your face has caught the sun perfectly, and Satoru can’t help but smile back.

He wonders how to bring up this Hanahaki disease theory. You look so perfect, so happy in this moment where their eyes meet, that he can’t bring it up. Maybe it’s selfish, but it feels like it’s been so long since the two of them even managed to see each other for more than an hour. With how overworked jujutsu sorcerers are, it’s hard to recall the last time they both had downtime at the same time that wasn’t spent catching up on sleep.

You look away, shoulders shaking, as if that’s enough to hide your coughing, and he thinks, Later. There’ll be time for that later.

“Here’s the menu,” you tell him once you’ve calmed down, extending your hand. He takes the paper, unfolding it as you cross your arms and tilt your head back on the concrete. Reading down the list, he keeps an eye on you out of the corner of his vision, and your fingers play at your lips as you swallow. Reaching into your bag, you twist the cap of a water bottle and chug half of it down.

“Do you have any medicine? For your coughing?” he asks casually. You hit your chest with a firm fist, clearing your throat and looking at him in surprise. The water bottle returns to your bag.

“Oh, uh, no. It doesn’t work. Just gotta keep hydrated and avoid any possible triggers,” you inform. You turn up the street as you speak, crossing your legs at the ankles and sinking against the concrete. 

“And what are those triggers?”

“And you say Ijichi is the one digging for gossip,” you snort with short, choked huff. Satoru rolls his eyes, but keeps looking at the menu. “Don’t worry about it. I’m avoiding them.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“If I wanted your dry wit, I would’ve gone to the original.”

“I don’t copy off Shoko. I take bits of everyone’s personality and twist it to make it my own.”

You shake your head. “Whatever you say.”

Your name is called a few minutes later and the pair push off the concrete pillar, heading through the crowd and into the small restaurant. It’s not too dimly lit, a bunch of natural light from the street streaming in through the open windows, and the air is rich with the smells of the kitchen as they sit down at the bar.

It’s not long before they’ve ordered, and Satoru has gone through his first bowl and is well into pouring his second into what remains of his broth before he remembers to even check up on how you’re doing. You’d been right—he loves this place. The atmosphere isn’t overly loud, but the mumbling of nearby patrons is enough to make him feel like he isn’t quite alone. It’s sheltered away from the world, and although he’s used to girls staring, no one has gone up to him which is giving him time to his own thoughts and food. Everyone here seems to mind their business—everyone likes to stay in their own bubble. 

Here, he isn’t the strongest, or quite so special. It honestly feels kind of nice.

You’re sipping on your broth, tilting the spoon towards your mouth and your lips are pulled into the warmest smile he’s seen since they were kids. The light’s hitting you just perfect again, more cool than warm, but it’s got you on the cheekbone, illuminated your lips. Satoru wonders if you know how to manipulate light, or if that’s just your natural blessing as you tilt your head towards him, eyes squinting from your own joy.

For a moment, another image flashes in his head. Him along the end of their group of four—you and Shoko, Suguru and Satoru. It’s almost poetry how much of a glimpse he can see in your smile. You would always be laughing, and Suguru’s cheeks would always be red, and Shoko would charm the guy over the counter to hand over a bottle of shochu. Satoru would tease his stupid best friend, and pay for their meal because “I’m friends with a bunch of goddamn freeloaders.”

But that moment ends as quickly as it came, and it’s so fucking heartbreaking that Satoru never thought their last meal together would be their last meal together. He would’ve cherished it more—done anything to make them stay in that ramen shop in Kagurazaka.

“Do you like it here?” you ask. 

He blinks. You’re studying him behind that smile of yours. Watching. Always watching. “It reminds me of when we were kids,” he replies. When he realizes that didn’t answer the question, he adds, “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

You grin, delighted. “If I knew how stupid you’d look sucking up these noodles, I would’ve brought my camera like when we were students. I still have it, you know.”

“Next time, then.”

“Yeah, next time.”

Satoru pays. He insists despite your protests, and snatches the bill from you anyway, swiping his card as quickly as he can. 

After, they walk slowly around the district, looking at the other restaurants and stores for desserts or souvenirs to bring back, and it makes him so nostalgic, his heart wilts a bit in his chest. 

He is saying something about buying some soymilk for Megumi when you stop suddenly, deviating to the side of the road to cough. It grows so intense so quickly that your eyes widen as if you’re surprised, too, and you place a palm flat against your chest as he comes to your side. You wave him back, and he frowns, running a hand down your back as you finally manage to dislodge the petals in your throat and spit them into your palm.

Satoru sighs, staring at the cursed things. The energy emitted from the petals are raw, potent, and his nose wrinkles at the stench that comes from powerful curses as he softly asks, “Do you know what Hanahaki is?”

“Flower vomiting?” you whisper through your raw vocal cords. You shake your head, slamming your sternum with a tight fist and flinging the drenched petals to the ground with a wet slap. “Itadori… said something about it, once. Never really paid attention, I—”

Satoru squeezes the back of your neck gently. “Whatever this curse is, it could be something like that.“

“You don’t want to open that can of worms, Gojo, of what is causing this.” Straightening up, your eyes widen and your cheeks puff up as you choke down another bout. Wobbly, you spit out, “It’s under control. I swear.”

“Are you sure?” His fingers brush your chin to turn your face towards him so he can look at it more clearly, and the instant their eyes meet, you lurch over, slapping his hand away and succumbing to the wracking. Hands shooting out to grab your elbows, Satoru barely eases you to the ground as your legs give in.

You collapse to your knees, hard. A hand is slapped over your mouth but your whole body shakes with the seizing of your lungs. Eyes widening, your cheeks puff up as Satoru grabs your shoulders, falling to his knees beside you.

“Hey! Hey, breathe!” His fingers dig into your shoulders and your nostrils flare, trying to follow his instructions. Bloodshot eyes and blueing lips, your inhales are shaking and incomplete, gasps for air that do not take in any oxygen before you’re kneeling over, hand falling from your lips. Blood splattered over your palm, you let out a low noise of pain. Satoru’s hand glides down your spine, rubbing in soothing circles as red spit falls to the pavement in thick globs. 

People all around stop to stare, eyes masked with concern, but he can’t care less at that moment despite the burning scrutiny. He shoves a hand into his pocket, speed-dialling one of the top numbers of his list.

“Ijichi, I need you to take us to the hospital, now!” Letting his phone drop with a clatter, he scoops you close but you slam your bloody hand against his chest, pushing him away. You throw yourself away, hands twisted tight in the fabric of your white shirt and Satoru looks down at the red handprint on his tee before blinking. “What are you doing? We need to get—“

“I’m—I’m fine!” Your voice, broken, is drenched with ice as you continue to wheeze, grasping at your chest as if you could reach and tear out the growths with your own hand. “Gojo, I’m fine!”

“No, you’re not!” Grabbing his phone, he hears a loud car horn, and looks up to see Ijichi leaning out of the driver’s seat, waving his arm frantically. Without another thought, he scoops you up and runs out into the street, ignoring the tires screeching, the cars horns blaring at him and the angry shouts as he jumps into the car and slam the door shut. 

Ijichi sets off at a drive, no directions needed. Satoru is sure he’s breaking as many laws as he can as he pushes you back against the seat to buckle you in. Blood dribbles down your lips in bubbles as a thick, gurgling sound begins to grow in your throat and he wipes at your chin with his sleeve, clicking the buckle into place just as you pitch forward. He jerks back just in time as you retch, and, slowly, torturously, you gag out three petals, one after another. Your fingers claw at your own throat, panicking and desperate as you struggle to breathe.

The petals fall in wet pools between your feet, landing on the carpet, and he spares them not even a glance before forcing your head between your knees. You’re still hyperventilating and as Satoru sweeps a hand down your back and up to your neck, his fingers come into contact with something sticky. 

Sweat. It drenches through your shirt so suddenly that Satoru reels at the wet marks spreading through your shirt, making the fabric translucent. Your heart is racing, tripping over itself. When you finally stop coughing, you breathe in harsh pants as he keeps your head between your knees.

Your fingers lace at the back of your head and he grabs them firmly, reassuring that he’s still beside you. 

.

“She’s stable,” Shoko announces to the waiting Satoru and six students. The latter came when their teacher had told them of what happened, and Itadori still clings to Fushiguro’s arm by an iron hand, fingers clawlike into his friend’s bicep. Kugisaki chews on her thumbnail, a bit paler than usual and there are crescent indents along her forearm where she had dug her nails in. Maki’s hand rests on her shoulder. Inumaki’s on the phone with Panda, and he turns the screen around so he can see the Strongest Sorcerer who does not feel quite so strong.

Satoru’s assurances that you would be fine had done nothing but send them into a quiet that scared even him. 

“Is she okay? When can she get out?” the kids demand suddenly.

“We’re waiting for the updates on her scans from the doctors, but she’ll need to stay here under observation.”

Satoru runs a hand through his hair, smiling in a way that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Guess that means she gets a few more days off while the rest of us are working our asses off,” he teases. Maki shoots him a glare and his eyes close in a way he hopes arranges his expression in one of joy as he shrugs helplessly. “Well, that means I have another girl I have to spoil.”

“Aren’t you too busy with the four already blowing up your phone?” Kugisaki mutters sourly. Satoru pretends not to hear. His phone has been silent without your texts, and it’s cold and heavy in his pocket.

“Can we see her?” Fushiguro asks. Shoko nods, but holds up a hand and the kids skid to a stop.

“She’s resting. I’m unsure if you know, but certain topics of conversation or trains of thought can lead to more attacks, so stick to talking about your curriculum. Topics you think are safe.” The woman shifts on her feet, a wisp of brown hair swaying in front of her eye. “It’s unavoidable, but use your judgement.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The students walk off down to the dead-end hallway, and Satoru turns to Shoko who has her arms crossed over her chest. She steps up, scanning him like he’s got contraband, and he raises his eyebrows innocently.

“What?”

“It’s getting worse. I hope you managed to get answers,” she says. At once, Satoru’s facade drops, and a sober sensation overtakes his face.

“No, I didn’t. She’s heard of the disease, at least. We talked about Suguru, but it wasn’t like it was under lock and key.” The brunette shakes her head at his words, gesturing for him to sit down beside her. Doing so, he leans back into the uncomfortable chair as she crosses a leg over the other. “She said she thinks about him a lot.”

“She still loves him,” Shoko says bluntly. “She gets that far-off look when she talks about him. You two should trade secrets some time.” A shake of her head, and she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I healed what damage I could, but I can tell those growths inside are expanding. The attack only seems to have agitated and prompted them to take root.”

“How…” It’s hard to formulate the question. Luckily, Shoko knows him well enough.

“Without seeing the scans, I won’t know. Based on her last ones, I thought at least four months. Now?” Her lips press into a thin line. “She’ll be lucky if she gets two.” Shoko’s eyes flicker down Satoru’s front, and her lips press into a wry line. “And change you shirt. You look like a murder suspect.”

Glancing down, he looks at your dried bloody hand print, stark against white, and he gets up abruptly. Shoko doesn’t stop him.

He walks down to the dead-end hall. He can hear Itadori through your open door cracking jokes, Kugisaki relaying every detail of her shopping trips, and you’re wheezing your laughter despite Maki scolding you to save your strength. Satoru stops just outside your door, out of sight, and rests his head against the frame, content to just listen.

“Tuna mayo.”

“Is that right?” you ask Inumaki. “Lay it on me.” 

You sound exhausted, beaten to the bone, but still, when Fushiguro says something too quiet for him to make out, you still have the strength to tease him for worrying.

.

The night is warm, and he sets the last plant back into its place on your window sill before cracking the window a bit at your request. He’s busied himself making this place as homely as possible as quickly as possible, and in the process, had walked in on you staring at your own scans on the lightscreen mounted on your wall.

“Thanks, Satoru,” you say over your shoulder. He joins you by your side to stare at the scans. Granted, Satoru didn’t cheat his way through medschool like others have, so he doesn’t understand much, but he can tell what is and what isn’t supposed to be there. The floral-like growths situated right where the main bronchi meet the trachea, for one.

The roots spreading across your chest like cracks in concrete, for another.

“The doctors want to monitor this,” you explain, pointing at the roots, “to see whether or not it’ll grow around my lungs or continue outward, around the ribs and spine. If it’s the former, I’ll slowly suffocate and die. If it’s the latter, I’ll slowly suffocate, become paralyzed, and die.” You smile grimly. “Not quite a win-win.”

“Exactly the opposite.” He inspects the growths and through the blue-white-black imaging, he spots the tiny stems emerging from the main growth, sprouting into your lungs. He guesses, with time, those will grow into flowers of equal size before sprouting more shoots.

He wonders…

As if sensing his hesitance, you scratch your collarbone and look at the scans with a new glint.

“The doctors say if I avoid another attack like today, I’ll probably have two months, three if I’m blessed, but because of how big the growths have gotten already and its volatile nature, it’ll be impossible, so we’re looking at a month. Maybe a month-and-a-half?” You smile at him, throat bobbing. “Guess it’s good to have a number,” you add shakily, a short puff coming at the end of each breath as you struggle to fight the cough. “Being a sorcerer, too much uncertainty, I think.”

“You should tell Nanami that. Maybe this time, it’ll convince him to stay away,” he retorts, turning away from the scans. They’re burning his eyes and he doesn’t want to look at the real thing for much longer. You turn with him, walking back towards bed and climbing in. “Are you sure you don’t want the operation? Shoko could do it so fast you wouldn’t feel a thing.”

“No, not yet. There are some complications that’ll definitely occur and I don’t want that to happen.”

“But it would save your life,” he argues. “What risks are frightening enough that you’d even consider not having it?” Your gaze flickers as you take another wheezing breath. The strength seems sapped from your limbs—you’re a scarecrow hanging off its pole as you swallow tightly. Satoru leans against your window sill and crosses his arms over his chest so you can’t see the frustrated fists he wants to make. “If this is about Suguru…”

Resolutely: “It isn’t.”

“You’re going to die if you keep going down this road. I don’t understand why you’re hesitating.” In the back of his mind, klaxons begin to scream.

“Satoru, some things are just beyond logical reason.” He jerks his gaze away, pushing his glasses up his nose pointedly. You sigh. “I know it’s hard, but this is my choice. I just want you to be here so you know it’s okay.” 

Your hand stretches out. Blue eyes flash to your outstretched fingers and he takes it before he can stop himself. Your fingers curl over his palm, tugging him closer and he lets you, sneakers dragging over the tile until he’s sliding into the chair by your bed. It squeaks against the tile.

“Please don’t be angry with me.” That’s all. That’s all I ask.

A hard, heavy sigh, this time from his end. He tightens his hold on you as you sit there, smiling hopefully. His heart thunders in his chest. “I’m not angry.”

You perk up a bit, and his index finger unfurls to rub your wrist. It feels colder than normal. “Promise?”

He wishes he could lie half as well as you. Either way, he tries his hardest: “Promise.”

By the time it’s quarter past nine, you’re already getting ready to sleep. You have enough pillows to surround your entire body, and he fluffs them up, helps you arrange them until you’re sighing against the white sheets, burrowing in with a sedated smile on your face.

Satoru sits down again on his visitor’s chair and you watch him lazily through the dim orange light stemming from behind your bed.

“You don’t have to stay here and watch me, creep,” you mumble, turning your face away to stare at the ceiling. You cough dryly, but it subsides moments later. Your voice is nothing but a croak as you let out a tired groan, and Satoru smiles to himself, cheek to his fist. 

“I feel robbed of our afternoon together. Making up for it now.”

You look at him again incredulously. “We’re not even doing anything.”

“I don’t know when you were told that every second of us being together had to be us doing something,” he huffs. “I like being in here. Isn’t that enough?”

“It’s too much. You’re annoying me.” Even so, your voice turns fond as you roll onto your side, away from him to settle in to sleep and Satoru’s warm gaze lands on your shoulder gently rising and falling as you slowly drift off. 

He already knows you’re gone by the time he’s standing up and gathering his jacket. Walking around the bed, he glances at the bathroom to check the light’s off and catches a glimpse of his shirt. A coil wraps around his gut at the muddy red handprint pressed into the fabric and he turns away to look at you instead.

Your face is in perfect peace, half-buried into a pillow you’re hugging into your chest, and he only soaks in those features. His hand twitches, and his infinity wavers as he raises his hand as if to touch you. Your eyelids flutter and he freezes, fearing he might’ve woken you up, but you only mumble incoherently and turn into your pillow.

Satoru watches on silently just as a breeze sweeps into the room and he looks up where the window he had cracked open. The breeze takes hold of the plants, uplifts them until they sway like a tender dance. 

His chest begins to hurt. The smell of the antiseptic is starting to sting, so he moves his hand to the light switch instead. Flicking it off, he turns to leave.

.

Every time Satoru walks down to the end of the hallway, a different memory will play in his head until he’s playing a movie over and over every single day. Of the first time he met you, although that one is blurry. Your sixteenth birthday when the four of them had piled into your dorm room to drink themselves stupid.

One-and-a-half weeks go by before he realizes that he only replays the moments where you feature. Like his brain is preparing him, reminding him. For what, he doesn’t know. 

He can’t come every day—considering the low number of sorcerers has been taken down by one more, it means besides teaching, he still has to work for the Higher Ups as well as his own personal agenda—but when he does make it, he always makes sure that he soaks in every second. Even the horrible parts. Maybe, especially the horrible parts.

You have scans taken every other day to monitor your progress, so when he arrives at an empty room, he isn’t surprised. It’s when there’s movement in the bathroom that sends his nerves prickling until he catches a slab of golden hair and reading glasses flashing in the sunlight.

“Nanami,” he greets.

“Good afternoon.” His jacket’s off and his sleeves are rolled up. With a quick sweep of the room, Satoru notes that the windows are cracked open and the aforementioned jacket is folded over a chair sat in a square of sunlight.

“Do we need to be so formal?” he complains, bypassing the bathroom and searching for another chair. The one Nanami’s taken by the plants is still warm and Satoru isn’t keen on the idea of sweating so soon. During his search, he stops by the windowsill and his eyebrows rise curiously at the new plants and trash bin pressed up right underneath. “What’s happening here?”

“We were planting new seeds when she had to be taken for her scans. She insisted I finish potting the plants.” Noting the empty terracotta, Satoru bends over and prods at the moist dirt. “I have to go soon, though. I had hoped it wouldn’t take as long as it did and she would be back by now.”

“They started taking MRI scans when the branches continued to grow outward rather than inward,” Satoru informs. “It takes around forty-five minutes, on top of the CT scans they’re taking, too. That’s if she doesn’t start coughing in the middle of it.” 

“I’m guessing she does.” Nanami adjusts the glasses on his nose, wiping at his hands free of the last of whatever dirt might’ve been clinging to his hands.

“Yup.”

“I see.” Satoru looks at the plants again. The blond man across the room throws the towel into the dirty clothes basket.“Has she… spoken to you of what to do with her effects?”

Gaze hardening, he doesn’t move at the question. Of course, he’s thought about it, but those bouts of weakness have never been longer than a few minutes. There’s no use in wasting time on a reality that won’t come until it does.

Hopefully, it never does.

“I’m so sick of everyone talking like she’s signed a death sentence,” Satoru murmurs, turning around to look at the blond man at the door to the washroom. “She still has time. Not a lot. It’s not convenient, but it should be enough.”

“She’s already considered the benefits of taking the surgery, and yet she actively decides to postpone it. You know she’s stalling,” comes the steady reply.

“And what about you?” Satoru asks. His words are biting, icy, but Nanami seems unfazed as he begins to loop the tie around his neck. “Would you do it?” Blue eyes meet a stoic face, and the coldness seeps into Satoru’s body. Nanami sighs.

A part of Satoru wonders why he even bothered asking. He already knows the answer—

“No.” Eyebrows shoot up. His mouth drops open and a strangled noise escapes his throat. Nanami merely continues on, quiet as death. “Perhaps it’s because I’m willing to accept my death, but, to be honest, I don’t know how to let any part of Haibara go. I’ve accepted it, but he’s still in my heart and my head.” Lips parting, Satoru takes a step forward as Nanami slants his body away, continuing to fold the fabric into a tie. He looks statuesque, unmovable, and something tightens in Satoru’s throat at the stone-like mask taking over his face. “I’m unwilling to do anything to taint that memory.”

Wordlessly, the blond walks over to Satoru to take his jacket from the chair, rolling down his sleeves and slapping his watch back onto his wrist. Standing less than two feet apart, the two men finally meet eyes.

“Gojo,” Nanami murmurs. “I can’t say I understand your burden, but I am by your side. I do not always agree with your choices, but I still respect them. As your kouhai and as your colleague.” His lips pull in a facsimile of a wry smile and there’s an understanding Satoru doesn’t understand haunting his handsome face. “However, she is your friend before mine. I think your opinion matters much more than mine. Don’t abuse that power.”

Satoru’s eyes nearly reflect in the lenses of Nanami’s glasses. He wishes his friend would take the damn pair off. 

In truth, the reason he’s so irritated is because he knows. If he insists enough, begs enough, there will always be a chance that he can convince you. That you will give in, not because you are selfless, but maybe because you’re too selfish to let him stay mad at you.

An unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and sometimes, the force wins.

But he’d promised, hadn’t he? To not be angry with the choices you’ve made?

“Jeez, it’s somber in here. Who died?” you tease as Shoko pushes the wheelchair in after you. Both men look away from each other. You’re still walking steadily, but an IV is hooked into your chest now, and it’s so obvious you’ve lost unhealthy weight that looking at you is hard sometimes. Satoru does, anyway. 

Noting Nanami, you straighten up. Surprised, but pleased: “You’re still here.”

“I was just leaving,” he says. You frown, but don’t protest. A jujutsu sorcerer’s work is never finished until one stops breathing. “I finished planting the seeds you asked me to, and watered them.”

“Thank you.” He dips his head to you, then to Shoko, before departing, and you watch him go for a moment before your eyes land on Satoru and you smile. The air around you shifts immediately to a vibrant yellow. 

“You’re early, Satoru.” You head towards the bed as Shoko parks the wheelchair by the door. “It took way longer than I thought.”

“That’s because you threw up pistils today,” Shoko replies dryly. Satoru straightens up and looks at Shoko more carefully. Placid lookimg—usual for his mortician friend in the jujutsu world—but there’s a blanching in her knuckles that isn’t usual. “The CT wasn’t good. You know that.”

“Well, it’s still more time than I could’ve asked for, you know.” Shoko shakes her head, and meets his eyes before leaving the room, presumably to talk to your doctors. “Party pooper.”

“First day knowing Shoko?”

You laugh sarcastically, adjusting the hospital gown on your body before climbing into bed slowly, as if your joints ache. Satoru’s feet shift on the tile when he realizes his body moves to help and he freezes. You’re breathing audibly by the time you settle in and you meet his eyes, wondering if he’s noticed.

Of course he has, he wants to tell you. He notices everything about you.

Then, you sigh, and the yellow energy around you flickers into something darker, something grey, something that reminds him of summer thunderstorms.

“The roots have reached the edge of my rib cage and are encroaching on my stomach now,” you inform bluntly. “I probably won’t be able to keep food down in the next couple of days so they’re going to up the ante on this thing.” You gesture to the catheter by your clavicle. “So that’s not really fun. And, they want to start taking scans every single day because the growth is increasing exponentially. The doctors think something triggered the flowers to begin blooming in earnest. Like spring has come to my body, and I’m having the worst fucking time of my life.”

Despite your admission, your smile only falters in that it no longer reaches your eyes. Satoru shoves his hands in his pockets because he doesn’t know what else to do.

The word Hanahaki still burns, whispers coyly in his ear. It teases the tip of his tongue as he watches you look to your windowsill where your new plants are and get up, walking over to inspect your friend’s work.

He wonders if he can bring it up again. If he can insist that there’s a way to save you—

But Nanami’s words linger, too, and he bites his tongue until he tastes iron. 

“Oh, look.” He blinks at your voice, turning to look. Your fingers sink into one of the pots and before he can ask, blue energy flares up around your hand and into the soil and a shoot breaks through the dirt, unfurling as it grows higher and higher into the air.

“What is it?” Petals are beginning to form, the shade of a warm, gentle red that fades in shade as it reaches the stem. Satoru comes up next to you as the first flower blooms and his eyebrows rise. “Tulips. Huh.”

“I used to love them,” you tell him, picking it off and extending it to him. Eyebrows furrowing in surprise, he takes it as you sink your fingers deeper into the soil, sending more cursed energy into the seeds. More stems to replace the one you had picked continue to grow and you pull your hand out, wiping at your fingers with a towel.

Satoru tilts the flower towards his nose, taking a whiff.

“Used to?” he repeats, and you nod.

“Trees and flowers have their own language.” Your eyes do not meet his as you watch the plant continue to grow. Your muscles go slack, and your fingers touch the petals, mind not quite aware of how you’re moving. “Red tulips mean eternal love, and fame.”

Blinking, he looks down at his own bloom. 

Suguru. He hears you say his name, even in the silence, and remembers years ago, walking through Tokyo. A neighbourhood he doesn’t remember, his best friend looking at the florist’s shop and immediately perking up to head inside and buy a bouquet after something had caught his eye.

“For a girl,” he had admitted sheepishly. 

“Only one?” Satoru asked, horrified. “You can’t settle down! We’re meant for so many more women than just one!”

A sharp nudge to the ribs. Raucous laughter. “Shut up!”

Quietly, Satoru’s fingers tighten around the stalk as you tilt your head to the sun, inspecting something he won’t understand. He doesn’t have a green thumb, and although you say you aren’t the smartest, he’s seen you grow the college’s gardens in a way that has amplified the beauty already lingering on the grounds. You had dismissed it as a little side project, but seeing you water your plants dutifully, spread feed and root out weeds, makes him wonder if you know how to put half-efforts into anything.

When you garden, you never take the easy route. You labour for the satisfaction, and pour sweat and tears into the soil.

When you love, you love with all of yourself and more. 

It’s what makes whatever he wants impossible.

Because he is the same, and they will never change.

When Satoru goes home, he places the tulip in a vase and the cursed energy prickles at his fingertips.

.

You get worse and worse with every visit. 

Each day brings him another raw wound, salt on blood. You slowly grow more and more ragged, even though you stay in the hospital, confined to your room. 

There are days Satoru walks into your room to you hunched over the toilet, spitting blood and flowers into the bowl and vomiting all you ate the night or day or hour before and he already knows what he has to do. A cold, damp rag to your forehead, a crouching stance beside you as your grip on the toilet seat becomes rigid like steel.

Other days, you’re still asleep because the night before, you’d been hacking up half a lung and half a bouquet. Sometimes, you’re curled around a plastic receptacle already full of your half-attempts to dislodge the pressure building in your chest. 

Or, you’re crying into your hands, breath coming in rapid bursts as you try to force your head between your knees to stop the world from spinning and Satoru holds you when you beg him to, and stands in the corner of the room when you push him away.

Afterwards, you always grab onto his sleeves, his arms, and sink against him, shivering. For hours after, he’ll curl around you on your hospital bed, no matter how much his body cramps, until you insist you’re fine.

“It’s a little like touching death,” you told him once, voice raw and fatigued. “When it’s a pretty bad day, and I think I’m going to die alone, it happens, so all I have to do is not think about it.”

There’s a flawed logic there, but Satoru was too busy pressing his nose into your hair and feeling the warmth of your body to reply any more than, “I’ll be there. I promise.”

Two weeks pass (fourteen sets of scans, a different pair hanging from the lightscreen every day tell him that) and Satoru watches as the branches spread through your body, past the reaches of your ribs, and the flowers have spread to your lungs so quickly he’s sure the time for you to decide is running out. 

You’re near-passed out against him on the bathroom floor one evening, and although it’s not closet-sized, it doens’t make the arrangement any less awkward. He’s up against the bathtub, legs sprawled all around you as he holds you in his arms. On the edge of the tub, there is a bar of bodysoap and a bottle of lotion he recognizes as the same one Shoko used to buy when they still had time. Your sink counter is filled with your toothbrush and cup, handsoap and a microfibre towel hanging off the edge smeared with lipstick, foundation, and black streaks of who knows what.

Shoko must have spent the night while he was out hunting a curse in Sendai. Good. He doesn’t like the nights when you’re alone and he can’t be there.

His fingers brush over your shoulder blade, and he travels over something rigid cloaked by your skin. Your eyes are closed, and you’re nearly asleep as you curl deeper against him. Looking down at you, he presses curious fingers into your shoulder blade only for you to let out a soft groan.

“Did that hurt?”

“No. It just feels like you pressed down on a big sore muscle,” you mumble slowly. He trails his fingers over, feels the bumps of the roots curling around your bones before following it towards your spine. It disappears the closer it reaches the trail of knobs that go down your back, and he moves back to your shoulder again. “Doesn’t hurt, though.”

“Does anything?”

“Mostly my stomach,” you tell him. “I’m so hungry all the time, but I can’t eat.” He glances at the IV stand, the only other witness to the events in this bathroom. It leads down through your gown and past your clavicle. Monitored every day in case the growths dislodge it, it’s one of the only things keeping you alive. “And my throat. It feels like I’ve scratched it out until it’s bleeding.”

He tilts his head. His lips barely brush your sweaty scalp despite how cold you feel in his arms “No surgery?”

You shake your head, what remains of your strength slowly coming back. “They say the flowers and roots have taken up sixty-five percent of my chest cavity. It’s not only inhibiting my lungs, but my heart and stomach, too, so it’d be kind of hard to get rid of it all. Not impossible, but it’s really risky. That, on top of the already-present consequences—”

“So let’s say we start with the lungs,” he cuts off, trying to not sound too desperate but these past few weeks have worn him down to the bone. Although he thinks he’s managed to hide it from his students, Shoko has offered multiple times to prescribe him sleeping pills just so he can shut his mind down.

He said no every time.

Your legs draw up and he squeezes your shoulder carefully, looking down. “Are you ready to get up?”

You nod. “I think so.” He wipes at your lips with the rag he left on the counter and you roll your eyes as he makes sure no blood is left on your face before throwing it back up and carefully adjusting you against him.

“Do you want my help?”

“My answer does not matter to you,” you shoot back teasingly and he lets you pull away from him before reaching up with one hand to push yourself up. Your arm wobbles, your feet kicking back underneath you and slowly finding theirselves on the floor. Satoru withdraws, ducking underneath and back up so he can stand, hands floating around your body as you draw the IV stand towards yourself and grab on. When he’s sure your knees might give in, he grabs your elbow, but you shake your head. “I think I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay,” you breathe, raising your head to look at him. Your lips curl in a soft smile, and you clasp his shoulder. “Thank you.”

“I didn’t even do anything this time,” he says.

“Not everyone stays for the pathetic girl on the floor of the bathroom floor,” you quip. Turning around, you begin to head back to bed and he trails behind you carefully.

“If the girl’s you, then I think exceptions can be made.”

“Hospital bonus.”

“It adds that you’re in the hospital, too,” he agrees. “My morals are just.”

“Isn’t that a relief?” 

It is. It is a relief that you still have the strength to joke with him. 

You climb back into bed. Satoru returns to the bathroom to make sure the bathroom is flushed and it’s clean before returning and perching on the edge of your bed. Pulling out his phone, he shuffles his shoes off and tucks his legs to his chest, leaning against the foot of your bed and scrolling through his messages.

Not much to miss, to be honest. 

“There’s supposed to be a lunar eclipse on the morning of the 28th,” you say suddenly. Satoru looks up. You’re leaning back on the mountain of pillows, exhaling and inhaling measuredly in a way he now knows is your way of fighting off another bout. Squinting against the orange glow of the sunset, there’s a longing in your gaze. “I want to see it. Outside and everything.”

“You’re not supposed to leave the hospital.”

You don’t miss a beat. “Oh, we’re abiding by rules, now?”

“If it keeps you around, yes, we are.”

“When did my best friend turn into such a party pooper?” Looking at him, an impish glint lives in your eyes. He balks.

“Don’t you dare insinuate that I’m not fun.”

“Then… take me to see the eclipse.”

“No. There’s nothing to even see.”

“I want to see the moon disappear, Gojo,” you declare. “And if you won’t take me, I will definitely sneak out.” 

It paints a pretty pathetic picture, and he can’t help but arch his eyebrows at your determination. The air purifier drones on. The nurse turned it on after dinner, he guesses, and he has the strange urge to kick it as you fix him with a fierce stare. 

“You probably won’t be able to walk by then,” he says.

“That won’t stop me.” He knows it won’t. The corner of his lips pulls into a slight smile as you continue, “I just want to go outside one last time. Is that really too much to ask?” Your words are tinged with a fine dusting of humour, and he shakes his head.

“You’re incorrigible.”

“Big word for you, Satoru.”

“I still mean it.”

“And I learned that from you.”

He rolls his eyes and sighs. “Fine,” he caves. Your face lights up, and he sets down his phone, legs unfolding to brush the floor as he leans over to flick your forehead. Your eyes squeeze shut at the contact and you slap his arm away sluggishly before he soothes the smarting spot over with a smear of his thumb. “I’ll come by, and we’ll sneak out.”

You beam and he slips his feet back into his shoes and pockets his phone so he can focus his attention on you. 

When visiting hours end, the nurses offer to set up the cot for him like they always do. You pretend not to look at him out of the corner of his eye, awaiting his answer behind your laptop screen, and he spares you a quick glance before saying yes.

“She likes you,” you tell him after one particular nurse with dyed purple hair who always wears a fishtail bids them goodnight. Satoru fluffs up his pillow ceremoniously, having shed his jacket and taken off his jeans to hide underneath the blankets. The fabric is cold against his bare chest, and he pulls his glasses off, sets them on the stand right behind him.

The black frame holding up his mattress rattles a bit as he punches his pillow one last time and lies down. He turns on his side and looks at you. You’re turned on your side, too, and your brow is furrowed as you fight the sleepiness.

“Is that so?” he asks carefully. “What do you think about it?”

“I think if you wanted someone with a hectic schedule, you could pick someone else,” you say vaguely.

He raises an eyebrow. “Does she have a bad attitude or something?”

“I dunno.” There’s a subtle fire igniting in your words. You look a bit more awake, and your eyes are shifting the air into a smouldering red. He squints up. Your face is shadowed, but you’re still silhouetted by the orange light behind your bed as your shoulders rise and fall greatly in staggering, weighty breaths. “She wouldn’t understand. I guess.”

He hums. “So I should find someone who understands me but can’t be there for me? Sounds like the set up to every tragic love story ever.”

You laugh, and it’s the saddest sound in the world.

.

Friday, July 27th arrives in clouds.

Satoru scouted a spot before where they can watch the eclipse. He settles on one of the highest buildings on campus with a balcony where they can sit against the railing and watch the moon disappear. You can’t eat, but he still buys your favourite food from all over Japan, travelling to different prefectures in hopes that they still have your favourite dessert or drink that you mentioned once—he even gets you a new polaroid camera. He doesn’t know exactly how well the eclipse will show up on it, but, memories, right?

Maki makes a dry remark about how much he’s running around lately, probably to make amends to a girl he’s scorned. Satoru deflects and says he’s actually trying to impress one this time.

It’s been a five days since his promise to bring you. You lost your ability to walk steadily two days ago and to speak effortlessly only yesterday. The roots have extended through your body, pushing the muscle of your back and shoulders, and it’s made even moving painful, so he intends to carry you everywhere he can, holding your IV bags if he needs to. 

The doctors say eighty-five percent of your chest is now occupied with foreign growth. Satoru wishes they’d just tell it how it is—you’ll probably be dead by next week.

He arrives at the hospital and walks the path he’s walked so often over the past few weeks that he is sure he could do it with his eyes closed. The nurse’s station, and there’ll be the purple-haired one and the one with a double helix piercing on call at this time. Then, twenty-five steps to the end of the hall where the window often lets a lot of natural light in. Today, it’s grey and not much, but it’s enough to cast his shadow long and blurry.

He stops in front of your door to sanitize his hands when he hears voices within and hesitates.

Your door is closed, which means you don’t want people to interrupt, and he moves away from the rectangular window, back pressing against the tiny slab of wall between the frame and the corner of the hallway. Glasses slipping down his nose, he tries not to listen but he can’t help of himself.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” you say weakly. You sound awful. Satoru wonders if he’s missed one of your panic attacks and curses himself. “If I don’t sound sure, it’s because I’m dying… and sounding like a fragile piece of shit… comes with the territory.” Your words are coarse, and a harsh anger grates his ears as you cough violently, a terrible retching sound ending with a splat following right after. 

“I wasn’t doubting you,” Nanami replies calmly. “But this could be done in so many other ways.”

“Look, Nanami. I’m not… brave enough to say any of it. Now, sit down. Your standing… it’s making me nervous… Thank you.” Satoru’s legs feel numb as he sinks down to the floor, tilting his head just enough to listen clearer through the sliver underneath the door. Resting his elbows on his knees, he runs a hand through shaggy white hair. It feels dry and lifeless. 

He can’t remember the last time he took a shower that was longer than ten minutes and more than ice-cold bordering on just beginning to warm.

“Take care of him for me,” you croak and his fingers tighten against his scalp. Nanami doesn’t answer, and you let out a sound that can only be described as pure agony as another bout grasps you tightly. You’re wheezing by the end of it, gasping painfully for air, and the monitors start beeping rapidly, a dinging that echoes in his head as Nanami’s low voice soothes you, tells you gently to calm down. “I’m—I’m sorry.”

“Breathe with me,” Nanami orders, and everything falls silent. Satoru stares at his lap. His head is beginning to pulse with the monitors when the beeping finally starts to fade. “Good. No sense to waste your strength.” 

Wobbly, spitting: “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” A pause. “It’s not your fault.”

You laugh, as if Nanami’s cracked a funny joke, and it’s gut-wrenching. “Remember how… we can curse each other? Ourselves? True curses.”

Faintly amused, immeasurably strained: “I thought it was still a hypothesis regarding those who don’t have the correct bloodline and the ability to curse through their own will.”

“No…Not a hypothesis. Real, Nanami. Real. No one knows how cursed energy affects us. Not really. Since, in my opinion, it’s entirely based on how we process things… it’s so difficult to say but when you know someone…” You break off to clear your throat. “The curse of adulthood… some of us got that too early… but we can survive that and even if it’s not a curse by… definition, we still feel it, right?” 

Satoru clasps his hands together just so he doesn’t rip the door open at the hinges.

“Right.”

“And… knowledge… can be a curse. Even if we can’t see it.” A ragged breath. Then, another laugh too loud for the grey light outside, too bright, a spark before it fizzles into, again, pained choking. “Nanami, remember last year… the job out in Yama… Yamaguchi?”

“Yes.”

“And we came back… Okkotsu was beginning his first year at the college… what I—what I told you?”

“…Yes.” A beat passes. A chair shifts on the linoleum floor and Nanami clears his throat. “I see.”

“I don’t want him to be so alone. I know I was never the strongest or the smartest or the most talented but I liked to think he let me in because I was there. Not because I understood. Maybe… Maybe because I didn’t. Nanami, please… he always try to stay so far away from the people he thinks he can’t love. Tell him… tell him—“

You break off and Nanami assures you with a steadfastness Satoru has counted on so many times before: “I will.” 

“…thank you.”

Eyes shutting tight, Satoru rests his brow against the heel of his hand. His head is aching, and a hard fist grabs his chest, squeezes his heart until it feels like it’ll burst. So this is how you’re really feeling. When you’re not smiling, this is what you are. Angry at the world, and heartbroken.

So terribly heartbroken.

And you couldn’t trust him with it? Because you thought he couldn’t handle it? 

He can take it. It’ll be okay because he’s the strongest. He has to be. 

I’m the strongest. I should be okay. I’m the strongest.

I’m the Strongest.

The headache gets worse so he gets up from that corner in the dead-end hallway, all the while three words replay in his head like a goddamn gramophone.

Nanami doesn’t come out of the room for a while. When he does, Satoru walks down the hall with takeout and a smile plastered on his face as if he had heard nothing at all.

.

At just past one-thirty AM, Satoru sits up from his cot and rubs at his eyes. After dinner, the both of them had forced themselves to go to sleep in order to have enough energy for their little late night excursion. He glances at you, a slumbering shape on the bed, and gets up, slowly sliding on the lights. They burn a dim orange, glowing on your face, and your eyebrows furrow as he touches your cheek.

“What?” you mumble, vexed, and he smiles.

“Are you ready?” he asks. A backpack is situated at the end of his bedframe and he reaches for it, unzipping it carefully as you crack your eyes open. “We’re going to go see the eclipse, remember?” Pulling out clothes he robbed from your room in the staff facility from when you used to work full time, he grabs your shoulder and shakes you gently. The gnarled roots under your skin feel strange against his fingers as you groan weakly. “Do you want five more minutes, Sleeping Beauty?”

You don’t answer, burying your face into your pillow and he shakes his head to himself. It’s going to be all right, he thinks. I planned for this setback.

Slipping into a dark long-sleeve, he parts the black-out curtains to let light come in. He checks his reflection in the bathroom mirror before running a hand through his hair and washing his hands with a cold stream of water. By the time he leaves the bathroom, you’re sitting up already, heel of your hand rubbing against your brow as you groan. In your other hand in your lap, there’s a splash of blood and a lone petal, and he rushes to your side instantly.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t even hear—“

“It came out easy,” you assure as he grabs a tissue to pick it off your hand and throw it into the receptacle at the table just beyond the foot of your bed. Wiping at your mouth roughly, he hears your complaints and your hand shoves against his shoulder to tell him to quit it. “Ah, I can do it myself!”

“Shh! Do you want every nurse storming in here while we conduct our super secret getaway?” he whispers, and your eyes fix on his. Dark circles mark your face like bruises, but that light is still the same—glimmering, bright, like twin suns and just as warm. Making sure your hands are clean, he wipes the invisible streaks of blood just to be sure before grabbing your clothes and setting them at the end of the bed.

You glance around the place sluggishly, at the paintings you never got to finish, and the books you haven’t finished reading, before settling on him. “What are we going to do about the… about the machines? And my IV…” 

“Oh, trust me. I may have bribed a nurse or two,” he confesses and you send him a scandalized look. He shrugs. “What? You told me a woman liked me and I couldn’t help but turn on my natural charm.”

“You’re awful,” you say without meaning it and he smiles as he moves your bed into a sitting position. You cough lightly, but sit up straighter as he carefully unhooks the huge bag and pump from your stand and gently slides it into the pocket in the backpack, resisting the urge to squish the pouch a bit. Strapping the pump in, he makes sure it’s secure as you peer around him to catch what he’s doing. “Is this… safe for me, you—you know, medically-speaking?”

“Nope.” He adjusts the tubing to avoid any kinks. “But, Purple gave me this backpack and she will come as soon as we come back to make sure you aren’t dying. And, if anything goes wrong, I promised her I’d come back as soon as possible.”

“Promised her?” you echo “I see. So that’s what Purple… was doing before my afternoon nap. I thought you guys traded suspicious looks.”

“Yeah. I’m pulling big strings. Now, c’mon, silly. Let’s get you dressed.”

You roll your eyes with a whistling breath. “Watch the tube… and c’mere, then, Gojo.”

He grabs the jacket first and does exactly as you order. Wrapping it around you, he helps you thread your arms through before zipping you up carefully as your shoulders begin to shake. Bending over, you reach blindly for the receptacle at the end of the bed and he hands it over to you.

A wad of saliva mixed with blood slips between your lips and you let out a low noise before forcing yourself to cough harshly again and again. Satoru watches. No matter how many times he sees you rip your throat up just to breathe with a bit less pressure in your chest, it doesn’t get any easier.

You manage to get up a whole magenta blossom. It blooms from your mouth like something out of a horror movie and lands in the receptacle before he’s wiping your mouth.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

They continue on.

Coat, next, zipped up, and a scarf, then he’s scooping up your legs to help you twist on the mattress until your feet are dangling off the edge. He weaves your legs through the sweat pants, careful not to let his gaze avert from his task even as the hospital gown trails up your legs. You shiver at the exposed skin and gooseflesh pimples your thighs as you lift up your hips to help with the effort. He pulls the hospital gown free from the waistband and lets it fall over the hem so you’re completely covered before falling back.

In a crouch, he pats your knees and makes the mistake of looking up only to find your eyes already on him, searching, nearly mystified. Satoru’s throat tightens. The faint light streaming from the window catches half of your face, as if half-divine. There’s a curiosity there, lingering, and the way you look at him makes him freeze in his spot.

Is this how Suguru saw you a thousand times before, a thousand lifetimes ago? Is this what he felt? 

Did he see the way your pupils dilate, the flare of your nostrils as you exhaled so quietly that it felt like a feather against his lips despite the distance between them? Did he see galaxies in your irises, home in the softness of your stare? Is that why he kissed you the last time he saw you? To memorialize their love for himself, to remember what it looked like when you loved him?  

Did he feel like he could fight dragons, crush demons, rip their world apart at the seams and rebuild it again with bloodied nails if it meant you would never cry again? Is that part of why he did it? So you would never be lonely again? 

Because if so, Satoru understands. 

Because if so, Satoru would do the same.

Because he always saw you as just pretty, because you had always been just his friend, and then his best friend’s girlfriend, and then his best friend, so there were always lines drawn in salt, scuffed and distorted over the years, but…

But in the light, tired and lost in his gaze, you’re nearly ethereal. The only reason he knows you’re not a goddess is because he’s still touching your knees, and your breath quivers, as if you’re just as disconnected from the world as he is in this moment.

Lips pressing together, he looks away, and the moment’s gone. 

He glances at the clock. 

How long has it been since he moved? It feels like hours.

Twenty-seven seconds.

Twenty-seven seconds of temptation, and then Satoru turned away. 

He slants to grab a pair of thick woolly socks to give himself something to do. You’re still watching him, head tilted down just so, and he carefully takes hold of your ankle.

He focuses on the little things: the iciness of your skin, the way you pick at the fabric of your sweatpants absently as you watch him work, the way you shiver a bit when he touches you.

He rubs heat back into the arch of your foot as you reach into your jacket slowly to carefully remove the nodes monitoring your vitals. You seem stiff to the bone, and your fingers are rigid with anticipated pain as you peel off the stickers. In the back of his mind, he remembers the days that feel like yesterday when you weren’t hooked up to so many machines to assure both you and him that you’re still alive.

Removing the cap for the oximeter from your finger, you shake yourself out a bit, clearing your throat. He slides one sock on, and then the other.

“How’re you feeling?” he finally utters.

It takes you a moment to answer. “Bottom half feels tingly. Usual these days. My body feels like a big giant bruise,” you inform quietly. Your voice is nothing more than a rasp. “Very warm and toasty, though… Thank you.”

“Just gotta get the shoes on and then we’ll teleport there.”

“Okay.” He helps you slip your feet in, something straight out of Cinderella, and then he stands up to take your hands. Your fingers slip into his palms, and he holds you so tightly as you slide off the bed. The instant your feet hit the floor, your grip intensifies and your head snaps down to the floor. You find your footing after a moment, and he lets go to crack open your window. Moving your plants aside, he climbs out to glance around. 

The air is crisp and cold, but not too bad for him. Even so, he’ll probably slip on a hoodie before they leave and he ducks back in to your room to do so, tugging it down his waist before grabbing the backpack.

“Arms through,” he instructs, slipping the backpack onto your shoulders. Guiding you closer, he helps you shuffle as close as possible towards him before turning around and bending over. “Alright, climb on. We’re going.” 

Your arms touch his shoulders, his hands shoot out behind him, and you fall.

Fingers hooking on your thighs, he boosts you up and your arms wrap around him, your own fingers wrapped so tightly around his collar that it nearly chokes him. Haphazardly stepping through the windows, his fingers sink into the fabric of your sweats. Your breath is warm against the shell of his ear, and he can feel your heart pulsing against his back as he turns to look at you. 

He smiles. “How’s it feel?”

“I’m still not sure if you’re going to let me die.” You press your face closer to his head and your arms tighten. “But the wind feels so good. So, so good.”

“That’d be too undignified,” he teases, and then he jumps. Time seems to slow as it always does when he’s about to teleport. He imagines the staff facility on the campus, quiet as a cemetery at this time of night, and his heart lurches forward. For a moment, his senses leave him all at once. He can’t taste or feel or see anything for a fraction of a second, then it comes to him in blinding speed. His hearing, as always, is first, then his eyes, smell and then touch and smell.

His foot lands on stone, as if he’s just finished a small skip, and he grins as he sweeps the courtyard. No one, as planned. The building’s to his immediate right, and he climbs the steps, using your knee to nudge the door open.

“That was fun,” you comment. “Convenient, too. Blink of an eye, and you’re somewhere else.”

“You can’t even begin to imagine how many lines I’ve skipped because of it,” he comments. The lights are all off, and he heads for the kitchen immediately to grab all the food he’s bought. Setting you down on the kitchen counter, he takes out another canvas bag and stuffs all of the food in.

Daifuku with of all kinds of fillings in the fridge, fresh dorayaki, canned coffee and aloe drinks, sweet soymilk and other wagashi they used to feast on when they were younger. Mostly because Satoru would buy enough to feed a kingdom so he always had something on hand for his overactive brain. You watch him with wide eyes as he moves around with such purpose one could think he was preparing to fight an army, but as soon as he finishes, he flashes you a smile.

“I think you’re going to like where we’re going a lot, silly.”

“Didn’t have to buy stuff,” you mutter, fingers playing with the tube leading into your backpack for a moment.

“You haven’t eaten in weeks. I thought maybe we could at least try. Maybe not now, but at the end of the night, before we go back. Just in case.”

“I can’t eat, though.”

“Don’t know until I stuff it down your throat,” he replies cheerily, and you smile at him so brightly it’s almost like you aren’t sick. Then, that smile turns into a cough, a fist in front of your lips, and your expression is frozen into one of exasperation before it flickers into strained. He sets down his bag, already knowing what comes next.

You make a hacking sound, deep in your throat, and he shifts you closer to the sink so you can lean over and throw up. Gagging, it comes in red and clear torrents, the cursed energy spilling out of your body nearly making it incinerating to even touch you as you clutch the edge of the sink basin. 

You fall to your elbows, and Satoru eases you off the counter so he can hold you up instead of the cramping body contortion you sink into. Cupping the juncture of your shoulder and neck, his thumb sweeps soothingly over your root-invested spine, tossing the ends of the scarf over your shoulder and out of the way.

Settling a hand on your hip, he presses you against the countertop so you don’t fall, and hopes your legs can hold you up long enough for him to reach for the hand towel. You spit just as he manages to grab it, snapping back into position and peering over your shoulder to inspect how much you’ve coughed up. You shudder and a tortured moan wrenches out of your throat as you sink, forehead against the cool metal.

You’re scorching to touch, but he tightens his hold on you anyway, setting the towel aside for just a moment. Carefully, he pulls you back up and you let out an drained whine, but he shushes you quietly, turning you around and guiding your head over his shoulder so you don’t stare at the rot any longer.

Satoru knows you would, even if you pretend like you aren’t plagued with morbid, self-destructive curiosity.

Looking into the sink, he counts a few petals and three whole flowers, and you’re quivering against him as he wraps his arm around you. 

“Alright, lean back for me,” he whispers into your ear, and you obey. His arm around you crooks so he supports your head, the other grabbing the towel again. Exhaustion seems to have sluiced through you, and your eyes are nearly unfocused as he dabs at your mouth carefully. His blue eyes focus on the gentle curve of your lips, and your cheeks puff up before you swallow tightly and let out a shaking breath.

“You’re really close,” you mumble in that exhale. He tilts your chin to the light to make sure he hasn’t missed a spot, and your eyelids flutter as the corners of his lips quirk up. His Six Eyes pick up a muted yellow emanating from you, and it’s so warm against his skin that he can’t help but relish in the feeling. “You smell nice.”

“Good. I took a shower before I came today. Well, yesterday,” he amends softly. “Alright, let’s go before you hack up your other lung.”

“Funny.” Nonetheless, he scoops you back up onto his back and he rinses down the sink as you rest your head against his. He feels you breathing steadily, much easier now than before. Red swirls down the drains, and he watches the magenta petals slowly reveal their true colours. There’s a flash of white in the center of each one, and he wonders silently what flower it is and what it means.

Maybe he’ll find out some day.

When the kitchen’s back to the state they entered, he grabs the bag of food and holds onto your legs tightly as your arms around his neck shift and pull him closer. 

This time, when he teleports, it’s not as jarring. Walking around the balcony, he makes sure no one’s in the area before checking that the door to the roof is locked and heading back out into the night air, towards where they can see the moon clearest.

“Hey, open your eyes,” he whispers over his ear, and your head shifts.

“Hm? Oh!” He feels you wriggle, but he doesn’t let you go as he walks closer to the spot he’s set up. Near the railing, a blanket surrounded by pillows is laid out surrounded by a few space heaters. The moon is hanging perfectly in front of them, and the light illuminates the forests in silver as a gentle wind whistles through. Tranquil, the only sound is his footsteps on wood as you manage to pull your legs free with a harsh twist of your torso. Your hand slaps against the railing and he whirls around to hold you up but you grit your teeth. “I can do it.”

Breathing in deeply, you pull yourself past him using mostly your arms. Your feet drag as if they’re not really attached to a living body but you still move steady onward, and he walks ahead to turn on the heaters and set the food down as far away as he can so it doesn’t spoil too quickly.

“Satoru,” you breathe as if for the first time,” it’s so fucking beautiful up here.” Looking up, his heartstrings twinge. Your face is bathed almost entirely in silver, and it drapes down your body like silk, illuminating the cord of your throat he can see above the scarf, the strength of your hands. A smile brighter than even the most blinding sun rays comes across your face and he finds that the moon pales in comparison as your knees begin to give.

Reaching forward, he helps you sink down slowly, and then sit down, legs hanging off the edge and then you’re leaning to rest your elbows on the middle bar of the wooden railing. You can’t stop staring at the moon, and Satoru can’t stop staring at you as he opens the box of daifuku and pops one into his mouth. 

“The eclipse should be starting in a few minutes,” he says, checking his watch. 2:10. Four minutes to go. You finally tear your eyes away from the moon to look at him.

“I forgot…” you muse. “I forgot how bright… the moon was.”  

He settles in beside you and offers a canned coffee, but you shake your head. He cracks it open for himself. 

“We’re about to watch the moon change,” he notes. “But I read that it’ll last six hours.”

“Really?” Excited, you look up at the moon again. The lunar rays outline your already-pronounced eye bags but it also makes you look more beatific. “That’s just proof… our time here on Earth is so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. It really makes you—makes you think how much we really matter. Which doesn’t seem like a lot, compared to things like a… fucking lunar eclipse.”

The moon’s opinion doesn’t matter more than mine, he thinks. “Well, while we’re waiting for your next epiphany to hit you,” he says instead, “you never answered my question.”

You smile, intrigued. “What’s that?”

“What if we removed the flowers bit by bit, rather than all at once?” he asks. Your gaze snaps to him, but he only regards you honestly. “That gives you a fighting chance.” Your eyes widen imperceptibly, and he grabs another mochi ball and takes a bite.

“The roots and flowers are too entangled in my chest to be removed safely. It’s either they remove my lungs completely, or not at all, and finding a… match for one lung is hard enough, much less two perfect lungs…” You trail off and shrug. “Well, that’d take forever… and I wouldn’t get much… longer, anyway. I’m a sorcerer. I always knew… I was going to die, so why not die on my own t-terms?”

He frowns. “Why not try?”

“Give me your phone.”

He does so, and watches you type in a query you must’ve typed before with how quick your lethargic fingers fly over the screen before you’re shoving it back towards him and leaning forward on the railing, chin to your forearms. You don’t even look at him, as if you don’t want to watch him crumble.

He reads: The first year after the transplant is the most critical period wrought with surgical complications, chances of rejection, and infection… Although there are some reports of some people living for 20 years post-transplant, many people do not make it past 10 years and only half make it past 5…

His stomach curdles. “Five years is better than nothing.”

“Five years worrying when my lungs are going to… kick it,” you correct. “Besides, my ribs are mangled by the roots. And my heart. My stomach. My spine. I’m undernourished, exhausted, and everything in here”—you gesture slowly around your abdomen—“is doing overtime. My body’s too weak to handle any kind of surgery that wouldn’t heal me… immediately.” 

Your eyes find his, and it’s as if lightning strikes through him like a spear—piercing cold and electrifying. You’re beginning to blue in the lips like you’re freezing to death, but he’s sweating under the blast of the heaters. 

Pulling off his hoodie, he drapes it around your shoulders. You don’t react anymore than: “Sucks, but that’s how it is.”

A few more minutes pass by in silence. Their knees knock into one another, and Satoru can’t stop looking at you as you breathe in the home you left months ago, head lifted to the inky universe.

“You know I can tell when you’re—when you’re angry with me,” you utter, not looking at him. “No matter how much you smile at me, you’re still too passive aggressive to cover it up.”

The words spill out of his mouth as you lower your gaze to him. “I’m sorry.” No sense in lying. 

“That’s okay.” You smile for a moment, like he hasn’t said something worth ruining a night over, but when you look up at the stars, it fades. Wistful, you cock your head at the moon that hasn’t gone away just yet and lower your chin to your arms again. “It’s not really something that was… fair of me to ask anyway.” 

.

Just as the moon turns yellow, he remembers something. Bending back to root through your backpack, he excuses himself. You frown. “What are you—“

“I got a camera for this occasion,” he announces, withdrawing the camera and a plastic bag, leaning back to snap a quick picture of you. You squint at the flash, mouth opened in an incredulous smile and face half-turned away, before the photo rolls out. “Like the one you used to carry around.”

“Some memories to hold on to, huh.” You reach for the camera and your fingers wrap around it, aiming it right at him. A flash and two peace signs later, another image joins the one of you Satoru slides into the plastic zip bag. “Hold on. I want to take another one.”

“We should do one of both of us.”

“Ugh, fine… I don’t look good at all, though.“

“Too late.” He snatches the camera from you and sticks out his hand, dragging an arm around your shoulders and you lean into him, temple against his cheek as he snaps another photo, and then another of him making a stupid face. Another of you mid-laugh. You’re wheezing for air as he keeps grabbing the polaroids as fast as he can with the arm that’s around your shoulder, leading to a bunch of jostling that has you in stitches at his frantic panic whenever the new photo chugs out of the slit.

When he’s had his fill of making you laugh, Satoru leaves you alone to look at the moon. He can’t stop grinning stupidly with every photo and while you watch the moon slowly descent into the earth’s shadow, he shuffles through the photos he just took of them together, trying to brand them to memory.

The way he looks at you in these photos makes him believe in something. In something that could’ve been there if they had more time, and he could convince you to open your heart up to a new possibility.

.

Another hour passes. The moon hangs a strange transition between black and blood red and a paler peach orange. A glimmering yellow dot sparkles below it, and he wonders if that’s Mars.

The forests seem almost hauntingly quiet, and no one has spoken in the darkness. You regard the moon, so enraptured, and more photos have joined the zip bag, but they’re mostly of you. He’s managed to sneak them in by turning off the flash and upping the brightness settings so it’d still be visible, and he hopes you never realize that he’s got them. 

Satoru has never been interested in astronomy, but the stars in your eyes are changing his mind.

He’s dug his hand into the bag of dorayaki already. He remembers it’s supposed to be for you, too, but his hands are too empty without the camera, his brain going a mile a minute and the air absolutely quiet with nothing. 

Twenty minutes ago, you asked him to help you take off your coat so you can pull on his hoodie, and haven’t moved since zipping yourself back up. The air smells only of canned coffee and the stinging wind carrying the scent of cedar. Feet swinging, he drapes his arms over the railing and looks up at the red moon.

It is pretty. Magnificent, and ominous, almost. The night is so much darker without the moon. Sheesh, colder, too. I wonder if you’re feeling okay. Maybe I should check, but you don’t seem to be shaking. Worst comes to worst, I could up the level on the space heaters…

“I don’t think I ever got to hear his last words,” you muse quietly, voice cracking, rousing him from his monologue. His head swings to you. Your eyes are barely open as you rest your cheek against your forearm, and you don’t look at Satoru despite your head turned towards him. Instead, he can watch the pieces of you fall apart without your scrutiny. “I used to think… that I didn’t care.”

“Do you want me to tell you?” he asks slowly as you continue to stare blankly over his ear. Your chest stutters in its inhale and the exhale is just as shaky as you smile a bit to yourself. He takes that as answer, and as he speaks, he sees Suguru’s smile—bright against the darkness of the alleyway, and a reminder of a simpler time. Satoru’s heart quickens from the memory “‘At least curse me a little at the very end.’”

You’re quiet for a moment, as if soaking that in. Then, you draw yourself up and sigh. “That sounds like him.”

You say it fighting off a laugh, even though it wracks your body with such intense pain you can barely breathe. You begin to wheeze not even a second in, and still, your face is cracked into an agonizing smile as you blink, tears slipping down your cheeks. Your eyes squeeze shut and your body goes stiff as you cough, hands flying over your lips. Your shoulders shake so uncontrollably it’s like an earthquake in your body, but Satoru cannot find it in him to calm you down as you hunch over yourself.

It comes in its own course, until you’re nothing but a gasping body, crying into bloodied palms cupping purple flowers, and the low sobs that spill and stutter out of your throat makes Satoru wish he never told you.

“‘At least curse me a little at the very end,’” you repeat to yourself, voice raw and iron-like, and your eyes finally rise to meet his. Nothing but hollow purple pierces through him once more. “Yeah… Yeah, that sounds like him.” 

An apology bubbles at his lips, but you continue before he can even begin. Your hands fall to to your laps, and you look at the decaying flowers, thumbs stroking the petals. “I could never make him truly happy… could I? Just like he said… nothing would’ve been good enough for him while we lived in this kind of world. No matter how many times I sat by him while he swallowed… swallowed those curses, held his hand, held him, I would have never been… enough to make him laugh from his heart.” Your tears cast dark shadows. “I held him, Satoru, with all my might… and I still felt him slip away between my fingers.”

That’s how Satoru learns you were there that day, December 24th, not a snowflake in sight. Just a few metres away, you stood for only a moment before you walked away from the man you loved so he could die without any regret, at the cost of your own guilt eating you alive.

No one speaks after that. Satoru cleans your hands slowly, carefully, giving attention to each finger, before swiping your lips, and then he wipes your tears away but you’re not crying anymore.

You just look up at the moon emptily and he scoots closer in hopes to keep your returning trembling at bay.

“Ten years is a very… long time to love someone.” You break the silence. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. Fifteen, thirty minutes? He looks at you, and your lips press into a thin smile. He lifts his arm so you can scoot up close next to him. Your eyes never leave his face, regarding him with new clarity. “I just… realized.”

“Ten years is a very long time for anything,” he replies quietly, their faces very close. Their noses brush, and a warmth spreads through his cheeks as he presses the tip of your nose against his. You don’t pull away. Instead, you almost lean closer. Your nose is cold against his hot face, and he rubs it slowly with his own, trying to send heat back into your skin.

“A very long time to… wait.” Your eyes flutter shut, and your breath is warm over his lips as you slowly tilt your head so their foreheads meet. His hand squeezes your waist. You smell like the hospital, but there’s still the fragrance of the fresh-cut grass and herbs clinging to your skin as he moves his head just to the side so his nose presses into your frozen cheek. Your arm moves as if dragging through honey until it’s wrapped around his neck, palm flat against his shoulder, just as their brows press against one another. 

Something ignites inside his chest, incinerating the rot that seems to grow inside his own chest—it’s his dread, he realizes a moment later. An ugly knot of dread for what’s to come, the guilt, the cold grief that’s just out of reach. 

It’ll unfurl soon, he knows, but for now, he welcomes the relief you bring him.

In this moment, you are his, and he is yours, and that is all that matters.

His eyes close. His cheeks are burning hotter than the heaters surrounding them, and he feels a smile pulling at his lips as your fingers curl against the back of his neck.

“When will people… stop waiting?” you ask him, hushed like a secret.

Eyes opening, he answers you in the same soft voice, “Probably when they die.”

Your eyes crack open once more and he catches a sliver between your heavy lids. You’re so close he sees every detail of your irises, the pores of your eye bags, the way memories flicker through your pupils like fish in a river.

Your exhausted smile grows more genuine—something inside you seems to rear its bright little head, but it’s sad, and he realizes, then, what you must’ve been thinking. Words fumble at his mouth, but he doesn’t let anything slip as you lift your face away to rest your head against his shoulder.

.

You’re dozing against him. Satoru is staring up at the moon in your stead. It’s nearly fully that famous shade of dark blood red, but not quite. He can’t hear anything except the buzz of the space heaters and your breathing. His arm is still wrapped tight around you, holding you flush against him. He’s wished he’d done it so many times before that now, he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself.

You’re dying. Even as you rest against him, he feels it. The weakness in your body, the way you’ve turned ghost-like. The strength of your Cursed Energy has become more prominent now that you don’t have the energy to channel it properly, and it’s centred so strongly in your chest that he can feel it poking curiously at him, leaving little marks, a souvenir for when you’re gone.

His fingers dig into your side. You let out a noise, head shifting, and he rips his gaze away away from the sky as your hand falls away from where it had rested around his neck into his lap.

“Satoru?” you whisper brokenly, and he nods, smiling. He pulls you closer, but their bodies are so pressed against each other that it only serves to make you huff a bit.

“Hey. You’re still with us, don’t worry,”

“Not worried,” you mumble, lifting your head with difficulty. “Just glad you’re here.” You tilt your face to the moon. “It’s still… red, huh…” You shake, your hand at the hem of his shirt twisting tightly. He reaches to squeeze your arm and hopes it’ll be enough now. “Pretty.” Throat dry, he does not answer. His white hair falls into his eyes as you look up at him, and he decays at the vulnerability in your gaze. “Aren’t you glad… that we saw the eclipse?”

Jaw clenching, he nods and tries his best to smile. Your hand lets go of his shirt and you shuffle up close enough that your other arm sneaks around his waist. Touching his chin with trembling fingers, your eyes glitter in the darkness of his shadow.

“I’m going to miss this. The moon, stars, how… fucking short… ’n’ beautiful life is,” you finally whisper, throat tight. “Makes shit worth living for. Maybe… won’t miss it… the most… but, top three.”

“Top three?” he echoes. “Top three sounds pretty good to me.”

“And, y’know what, Satoru?” you continue in the same low, husky tone, as if you’re about to change his world one more time.

He drops to the lowest, quietest voice he can manage and moves his head closer. Their noses nearly bump into each other again, and you smile as he quirks an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

“You’re… going to miss me… more.” 

Your hand on his waist travels up his shoulder and he feels the last of your strength in your muscles as you pull him towards you. Letting you, his arms wrap around your waist as your other arm shoots around his neck, clinging on so hard that he’s sure his spine might break. 

Flattening his palms against your uneven back, he closes his eyes and slides a hand to cradle your head close.

“And promise… me something,” you breathe into his ear. Your lips brush the shell of his ear, and a shiver shoots down his spine.

“Anything.”

“When I kick it,” you whisper, “take my body, and bury me… yourself.”

Throat swelling shut, Satoru’s glad you can’t see the way the blood drains from his face as he nods and holds you tighter. “I will.”

.

“One more photo for the road?” he asks. You lift your head from his chest, and he looks as you reach to sweep his lips with cold, trembling fingers. He smiles, his hand on your thigh squeezing meaningfully even though you can barely feel it now. Your arms are bundled between your chest and his, and he hauls your legs on his thighs more securely up his lap, arm tightening around your torso.

“Satoru,” you murmur, tilting your head to him. His eyes never move from yours as he picks up the camera, and your hand falls from his lips. “I’m glad… that it was you.”

He snaps the shot and the only sound that fills the silence is the camera chugging out the polaroid. Your eyes are dark, murky and unfocused, and he feels your stammering inhale in his very lungs as he presses his forehead against yours.

“I’m happy it was you, too,” he whispers. You search his gaze for only a moment, and then turn your head to the moon once more. 

Lowering the camera to the floor, he sneaks his other arm around you and rests his chin atop of your head, eyes sliding shut.

.

Nanami, Yaga, and Ijichi approach, dress shoes tapping against linoleum floors. Satoru and Shoko say nothing to them as they join in watching through the glass doors.

Satoru doesn’t like the room they’ve moved you to. It’s too full of machines, too open to passersby who could just look in if the curtains aren’t drawn, and even then…

It smells too clinical here. Too full of artificial light. The ICU is a mechanical sort of silence than the quiet peace of the dead-end hallway. There is no warmth, no books, no paintings. Your plants have been removed, and Nanami has taken all of them into his apartment except the red tulips which rest on the dinner table in Satoru’s kitchen.

You stopped being able to breathe on your own only a day after the eclipse. That was two days ago, and the ventilator is doing nothing more than prolonging your agony. Soon, the growths will block your lungs entirely, suffocating you from the inside out. 

The doctors have stopped taking scans.

“It’s only a matter of time, now,” Shoko had said. “Her directive says we let her go as soon as she can’t come back.” Quieter: “Her pulse ox has been dropping. It won’t be long.”

Ijichi’s face is stony. Satoru doesn’t know why he focuses on him out of everyone. Leaning against the nurse’s station, he stares blankly at the Assistant Director’s. Maybe because he thought he’d be a wreck. Out of all of them, Ijichi’s the most emotional, but his lips are set firm from where he stands between Nanami and their principal.

Maybe Satoru’s just looking for permission to fall apart, but that’d be stupid. 

I’m the strongest. I’ll be fine.

“I’m going to go in,” he announces. No one protests. Nanami sits down and crosses one leg over the other, fingers steepled and eyes indecipherable. Shoko sits beside him. There’s the faint scent of smoke clinging to her lab coat. 

Ijichi dips his head, but doesn’t sit and Yaga excuses himself to talk to the nurse about your condition.

Satoru sanitizes his hands, approaches the door, and pulls it open before stepping in and sliding it shut behind him. 

Click. Hiss. 

The sound of the ventilator is the only thing that occupies the room. That and the monitors. It’s very dark, despite it being the middle of the day. Mostly because you can’t open your eyes wide enough to withstand the sun anymore, so Satoru had asked the nurses to bring the same blackout curtains from your room here. The lights are dimmed until it’s only an orange glow right behind your bed. 

Click. Hiss.

Sitting down, he doesn’t take hold of your hand just in case you’re sleeping. The intubation tube rests on a pile of towels on your chest, and it takes a long time before your eyes open and your head tilts just enough to look. Your hand twists on top of the covers until your palm is tilted open.

He slips fingers in, takes hold. The feel of your skin making everything worse. You’re colder than you should be—it’s sweltering in this room, enough that Satoru is already beginning to sweat even through his short-sleeve—and your fingers just barely twitch against the back of his hand, tracing strange shapes.

You blink, tapping his knuckle, and he frowns.

“What’s up?” Withdrawing, he feels your nail scrape against his flesh and he looks down. Curiously, he takes your hand and places it on top of his so your fingers can touch the lines of his palm. “Are you spelling something out?” he asks, amused, glancing up again.

Another blink, slower this time.

He leans forward on his elbow to touch your cheek before resting his cheek against his fist.

“Alright, give it your best shot.” 

Your eyelids flutter, lips trembling in a weak smile. Your index finger begins to trace shapes, kanji, into his palm. Your chest rises and fall slowly, pumped full of air by a machine hooked to your lungs, forcing breath into you as your writing grows sloppy by the passing second but you still persist.

ANGRY?

“Angry?” he repeats, and you blink slowly again, fingers insistent on grabbing his palm. Folding his fingers over yours, he arches his eyebrows. “If I was angry at a terminally ill patient, that’d make me the asshole here.” Your eyes squeeze shut, eyebrows rearranging in what he recognizes as your laugh in silence. More seriously, his hold on you tightens and he lifts his head to brush his fingers over your brow. You tilt your head more to him, gaze murky warm. “How’re you feeling?”

It takes a while, but he feels your hand shuffle back to trace your answer on his hand.

BETTER

“Better. Yeah?”

Another lethargic blink. Yes.

“It’s because of me, right? I knew it. I knew it. We should tell Shoko—I’m the newest medical innovation in town,” he proclaims, and his smile begs to slip off his face but he only forces it back on, shoves it into place. Your eyebrows move again, like you’re struggling to hold back your laugh. Your eyes slip shut and do not open again. 

Your face goes lax a moment later, and your fingers loosen a bit, but he doesn’t let go. He just wants to touch your face and trace the lines into his memory. 

Satoru stretches his thumb along the swell of your bottom lip while carefully avoiding the tube. He runs his knuckles down your cheek. His fingers brush your pulse point along your neck, and he feels the slow, weak beat.

Click. Hiss.

He thinks you’re asleep for a while, until your finger drags over the flesh of his palm and he looks down, hand lifting from your face. 

“Hey, I’m still here,” he whispers, and your face turns towards him slightly, the tube in your mouth shuffling. He reaches forward, cupping your face and holding you still. “Hey. Don’t move. Your lungs are weaker than the rest of you and I’m not about to watch you die.” Something grabs onto the front of his shirt near his stomach and he looks down to see your fingers hooking on the cotton of his tee, twisting it weakly. “Oh, sorry.”

He draws back and slips his palm back into yours. Your index finger taps against the heel of his hand before your nail drags deliberately. One stroke. Then another, and another. Gojo wishes your eyes were open, because then he would be able to determine what the rest of the sentence could spell out before you’re done, but he’s patient. 

HERE

“Here?” You tap on his hand. Yes. “What’s here?”

YOU AND ME

“You and me,” he repeats thoughtfully. “Yeah, I get that. At least… now you can see Suguru again, right?” Your hand goes still and he looks at your face, reaching to touch your cheek again. You’re placid—doll-like, eyes shut, living dead. “I’m a bit jealous of that, but you should rest easy. It’s been a hard few months, hasn’t it?”

Another weak twitch of your finger on his hand.

“No matter what happens, don’t think I’m angry at you, or the choices you’ve made,” he continues. “As long as you let me stay here, I won’t waste a single second of it, okay?” Tap. He squeezes your hand so tightly your eyebrows twitch, even as you slip away from him. “For all your saying that you’re weaker than me, I never thought that. Not really.” Satoru raises your hand to his lips and he closes his eyes. “Being the strongest is pretty lonely. Used to be so fucking cocky about it, huh. Thought no one could touch me or the people I cared about because everyone would be too scared.”

Your fingers curl against his palm and he lowers his head to press your knuckles against his brow.

“I was wrong. I’d give anything to have you both back, but I can’t, and I hate it. You’re supposed to be with me at the top. I don’t want to be alone again.” His eyes are burning from the strain of keeping them open, but he refuses to miss a second of you being alive when the time is trickling like sand in an hourglass. He feels it like a heavy stare on his back, wondering if this next breath will be the last one before your brain finally decides to shut down. Your organs have been shutting down for nearly weeks now. He knows it’s out of pure selfishness that they’re dragging precious moments into agonizing hours. 

He knows you’re exhausted. 

Resting his chin on your fingers, he swallows. “I don’t know how to let you go. I wished I’d come sooner. I was careless. I know that. We could’ve had more time…”

Your fingers squeeze his as tight as you can before letting go. Somehow, he hears your voice in his ear. Something about being grateful for the time they did have.

“You were right, silly.” He chuckles to himself, bitter, anguished, and lowers your hand back to the bed, not letting go yet. “Ten years is a long time to wait. I let you down, but I’ll make sure you go easy. I promise.”

Satoru lays his head down on his forearm and he swears he catches your lips pull into the faintest smile. He stays there for hours, watching your face, stretching up to touch your unmoving face. The only sound is his steady breaths, the beep of your monitors and the click-hiss of your ventilator. 

It’s 1:04 PM when he falls asleep to the sleepy circles you trace into his wrist

It’s 6:22 PM when only one of them wakes up.

.

At 11:00 AM the next morning, during one of the hourly tests, they declare you brain-dead. With the announcement of your directive being honoured by your chosen proxy, Satoru himself, classes are cancelled and they are scheduled to take you off life support at six.

Ijichi brings them lunch and dinner. Satoru doesn’t eat. Only sits by your side, leaned back into the chair and looking at you while he still can until the clock ticks and ticks and ticks towards doomsday. The kids come to say final goodbyes while he watches on. Inumaki, as always, brings Panda through his phone, and Satoru wishes there could’ve been some way to sneak Panda into a high-class hospital just so their last moments together aren’t cheapened by a screen.

Shoko enters five minutes before it’s time, hand finding his shoulder and he looks up just long enough to catch her blank stare resting on your face.

She doesn’t say anything, only moves to the other side of the bed and sits down in the other chair.

The doctor pumps you full of sedation drugs, so you won’t feel any of the pain, unhooks the machines, and extubates you, explaining all the while what he’s doing just to fill the silence. As he pulls the tube from your throat, something in Satoru turns icy when a purple petal is plastered to the side of the plastic, but the doctor does not acknowledge it any more than murmuring that he will give them privacy.

Your rattling breaths echo in his ears as he watches the numbers slowly drop, but even your inhales fade to nothing more than soft, slight wheezes. The tape has left a strange mark around your mouth, and you’re unmoving otherwise. Shoko gently reaches and touches the eye bags that are, for once, worse than hers before shaking her head and pulling back. Everyone else waits outside.

Hours pass by in torturous years. 

Satoru wears the same stony expression the whole while, finally surrendering into his desire to hold your hand. 

His heart hardens. He goes completely still. Shoko talks but he can’t really hear anything except the slow beeps of your monitor once you pass certain thresholds. 

There are nurses waiting outside. They’ve grown used to the company, he thinks. He thinks one or two are crying. Soon enough, they’ll come in to turn off the machines tracking your vitals so the sounds don’t drive them crazy, banging in home that you’re dead, dead, dead.

After a while, Satoru realizes you aren’t quite breathing, although your chest moves. Sometimes, there’s a gasping sound, like someone surprised the breath out of you and you’re inhaling sharply to replace it, and he imagines your fingers twitching against his hand one last time.

It’s very slow. Much slower than he imagined it to be. Maybe you’re still fighting. Maybe you don’t want to go.

Satoru can’t imagine why. Where you’re going, there’s no pain, or exhaustion, or blood. Where you’re going, Suguru waits.

He leans against his hand, elbow on the slight incline of your bed. Letting go of your hand, he touches your face, feels the soft puff of your breath, the curve of your jaw. You’ve lost so much weight from the sickness you barely look like yourself, but you’re still you. The cursed energy is still yours. His Six Eyes sees it. His soul feels it.

It tangles with his own where he touches you, and a wave of exhaustion washes over him. 

He wants to sleep, let time pass, and wake up to you dead.

It seems a much better alternative to watching you slip away, but he’s always been selfish when it came to personal affairs.

.

You die two hours later.

Shoko closes her eyes and leans back into her chair as the nurse comes in to turn off the droning monitor. Her face is dry and she takes long, measured breaths as if trying to temper something swirling inside her. Satoru’s hard heart cracks as he squeezes your hand to see if you’ll wake up. It doesn’t quite sink in, even though he can hear someone crying outside, and when your limp hand doesn’t react at all, he shakes his head and gets up, pulling his sunglasses off the collar of his shirt and sliding them back onto his face.

He shoves his hands into his pockets and rakes his face over your body, your face.

He’s seen a dozen dead bodies before, maybe more. You look just like he did on December 24th. At peace, younger. Like you’re glad the suffering is over, and Satoru turns his face away sharply and leaves the room. He doesn’t know what to say and he’s not sure if his voice is still here. 

Everything feels dry and dull and grey.

“Sensei,” Itadori whispers wetly, reaching out a hand, making him stop. The students are all sitting in a small area, but they stand upon seeing him leave the room, and he gives them a plastic smile that makes all of them flinch. Maki is scowling furiously at the ground as Inumaki takes hold of her bicep but she flings the hand off and stalks away, hiding her red face.

“It’s going to be okay,” he tells them as Kugisaki runs after Maki. He watches the two go before turning his attention back on the students. “The important thing is that she didn’t suffer. Arrangements will be made, but there won’t be any rush, alright?” The words feel lacking, but he still manages to smile. “It’s been a long day. Go home. Rest, shower, eat. Let’s remember that she doesn’t want us to be here, slumping around looking like idiots. She wants you to all to take care of yourselves.” He arches his eyebrows insistently at his students, but they don’t seem to hear him.

They’re only looking through the glass doors at your coolling corpse, at Shoko who stands, and speaks to the doctor when he comes back in.

Fushiguro is the only one really looking at him, and the teenager has a silent question in his stare. 

Satoru shakes his head, and Megumi nods.

“Classes are cancelled for the rest of the week,” Yaga adds. “Ijichi will drive you all back to the college in thirty minutes. Make sure you tell the girls.” He directs this to Inumaki, who nods.

“Salmon.”

Later, Megumi finds him smoking a cigarette leaning against Shoko’s car. Satoru’s never liked the taste of the stuff so he doesn’t really know why he’s smoking other than the fact he doesn’t know what to do. 

Up is down, left is right, and you’re dead. 

Nothing seems right, but Megumi gives him a good excuse to stop. Flinging the cig to the ground, he stomps out the ember and re-arranges his expression into that shielded smile of his, but it feels a bit weaker. Sharp, janky, wrong.

“Why haven’t you gone home yet? Ijichi should’ve taken you all back by now,” Satoru says wearily as Fushiguro stops before him, hands shoved in his pockets.

“I stayed behind to look for you,” informs Megumi. He looks a bit fractured, but the boy’s never been one to wear his heart on his sleeve. Satoru makes a mental note to dig into his psyche at a later date, and stretches an arm out to wrangle the boy into a hug against his side.

For all of his complaints and mumbles and scowls, Megumi’s body still relaxes a bit against his, and even though he doesn’t hug him back, when he tells him, “You should go home and get some sleep, too. These past few months haven’t been easy on you, either,” Satoru feels a part of his old self raise its bloody head. 

Glancing down at a head of spiky hair, he knocks his knuckles into his student’s skull. “Have you been keeping an eye on me?”

Megumi crosses his arms, glares over Satoru’s elbow, but even his voice is quieter. “You need to take care of yourself.”

Satoru smiles again. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “But you’re not worried about me, are you, Fushiguro?”

Megumi ducks his head and doesn’t answer any more than, “Someone has to pick up the slack, now.”

.

“Thanks, Ijichi,” Satoru says with a huff, digging the shovel into the ground and stepping on the metal edge. “Not every day you help me carry a dead body and dig a grave, huh.”

“No, sir,” Ijichi replies. He sounds a bit hoarse and tired as he wipes at his brow.

It’s been two days since you’ve died. The college grounds feels a lot less lively. He took a walk in the gardens yesterday, and saw Yaga planting new flowers. He had strode past and ignored the tears on his sensei’s face, and absently wonders now why he hasn’t cried yet as he grabs the shovel and yanks it out of the dirt, tossing it to Ijichi.

It feels kind of stupid, but despite how eviscerated everything inside him feels, he just can’t.

Either way, he’ll deal with it when it becomes a problem.

Satoru wipes at his brow, too, with a heavy sigh, and heads to where a cloth-covered shape is resting on the ground. Your corpse is light in his arms as he bridal carries you to the hole he’s just dug into the grass. It looks suspicious as hell, but it’d probably be even worse if he’d been walking around with a dead body over his shoulder, stitched back together after an autopsy by your best friend. 

Good thing they’re only in the forests outside the college campus. There won’t be any civilians for miles.

“You can go,” he says over his shoulder, setting you down by the hole they’ve dug. He takes in a deep breath to calm himself and Ijichi’s footsteps hesitate before beginning and fading away moments later. Falling to his knees, Satoru begins to carefully unfold the cloth just enough that he can see your face and chest. 

He squints behind his blindfold at the ripples of energy still seeping from the stitches along your chest. Sinking his hands into the lush, cold grass, he twists the blades with rigid fingers at the stench of rot coming from the curse before he draws back.

Hands on his lap, he stares at your face. You look frozen in time, eyes closed, skin clean, and there’s that unnatural stillness about you that only comes with the dead. It’s strange. He probably couldn’t have imagined someone so vivacious could be so motionless if he hadn’t seen it first with Suguru.

He had asked not to hear the results of your autopsy. Not now, maybe not ever. It’d be fresh lemon juice in a weeping wound. All he knows is that the curse clings to your corpse, and Shoko could only remove the growths that were no longer being fed for examination.

“Weird that this is where we’ve found ourselves,” he begins humourlessly. “With how we were living, Suguru always said I’d die first. Doing something stupid, being too cocky.” He slides a hand into his pocket and withdraws something he’d snipped this morning from the last plant you had grown with your Technique. A red tulip with a short stem that’s a bit crushed, and beginning to decay, but… everything can’t be perfect.

“I never thought I’d outlive you.”

Reaching forward, he places the tulip gently on your chest, takes your cold arms that are just beginning to loosen up again from rigor mortis, and folds your hands over the stem.

“Eternal love, and fame,” he repeats to himself. The energy nearly swallows up the tulip, but as it radiates from your chest, flickers in the slight breeze, Satoru sees flashes of red and green, much brighter than everything else around him, and knows that it won’t be consumed. Sitting down, he hugs his legs to his chest and stares at your dead body blankly, chin on his knees.

He had had a plan. He was going to just… put the flower there, exorcise the curse inside you, and bury you so you could finally rest. He wouldn’t hesitate because this is something you entrusted him to do.

But this is the first time in months he hasn’t had a cloud hanging over his head, and his body feels so much ligher without the burden of your disease hanging off his shoulders, that he can’t help but relish in it. Speak to you without worrying about saying the wrong thing, of people overhearing. He’s finally… free. 

It feels fucking awful.

“You were right, by the way.” His voice is dull, resonating deep in his chest. There is no August sun breaking through the trees above, only from behind him, and the golden beams touch your chin, down your throat and chest. It sets the red of the tulip on fire. “I miss you. And I wish I could’ve said so many things, but we ran out of time.” A faint smile. “No matter what you think, Suguru loved you. It’s why he came to see you one last time. I knew him better than I knew myself, and I know he was happiest knowing you were at his side.” Closing his eyes, the ache in his heart swells as he utters out, “So was I.”

Burying his his face in his forearms, a cup inside him seems to tip over and everything feels too hot for him to breathe in. Ripping his blindfold off and tossing it away from him blindly, his eyes snap open wide as he tries to breathe. His ribs constrict his lungs, and he presses his eyes into his arms, hands shaking as he sinks his nails into his biceps. 

Harsh pants puff against his face as he tries to reign in his shuddering, but he can’t. The knot in his heart twists until he thinks he might die, and distantly, he hears soft footsteps so faint he’s not sure if he imagines it. Gritting his teeth, he stifles the bruising feeling welling up in his throat.

Gentle hands brush down his shoulders soothingly, sending a wave of nausea through his body, and he jerks away.

“Damn it, Ijichi, leave me alone!” Wrenching his head up, his eyes widen at the figure crouched in front of him.

Arms falling lax to the grass and his knees widening, his jaw drops as a thumb teases his parted lips. You step between his legs and crouch down, limber and strong. You look healthy again, bright eyes and full cheeks, young like spring, and when you smile, it fills him utterly with light. In your hands is his blindfold, and you ruffle his hair, tilting your head curiously.

“I’m not Ijichi, but… do you really want me to go so soon?” you ask as he rakes his gaze up and down your body. There is still a purple shell encasing your legs, but as you shift your weight on your feet, it falls like fragile eggshells to the ground and sinks into the dirt, disappearing for good. Peering around you, his eyes widen when he sees shards of a purple shell in shatters all over your corpse.

He’d only seen this once before, eight months ago, with a certain student of his and the cursed spirit of the girl he loved and who loved him.

Face burning, his gaze snaps back to you as you poke his cheek and continue to grin. Leaning back on his hands, he tries to stop the intense shattering of his walls by clenching his jaw, but the shudders overtake his body, his chest, his throat until he’s letting out an ugly sound and blinking hard as if that’ll hide it away from you. Something devastatingly warm immediately shoots down his cheeks. Covering his mouth with the crook of his elbow, he turns his face away but your warm hands cradle him carefully, thumbs brushing underneath his eyes.

“Yuuta, you’re right. Rika isn’t cursing you.”

“No,” he whispers, arm falling. His fingers sink into his shoulder as if that would be enough to wake him from this nightmare. “No. I can’t—Did I—Did I kill you?” You squint studiously, not letting go of his face as he lifts the hand from his shoulder and reaches to touch you. It shakes, and he snaps it into a fist to stop it, looking at his fingers that have done so much harm—shed so much blood. “Did I do this to you?”

“You cursed Rika.”

You chuckle fondly, like he’s said something silly, and set a hand on his fist, pushing it down firmly. “You can’t control how other people react to your words, Satoru.” Your voice changes, and your eyebrows draw together in something bittersweet. “And you can’t change something you didn’t know. The chances of you cursing me and me cursing myself are irrelevant. It doesn’t change anything about where we are, now.”

Satoru watches you, lips parted, as you tie the blindfold around his neck. You feel so real, so close, and as you slide your hands down his shoulders, to his chest, he jerks his head down to stare at your shoes in the grass. 

So he did. 

“I see,” he murmurs.

That’s it, then.

“Satoru, please look at me,” you whisper, fingers stretching to his chin. With the gentlest of pressures, you prompt him up and he finds your face, your smile, where all colours begin and end. For a moment, the world seems to inhale all of its life back into its core—the leaves whistle, the sun is warm and golden, and he lifts his hand to touch you again, but you pull back before he can. 

“I can only thank you for being my friend. For staying with me until the very end.” You laugh quietly to yourself and lift your hand from his face. “I would make a joke about a curse, but I know it still hurts, so I’ll save it for when I see you on the other side, okay? When it heals a bit more.”

“It’s never going to hurt less,” he croaks. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know how much you mean to me.”

Your smile softens. Satoru tries to eternalize that expression forever. “I’m honoured, but, I hope it does heal. I don’t want you to learn how to carry so much pain around. I don’t want you to be numb.” You touch his cheek again, as if you’re trying to soak in as much of him as you can, too. 

“Do you have any last words?” he manages to ask raspily, and you chuckle, tilting your head and running your hand through his hair again. His eyes flutter shut at the scratch, the sensation of your nails against his scalp, and then there’s your hand at his jaw, holding him all together. He wants to hold you so badly he thinks his muscles might cramp into stone at the desire.

“What does it matter?” you ask curiously. “You already know how I feel. That will never change. And if you ever want to know what I think, or what I’d do, you can just ask Shoko and think about it yourself. You know me well enough to not need me nagging about it.”

“But, it won’t be enough.”

“It never will be,” you agree. “But isn’t it wonderful that we even got to know each other at all?” You lean forward, and his eyes flutter shut as you hold him to your chest. He can’t hear your heartbeat anymore, but your warmth is almost the same. The echo of your voice rumbles in his head as you speak, and maybe that is enough. “If you want my last words, you already have them.”

You draw him back, and give him one last smile. The air shifts golden yellow to his Six Eyes, for the last time. 

“Until we meet again, my Satoru.” 

You fade without giving him a chance to answer, taking all the colour with you. 

Staring at the empty air where you had been just a moment before with wide, burning blues, he whispers your name brokenly before burying his hands in the dirt, squeezing his eyes shut, and letting boiling tears scald his face red.

.

“If you want my last words, you already have them.”

Spinning the key ring on his finger, Satoru looks dully at the door knob he had just unlocked. There’s no one in the hall, and he debates whether or not he should turn around, but Shoko had insisted. There’d been something left for him in your old apartment, and according to her, it would be spoiled soon if he didn’t go.

“Oh, what the hell,” he mutters, catching the key in his palm and shoving it into his long coat. Tugging it tighter around himself, he twists the knob and pushes it open. He can’t remember the last time he was in here. Maybe five or six months ago, when they both had a day off that didn’t need to be spent at the college.

There aren’t any plants anymore. He supposes Nanami, Ijichi, maybe even Yaga have taken them. He swears he’s seen a few in the gardens lately, but who is he to say? Toeing off his shoes, he makes his way down the hall. 

 Everything is just as you left it, with clean counters and empty tables. The curtains are spread, letting in so much September sunlight. It hits random display pedestals of different sizes, all the surfaces big enough to fit a pot on. Your watering can sits by the sink. There are photos hanging on the walls, propped up on the desk, on your shelves, polaroids taped to the walls. 

Reminders that someone did live here. That there is a whole life unknown to strangers but evidence enough that whoever used to be here, they had people who would miss them.

Walking up to the counter, he drags his fingers along the surface, feeling the dust collect up to a square of pale light. A clean circle is all that’s left as a clue that there used to be something there, and his heart twists.

Who knew he could miss fucking plants of all things?

Sweeping his gaze around, he brushes off the dust on his jacket and hooks a thumb on his blindfold, sweeping the area with an eccentric eye. The TV is off, your bookshelves are in their usual untidy state, but even the reaching vines of the bean plant is gone from the highest shelf.

 “They really scooped this place dry,” he muses dryly to no one. He can still hear the music you’d play for late nights, the smell of dumpling soup. He walks down the hall and still remembers how many steps it takes to reach the bathroom that guests would use. 

He had hunched over that bath on December 25th, and let water soak through his hair as strong fingers worked the sweat from his scalp and skin.

Four more steps to the guest best room on the right, and another three to the end of the hall where a door leads to your room. It’s already open, and he steps in easily, tugging his blindfold all the way down off his face. Hair falling over his eyes, he sweeps it aside and surveys the room. The walls are still that pretty shade of cream, and your bed is made carefully, dark olive blankets resting atop your white sheets. He smiles to himself, despite the twang in his chest.

Walking deeper, he approaches the cabinet by your bathroom, and picks up the photo you have by your jewelry stand.

A smile curls his mouth. He remembers this one. First year, their first September. All four of them had gone together to Sapporo for the autumn festival. 

He sets the photo back down and looks into the bathroom. Your toiletries are all lined up, waiting for their next use, and he swallows as he raises his gaze up to the mirror. His blue eyes look a big too big on his face from the past month alone, and there are red-purple half moons printed onto his face that have only just started to fade. He swears it only looks worse because of how much pale light is streaming in from the windows, and he tugs at his collar uncomfortably, clearing his throat.

Turning around, he looks at the offenders for making him look so awful, and finds a medium-sized pot sitting on the window seat. It’s the only thing sitting on the flat, wooden surface, in partial shade and almost unfurling before his very eyes.

Satoru frowns, walking around your bed to inspect the plant. 

The flowers are a warm magenta colour, and his eyes widen at the flash of white he can see leading to the center of each bloom. Brushing a thumb over the petals, his jaw sets as he tilts his head to get a better look at the plant. So this is what was growing inside of you. Huh.

There’s another slip of white near the dirt, and his eyebrows furrow, fingers seeking the thing. It crinkles when he touches it, and his frown deepens as he manages to grasp it, pulling it free underneath the leaves and stems of the plants. Sitting down beside the pot, he dusts off the dirt clinging to the paper, and reads his name along the front in your print before flipping the envelope around. There’s something sticking out of it, a sloping shape that’s hard but not too big.

Curiosity peaked, he tears the envelope open carefully and peers inside. A binder clip is inside, holding something together, and he flips it upside down, letting everything fall. The letter slides out first, followed by whatever the binder clip is holding together and he squeezes his thighs together so it doesn’t fall to the floor.

Setting the letter aside, he picks the bundle up. 

Polaroids.

They’re polaroids of different sizes that have him smiling despite the heavy sorrow twisting his entire chest.

Various pictures of Satoru, Suguru, Shoko, and you together, and he finds most of them are of him and you. Pictures of him hiding behind plants of various sizes, a picture of him drinking soju, because Suguru liked it the most and insisted he try, while leaning against Shoko who was knocking back a shot of tequila. There is a shot of Suguru, wet with mud and smiling like sunshine, while a drenched Satoru was in the background, flipping the camera off in the middle of a storm. 

More and more pictures, enough to spill out of his lap, and he picks up each one, desperate to remember when or where you took them.

And, sometimes, he can’t. Sometimes, they are just moments that he’s lost because he never thought they’d be important, and now moments he’d give anything to remember.

There are pictures of a fern he had named their first year, little annotations on the bottom of some others. Dates, but with no context otherwise. Names scribbled in black ink. 

You’re in a lot of them, your smile timeless, your joy infectious even through film.

Arms slung around Suguru, face smushed against his, artfully blurry perhaps on accident, and annotated with scrawl that read: I call this masterpiece “Dumb Sweethearts” by Gojo Satoru :)

A picture of him and Shoko and Suguru, of them in one of Tokyo’s night markets, you behind the camera, the lights flashing and warm and pink, making them all look like they’ve transported to some other kind of cyberpunk world. 

You and Shoko lounging in the gardens, having a tiny picnic at your insistence, and in Suguru’s handwriting in black: JUST GIRLS BEING PALS

Satoru stares at Suguru’s writing the longest, not even at his words, just the strokes of his pen. This is a new part of him Satoru thought had been destroyed, and he starves for it. It’s like his one and only lives and breathes in the ink, in those snapshots of him caught in eternal youth. When they’d been happy and unaware and not innocent, but cocky enough to think they could rule the world. 

It’s hungry, the way he goes through each photo, searching for another glimpse of you, of him, of them together, until Satoru is all out of moments to feed on, and still, he feels empty, flicking through the last few photos.

You in a pool, arms wrapped around Shoko and beaming like the sun.

A shot of Satoru and Suguru climbing trees shot from below, your eyes and skeptically raised eyebrows in frame, captioned big dumb monkeys

And the last one…

He holds it to the sunlight and his gaze softens.

A selfie of you kissing Suguru on the cheek. It’s mostly dark, but they were definitely in the bathroom, and the flash made Suguru’s outstretched arm look pale as a ghost, but even so, there’s no mistaking the happiness captured there. He was sticking out his tongue, winking, and red as a beet so he was either drunk or you had said something or both. Your arms were wrapped around his neck, nose squished against his cheek, eyes squeezed tight as he took the shot.

Turning it over, Satoru’s heart plummets into his chest. In Suguru’s clean, blocky writing:

THE GIRL IM GOING TO MARRY ONE DAY <3

And crossed out is your reply followed by a little note:

dummy doesnt have the nerve to propose SHHH!!!! ONE DAY C:

One day.

It sounds so much emptier now.

He lowers the photo back to his lap, and glances around him, at all these scattered moments captured forever. Gathering them up again, he relives them all over again, looking at each photo for longer to see if he’s missed anything, but mostly his stare lingers on your face, and on Suguru’s, and his own, too, because he can’t remember what it felt like back then, but he is sure it feels so much better than now.

The polaroids come together a neat stack and he is careful not to scratch any of them when he clips them together. The top photo is of you with your arms wrangled around Suguru and Satoru, your face split in a maniacal laugh, their mouths open in shock, eyes bulging in how you must’ve scared them witless. 

Shoko’s messy writing at the bottom, for it must’ve been her who had taken the photo: BREAKING NEWS: Japan’s Strongest Conquered by a Woman.

A smile cracks his weary face and he runs a thumb over their faces before sliding the photos back into the envelope for safe-keeping. 

Then, he grabs the letter. His name is written again on the first flap, and he reads it three times over before unfolding the paper, not quite ready but also not sure if he ever will be.

Immediately, a faint, herbal-like scent slashed with antiseptic flows from the page and his stomach curdles as your script pours down the page. 

Swallowing, Satoru shifts and leans against the wall, hiking a foot up onto the seat and holding your inked characters to the light. There’s a date inscribed at the top.

Thursday. 

The first Thursday after you had been released from the hospital. Your last Thursday before you were back in for good.

“Shit.”

He folds the letter again and tilts his head back against the wall, staring at the ceiling.

Does he want to read this? Does he really want to fucking read this? 

Taking a deep breath, he clears his throat and lowers his gaze to stare determinedly ahead of him. The purple flowers greet him warmly and he shakes the shiver out of his body before tightening his grip on your letter and unfolding it again, forcing his eyes on the page.

My Satoru,

I sent all the pictures I had of Shoko to her, and she has some of Suguru, too. Now that I’m gone, there’s no use if I keep them. Maybe you two could share some time, laugh it up over these old memories. I know she says she can’t stand you, but to be honest, who else is there that will remember us now? Who else is there to remember Suguru for more than his bloody hands and me as more than that girl too sick to do anything but die? 

Some legacy we said we’d leave, huh.

I don’t think I told you this, but with this disease catching up to me, it’s hard not to form hypotheses on why it’s happening or how. I have quite a few theories, and, unfortunately, none of them are pleasant or unriddled with angst. By now, you’ve probably figured out it’s a curse, and if you’re smart enough to ignore how much I’ll probably deny it, that it’s some love bullshit. If you didn’t know, now you do.

I know it’s weird. Suguru is dead. It shouldn’t be happening, right?

That’s what I thought, too

You once said love manifests the most twisted curses. I never thought of it that way before, but I’m starting to think you’re right. I don’t want to curse you by dying, but I can’t help but wonder if we can control who we curse. If I hadn’t heard you say that, would I still be here? Healthy? Okay? 

I don’t know. I can’t predict alternate timelines, because I got to live one life, and that’s more than most people get. But, because I know you, you want me to entertain you. I’m sighing as I write this.

Look, I know the pain would still be there. I know I still wouldn’t be able to forgive myself for what I did, even if it was what had to be done. I know I would still miss him. I know that I would still long for the day I didn’t feel guilty for loving someone else.

If you didn’t curse me, I cursed myself. It drives me crazy that this is how the die was cast, even now, even after months where I could’ve accepted this, but at least this physical manifestation almost makes me… calm. Like seeing what this life has done to me makes me brave enough to fight it. If anything at all, the curse brought me a greater understanding of how powerful our world is in comparison to people who… are normal. The people we have to protect.

I’m sorry. Reading this back, it sounds like I’m the one cursing you now; telling you all this knowledge that can only bring you more anguish. I promise, this isn’t what it is. I just want you to understand. You couldn’t have saved me, Satoru. I couldn’t have given you the absolution you wanted, and if that’s how it is, then I just hope that one day you can look back on this and it won’t hurt anymore.

It’s always been so complicated between us, after what happened to Suguru, and after what he did, even ten years ago. What we couldn’t stop and what we had to do that day. There was always a line that I thought I couldn’t cross, or a line you didn’t want to cross, and it was shaped a lot like him. I don’t know if it was just in my head, but there was something holding us back, and I was fine dancing around it because I saw how you felt about him and I understood. Your eyes always changed when you looked at him. When you spoke of him. Even after.

Always after.

Don’t think I’m angry. I’m not blind. I know how much you two meant to each other, and I could never be angry that Suguru is so cherished. Missed. It makes everything so much harder, so much more painful.

Look, in the end, I loved him, and you did, too. And if we both still do, that’s okay. He deserved love. 

I guess it just feels like a stab in the back that it wasn’t enough. 

But life isn’t a fairytale. None of it really matters. To be honest, I wouldn’t trade any of it for a second, and I hope you wouldn’t either. 

Maybe life isn’t supposed to be lived happily, but lived contently. And I did. I am satisfied with what I’ve done, even if I wanted to do so much more. 

I’m so grateful to have known you, to have had you by my side. I hope you can say the same. 

Don’t regret my death. Remember how much fun we had when we were stupid kids, and smile. Because I don’t want you to think your best years are behind you. I want you to be happy, even if I can’t be there to see it. I want you to be excited for your future, even if I can’t be in it.

I’ll always be watching over you, so smile for me every once in a while. Even if it seems like you’ll never feel anything again. One day, I promise you will, and it won’t feel so bad.

Yours forever and ever and ever,

(Name)

.

Throat crushed, he reads one line over and over the most. He’s memorized your letter heart, but he still carries it around with him, anyway.

“I know that I would still long for the day I didn’t feel guilty for loving someone else.”

Sometimes, he just wants to imagine your hand whispering over the page, the pen tapping against your chin, your face as you wrote, the sigh that you said you heaved. Because he’ll never hear you laugh again, see your smile. Your voice will never tease his ear, your fingers will never touch his face. There is no more laugh-wrinkles set in a face always perfectly hit by sunlight, and this is all he has left. His memory, and what you’ve left behind.

It makes him laugh how almost lovestruck stupid he’s being, but… he doubts anyone blames him. As long as he’s still doing his job, as long as he’s still the Strongest, what does it matter if he carries a dead woman’s letter in his pocket everywhere?

“Warm weather, even in the evenings. That’s a bit unusual,” Nanami observes, startling Satoru and he looks up at the blond who stops by him in the gardens. The man is wearing his grey suit, as always, and his watch glimmers in the fading gold light. “How are you?”

Satoru’s fingers tighten around the letter in his hands. As usual, the urge to crumple it up, throw it into the garbage to never see it again, has reared its head after his latest re-read, but he’ll stave it off. He always manages to.

“Fine,” he replies, glancing at the startling blood red and burnt orange leaves casually. Colours seem a bit brighter, and Satoru still squints a bit against them, despite the soft light of the sunset. He doesn’t know when his Six Eyes got so sensitive to that kind of stuff, but it almost feels good to be distracted by something so trivial as sensitive eyesight. “It is a bit warm for October.” 

Nanami hums. “How are your plants doing?”

“Mine are doing good,” he says, smiling. “The tulips have gone dormant, so nothing to worry about there. The one with purple flowers, though. It’s a tough one. It took me a while to figure out what it liked, but it didn’t go dormant or anything as long as I gave it enough water and paid attention to it.”

“That’s good.” Nanami adjusts his green lenses and sighs like he’s bracing himself for something difficult. “Gojo,” he begins, but Satoru merely folds your letter up and slides it into his breast pocket, holding up a hand.

“Whatever you’re going to say, Nanami, I don’t need to hear it.”

“Are you sure?” he asks skeptically, gaze following as Satoru stands, patting his jacket. Adjusting the lapel, he turns to his friend and when he grins, it feels like it reaches his eyes behind his sunglasses for the first time in two months.

“I’ve done this before, Nanami. I’ll be fine.” He waves it away. Nanami frowns. “I’m gonna get some dinner, though. Care to join? There’s a real good ramen place in Ikebukuro that you have to try.” The blond man observes him for a moment, before shaking his head, saying he had dinner already. “Suit yourself. Next time, I’m treating you, though.” 

Lips puckered in a whistle, Satoru turns around and begins to walk away. 

A breeze sweeps through the gardens, rustling the leaves in a discordant harmony, and sneaking into his jacket, sending a slight shiver up his spine as Nanami’s voice follows after him.

“The flower she left you is the sakurasou.” Satoru stops, hands in his pockets, but he doesn’t turn around as Nanami continues, “I wasn’t certain if if you knew.”

“Nope, I didn’t. Thanks for the info.” Lifting a hand, he barely looks over his shoulder before saluting with two fingers and smiling cheekily. It’s not as forced as it used to be. In fact, it comes quite easy as he reaches into his pocket for his phone. He knows what he has to find out now. “See ya later, Nanami.”

“Good evening,” he replies, and in a blink of an eye, Satoru is gone.

On the windowsill of his empty apartment, the sakurasou soaks in the last remnants of the day before wilting against two photos.

One of four students, arms entangled, and faces framed in eternal youth.

And another immortalizing what could’ve been longer than a few shaky months if someone had been just a bit braver.

a/n: satoru’s google search result: the meaning of sakurasou - desire and long-lasting love. 

and yes, there was an actual lunar eclipse on july 27th, 2018 (28th in japan time). it was very pretty. i researched a bit about both the lunar eclipse and the medical stuff, but excuse any inaccuracies! tis but a work of fiction <3 also, fun fact: the polaroid camera is supposed to be the instax mini 90 but ive never used it so excuse those inaccuracies as well SKNDALSDKN

ngl i did wanna write an alternative ending, but i can’t see this ending any other way. this is it. this is the canon, and we got a bit of happy feelies at the end as a treat. thank you for reading!

[fivelakesinwriting]

Night Driving (Drew Starkey)

Author's Notes: This is a continuance of the request Night Swimming - I had so much fun writing that request that I wanted to make a second part, and you all said "heck yes". Here we go. Let me know what you think if you have a moment, please! It's admittedly shorter that Night Swimming, but I don't think it's any less fun and I hope you love it all just the same! xoxo

Warnings: Swearing, sexual references - sexual innuendos, Smutty(ish) - some clothes are removed. Lots of touching, and kissing.

Requested? Yes! You all wanted a sequel, and I couldn't help myself to write one either. Requests for OBX are also very much open.

*My work is not to be transferred, copied, translated or reposted to any other sites without my permission. Please see my masterlist for all other works and warnings. Thank you! xoxo

Drew picked her up for dinner on a mild evening for dinner. He was on time like he always was, pulling up into the driveway with a flash of his high beams at her just to make her smile as she stood on the front porch while she waited for him.

"Hey, good looking." Drew grinned as he hopped out of his truck and took the few shorts steps to stand in front of his girl.

"Hey, handsome." She smiled as she placed her hands on his sides, pressing up on her toes to be closer to his height.

"Ready to go?" Drew asked while he wrapped one arm around her waist, then dropped his head down to press his lips to hers quickly. He smiled softly at her little pout, then led her towards the passenger side of his truck.

Drew opened the door for her, his hand gripped to hers as he helped her into the truck. He raised his eyebrows and felt his conviction to be on time for dinner begin to fade as he saw a flash of her backside under her little skirt. Drew pursed his lips as he shut the door once she was settled safely in the front seat then made his way around to the driver's side, his fingertips brushing over the scruff of his chin as his mind began to race.

"Let's go! I'm so hungry!" She groaned out as she pressed her hands to the roof of his truck, her head against the headrest.

Drew smiled softly as he started the ignition of the truck and made his way back out of the drive, and towards their destination. The drive to the restaurant where everyone else was meeting them felt long. It was a place they all frequented, and Drew knew the route well. But for some reason the drive today felt excruciatingly long.

Drew reached the turn off for the restaurant, but kept driving. His eyes focused on the road as one hand clutched the steering wheel as the other ran his thumb over his bottom lip.

"Wasn't that our turn?" She questioned as she turned her body to look out her window at the passing street sign.

"Gonna take the back roads. Nicer drive. Less traffic." Drew mumbled as he took a quick left turn onto a bumpy, dirt path that had her squealing and reaching for the handle above her window.

"Drew! There's nothing out here! Where are we going?" She replied, her knees pressed together. She reached for the dashboard with one hand as the other kept her white knuckle grip on the handlebar over her window.

Drew didn't say anything in response. He simply kept driving, his eyes fixed on the road ahead of them. A small smile on his face as he heard her squeal again as they hit the larger bumps in the dirt path. He found a spot on the side of the road that was covered by some trees, his truck still somewhat visible in the light of dusk. He pulled over, put the car in park and pulled up the emergency brake just to be sure.

"That is just cruel." Drew stated firmly with a jab of his index finger towards the short, pleated black skirt she wore.

He pulled his keys out of the ignition and dropped them in the cup holder in the centre console. He ran a hand over his chin, his fingertips catching on the scruff of his chin.

"You don't like my skirt?" She asked as her fingertips tugged at the hem of her skirt, the fabric pulling up her thighs a little more.

Drew breathed out a laugh before he reached over to the passenger side, unbuckled her seat belt and grabbed her hips. He pulled her over the console and placed his girlfriend on his lap to make her straddle his thighs.

"I like it a lot, and I think you knew that when you put it on." Drew muttered as he placed his hands beneath the short hem of her skirt on the backs of her thighs.

"This road doesn't go anywhere. Does it, Starkey?" She questioned softly as she combed her fingers through his hair.

"This road? No. Just leads to some guy's fields. It's a dead end." Drew whispered as he turned his face to kiss her wrist, his fingertips creeping up the back of her skirt to feel for her panties.

"If I didn't know any better, I'd think you just kidnapped me so you could fuck me in your truck." She shivered as she felt his fingertips hook into the strap of her thong.

"It sounds bad when you say it like that." Drew teased as he hooked his fingers in the back of her thong, kept them there, and did nothing.

"So, what's it like?" She asked as she wiggled in his lap for more attention. His touch was too light on her backside under her skirt. He was gentle with her, but never feather-light. His touch always had some sense of urgency.

"More like, I took you somewhere pretty to get under your skirt before dinner." Drew grinned as his right hand moved from the strap of her thong and into her hair to pull her close.

"Make your move, Starkey." She challenged as she pulled her short nails down the front of his shirt, her thighs squeezing against his as she held her breath waiting for his kiss.

Drew leaned forward to close the small space between them, his lips pressed to hers. He released a sigh of relief through his nostrils at the feeling of finally kissing her that day. He wrapped his fingers around the long tresses of her hair and gave a small pull, his tongue slipping in her mouth when she whined.

Drew's girlfriend pushed the bottom of his shirt up over his abs, her fingertips pressed into the deep plains of his muscles. He smiled against her mouth as he felt her fingertip move down his abdomen towards the buckle of his belt.

"Let me help." Drew smiled through a heavy breath as he removed his hands from his girlfriend's body and reached between them to pull the prongs of his belt for her. The anticipation and sexual tension in the cab of the truck was almost tangible at that point. Drew wasn't sure who wanted it more.

"Thank you." She sighed with relief as she reached for the button of his jeans only to have her hands swatted away, her body being thrust backwards against the steering wheel which caused her backside to give a prolonged honk on contact.

"Goddamnit, Drew!" She gasped as she jumped forwards, her arms wrapped around his neck and her body flush against his once more.

"Well, sit your ass in my hands and that won't happen again." Drew growled as he reached beneath her skirt to grab hold of her backside in both his palms firmly. He gripped at the flesh of her ass and squeezed, smiling as she dropped her forehead down to his with a pout.

"Kiss me, Starkey." She begged as she adjusted her arms around his neck, her hands combing through his hair again.

"You kiss me first. Everyone knows when I start with you, then I get razzed all night long. You kiss me first, pretty girl." Drew demanded as his hands pulled at the flimsy strap of her thong and he realized with the right twist, he could snap it.

She released a whine from the back of her throat that made Drew feel primal, every carnal instinct in his body being lit like a match. He bared his teeth to her before he grabbed at the back of her neck and pulled her down for a kiss that would no doubt leave both of their mouths hot and swollen.

Drew's free hand pulled at the strap of her thong, doing his absolute best not to tear it into pieces. He tugged it down over the swell over her backside and to her knees, reluctantly removing his lips from hers to look between them to see what he was doing.

Drew adjusted himself in his seat and with an easy lift of the woman in his lap, he tugged her underwear the rest of the way down her legs. He reached up and hung the lace material over his rear view mirror for safe keeping.

A loud honk erupted from around them. Drew pulled his hands from under his girlfriend's skirt and glared at her.

"That wasn't me! I can barely move you're holding me so tight, Drew." She panted as she pulled her hands from his hair to move her own hair from her face.

Drew quickly averted his eyes from her lips, swollen from his kiss and looked into the rear view mirror. Behind his truck was a sedan that he knew all too well.

"There's someone behind us." Drew growled through gritted teeth.

"We were followed? Do you think it's the guy who owns those fields? Drew, farmer's have guns. Big guns." She rambled as she reached for his belt and quickly redid the buckle for him as she tried to look through the tint of his back window.

"It's no one with a gun, Sweetie." Drew soothed, his body relaxing when he realized his reaction to the vehicle behind him had frightened her.

He lifted her up and gently placed her back into the passenger seat of the truck, his fingers reaching up to pull her underwear off of his rear view mirror - which he handed to her with a soft smile.

"Be right back. Put these back on, hon." Drew smiled as he leaned over the console and pressed a quick kiss to her lips before he practically kicked open his door and hopped out of the truck.

Drew stepped on to the dirt road and closed the door harshly behind him, refusing himself a look back at his girlfriend as he pulled her underwear back on. He stood quick, purposeful strides over to the sedan that idled behind his truck and knocked on the window with a closed fist.

"Dude, I swear to god. We followed you because we thought something happened. We saw you take that super hard turn passed the restaurant and come this way." Rudy giggled as he rolled down the window, his lips sucked between his teeth as he stared up at his friend who was less than impressed.

"You can't text?" Drew asked while he shoved his hands in his pockets, his eyes narrowed at the blonde man who still giggled in the front seat.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Next time I'm certain your truck has been stolen, and you and your girlfriend are being held hostage - I won't come save you. Can we go for dinner now? I'm pretty sure the guy that owns those fields has a gun." Rudy replied as he caught his breath.

"You're a fuck." Drew muttered as he held back a smile. He turned on his heel and made his way back to the truck.

"The scenic route. Huh, Starkey?" Rudy yelled out the window of his car before he backed up and drove away, back towards the main road.

Drew shook his head as he opened up the driver's side of his truck and climbed in once more. He gave his girlfriend an apologetic look as he sat back down, fastening his seat belt once more.

"I'm sorry about that." Drew stated softly as he grabbed his keys from the cup holder and stuck them in the ignition again.

"That's okay, Starkey. You can take for a drive after dinner, if you like." She smiled as she sat up on her knees, leaned over the console and pressed a kiss to his cheek.

"Alright. Promise I won't take you near a farmer's field, or where Rudy can find us." Drew smiled as he placed a hand on her thigh once she settled back in her seat, and pulled the truck around and drove back towards the main road.

Please let me know what you think if you have a moment! xoxo

Thank you for your support. Requests for OBX are open!!

@littlementalpolaroids I'm sorry I didn't tag you sooner - if you haven't already seen this!!

[space-mermaid-writing]

The Anchor - Chapter 8 [Doctor Strange x Reader]

Summary: Every Sorcerer Supreme has an anchor. Someone whose magic is compatible with theirs, ensures that he is additionally protected and prevents him from falling prey to evil forces. You grew up in Kamar-Taj and studied the Mystic Arts there, but then you traveled the world looking for a more quiet life, a life away from magic and superheroes. When you return and meet the new Sorcerer Supreme, it soon becomes clear that you share a special connection.

Tags: Slow Burn, Reader is a master of the Mystic Arts, Magic!Reader, spells and magic

Read it on AO3 | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter

Chapter’s Notes: No Beta this week. I‘m actually looking for a new one. DM me if you can help me out.

Also I recommend the Song Hellhound by Shawn James. It does not quite fit the pace of the chapter, but I love it and listen a lot to it when writing this part.

Chapter 8: Hellhound

You dodge the attack of the hellhound and then place your hands on the asphalt floor. With a short spell, the surface begins to soften, and while you remain on solid ground, the animal sinks in with its legs.

Baring its teeth, it howls and snaps at you. It has to use a lot of strength to move forward, and you gain a little time.

You need to lure the hound to Strange so that you can take care of this problem together. Ideally, you'll send it back to where it came from.

You step out into the street, directly into the field of vision of the Hellhound, who is now redoubling his efforts.

The animal looks really scary, its saliva black and slimy. Definitely not recommended as a pet, you think, and wrinkle your nose in disgust.

The beast reaches the edge of your spell and sets a paw on solid ground. You create a portal behind you and leap through it and sideways out of the way as it follows you through.

You roll off the ground and are immediately back on your feet, dodging a second hound that snaps at you from the other side. You stumble a bit, and the beast uses this to attack you again.

Way too late you raise your arms to protect yourself, when golden ropes wrap around the troublemaker and pull him back. He braces himself, baring his teeth and flinging his black saliva at you.

Above him in the air, hovers Stephen and uses all his strength, pulling the beast backwards with the magical ropes.

You hurry to get out of reach and climb onto a bus lying on its side abandoned by its driver and passengers.

"Thanks," you call out to Stephen. He doesn't answer as the hellhound is rearing up, throwing itself on the ground, rolling around, and generally doing everything it can to get free. A bumpy ride for the doctor ensues.

You realize that this hound also has half-open areas on its body, especially on its neck and front legs. There is also a third one whose entire right side is black burned. Concerned, you keep an eye out for civilians who might be targeted by them, when you realize that you've switched to the mirror dimension.

At least one thing less to worry about.

"If we keep the pack in one place, I can perform a ritual to send them back to hell."

Stephen appears floating in mid-air next to you. He has given up on the rodeo and looks grim as he creates a dome-shaped barrier around the hellhounds. It won't last long.

"We need more people for that," you reply, shaking your head. Your arm is scraped and bleeding, but not bad enough to worry you. "I can't take care of all three of them at once and keep them from eating you during the ritual... unless…"

"Unless what?"

"I have an idea, but you won't like it. Can you make sure they don't kill me for the next two minutes?"

Without waiting for an answer, you sit down and speak a longer conjuration.

Strange moves in another direction, but you are too focused to hear his muttered complaint.

Smoke forms around you, briefly obscuring your view, and the familiar smell of sulfur rises. A moment later, you have a warm snout on your face.

"Will you help us, Cal?" you ask the Levion, standing up to pat his neck. "It's urgent, so we can't negotiate for the price, but you'll get a bucket of innards later. I promise."

You get a sneeze in response. That will have to do and you swing onto his back. Now you're much more mobile and a less easy prey.

Callum jumps down from the bus, and you steer him, as best you can without his harness, toward Stephen, who is still busy with his dome.

"I thought there’s a rule against conjuring the Levion in a city," he growls.

"Sorry, I can't hear you under all that noise of panic and destruction," you shout back as you jump on the ground for a moment to repeat the 'the ground is lava' trick from earlier.

Instantly, all three dogs sink their legs into the softening asphalt.

"Okay, I've got them. You can start."

Since you're in the mirror dimension, any damage is inconsequential. Using magic, you retrieve car parts and pieces from buildings to build a fence all around where the magical dome was just seconds ago, hoping to keep the animals inside like a herd of sheep.

Callum, meanwhile, moves in circles around them so you can secure all sides equally.

Strange hovers in the air, sitting, and has begun reciting in a demonic-sounding language with his eyes closed.

You pay no attention to him, as you have enough to deal with the pack before you. One hound fights its way dangerously close to the edge of the field, despite its sunken legs. Callum snaps at him and growls menacingly, whereupon all three hellhounds burst into loud howls.

You steer your mount to the opposite side, create the same glowing golden ropes as Stephen did earlier, and pull the beast back to the center, causing it to fall to the side and now sink in with its body. That's good.

You repeat the whole thing on the next hellhound, which is also about to fight its way free.

"Hurry up, Stephen," you mutter, because you can't keep all three at bay forever.

Fortunately, Strange's incantation is already having an effect, as signs of a ritual circle form on the ground, from which small flames are now flickering.

It's time to send the beasts back to their hell dimension.

You create a shield on your left fist and hit one of the dogs on the snout with it, while Callum bites it in the neck at the same time. The creature yelps and recoils, stepping into the flames. Immediately the yelp turns into a growl, and with horror you see the animal's black saliva start flaring up. Smoke is rising from the nostrils of the others as well.

"Oh crap!"

You forgot about that. You quickly back away as a jet of fire lands where you and Callum were standing two seconds ago.

Another hound aims upward, and you throw your shield up into its path – almost like Captain America. It gets hit, lights up, and then disappears. But Stephen remains safe.

The Sorcerer Supreme has his fingertips together and stretches his arms out to the front. His movements are fluid, and his voice grows louder. Another pair of eyes appears on his forehead, blood red like the eyes of the beasts he is about to banish.

You do your best to intercept the fire of the furious hounds.

Then suddenly they sink even deeper, this time through Strange's work. The flames flare higher and blaze brightly, and then the hellhounds are gone.

It's over.

You breathe a sigh of relief.

You slide off Callum's back and pat the still growling Levion's neck until he calms down.

"Good boy. You've earned your treat."

Stephen floats down beside you, his face now looking normal again with just two regular eyes.

"That was a ride," you say to him. "Do you know how they got here?"

"There was a portal in that parking garage over there when I arrived." He points to the building you tore pieces from. "I sealed it right up, but the question remains as to who opened it."

You nod. Callum sniffs in Stephen's direction, who has kept his distance, eyeing the Levion suspiciously.

"He wants you to thank him," you explain to Strange. "After all, it’s thanks to him, you and I didn't get grilled.”

Strange furrows his brows. "You want me to shake his hand, or what?"

"Sure, that’s a start."

He looks from Levion's two extra claws to his gloves, then hesitantly extends a hand. Callum takes a step toward him, but the Cloak of Levitation wraps around the outstretched arm to protect Strange.

He listens to it and pulls his hand back, to which Callum bares his teeth. You quickly step into his field of vision, drawing his attention.

"He doesn't mean it," you say to the Levion, petting his head until he's calm again. "I'll send you home now, and later we'll meet in Kamar-Taj. There you'll get your reward. What d’you say?"

He nudges your shoulder, and his ears wiggle. "That's what I thought. See you later."

It’s easy for you to transport him back to his own world. Then you turn to Stephen, who has been watching you.

"I'm really knocked out. Let's clean up over here and then go to the Sanctum," you suggest.

He nods in agreement, and you leave the mirror dimension to step back onto the streets of the real New York, which looks far less destroyed.

Strange undoes some major damage, and hopefully the authorities will take care of the rest. After all, there's an entire department that specializes in that.

You're far too tired to walk the few blocks home, so you create a portal. And back in the Sanctum, you drop into the nearest chair.

"Whew, I forgot how exhausting it is to save a city."

Strange also looks tired, but he still cuts a fine figure doing so. It’s the same when he fights, you’ve noticed. It makes him look younger, more alive.

You yawn, glad he can't read your mind.

"You're hurt," he suddenly says.

Your eyes fall to your right arm with the bleeding scrape and you notice that half your sleeve is torn off and a few scratches have been added.

"Nothing serious," you wave it off, but he approaches anyway and sits down on a chair that appears out of nowhere next to yours.

"Take off your jacket," he says.

"You should save that for the bedroom," you joke, but push the fabric off your right shoulder, fully exposing your injured arm. You wear a sleeveless shirt in a similar color underneath, all in Kamar-Taj's signature layered style.

A regular first aid kit appears next to Strange, from which he takes a few things.

He disinfects the wound and also wipes off the dried blood from the rest of your arm. Then he puts a bandage on the arm.

"That should do it."

"Thanks, doctor."

You smile gently. With magic your arm would be like new in a few moments. Maybe you'll even try your old healing spells later. But it's nice that he's taking care of you.

That's when Wong enters the room.

"Where have you been?" you ask him, not without reproach.

"You had the situation under control," he merely explains, then turns to Strange. "No comparable incidents elsewhere. Seems to have been a one-time incident."

Stephen nods and leans back in his chair. He magically creates a stool to put his feet up. "Good." Apparently he doesn’t plan on moving anytime soon.

And though you want nothing more than to lie down and sleep, you still have a promise to keep.

"Do any of you know a good butcher?"

~~

An hour later, you're standing on one of the smaller training areas with a sandy floor, Callum at your side. You haven't bothered to change out of your torn robe.

While you sit on the sand and eat a pizza you got yourself, the Levion digs into the promised bucket of innards you brought him. It’s still fresh, and blood drips off his mouth and onto the ground.

You're glad to have a solid stomach, because it's kinda gross.

Afterwards, Callum curls up at your side, and you pat him with one hand. With the other, you make sure the last slice of your pizza stays out of his reach.

"Good boy! You did a great job today. Showed those hellhounds who the alpha is, didn't you? No, that's my food!"

You push back Levion's little extra claw, which he uses to sneak a nibble of your food. He makes an annoyed sound.

"Didn't you have enough? I went through such trouble to get you the best parts from the butcher.”

You rub his belly and he contentedly puts his little claws on your arm, clawing a little. It scratches your bare skin, but only on the surface. Nothing you can’t endure with some willpower.

"I'm sure you'll make friends with Strange. He's actually quite nice. A bit like you: hard shell, soft core. And even deeper inside, unpredictable."

Callum sneezes because sand has gotten into his snout.

"Yeah, I know," you reply, "We'll go on a ride again next time. But today I'm too tired for it."

---------------------------------

Tagging list: @calsjack, @onebatch--twobatch

[lokiskitten]

Request for @cara-serpens !!

“Loki is tortured, really badly tortured. He may be freed from the avengers and female reader ( which he knows well as she was always friendly to him ) but nobody really cares about his condition. It’s not just injuries and pain, but also pure fear as soon as someone approaches him. Will female readers succeed in making Loki feel safe? Can she take care of his wounds on the body and in the soul and give him a feeling of secureness and comfort? How would he react?”

Loki Laufeyson | gruesome torture

Loki Laufeyson x fem!reader

plot : after finding out that the Avengers have been secretly torturing Loki instead of sending him back to Asgard, you step forward and offer him your help in hopes that he will be able to recover.

warnings : dark!avengers, mention of physical torture, electrocution, mention of open wounds.

Screams of pain echoed through the underground levels of the Avengers’ compound, fuzzy sounds accompanying the groans and whines as you stepped forward through the hallway. You had been originally tasked to check up on the building’s batteries, the box being located a few floors bellow earth- but after hearing such noises you couldn’t help but grow curious but concerned regarding who could’ve been making such sounds. Following the screams, your feet were soon to lead you until a closed door against which you pressed your ear in order to receive confirmation regarding your doubts and chosen path. The screams had to come from the inside of this closed area. Without hesitation, your hand pushed against the metallic door and allowed it to open, shock filling your organism upon stumbling onto such a horrific sight.

None but the Asgardian god of mischief who was known as Loki appeared to be tied down against a metallic table, wrists and ankles restrained by leather straps which held hip back from escaping this gruesome situation. He was receiving electric shocks coming straight from a device locked against his scalp, which had easily led his hair to get messy. However, other form of bruises appeared to cover the rest of his naked body, whether they were sealed or open wounds. By the table’s side stood Tony- visibly enjoying to provide his enemy with pain though it was none but Banner who controlled the entire torture device. Whilst Stark simply wished to see pain and fear reflect in Loki’s eyes, Banner stood there in an uncomfortable manner. You could tell Tony had probably forcefully dragged him into this mess.

You were soon to understand that your leader had lied to all of you- claiming that they had lost Loki through the battle only to be able to sneak him down here in order to make his own justice. But this simply didn’t work out for you. Banner was the first one to notice your presence, though you had to speak up in order to catch Tony’s attention. “What are you doing?” You asked, watching as Iron Man’s head lifted to make eye contact with you. He knew that now was too late to back away, and that his prideful self would have to admit what he was doing without speaking a single lie to you if he wanted to maintain his reputation. “Just giving him a taste of his own medicine.” Tony answered arrogantly, easily leading you to drift off to the doctor in hopes to make this whole thing stop. You were aware that there was no way in hell you would’ve been able to make Tony change his mind.

“Stop this.” You ordered, earning a rather uncomfortable eye contact with Bruce who then looked towards his superior as if he was physically asking him if he was allowed to obey your order. “Banner- if you do this-..” Tony began, only to end up being cut off by your determined self. “Bruce. Whatever he told you, this is not the right way.” You spoke empathetically. Thankfully, your strategy adding up to the doctor’s natural empathy ended up leading the man to stop the electricity from nourishing the machine by pressing on a simple button, both of you earning a head shake from the Avenger standing by the table. “Jesus Christ-“ Tony cursed, feet beginning to lead him towards the controllers though you were soon to stand in his way in order to stop him.

“Does Thor know about this?” You asked, hoping that reminding Tony that Loki’s brother was one of yours would make him change his mind for good. Unfortunately for you, it was rare for Iron Man to ever fear much as his huge ego held him back from doing so. “There’s a lot of things Thor doesn’t know.” Joked the man, rudely underlining the fact that he believed Thor to be a muscular idiot whilst still trying to get past you. But your tough self refused to move, which ended up leading the older man to groan in annoyance. “Fine. Two hours break for him. I wouldn’t want to skip my lunch.” Tony spoke before making his way out of the secret torture room alongside Bruce who appeared to be in pure distress. The doors closed and locked behind you, trapping you in here with poor Loki who was still attempting to recover from this tough step.

He was panting, his chest rising and dropping at quite an incredible rate. You could tell that the demigod was exhausted, and even if he had wrecked havoc around New York, you couldn’t help but feel bad for him. Carefully nearing the table, you watched as droplets of sweat ran down his bare skin- which you soon understood was water that Tony had sprayed around after removing his armor to make sure the electricity would properly pass through his body. His ankles were the first thing you freed, remaining cautious regarding his usually agressive persona. You didn’t want to risk having him put his anger out on you. “I’m gonna free your wrists now, okay? Remember, I’m doing this to help you.” You informed before undoing the upper leather straps.

Unlike what you would’ve expected, Loki’s body simply rolled to the side before falling to the floor and nearly crushing your feet- which he would have if you hadn’t backed away after freeing him. He appeared lifeless, though you could clearly tell that he was breathing due to the weak movements of his back. The poor man simply didn’t have the strength to use his powers nor move any longer- and god knew for how many hours Tony had probably left him here, through pain and torture. You were soon to assume that Loki was probably cold, his wet and bare skin being an awful duo when it came to warmth. “I’ll fetch something to warm you up.” You informed before moving away from his body, walking around the room and seeking for a blanket or other piece of clothing to offer him.

Meanwhile, the demigod found the strength to turn around and look up at your back, surprised that a human such as you who on top of that was part of the avengers would agree to help him. Groaning out of pain as he sat up on his elbows, the raven haired man carried on following each of your steps to make sure you wouldn’t attack him by surprise. Thankfully, you were soon to lay your hands on a blanket, body turning around as you approached Loki’s injured self. However, the demigod surprisingly began to place his hand before his body and lower his head- probably out of fear that you were meant to hurt him again. Besides, humiliation stole away his envy of being touched by anyone at the moment. “Pl- please.. I learned my lesson.. I can’t take anymore of it...” he admitted breathlessly, earning a sigh from you.

“I’m not here to hurt you, Loki. Even if I admit you’d deserve a good beating for wrecking havoc in this city.” You answered, his blue eyes peeking up at you in a shy manner. “It’s just a blanket. See?” You added, raising the large piece of fabric above your chest to make sure he would be able to see it properly. After waiting for a couple of seconds, Loki ended up nodding weakly, visibly agreeing to receive the blanket he was in desperate need of. “Sit up.” You asked him, just in aim to be able to wrap the clothing around his back and keep him warm. However, when the male found himself sitting up on his bum, you couldn’t help but notice the wide scars which adorned his back. They appeared healed. “Is that from Tony?.. they look old-“ You began, only to be stopped by the demigod himself.

“I don’t wanna talk about it.” He responded as his hand rudely took ahold of the blanket, and all of that whilst avoiding eye contact with you. You sighed. “Fine. But looks like I’m trapped in here with you for now.. So the best we can do is remain polite.” You responded wisely before sitting down beside him as Loki wrapped the thick material around his body. It wasn’t the first time you had encountered the demigod, and you had felt surprised to see that he had stolen the Tesseract and attempted to reduce New York to dust. It just didn’t look like something he’d do. Unfortunately, your alliance with the avengers had always held you back from getting to know him better. You two made eye contact for a brief second which allowed you to notice the open wounds on his face and chest- the only part of his body which remained uncovered.

“Will you allow me to get a closer look at those? They might get infected..” you asked, tone lowering just so slightly as you remembered the way his healed scars looked. They didn’t appear as if anyone had taken care of them, which had resulted in a rather healed for sure but bumpy texture. Face to Loki’s lack of response, you decided to take the decision by yourself. Getting up from where you had been sitting, you made your way until the pharmacy cupboard which was part of Bruce’s small handmade lab. You managed to lay your hands on everything you needed- bandaids, alcohol, coton...- which now allowed you to make your way back to Loki. The raven haired man remained suspicious, looking up at you with squinted eyes and following every single one of your steps.

Upon sitting on your knees beside him, you could sense Loki attempting to move further away from you in the most discreet manner- a detail you didn’t bother to speak up about. You could understand he felt afraid and uncertain, but you were willing to prove to him that you meant ho harm or whatsoever. “Just a little bit of alcohol on a piece of coton will do just right.” You explained through your steps, keeping Loki informed of every move just like doctors did with young children. “It might sting a little, but I assume a tough guy like you went through worst, Mmh?” You joked before your hand gently started to approach Loki’s face, the man’s head backing away as you tried to reach his skin. It annoyed you.

“I’m afraid you’re gonna have to make efforts too, because otherwise we’re still gonna be here when Tony would have finished his lunch.” You explained, underlining that him constantly backing away could lead this cleaning process to take hours. After hearing this sentence, Loki’s head finally ceased to move away though his blue eyes remained on you- orbs shooting daggers and body getting ready to intervene if you ever attempted to backstab him and bring him harm. “Breath in.” You asked empathetically before allowing the alcohol coated coton to gently collide with the bruise on his nose. The poor boy winced loudly, his entire body tensing up as your arm went motionless. “I’m sorry.” You spoke, leading Loki’s eyelids to open.

“Sorry?..” he asked whilst making eye contact with you, his calm self now allowing your hand to take care of his face without letting go a single sound. “Yeah. Why?” You carried on discussing with him, believing that it was a good way of distracting his brain from the pain. Loki’s eyes looked away, orbs growing moist as he bit down on his gum. The truth was, no one had ever apologized for manhandling or neglecting him- and hearing you say such a thing to him had honestly reached and pierced through his heart within a matter of seconds. He couldn’t help but remember the horrors Thanos made him go through before he arrived in New York, and the constant conflicts with his father. However, his pride held him back from thanking you or allowing his tears to go down.

“There you go. All cleaned up.” You informed once you had finally finished to clean his face, this statement dragging Loki out of his painful thoughts. You got up from where you had been sitting in order to throw the dirty pieces of coton away and put the rest of the medical furnitures back in their place, and all of that whilst Loki allowed himself to get lost in his thoughts again. “This might cause a civil war, but I’ll inform you brother that you’re here as soon as I can.” You notified as the demigod finally found the strength to get up to his feet- blanket wrapped around his waist- though he still had to lean against the table for support. Is this what empathy feels like? The demigod asked himself as he continued to stare into the void. After such a long time spent by himself, he had forgotten about the many assets of friendship.

You kept Loki company until Tony finally unlocked the room for you to exit. Not once had the demigod thanked you for what you did and were about to do for him, and yet you still felt guilty about leaving him in Tony’s hands until you were able to find the god of thunder. However, for the first time ever, you had been able to distinguish fear and gratitude through Loki’s wealthy orbs.

I’m so sorry this took a while to write! Was having a writer’s block. But here it is now! I hope you was able to enjoy it❤️ take care.

special tag for my best friend @devilsuga who I’d heal and protect on my life if I had to.