about me ₊‧꒰ა 🎀 ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ :

୨୧ ⊹ ࣪ ˖ 🩰 ⋆ ₊ ⟡ : currently obsessed with jjk, gachiakuta, solo leveling, and blue lock ♡ please send recommendations my way! i love discovering new series, even though i only write for jjk (for now… )

🎀 ⌇ masterlist⁠ ˖ ࣪⊹ 𝓻𝔂𝓸𝓶𝓮𝓷 𝓼𝓾𝓴𝓾𝓷𝓪

series: 𐙚 out of bounds [baseball player!sukuna × libero!reader] status: unpublished ♡ will return after revisions. | more coming soon..

oneshot: 𐙚 july, and its aftermath [angst] | 𐙚 papa!kuna vs his pregnant waddling wife | 𐙚 boyfriend!sukuna vs your animal crossing island | 𐙚 ruin the friendship w/ bsf!sukuna | 𐙚 the day sukuna realizes he needs to marry you | 𐙚 sukuna vs girl math | 𐙚 beach day | 𐙚 how sukuna proposes to you | 𐙚 babe? no! i’m mom!

🎀 ⌇ masterlist⁠ ˖ ࣪⊹ 𝓰𝓸𝓳𝓸 𝓼𝓪𝓽𝓸𝓻𝓾

series: 𐙚 just friends (don’t do what we do) [friend!satoru × reader] status: ongoing ♡

oneshot: 𐙚 all the times gojo satoru tricks his wife into spending his money | more coming soon..

🎀 ⌇ masterlist⁠ ˖ ࣪⊹ 𝓶𝓾𝓵𝓽𝓲

oneshot: lunch break fight club | more coming soon..⁠

all stories on this blog are written by paxyfica | please do not repost, translate, or plagiarize my works. sharing links is always welcome ⋆𐙚₊˚ | sukuna art is from @lacquerheadd + dividers from @dollywons 💌

not for ai training, machine learning, or automated content generation. © paxyfica ♡ all rights reserved 🩰

Hello, everyone. 💛

I just wanted to let you all know that I’ll be going on hiatus for a little while due to my grandpa’s passing. I’ve moved all of my queued posts back to drafts because it just doesn’t feel right to post anything at the moment.

Thank you so much for all the love you’ve shown my silly little fics—it truly means a lot to me. I’ll be back once I’m feeling a bit better.

Take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you again soon. 🤍

BITCH WHAT THE FUCK THEY JUST CANCELLED VALKO IM LITERALLY FUMING AS FUCK WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCKING FUCK!!!!!!!

I js started playing LADS not even a week ago because of him and now i must uninstall, FUCKING FUCKKKKKK BRING MY MANS BACK!!!

wc: 4.3k | series masterlist

chapter 1: studio chairs 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🫐⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚

You spent the first two weeks of the semester doing absolutely nothing but tiptoeing around your new blockmates. The Graphics and Design major was tight-knit. Everyone had already trauma-bonded over crashed Adobe files, sleep deprivation, and brutal critiques during their freshman year. Coming in as the new kid meant you were stepping into a pre-established ecosystem, and honestly, you just wanted to get your degree and get out without stepping on anyone’s toes.

So, you kept your head down. You wore your headphones, drank your iced coffee, and sketched in the back of the studio.

That was until Typography, when the professor decided to enforce assigned seating.

pairing: gojo satoru x fem!reader | cw/tags: 18+ mdni, heavy cursing/explicit language, alcohol consumption/drunkenness, jealousy, miscommunication, heavy makeout sessions, suggestive themes, idiot Gojo Satoru, yearner Gojo Satoru, touch-starved idiots, heavy banter.

chapter index | chapter 1: studio chairs 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🫐⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ | chapter 2: library notes 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🫐⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ | chapter 3: creep repellant 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🫐⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ | chapter 4: game of chicken 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🫐⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ | chapter 5: collateral damage 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🫐⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ | chapter 6: blockade 𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🫐⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧˚ | chapter 7: lovesick

authors note: in honor of the s4 trailer release (and my husband's near unsealing.. i present you this!) This series is already 100% finished! All chapters are queued and will be posted every 7 days, so you won’t be left hanging. | art by: @/9enesiass & divider by: @/bbyg4rlhelps

taglist: Let me know in the replies, asks, or tags if you want to be added to the tag list so you get notified the second a new chapter drops!

© all rights reserved — paxyfica ♡ do not repost, translate, or modify without permission. not for ai training, machine learning, or dataset use.

The invitation arrives on a Tuesday.

That's the thing that gets you—not the invite itself, but the day. It's not a Friday, when you could blame the wine you poured too early. It's not a Sunday, when the quiet of your apartment already has a way of sitting heavy on your chest. It's a Tuesday morning. You're barely through your second cup of coffee, still wearing the hoodie you slept in, when your phone lights up with a notification from the college groupchat—that ancient, barely-alive groupchat that only ever resurfaces for birthdays and Gojo's completely unsolicited life updates.

ryomen sukuna has sent an image.

You stare at the preview for a long moment before you open it.

You are cordially invited to the wedding of Sukuna Ryomen and Yorozu on July 18th.

The coffee goes cold. You set the phone face-down on the table, pick it back up, set it down again. The second time, you look a little longer. Somewhere in the groupchat, someone has already sent the confetti emoji. You don't look to see who.

You're still sitting at the same table—same apartment, same city—when your phone buzzes again. Not the groupchat this time.

ryomen sukuna: hey.

You know that number by heart. You've known it for ten years. You've never deleted it. Never considered it, the same way you don't think about knowing your own birthday or which drawer you keep the scissors in.

you: hey.

The reply comes fast, like he'd been watching the screen.

ryomen sukuna: i wanted to tell yu before you saw it in the chat but shoko said i was overthinking it and gojo said just rip the bandaid so. there's the bandaid.

You almost laugh. Almost.

you: classic gojo advice.

ryomen sukuna: yeah well. look. i sent the invite because we've known each other for a vert long time. and everyone's going. the whole circle. but it's completely okay if you're not comfortable. i mean that. no pressure.

You read it twice. No pressure.

Twelve years of knowing someone; two years of tiptoeing like the 15-year old you both are. eight of loving them, two years and six months of learning how to breathe without them—and he can still put together the exact combination of words that make everything worse.

you: is it okay with yorozu?

ryomen sukuna: she's the one who told me to make sure you got an individual invite.

You put the phone down.

Pick it back up.

you: then i'll be there.

Three dots. They disappear. Come back.

ryomen sukuna: okay. good.

That's it. That's the whole conversation. You close the chat, put your phone in your pocket, and get ready for work like it's just another Tuesday.

---

July 18th arrives the way these things always do—too fast and somehow not fast enough.

Yorozu is breathtaking. You'd seen photos—you follow Sukuna on Instagram the way you follow a weather app, rarely and only when the anxiety about not knowing feels worse than actually knowing—but photos hadn't prepared you for the reality of her. She's the kind of woman who carries a room without trying. Her dress is simple and devastating in equal measure. Her laugh carries across the ceremony hall without effort. And the way she looks at him when she comes down that aisle is so uncomplicated, so completely without reservation, that it makes something in your chest go complicated in response.

You look at your hands.

You look back up.

Sukuna, two years and six months out of your life, looks exactly the same. You'd been afraid of that, secretly—afraid he'd be so changed he'd feel like a stranger, afraid he'd be unchanged and you'd feel like a fool. He's the same. Older, maybe. More settled into himself. But him. The impossible posture. The red eyes that don't give anything away until they give everything away. The way he stands like the space around him belongs to him.

You keep your hands folded in your lap and watch someone else marry the person you'd once mapped your whole future onto, and you do not fall apart, because you promised yourself you wouldn't.

---

The reception is the easier part, because there's noise, and noise is always a mercy.

You're at the round table with the full circle—Gojo already on his third glass of something sparkling and getting elaborate about it, Geto watching him with the fond, exhausted patience of a man who has been doing this for twenty years, Choso and Shoko deep in what sounds like an argument about the seating arrangement, Nanami radiating stillness in the way Nanami always does, Utahime fixing her earring with focused precision—and you settle in like you never left.

"Okay, but whose idea was it to put the cousins next to the college friends table," Shoko is saying, "because I have been making sustained, uncomfortable eye contact with someone in a cow print neck tie for the last twenty minutes."

"That's called networking," Gojo says.

"That's called being victimized."

"His name is Ryu, he's Yorozu's second cousin apparently," Choso offers, helpfully. "He's very nice. He works in finance."

"Of course you did." Shoko points at him. "You're immune to social discomfort. You have no fear response."

"I don't understand what's scary about eye contact," Choso says, and he genuinely doesn't, which is the most Choso thing possible.

Nanami sets down his fork with the quiet deliberateness of a man who has made peace with the company he keeps. "It's a social anxiety thing."

"Oh." Choso nods. "Okay. That makes sense."

You're laughing—genuinely, actually laughing—and the table is warm and the champagne is cold and for one merciful minute, everything is just fine.

And then the music shifts.

The lights dim slightly. A spotlight catches the center of the floor. Someone taps a microphone.

"Would the groom and bride please take the floor for their first dance?"

Gojo keeps talking. Shoko keeps scrolling. The table doesn't go dramatically silent—it's not that kind of moment. But something in the room realigns, and your eyes find the dance floor before you give them permission.

Sukuna leads Yorozu to the center like he was built for exactly this. And she says something to him—quiet, just for the two of them—and his whole face does something.

Not a polite smile. The real one. The one underneath everything, the one you had to earn over months and years, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and meant he'd actually let his guard down for five full seconds. You'd thiught you were one of maybe three people in the world who'd ever gotten that smile.

An entire lifetime flashes behind your eyes.

You're seventeen again, a senior in highschool, in the parking lot behind the school. The two of you have been dancing around something that's been building since sophomore year. You'd both been ridiculous about it—tiptoeing and pretending and memorizing each other's schedules while pretending you weren't. And then one afternoon he'd just stopped walking. Turned around. And said, with all the casual certainty of someone who had never once in his life been unsure of himself, "are you gonna keep doing this or are you gonna let me take you somewhere?"

Freshman year of college, same school, which had felt like a private victory you weren't supposed to celebrate out loud. Sneaking out of dorms at midnight. Lying to your parents about whose house you were sleeping at. Taking the long route back from everything, always, because walking meant more time and leaving always felt like giving something up. You were nineteen and completely gone for each other and completely convinced that you were being subtle about it, and you were not.

"Hey."

A hand folds over yours.

Utahime is watching you. Her expression is careful—brows slightly drawn, mouth just slightly pressed—and you understand that you have been somewhere far away in your own head for a minute now.

"You good?"

"Yeah," you say, and you even manage a smile. "Yeah. I'm good."

She doesn't let go of your hand right away. She holds it for one more beat before she does, and then the music shifts again to something uptempo and someone announces the garter toss and Gojo is already on his feet hollering something that makes Nanami pinch the bridge of his nose with two fingers, and the table erupts, and you laugh, and you refill your champagne.

You stay in the present. You promised yourself you would. But the champagne is only so effective.

By the time the photographer herds all thirty of you into position for group shots—the casual chaos of trying to organize people who collectively have never followed a single direction in their lives—the memories are bleeding through the edges whether you want them to or not.

Senior year. That small 1-bedroom apartment, you moved in 4 months before graduation.

God, that apartment.

You'd been so proud of yourselves. Five years together, and you'd finally signed a lease, finally handed over a deposit, finally stood in an empty room that was yours. You had nothing in it but an air mattress from the discount place and an induction cooker, and you'd stood in the middle of the bare floor and felt like you'd conquered something enormous.

You remembered sitting cross-legged with a pizza box between you, looking around at the exposed brickwork and the single overhead light and the mattress that was already, now that you looked at it, doing something suspicious.

"Welp," you'd said. "There goes our money." Sukuna had looked at you. Then at the room. Then started laughing—that chest-deep one that meant he'd actually been caught off-guard.

"We'll be fine."

"We have literally nothing."

"We have the mattress."

"The mattress looks like it's planning something against us."

"Then we go down together. Very romantic." He'd leaned over and stolen your last slice of pizza without any hesitation. "We start job hunting next week. Figure it out. We always do."

That night, on the mattress that slowly deflated over three hours until you were essentially both sleeping on the floor, you'd laughed until your stomach hurt, and then it had stopped being funny, and then you'd talked in the dark about the future like it was a country you could already clearly see.

"We need a dog," you'd said.

"Obviously. Small. Completely vicious. Loyal only to us."

"When we've saved enough—"

"You stay home," he'd said, quieter, his fingers moving through your hair. "I'm serious. I want that. You stay home, take care of the dog, I handle the rest."

"That's dangerously traditional of you."

"I'm a dangerously traditional man."

"You're insufferable."

"Your insufferable man."

He'd kissed you then—or you'd kissed him, you could never actually tell who moved first—and the mattress had finally surrendered to the floor entirely, and you'd both dissolved into laughter for the last time before it became something else. Something slow and unhurried. Your first night in a place that was just barely, finally, yours.

"Hi!" You blink. Yorozu is standing in front of you, bright-eyed and completely genuine, a bride in the last stretch of formal photos, and you have approximately one second to get your face organized.

"Hi," you say, and you mean it, which surprises you a little. She takes both your hands in hers—this woman you have never met before today, this woman who married the man you loved—and squeezes them like she already knows you.

"I'm so glad you came," she says. "I really mean that."

"Me too," you say. You mean that too.

"He talks about everyone in the group so much," she says. "I feel like I've known you all for years. In the best way."

"Good things, I hope." She laughs, bright and uncomplicated. "Only good things, I promise." Behind her, Sukuna catches your eye over her shoulder. He offers you a tight, careful smile. You return it.

The photographer calls everyone back. You get through the photos.

---

The ride to the lakehouse is Shoko and Utahime in active dispute over the aux cord and you in the backseat watching the city dissolve into suburban streets into dark country roads.

"Okay but you," Shoko says, spinning around in the passenger seat with the energy of someone who has been waiting all night for the right moment. "Love life. What's happening. I need something."

"She's not actually asking out of concern," Utahime says.

"I'm asking out of a combination of genuine care and personal entertainment, and I don't see why those have to be mutually exclusive." Shoko fixes you with a look. "Well?"

"I'm working on it," you say.

"That's the most nothing answer I've ever heard in my life."

"Thank you."

"Is there a person?"

"There's a situation."

"Those words don't mean anything together."

"They mean what I said." You look back out the window. "I'm working on it."

Shoko makes a noise of profound dissatisfaction and faces front again. Utahime glances at you in the rearview mirror—just once, quick, with an expression that is careful and kind in equal measure—and you look out the window before she can make it into a moment.

The trees are dark shapes on either side of the road. Stars out here, away from the city light. You watch them and think about the quiet architecture of an ending. How it never announces itself. How it builds in the gaps—between dinner conversations, in silences that have stopped being comfortable, in the way you stop reaching for someone because your hands keep coming back empty.

The year after graduation, both of you are still in the apartment. Both employed, both trying, both doing everything you can to build a life together. You had always thought living together would bring you closer than ever. And for a while, it did. But one year and four months after moving in, you realized something no one ever tells you: when two people are genuinely trying to make life work, their priorities begin to shift.

The shared meals became less frequent. Overtime hours piled up. Movie nights—a ritual you had kept even back when you were university students sneaking out together—eventually faded into memory. You tried to communicate. You told him how the distance between you somehow felt bigger than ever, even though you shared the same home.

So the two of you decided that maybe things would be easier if you quit your job. You had been talking about wanting a fresh start anyway, and your boss had been making you miserable for months. He apologized for how things had become and promised that you could go back to work whenever you were ready. He told you he had the two of you covered.

And he did.

For exactly three weeks, it worked.

When he came home, dinner was already on the table. Movie nights returned. There were conversations again, quiet moments spent together, and for the first time in months, you allowed yourself to think that maybe—just maybe—quitting your job had been the right choice.

But exhaustion has a way of catching up to people.

Trying to make a living, trying to build a career, trying to make sure the bills were paid—it was all slowly creeping up on him. And no matter how much he wanted to carry the weight for both of you, even he was beginning to feel it.

By second year, it was quiet. It was a routine. You were roommates at best, and then Sukuna's father had died, and you'd watched someone you loved go somewhere you couldn't follow. You knew he was trying. You could see it. But grief doesn't negotiate, and what it wanted with Sukuna was all of him—and what was left wasn't enough to fill a space meant for two. He'd worked more. Talked less. And you'd held the apartment together with both hands and called it love and kept going, and you'd been wrong about what that was going to mean.

By year three, you were ghosts of yourselves. Haunting the same space.

The car turns down a long gravel drive. The lakehouse is lit up ahead. Gojo's car is already there, horn honking twice in greeting like a summons.

You come back.

You smile.

---

The after-party is, genuinely, fun.

Fewer than thirty people in a lakehouse that could fit twice that. A playlist that walks the line between wedding-adjacent and something you'd hear at a bar at midnight. The drinks are good. Choso discovers he has an uncanny gift for darts and approaches it with absolute seriousness, which is both impressive and deeply funny. Gojo loses at everything and has not a single shed of shame about any of it. Nanami makes one glass of wine last the entire evening and somehow remains the most serene person in every room.

You let yourself have it. You dance witth Shoko and Utahime to something with a good chorus. You lose twelve dollars to Choso at cards because you underestimated him, which is a mistake you will not make twice. At some point you end up on the dock with Geto, both of you sitting with your legs hanging over the edge, looking at the water, the silence between you easy in the way it only is with certain people.

"You're handling this well," he says, eventually.

"Don't," you say.

"I was just—"

"You have your thing voice on. The voice where you're about to say a thing."

He considers this. "Fair." He takes a sip of his drink. "I'll let it go."

"Thank you."

"For the record, though."

"Geto."

"I know." He looks at the lake. "Just—for the record."

You lean back on your hands and look at the dark water and let it be.

---

Around midnight, the party has the quality of a good night in its final hours—slower, the music quieter, everyone gravitating toward their people. You slip out to the back porch.

You're not a habitual smoker. You picked it up somewhere in the last two years, the way you pick up habits when you're filling space you don't know what else to do with. You tap a cigarette out of the soft pack in your clutch, light it, and you're most of the way through it when the door opens behind you.

You know who it is before you turn around. Something about the particular way he takes up space even when he's trying not to.

"Hey," Sukuna says.

"Congrats," you say.

He comes to stand beside you at the railing. Leaves distance between you—reasonable, deliberate. The lake is a dark mirror below. The dock lights catch the surface in pale strips.

"You smoke now," he says. Not quite a question.

"Sometimes."

"Since when?"

"A while." You finally look at him, sideways. "Is that your small talk?"

He almost smiles. "I don't know what version of this is small talk."

"Yeah," you say. "Me neither." You both look at the water.

You notice he isn’t watching the TV.

That’s the first thing. The show has been on for forty minutes and the volume is low the way you keep it now—low enough to fill the room without demanding anything from either of you—and somewhere between the second and third episode you realize the light from the screen isn’t reflecting off his eyes the way it usually does when he’s actually watching.

He’s watching you.

You pretend not to notice. You pick at the last of the takeout with your chopsticks and keep your eyes on the screen and try to remember the last time the two of you sat through something together and actually talked about it after. You can’t. The thought arrives quietly, the way all the worst thoughts do now—just settles into the space between your ribs like it’s been there for a while and is finally getting comfortable.

Three years in this apartment.

Three years of a life you built from an air mattress and a single induction cooker and a stupid dream about a small, vicious dog that never happened.

The first year had been good. Genuinely good—the kind of good that felt like proof, like see, we were right, we were always right about this. The second year had started the same way. And then his father had died on a Thursday in March, and something in Sukuna had gone somewhere you couldn’t follow, and you’d spent the better part of twelve months watching the man you loved move through the apartment like a ghost who’d forgotten what he was haunting.

He was trying. You knew he was trying.

But trying and being here are not the same thing, and you’d learned the difference slowly, in the dark, lying next to someone who was already somewhere else.

“What?” you say, finally, because you can feel him still looking and pretending you can’t is suddenly exhausting.

He doesn’t answer right away. Sukuna has always done this—taken his time with things he actually means. You used to love it. You still love it. You love him. That’s never been the question.

"She's wonderful," you say, because it needs to be said and because you mean it.

He's quiet for a moment. "Yeah," he says. "She is."

"I'm glad." And you are—the complicated, true version of glad that holds grief and sincerity in the same hand. "Really. She's good for you."

"You don't have to—"

"I know I don't have to." You tap ash over the railing. "I'm saying it because it's true. That's allowed."

He looks at you then, and you can feel it before you turn to meet it. Twelve years of knowing someone gives you a map of them you can read in the dark.

"You look good," he says, quiet.

"Sukuna."

"I'm just saying. That's allowed too, right?"

You hold his gaze for a second. "Sure."

A beat. Then: "How are you? Actually."

"I'm fine."

"That's what you always say."

"Because it's what I am."

"You're on my back porch at twelve-fifteen, smoking alone."

"Your wife's lakehouse porch," you correct. "And you followed me out here, so if we're keeping score—"

"I know," he says.

The lake does its thing. Somewhere inside, something crashes—based on the immediate cascade of other voices, probably Gojo—and you both almost smile at the same time.

He reaches forward and sets his takeout carton down on the coffee table.

Then he reaches into the pocket of his sweatpants.

You see the velvet box before you understand what you’re looking at. Small. Dark. He doesn’t get down on one knee. He doesn’t clear his throat or build to it or give you anything to hold onto. He just sets it on the table and pushes it—slowly, with two fingers—until the corner of it nudges against your chopsticks.

The TV keeps going. Someone is laughing on screen.

“Let’s stop playing house,” he says.

The air leaves the room.

You look at the box. You look at his face. You look at the box again.

And something cold and specific starts moving up through your chest—not joy, not the specific species of joy you have spent eight years imagining for this exact moment—but panic. Pure and clear and devastating. Because this is the moment. This is the moment you have wanted since you were twenty-two years old sitting on a deflating air mattress and he was kissing your temple and talking about the future like it was already decided. This is the moment.

And all you can see, looking at that box, is the next fifty years.

Not the good version. Not the version you used to picture. The version that’s been building quietly for the last twelve months—the long silences over dinner, the way you’ve started sleeping on your side of the bed with an invisible boundary between you, the way you’ve stopped reaching for him in the mornings because it feels like reaching for someone who’s already left. The version where you say yes and you move the ring from the box to your hand and nothing actually changes, because the problem was never the absence of a ring.

You would be so alone, something in you says. You would be so alone, and you would call it a marriage.

"Can I ask you something," he says.

"Don't."

"I'm not trying to—I just need to know something, and then I won't. I promise."

You wait.

"Do you regret it?"

You look at him. The complicated expression underneath the surface—the one that means he's actually saying something instead of performing it.

"Which part?" you ask.

"Any of it."

You flick the spent cigarette over the railing and watch it fall. "I regret how it ended," you say carefully. "I don't regret what it was."

He swallows. "Okay."

"Okay," you say. Another silence. This one is different from the others—softer, maybe. Or just tired, in a way that's finally allowed to be.

“Sukuna…” Your voice comes out wrong. Too small. Too broken.

His brow pulls together. He was expecting something else—you can see it, the way the certainty shifts on his face. He was so sure. He’d done the math in his head and arrived at a foregone conclusion and he is staring at you now like you’re a problem he suddenly can’t solve.

“Open it,” he says. “You don’t even know what it looks like.”

“I can’t—” You stop. Start again. “We can’t.”

“Can’t what?” His voice is still steady. Still him. That’s the thing that breaks you—that he’s still so completely himself right now, so contained, while you are sitting here watching eight years build up behind your eyes. “Baby, just look. This is what we always talked about.”

“I know.”

“Then look at the box.”

“Sukuna, I can’t marry you.”

The sentence lands like something dropped from a height. You watch him absorb it. Watch the steadiness take the hit and hold, barely, the way a structure does right before it starts to give.

“What?” Low. Almost inaudible.

“I can’t.” Your voice is shaking now. You hate it. You hate that you’re crying before he even is, hate that your body is doing this before you’ve had the chance to say any of the things you need to say. “You’re doing this because you know—you know it’s done, and you’re trying to fix it, and I love you for that, I love you, but I can’t—this isn’t—”

“Stop.” He says it quietly. “Stop. Look at me.”

You look at him.

“I know,” he says. “Okay? I know I’ve been—” He stops. Pressess his mouth together. Tries again. “I know. And I’m sorry. I know I’ve been somewhere else and I know it’s been—I know what it’s been. But I’m trying. I am trying right now. Is that not enough to—”

“It’s not about trying.”

“Then what is it about?”

“It’s about the fact that you need help.” The word comes out rougher than you meant it. “Not me. Not a ring. Not something to hold onto that just—papers over it and gives us something to plan for so we don’t have to look at each other. You need to talk to someone. A real person. Even before you lost him, it was failing. We were trying, but it kept on failing. The you lost your dad, Kuna, you lost your dad and you just—you went back to work, and you never—”

“Don’t,” he says, and there’s an edge to it now.

“I’m not trying to—”

“Don’t do that. Don’t make this about my dad.”

“It is about your dad.” You’re not yelling. Neither of you are yelling. That’s the thing about eight years with someone—you learn how to devastate each other at a perfectly conversational volume. “It was about our dreams a year before that, then It’s been about your dad the year after and I have watched you carry it alone and I have tried to be there and I have tried to reach you and I don’t—I can’t anymore. I don’t have anything left.”

Silence.

The TV laughs again.

“Then let me do better.” His voice has changed. The edge is gone. What’s underneath it is worse. “That’s why I’m doing this. That’s what this is. I want to do better. I want to—fuck.” He pushes a hand through his hair. Presses it against his mouth for a second. When he looks at you again his eyes are red. “Please just—please. Marry me. We figure it out, we’ve always figured it out, just—please.”

You have never heard him say please like that. That’s what does it. Not the box, not the question, not the ring you still haven’t looked at—his voice, on that word, like he’s handing something over that he doesn’t know how to carry anymore. Like he’s finally, finally putting something down.

"I did the thing," he says. "That you told me to do. The help thing."

"I know. Shoko told me." You pause. "I'm glad."

"It took a while."

"The important things usually do."

He nods. Looks at his hands on the railing. His wedding ring catches the light. "I thought about calling you," he says. "When I got back from my mom's. A few times."

"Why didn't you?"

He thinks about it—actually thinks, the way he always did when he was taking a question seriously rather than just answering it. "Because I think I needed to not," he says. "Does that make sense?"

"Yeah," you say. "It does."

You are already crying. You’ve been crying, you realize, for longer than you noticed.

“I will always love you,” you say, and you mean it. You will mean it for the rest of your life. “I will love you until I don’t know how to do anything else. But I cannot save you. I tried. Look at us—just look at where we are and tell me that me saying yes tonight changes any of it.”

“I’ll go to therapy.”

“Kuna—”

“I’ll go. Tomorrow. I’ll call someone tomorrow. Just—”

“You’re saying that right now.”

“Because I mean it right now!”

“You’ve meant it before,” you say softly, and that lands harder than anything else, you can see it, you can see the moment it lands. “You’ve meant a lot of things. And I believe you—I genuinely believe you—but believing you isn’t the same as it being true yet. And I can’t bet the rest of my life on yet.”

He goes very still.

You look at the man you have loved since you were seventeen years old. The man whose number you memorized before you even admitted to yourself that you wanted to. The man who put stars on the ceiling of this apartment because you’d had a bad week and he wanted you to have something to look at in the dark. The man who stole your last slice of pizza and called it romance and made you feel, for years, like you were exactly where you were supposed to be.

You break his heart.

You do it as gently as you know how, which is not gently at all, because there is no gentle version of this.

“No,” you whisper. “I can’t marry you. Not now. Not like this.”

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t throw the box. Doesn’t raise his voice. Sukuna has always been better at stillness than you are—has always known how to contain himself, how to pull everything behind his eyes when he doesn’t want you to see it.

But you see it.

You’ve always been able to see it.

The light going out, slow and specific, like watching something you love get very far away very fast while you stand completely still.

The silence goes on long enough that you have to be the one to break it.

“If you do it,” you say, carefully. “If you go. If you actually get the help—” Your throat closes. You push through it. “I’ll wait. I said I would and I meant it. I will always—”

“Don’t.” His voice is barely sound. “Don’t say that if you don’t mean it.”

“I mean it.”

He looks at you. His eyes are wet. You have seen Sukuna cry exactly twice in eight years and both times it was for his father and both times he turned away first. He doesn’t turn away now.

“And if I do?” he says. “If I go and I get the help and I’m—better. Will you wait for me?”

I will, you think. I will wait and I will mean it and it will be the realest thing I have ever said.

“I will,” you say. “I will always. But right now I can’t save you. I tried, Kuna. I tried so hard. And look at where we are.”

He sniffled, and looked down. “So this is it, right?” Tilting his head up, you saw how his bloodshot eyes are looking around. Not at the apartment. Not at the box still sitting between you on the table, unopened, still holding something you never let yourself see. He looks at you—long and exhausted and full of something that doesn’t have a name yet, something that will need years to become whatever it’s going to become.

Then you nods. Once. The smallest possible motion.

You both sit there for a long time after that, in the apartment you built together, with the takeout going cold and the TV still going and the stars on the bedroom ceiling you’ve both stopped thinking about, and neither of you says anything, because there isn’t anything left to say.

The box stays on the table.

You never open it.

You never find out what it looks like.

You straighten off the railing. Adjust the strap of your clutch.

"I should go back in."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for inviting me." And you mean all of it—the complicated whole of it. "I know it wasn't a simple call to make."

He starts to say something. You can see it—the way his mouth starts forming a word before he pulls it back. He just nods instead.

You turn toward the door.

"Hey—" Your name in his voice, the exact specific way he's always said it, like it carries more weight than names are supposed to carry. "Just—"

"Don't," you say, and it's gentle. It really is. "It's your wedding night, Kuna."

A pause that lasts a second too long.

"Yeah," he says. "Okay."

You push through the door and back into the warmth and the noise, and you do not look back. You find Utahime and Shoko and insert yourself between them without explanation, and Utahime puts an arm around your shoulders without a word, and Shoko hands you her drink, and you take it, and that is that.

---

By one-thirty, the party is winding down in the way good parties do—gradually, and then all at once.

The circle does the rounds. Gojo squeezes you hard enough that you briefly lose your breath and have to tell him to stop before you both fall over. Geto's hug is longer than it is tight. Choso goes for a fist-bump, immediately reconsiders, switches to a hug, and then does both in quick succession. Shoko kisses your cheek and makes you promise to text tomorrow. Utahime holds your hands again, one last time, and doesn't say anything, because she doesn't have to.

Nanami says, "Text when you're home," adjusts his coat with quiet precision, and goes to get his car.

And then there's the couple. The circle moves toward them for the final goodbye, and somehow you end up at the front, which means you go first.

Yorozu opens her arms and you hug her, and she's warm, and she smells like something expensive and floral, and you feel—briefly, overwhelmingly—the specific and exhausting clarity of understanding completely why he chose her. She is everything that makes sense. She is uncomplicated in all the ways this night has not been.

"So happy you were here," she says into your shoulder.

"Thank you for wanting me to be," you say, and you mean it.

She pulls back, smiling. Steps sideways to say goodbye to Shoko, and then it's just you and Sukuna. The circle is right there—all of them, technically occupied with their own conversations, technically not watching.

He’s gone in two days. Quietly, the way he does everything that costs him.

Grocery store boxes. Tape from the hardware place down the block. His half of the closet, then the shelf above the bathroom sink, then the small things—the charger he kept on his side of the bed, the hoodie you’d been sleeping in for two years that was technically never yours to begin with. You move around each other like people trying not to cause any more damage than has already been done, which is the saddest kind of careful.

I’ll get the rest later, he says, at the door, the last box under his arm. Okay, you say. He looks at you for a moment that lasts longer than a moment.

Then he goes. You close the door and stand with your back against it for a long time, looking at the apartment that is now just yours. The hook by the door. The dent in the wall he’d fixed and repainted badly. The bedroom ceiling with its fading, peeling stars.

You’d meant it. You meant every word. I will wait.

You meant it the way you meant everything when it came to him—completely, without reservation, with the specific recklessness of someone who has loved one person for so long that loving them has become a thing you do as naturally as breathing, as unconsciously as knowing their number by heart.

You wait.

He doesn’t come back.

And somewhere between month eight and month twelve, when the silence has gone on long enough to have its own shape in the room, you understand—slowly, the way understanding always comes when it’s the kind you don’t want—that waiting and living are supposed to be the same thing.

You’d only been doing one of them.

He opens his arms slightly. The question is implicit. You step in because the alternative is making it weird, and because some small stubborn part of you—the seventeen-year-old who memorized his number, who took the long way home every single time—needs one last second of it. Just one.

His arms close around you, brief and careful. You both step back at the same time.

"Take care of yourself," he says.

"You too." You look at him—really look, one final time. "Be happy." Something in his face shifts. Something quiet and real. "You too," he says, lower.

You turn around and walk toward the car. You don't look back. Your eyes do not do what they've been threatening to do all night, because Yorozu is wonderful and this is right and you are holding yourself together until you are home.

The circle walks with you to the cars. Gojo says something that requires no response. Nanami is already in the passenger seat. You get in your car. You put it in drive. You go home.

---

Your apartment is dark when you get back.

Same apartment. Same city. Same walls. Same landlord who keeps forgetting about the intercom. You'd signed the lease here at twenty-one, and when the lease renewed you'd renewed it, and when it renewed again after that you'd renewed it again, and every year you'd told yourself you were staying for the rent control, for the location, for the landlord you actually liked.

You drop your keys on the hook by the door—his hook, technically, the one he'd put up on a Sunday afternoon because you kept losing your keys and it was giving me a headache, so I fixed it, problem solved, you're welcome—and you don't turn on the lights.

You know this apartment in the dark the way you know it in daylight. Kitchen counter, left. The bathroom doorframe that's slightly too narrow and always catches your shoulder. The step near the hallway that used to creak until you fixed it. You navigate all of it and end up lying on your back on the bed, shoes still on, staring at the ceiling.

And there they are.

The stars. Faded now, a little. Not as bright as that first night—

Both of you standing on the mattress on a Wednesday because you'd had bad days and he'd bought the pack from the corner store as a half-joke and then executed it with total seriousness. You'd stuck them up wherever felt right, no pattern, no science, just wherever. And then you'd both lain there and watched them glow, and he'd said, "this is objectively the best decision we've ever made," and you'd agreed with complete sincerity.

The ones in the corner have started to peel, gravity winning its slow argument. But they're all still there. Every single one.

He'd gone overseas to his mother, and you'd texted across time zones until the time zones won. By month eight: silence. You'd heard through Shoko—the way you hear everything, eventually, through Shoko—that he was seeing someone. One year and four months in. And then, at the two-year mark, that he'd proposed.

You stood up, walked towards the kitchen. You looked back at the bedroom. And the stars were right there on the bedroom ceiling, same as they'd always been.

And if I do? Will you wait for me?

I will. Always.

You'd meant it. Completely. That's the part that doesn't go away—not the waiting itself, but that you'd meant it in the particular way you meant everything when it came to him. And then he'd done the work and come back to himself and built something new, and you had stayed in the apartment with his hook on the wall and his stars on the ceiling and his absence like furniture you kept choosing not to rearrange.

You should have moved. You should have taken the stars down. You should have, somewhere in the last two years and six months, done something that looked more like leaving.

But you hadn't.

And now you are lying in a dark apartment watching glow-in-the-dark stars fade against the ceiling, and somewhere across the city, Sukuna Ryomen is on his wedding night with his wife, who is kind and funny and warm and deserves everything— And you are here, and that's okay.

It is, actually. In the slow way that the most honest things tend to be. Not resolved. Not dramatic. Just true. You loved someone completely. The love was real even when the timing was wrong, even when the ending was necessary, even when you held on long after it had already asked to go. You are allowed to mourn that. You are allowed to be twenty-seven and still in this apartment and not entirely healed and still—somewhere in the quiet part of yourself—proud that you loved him the way you did.

You waited. He didn't come back. You had been wrong about what that was going to mean—not wrong to wait, not wrong to love him, just wrong about where it would all land. Some things don't land where you imagined them. Some things are only ever exactly what they were.

Outside, a car passes. Your neighbor's TV murmurs through the wall. The city does its thing, the particular not-silence of a night that keeps moving while you stay still. The ceiling glows. You look at the stars. Eventually you'll take them down.

Tonight, you let them glow.

an: now listen to the song again, this time - with both of reader's memory and sukuna's mirroring the lyrics. see why im fucking bawling?? what do you mean she WAITED; like ACTUALLY waited, in a sense that she didn't fucking leave the apartment they shared.

this is a by-product of all my imaginations.. my boyfriend and I have been together for 10 years (we were 14 and 15), and best believe these are everything my anxiety has told me would happen. i share with you... my actual fears. (if this hurt u too much, lmk; i promise to write... a long fluff next ahahah) dividers by: @/chrisssiren, visuals i got from pinterest here!

tags: (i tagged everyone who interacted in my post - if you do not want to be tagged, pls lmk!! ily!): @oikawasabc @stupidlyawasomegirl @dauntlessprototypenexus @palanggaaa @plumwhispers @typeobitch @liorascove @meowisitt @xciyfj @kieraondabeat @vleixieee @zebuchis @layyyyy27-blog @lovelyknox @lxiasx @bunnybae3 @ireallyreallylikeducks @carmen-j @queenofthewprld @qyomei @peysdeliveryservice @pinkgirlyprincessposts @maulavibes @gooojjjoooooooloverrrr @cnnlvjsn @charchar061704 @sabaku-no-eyebrows @1sukunalover1 @doll-ini @alluvixm @yopapayummer @blahblah9211202 @ofthewhales22 @angelbabykuromi i @dingleberrycentralsblog @sxgacxbe @g-library @bazingabazinga0904 @matcha-caffein

The sun is streaming through the kitchen windows, the smell of fresh coffee and pancakes is filling the air, and you are currently standing at the stove, flipping a slightly burnt blueberry pancake.

Sukuna is sitting at the kitchen island. He’s fresh out of the shower, wearing nothing but a pair of low-hanging gray sweatpants, his damp pink hair falling into his eyes. He’s scrolling through his phone, sipping his black coffee, completely relaxed.

“Hey,” you say, not looking away from the frying pan. “Can you grab the syrup from the pantry?”

“Yeah, I got it babe.” Sukuna rumbles. He stands up, his massive frame easily reaching the top shelf of the pantry. He sets the bottle on the counter next to you, leaning in to press a lingering, warm kiss to your bare shoulder. “Smells good.”

“Thanks, babe,” you smile, leaning into his touch.

It’s a normal morning. A perfectly domestic, quiet morning. And then, the patter of tiny, bare feet echoes down the hallway.

Yuji waddles into the kitchen. He’s wearing his favorite dinosaur pajamas, his spiky pink hair sticking up in every possible direction. He’s clutching an empty plastic sippy cup in one chubby hand, looking incredibly serious for a toddler who just woke up.

He stops in the middle of the kitchen floor. He looks at you. He looks at Sukuna.

Then, he takes a deep breath, puffs out his little chest, and yells, “Babe!”

You freeze. The spatula in your hand halts mid-air. Sukuna stops mid-sip of his coffee. He slowly lowers the mug, his eyes blinking in confusion.

“Did he just…” you whisper, slowly turning your head to look at your husband.

“There’s no way,” Sukuna mutters, his brow furrowing. He looks down at the two-year-old. “What did you say, little man?”

Yuji marches over to Sukuna. He stops right at his father’s bare feet, tilts his head all the way back to look up at the towering 6’4” wall of muscle, and holds up his empty sippy cup.

“Babe,” Yuji says, his voice completely clear and demanding. “Juice. Pwease.”

Sukuna’s jaw drops.

You slap a hand over your mouth, your eyes going wide. “Oh my god.”

“Did you…” Sukuna stammers, looking from Yuji to you, completely bewildered. “Did he just call me babe?”

“He definitely just called you babe,” you wheeze, a laugh bubbling up in your throat.

Yuji, growing impatient with the lack of service, turns his attention to you. He waddles over to the stove, tugging on the hem of your pajama shorts.

“Babe,” Yuji insists, pointing a chubby finger at the frying pan. “Pancake.”

A loud, booming bark of laughter erupts from your husbands chest. He throws his head back, his massive shoulders shaking as he braces his hands on the kitchen island. “Holy shit,” he wheezes.

“It’s not funny!” you scold, though you are biting your lip so hard to keep from laughing that it actually hurts. “He’s going to go to daycare and call his teachers babe!”

“The kid’s got swagger, what can I say?” Sukuna laughs, wiping his eyes. He crouches down, bringing himself to Yuji’s eye level. “Hey. Buddy. Who am I?”

Yuji looks at him like it’s the stupidest question in the world. He reaches out, patting Sukuna’s tattooed cheek with a sticky hand. “Babe.”

Sukuna bites his fist, his face turning red from the effort of holding in another hysterical laugh. “Fuck, that’s good.”

“Stop swearing!” you hiss, swatting Sukuna’s shoulder with the spatula. You kneel down next to him, putting on your most serious, gentle mom-face. “Yuji, sweetie, look at me.”

Yuji blinks his big, golden eyes at you. “Yeah?”

You let out a long groan, dropping your head into your hands. Sukuna is practically vibrating next to you, completely useless.

“No, baby,” you say, looking back up. You point to yourself. “I am Mama. Ma-ma.”

Yuji stares at you.

You point to Sukuna, who is currently trying to compose his face into something resembling a responsible parent. “And he is Dada. Da-da. Not babe.”

Yuji looks at Sukuna. He looks at you. His little eyebrows furrow in deep toddler concentration. He’s processing the information. You can practically see the gears turning in his head.

“Mama,” Yuji says slowly, pointing at you.

“Yes!” you cheer, clapping your hands. “Good boy!”

Yuji then points at Sukuna. “Dada.”

“Exactly,” Sukuna nods, looking incredibly proud. “Nailed it, little man.”

Yuji smiles, a massive, gummy grin that lights up his entire face. He looks thrilled with himself. He holds up his sippy cup again, looking right at Sukuna.

“Dada babe! Juice!”

“I give up,” you sigh, standing back up and walking over to the fridge to get the apple juice. “We’re raising a tiny frat boy. This is entirely your fault.”

“My fault?!” Sukuna gasps from the floor, trying to catch his breath. “How is this my fault?!”

“Because you call me babe every five seconds!” you argue, pouring juice into the plastic cup. “You never use my actual name! You never call me mama! He literally thinks ‘babe’ is a universal pronoun!”

“You call me babe too!” Sukuna defends himself, sitting up and resting his arms on his knees. He looks entirely too amused by the situation. “I haven’t heard you call me ‘dada’ unless we’re in the bedroom, and even then—”

“RYOMEN SUKUNA!” you shriek, your face flushing a shade of red as you shove the sippy cup into his chest. “Not in front of the child!”

“What? He doesn’t know what that means,” Sukuna smirks, standing up and effortlessly pulling you by the waist until your back is flush against his chest. He rests his chin on top of your head, wrapping his arms around you.

Yuji happily takes his juice, taking a long sip before waddling over to the living room to watch his cartoons, completely oblivious to the absolute crisis he just caused.

“We have to actively start calling each other Mama and Dada around him. Seriously. I am not having my two-year-old walk around the grocery store yelling ‘babe’ at me.”

“Alright, alright,” Sukuna chuckles, his chest vibrating against your back. He presses a soft kiss to your hair. “We’ll be better. Strictly Mama and Dada from now on.”

“Promise?” you ask, turning your head to look up at him.

“Yes, mommy..” he laughs, kissing your cheek. You groan, elbowing him hard in the ribs. “I hate you.”

an: i'm laughing my ass out with the tiktoks of toddler calling their parents babe! please let me marey Sukuna :c art by: umeka ryomen on pinterest here! the dividers and GIF i got from pinterest! please let ne know who the owners are if u know!

YALL IM COOKING UP SOME HEAVY ANGST, and THIS IS ME RN - WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST MADE MYSELF CRY BY WRITING?!

Anyways - i'm drafting it on my notes and might post it 3rd week of June. But yeah; just know IM LITERALLY SOBBING ASS OUT.