Archive of Our Own ^beta

     Yuji’s eyes opened slowly. 

     He was lying in a bed he did not recognize, nor did he recognize the ceiling above him, or the room around him. The world seemed…off. Like he had stumbled somewhere he didn’t belong—chanced on a reality that was never meant to hold him. 

     He shouldn’t be here. 

     He was too aware of his heartbeat, his pulse and the sound it made in his ears. This world was wrong and he, an actor in this play, was on the wrong stage. He moved immediately to sit up, to flee—and felt a searing pain shoot through his body the instant he so much as twisted his torso to push himself upright. It stabbed him in the ribs and made him cry out, faintly, his voice hoarse and weak, breath stolen. It burned in his spine and up his sides, and he almost heaved, the wind knocked right out of him. 

     “Don’t try to move.” 

     That voice. Yuji froze the moment he heard it, he knew that voice, like he knew he needed air and could not breathe in water; he hated to hear it. He should have recognized the aura, the reason he felt so off-balance; he should have sensed the threat , sitting in a chair off to the side of the bed, watching him, the same way a lone wolf observes an injured deer. Debates whether it’s worth the energy to chase that deer down, or if there is other, easier prey to be found elsewhere. 

     Sukuna. A monster who had risen to power almost a century ago and maintained that power through bloody, unsustainable war. The authority behind a thousand atrocities, and the architect of a hundred genocides. Of a hundred thousand murdered children.

     And Yuji, a fly in the spider’s web once again. A prey animal, trapped in the predator’s lair. 

     Predators were not cruel by nature, they did not go out of their way to torment their prey. Sukuna stood as the exception. He was not part of nature. He was not of this world. He was simply too monstrous to be. 

     Was this part of it, then? Saving Yuji’s life, just to plague him with fear and terror before the end? 

     Yuji swallowed. 

     He heard the rustle of hard armor and fabric as Sukuna shifted in the chair. “You were fairly badly wounded. I healed your stomach wound as best I could; my healers have seen to it further. You should make a full recovery—but as of right now I would advise against large movements.” 

     “Why did you save me?” He asked sharply, mindful not to add the ‘Asshole’ comment he wished to make at the end of that sentence. Asshole.

     “Good question. I don’t know.” From what Yuji knew of Sukuna, that was as likely an answer as any; the Emperor of Death was vain, as mercurial and inconstant as a god might be. Capricious. Prone to whims and flights of fancy. He might throw you a bone if he was amused by you; he might kill you in the next breath if you bored him, or did not amuse him just right.  

     Still, Yuji was not satisfied with that answer. Sukuna took and he took and he never gave, so why had he saved Yuji? It didn’t make sense. Capricious or not, there was no rhyme or reason in saving someone who was a threat to you, just for fun. And while Sukuna lived by his whims, he was not illogical. In fact he was very coldly rational. 

     Except when Yuji was attacking him. Then he seemed insane, because that was when he smiled. 

     Yuji moved his head and found no striking pain associated with such a motion, so now he turned it to face the cruel king, who was just sitting there in a chair, shrouded in that dark, demonic armor, his red cape spilling over the left arm of the low-backed seat like pooling blood, matching the color of his four eyes. He did not belong in this setting any more than Yuji did. He was a blot on an otherwise normal landscape, though it wasn’t Yuji’s landscape of choice; he was an error message on the computer screen when everything was working just fine. Yuji loathed the sight of him. 

     And yet. 

     “Bullshit. Why did you save me?” He was not afraid to meet Sukuna’s eyes, brown into red, and he refused to look away. The wolf assessing the fallen buck without a word, perhaps no longer so sure of its quarry; the deer still has antlers. It can still gore the wolf. But wounded, is that very likely? 

     Sukuna simply sighed. It wasn’t that the normal part of his face was ugly, because it wasn’t—he would be quite handsome if half his head wasn’t a monster’s visage—but Yuji had no desire to mingle with such a beast, no matter how many times Sukuna entreated him. “What, was ‘I don’t know’ not a good enough answer for you?” 

     “It wasn’t, because I know it’s bullshit,” Yuji retorted. 

     Sukuna sighed again, turning his head to the window. Yuji saw the scales on his neck twist, moving with the muscles. He still wasn’t sure if that was part of his skin, or part of the armor and whatever he wore underneath it. Given it only seemed to appear on the sides, and on the right side specifically, he was inclined to say ‘skin’. Just like his strange, mutilated face. 

     “You just can’t let it go, can you?” Yuji demanded, lip curling. “You want me and you won’t stop until you have me. You’re obsessed.” 

     Sukuna huffed, though the sound was more amusement than derision, leaning the good side of his face against the sharp black gauntlets on his hands and turning his head back to stare at Yuji, those half-lidded eyes so condescending, so casually amused and at ease when Yuji felt himself in mortal peril. “How arrogant of you, to think that you could hold the obsession of a god.” 

     “How pretentious of you, to claim yourself a god.” 

     At that, Sukuna laughed, and for the first time Yuji felt a degree of fear flirting with his bones, slinking down the back of his neck, uncomfortable and cold. Sukuna’s laugh had never been a pleasant sound, and he was not a man who laughed often—to hear it carried a weight to it Yuji didn’t like, it seemed a promise of something less than benevolent. 

     Wolf indeed. Perhaps more of a tiger; tigers had been known to be far crueler in their preying on other animals than some. 

     “How ignorant of you, to be so confidently wrong.” 

     Yuji stuck out his tongue; he wasn’t entirely sure what else to do. 

     Sukuna smirked, amusement painted all over his deformed face. Yuji tried to ignore the dark color of his lips. They darkened when the monster had freshly fed on human flesh; he knew that. He knew that from watching it happen. Sukuna was pale on the best of days, but he regained some modicum of color when he devoured innocents. Yuji suspected he might turn monochromatic if he was ever made to starve. 

     “You don’t understand yet, do you?” 

     “Understand what?” Yuji asked, looking back at the ceiling so he did not have to look at Sukuna. But he did not close his eyes. 

     “Who I am. Who you are.” 

     Now he did close his eyes, aggravated more than anything, wishing he could tune him out. But Sukuna was all around him, in the room, in the air, and he would be here even when the Emperor himself left and it was just Yuji; there was no erasing him. He had carved himself into Yuji’s soul the first time Yuji had failed to kill him, with the delight in his eyes as Yuji tried to pierce his throat with a knife that could never cut the strange scales that lay over his skin. He had plastered his initials on his bones the next, even as Yuji stood there holding the monster’s internal organs in a pool of deepest crimson, and Sukuna had simply laughed at him. They were cleaved together; they were cleaved apart. Yuji hated him, even though he knew deep down he didn’t hate him at all. 

     “So this is why you saved me, ‘I don’t know’ was just bullshit. I knew it.” 

     Sukuna chuckled. That, at least, was a more familiar sound—he did that more often than he laughed. Was Yuji the only one who had ever heard him laugh? Probably. Then why did he only laugh when Yuji was attempting to kill him? 

     “I could have let you die. And maybe I should have, given you keep trying to kill me—but I didn’t want to.” 

     The I want you was unspoken; Yuji didn’t need it said. He knew it was there, like the wind in the eaves of an old house. 

     “I’m not going to ever give you what you want,” Yuji muttered. “So give up and stop hoping.” 

     “Give up on you? I could never.” Sukuna chuckled again. “You laugh at me when I refer to myself as a god, Yuji, but I want you to think—really think—about it. About me. How mortal do I seem to you?” 

     “Not mortal at all,” Yuji rejoined, “given you’re over a hundred years old, but that doesn’t matter. There are plenty of fantastical beings in this world and there are plenty of demons, you being one of them does not a god make.” 

     “Well-worded. Eloquent. That’s why I like you.” Sukuna was still leaning his cheek on his hand, staring at Yuji with a fondness, a naked affection Yuji was unsure how to respond to. Desire and lust would have been one thing. He had seen them in Sukuna’s wine-dark eyes before, when he tore him apart, all those times he came close but never close enough to killing him. He had assumed the Emperor was a masochistic bastard and had rarely found someone who could inflict harm on him. But this fondness, the way his face and eyes were almost gentle—Yuji did not know what to do with that. He had no defenses for that. Nor for how it made the inside of his chest feel. 

     Stop looking at me like that. 

     “But not very knowledgeable in the ways of gods, are you?” 

     This conversation was starting to make Yuji deeply uncomfortable. He didn’t exactly know Sukuna as a person, but he knew enough about him to know that he wasn’t a practical joker. He sounded deadly serious here. 

     “You’re some kind of war god, then?” Yuji asked bluntly. Some people had indeed said he was the war god ‘Mares’ incarnate, but there were a hundred war gods, and a hundred wars, and none of them were anything like Sukuna. Yuji did not believe in them; he believed in what he could see, and he could see Sukuna. Sukuna was a man. A horrible, cruel, violent man. An immortal man, presumably. Not of normal mortal origin, most likely—but a god was something else. 

     Sukuna laughed again. The sound grated up Yuji’s spine, deep and painted with just a flavor of loose insanity. It was the laugh of a monster, whether a pleasant sound or not. “Is that what you think? Close, but no. There are the gods who are manufactured entities made by mortals, and then there are the real gods.” His smile was teeth and cold malice, and Yuji would not meet his eyes this time. “There’s me.” 

     “And what is your godly name, then?” To name a god was to give it power, but gods could rarely speak their own names. Even so, Yuji regretted the question the moment he spoke it. If Sukuna named himself, it did not necessarily mean he was lying; it meant he was powerful. 

     Sukuna merely smirked. “I could tell you. But the word might rip your ears and lips off.” 

     “Of course it would.” Yuji closed his eyes and counted his blessings. “If you’re the Emperor, I don’t see how you can be a god.” 

     “I’m not the Emperor. I have merely made his corpse my own.” Sukuna was smiling again, his teeth stained with decades of blood that would never clean off, the tips reddened. Each one was a fang of some length, the canines longer and sharper than the rest.

     “So this isn’t your face?” Sukuna being a corpse explained the pallor. The way he was cold whenever Yuji touched his bare skin. The way he gained color only upon devouring human flesh. 

     “This is my face. I own his body now. It is my mortal avatar; I have sculpted it into my own shell.” That didn’t really answer Yuji’s question—if this was the former Emperor’s face and Sukuna had just commandeered it as his own, or if this was the representation of the god manifested on a body he had claimed and begun to wield as his.  

     “How did you wind up in the Emperor’s body, then?” Because that seemed like a pretty big hole in the story. 

     “Summoning gone very wrong.”

     And Yuji might have snorted in amusement at that if not for the fact that for the first time, Yuji felt true, real fear. Sukuna being an immortal monster was one thing. Sukuna being an immortal god was another. A god that could walk among humans in mortal flesh was a god to be feared. And the more he thought about it, the more Sukuna being a god of some kind made terrible, awful sense. The way he had not died or so much as passed out even when Yuji held his intestines and liver in his hands and strangled him with them; his face hadn’t even turned red as Yuji choked him out with his own small intestine. The way he had never once fallen or even staggered, even when shot in the head with a bullet. The way he never lost a battle (except to Yuji?). The way he left such unparalleled destruction in his wake. Every horrible thing he had ever done…it was all coming together. The picture of a malevolent shrine, painted bloody and piled high with skulls, in a sea of corpses and blood, a temple to a dark and evil deity. 

     “What is your godly name?” Yuji whispered again, serious this time, his heart pulsing a tattoo against his sternum, about to leap out of his chest. He was scared.

     Sukuna looked back at him, red eyes a single shade of clear, emotionless crimson, a lake of blood. Eyes that had seen more calamities than Yuji could imagine—that had brought those calamities forth. Yuji held his gaze and knew, in that moment, Sukuna was not lying. This was not a man. This wasn’t even a person. This was a force, of incalculable power and unprecedented danger, and it was speaking through a humanoid avatar. An avatar that was not its true body, but a container for something with no face or form of its own. 

     “I will tell you once you understand who you are.” 

     “I know who I am.” This was a bold-faced lie. Yuji had been spawned without memories. He knew more or less how the world and technology worked, but he knew nothing about who he was or how old he was. All evidence said he was in his mid to late twenties or possibly early thirties, all evidence said he was perfectly healthy, albeit with strange hair and odd lines under his eyes that no one could identify the purpose of, but he knew nothing about himself. He had come into this world, however it was he had achieved that, knowing only two things: 

     Sukuna must die. 

     And Sukuna could not die without him. 

     And for so long, he had assumed that meant he was made to kill Sukuna. But in recent years, he had begun to second-guess that assumption. To second-guess the compulsion that spurred his every attempt on the monster’s life. Was it really a compulsion to kill him? Or something else? Because it hadn’t been present at the festival. 

     “Do you? Because I know who you are.”

     “Oh, do you? Please share.” 

     “The last time you and I struggled, I kissed you,” Sukuna said, completely matter-of-factly, and completely unrelated to the question.  

     “Without my consent,” Yuji retorted. 

     “That didn’t stop you.”

     Yuji flushed angrily. It was a kiss, it had happened in the heat of the moment, and he had responded to it, nothing more, nothing less. For Sukuna to hold it over his head like that was insulting. To remember it was embarrassing. “It doesn’t matter—I didn’t say yes and you didn’t ask.” 

     He hadn’t needed to—Yuji had been thinking the exact same thing the moment Sukuna kissed him. He just didn’t want to be reminded of that fact. 

     “I nearly took you then,” Sukuna admitted, ignoring Yuji’s statement completely, and Yuji pointedly ignored the thrill that eked through him at the statement—it was easily overpowered by the horror and disgust at such a blasé remark. “If only you had come to me willingly, I would have.” 

     Yuji stared at the ceiling, determined to feel and think nothing about this. Certainly not about how close he had been to giving in. 

     Or about the festival, the one time of the year where Sukuna allowed the fighting to cease and let the people celebrate in peace, where they could not see each other’s faces behind the veils they wore—but Yuji had known, there in the darkness…and he couldn’t imagine Sukuna hadn’t.

     “I knew,” Sukuna continued, his words so close to being a response to what was in Yuji’s head that it was deeply jarring, made him suddenly return to being on high alert. “I knew it in that moment. I had suspected, hoped, even—but the moment I had you in my arms I was certain.” 

     “Of?” Yuji asked snidely. 

     The warlord shifted in the chair, uncrossing his legs with the clunk of armor so he could lean forward, elbows on his knees. Yuji was once again the wounded deer, and Sukuna was once again the tiger watching. And Yuji’s antlers were not so sharp as to compete with a tiger’s teeth. 

     “You are mine.” 

     Yuji rolled his eyes. “How did I know that was what you were going to say? Don’t give me that. You just want—”

     “Sarana.” 

     Yuji stopped dead, eyes widening, breath catching. He knew that name—some ancient god in the Imperial pantheon—but hearing it, from those lips…it did something to him. Something he could not explain. He felt the ring of it in his ribcage, in his ears and torso, sundering its way through his atoms, and for a moment the sound of it burned itself into his eyelids, which he closed sharply and opened again, trying to chase it out of his brain. He swallowed and it felt dry. 

     Sarana. What about Sarana?

     Was that Sukuna’s name? No, it didn’t feel like it was. Sarana felt benevolent. Sukuna was anything but—

     He had failed to notice Sukuna getting up. While the name Sarana was having some kind of effect on him, Sukuna had stood, had placed a hand on the bed, right next to his hand. Yuji did not flinch, to his credit, but his heart began to pound. The Emperor—the god—leaned over him and he could not run, he could not even sit up. When he tried to scramble away, it hurt , and he was left breathing hard and terrified, reduced from a deer to a rabbit, the tiger as dangerous as ever, and twice as big. 

     “Don’t you understand?” Sukuna entreated, sounding almost a little desperate, reaching for his face, though when Yuji jerked his head away he stopped. “You are my Sarana. I have waited for you ever since I was sundered, since the moment I incarnated in this body when the idiot Emperor summoned me. I knew you were my mate the moment you attempted to end my life—so like Sarana—and I knew it with certainty the moment I kissed you, I knew it tenfold the night of the festival. And now I have you back.” 

     What?

     What?

     “You’re wrong,” Yuji managed, trying to sit up, his muscles seizing, an ache stabbing through his chest. Sukuna reached out to him, but Yuji tried his best to roll away, and succeeded in flopping to a different side of the bed. “I’m not your mate. ” 

     “Aren’t you? You are my Sarana. Don’t you remember the festival?” 

     Yuji shook his head, at this point seeking only an escape, no longer interested in hearing more—because if he heard anything further, he was afraid he was going to lose what little sense of self he had. Never mind that confirmation of the fact that Sukuna knew it was him at the festival was the last thing he wanted to hear. 

     “You don’t remember your own celebration?” Sukuna had straightened up; Yuji could not tell if he was disappointed or ambivalent, his face was carefully neutral. “The one night of the year when I lay down my arms and cease my hostilities for you, Sarana. Only for you.” 

     It came back to him, then, in a burst of memory—the festival of Sarana. That was what it was called. A celebration of the God of Peace, the Holy Victim, one of the most ancient gods in the imperial pantheon, the divine twin, spouse, and second half of the…

     “War god,” Yuji whispered, his voice dry like dust. “You are Akinara.” 

     Akinara, the God of Annihilation.

     Sarana and Akinara, avatars of restoration and destruction. Unified into the god of life and death, Ahirana. Sarana was oft but the shadow of Akinara, the smaller of the duo, the one forgotten, but the two were one and the same, and in the last century as Sukuna’s power grew, people had begun to pray to Sarana more—praying for peace and mercy in the face of endless war and devastation. 

     Sukuna did not suddenly sprout a halo of fire like Yuji had half-feared he would. “And I am your Akinara.” 

     “No.” Yuji rejected it, wholeheartedly. Not just Sukuna being Akinara, because that was too terrifying to think about—Akinara the Destroyer was so much more than a war god, it was a proto-Empirian deity of destruction and annihilation and complete eradication, of which war and death were each only two small facets. It stood among Senra and the First Children—literal existence and creation itselves—the ones who were forces of nature more than any ‘divine’ being, inexorable and unstoppable. The evidence of their existence, at least, was everywhere. It painted the world they stood on and made the existence they were born from. They were real, tangible, even dormant as they presumably were. Older than reality itself, more dangerous than any lesser god could ever claim to be. Even the most devout and zealous believers in other pantheons knew when to bend the knee to the memory of the Eridanus. Their relics still scattered the world. Akinara was one of them.

     They were fucked. They were so, immeasurably fucked. No wonder the war had dragged on for so long—Sukuna didn’t care about winning, he cared about destroying and killing as many people as possible. He only existed to ravage. 

     But Yuji also rejected the thought of himself as a god. As Sarana, Akinara’s better half, born from the war god’s stomach after Akinara had devoured them in a mortal form. Yuji wasn’t totally up to date on his Eridanian lore, but he remembered the basics of the story, with minimal changes from one sect to the next; Sarana the Holy Victim, the mercy Akinara had discarded once, incarnated in flesh so that Akinara might be humbled. Devoured, swallowed, and subsumed, only to tear free and cloak themself in the divinity of the one they had been born from. And then, for some incalculable reason, Sarana had raised Akinara back up and married the war god that had eaten them. Or Akinara had been smitten and married Sarana; one way or another, they had become united. All the legends painted the two as an indisputable pair; Yuji knew that much. Two halves of a whole. 

     If he was Sarana, and Sukuna was Akinara…

     Sukuna was his husband. And his sibling, and sire, and self, all at once. 

     No. No, no, no. 

     Absolutely not. 

     “Yes,” Sukuna said simply. “I’ve waited for you to incarnate alongside me for an eternity, Sarana.” 

     “My name is Yuji!” Yuji exclaimed, forcing himself up on one elbow, even though he clutched his chest, struggling to breathe. Now he saw Sukuna’s expressions change, concern flashing across his face, and he reached again for Yuji, but Yuji slapped his hand away. “I am not your—whatever!” 

     “You are,” the god said simply. “As I am yours. Yuji, Sukuna, Sarana, Akinara—it doesn’t matter what forms or names we take. I will always be yours, and you will always be mine. You are me. And I am you.” 

     “Stop!” Yuji cried. 

     “I won’t. I have waited for you, and I do not ever wish to be parted from you again. I was sundered and taken from your side once—” 

     Yuji flung the covers of the bed off and rolled out of it before Sukuna could stop him, possessed only of a desire to flee. He hit the ground and pain exploded through him, searing up his spine and into his lungs, blinking white-hot spots behind his eyes, and he let out a strangled yelp-groan of agony before forcing himself to his feet—except Sukuna was there, grasping his arm, and Yuji could struggle all he wanted but he was not getting out of the hold of a god, and he wouldn’t have been able to escape Sukuna even if he wasn’t the god of annihilation incarnate. 

     “—Yuji!” Sukuna held him surprisingly gently, trying to support his shoulders without touching his lower half where the wound presumably was, hurriedly lowering him back to the floor, cradling him like one might a child. “Don’t be stupid, you’re still healing—”

     “Let go,” Yuji wheezed. “Get off me—let go—”

     “You mustn’t move, you’ll pull your stitches.” 

     “Fuck you!” 

     In response, Sukuna scooped him up as easily as one might a sack of flour, holding him like a new bride. Yuji groaned in pain when his body bent; Sukuna laid him back in the bed as gently as possible, pinning him down when he tried again to get up. 

     “You can hate me and reject me all you want, but hold still and let yourself heal, for fuck’s sake.” 

     Yuji’s temples were clammy, as were his hands. His heart was pounding and he didn’t feel any kind of healing at all. “What do you want from me? ”

     “This should not even be a question. I want you,” Sukuna responded, easily, pulling the quilt back over Yuji and extending his hand as though to caress Yuji’s face; Yuji jerked his head away. “You are my missing piece. My everything. My only god, and my only love.”   

     No. Absolutely not. Yuji refused to believe the words he’d just heard. He refused.

     “I don’t fucking believe you.” 

     “You don’t have to,” Sukuna replied simply. “It is true regardless—I love you.” 

     “You don’t even know me, ” Yuji insisted desperately. His hands were shaking. “And don’t say ‘you know Sarana’. I’m not Sarana. I’m me.” His voice cracked on the final word and he twisted his face away, burying it in his hands, unwilling to cry in front of Sukuna. 

     The emperor’s voice was so soft, Yuji hated it. “Yuji—”

     “No! Leave me alone.” Yuji tried to turn on his side, couldn’t, so he just turned his face away, hands still over his eyes. “I don’t want to hear any more about this. I’m not your god. Find someone else.” 

     Sukuna sounded almost sad when he answered. “Would that I could.” 

     “Go away,” he muttered. 

     “Not until I am sure you won’t leap from this bed and harm yourself. My only intention in bringing you here was to heal your wounds. Once they heal you are…free to leave me.” 

     Yuji snorted bitterly. “Yeah, right.” 

     “What do I gain from keeping you here unwillingly? I think of our past and I picture our future, a life with you at my side, but if you would not see such a future blossom I have no desire to force you. I hope only that eventually, you will change your mind, and choose to be mine again, as you once were.” Sukuna backed away from the bedside. His voice had softened when he spoke again; it sounded more human, more gentle. “I do love you as Sarana, but I also love you simply as the human I have come to know. The fact that I love you now at all, that I can love your mortal self in the first place, simply proves to me who you truly are.”  

     “I keep trying to kill you! That’s the only time we’ve interacted!” Yuji complained, but he knew that wasn’t true. Each of the five times Yuji had made attempts on his life, there had been moments they spent together, either before or after. Time. Obviously time enough for Sukuna to become besotted with him.  

     …and the kiss. 

     …and the night of the festival. That, above all else, gave Yuji the most pause. 

     I have no desire to force you. Yuji would have scoffed if he had the energy. That’s exactly what you’re trying to do to me.

     “I love you,” Sukuna said again, “And I shall wait patiently until you love me.” 

     “It’ll never happen,” Yuji spat. 

     “Then I will wait forever and a day.” 

     Yuji ignored him, and did not answer, and eventually Sukuna left the room. 

     The god of annihilation, war and violence is in love with you.

     The thought had absolutely crossed his mind even before this. It had begun to sow its seeds before that when he lay there and laughed as Yuji attempted to strangle him with his own intestines, and Sukuna had touched his face so tenderly, tracing the shape of his jaw, eyes dark and glazed over with the kind of desire that made Yuji afraid. It had cropped up again when Sukuna allowed Yuji to thrust a blade inside his ribs and slice his chest open, had murmured how beautiful he looked covered in Sukuna’s blood, and kissed him on the mouth while bleeding from his own. Every taunt, every laugh after that, when Yuji cut him or hurt him or sliced him open. And had truly blossomed after that—when Sukuna actually fought back for a scant second, twisted his arm with the knife around behind him and pinned him against the balcony railing, and for a second Yuji had thought that one of two things was going to happen here; either Sukuna was going to shove him to his death, or he was going to kiss him. 

     And Sukuna had indeed kissed him. 

     And if Yuji had folded into his arms, kissed him back, put his hands on Sukuna’s chest, well, that was no one’s business but Yuji’s. It certainly wasn’t Sukuna’s.

     The god of annihilation is in love with you.

     Of course, at the time, the thought was simply ‘the Emperor’. And ‘love’ was replaced by the thought, ‘lust’. Yuji could never have imagined he was facing Akinara, the pre-Empire god of annihilation. The mere thought made him shake where he lay, trapped in the bed, unable to move until he healed further. He was sitting up, propped up by pillows, and now there was no further lying down, he was never going to be able to get back to lying flat. 

     The wound was a deep, vicious gouge to the abdomen, a slice through several layers of muscle and organs, one that surely would have been fatal were it not for Sukuna’s intervention. Not made by him; by one of his war machines. Sukuna had not been anywhere near the altercation. No intelligence had indicated he was intending to be, either. But he had somehow appeared and saved Yuji, and brought him back to the Imperial Palace where he lived in a mortal shell, masquerading as the Emperor, keeping the wars that man had started going for the sake of war. 

     The god of war.

     He couldn’t forget the festival, try as he might to. Even now, laying here on the bed, he remembered Sukuna on top of him, their limbs entwining, fingertips reaching for his. Sukuna inside him, the veils on their faces—the standard festival attire—brushing against each other, Yuji cloaked head to toe in spring oranges and Sukuna in autumn purples. Dyed gradients in the silk of the veils was common, and Yuji’s went from orange to red to violet at the very tips; Sukuna’s, from deep purple through maroon to red with just a hint of orange. How fitting. 

     He had known the man he was dancing with, falling into the arms of, and fucking was Sukuna, and deep down he had known Sukuna knew him too. It had been fun, for a second, to pretend they were someone else. Fun to pretend he was aware and Sukuna wasn’t. Fun to pretend this wasn’t Sukuna at all. Neither one had dared look beneath the veils because they already knew what they would find; why ruin the immersion? And Yuji wished he could blame his decision on drink, but unfortunately he had been stone-cold sober when he decided to dance with the enemy, decided to allow Sukuna to carry him away, and decided to sleep with the biggest threat to his life he had ever faced. He had closed his eyes when they kissed, the fabric bunched up over his nose to free his mouth, knowing he was risking exposing himself and caring very little, because deep down he also knew Sukuna would not unveil him any more than he would Sukuna. Even the morning after when sunlight was filtering into the dingy room they’d wound up in and falling on Sukuna’s veiled face on the pillow, Yuji had had the option to expose him, end this farce, and make another attempt on his life—but he had not. He had chosen instead to dress and leave quietly, and only later was he insulted by the fact that Sukuna was willing to fall asleep beside him after the five separate times Yuji had come strikingly close to killing him—did not consider him enough of a threat to be wary. 

     In hindsight, Yuji had clearly not considered Sukuna a threat that night either. He had fallen asleep beside the enemy too. 

     Yuji’s face burned at the memory. Fuck.  

     He’d known, all along, that Sukuna was obsessed with him. Fixated. That Sukuna desired him. The kisses and the festival were proof of that. His behavior during their altercations had hinted at it. Part of him had suspected it might be more than mere desire or raw attraction. And he’d been right. 

     But to be told one of the most ancient and powerful gods was in love with him… and he was that deity’s other half, a god in his own right—

     Yuji couldn’t handle that. 

     Sukuna continued to visit him and Yuji continued to reject him, as clockwork as the tides or the turning of the earth around the sun; predictable, repetitive, and guaranteed. Each visit went roughly the same. 

     “I love you.” 

     “I don’t believe you.” 

     “It does not change this.” 

     “I don’t love you.” 

     He convalesced gradually. Sukuna really had given multiple healers to attend to his wound and what should have been fatal, had him potentially comatose, or at minimum unable to move for weeks, was allowing him the freedom to sit up and lay down on his own within a few days. Finally, when he was healed enough to move around on his own a little , he demanded Sukuna stop professing his love. 

     “I don’t want to hear it,” he retorted. “I don’t believe you and I don’t care. You’ve been saying the same thing in different words ever since we met and I tried to kill you and that is not love.” Except maybe, for a war god, it was? “I’m not your Sarana. Stop asking me to love you.” 

     “I don’t ask for you to love me,” Sukuna retorted, once again sitting in the chair, still in his full armor. Did he ever take it off? Aside from the festival, Yuji had never seen him without it. 

     Remembering the festival made Yuji deeply frustrated. 

     “I only tell you the truth—that I love you. That you are Sarana and I am Akinara.” Yuji winced when he said the names, so casually, so unconcerned by throwing the raw identities of two utterly titanic deities around almost callously. Gods normally could not name themselves. Perhaps Sukuna could because Yuji had said it first…or perhaps Akinara’s power was truly so titanic as that. That it could name itself without concern. Such a thought was terrifying. “What you do with that information and how you choose to feel about it is your own prerogative.” 

     “You wouldn’t keep telling me if you didn’t want me to love you back.” Yuji rolled onto his side, facing away from Sukuna. 

     “Of course I would like my other half and fated partner to love me in exchange, but…” He heard Sukuna sigh, heard the clink of his gauntlets as he put his claws to his temple, arm on the seat of the chair; Yuji knew this because he’d seen him do it a thousand times. “There are things Sarana and Akinara wanted that I still wish to give you—especially now that we are both in mortal incarnations, and therefore these things are in reach. Of course I want to tell you all about our time together as gods, to show you who we were. Of course I want you to love me. But I know better than to push you. You have ripped me open countless times, and I fall a little more in love with you every time you do, but I am well aware you are not to be tested.” 

     Yuji closed his eyes. I fall a little more in love with you every time you do. He knew it was true. He hated it, but he knew it in his bones to be the truth. He had watched it happen. Sukuna’s delight when they first met, when Yuji first put a dagger to his throat. The way that delight increased to something feral, lustful and borderline insane whenever they clashed in the times following that. How it only seemed to grow and blossom with each altercation. He remembered being shocked at the blood kiss. 

     He remembered leaning into the other kiss. 

     Fuck, he hated him. 

     (He didn’t hate him. He never had.) 

     He wondered if Akinara had been so similarly smitten when Sarana ripped free of Akinara’s ‘stomach’, if that was even an accurate depiction and not a metaphor for some divine form of transmutation that human minds could not comprehend properly. If there had been that same thrill and delight in Akinara’s eyes as in Sukuna’s. If that was why Sarana had lifted Akinara back up and made Akinara their spouse, forever and always. Or if it was because Sarana knew they were once a part of Akinara, even before they were subsumed by Akinara’s body. Sarana, the physical manifestation of Akinara’s discarded mercy, because fate had sought to humble the god of annihilation and cruelty when Akinara sought to become a ‘perfect being’. And part of Yuji wanted to ask. He wanted to know. But the thought of being a god, of being more than him, was terrifying—more even than the thought that Sukuna was in love with him. If he was a god, if he was Sarana, he wasn’t Yuji. If he learned about them as gods, would that erase who he was now? Would he become Sarana again—was Sarana a separate individual from him, Yuji, and would Sarana override everything Yuji was? 

     He couldn't bear to imagine it. 

     Sometimes the thought scared Yuji so much that he woke in a cold sweat, in the middle of the night—and Sukuna was often there, for some undefined reason that Yuji never bothered to question, because he didn’t want to. Setting Yuji’s head on his thigh and stroking his hair and murmuring words in another language until Yuji fell back asleep, and dreamlessly this time. 

Yuji fled as soon as he was able. 

     Once he could walk, he packed what few things he had and abseiled out the window in the dead of night, skirting the patrols of the castle watchmen—huge mechanical constructs like all Sukuna’s war machines—that he had been meticulously observing the timetables of ever since Sukuna had confronted him about his ‘origin’. Yuji escaped the castle far too easily; he knew Sukuna had allowed him to leave. It was impossible for him not to, the castle was so impregnable that decades of attempts to both siege it and infiltrate it had produced no success whatsoever. It had been the Emperor’s palace before it was Sukuna’s, and Sukuna had naturally made it into a fortress. 

     Leave it to the war god to prevent anyone from bringing the war directly to him. 

     As Yuji ran, he wondered what he would tell everyone else. If they would believe him. And if they did, could he live with the despair on their faces—the crushing realization that there was no way to end the war, that something as powerful as Akinara could never be defeated, not by an enemy army, not by a rebellion, not by domestic terrorists. There was no bringing down a monster like that. 

     Could he live with crushing the hope of the rebellion? 

     No, Yuji decided. He could not. 

     He would find a way to defeat Sukuna. Once and for all. 

     Fate saw Yuji as its plaything. 

     He braced himself for the worst as Sukuna backed him into the stone pillar, his companions dead and strewn about the black and white tile floors around them, blood pooling red against the stark dark and light. The air was full of the stench of it, of iron and salt, and it swam up his nostrils and sought to make him gag. Yuji could have told them this was a terrible idea, but he never seemed able to reach the people he cared about in time. And given his history—attempting to mitigate loss of civilian life wherever possible, even if those civilians were in Sukuna’s cities and part of the point of terrorism was to attack civilians, to make a point using the innocent; working diagonally rather than for or against the movements opposing Sukuna; disappearing after presumably dying to a war machine and then returning fully intact, albeit with a scar, when Sukuna was the one last seen near his body—no one shared plans with him anymore. He could not have warned them because they hadn’t told him. He could only run after them and yell into emptiness and know, deep in his bones, he was always going to be too late. 

     “Get it over with,” Yuji muttered, glaring up at the war god’s deformed face. The other half was always so expressionless, so… bored. He wanted to see Sukuna get angry. He wanted to see rage in those eyes. But no matter what he or anyone else did, Sukuna only ever seemed tangentially amused at best, disinterested at worse. With the exception of Yuji trying to kill him, he never laughed. He often rolled his eyes. So callously condescending about the lives being sacrificed to attempt to bring him down 

     “What do you think I’m going to do, kill you?” Yuji disliked when Sukuna smiled. It felt sincere in its cruelty and depravity, in the way his eyes glittered menacingly, and that was the problem. 

     “I wish you would.” 

     “I don’t think you do.” 

     Yuji let Sukuna kiss him, merely allowing instead of leaning into, holding still and remaining as unyielding as a statue. He hoped Sukuna might withdraw, disappointed by the lack of response, but all the monster did was press his forehead to Yuji’s, wine-dark eyes swimming with a depth of emotion Yuji refused to dip any further into, for the sake of his own sanity. “I love you.” 

     “How many people have you killed?” 

     Sukuna raised an eyebrow and Yuji felt it against his own forehead. “With my own hands? Do you count those killed in wars, in battles bearing my name but not the cold sting of my claws?” He looked around the room, as though mentally tallying up the people he had slaughtered here. It turned Yuji’s stomach. 

     “Say it once, for every life you have taken. Every child you have eaten. Every woman or man you’ve had your way with. And then, maybe, a thousand million later, I’ll believe you.” Yuji narrowed his eyes. “The words will be meaningless by then. To you and me both. And you’ll see exactly how meaningless your love is to me.” 

     “You are cruel, Sarana.” Akinara was smiling. 

     “I’m not your Sarana,” Yuji retorted, “And I never will be.” 

     He had made a grave mistake. 

     Where Sukuna had been cautious about professing his love before, reserving it for moments they were alone and Yuji was most vulnerable, now he would not stop. Yuji could have killed him, and tried to, several more times. 

     It was hard to carve a heart out of someone’s chest when they were tracing their own blood onto your face, smiling softly with ardent eyes. 

     “I love you.” 

     It was hard to fight someone, sword to sword, with everything you had, when every clash of your blades they said “I love you” and meant it. 

     It was hard to fight someone who found beauty in your attempts to end their life. Whose eyes burned with lust and adoration both when you drove a knife into their face. When your violence made them look at you like a man looking upon divinity, and it made you sick. 

     Yuji recognized he was in danger of losing himself to the violence of trying to silence a foe who could never die. 

     Sukuna did not stop telling him he loved him. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

     Yuji lost count with the first dozen. He had no idea how many had been said when he folded. 

     “No more,” He begged, standing in utter defeat among the hollow knights his side had summoned, something they had truly hoped might be the answer to Sukuna’s endless war machines. Their empty armor carpeted the ground, lay in piles around him as Sukuna approached through the wreckage, kicking empty helms aside. At least these weren’t human lives lost. 

     This time. 

     “No more what?” 

     “I can’t hear you say it again. It’s too much. Stop, ” Yuji entreated, refusing to meet his eyes. Sukuna’s words had become a mantra that stabbed though his skull in his waking hours and haunted his dreams when he was asleep. Each as earnest and real as the last. “The words have no meaning anymore. I can’t make them go away. And you’re never going to stop, are you? You’re never, ever going to let me go.” 

     Sukuna appraised him in silence for a moment, his sword Kamutoke at his side. The blade crackled with red lightning, even though it had slaked its thirst for blood many minutes ago—or maybe constructs didn’t count. Maybe, like its master, it longed to bite into human flesh. 

     Maybe, like its master, it was never sated. 

     “The words will never lose meaning to me. My love is eternal, as am I.” 

     Yuji’s voice cracked. “I cannot bear this burden any longer. I’m begging you. Stop. Spare me your goddamn relentlessness! ”

     “Then let this be the last time I say it, until you say it back to me; I love you. That will never change. I can no more stop chasing you than I can change my nature—but I don't wish to force you.” 

     “I know exactly what you’re like with other people,” Yuji muttered. “‘Don’t wish to force me.’ That’s bullshit, and you’re lying.” 

     “You are not other people.” 

     “They are people too! Was this something you did as a god, Akinara? Rape? The devouring of children, many times your own? How can you profess to love me when you are this?!” His voice had risen in rage and it rebounded off the walls now, cracking in desperation with each subsequent echo. 

     This.

     This.

     This.

     “Those are consequences of mortal skin and bone,” Sukuna admitted. “And the corpse of a man who was far from holy himself. Akinara was not so driven by carnality and the desires of the flesh—hard to be when you have no flesh. I am, because I am Akinara in a mortal shell. This body belonged to someone else once. Human beings are cruel and violent and as the god of both, I embody that all the more now. There are differences—though not so many as you might hope. I have never been kind. But that does not render me incapable of loving you. That, the love of Akinara for Sarana, transcends all lifetimes and forms. No matter how else I may deviate, that will never change.”

     Yuji refused to look at him, disgust turning his stomach, and making him hate and loathe Sukuna more than ever now. “You’re a monster.” 

     “I have never claimed otherwise.” 

     “Perhaps Sarana should have picked a better choice of spouse,” Yuji spat.

     “You and I have been bound from the beginning. There was no other option for either of us and we both knew that. I don’t have any more of a choice than you do—but I still choose you.” Sukuna extended his hand, his black, spined gauntlets for once not stained with human blood. 

     “Let me love you. Even if only from afar. Deign to permit me closer and I will do anything you ask.” 

     Yuji did not say yes. He would be a fool to say yes. But the words did not leave his head.

     Permit me closer and I will do anything you ask.

     For the small price of his freedom, Yuji might be able to end the war. 

     Perhaps he had known it all along—from even before Sukuna told him. Regardless, he learned it over time.

     He learned it in the way the god of cruelty and violence touched him like he was touching a flower; something fragile and beautiful to be cherished, the hands that had felled millions with practiced brutality ghosting over his skin as delicately as down feathers. He learned it in the way Sukuna worshiped his body like it was a god on its own and Sukuna was a mere mortal supplicant, not the god of annihilation himself, not something capable of wiping out nations—a man, venerating his deity, and nothing more. He learned it in the way they made love, in the darkness in rare stolen moments that Yuji always ran from afterwards, and the way Sukuna whispered to him, words of affection and passion that he would never share with anyone else, that he certainly never bestowed upon the hundreds of former wives he would discard when the mood saw fit. 

     He learned it in the way Sukuna kissed him when Yuji shattered his skull and beat the deformed side of his face into a bloody pulp: so tender and gentle, as though he did not have brain hanging out of his obliterated cheek and the remains of his double eye sockets.

     And the way Yuji broke down sobbing over his body when he looked at what he had done, and Sukuna simply put his bloodstained hands on Yuji’s quaking shoulders and held him in silence, comforting the one who had ravaged him so violently. 

     He learned it in the way he had denied all of Sukuna's advances and ignored his pleas for Yuji to love him for years, and Sukuna never once grew frustrated or seemed to mind. Never did Sukuna grow petulant like Yuji would have expected—like he knew Sukuna was absolutely capable of. Never did he blame Yuji or call him selfish, like he had expected too. 

     “I love you.” 

     “I don’t believe you.”

     “You don’t have to. I still love you.” 

     And perhaps most importantly, he learned it in the story of the twin gods. Of Sarana and Akinara, and their combination into Ahirana—that they were always Ahirana, and Akinara had sundered them apart by attempting to remove all mercy and become ‘pristine’. 

     Yuji stood in the city’s chief cathedral and stared up at the stained glass windows, their sharp reds and violets and vermilions painting the bloody story in beautiful abstraction. A priest clad in white and scarlet read him the passage from their holy book as Yuji stared up, enraptured, at seven images that were less of two beings and more two metaphysical forces. 

     “ Akinara, endless evil hunger, was rampaging through a battlefield devouring the victims of war. ” 

     Akinara, depicted in blacks, violets, reds—a swirl here, a stab there. Bright, and blinding, the only color on a background of dull grey. Yuji stared up at the depiction, of what might have been wings here, an eye there—it always seemed to have four eyes, or four plumes of flame. 

     He pictured Sukuna, lying beside him on the bed, four eyes staring into Yuji’s with deep affection. 

     Did you look at Sarana that way? 

     “ One day, however, Akinara swallowed a victim unlike the others, and swallowed them whole and alive as well—the Holy Victim, who would become Sarana, the god of peace. ”

     Sarana, a gentle swirl of light and color; whites and yellow, the lead between the panes covered in gold leaf; soft oranges, with small hints of greens and blues and pinks, of rainbows, where no other such colors existed anywhere in the ecclesiastical display. Entwining with Akinara’s darker hues, firing streaks of red and magenta and gold through its deep obsidian and amethyst. 

     That’s me, Yuji thought, staring up at the window with a curious lack of feeling for the depiction of his own supposed self. Sarana. Me. The thing he liked the least was how Sarana began as a most basic depiction of a human being, a mortal form in simple brown, and then became a conceptual blob of light and color. Was that what Sukuna was doing to him? Was that what would happen if he accepted his role as Sarana—that he would become something beyond human, every part of him that made up Yuji lost to the godly power inside him? 

     “ This Holy Victim refused to die inside Akinara’s body. The Holy Victim lived within the god, suffused in Akinara’s magic, gaining strength. When Akinara devoured warriors, the Holy Victim blessed them and purified them, freeing them from Akinara’s hell, and diminishing the god’s power. Eventually, Akinara realized that there was a force inside them fighting back, but it was far too late to do anything to the Holy Victim, and they were too deeply woven into the god’s essence—they had been digested just enough that they were immutably inseparable from the god’s inner soul. ”

     How do gods have souls, Yuji wondered, looking up at the third window from the right, Akinara’s defeat and Sarana’s rebirth. Do you have a soul, Sukuna?  

     Do I?

     “ And when the cruel god of war ate another unfortunate soldier on the thousandth day, the Holy Victim took the blade the soldier had been swallowed with and cut Akinara open, liberating themself from the god’s stomach and bathing themself in Akinara’s blood, and thus becoming divine in their own right. ”

     The largest window of them all, in the center, was the gods’ union, the two merging into one harmonious element full of radiating light, the colors in perfect balance, and all the hues of the rainbow. At the right time of day, light through this window painted the narthex in all of them, every single color and more. Ahirana, the god of Life and Death, Destruction and Resurrection, born of the unity of Sarana and Akinara in equal harmony at last. 

     “ For, it turned out, the Holy Victim was the embodiment of mercy Akinara had discarded, that Akinara had shredded their own soul apart to rid themself of. The two were one and the same, and now Sarana had been born anew, bathed in the blood of a god, grown to godhood in the image of one. Akinara was smitten, and married them. From that point on war and peace were one god, Ahirana. ” 

     Sarana raised Akinara up and they were married. Akinara was smitten and married Sarana. Two different versions, all the same ending. 

     Not every version named Akinara as evil. Some had the god simply doing as Akinara was always intended to do, consuming worlds so new ones could be born, and Sarana was what happened when Akinara decided to go rogue and consume worlds without creating new ones; in others, Sarana was discarded from Akinara’s heart and eaten immediately, with Akinara well aware of the danger but striving to strike down such a threat upon its genesis rather than letting them wander. In some particularly wild versions, Sarana became Akinara’s lover before Akinara ate them, and then returned to Akinara’s side after; regardless of their beginnings, all the stories ended the same. 

     Sarana raised Akinara up and they were married. Akinara was smitten and married Sarana. A hundred different versions, all the same ending.

     Sukuna and Yuji, the Emperor and the rebel. A hundred thousand different versions, just one of the many. 

     A god and a mortal. 

     Just one and the same. 

     “How do I get you to leave me alone?” Yuji muttered in the silence of the church, when it was empty and all the supplicants had left, the only light coming through the windows from the fiery city behind, and the hellsent abomination of a man standing behind him simply chuckled, leaning his face into the crook of Yuji’s neck and shoulder. 

     “You don’t.” 

     “Of course not, I could never be so lucky,” Yuji grumbled. Sukuna’s hands had closed around his waist, and he made no attempt to pry them off. 

     Sukuna’s lips found his skin, trailed breaths and kisses in equal measure up the side of his throat, and Yuji leaned back against him and said nothing except, “This is a holy place. Not for you to besmirch with your sick appetites.” 

     “This holy place is dedicated to us. Our coupling would be the holiest thing to ever grace these walls.” His hand slid down from Yuji’s waist to his thigh, across his thigh to stray dangerously close to the space between them. 

     Yuji sighed. “I’m tired of you.” 

     “You say that, but we both know it’s untrue.” 

     Yuji hated him for his perceptiveness. 

     He stared up at the statue of the two of them in silence, loathing that he had even come to think of the gods as ‘the two of them’. Akinara and Sukuna he had reconciled without issue. Himself and Sarana…

     This was one of the few humanoid depictions of Sukuna and Yuji—of Akinara and Sarana , he was starting to lose himself and he hated it—that existed. He had traveled halfway across the world to see this statue, to see more than just stained glass windows in a church, to see a real, physical representation of them in physical form—a pilgrim on a journey that had no purpose and no end in sight; always, eternally running away. 

     He didn’t want to run forever. He wanted to run to something. To someone.

     The someone he wanted to run to was someone he had sworn to never want. Ever. 

     To want him felt like a betrayal. 

     It felt like home.

     His arms felt like home. 

     Loneliness felt like freezing to death. 

     He hated himself for it. 

     He had given up on hating himself for it. 

     Akinara looked a lot more like Sukuna than he expected. Neither figure had a face, they were very carefully sculpted so there was no angle from which you could make out the facial features of either. But Akinara stood in armor that looked strikingly like the Emperor’s, with a long cape half-wrapped around the other figure entwined in the god’s arms. And Sarana…

     The shorter figure folding into Akinara looked entirely too much like Yuji. The way they dressed was the same—flowing robes with the pointed shoulders overtop and the stoles flowing out behind them. What skill, to carve stone until it resembled fabric. Until it looked soft and translucent despite being a solid block of marble. 

     It was so easy to put Sukuna’s face on Akinara’s body and Yuji’s on Sarana’s. The two gods twined around each other, wrapped so intimately into one, faces shielded by their embrace. There were hints of an eye here, a brow there, but Sarana wore a halo whose radiant spears shielded them further and a veil over their face, and Akinara wore a crown of blades that covered most of their visage, and a veil that just barely hinted at a nose and eyes. 

     So like the festival. 

     If I acknowledge you, Yuji thought, tiredly. Will I lose who I am to you?

     Is that what you want? To possess me so utterly I am no longer myself? 

     Of course it was. Sukuna was cruel and violent. His ‘love’ was brutality and fear and he enjoyed the suffering and terror of others. Yuji should have known, every time he second-guessed himself, that the god of war could never truly love him, only covet what was not his, and desire to reunite his shattered halves together. He yearned to own Yuji, he did not yearn for Yuji. This was what he told himself every time he stole away from their shared bed, every time he pushed Sukuna’s hands off him, every time he withdrew before the fight could commence properly and left Sukuna standing alone in the silence, watching him walk away. 

     But looking at this statue…at the way Sarana was enveloped in Akinara’s arms, leaning against Akinara entirely willingly….Yuji did not need to see their face. There was rapture and adoration in their body language. 

     And devotion and need in Akinara’s. 

     Their stances unbalanced; the only thing keeping them upright was their grasp on each other. 

     Yuji turned away. 

     Sukuna was dishonest. 

     Yuji had known that going into this, but still. He had said he would not say those words again, but he still did, in stolen moments and rare seconds, catching Yuji before he could fully abandon their bed and putting his arms around him from behind when he stood on the balcony, leaning his head on his shoulder, skin against skin.  

     “I love you.” 

     “You promised to stop saying that.” Yuji did not push him away. 

     “I promised to stop saying it as relentlessly,” Sukuna corrected, which was incorrect in itself. Yuji rolled his eyes and did not argue. 

     “Go back to bed.” 

     “Mm. Only if you come back to bed with me.” 

     Yuji did not respond at all. 

     His colors were bleeding. Day by day, everything seemed more and more red. He could not shake it off. It consumed his life and coated his soul. He came to Sukuna of his own free will when he knew he should run and let the god smear bloody handprints on his body, Sukuna’s palms painted red and painting him too. 

     There would be nothing left to paint soon if this continued. 

     Yuji made sure to appear when Sukuna thought he was alone. He freely moved in and out of the palace, knowing as he did that these doors he opened and the locks he turned allowed him in, that were he to bring an army here he would lead them into an ambush—but for him alone, Sukuna allowed him passage.  

     Even so, he moved with caution regardless, aware of the dangers lurking in the fortress, aware of the danger he was utterly unable to pull himself away from, that he was charging headlong towards. He slipped through the shadows and found his way to the Emperor’s side, coming up behind him while he worked on battle plans, or when he was sharpening the blade of his sword, or when he was simply standing in their room, in silence. 

     Sukuna was never surprised by his arrival. He welcomed it, always, the presence that appeared beside him, or the arms that slipped around his armored waist from behind as Yuji leaned his head against Sukuna’s spine and said no words at all. Sukuna was not a small man; Yuji barely reached the bottom of his shoulder blades.

     “There you are,” he would murmur quietly, placing a hand on Yuji however he could, forgetting battle plans and schematics and a pile of unanswered pleas for peace from the enemy he so mercilessly crushed beneath his iron boot. 

     “Don’t get excited.” This had become their standard greeting. “I should be trying to kill you.” 

     “I would welcome your company either way.” 

     Sometimes Yuji did try to kill him, after such a comment. Sometimes he didn’t. It always ended the same. 

     Sukuna never complained when Yuji attacked him with his knife or they clashed swords, never complained when he got shot in the thigh or the shoulder and once in the heart, but never in the head, Yuji couldn’t do that again—and he certainly did not complain when Yuji pushed him down and swung a leg over his, or backed him up against a wall, or lost a struggle of strength and found himself kissed against the floor. He merely gripped Yuji’s hips in both hands, all four red eyes glinting brilliantly with need and excitement. And Yuji allowed him. 

     And their farewell became standard too. 

     “I love you.” 

     “Go to hell.” 

     “And when will you love me in return?” 

     “Never.” 

     “Then I am in hell already.” 

     How Yuji wished that were true. One of them was in hell and it wasn’t Sukuna, grinning at him with ruby eyes, watching him leave with a smile that knew he would return. 

     Yuji often waited for Sukuna to either get up afterwards, and be the one to leave him; or he waited for the god to fall asleep. The latter was rarer than the former. Sukuna did not usually need rest. Yuji hated that he had come to recognize when Sukuna was too pale, was losing his colors, recognize when he needed to consume human flesh. 

     He knew that Sukuna could not die, and he knew that Sukuna in a weakened state would be for the benefit of everyone. But he was ever a fool. 

     Yuji was ever a self-sacrificing, reckless fool, indeed. Ever a dolt, in Nobara’s words. He allowed the monster to partake of his blood if it kept him from needlessly slaughtering others. It was a willful ignorance; he kept his eyes shut to the awareness that there were almost certainly other people Sukuna was eating behind the scenes and Yuji was certainly not enough to sustain him. He did not know for sure and with all the blind optimism of an idiot, he marched forward and refused to look behind the curtain, because if he could believe he was helping people, he could hate himself less. 

     Sukuna never hurt him. He drank his blood and consumed his flesh as though taking communion before his god, devoutly, devotedly, holding him secure in the cage of his arms, and never taking enough for Yuji to fall unconscious. Yuji would cling to him for stability and Sukuna would feed some of his own godly power into Yuji to help him bear it, and then the healers would attend to the damage immediately, and Sukuna would stay beside him, holding his hand. Would lay beside him as he convalesced for a day, arms around him, pressed against his side.

     Yuji knew Sukuna was going longer and longer between feedings on purpose. Yuji knew he should tell his allies when Sukuna was weak, instead of feeding him and making him stronger. 

     But he didn’t, because the result would be the same; a bloodbath. He had given up trying to bring Sukuna down that way. It was impossible, and the impossible was too daunting even for Yuji’s unwavering resolve to face forever—at least when it came to endangering other people. He would not wear any more lives hanged on his crown of thorns. 

     However, Yuji was determined to wear the pink scars of Sukuna’s teeth as a badge—of sacrifice, and of shame. 

     Sukuna wore his own scars. When they lay entwined in the sheets, Yuji traced the thousands of them that littered Sukuna’s body, the strange scales that grew along his neck and throat, and all over his right arm. He knew, without needing to ask for confirmation, that these scars were all his doing. That was where he had gutted him once. This was where he’d stuck a knife between his ribs. Here, where he had sought to carve out his heart. Here he had slit his throat, and here he had tried to hack out his kidney. Here he had stabbed and stabbed and stabbed relentlessly in a blind rage. There, over his face, where he had…that one did not bear thinking about. It made Yuji sick. The violence he was capable of…the things he allowed and enabled Sukuna to do…he couldn’t be the god of peace. Not when he had brutalized someone who wasn’t fighting back so horrifically thoroughly. Not when he let the god of annihilation slake his thirst on his own blood and flesh and still bedded him afterwards. 

     “I wear them proudly,” Sukuna’s deep voice broke through the twilight and silk of the bedroom, and Yuji squeezed his eyes shut, blocking it out. But his head was on Sukuna’s chest and the words vibrated through him directly into his brain. “Only another god could damage me. Only you could have left these behind.” 

     I am a false god, Yuji thought miserably. I am as much a monster as you. 

     Yuji sat up without a word and moved to get out of the bed, but Sukuna caught his arm by the wrist, and he stopped. It was the first time Sukuna had ever prevented him from leaving. 

     “Where are you going?” It was the first time he had ever asked that, too. 

     “Away from you.” 

     “Why?”

     “Why do you think?” Yuji snapped. “I never want to see you again.” 

     “You say that, yet you return to me time and again.” 

     “This time it ends. I mean it.” 

     “The same way you thought I meant it when I said ‘I love you’? Because you do not mean it. I do.” 

     “Whatever, Sukuna.” Yuji turned away. “Let me go.” 

     “Never.” 

     Another nation fell to the war machine. Yuji soldiered on and hated himself more for it. 

     “What is it you want?” The god’s voice held a tinge of something that a more naïve, clueless Yuji might have been fool enough to call desperation. As it stood, he had no idea what that was he was hearing, but he in no way wanted to hear more of it. It almost sounded like he was pleading and the thought made Yuji very uncomfortable, even if once upon a time he had wished Sukuna might at least beg for his life. “What must I do, to keep you by my side, Yuji? Name your price and I will pay it.” 

     Yuji’s hand crept up to the scar on his shoulder, still tender from its healing, where the monster’s teeth had met in his skin. “Are you finally tired of these stupid games?” The games you have enabled. The games you have invited. You are in his bed!

     “It’s been seven years, Yuji. I no more know what you want from me than I know why Senra does anything Senra does.” 

     Yuji jerked his hand away and would not grace Sukuna with his eyes. He didn’t want to see any expressions on Sukuna’s face that he was unused to seeing there, that did not belong there. He didn’t want to see his face at all. He didn’t want to admit that seven years was a ridiculous amount of time for something like this to go on, a testament to the fact that not one of them was a human being. 

     “You are a monster,” Yuji said quietly, staring at his knees, at the ground. “You bed me gently and kill millions in the background. Your atrocities have never once stopped. Your cruelty, publicly torturing the traitors, fighting prisoners of war to the death because you know no one can beat you, commanding enemy children to fight to death in a pit for your entertainment, eating people, crushing those who beg for mercy because you can and leaving their cities sacked and wasted to show you never wanted anything other than to wipe them out—everything you do is evil and cruel. I—” Yuji’s voice caught. His eyes had begun to sting. “I can no more shuck you from my life than I can kill you. If I ran you would hunt me to the ends of the earth. The only end I see in sight is my own death. Sometimes I think it’s the best idea I’ve ever had.” 

     Sukuna was silent. Part of Yuji wished he might refute it, but he did not. 

     Yuji looked up at the wall now, still anywhere but at Sukuna. 

     “I can’t get rid of you. I am trapped in your bed, in your arms, forever and ever. No matter how far I run I keep coming back. And if I truly ran you would never let me leave. There is no freedom for me. I have lost everything in pursuit of you. I’ve turned myself into a mockery of my own morals. I want you dead, I want you gone, but there is no way you could or would grant that.” 

     Even as he said it, he knew there was no truth to the words. To some of them, yes. But he did not want Sukuna dead. He just…

     …wanted him to be an entirely different person. 

     Both equally unrealistic. 

     Sukuna withdrew his hand, lingering still near Yuji’s, slowly. “You wish to end my life.” 

     “For good.” 

     “You cannot. We are the same. Evenly matched, equally powered. I can’t kill you, and you can’t kill me.” 

     “Does that mean I can’t even kill myself?” Yuji asked bitterly. 

     “You cannot, and if you think I would allow that for a second you are a fool.” 

     “See?” Yuji snapped. “You control me. You control everything about me. I have no future! No options! You have taken it all!” 

     “You sought me out this night.” 

     “Why do you think that is?!” Yuji exploded, rounding on him at last. Sukuna looked surprised. The god of violence looked surprised that Yuji’s words had become such a thing, that there was rage and turmoil in his face. “Because I can’t escape you! I have deluded myself into thinking I can mitigate the harm you do by letting you feed off of me, but I know full well you continue to consume other people, you are never. satisfied! And I am the monster for enabling you!” 

     “Yuji—”

     “Fuck you.” 

     “You have, several times.” Sukuna reached for him again, caught his hand this time, curled his fingers around Yuji’s as lightly as possible. “My feelings for you have not changed. I had hoped yours might be changing at last. If you wish for me to—”

     Yuji wrenched his hand free, and felt the sting of rejection from both of them. “I don’t want you. My body does, but my mind? You’re a horrible person. You’re not even a person, you’re just an abomination. I don’t want that. I don’t want you. I want to be free of you, I want you to leave me alone!” 

     He said, after having snuck himself into Sukuna’s castle. He put his head in his hands, loathing what he had become, what Sukuna had made him into. 

     “You ask what I want, what you must do to keep me—unless you can change your nature, unless you can embody the peace and mercy I am supposedly incarnate of, we will never be together like you want and I will never love you! ” His voice caught. “I’m leaving. I can’t even look at you right now.” 

     “Yuji—”

     “Don’t.” 

     Sukuna did not. And Yuji disappeared, into the night, away from silk and silence and the arms he had come to crave. 

     Yuji almost kept to his resolve. Almost. 

     He lasted three months without seeing hide or hair of Sukuna. The war foundries belched smoke into the sky and churned out their war machines and the war ships carried those machines to the front lines and, Yuji prayed, they carried Sukuna with them. He hid in the bowels of the city, below the palace citadel, aware that Sukuna was unlikely to search so close to home for him when he had always traveled so far away before. It was as if he was too entangled in the web of them and their messy truths and lies to venture past the city limits. When two of the city’s three suns set and neardark struck, Yuji crept into the church he had visited once before, and slept in the shadows of the stained glass windows depicting his sacred history, the holy site bathed pink and red in the shadows of the city. 

     You have always wanted to be loved, more than anything else. Why then do you reject the love of a god? The voice might have been Sarana’s, it might have been his own. Yuji feared he no longer knew the difference. 

     I am not a god. The words were so hollow and dry, a useless phrase he threw back at the demons rattling around in his skull in the hopes they might shut up briefly. It never worked. I am a monster. I enable a monster. I have emboldened a monster. I deserve this torment for what I do. For the lives I have indirectly allowed to be taken. 

     Why not love the god back? Why not free yourself from this pain and accept what your heart already knows to be true? 

     I’d rather die. 

     Even that was empty and hollow. 

     “Deign to permit me closer and I will do anything you ask.”

     I could do it, Yuji thought, staring at his reflection in the canals. I could stop the war. 

     It seemed a fever dream. It seemed impossible. Something he had rejected so immensely, so firmly, that to give in now seemed traitorous, when he had sworn up and down he would not sacrifice himself and his own morals just to save the world, he would not bend, he would find another way, a way where everyone was happy and nothing of his was lost; but there was no other way. And his morals were gone, painted red with the blood on Sukuna’s hands, his body covered in the stains of Sukuna’s bloody lips. He no longer bore the right to take the high road. He had to face Sukuna and he had to sell it, convincingly, that he had given in. Another country had fallen, he could not delay any longer. 

     Will he even believe me? After all this time…

     He practiced on his reflection in the cold water, the ever-shimmering mirror of his own pathetic face. How had he never once questioned just how closely he resembled Sukuna? They could have been brothers. Father and son. Mirror images. Akinara and Sarana, one being split in half. The same.

     The same.

     “I may not love you yet…” The words felt arid and false. His tongue curled around them oddly, bereft of its usual venom, left to play with dusty lies and lackluster sounds. “But I’m willing to…try. If you stop the war.” 

     He couldn’t do this. 

     A lie that would save millions of lives. All for the price of his own freedom. To come and go from Sukuna was what kept him going back; if he was rendered incapable of escape, he would hate him, he was sure of it. And the truth would be out and the war would continue. He would not be able to play the role convincingly enough to keep peace forever. 

     He was not the god of peace, no matter what Sukuna said. Trying to embody Sarana was like trying to drink the sun. 

     But he would hate himself more if he didn’t do this. This was his penance, after all, for loving a monster. 

     Loving a monster? You don’t love him. 

     Yes, that’s good. Use that.

     “This is my penance for…loving a monster.” 

     The words felt like lies, the kind the gods might strike you down for. Of course, only one god mattered here, and Yuji was trying to deceive it with intimacy, to bring the Emperor down not with weapons and wounds and violence but with subterfuge, lies, and heartbreak. This was a farce. He was a fool to think he could thwart the god of war. 

     And a fool to think the god of war’s love was something that could be used against him.  

     He was a rabbit walking straight into the tiger’s den. A fool to the bitter end. 

     He was going to die for trying to play with Sukuna’s heart like this. 

     He felt sick. 

     He went back to Sukuna in shame, without a word, head down, defeated. Sukuna said nothing, either. They simply sat, in a weighty, tense void of speech or thought or even breath, so cloying and omnipresent that Yuji could feel it permeating the air. It weighed on his chest and stifled his breath. A thousand more deaths hung over their heads and Yuji could see nothing but ghosts between them. He closed his eyes and willed it to be over.

     Sukuna broke the interminable endlessness of Yuji’s wordless guilt first. 

     “I missed you.” 

     Yuji glanced up at him then, hating every part of himself for betraying someone who loved him so dearly, hated himself for hating the betrayal, and did a double-take at the man before him. Something was off. Yuji could not say what, at first, until he noticed Sukuna’s lips were pale, paler than the rest of his face. And perhaps all of his colors were less vibrant, less bright—it was hard to say, Yuji had not seen him in months, and memories were unreliable. Memories painted Sukuna larger than life, a portrait in stained glass and chiaroscuro, an opulent commission by a perverted mind, magnificent and deplorable and beautiful all at once. Memories haunted Yuji in empty rooms and hunted him through the silence, kissed his neck when no one was there, whispered words in his ear he could not recall. Sukuna’s voice, Sukuna’s face, plagued his waking moments and sleeping respites alike. The god of war waged a silent, invisible one on Yuji’s subconscious and he was winning. 

     Yet he seemed subdued, and more guarded than before. Something about this set Yuji on edge. A tiger had no business being circumspect around prey. The buck’s antlers had well and truly fallen away at this point; Yuji was as useless against the teeth of a predator as a newling fawn. 

     For what reason would a tiger possibly tread so hesitantly?  

     Yuji swallowed down the bile rising in the back of his throat. You. He knows you’re here to hurt him. You’re a liar. A liar. You deceiver. Manipulator. He should be pleased he had found a way to possibly end the war. Pleased he had a solution to the problem. So why did he feel so terrible instead at the thought? 

     He does not deserve your sympathy. If this is the only way to save the world you must do so without guilt. He is a monster and you do not love him. 

     This isn’t to save the world and you know it. You’re just too weak to stand up to him.  

     Yuji closed his eyes again. “It was safer to keep denying you than give in to you, but I can’t do this anymore.” That was truth enough; never had Yuji felt particularly threatened by Sukuna. Sukuna had had thousands of opportunities to kill him and he never had. Yuji’s life was not on the line here. But thousands of other peoples’ were, entire countries’ were, and to give in to Sukuna, to admit Yuji had the same desires, was to admit he was a monster too—enabler, liar, traitor. 

     That statement seemed to give Sukuna pause regardless. Yuji felt him withdraw, felt the oppressive aura of his strange melancholy recede, felt a heavy, pregnant silence full of unpleasant thoughts and confusion permeate the air, and he knew not which of them it engendered from the most. At last, Sukuna merely said, “Meaning?”

     “I can’t keep running. I can’t.” Yuji hung his head, the picture of misery and defeat. It was a truth, but it burned in his gut to say it all the same. “I’ll accept you,” he whispered. He felt a small part of him wither at the words and pushed it down, drowning it in the ocean of shame and regret that spurred him forward with wave after wave of reminders. You fucked him. You touched him. You fed him. This is your punishment, yours, yours, yours. You deserve to be trapped eternally with the man you hate. “I may not love you as you love me yet, but I’m willing to try, because I can’t keep fleeing.” 

     Sukuna went silent, and remained thusly for some time. He did not speak, and the lack of response began to weigh heavy on Yuji’s chest, crushing down on his lungs until he feared he might run out of breath entirely. When he turned anxiously to look at Sukuna, all he saw was the demon god standing there, staring straight back at him, exactly as he was when Yuji woke. His eyes were a single shade of cold, clear, emotionless red. 

     The one time Yuji needed him to laugh. To smile. To give anything that he had been giving these last seven years during their insurmountable struggle. But no, he sat there as cold and removed from Yuji as the statue of Akinara that had towered over a city in a foreign land, face obscured, so tall you could not see the statue’s head anyway. 

     “Deign to permit me closer and I will do anything you ask.” 

     “Why?” Sukuna finally asked. 

     Yuji swallowed. “I don’t know.” How it mirrored that day in Sukuna’s infirmary. He did know. He just didn’t want to say it right away. 

     “You do know.” 

     “I don’t,” Yuji retorted, voice catching. “You’re confusing enough as it is. I don’t know why I want you. I don’t know why you want me. I just have to accept it, because it’s tearing me apart to keep running away from you.” 

     It certainly was tearing him apart, but it was not the running away from Sukuna that was the problem. 

     When the god of war embraced him then, he should have felt triumphant. 

     Yuji just felt hollow inside. 

     He still came and went as he pleased. 

     Sukuna did not try to hold on to him, which Yuji appreciated more than words could say, because he did not think he could maintain this façade forever were he forced to be by Sukuna’s side every hour of the day. With each time he successfully escaped the castle, he felt a slight weight ease off his shoulders. At the same time, the guilt did not leave him. 

     If this was really for the sake of the world, he should be rejoicing that it was working—that Sukuna did not suspect his affections were false and did not imprison him for trickery. That he might soon enough be in the position to ask Sukuna for peace, and receive it. 

     So why did he feel so bad?  

     Why did his stomach hurt when he thought about it? 

     Why did his arms around Sukuna’s shoulders as they lay in bed feel so heavy? 

     Why did Yuji feel like a monster every time Sukuna touched him, in a wholly different way from before?

     Why did Sukuna stop whispering “I love you” in his ear late at night when he held him in his arms and Yuji was nodding off against his chest, drunk on intimacy and sleepy, sleepy enough to fall into the arms of the enemy without guilt or woe and simply be? Those moments did not change, but something had changed. Was it Yuji? Or was it Sukuna? 

     Who was lying? What was Yuji even lying for in the first place? Salvation for those around him? Or was he desperately grasping for an excuse for himself—trying to pretend he had a reason to fall into the arms of a monster, that there was some light at the end of the tunnel and he wasn’t just a horrible person who selfishly placed his own desires before the good of the world?

     Had Sukuna simply worn him down? 

     “I do love you still,” Sukuna told him one day, quietly.

     “I think I’ll believe you soon,” Yuji replied, equally quiet.

     Sukuna was a little paler each time they spoke. 

     Yuji made a foolish mistake in the labyrinth. He lost his way. Sukuna found him in the tunnels beneath the palace, a week later, curled in a ball on the cold metal ground. He had been hoping he might pass away here, where even the ever-burning three suns could not penetrate, under the millions of layers of steel and mechanica. It was stifling cold down here, near the dying planet, under the city layers. Sunlight did not reach this barren plane and cold steel trapped the frigid air that blew out of the Underdark, the bowels below the bowels where the only denizens of the city were machines. He had been wandering aimlessly here without purpose, had found the one part of the labyrinth Sukuna did not obsessively watch in the hopes he might arrive, and he had run out of lucky left turns. In the barren expanse of metal that was the very citadel he sought to penetrate, he gave up once again, lay still, and hoped he might freeze. 

     A god, dying in the subtunnels. How pathetic. 

     He had never failed to find his way into the palace before; this was a first. The fortress knew, surely, that he came with an attempt to sabotage its master—that he was waging this war from the inside. As surely as Yuji had known that if he led others to the palace it would bar them out and slaughter them one by one, he knew that the palace had frozen him out as a result of his insidious plan. Was this how it ended, then? Alone? Yuji wasn’t sure he liked that. 

     He heard Sukuna’s voice as if from a distance. He made no attempt to respond to it. He let the world fade out. 

     It all came back to this bed. 

     This room, he had learned, was the infirmary. It sat near enough to Sukuna’s own bedroom; it was situated within the Emperor’s personal wing. No one entered this space save him, Yuji, and the healers. The palace was exorbitant to look at from the outside, but it was a citadel at the end of the day, and even the interiors were a labyrinth unlike any other. Yuji had learned his way around, mostly, but he knew damn well Sukuna gave him passage, made it easy for him to come and go. And this time, for whatever reason, the fortress had forbidden him from coming. 

     Sukuna’s hair was washed out, his skin twice its normal pallor, and his lips were whiter than his cheekbones. His eyes remained as red as ever, though, cold and dark in their fury, set in deep shadows that gave him the appearance of a skull. His jaw tight, his hand curled into a fist.

     “You wish to sabotage me that badly? That you believe killing yourself is the answer? I thought we were past this.” 

     Yuji did not grace that with an answer. He dearly wanted to mutter ‘Not everything is about you’ but this was very much about him. It always had been. 

     And Yuji had, more than anything, simply been trying to avoid Sukuna at all costs for as long as possible before returning to him. He had always known, deep down, that if he was really a god, then he could not die by his own hand. Sukuna had confirmed as much last they spoke. 

     “Do you know how terrifying it was to feel your life begin to flicker out?” 

     “So I can die.” 

     “You can murder your mortal shell, I fucking suppose, even though I cannot do the same to my mortal form!” Yuji could not remember the last time he had heard Sukuna truly angry. “I sorely misjudged the limits of your incarnation and your stupidity and stubbornness! ”

     “I made a mistake.” Yuji closed his eyes. “I’m sorry.” He did not deserve his apology, but he offered it anyway. It helped sell the cover he was operating under.  

     “A mistake? A mistake? You could have died!” 

     Perhaps I should have. “I was looking for you. I didn’t mean to.” 

     He felt Sukuna sneer, even with his eyes closed. “The other entrances to the castle suddenly aren’t good enough for you?” 

     “I like trying different entrances, you know that. I thought another entrance, one you weren’t monitoring…” Yuji coughed. “I thought I might succeed in sneaking in and surprising you for once.” 

     Sukuna glared at him suspiciously; Yuji cracked open an eye and saw the glare intensify when he did. 

     He was too pale. Was that from Yuji’s near miss in the subtunnels? Could the loss of Yuji potentially destroy Sukuna? 

     At least he had a backup plan. 

     “It wasn’t an attempt at sabotage.” Yuji slowly sat up, pushing the pillows back to prop himself up on his hands. He was not wounded this time, incapable of moving. He was pleased by that, at least. “I have no plans to hurt you, I promise.” 

     Liar. Liar. Liar.  

     Sukuna looked at him for a long time, his expression heavy and almost sad, though Yuji could not say why. The silence stretched until Yuji began to be afraid, that Sukuna knew, that he was aware this was all fake, but eventually the Emperor simply turned his head and stood from the chair, and left without another word. 

     When the emotional turmoil was too much, Yuji would kick Sukuna out of his own bed. Yuji had a room. Sukuna had made that room for him. 

     Sukuna was still the one who left their shared room and went alone to his own whenever Yuji curled away from his touch and went silent; he left and left Yuji behind in that silence with only his thoughts and his self-loathing—often in the moments Yuji wished he could accept Sukuna’s arms around him the most. 

     Often, Yuji was gone when Sukuna returned in the morning. 

     He wondered if it hurt Sukuna the same way it hurt him. 

     He resolved not to do it anymore. 

     “What was I like, as a god?” The question was not something Yuji had ever expected to find himself asking. Certainly not while entwined with Sukuna among the silk sheets of the Emperor’s bed, one of the dark god’s clawed hands resting on his shoulder. The teeth scars on the other side of his neck were faded silver, smooth to the skin. 

     “…stubborn,” Sukuna replied, mulling the question over for a moment before answering. “You and I both knew you were fighting a losing battle, but you kept going, even though anyone else would have given up and given in just to see it ended and their burden lifted. You did not. You would not. So, not much has changed, all things considered.” 

     Except you think I’ve given in now. Yuji remained silent on that front and asked instead, “What was I fighting for?” 

     “Oh, you were fighting me. Like I said; not much has changed.” 

     So casual about it. Yuji shifted a little, leaning away from Sukuna, and Sukuna released him, though Yuji did not go far. The breeze painted goosebumps over his skin the way Sukuna had just hours ago with his fingers and lips. The breeze, at least, did not bring shame and guilt…though Yuji had gotten good at compartmentalizing it. 

     “When the legends say Sarana was ‘eaten’…”

     “A little too literal-minded, but true enough. That would be the fight I refer to. The one where you eventually brought me to my knees.” 

     In times like these Yuji could not say if it was Akinara talking, if there was any separation between Sukuna and the god. “I can’t picture you on your knees.” 

     “I’ve been on my knees for you plenty of times.”

     “Not what I meant.” Yuji closed his eyes. “Still don’t understand how ‘we’ came together if Akinara ate Sarana…”

     “An Eridanus is nothing like a mortal, you have to understand. And one Eridanus ‘eating’ another is nothing like human digestion.” 

     “You’re not an Eridanus. Akinara and Sarana are a step below them, but above the other gods.” 

     At that, Sukuna merely chuckled. “Ahirana is an Eridanus. ‘Life’ is not a gift of just any god. Ahirana is Life and Death, Destruction and Resurrection. That is no mere godly sphere. That is Eridanian.”

     “Then what are we?”  

     “I am Akinara, but I am also Sukuna—the melding of god and mortal. Akinara incarnated into a mortal body via a summoning ritual gone wrong. You…well. I’m not sure what you are. I just know that you are Sarana but mortal, and that I love you all the same, even when you leave without warning in the middle of the night.” 

     He had not said those words in weeks. 

     Yuji found it warmed him a little to hear it again. 

     “I’m starting to believe you.”

     Sukuna smiled, but it was a little thin, a little forced. 

     Yuji felt his own smile fade. 

     “It’s hard to be lovers,” Yuji admitted, a different night, as Sukuna put his armor back on. “When we can’t even be friends.” 

     Once upon a time Sukuna might have said “Who says we can’t?”

     This time he said nothing at all. 

     Yuji supposed he deserved that.

     There was an attack in one of the central marketplaces of the city. Innocent civilians died—and not by Sukuna’s hand. Yuji sobbed for hours until Sukuna carried him to bed. He left him alone when Yuji needed his arms the most. 

     Yuji supposed he deserved that, too. 

     Sukuna had lost his color. 

     Yuji hadn’t noticed it at first, until he saw their reflections side by side. Where Sukuna had always been the more distinct of the two, sharp lines and hard angles where Yuji had flat planes and gentle slopes, a boldface font against elegant script, now their roles seemed to reverse. Yuji saw himself vivid as a gem. Sukuna became his shadow, drifting into the background, blending into the steelscape of the world. It happened so gradually Yuji failed to notice until it was severe. 

     Sukuna’s hair was all but grey when Yuji looked at him now, and his face had grown pale and colorless, as pallid as a sheet of paper if not moreso, eyes sunken into dark grey hollows. The way his lips were white—not their usual dark color, and not their human color either—made his face look dry like a bone. And now, even his eyes seemed to fade, their red muted, and never meeting Yuji’s gaze anymore. The rest of him had blanched too, with even the oil-spill iridescence in his black armor growing muted and matte. That more than anything bespoke the abnormality of it all. 

     Yuji did not ask. He was afraid to. But he had expected everything to return to normal after the tunnels, and they had not. Sukuna continued to lose color. 

     Now he was nearly monochrome. 

     It was strange, and abnormal, and it scared Yuji more than he cared to admit. 

     “You’re very pale,” Yuji attempted to hedge the subject, just once, against his every instinct that told him to leave the hornet’s nest alone. 

     “I am a god inhabiting and piloting a human corpse, as you know.” 

     That was no answer. 

     “When was the last time you—” Yuji swallowed, weeks later when color had still not returned and he could not leave well enough alone, because it was not in his nature to. “Devoured a human?” 

     Sukuna did not offer any response.

     Yuji knew it had been too long. 

     Was he starving himself? 

     Why?

     The answer came to Yuji in the silence of dawn, the two rising suns a pink promise in the sky, the triarchy of the celestial spheres never truly setting. It came on fleeting wings as he watched Sukuna sleep. Sukuna, a god who did not sleep, lying pale and still beside him, eyes shut to the world. Sukuna slept the most when he was starved. But why was he starved? This level of pallor could not have come from just a few missed feedings. He had been abstaining from humans for a long time. Why?

     “I have deluded myself into thinking I can mitigate the harm you do by letting you feed off of me, but I know full well you continue to consume other people, you are never. satisfied! And I am the monster for enabling you!” 

     As a god, Akinara could ‘pilot a corpse’ all it wanted. It could not be killed—Sukuna had said as much. If Sukuna could not be killed, it stood to reason he could not die from lack of food—even when that food was human flesh and souls. 

     But could the body erode? 

     “You ask what I want, what you must do to keep me—unless you can change your nature, unless you can embody the peace and mercy I am supposedly incarnate of, we will never be together like you want and I will never love you!”  

     When was the last time you devoured a human?

     Unlike humans, who lost weight, Akinara lost color, apparently. 

     Why are you starving yourself? It cannot be for me. 

     “I do love you still.”

     “I think I’ll believe you soon.” 

     “I love you all the same.”

     “I’m starting to believe you.” 

     Yuji kissed his throat and then his cheek, but he did not wake. 

     Lost color and slept like a person would sleep, too. 

     Lost his godliness.

     Yuji hated that this worried him. 

     Yuji gave the god back his colors. He told himself it was for a reason, a good reason. 

     He did not know what that reason was.

     I’m starting to believe you. 

     Maybe that was why. 

     “You didn’t have to starve yourself,” Yuji said softly, voice rougher than he would have liked, his composure wavering wholesale as he looked at Sukuna in his armor, pale and withdrawn, staring out over the city. How many times had they been on this balcony—at night, when Sukuna folded naked arms around Yuji and dragged him back against his chest, at twilight when Sukuna’s lips sought the hollow of Yuji’s neck, trailing along his pulse, predator’s eyes watching the colors of his veins and the flash of his throat as he breathed. For me.

     “It will not kill me,” Sukuna said tonelessly. He did not refute Yuji’s claim, though. “A god cannot die.”

     Yuji turned away, from the voice in his head uttering I’m not worth that. “Sometimes I don’t understand you.” 

     “What’s there to understand?” 

     Yuji was silent for a long moment. “When was the last time you devoured humans?” 

     Sukuna still refused to answer. 

     “Sukuna. How long have you gone without them?”  

     The god finally graced him with a reply. “Since the day you first allowed me to take from you instead.” 

     The words cut into Yuji’s belly like a knife. 

     He has starved himself for over a year. Once I was gone the starving became for real. 

     “It will not kill me, like I said. Humans didn’t offer anything except additional strength. It in no way detracts from what I am, merely supplements it. That should assuage your guilt, should it not?” He paused, almost glancing over his shoulder, looking away instead. “…enough to give you peace of mind, at least.” 

     Yuji frowned, coming to stand nearer to Sukuna’s right, though he was still afraid to stand side by side with him—to look out over the city at Sukuna’s shoulder as though they were equals. 

     “Since when have you worried about my peace of mind?” 

     Since when have you reduced yourself to make me whole?

     It’s the other way around. I am your missing piece, I am supposed to make you whole. Make you more than.

     The god offered him a vacant, disinterested smirk. “Since you returned to me.” 

     He leaned in close, then, closer than Yuji expected. And he almost recoiled, though too many months had worn his instinctive responses of fear and conflict down to nothing. Now, normally, he leaned into Sukuna’s touch. Normally he veered ever closer. So he simply held still as Sukuna’s deformed lips neared his ear, almost kissing his temple.

     “You needn’t pretend any longer.”

     Pretend…? Yuji felt his heart sink into his stomach. Pretend what, pretend affections? Pretend concern? How had he known? Did he know? What did he mean?

     What did he even know in the first place? What was Yuji even pretending at this point? 

     “I’m not sure I follow.” 

     Sukuna laughed, a little derisively, straightening up and backing away. “You are a poor liar, my love.”

     “I have not lied—” he began, hesitantly. 

     “Now that is a lie, and bolder than any other you’ve ever thrown in my face.” 

     Yuji flinched. “How would you know I’m… lying about being worried about you? Or feeling…something…for you? I think that’s a bit presumptuous, to think you know what’s in my head…”

     Sukuna’s lip curled in conceit. “Are you a fool? Don’t answer that, I already know the answer. I am a god, Yuji, I see lies as well as night and day. I can see what your aura looks like. We have known each other for seven years. I have been in love with you for that entire time. Do you really think I don’t know you?” 

     Yuji opened his mouth to speak, then stopped, unsure what to say. “I think we fight and fuck more than we talk. And when we do talk, you talk at me. You tell me I’m a piece of you, Sarana, a god, but I have never felt like a god.” He looked away. “What do you even know of me as a person, Sukuna, what do you know of love? You have said it yourself, the Eridanus are not like us. I…” He looked suddenly at his hands, terrified of the words he voiced here. “I have never wanted to learn to love you only to realize you love me as an Eridanus does and not a person.” 

     Sukuna scoffed, loudly, derisively. “You love the color of the sky when Brisa and Sirocco have set and only Kona remains to light the night. You are the only color that has ever illuminated my world. You can’t meet my eyes when you lie. You like lemons but hate limes and you leave the lemon peels all over the place, but you plant the seeds in one single pot and you have no idea how to plant anything, because you haven’t once watered those seeds, ever, I water them when you're not looking. You like little children and cats and dogs but you don’t like squirrels for some odd reason. Your favorite color is orange. You changed it to pink somewhere along the line and your specific reasoning was that it matched my hair. We have the same damn hair. You are an idiot and a reckless fool and selfless and I have been relentlessly in love with you since the day I laid eyes on you for the first time in this life. You don't love me, but I have never once cared.”  

     Yuji went dead silent, blinking wide-eyed in something that might have been shock. “Sukuna…”

     Sukuna turned back to his city, resuming his staring out over the expanse of steel and stone without letting Yuji look on the side of his face that changed and felt, his words quieter now, voice more detached. “Do you think I wouldn’t know what real love looks like? After seven years of it, you still don’t believe me capable of loving you? I have watched you every day since our first meeting. I have fallen for the mortal who kept trying to murder me even though I proved, time and again, it was hopeless. You feel so very powerfully for everything, even the weakest of people, and I don’t understand why you put yourself on the line for them, but you do and it has driven me insane time and again, that I cannot have you and be myself, that I need to bend for you. But I will bend, because that is who and what I love. And I know you do not love me. I suspect you never will. You ask ‘what pretense’ so innocently—I know you cannot even look at me half the time, yet you claimed you were ‘done running away’. Your aura never changed. Your fear and hatred never left.” He paused. “I thought it might have—for a moment—but I digress. You wanted something from me, and I have given it to you. You are free now.”

     “I have not wanted anything from you,” Yuji replied. “I came back because I could not—I—” His mouth was suddenly suspiciously dry. He could not say the words. “It has been… so hard, trying to reconcile my feelings for you with my morals, I have been afraid to give in to the belief that I am a god— ” he finally said, pleaded, begged, desperate for Sukuna to understand, to know he was not just using him like that…at least not anymore. 

     But he could not say it. He could not make the words come. 

     So he chose the coward's way out. He deflected. And he hated himself for it. “What does my aura look like?”

     Sukuna’s expression was far away, closed off, and maybe a little bit sad. “Conflicted. Lonely. And it has never loved me. Some of the fear and hate did dissipate, and there was even a moment I thought affection might be blossoming in your heart, but it has always remained the same, even when you professed you were done running away, that you wanted me.” 

     Yuji winced and now it was his turn to look away. I’m sorry, he wanted to say, and it’s not totally a lie, I do feel something for you and I always have, it’s just…complicated.

     It’s always been complicated. We are complicated by nature. 

     “It has not…there’s always been…” Yuji tried again. “I was done running. It was going to drive me insane if I kept—”

     “Yet you continued to come and go as you please. It was never about the running. I am not a fool. And I have deluded myself for long enough. We both know you have tried to manipulate me into reducing the weight of my hand on the war front just to feel less guilty about yourself, you’ve been eating yourself alive over it—”

     “—I have been trying to convince myself that I am manipulating you to justify my feelings for you! ” Yuji burst out. 

     There. I said it.  

     Sukuna stopped abruptly. Slowly, he turned his head to look back at Yuji. Allowed him to see the human side. The one with the furrowed brow and the hollow eye, the etches of a recently-remembered melancholy, always close behind his thoughts. 

     “You don’t know me as well as you think,” Yuji said bluntly, sullenly. “I wish you did. I wish at least one of us knew me better.” 

     Sukuna managed a small scoff. “Wouldn’t that be nice.” 

     “If I am—if I am really worth it to you, worth you causing detriment to yourself, then let me stay by your side. I will stay by your side, and I will mean it.” Yuji drifted closer, closer, until he was within reach of Sukuna’s arms. Almost out of instinct, the god reached for him, and Yuji leaned into the embrace with a sigh. “Please. Understand that it’s not pretense…I just…”

     “You still don’t believe that I could want you,” Sukuna murmured against his hair. “That something like me could truly love.” 

     Yuji shut his eyes sharply. “I'm starting to, Sukuna. I really am starting to.” 

     Sukuna wrapped his arms around him and said nothing.

     Sukuna came to him in the cathedral. Yuji was staring at the stained glass again, tracing the lines of Sukuna’s body into the swirls of Akinara’s colors and the shapes of himself into the streaks of Sarana, bleeding the two images together in his head, into the third of the statue, picturing himself and Sukuna enfolded in that way, in the colors of the glass, cloaked in myth and legend. Yuji expected an embrace, waited to lean into it, but it never came. 

     “Sukuna?” 

     “I asked you before,” Sukuna said quietly, when Yuji turned to face him, his back to the pillar, the pews arranged around them like bodies or discarded armor. “What you would have me do to win your hand in full. To earn the love you were so eager to refute. You wished for me to change. I’ve told you many times I will do whatever you ask, so change I will.” 

     Yuji hesitated. It felt as though he was on the precipice of either a great discovery or a catastrophic fall. He knew not which it was, only that he was scared, that he wanted Sukuna to embrace him like he always did, and take the fear away, kiss it from his eyelids and silence his worries on his lips before they fell. 

     “Withdrawing from a war is not easy. But the pieces are now in place. Speak the word, and I end it all.” 

     Yuji’s breath caught. 

     “What—what do you mean?” 

     “I withdraw the warships,” Sukuna replied quietly. “I recall the armies. I have drafted the treaties and now I will send them forth.” 

     “And if the enemies will not submit, will not take your terms? If your terms are needlessly swayed to your side and unfair?” Yuji asked anxiously, unable to believe such a thing could be real. Sukuna was so close. In the last three years, perhaps tiring of the war’s unsustainable nature—even for a god—Sukuna had pushed his advances and brought the hammer down harder than ever. Seven nations sat at the end of point-blank arrows to the breast, poised to fall as soon as the Emperor gave the command. Two had sued for peace, for amicable terms. Sukuna had not answered, had maneuvered his forces to choke all seven nations out so that they had nowhere left to turn or run. Even now, if they all allied with one another, they could not hope to stop him. One word, and seven nations would fall. After them, three more might quickly bend the knee. The Empire could encompass the entire known world, if Sukuna chose to win just one more battle. 

     One word from Yuji, and all of that…would never come to pass. It would be over.

     Surely this was deceit…surely Sukuna was not giving up everything for him. 

     “I will negotiate,” Sukuna replied. 

     This could not be. Surely this was a trick. The god of war suing for peace when he could have strangled the world and brought it all crashing down with him as its king—impossible. 

     “Why?” Yuji choked out. 

     “Why else?” Sukuna asked, holding his hands to the side, gauntlets barren of blood—they had not been stained in such a very, very long time, longer than Yuji could even remember. “You are my Sarana. You are the god of peace. If I must court you with peace, I shall. I cannot make you love me out of war.”

     “No, you never could have,” Yuji agreed, voice tremulous. The thought still seemed like a fever dream, something insane and unrealistic, something that would be wrenched out from under him in the end. “Sukuna—”

     “I love you,” Sukuna said simply. “That will not change. Whether or not you love me back. If I cannot have you and war, I will choose you over war. You have what you wanted from me. You no longer have to pretend.”

     “I—” Yuji didn’t know how to rebut that. He didn’t know how to respond. If Sukuna had known all along this was a pretense, why go along with it? 

     Why end the war when he was being lied to and he knew it? 

     “I don’t believe you.” He saw Sukuna’s expression harden, even though his face was partially turned so Yuji could see less of the emotive side. “You won’t end the war. You’ll accept their surrender and then demolish them.” 

     Sukuna smiled thinly. “Because I am a monster, yes, I’m sure that’s what you think.”

     Yuji held his ground. “Are you not?” 

     “You are right that I am—but I have always been your monster. And I have laid all my cards on the table. I fold.”  

     Always a game. “Withdraw your warships, then.” Yuji retorted. “Do it. Prove it to me. Call back your armies, do everything you promised—” His own voice came out shaky, less powerful than he wanted it to. “Prove it. ” 

     Sukuna looked at him for a long time. Yuji did not know what he would do if it was a bluff. He could not imagine it not being a bluff. He wanted, so badly, for it to be not be a bluff. For it to be real—for this to end and for them to finally, truly be together, without the chasm of a hundred wars between them. 

     And then he turned. 

     Raised his hand and called up the screens that controlled the warships, appearing in the air over his gauntlet, all around him, translucent panels of endless information. Yuji watched as, slowly, one by one, each bullet indicating a warship turned red and disappeared from the display. Like sinking battleships in a game. 

     This can’t be happening. It can’t be real. 

     He watched Sukuna’s long fingers in their gauntleted claws click their sharp tips over various portions of the display, one by one, methodically shutting down every foundry, every turret, every shipyard, every drydock, every mechanical soldier. Yuji could not even make out all the things on the map, it was appearing backwards to him, the display between them, words flashing and disappearing faster than he could parse the information. Surely this was a facade, a trick, an illusion—

     No. He knew it was real. Sukuna was drama and everything unexpected, he was larger than life and full of ostentation when it came to his wants and whims, greedy and capricious and changeable as the weather, but he was not one to bluff—he felt he did not need to, he was powerful enough to show his hands from the start and still take what he pleased—and he was not one to fail to follow through. He was showing his hand indeed. 

     He was stopping the war. 

     “I—” Yuji’s hand went out before he could stop himself and brushed the display, which flickered around his fingers and sent a gentle hum of energy through him, a hum that felt like sunlight, like Sukuna’s fingers trailing up his spine, like electricity. Sukuna paused, unmoving, watching Yuji with blank, empty red eyes. 

     “I—I believe your word,” Yuji whispered hoarsely, his throat dry. “You don’t—you don’t have to do it all now. That would take hours.” 

     “Do you have somewhere to be?” 

     Yuji leveled a faint, half-hearted glare at him. His mind was reeling. The air was heavy and he was gripped with the adrenaline of several heretofore unrealistic futures coming to pass right before his eyes. His head felt like it was spinning off his shoulders. 

     “Why?” He finally managed. 

     “You asked,” Sukuna replied, that same quiet, near-toneless voice, but Yuji could feel something beneath the surface, in the way Sukuna looked directly at him—but would not look him directly in the eye. Always a hair to the left, to the right. Never full on.

     “Why?” Yuji’s voice stammered out the word again, louder and more desperate. The thought of everything ending had become far more terrifying than he liked. “Don’t say it was ‘because I asked’. That’s not an answer. Why would you do this? Why would you sacrifice everything for me?” His voice caught and faltered, it echoed in the cathedral, nearly a sob. “I don’t understand why you would do this when you were so close to winning.” 

     Sukuna closed his eyes. “Why else, Yuji? Because I love you, and I’m tired of fighting. I have deluded myself for long enough. I made my choice. It does not change how I feel about you, but it’s finally over.” 

     “W-what?” 

     “The fact of the matter is that while I could fight a war forever, I cannot fight you forever. Not without destroying both of us in the process. Just like before, I am forced to my knees. The war is the collateral for losing to you. You have won a battle of attrition, Yuji—you have defeated me.” 

     No, Yuji thought, alarmed and dismayed and more than a little confused, as Sukuna sank to one knee with far less grace than he usually moved, as though the armor was heavy, as though it took effort and strength he did not have to move in it. He dropped with the dull and hollow thud of metal on the black and white marble floor. Wait. Hold on. Don’t—

     Sukuna bowed his head, kneeling before him on bended knee, one hand on the floor. They stood in the cast light of the righthand windows, Akinara’s colors from the third one speckling Sukuna’s cape and shoulders and putting rainbows in his hair, Yuji bathed in a halo of fire from Sarana’s yellow and yellow-white in the same casement. He did not know what to do or say. Why did he feel like everything was falling down around him? This should be what he wanted! 

     “You win, Sarana. Yuji. Just as you did before, though perhaps with a lot less shredding of my insides this time…are you happy now?”

     No, Yuji thought miserably, mouth opening and closing without sound. No, I’m not. I don’t know what I wanted, but I don’t think it was this. 

     “You are free,” Sukuna repeated, head still lowered. “I admit defeat.” 

     I’m not free, Yuji remembered himself saying once. I will never be free of you. 

     I have not wanted to be free of you for some time. 

     Yuji knelt before him, and placed himself in Sukuna’s arms. 

     Sukuna’s head snapped up in alarm. “Yu—”

     Yuji pushed on Sukuna’s chest, with his whole body, until he shifted back and was forced to his feet, his steps unbalanced, the both of them almost tripping on his cape. And to him Yuji clung, grasping onto Sukuna’s arms, staring up into the god’s face, a hand reaching up to the deformed part that resembled shards of flesh in the shape of a mask, the hair like a halo of pink fire. Sukuna did not recoil, not when Yuji’s hand came to rest on the rigid skin and the layers of overlapping scars.

     “I believe you,” Yuji whispered, clinging to Sukuna’s face, to his cuirass, holding them together. The lights of the cathedral danced around them. “I believe you.” 

     “Believe what? ” The god rasped, voice rough and full of roiling emotions Yuji could not name, catching his one wrist in hand and folding the arm that had grasped his cape around Yuji’s shoulders to secure them both, Yuji practically entangled in his limbs, both off balance, both relying on each other to stand. “That I love you?” Sukuna demanded, his hand on Yuji’s wrist tightening, shaking him lightly, the arm around his shoulders dragging him closer. Their faces were inches apart. “And I don’t care if you never love me back, I will always love you? Now and forever? You are my Sarana. You are all I want. Even if you never want me in return—I cannot love another. Only you. Only you. ”

     Gold and white glinted against purple and orange.

     Like the veils. 

     Like the stained glass above them. 

     Like the twilight and the dawn. 

     Life and death. Day and night. 

     Sukuna and Yuji. 

     “I believe—” His voice broke like a wave on the rocks, picked up like shattered teacups, repaired, reassembled, plowing on. “That you love me.” Yuji said it with conviction, a single tear sliding down his face, gripping Sukuna’s collar as they drew ever closer, like two black holes colliding, two gods entwining. “And that I love you too. ”

—----—

     The stone façade slips. A crack in the armor. The god’s voice breaks. 

     The lights of the cathedral dance around them still. 

     They hang like a statue in the silence, cleaved together, no longer cleaved apart. Ahirana made whole. 

—Epilogue—

     Sukuna beds him in the darkness after withdrawing his very last troops from the very last frontline. They’ve done this before, a thousand times, but this is different. This is real. It feels true. And like the festival, there is no shame. Unlike the festival, they don’t hide their faces. 

     “Sarana,” Sukuna murmurs, in whispers that float on the night air, his hands roaming over Yuji’s skin, over his face. “Yuji. My Yuji. My everything. You are the only thing in a thousand lifetimes and forms I will ever want.”  

     Yuji’s voice is soft as he responds, his hands on the war god’s face. 

     “I love you too, Sukuna.”