Work Text:
Sukuna liked the consistency of the library.
It was organizational chaos at its peak—hundreds of thousands of books tucked beneath a single roof, their spines multicolored, well-manicured, some of them volumetrically slim, others thick, sorted and shelved alphabetically across all genres. If he wanted horror, Suzuki Koji’s Ring was just around the corner. Fiction? Souseki Natsume’s Kokoro was only a few aisles down. Every novel had its own placement, subjected to minimal change throughout the years save for the occasional check-out and return, and he could faithfully depend on them to be in the same spot each time he revisited.
Sukuna was rather forgetful about those things—the deadlines. Every check-out was marred with a receipt, and on that receipt was an obligatory return date. Having been shanked by late fees as many times as he had (too many to count), Sukuna had to change his approach to reading. As to spare his wallet an unwarranted onslaught of suffering, he’d taken to reading the entirety of all of his chosen novels in one sitting, nestled comfortably on one of the couches in the upstairs lounge. After all, if he could read the whole story in a day, he wouldn’t need to think about when it was due for re-shelving.
He started small, binging works of a hundred pages or less in the span of an hour, and then worked his way up to two hundred pages, then two hundred sixty, then two hundred eighty, until he could successfully start and end a three hundred page novel during the average worker’s lunch break. His reading comprehension skyrocketed, and so, too, did his understanding of people.
He couldn’t guess how many others actually bothered to pay attention to their fellow patrons at the library, but the longer Sukuna sat in its comforting depths, the more closely acquainted he became with the habits of strangers. He learned their names through passerby, eavesdropping on casual conversations about dinner plans and grocery lists, and if he couldn’t find out what their actual name was, he made one up.
The librarian he knew best, Tateyama-san, was an older woman in her mid-sixties with a penchant for dogging the corners on her personally-owned books. She didn’t often get the chance to sit and relax during her shifts, either assisting her coworkers with their individual tasks or helping a patron find something lost amidst the shelves, and the bent pages of her novels seemed to reflect that rushed disposition. If she couldn’t even afford to use a proper bookmark, then it would likely be harder for Sukuna to get a hold of her than it would be to contact the President of the United States.
Moriguchi-san was a middle-aged man and an avid fan of the romance genre. Sukuna once heard an employee greet him from behind the front desk, asking how his wife and children were only to be brushed off with a dismissive reply. He frequently spotted the man perusing the display tables near the top of the staircase, decked out and filled with elaborate, rsiqué covers, though Sukuna doubted it was the chiseled men and beautiful women that allured him. The scandalous dalliances within the pages were surely what attracted his attention, a dramatic thrill he lacked in his homelife to keep him entertained where his wife could not. Sukuna pitied him, but pitied the mother of his children even more.
And as of recently, Sukuna had been keeping an eye out for Nomura-kun. This was one of his made up names, a playful tag that made it easier to analyze behavior.
Nomura-kun couldn’t be any older than twenty-two or twenty-three, a good deal younger than Sukuna but hardly childish. He reigned over the nonfiction section of the second floor as a king would his subjects, breezing through academic essays by the dozen while drilling at the keys of his laptop as quietly as he could muster. Sukuna found him rather funny.
He brimmed with the passion of an overachieving college student, the type who probably got only a few hours of sleep at best before rising with the sun and starting anew. Sukuna wagered he was compiling research for a dissertation—on what topic, he did not know—and if the self-satisfied gleam in his eyes was any indication of his success, Nomura-kun was doing a great job.
He kept to himself and rarely disturbed the other patrons, much less the librarians, and knew where to find his materials without asking. He was quick, efficient, and mission-oriented, leaving no room for error as he went about his day according to schedule. Needless to say, a concussion most certainly would have thrown a wrench into his plans had Sukuna not been there to prevent it.
Nomura-kun was on his tippy toes, leaning heavily against the shelf for leverage in order to grab a book he was searching for, but didn’t seem to notice the instability of its frame. The shelf wobbled with every attempt he made, the books at the very top inching closer and closer to the edge of their perch after each failed grab. Sukuna’s leg started to bounce before he could control it. Anxiously, he found himself standing, rushing toward Nomura-kun with purposeful strides that quickly turned into a frantic walk as soon as one of the novels slipped from its place. Like a chain reaction, more of the books began to tumble downward, Sukuna’s forearm the only thing stopping them from plummeting onto Nomura-kun’s head.
He let out a grunt at the pressure, Nomura-kun gasping in shock—at first because Sukuna’s abrupt presence scared the living daylights out of him, and then because he noticed the avalanche of paperbacks hovering just above him. Stepping aside, Nomura-kun gave Sukuna the space to push them back onto the shelf, brows furrowed in concern.
“You should ask for help if you can’t reach something.” Sukuna sighed, gesturing to the rack, “Which one?”
“I can get it just fine-”
“Which one?”
Nomura-kun scowled, “Watano Keppei. Mammalian Skeletal Structures.”
Sukuna turned to face the titles, scanning briefly before plucking the book from its confines and handing it to him. “What are you studying?”
“Veterinary practice.”
“Dog lover?”
The younger man huffed, “You could say that. Thanks for grabbing it.”
Sukuna pointed at the lounge, “I’m usually sitting there. If you can’t reach something again, come ask.”
“I- uh… Okay.” Nomura-kun fidgeted embarrassedly, cheeks dusted light pink after having inconvenienced a stranger. He hoped the man’s forearm wasn’t bruised. “What’s your name?”
“Ryoumen Sukuna. Sukuna is fine. And who are you, doctor?”
The pink deepened into red, his neck blotchy with patches of flushed skin, “Fushiguro Megumi. I’m not a doctor.”
Sukuna smirked, shifting on his heel to walk back to the couches, “Not yet.”
The next time Sukuna saw Nomura—no, Fushiguro-kun—was Wednesday the following week.
He was more stressed than usual, fingernails drumming against the aluminum frame of his laptop with a pinched brow to accompany the taut scowl on his lips. Much like Sukuna’s distaste for deadlines, Fushiguro-kun also seemed to loathe the time crunch. The due date for his midterm appeared to be catching up him, a race against the clock to cram last-minute information into an essay before submitting it. Constraints, as per usual, left his nerves frayed at the edges, worn from overuse and duress.
Every hour or so, Fushiguro-kun would stand from his table and walk to the same shelf as last time, fingering through the titles in search of an author that always slipped through the cracks of his vision the first time over. He crouched low to the ground, stretched onto his calves, and practically scaled the bookcase for valuable research that could be attributed to his thesis. Sukuna grew so distracted by the performance that he was forced to restart the same chapter of his own novel on four separate occasions. After the fifth, he stopped making internal excuses and gave up, fully diverting his attention to the manic college student.
He had been doing this—the back and forth game—for almost six hours straight. Sukuna had only left once to go to the bathroom and another time to buy a snack from the downstairs vending machine, but as far as he could tell, Fushiguro-kun hadn’t taken a single break, be it for food or leisure.
Preparing to stand once again, the legs of Fushiguro-kun’s chair grumbled as they scraped against the carpet, and Sukuna decided it was time to intervene. Sticking a bookmark between the pages of his novel, he laid it onto the table and strolled to Fushiguro-kun’s workspace slowly. The young man was mumbling to himself, visions of what Sukuna imagined to be animal bones and x-rays swimming through his mind in a blur.
“L’art Vétérinaire… L’art Vétérinaire…”
“A French title, then,” Sukuna interrupted, sliding passed Fushiguro-kun’s back to get a better look at the shelf. He read through the titles and authors carefully, trying to pinpoint a romanized name littered into the mix of kanji somewhere. Having had a few conversations with Sukuna since their first meeting, Megumi wasn’t surprised about the magical appearance. He’d learnt early on that Sukuna moved with frightening silence, startling even the most well-prepared of the librarians with an abrupt greeting upon his arrival each day. Megumi, too, liked to think he had gotten used to Sukuna’s antics. What he didn’t take into account, though, was how deep the man’s voice sounded up close, how warm his breath would feel as it fanned across the shell of Megumi’s ear. A vibrato like liquid velvet, Sukuna’s words seemed to melt into his body straight through the skin of his neck. “Right here. Claude Bourgelat, no?”
Megumi felt his breath hitch, lodged inside of throat as if he’d been punched square in the gut. He tried to prevent his diaphragm from spasming as Sukuna wrapped a hand around his waist, a large blanket of warmth settling on his hip.
“The founding father of veterinarianism. Am I correct?” Sukuna asked.
He draped himself over Megumi’s back, a living, breathing cloak compared to the semipermeable jacket Megumi shrugged on every morning, the heat radiating between them reminiscent of the heat shared between his dogs as they slept at night, cradling each other as gently and closely as possible. The layers of clothing did little to prevent Megumi from noticing the sheer difference in size and mass.
How had he not noticed before? It wasn’t as if they hadn’t spoken to each other more than a few times over the course of a week. Sukuna could probably cover his entire face with a single palm, yet up until now, Megumi had been perceiving him as a plain, ordinary man who just liked to read in his spare time.
His frame overshadowed Megumi’s; to the CCTV footage, it probably looked as though Megumi had simply disappeared into the aisle. But he was there, crowded beneath Sukuna, suffocating and flustered by the proximity. With how frequently he isolated himself to study, it had been a while since Megumi was so… near to another human being.
Maybe it was just one of those days. Maybe he was feeling lonely and Sukuna just so happened to reawaken that insignificant little desire for company.
“Fushiguro-kun?”
“H-Huh?” Megumi blinked, whipping around to slip beneath Sukuna’s arm and grab the book himself, “That’s—That’s right. How’d you know?”
A soft smile played at Sukuna’s lips, “You were talking to yourself.”
“…”
“My, what a pretty color!” The man snorted, brushing a thumb along the underside of Megumi’s eyes with a laugh, “Don’t overwork yourself. You’ll catch a fever.”
Was that all he’d come over for? To warn Megumi about getting sick? To help him grab another book? He was already walking back to the lounge, already finished with him for the day, already leaving, and Megumi didn’t want him to go.
“Sukuna.”
“Hm?” Glancing over his shoulder, he shot the college student a questioning glance.
“Will you sit with me for a while?”
Sukuna changed his routine.
There was something to be said about the affect Fushiguro Megumi had on him if he’d been so easily persuaded to abandon the soft suede couches of the lounge in exchange for the much more uncomfortable table-and-chair set-up Megumi partook in. What had first started out as companionable silence turned into friendly banter, and then, once Megumi’s finals were dealt with, borderline flirtatious quips.
Megumi opened up to him as ferns unfurl in the sunlight, slowly, cautiously, fearful of what may blind them in the near future, but Sukuna somehow made the process smoother. He was casual in a manner most adults were not, disregarding formalities in favor of having a genuine conversation that rivaled the sort of chats he had with his step-sister, Tsumiki. He asked Megumi questions that mattered, validated him more than his professors ever could, and really, who could blame Megumi for falling victim to that form of flattery?
Sukuna was licking the residue from a packet of chips off his fingers when Megumi decided he liked him in more than just a subtle acquaintanceship type of way. Dressed for the winter season in thick corduroys and a wool sweater, Sukuna looked like a personified version of the bears in Megumi’s textbook, huggable, but just large enough to be considered dangerous.
“What do you do outside of the library?” Megumi asked, pretending to convince himself that he wasn’t into that.
Humming contemplatively, Sukuna’s lips popped as he sucked the last bit of grease off his index finger, “I like movies.”
“What kind of movies? You should-” Megumi bit his tongue for a moment, rewording what would surely be a make or break question, “Would you want to…”
“There’s this one sci-fi thing that just premiered. I was going to see it by myself, but you should come with me.” Sukuna said, “If you want to…”
“O-Oh.” Thank God, he’d spared Megumi the trouble by asking him out first. “Sure… I’d like that.”
“Give me your phone?”
Megumi handed it to him wordlessly.
Wiping his hand on the inner fabric of his sweater, Sukuna began to tap a series of numbers on the screen before sliding it back to him across the table. On it, the emboldened letters spelt out Ryoumen Sukuna, and for what Megumi assumed was shits and giggles, added a tiger emoji beside it.
“Text me when you’re free.” He said quietly, uncertain.
“Okay. I will.”
The tension in Sukuna’s shoulders lifted, and a relaxed smile spread across his cheeks. “I’ll see you around then, Megumi.”