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It is frigid in the prison realm. The chill is a creeping thing, born more from the complete absence of warmth than any true cold. It's the only sensation Satoru lets himself acknowledge.

Beyond that, he doesn’t think, doesn’t worry, doesn’t allow himself the luxury of feeling bored. If he contemplates how he got here, the being masquerading as Suguru, or the fate of the world and his students with him locked away, he will definitely go mad. There’s nothing to be gained from it, nothing he can do.

Satoru is not used to being powerless. (One more thing to not think about.) He sits, and he feels cold, and he ignores the way he can’t keep his senses from roving out and out and out around him. They find nothing but the endless, miserable infinity of his cage.

November 19, 15:40

The prison falls away with no warning. Satoru’s power rushes back to him immediately, an infinite, untamed storm. The abrupt return of reality is overwhelming. The bright light of day tears at his delicate eyes and the scents and sounds of a dozen people gathered around him assault his overworked senses.

Some scent, sticky and wet, teases at the edge of his awareness, makes the alpha in him sit up and take notice, but beyond the tapestry of cursed energies surrounding him is something else, something far more pressing. The massive, malevolent miasma of Ryomen Sukuna’s unleashed power is impossible to miss, even more impossible to ignore.

Satoru goes.

November 19, 15:51

That Satoru doesn’t destroy Sukuna and his dishrag hanger-on here and now has nothing to do with honoring the request to wait and everything to do with the body he’s wearing.

Specifically, that it isn’t Yuuji’s.

He has no idea how Megumi has managed to get himself into this situation but he can tell that the boy is still in there, safe enough for now. Satoru can’t say the same for Yuuji, and he can’t deny the way his chest tightens when he considers the most likely explanation for Sukuna’s new skinsuit. He needs to find him. He has to.

(He won’t think about what he’ll do if Yuuji is gone. He’s gotten good at not thinking.)

November 19, 15:52

“Where is Yuuji,” he demands before his feet touch the broken ground in what the surviving sorcerers are generously calling a home base. The smell hits him on the next breath, overpowering and wet - cut grass, vibrant and verdant and vaguely floral, and under it all, sharp on his tongue, aching in the back of his teeth, blood.

It’s not a scent he knows but he recognizes it all the same: Yuuji.

Yuuji is in heat.

“He’s safe.” Satoru whips around and Shoko is approaching him, hands in her coat pockets, shades pushed up into her hair. She looks tired, more exhausted than he’s ever seen her, and he almost thinks to ask how long he’s been gone, what all has happened, who all has died (He hasn’t thought about it but he knows they have. He can see all the empty spaces, all the gaps that should be filled.), but then the wind shifts. Shoko reeks of desperate omega, the scent so heavy on her he can barely pick out the sting of cigarette smoke beneath.

He bares his teeth without thought, blindsided by a primal sort of rage that she would dare to even get near what is his.

“Don’t,” she tells him, voice flat, coming to a stop just out of his reach as if those few steps could ever save her from his wrath. She sighs, the sound heavy. His Six Eyes can tell that she’s almost entirely depleted, past her limit, but he can’t bring himself to care. Shoko isn’t his priority. She can’t be, not when Yuuji’s need for him is in the air, practically dripping from her hands. Not when his omega is desperate and vulnerable and out of his reach. When he can’t claim him, can't protect him.

“Nobody has touched the kid.”

That’s not what it smells like.

“Take me to him,” he demands. It grates that he even needs the help, but wherever they’re keeping Yuuji his scent is barely reaching this communal area. It’s more of a suggestion, a tease when the wind changes. Around them, a few of the alpha sorcerers look tense but nobody moves to seek the omega out and none of them smell like they've been as close to him as Shoko. Even in his absence they had the good sense to recognize what belongs to Satoru.

And without Sukuna, Yuuji has no cursed energy to track down, to find him with his Six Eyes.

“Yeah,” Shoko mutters. “That would be best for everyone.” She leads him between a pair of towering office buildings, down a rubble-strewn alley to a service door partially shadowed by an overturned dumpster.

The city is in ruins, everything vacant and crumbling around them, but the destruction hardly registers. There’s an itching under his skin, a metallic ache in the back of his teeth, and every time he catches the scent of Yuuji on someone else’s skin the dark, animal thing inside of him throws back its head and howls.

Shoko ducks down by the doorway to pick up an electric lantern then pauses, clutching the door’s handle. She meets his bare eyes without flinching, tired and serious. “Satoru,” she starts, and then stops, licks her lips. Satoru curls his hands into fists and fights the urge to tear her away from the door, to rush into the building and find his omega, to find Yuuji, and trap him on his knot, to fuck him and fill him and mark him, make him Satoru’s permanently, forever-

“Yuuji’s brother is with him. Watching over him.”

Satoru blinks, brought back to himself by the unexpected comment. “Brother? How-”

“I’m not interested in explaining. I don’t even really understand it, or care to. The only thing you need to know right now is that if you kill him the kid will be upset so try your best to scrounge together some kind of self-control. For Yuuji’s sake, if nothing else.”

“Ah, Shoko,” Satoru says. “Do you think I’m the type of alpha who would kill someone just for being around my omega? Even if he’s in heat. Even if he’s unclaimed, even if I’m not-” There’s a growl building in his chest, rumbling through his playful words and warping them into something twisted and dark, violent.

Shoko shakes her head. “Just try.”

Then she wrenches the door open.

The air inside the building slams into Satoru with all of the force of a freight train and none of the kindness. The traces of scent he’d been catching off of Shoko were nothing, nothing, to the true power of Yuuji’s heat.

The air inside is saturated with Yuuji’s scent, soaking in it, sticky and hot and so wet Satoru half expects to see slick dripping from the walls. His cock fills immediately, fast enough he’s dizzy with it, straining, obscene, against the front of his pants. The ache in his teeth has grown to a sharp burn, like biting into ice, his alpha fangs abruptly too big for his snarling mouth.

Omega. His omega. Satoru needs to find him. Now. He needs to bury his teeth in him, bury his knot in him, fill him until he’s swollen and leaking so that no one will ever be able to smell him like this - desperate and untouched - again. The world will know exactly who he belongs to.

Fingers snap in front of his face and Satoru snatches Shoko’s wrist out of the air before he comes fully back to himself. He gentles his grip but the damage is done; she’ll be wearing a bracelet of bruises from his hand.

“Fuck,” he manages. His tongue is clumsy, dumb in his mouth. He feels…insane, out of his mind, his untouched cock throbbing viciously in time with his hammering heart. There’s a growl rumbling through his chest that he can’t seem to stop and he’s shaking, violent tremors he can’t control.

Satoru has smelled omegas in heat before, has had them, but he has never been so affected, so out of his fucking mind, not even in rut.

“Fuck,” he says again. Shoko watches him with calculating eyes.

“I’ve been wondering if it would be the same for you.”

The same? he means to ask, but his thoughts are still scattered around him like so much debris, caught in the blast zone of Yuuji’s devastating scent. By the time he can gather himself enough to try for coherency she’s already stepping back from him, inclining her head down the hallway.

Satoru goes immediately. Nothing is worth delaying him getting to Yuuji. Certainly not…whatever his question had been.

They cross the length of the building to the stairwell on the far side, then climb to the third floor. The scent of Yuuji’s heat is somehow, impossibly, growing stronger and Satoru feels like he’s going mad with it. Just the smell of Yuuji’s need for him is accomplishing in minutes what all of his time in the Prison Realm hadn’t been able to manage.

His skin is crawling and every instinct he has is screaming in his head, demanding that he get to his omega, that he get him on his knot and kill anyone and everything that tries to interfere, to challenge his claim to what’s his. The knowledge that Yuuji has been like this for hours (don’t think, don’t think) tears at his fraying control. There are alphas here, alphas who had smelled him, wet and ready and so desperate, mindless with the need to be fucked and bred, and Satoru hadn’t been here to warn them off, to kill them for daring to come close.

He hadn’t been here to take care of Yuuji, to provide for him, to soothe the fire of a need so powerful that it threatens to burn even Satoru alive.

He’s close now, though. He’ll do all of that and more, give Yuuji everything he needs, give him everything Satoru has to offer. Yuuji will take it all, and gladly. Satoru knows he will, has always known it. Even when Yuuji had been a beta, a deep, visceral part of him had recognized that they belonged to one another.

An alpha and a beta were a strange combination, maybe, but that had never given Satoru any pause. He’d just thought they had more time together, that he could give Yuuji the space and freedom to grow up a little before binding them together forever, body and soul.

Stupid. Foolish. Unforgivable. (One more thing not to think about, alone in the Realm.) He’ll never waste another second when it comes to Yuuji, not ever again.

Which is why when Shoko stops him with her hand on the door again he doesn’t even try to bite back the snarl that tears from his chest to ripple violently between them. Satoru is out of patience, the threads of his self-control audibly snapping under the tension, one by one. His cursed energy flares up, strong enough to make Shoko’s hair flutter, but she only watches him with dour eyes, unimpressed.

“You’re going to bond him.” It’s not a question. Satoru laughs, the sound manic, fractured like glass.

“If you’ll get out of my way, yes!”

“His late-onset development means he’s likely infertile; you should know that going in. You can’t regret this, Satoru.”

“Shoko, why would I want to share him with kids?”

Shoko watches him, gaze searching, and then her shoulders slump and she blows out an amused huff of breath. “I forgot who I was talking to. Okay.” Her grip tightens around the door’s handle and Satoru tenses, understanding that this is the very last barrier keeping him from Yuuji. His cursed energy flexes, prepared to blow right through the door if Shoko doesn’t open it now.

“Let his brother go,” she reminds him, and then the heavy steel is pulling back from the frame, opening inwards like the gates of fucking destiny, and -

“-sei! Gojo-sensei!!”

Satoru had thought the Prison Realm was still? This is stillness. Even the Six Eyes have gone dark. There is nothing, nothing, but Yuuji’s voice crying out for him. His cursed energy howls around him, his body moves, and he's standing at the end of the hallway before Yuuji can finish the honorific a second time.

He's aware of the final door between them in the way a meteor would be: just one more thing to tear through. It takes less than a thought to unmake it, to rip it down into atoms and scatter them into nothing. Satoru is already staring through it, gaze locked on his omega, finally, finally.

Yuuji is an inferno, blazing with heat and need. He is also gloriously, devastatingly naked, his skin flushed and gleaming with sweat. He's lying on his side, one hand tucked between the bulk of his thighs, obscuring Satoru’s view, his gasping mouth open and wet and red as a wound. The sweet bite of blood is thick in the air and Satoru wants to drink it, to bathe in it, to drown himself in it.

He can't help the snarl that builds in his chest any more than he could stop the stars from spinning out around them. Yuuji whines in response to him, fingers crawling through the dark nest of blankets, searching.

He's reaching out for Satoru and Satoru steps forward, towards him, hand outstretched-

Another hand comes down, strange fingers caressing Yuuji's in a familiar, intimate gesture.

Satoru has used the term blind rage before but he has never understood it, not really. Not the way he does watching another alpha touch his weeping omega. His fury is primal, feral, something dark and wicked in him that isn’t quite human, something visceral, something ancient. He feels out of control but focused, dangerous in a way he has never been. The rumbling growl in his chest claws its way up from the depths of him, from a place he’s never acknowledged, a part of him that is more beast than man.

The other alpha lifts his hands away, holds them up as he steps back from the pallet of blankets and Yuuji, curled and vulnerable. There’s something about him, something that teases at the edge of Satoru’s mind while his Six Eyes whisper at him. Curse, they hiss. But not. They cannot tell him if this being is a threat but they don’t need to. He’s standing near Satoru’s omega. He was touching him, just now, with his filthy, clawing hands. Satoru’s cursed energy surges, prepares to rip this challenger apart, to leave nothing of him left to so much as taint the air Yuuji breathes.

Between them, Yuuji sobs. The smell of pain and desperation and need is sweetening, heady, curling around him enticingly. Desire. Omega knows his alpha is close. His fingers scrabble through the blankets with a clumsy fervor, reaching, reaching. Without thought, Satoru pulls Infinity into reality to surround him in an impenetrable shield.

The cursehumanalpha takes another step back. Satoru bares his teeth again but the other alpha just watches him with dark eyes, waiting, unnervingly passive in the face of Satoru’s incandescent fury. He stinks of Yuuji’s heat, blood-thick and tacky on him, but there’s no tell-tale hint of sex or lust. Yuuji himself smells untouched, unbred.

In fact, beneath the heat and the need, the difference between their scents is nearly indistinguishable. It’s all blood undercut by sweetness. Shoko’s voice nags at him. She’d told him to remember something, to not upset Yuuji. His instincts supply the answer before his mind can organize the pieces: this alpha is Yuuji’s family.

“You’re the brother.”

Something complicated flashes through the other alpha’s eyes, there and gone faster than Satoru’s distracted mind can parse. Yuuji’s hand is free of the blankets now, clawing at the ground, his cries increasing in pitch and intensity with his alpha so close and not touching him. Satoru’s hammering heart pounds behind his eyes, throbs in his teeth, makes his cock jerk violently in his pants. The need to fight and the need to fuck are at war with one another, neither willing to give ground.

“I am,” he says finally. Satoru has nearly forgotten what that means, that the alpha is responding to his own statement.

“Leave. Now.” This is an offer, an act of mercy. Satoru should tear this being apart, should gouge out his straying eyes and feast on his grasping fingers and feed Yuuji his still-warm heart to nourish him, to fuel his body through the throes of heat. He doesn’t. Shoko’s voice is still in his head. Yuuji will be upset if Satoru kills his brother.

Satoru is Yuuji’s alpha. Yuuji’s happiness is his priority.

The alpha seems to sense Satoru’s fraying control. He inclines his head again and steps further back, until he’s pressed against the wall. Infinity flexes around Yuuji, widening until the other alpha has just enough space left to edge around the room, hands raised and back dragging against cracked plaster.

“Take care of him,” he says, stopping just beside Satoru, still lurking in the doorway. Only now is there a flash of teeth, the sharp edge of a threat undercutting his scent. “Don’t fail him again, Six Eyes.”

Satoru’s cursed energy spikes up around him like a solar flare, his scent surging alongside it, burning any and all traces of the other alpha from the room. Yuuji wails, wriggles like he’s going to try to get up. The other alpha takes the hint and leaves them alone, disappearing down the hall. The Six Eyes track him until he vanishes into the stairwell, his energy joining Shoko’s and retreating.

Satisfied, he spreads Infinity out as far and wide as he can, forming a protective bubble around this makeshift den. It’s far from perfect but there’s no time to find better. Yuuji has tipped himself forward, one hand still outstretched towards Satoru and the other buried firmly between his thighs. He’s sobbing into the bedding, writhing; he can’t figure out why his alpha isn’t touching him.

Satoru abruptly can’t remember either. He closes the space between them and kneels, takes Yuuji’s hand. The touch is burning hot, searing down to Satoru’s bones. He half expects it to scar, for Yuuji’s touch to mark him forever.

He hopes that it does.

Yuuji keens, clinging to him with a desperation so violent his nails bite through skin. Satoru can smell the slick gushing from Yuuji’s body, thicker and sweeter than before in response to his presence, the alluring scent of an omega who knows he's got his alpha's attention, who only needs to tempt him into their nest, to entice him into fucking and knotting and breeding.

Satoru doesn't need the encouragement. He’s always considered himself above the temptation of omegas, their smells and their heats and all the ways they can steal an alpha’s mind. As it turns out, he had just never encountered Yuuji. He has just enough presence of mind, just enough humanity, left to strip off his clothes before he climbs over his omega, covering his body protectively with his own.

With gentle hands, he turns Yuuji onto his back. The omega goes easy, body loose and lax, open for him. The splay of him is obscene, toes curling and thick thighs trembling, his body all soft, rounded muscle and rosy skin. He's sweating and his belly and thighs are coated with his own slick, the arm still buried between them shining up to the elbow with fragrant wetness. Satoru has never seen an omega more ready to be fucked.

Yuuji's eyes flutter open. They're hazy and unfocused, the gold of his irises barely more than a suggestion around blown-out black. He's out of his mind, completely fucking gone, licking clumsily at his lips and whining, heedless of the way his tongue catches on gleaming omega fangs and bleeds. His gaze roves over Satoru’s face, returning again and again to his bare eyes.

Even the King of Curses had never been enough to shatter Yuuji’s unshakeable sense of self, to seize control of his body and tear away his mind the way his desire for Satoru has. Seeing Yuuji this way, a being of pure instinct, vulnerable and dangerous, sparks a fierce protectiveness in Satoru, the force of which is matched only by his delight.

Satoru lowers his body onto Yuuji’s, shuddering at the hot press of naked skin, of finally feeling his omega all along the front of him. He rumbles his approval when those powerful thighs fall open for him without resistance, splitting around his hips.

"Gojo-sensei," Yuuji whispers, hoarse and reverent. Satoru’s attention snaps back to him, to the recognition and awe on his haggard face. His heart squeezes in his chest, struck by a tender sort of affection that should feel out of place in this moment, when animal need is in full control. It doesn't.

Of course his Yuuji knows him even like this, stripped of his mind and his reason, blinded by his need. They've always been more than just biology.

"I'm here, Yuuji."

November 19, 21:26

His omega sleeps. Satoru passes the time curled around him, a wall of flesh and blood and bone to shield him should anything manage to break through Infinity to try and harm him.

Yuuji is changed from the boy he was the night Satoru was sealed, his face leaner and his body harder, all of the childhood softness Satoru had sought to preserve carved from him like meat from the bone. His suffering is written clearly across his body in newly hollow places and tell-tale scars and Satoru can’t stop himself from reading their cruel story, obsessively, again and again. He pets at the overlapping wounds over Yuuji’s battered heart, one new and one not much older but known to him, at least; trails his fingers over the deep slices lining Yuuji’s forearms; presses careful, mournful kisses to the shadows under Yuuji’s eyes and the lines of tension around his mouth, the terrible new scars slashing through his beautiful face.

It doesn’t take a genius to divine what happened to Yuuji’s pinky finger, not after seeing Sukuna in his new body. The stump of it is pink and raw still, hot to the touch, and Yuuji has never much minded pain but the sight of it makes something inside of Satoru howl and rage, fills him with a black kind of fury he didn’t know himself capable of.

(He can’t stop thinking about it. Sukuna had taken a piece of Yuuji from him, from Satoru, a part he’ll never get back. He’s marked Yuuji, maimed him, but more than that, he’s taken what Satoru will never allow himself: he’s tasted Yuuji, devoured him, held a piece of him inside of himself to nourish his body and fuel his cursed energy. Jealousy is new, and twisted, and ugly.

Never mind, never mind. Don’t think about it. Satoru will tear Yuuji’s bones from the curse's belly before he destroys him.)

No one will ever be allowed to harm Yuuji again. He will wear only one more scar, a pretty ring of Satoru’s teeth, so that all of the sorcerers and the curses and the boring, mundane people of the world will know that he belongs with Satoru.

Satoru’s own neck throbs in time with his tender heart at the reminder. He reaches up with reverent fingers to trace the ragged edges of the wound Yuuji had gifted to him. Satoru can clearly remember the last time he’d bled; the moment Yuuji’s teeth had sunk inside of his skin had been just as profound, just as life-altering. He will never be the same and he would never want to be, to go back to the person he was before Yuuji had openly claimed him as his own. That man is dead.

Yuuji makes a quiet noise, shifting in his arms. Satoru pets at pink hair, brushes his lips over Yuuji’s forehead to check for the warning flush of fever that will herald the renewal of his heat. Yuuji’s skin is warm but dry and Satoru shushes him, trying to coax him back to sleep, trying to ignore the way his own instincts are beginning to stir awake.

Despite Satoru’s blood in Yuuji’s mouth, his sweat on his skin, his come in his belly and leaking from his ass, Yuuji is still, technically, an unclaimed omega. There is no alpha alive who could take Yuuji from him but the knowledge grates along his nerves. His teeth itch and a warning shiver keeps crawling along his spine, up and down, screaming danger! and Satoru has only been able to keep control of himself for Yuuji’s sake. The need to let his omega rest has been even stronger than the need to bond him, at least so far.

He can’t deny his relief when Yuuji’s eyes flutter open though, fixing on Satoru’s immediately.

“Gojo-sensei,” he breathes with the same awe, the same reverence, as the first time. Satoru’s heart shudders, twisting in on itself, all affection and a devotion that hurts, and it takes him a beat to remember how to speak.

“I’m here.”

“You’re here,” Yuuji echoes, and the smile that spreads over his face is the dawn, finally breaking.

As long as Satoru has known him, Yuuji has been obscured by Sukuna’s cursed energy, wearing it like a sickly miasma that had drifted across Satoru’s Six Eyes like fog. Now Yuuji’s face is clear to him, uncovered and radiant, breathtaking and so precious, and all Satoru can do for a long moment is look at him, to take in Yuuji in his entirety, just as himself. He imagines this is what a groom feels on his wedding day, lifting away the bridal veil to reveal a face that is, for the first time, wholly his, forever.

Yuuji’s eyes, clear and present now, dip down to take in their positions, the naked press of their bodies and the intimate way they are tangled together. His cheeks flush the most fetching shade of pink and Satoru coos at him, smacking a kiss to one just to watch the color deepen into red. He can feel the way Yuuji’s heart speeds up at the simple affection and pulls back to beam at him, smug and delighted. Yuuji’s smile is a little bit dazed, a reflexive reaction to Satoru’s happiness, and Satoru has always intended to spend every day with him for the rest of forever but that intent solidifies into a soul-deep conviction.

“How are-” Yuuji starts, and then visibly decides he doesn’t actually care. Satoru pats at his ass approvingly and smirks when his fading blush returns with a vengeance. He waits as patiently as he can while Yuuji decides what he wants to ask first. A lot has changed for the teen in a very short time; it’s only natural for him to feel overwhelmed.

Secretly, privately, desperately, Satoru hopes that Yuuji won’t ask for space. He would give Yuuji the world but he is not sure he could give Yuuji that. To be separated from him, to leave him unmarked and unmated, would -

“Will you claim me?”

Satoru blinks down at his omega, briefly thrown. Warmth builds in his chest, burning away his momentary doubt like sunlight to shadows. “Yuuji!” he gasps. “Are you reading my mind?”

Yuuji’s eyebrows furrow and his lips purse, like he’s seriously considering the question. Satoru’s heart may give out from the sheer force of his adoration. “I don’t…think so? It’s pretty quiet in here.” He taps at the side of his head to demonstrate and it's lighthearted, a joke, but a shadow crosses his face for just a moment and Satoru pulls him closer, pressing a kiss to his hairline because he can, because Yuuji is his and he’s allowed.

“Claiming?” Yuuji prompts when he pulls away again, a dog with a bone. There’s a smear of Satoru’s blood at the corner of his mouth and that dark thing inside of him shudders with approval at Yuuji’s insistence. He’s completely gone on Yuuji, wrapped up in him, obsessed. Yuuji isn’t trying to hide that he’s the same; he wants Satoru, and he won’t be deterred.

“Are you sure?” he asks, just so Yuuji will keep pushing, will show Satoru exactly how much he wants him, how much he’s willing to fight for him. “Once we bond you can’t ever go back.”

“I’m not going back to a life without you, Sensei.”

It’s exactly what Satoru had been angling for but hearing Yuuji say it with all of the uncomplicated conviction of a carving in stone is immediately devastating, a blow he will never be able to recover from. A fist closes around his throat, seizes his heart, and he’s surprised at the heat building abruptly behind his eyes. He hides himself in the curve of Yuuji’s neck, weak in the face of everything he’s feeling, everything that Yuuji is to him.

Yuuji makes him more helpless than he’s ever been, and infinitely more powerful.

“No.” He turns his head to growl his promise into Yuuji’s ear, voice low and rough. “You won’t.”

Satoru drags his teeth down, down the long column of Yuuji’s throat, lets his nose and instincts guide him to where Yuuji smells verdant and bloody and expectant, and finally bites.

Swollen skin splits around the sharp of his alpha teeth like the sweetest of fruit and Satoru’s mouth floods with copper, hot and thick across his tongue. His throat works to swallow Yuuji down, refusing to waste even the smallest drop of what’s been offered. Yuuji is inside of him, coating his mouth and settling in his belly, and in his arms the omega spasms, choking out a high keen that might be Satoru’s name.

The change in his scent is almost immediate, an undercurrent of steel as bright and violent as a bared blade: This omega is taken. Touch him and die.

Satoru doesn’t let go even once the claim takes. He digs his teeth in until Yuuji whines at the pain of it, but he makes no move to pull Satoru off of him and so Satoru stays, listening to the low, rolling rumble of Yuuji’s purr. The smell of him is sweetening with arousal, the next wave of his heat lured out by their new connection. Yuuji’s body is figuring out what Yuuji himself had already known: Alpha is here. Alpha will protect him. Yuuji is safe and he is cherished and Satoru will never leave him again.

“I didn’t even know I was a ‘mega,” Yuuji tells him eventually, his voice pitched lower. “Then all at once I was one. Like bam! I didn’t know what was happening.”

Satoru hums, pulling his teeth from Yuuji’s skin reluctantly so he can sit up and meet his gaze. He licks at his lips, chasing the taste of Yuuji’s blood, and Yuuji watches with eyes that are darkening rapidly with his interest.

“I didn’t either,” Satoru admits, smirking when Yuuji blinks at him in confusion. He’d clearly lost the thread of the conversation he’d started in favor of staring at Satoru’s slick mouth. “It seems Sukuna worked very hard to keep us both from knowing.” His smirk turns sharp, widening to expose alpha fangs still stained by his claim on Yuuji. “So much wasted effort. Omega or beta or whatever you want to be, it doesn’t matter. You’ve always been mine.”

He watches that land, watches as Yuuji’s face contorts, as Satoru’s words tear him open to expose the raw, vulnerable, bloody inside of him. Yuuji had allowed Satoru to hide when he’d been the one flayed open by feeling but Satoru has no such mercy.

His Six Eyes catalog every minute shift in Yuuji’s expressive face: the wounded twist of his mouth, the flush blooming over the bridge of his nose, the flutter of his lashes as tears bead up along the line of them. They glitter in the dim room, sparkling around the flickering gold of his irises like stars around the sun.

“I-” Yuuji starts. He stops, swallows, tries again. Satoru pets at his sides, encouraging. The inferno of Yuuji’s need is rising around them, his skin heating swiftly under his hands, but they have enough time for this. “I wanted to belong to you. I wanted -” a curl of his lip, a flash of fang, hands fisting between them “- you to belong to me. But I didn’t know how to get it. You’ve always felt so out of reach, like a star, while I’ve been stuck on the ground.”

Tenderness digs like claws behind Satoru’s ribs, takes a vicious bite of his heart. He cups Yuuji’s face with a gentle hand, thumb curving over the knotted scar quirking his mouth. Yuuji leans into the touch with a shuddery little exhale and Satoru rumbles at him, comforting, possessive. Yuuji is perfect and Yuuji is his. He’ll burn the entire world to ash to keep him.

“Ah, my Yuuji. I’m sorry,” he says, low and devastatingly devoted, and he finds it easy to admit to his faults if it’s to Yuuji, who has always known that Satoru is human and wants him all the more for it. “I misjudged. I thought you needed time. And then this whole mess happened.” He waves his hand to indicate the world at large, overrun by curses, by wicked minds and wicked hearts. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll destroy every challenger and build you a world where you can be safe and happy by my side, okay? Just believe in me a little longer.”

“I’ll always believe in you, Gojo-sensei,” Yuuji promises. He’s so sincere, so earnest. Satoru will never disappoint Yuuji’s faith in him. He would rewrite his entire life to be the man Yuuji sees in him.

“Good,” he says, and it feels woefully inadequate but Yuuji beams at him, pleased, because Satoru is enough for him, all on his own, no pretty words needed.

Yuuji shifts against him and Satoru is abruptly made aware of the thickness of his scent in the air, iron and grass and the sharp chill of steel, sweet and dangerous and heady.

“Hmm,” Satoru hums, dragging his hand up the back of Yuuji’s trembling thigh. It falls open at his touch and the smell of Yuuji’s heat nearly punches the air from his lungs. Yuuji whines in response to the snarl he can’t help but make, his own body reacting to his omega’s blatant desire. “I love Yuuji no matter his body,” Satoru says, voice nearly a growl, plowing ahead and refusing to give either of them time to process the enormity of that confession, “But I’ll admit, this is a fantastic bonus.”

He presses two fingers to Yuuji’s dripping hole to demonstrate and the choked moan the omega lets out makes him feel more powerful than any cursed technique ever has. He can practically see Yuuji’s mind pack up and leave, driven out by the abrupt force of his need for Satoru. He curls his fingers inside and revels in the choked out alpha! it earns him.

“I’m here, Yuuji,” he says, one last time. “And I’m never leaving again.”