Archive of Our Own

For almost a year, you don’t let yourself think too hard about how absurd it is.

It starts off as necessity — because if you don’t feed him, he looks… thinner. Like even the little blob of him can wither, in its own way. The first time you notice it, you panic so badly you spill your tea all over the counter and nearly drop him trying to scoop him up.

He glares at you with his single eye and snaps with that little mouth.

You snap back, because you’re already halfway into this, apparently.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m trying.”

He makes a noise like a scoff — impressive, for something the size of your palm — and then presses himself against the warmth of your wrist anyway, as if your body heat is a resource he’s entitled to.

So you learn.

You learn what he will and won’t take. The first few weeks you treat it like a science experiment, because that’s safer than thinking about it like a relationship with a cursed calamity that once tore cities apart. You try ordinary food, he rejects most of it with offended wet little spitting sounds. You try salt, he reacts like you personally attacked him. You try sugar, he hates it even more.

What he does take is… strange.

Leftover cursed objects you keep sealed in jars, because you’re not an idiot. The lingering residue from exorcised things that cling to paper talismans. The faint, metallic taste of your own cursed energy when you press your thumb to his mouth and force a thread of it in, jaw clenched as you watch his eye narrow like you’re doing him an indignity.

He hates that most of all.

He also — when he thinks you’re not looking — leans into it.

You end up with a routine that would make you laugh yourself sick if you heard it from someone else.

Morning: check him.

He likes to sleep tucked into the little bed you made out of an old scarf and a shallow wooden bowl, like some ridiculous shrine offering. Sometimes he’s on top of it, like he fell asleep mid-protest. Sometimes he’s under it, like he burrowed down to hide from the cold.

He never admits that he gets cold.

He just glares at you when you pick him up, and his texture is a little firmer in winter mornings, less pliant, like gelatin left too long in the fridge.

You warm him up between your palms. He complains. You do it anyway.

Afternoon: feed him.

A small measure. Not too much, because once — early on — you get anxious and overdo it, and he swells in your hands like a balloon, eye widening, mouth distending in a way that makes your stomach flip. He starts making wet, violent choking noises, and you go pale, whispering his name like it’s a prayer and an insult at once.

He survives. Of course he does. He’s Sukuna, the King of Curses, he won’t die from overfeeding.

But afterward he spends three days pressed into the farthest corner of the bowl-bed, facing away from you like a sulking cat, and every time you come close he bares a tiny, sharp line of teeth.

Even like that, he’s still Sukuna.

Petty. Proud. Vicious in miniature.

Night: you talk to him.

At first it’s just you, filling silence, because leaving him in the quiet feels wrong. You tell him what you did that day — grocery run, train delay, the way your neighbor’s dog barked all night — and he watches with that single eye like you’re a strange animal he hasn’t decided whether to eat.

Then one evening you’re exhausted, sitting on the floor with your back against the couch, and you say,

“Do you even understand me?”

He opens his mouth and, very clearly, says,

“Idiot.”

You stare.

He stares back.

Your face gets hot.

“Oh, so you can talk.”

He closes his mouth like he regrets it, and his eye narrows to a thin slit.

After that, you keep talking, and he keeps pretending he doesn’t understand, except now you know he does. You catch it in the way his eye follows the shape of your mouth. The way he reacts to certain words — king, curses, bored — like they’re splinters.

And the way he reacts when you’re hurt.

The first time you come home with a shallow cut across your knuckles from a broken jar, you haven’t even finished washing your hands before you feel him — his tiny, warm weight — thump against the inside of your wrist like he launched himself from the counter.

He latches onto you.

Not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough that you yelp.

He makes a sound that’s not quite a growl, and his single eye is sharp, fixed on your blood like he’s offended by it.

You grit your teeth through the sting and pry him off gently.

“I’m fine.”

He bites you again, as if correcting you.

You look down at him, and you find yourself saying, softer,

“I’m fine. Look. It’s nothing.”

Only then does he release you, sliding back into your palm, and the pressure of him — warm and insistent — stays against your skin for a long moment, like he’s checking you with the only language he allows himself.

After that you start catching the little things.

How he creeps closer when the heater breaks and the apartment gets too cold. How he migrates to your lap when you’re sitting on the couch, pretending he’s there because the fabric is convenient and not because you are.

How, on the nights the wind screams against the windows and you can’t sleep, you lift him and place him on your chest, tucked under your chin, and he goes still — stubborn, silent — until your warmth sinks into him and his body loosens, almost melting against you.

He never thanks you.

He doesn’t have to. You can feel it in the way he doesn’t leave or tries to slit your throat when you sleep.

So when it finally happens — when the year of routine shatters like glass — you almost don’t recognize it at first.

It’s a normal day. An ordinary day. The kind you’ve built around him to make him manageable.

You come home with groceries, kick your shoes off, set the bags down.

“Hey,” you tell him automatically, because you’ve started doing that, like you’re greeting a roommate.

He’s in his bowl-bed, eye half-lidded, like he’s bored by your existence.

You move closer, shrugging your coat off, and you notice the air feels… heavy.

Not humid. Not warm. Heavy like pressure. Like the atmosphere is bracing.

Your skin prickles.

His eye opens fully.

His mouth splits wider than it ever does, and for the first time you see something like strain in the way he holds himself, as if the blob of him is too small for what’s inside.

“Okay,” you whisper without meaning to. “Okay. What’s wrong?”

He doesn’t answer.

Instead the cursed energy in the room spikes so violently your teeth ache.

The lights flicker.

Your warding charms — things you hung half out of habit, half out of fear — flutter like they’ve been slapped by wind.

The blob in the bowl swells.

You take a step back, instinct screaming, brain racing through options the way you trained yourself to in every story you’ve ever heard about him.

Exit. Phone. Talismans. Run.

But your feet don’t move fast enough, because you are still staring, still trying to understand how something you’ve been lifting with two fingers could possibly be…

The bowl cracks.

The scarf-bed is ripped apart as if it’s paper.

And then he expands so quickly the air itself seems to recoil.

It’s not a gentle shift. It’s not a smooth transformation. It’s a violent, sudden reclaiming, like the world is being forced to accommodate a shape it forgot how to hold.

The room fills with him.

Four arms unfold first — corded muscle, tattoos like brand marks, hands flexing as if he’s waking them from sleep. Then the shoulders, the chest, the towering frame, the weight of him settling into your tiny space like a throne being dropped into a dollhouse.

Four eyes open.

And when the stomach maw splits into existence, teeth gleaming wetly, your throat tightens so hard you nearly gag.

He stands there, bare and colossal, breathing in slow, steady pulls like the air belongs to him now.

Your coffee table groans under the shockwave of cursed energy and tips, clattering.

You stand frozen beside the doorway, grocery bags still in your hands like an idiot, heart hammering so loud you swear he can hear it.

He turns his head.

All four eyes fix on you.

You feel very, very small.

Your mind tries to sprint ahead of your body — If he moves first, you die. If you provoke him, you die. If you run, he might let you die slower just to enjoy it. You swallow hard, forcing your fingers to loosen around the bag handles before they cut into your skin.

“Right,” you say, because apparently your mouth is suicidal. “So… that happened.”

One of his brows — one on the left, one on the right, it’s hard to track, he used to have one eye and now there’s three more — lifts with slow disbelief.

His upper mouth curls.

The mouth in his stomach shifts too, like it’s tasting your words.

For a long moment he says nothing.

Then he exhales through his nose — sharp, irritated — like you are the inconvenience here.

“You kept me,” he says finally, voice low and rough from disuse, the sound filling the apartment and making the windows vibrate. “In that.”

You swallow again. Your pulse stutters.

“I — ” Your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth. You force it free. “I didn’t exactly have a spare palace.”

One of his lower hands flexes. The tendons stand out, thick and brutal, like he could crush your skull without noticing.

He doesn’t move toward you.

He doesn’t lunge.

He doesn’t rip the roof off your building to announce his return to the world.

He just looks around with a slow, disdainful sweep of his gaze, taking in your small kitchen, your couch, the ridiculous bowl-bed remnants scattered on the floor.

“Pathetic.” he mutters.

You let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding — half relief, half rage, because of course he comes back into full monstrous glory and his first reaction is to insult your decor.

“You’re welcome.” you say, before you can stop yourself.

All four eyes snap back to you.

Your stomach drops.

Then — unexpectedly — he huffs, like a laugh that doesn’t want to admit it’s a laugh.

“You have nerve.” he says, and there’s something almost… amused beneath the contempt.

Your hands tremble. You keep them at your sides so he won’t see.

“Yeah,” you manage. “I’ve had practice.”

He stares at you like he’s cataloging you again, reassessing.

Not prey.

Not worshiper.

Not sorcerer trying to prove themselves.

Just… you.

The person who fed him, warmed him, scolded him, put him on their chest like he was something that deserved comfort.

It should make him angry. It should make him punish you for the audacity.

Instead he turns away and walks — two steps, then another — toward the center of your living room, ducking slightly so his head doesn’t hit the ceiling. His presence shifts everything. The air warms with him, thick with cursed energy and body heat.

He reaches down with one hand and picks up the cracked wooden bowl, examining it like it’s an insult.

“This?” he says, voice dripping disdain.

You set the grocery bags down slowly, carefully.

“It was… the right size.”

He squeezes it.

The wood splinters in his palm.

You flinch at the sound.

He flicks the pieces aside, like scraps.

“And you fed me like this,” he continues, eyes narrowing as if the memory is sour. “Little scraps. Little sips. Like I was some — ” he pauses, mouth curling, “ — pet.”

Your face goes hot.

You don’t know why it embarrasses you now, with him towering there in true form, when you spent a year doing it with your head held high. Maybe because now he can say it with a voice that can crack stone.

You lift your chin anyway, because pride is sometimes the only thing you have.

“If I didn’t,” you say, “you would’ve… withered. Or whatever the cursed equivalent is.”

He looks at you for a long moment.

Then he clicks his tongue, annoyed.

“Hmph.”

Which is not an apology, not gratitude, not anything you can hold onto.

But he still doesn’t leave.

He lingers in your space like he belongs there.

Like he’s deciding to.

Like a cat that intruded your house and decided it lives there now.

But the cat is the size of an elephant and it has strong opinions about everything you do.

Hours pass in a state of tense unreality.

He makes rude remarks about your cooking when you force yourself to move, to put things away, to keep your hands busy so you don’t shake. He criticizes the way you cut vegetables. He leans over your shoulder, too close, crowding you on purpose, and you refuse to step back even though every survival instinct tells you to fold yourself smaller.

“You’re slow.” he murmurs, breath hot against your ear.

“I’m trying not to lose a finger.” you shoot back, voice tight.

One of his hands — upper, left — reaches past you and steadies the cutting board.

The other — lower, right — snags the knife from your grip and slices through the rest in two swift strokes, perfect and brutal.

“Better,” he says, handing it back like he’s doing you a favor.

You stare at the neat pieces, then at him.

“Show-off.”

He bares teeth, pleased.

He doesn’t touch you beyond that.

Not really.

But his presence is constant — behind you, beside you, watching you like you’re something that fascinates and irritates him in equal measure.

And when the sun goes down and the apartment cools, you finally run out of things to do.

You stand in the doorway of your bedroom, staring at the bed that suddenly looks… impossible.

He fills the hall behind you like a wall.

“You can take it,” you say carefully, because offering him space feels like the safest thing in the world. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

A low sound comes from his throat, dismissive.

He steps closer.

You feel the heat of him before you feel his hands.

Four arms move at once.

Two slide around your waist, lifting you off your feet with such effortless strength your stomach lurches.

The other two brace under your thighs and behind your back, shifting you like you’re nothing but a bundle of blankets.

“Hey— ” you gasp, instinctively grabbing at his forearm.

His skin is warm, solid, tattooed, real.

Your pulse goes wild.

“You think I’ll sleep in your pathetic nest,” he snarls near your ear, voice like velvet over a knife edge, “while you freeze out there?”

“I didn’t say—”

He ignores you, so you cut yourself short.

He carries you past the bedroom entirely, into the living room, where the couch now looks like a joke under the shadow of him.

He sits down anyway.

The couch protests — springs creak, cushions compress flat — but it holds.

And then he pulls you down with him.

Not beside him.

On top of him.

He settles you against his chest with the same careless certainty you used to have when you placed his blob version on your sternum in winter, letting your warmth seep into him.

Except now the warmth is him, all of him, pouring into you like a furnace.

You go rigid, breath shallow.

His arms wrap around you.

Not tight enough to hurt — tight enough to make it clear you aren’t going anywhere.

His heartbeat is steady beneath your cheek, heavy and slow, like something ancient and unbothered.

You stare up at him, trapped between four arms and the sheer reality of his body.

“What are you doing?” you whisper.

He looks down at you with half-lidded eyes, expression set in irritation like you asked a stupid question.

“Sleeping,” he says. “Hush, woman.”

Your mouth opens, then closes.

“You don’t fit.”

He glances at the couch like it personally offended him.

“It’s tolerable.”

Then one of his hands — lower, left — slides up your back, not groping, not crude, just… positioning you more securely. Making you comfortable, despite his scowl.

“You used to do this,” he adds, voice quieter, as if the words are being dragged out of him. “When it was cold.”

Your throat tightens.

Because he remembers.

You remember, too — the nights you couldn’t sleep, the way his blob body would go still against your chest, the faint, reluctant way he’d press closer as if he couldn’t help it.

“I didn’t think you noticed.” you admit, voice rough.

His mouth curls in a sneer.

“I notice everything.”

The stomach mouth shifts, and you hear it murmur something under its breath — too low to catch, like it’s commenting in its own language.

You swallow hard.

“So this is… payment?”

His eyes narrow.

“Don’t call it that.”

“Then what is it?”

For a moment, you think he might snap at you.

He does, kind of — his jaw clenches, his lips pulling back with annoyance, like you’re forcing him to name something he refuses to hold.

But he doesn’t push you off.

He doesn’t stand up.

He doesn’t leave.

He simply adjusts his grip, pulling you closer until your cheek presses against the tattoos on his chest and the heat of him wraps around you like a heavy cloak.

“Shut up,” he mutters. “Sleep.”

You should be terrified.

You are terrified, in a quiet, buzzing way that never fully goes away.

But your body — traitorous, practical — registers the warmth first. The steadiness of his breathing. The fact that he’s not hurting you.

The fact that his arms, for all their power, are holding you like something he intends to keep safe.

Outside, the wind rattles the windows again, cold pressing against the glass.

Inside, Sukuna’s heat makes your eyelids heavy.

You lie there on his chest, listening to the monster’s heart like it’s an ordinary thing, and the strangest thought settles into you — soft and unsettling and impossible to ignore.

He’s not saying he’ll stay.

He’s not promising anything.

But for now, he’s here.

And in his own vicious, prideful way, he’s giving back the only thing you ever truly gave him without asking for anything in return.

Warmth.

Stillness.

A place to sleep.

His hand pauses at the back of your neck, fingers spread wide, holding you in place for a heartbeat longer than necessary.

Then he grunts, annoyed at himself, and settles.

“Don’t get used to it.” he murmurs, voice already sinking into sleep.

You close your eyes anyway.

“Too late.” you whisper back.