Archive of Our Own

Yuuji is curled in Sukuna's lap.

That is the fact of it, stripped of everything else: he is curled in Sukuna's lap, knees drawn up, face pressed into the King's chest, and the whole of him has been folded into the smallest shape he can manage—like if he just gets small enough, takes up just enough space that the decision to allow it costs nothing, then maybe it won't be taken away.

It hasn't been taken away.

That's the thing he keeps returning to. Every thirty seconds or so, some part of him surfaces long enough to check—still here, still allowed, still not removed—and then sinks back down. The checking is exhausting, but the alternative is not checking, and not checking requires a kind of trust he's still building the architecture for.

He pressed his face harder into Sukuna's chest and exhaled.

The itch was prominent under his sleeves.

He had been having a conversation with it all week—not now, not here, later, maybe, just wait—and tonight the conversation got harder to maintain, causing him to have fallen asleep and ended up here, in this innate domain, climbing to the throne without entirely deciding to, burying himself into the King's lap without asking.

Sukuna had gone very still.

Not the stillness of something preparing to act. The stillness of something that had encountered something so outside its experience that it had no immediate response queued.

Nothing happened when Yuuji buried his face in the King of Curses’ chest.

No shove. No cursing. No cold hand wrapping around his collar and lifting him off. Sukuna's hands had rested at his sides, not touching, not removing, and Yuuji had decided to accept that as permission and let himself sink.

That was some amount of time ago. He doesn't know how much. The domain doesn't do time the way the real world does.

He pressed his left hand flat against the throne seat. The itch responds to the movement, flaring once against his sleeve, and he thinks to it: no. Not now. I'm busy. 

"You've been staring at your arm," Sukuna muttered.

Yuuji goes still.

"I wasn't," he mumbled, into Sukuna’s chest.

"You were." A pause of consideration. "You've done it four times since you got here."

Yuuji doesn't answer. He shifts his left hand away, tucks it between his chest and Sukuna's, where it can't see anything or do anything or make any decisions without him noticing first.

Sukuna says nothing about that. He doesn't ask. Yuuji doesn't know if that's because he doesn't care or because he knows that asking would make Yuuji leave, but either way the not-asking lands like something he can breathe around.

"Thank you," Yuuji finally says quietly. "For… not asking."

"Don't thank me," Sukuna grunts. "It's not for you. I simply don't want to deal with the alternative."

He says it flatly with no regard whatsoever.

"Okay," Yuuji hums.

He closes his eyes. 

The itch pulses once and goes quiet.

"You're breathing like that on purpose," Sukuna states after a moment of silence.

"Like what?"

"Slowly. Like you're counting."

Yuuji pauses. "...yeah..?"

"Why."

It's not quite a question. Sukuna asks things the way he did everything else—without any particular acknowledgment that the thing being done was a concession to something.

He asks, waiting and Yuuji understands that he doesn't have to answer, that the not-answering will be absorbed the same way everything else is absorbed in here: into the silence, without consequence.

"It helps," Yuuji replies anyway. "When my head gets loud. Counting breaths helps."

Sukuna doesn't respond to that immediately.

"Your head is loud right now," Sukuna rumbles. Not a question this time.

"Yeah.”

Yuuji breathes. He tracks the count—four in, hold, four out—and then loses the count because Sukuna shifts, just slightly, just a fractional redistribution of weight, and one hand lifts off the throne seat.

Yuuji goes very still.

The hand settles on his back.

Not moving. Palm flat between his shoulder blades, large enough that Yuuji can feel the span of it even through his shirt, and Sukuna holds it there with the extreme tentativeness of something that has never done this and has arrived here by following a logic it doesn't fully trust. He's not rubbing. Not patting. Just resting.

Yuuji's breath catches.

Sukuna says nothing.

Yuuji breathes in. Breathes out. The hand on his back is so still it's almost startling, the way a sound was startling in absolute silence, and he focuses on it—the pressure, the span, the specific knowledge of something is here and it is not going anywhere—and the itch under his sleeve goes quiet in a way it hasn't gone quiet in days.

"Is this—" Sukuna pauses. "You're not reacting."

"I am," Yuuji protested. "I'm just doing it quietly."

A pause.

"Explain that."

Yuuji considers. His face is still pressed into the chest, his voice coming out muffled and low. "When something's really—when I really needed something and I get it, I go quiet. Because if I make too much of it, I feel like it'll stop."

Silence.

"That's irrational." Sukuna grumbled.

"I know."

"The continuation of a thing is not predicated on your reaction to it."

"I know," Yuuji repeats. And then, softer: "I know. I just—" He stops. Swallows. "I just don't want it to stop."

The hand on his back does not move.

Then, slowly, so slowly that Yuuji genuinely cannot identify the moment it began, it starts to move. Not much—a small, circular motion, barely a motion at all. Just the palm, just that slow drag of contact between his shoulder blades, and Yuuji presses his face into Sukuna's chest and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Still quiet," Sukuna observes.

"Still afraid you'll stop." Yuuji admits.

"I'm not going to stop because you react," Sukuna grunts. 

Yuuji laughs a little, very softly and it sounds slightly wet.

He's not sure when he starts crying.

His eyes are wet, his chest is doing the thing it did when the structural parts of him gave up holding a shape, and the hand on his back is still there, still doing its slow work.

His brain does the only thing it knows how in a situation like this.

The first sob is mortifying. He feels it come up from deep in his chest, wet and graceless, pressing his face harder into Sukuna's kimono, and Sukuna—

Sukuna goes still for exactly one second.

Then the hand on his back presses in more firmly. 

"You're crying," Sukuna commented.

"Yeah," Yuuji manages, voice shaky.

"On my— " A pause. "On me."

"Yeah. Sorry."

“Don’t apologise."

"… Sorry?”

Sukuna exhales through his nose. His other hand—the one that has been at his side this entire time, the one Yuuji had been tracking in his peripheral awareness with the hopefulness he hadn't let himself name—lifts.

It finds his hair.

It is so careful. That's the thing. It is so genuinely, almost painfully careful—the touch of something that doesn't know the rules and is trying very hard not to break anything through ignorance, a palm resting against the crown of his head. It doesn't move at first. It just rests.

Yuuji whimpers.

It came from somewhere underneath language, underneath the part of him that knew how to compose himself—it comes from the part that had been very tired for a very long time, and it looks exactly like it. 

"Pathetic," Sukuna states, quietly.

The hand in his hair begins to move.

It moves slowly. Crown to nape, palm dragging through his hair in the most elementary gesture of comfort—the logic of someone that has never learned this but has arrived at it by simple deduction, by the cause-and-effect of the thing is making sounds, hands on hair seem to be a relevant variable.

It is not skilled. It is not experienced. It is the most earnest and unguarded thing Sukuna has probably done in centuries, and Yuuji can feel that in it—the rawness of it, the careful unfamiliarity of it—and that is why the sound he makes in response is the one he makes.

The sob that comes out is not quiet.

It is the kind that comes when something held too long is let go all at once—chest-deep and completely without dignity, grief, relief and exhaustion all arriving simultaneously.

"There it is," Sukuna purrs. Not cruelly. "You've been holding that since before you got here."

"Yeah," Yuuji agreed.

"Pitiful." Sukuna muttered, and ran his hand through his hair again, slower this time.

Yuuji made the whining sound again and buries his face deeper.

"You sound like an animal," Sukuna tells him matter-of-factly. The hand keeps moving.

"I know." It comes out broken. "I can't—" A breath. "I can't stop—"

"I'm not asking you to stop," Sukuna grunted, and his voice has the flat certainty of a statement of fact. Not comfort, not reassurance—just information, landing anyway as the most steadying thing Yuuji has heard in weeks.

He cries.

He cries the way he hasn't let himself cry in a long time, without managing it, and Sukuna's hand moves through his hair and the hand on his back maintains its slow circle and Sukuna talks—not kindly, not warmly, but continuously, which is its own little thing:

"You're getting my shirt wet," he complains, as his hand goes crown to nape and back.

"Disgusting," he had snarked, when Yuuji makes the whine again, and he says it the way someone said there you are—annoyed, yes, as well as something adjacent to relieved.

"You breathe like a dying animal when you cry, brat," Sukuna sneered, fingers pressing slightly into his scalp, not harshly.

Each insult lands on Yuuji and passes through him like water through open hands. He hears them. They have no purchase. They are Sukuna saying I'm here in every language except this one, and Yuuji is fluent enough, now, to translate.

He curls closer.

Not thinking about it—just doing it, just following the animal gravity of needing to be closer to the solid warmth of the person that is holding him, and his fingers curl into Sukuna's side, tucking himself tighter and Sukuna makes a low sound of protest.

"Ridiculous," Sukuna complains. "Absolutely ridiculous. Climbing into someone's lap like a—"

"Like a what." Yuuji asks.

A pause.

"Like a brat," Sukuna snapped, which is not what he was going to say, and they both know it, and neither of them says so.

The hand in his hair presses down gently, palm against the back of his head, cradling the weight of it, and something in Yuuji's spine goes loose all at once and he goes soft against Sukuna's chest.

"Crying is inefficient."

"You're the one who didn't make me stop." Yuuji pointed out.

"I considered it," Sukuna defended. "The alternatives were worse."

Yuuji almost laughs. "What alternatives?"

"You carrying that around in my body," Sukuna simply says. "Going back to the surface with it still in you."

Yuuji goes quiet.

"That's—" He stops. Tries again. "You noticed it. Before. Not just tonight."

Silence.

"I am in your body," Sukuna hissed. "I notice things."

"And you didn't—" Yuuji's voice is very small. "You didn't say anything."

"What would I have said, brat?”

Yuuji doesn't have an answer. He thinks about the itch, about the weeks of it, about the conversation he's been having with it in the small hours when the world was quiet and everything was loudest. He wonders what Sukuna noticed and what he understood.

"Sukuna," he started.

"Don't," Sukuna grumbled.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were." A pause. "Your voice does a thing. Before you say something I'll find inconvenient."

Yuuji huffs. "What kind of thing."

"Soft," Sukuna spat, and the word sounds strange in his mouth, like a word in a language he does not often speak. "It gets soft. It's irritating."

"Right," Yuuji hums. "Sorry."

"Stop apologising."

"Sor—" He catches himself. "Okay."

The hand in his hair moves. Crown to nape. Slow. The hand on his back maintains its circle.

The crying settles eventually into something slower.

"Your breathing changed," Sukuna commented.

"I know. I'm not asleep."

"I know you're not asleep. I said your breathing changed."

Yuuji considers. "Better?"

"Less like something drowning," Sukuna pauses. "So relatively, yes."

"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"It's an observation."

"The nicest one, then."

Sukuna's fingers pause in his hair. Then resume, slightly slower.

Yuuji curls his fingers into the fabric at Sukuna's side.

"Hey Sukuna?" Yuuji mumbles.

"What." Sukuna grunts.

"You're not—" He stops. Tries again. "You're not as bad as you think you are."

The quiet stretches long enough that Yuuji starts to feel the edges of it. He turned his face slightly, just enough to breathe air instead of fabric.

"You're soft," he mumbled, his left cheek pressed into Sukuna’s chest.

The hands stop.

"Excuse me.

"Soft," Yuuji repeats, and there is something in his voice that has not been there all night—something light, something that found its way up through all the heavy and arrived at the surface blinking. "You totally are. You sat here and did the hair thing for like—"

The flick is instantaneous.

Two fingers, directly to the centre of his forehead, with the precise force of something that was not trying to hurt and could have.  Yuuji yelped, pulling back.

He giggled softly.

It is not a dignified sound. It is the giggle of someone startled back into something that had not been accessible all night.

"Don't," Sukuna grunts.

Yuuji giggles harder.

"I'm warning you, brat—"

"The hair thing," Yuuji snickered. "You did the hair thing and now you're acting like—"

"I did nothing of the sort—"

"For like an hour—"

"Ten minutes, at most—"

"Sukuna." Yuuji looks up at him, grinning. "You were so gentle."

The expression on Sukuna's face is extraordinary. It is the expression of a man who has been accused of something he has no defence against and has chosen, as a strategy, to look as though the accusation is beneath engagement while also being visibly, completely engaged.

"I will kill you." Sukuna hisses through gritted teeth.

"No you won't," Yuuji smiles, reaching up and hugging him.

It is not a graceful hug. He has been lying in the lap for an extended period, his arms slightly numb and the angle is awkward, but he gets his arms around Sukuna and buries his face into the side of the king's neck.

Sukuna goes rigid.

"What," Sukuna demands, "are you doing."

"Hugging you," Yuuji says, into his neck.

"I can see that. I'm asking why."

"Because I wanted to.”

"Get off."

Yuuji does not get off. He tightens his arms, the way you tighten them when the person you were holding tried to leave, pressing his face further into the side of Sukuna's neck.

Sukuna made a sound that is completely undignified—a short, sharp sound of someone deeply and genuinely put-upon—and then another one when Yuuji doesn't move, more of a complaint now.

"You are," Sukuna accused, “the single most irritating vessel in the history of this practice."

"Mm," Yuuji agrees, cheerfully.

"You're breathing on my neck."

"Yeah."

"It's unpleasant."

"Okay."

"I want you to stop."

"In a sec," Yuuji says, and does not stop.

Sukuna exhales—long, theatrical, the sigh of someone performing suffering for an audience of one—and Yuuji feels it move through his chest, and grins against his neck.

"Pathetic," Sukuna repeats, to no one in particular, to whoever was keeping track of the indignities of gods.

"You love it," Yuuji snickered.

"I will end you."

"Sure." Yuuji says, grinning.