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2ND PART TO BELOW ME, FOR RYOMEN SUKUNA
WHEN SHE PULLS away from his hands, that is when Ryomen Sukuna feels the first ache of... something.
And when she finally speaks, that is when something inside him collapses in on itself.
"Don't fucking touch me."
The sharp tang of metal seems to claw at the insides of his nostrils. The smell of blood is strong in the air. It is the smell of her friends' blood. The stench of death. Both fetid scents hang heavy over the corpses of those who betrayed their queen.
"They were going to kill you." He has four hands, an infinite pool of power, and the strength of a thousand armies. Yet he feels so weak in the eyes of the woman who hates him. He knows he will never see the affection she used to hold for him bloom in her eyes. It could take a century for him to earn her forgiveness. A millennium. He knows that it would. That it will.
"You wouldn't have been able to do it," he intones in a quiet voice. Breaths an innocent difference in the red and hot mist of blood.
"Shut up." Her eyes screw shut. He remembers holding her face only the night before. Holding her in his arms as she smiled right up at him like he was her whole world.
To think that he would be the one to crush it.
"They were my friends, Sukuna. My family. And you... you killed them." She whispers the last word. He hears a sob linger in the back of her throat.
"I would do anything for you," he admits. The first hint of timid apprehension slips into his words. "My queen, I would cut my throat open and die for you if it could make you smile. I would snap my own neck and behead my person if it meant giving you happiness. I would do anything to make you happy." He wants to call her the name she so loves. But he knows it would only tear her apart. Too many memories cling to the name. Memories that will soon be part of a far-away past. "I would do anything to protect you, (Y/N)."
"I don't care," she sobs out. "I don't fucking care. You killed the innocent boy who would help me choose a good outfit every evening before bed. You killed the harmless girl who set up the library in our home and studied with me there. You killed the beautiful bard who would sing me to sleep." Her hands shake as she clutches them to her chest. Protective of herself even in this moment. "He would sing us to sleep, Sukuna. And have tea ready for us every morning. Don't—don't you remember? Fuck, Sukuna, they were our family."
"And you are my queen." She does not flinch away as he cups her face in his hands. Her tears wet his fingers. He rubs a thumb over her eyes so she can keep them closed. He does not want her to have to see the bodies of those she loved. No matter how rightfully they deserve to be dead. "You are my wife. My lover. My heart. What would our family have been without you? What would I be without you?"
A stentorian sound of pain grates out from her chest to tear the cords in her throat. She cries into his arms, raking her nails through his skin as he pulls her into his body, as if to break him the way he has broken her.
"I hate you," she sobs into his chest. Then her hatred festers into a scream. "I hate you! I hate you I hate you I hate you I fucking hate you!"
He takes her away to a distant village. Murders the people there. The men. The women. The old. The terrified children who stare at the dead bodies of their families as he snips the threads of life that keep them alive.
He settles her into a bed. She is a small, quiet bundle in his mammoth-like arms. Her tears coalesce with blood and soot and dirt.
"I hate you, Sukuna," she says, meeting his gaze with her own pained eyes. "I hate you."
"You can hate me, my dove." He encases her in the safe, warm cage of his arms. It is a cage all the same. "As long as it means I get to protect you. As long as it means you stay alive, for me."
