You're dying.

It's a quiet realization that comes to you one day as you lay in bed, with your head pillowed against Sukuna's neck, drifting in and out of an unreachable sleep. He runs his jagged nails through the tangle of your hair; his hands have caught prey, broken necks, but he touches you in an uncharacteristically gentle show of affection, mindful of the bruises spreading and darkening all over your body.

You're dying.

In the following days, Sukuna has deigned to spend the bulk of his time with you. He rarely leaves you now. You've always been his favourite, his favour bestowed upon you like none of your other sister wives. And now, with your impending doom inching closer, he would have granted your every wish. You could have asked for him to burn the world down for you – and he would have.

The very thing you want more isn't something he can so easily grant. More time. A chance to live. He's been hailed as a God, has an endless stream of followers worshipping the very ground he walks on, but for all his powers, he's utterly powerless in the face of the illness robbing the colour from your cheeks and stealing the breath from your lungs.

He can smell it. The heavy stench of decay and sweat and blood that lingers in the room, under the heavy creams and tinctures created to prolong your life. You can see in Sukuna's eyes that this is a sight familiar to a God of carnage and blood and death, but the resulting emotion of pain is one that's unfamiliar.

"Read to me." You say into his neck instead, wanting to chase the shadows and clouds from his eyes. It's a weak, garbled sound, but he snaps to attention, and you manage to smile at him faintly, with lips tinged purple. Your eyelashes flutter and you open your eyes. They're not the vivacious things they once were. They're eerie and distant. But there's still life in them. You're still staying with him, clinging stubbornly to life.

"Demanding little thing, aren't you?" Sukuna asks, his voice perfectly neutral.

"You were the one who chose me." You say on a laugh which ends on a moan.

Your hand comes away red and stained with blood; you wipe it away on your wispy nightgown, hoping that Sukuna won't see, but he does. He stares at the red poppy blooming on the white fabric, and for a moment, it feels as though he isn't looking at you, but at the thing that's killing you.

Still, he picks up a scroll from the nightstand and begins to read. This is one wish he can grant, after all. It's a story about a gentle world, of summertime romances and fleeting kisses and touches, one of the romance stories you've been so charmed by, but ones that Sukuna has no patience for. He reads it aloud to you, and you let yourself float away, carried off to dreams by his voice. His hand still cards through your hair. It feels nice.

You sleep the morning and night away, motionless except for your jagged breathing. You barely stir when the servants come in to change your nightgown, soaked through with sweat, or when they strip the soiled sheets away from your body, though your eyes flutter open blearily when Sukuna rubs a salve on your chest that takes the creakiness out of your breathing.

It seems to you a funny thing, that right at the end of your life, just as you're about to expire in his arms, you're realizing for the first time that he loves you. Not in the fairy tale loves written by the dozen in your scrolls, but perhaps in the only way he's capable of. With a guarded tenderness. Pushing the matted hair away from your eyes. Holding onto your body as though he can keep you tethered to this world by the sheer force of his will alone.

Sukuna dismisses the servants who come with medications, after you prove too weak to swallow pills, and fail to keep down anything else they try to give you.

He must know it too. How sick you are, how you're barely hanging on. The shadows are back in his eyes.

Hazy and barely able to speak, you bury your face into his neck and close your eyes. "In the next life." You tell him. "In the next life, I will definitely –"

"No. This one." He says, the closest thing to begging as he'll ever get. "Stay."

It's the first and the last time you ever disobey him.