❋ It starts off small, a fever you can easily chalk up to the cold weather and the turn of the seasons. Your voice is strained, and you cough incessantly. It's to be expected, honestly, considering how you've been looking pale and wan for days. You're immediately confined to bed and to your room until you recover.

❋ Sukuna visits often. He never shares your bed (sexually at least) when you're ill. He seems softer somehow, more open with his affections when he sees how withered you look, buried under blankets and mounds of pillows. He allows you to lay upon his lap or bury your face into his neck as you wish, puts cold cloths on your chest and forehead and runs his fingers through your hair.

❋ It soon becomes apparent that it's more than just the flu when your cough and fever persists for weeks, then months. Medicines seem to have no effect, and your breathing has taken on a wet, drowning quality. Soon, you're stifling coughs that spray blood into your hands, and though you try to hide it from Sukuna, he smells the rust-iron smell clinging to your clothes, the smell of death lingering below the smell of the medicines and creams.

❋ You're Sukuna's favorite wife after all, and an army of physicians are summoned to your bedchambers to find out what's wrong. The physicians feel the sides of your jaw, holding your tongue under their fingers to look down your throat, and you're too wilted to protest their ministrations. You do however, muster up enough strength to hide your face in Sukuna's kimono when you hear footsteps approaching, unwilling to be prodded and poked at anymore.

❋ The physicians are unwilling to tell you – and more importantly, Sukuna – their diagnosis, unwilling to bring down his wrath upon them. He isn't stupid. He knows. You know. How could you not, when your skin has paled to chalk? When there are bruises spreading across your throat and arms?

❋ The good days are rare, but they exist. You don't have the strength to step out of your chambers, so Sukuna comes to you. He'll rest his head in your lap and close his eyes while you read or sing to him. The windows are pushed open, and the breeze rolls into the room. Your hair tangles in the sunlight, and some small amount of colour returns to your sallow cheeks. Like this, smiling, full of life, you could almost convince yourself that you have more days yet in you. But your body knows otherwise.

❋ Bad days are numerous, and also spent with Sukuna. This time, your roles are reversed: you'll spend them drifting in and out of an unreachable sleep, your head pillowed on his lap, or buried in the crook of his neck. You often ask him to read to you, knowing that his voice will carry you off to a world that isn't quite so cold and painful.

❋ If it isn't a figment of your medicine-addled mind or a fever dream, you swear that you feel his fingers pressed against your wrist, as though reassuring himself that you're still with him, that you're still clinging to life.

❋ If you thought Sukuna was indulgent when you were in the earlier stages of your illness, he's far more accommodating as your illness worsens; whatever requests you may have, he's more likely to fulfil them. He's made powerless by the fact that he can't do a thing to save you, but accomplishing the small requests you have eases the bitterness lingering in his mouth somewhat.

❋ Sukuna leaves cleaning and dusting to the servants, but the smaller tasks – feeding you food and medicine, changing the cool cloths on your chest and forehead – he's more willing to do, especially since you cringe away from hands other than his. He might growl and call you demanding, but his voice is devoid of heat, and his hands are uncharacteristically gentle as they hold you.

❋ Sukuna knows you're dying, but he won't beg you to stay with him. He's still much too proud for that. Instead, he'll have flowers and your favorite foods brought in. Life. It's almost as if he's telling you, look at what you'll be missing if you leave.

❋ The subject of your death is never really talked about. When you try, Sukuna tells you to stop, says that he didn't nurse you for months for nothing. In spite of yourself, you smile at him then, and it's a beautiful, broken thing.

❋ During the final days of your illness, Sukuna rarely leaves your side. You know your body is giving out on you when your chest convulses and you vomit up a fountain of blood. During the times where you're conscious, constantly asking him to read to you, so that your mind won't linger on the bleeding bruises, or the translucent marble your body has become.

❋ Your mind is hazy and you're barely able to speak, but still, you bury your face into the crook of his neck and promise to find him in the next life. Because he needs to hear it. And you're sorry that you can't stay with him. And then, you're gone, slipping away quietly in the early morning light as Sukuna holds you.

❋ Sukuna doesn't cry. He buries his neck and tries to hold on to your fleeting warmth. You look as though you're still about to draw a breath, as though you'll wake up and lay your hand against his cheek. Sukuna holds you for a very long time, and then orders you to be buried. He also orders the room to remain untouched.

❋ But then the grief gives way to anger. Sukuna unleashes fire and venom and pain onto humans and Curses alike. And when his rampage has ended, when his anger has given way to the sharp sting of grief once again, Sukuna finds himself being hailed as the King of Curses, a spectre with four arms and two faces. He has everything he's longed for - but he finds that none of it can soothe the dull ache making a home in his chest and in the pit of his stomach.