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Sinclair was pulled out of sleep by a knock that did not belong to Ryoshu.
That was the first thing he noticed instead of his dream dissolving, instead of the pain in his neck from collapsing over his desk. It was considerate. A sound that paused short of intrusion and asked if it might be allowed in.
Ryoshu did not ask.
Ryoshu kicked. Ryoshu exhaled smoke into rooms that weren’t hers. Ryoshu carved her presence into a room without pausing, without the tedious ritual of permission. The knock felt like an imitation. Hesitation maybe.
Before he could gather the scattered remains of his dream, Sinclair found himself circling that detail instead, worrying it between his thoughts. It didn’t suit this version of her... yet. It didn’t suit anything younger him understood about her.
But he wasn’t his younger self right now.
Another knock followed, just as restrained.
He thought, briefly, that he would have preferred something else. Not the kick—though that would have been familiar, and familiarity had its own torment—but perhaps a hand, warm and insistent, dragging him back into waking. Or a voice, tinted with irritation, telling him in no uncertain terms that sleeping at his desk was stupid, embarrassing for him.
He thought he knew someone who would’ve made a huge fuss over him taking proper care of himself every once in a while, but actually, he had no one like that in his life. Not for a long while. Not after her, funnily enough.
Ryoshu had been beside him long enough that the word constant almost fit. Almost. Constants were supposed to hold under pressure, under time, under the dwell of repetition. But this—whatever existed between then and now, or now and then—had begun to feel like something misremembered. A fact recalled incorrectly, repeated anyway until it sounded true.
“G.T.F.U.”
She had a talent for condensation. Entire emotions, reduced to four letters. Even if it was something as simple as ‘Get The Fuck Up.’
Sinclair tasted something strange when he woke. Not the usual blood he’d have a mouthful of but the stale, lingering tang of something familiar that he missed. Affection, perhaps. Love, certainly. He held it carefully, reverently… and still—it soured. Not enough to discard. Never enough for that. Just enough to notice.
He lifted his head.
The desk lamp cast him in halves. One side gilded in a tired, artificial warmth, the other untouched, preserved in a cool and distant shadow.
“Morning, Shu.”
She didn’t answer. She rarely did at this point. Greetings implied softness, and Ryoshu had discarded anything that resembled it for a while after what they went through in that House.
She stood with her arms loosely crossed, cigarette caught between her fingers, unlit, suggesting that she had forgotten its purpose. Or perhaps she hadn’t—perhaps she simply hadn’t decided yet whether it deserved to be lit. Her gaze rested on him longer than necessary, longer than neutral.
“D.”
Sinclair let out a breath that almost became a laugh. “That’s harsh. I’m not disgusting.”
“You were drooling.”
There was no inflection.
“That’s cruel,” he said, though without conviction, pushing himself upright. His hand dragged across his jaw as if the evidence might still be there, lingering. “I thought you knocked like that because you cared.”
He caught the way her tongue slid over her lips just as she turned the cigarette once between her fingers. The paper gave a faint, dry whisper. “Don’t romanticize me.”
There were many ways to say you’re wrong. That one was hers.
Sinclair smiled anyway. “I missed you, Shu.”
She flicked ash that didn’t exist onto the floorboards. “My Sin—P.S. summoned you. Mission’s done. You’re supposed to be smoke by now.”
He tipped the chair back until the wood gave that familiar low groan. “Faust had a theory, didn’t she? Something about how a summon can stick around if the future self still has… unfinished business. Or if the present self refuses to let go.”
He tilted his head the way he used to when he was trying to read her mood through the haze. “You rolled your eyes so hard I thought they’d fall out and I’d have to go fishing for them under the table.”
Ryoshu snorted. “F. talks like she’s already memorizing her own epitaph. I don’t care what she has to say.”
He found that adorable—the way she dismissed anything too cerebral with the same flick of the wrist she used to kill weak cigarettes, to shut down Ishmael when her rants had gotten too long. Done. Over. Clean cut. And yet the slow creep of heat under her jaw when he kept looking said the cut had never gone as deep as she wanted for him to believe.
“Cute,” he murmured.
“Shut up.”
He stood. The chair scraped back like it knows exactly what kind of stupid he's about to do. Top already a mess from when he’d taken some layers off and collapsed hours earlier; he didn’t bother fixing it. The room smelled of an old light scent, and the ghost of her tobacco even though she still hadn’t lit the damn thing.
Ryoshu’s eyes tracked the small lift of his shirt, then flicked away so fast it was almost comical.
He steps in. Close enough that she has to tip her chin. (He's not even that much taller, really. The difference feels obscene anyway.)
“You’re curious,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“You are.” He smiled, the kind of smile that knows it’s dangerous and doesn’t care. “You keep staring at my arms like they owe you an apology. Or maybe a thank you. Hard to tell with you.”
Her nostrils flare. “They look different. S.M.”
“They are different.”
He shrugged out of the shirt without ceremony. Let it fall. The fabric hit the floor like a shed skin.
Ryoshu inhaled through her teeth.
The body in front of her was still recognizably Sinclair—same shoulders that used to hunch when Hong Lu teased him, same collarbones Heathcliff once mocked for being “delicate as fucking porcelain”—but everything had been recast in harder lines. Sun had darkened him to a light warm bronze that made the pale scars stand out like silver rivers. Thick raised ones laddered across his ribs, a vicious starburst over his left pectoral where something heavy and hot had tried to take the heart and missed by inches. Lower, a long slashing wound that disappeared beneath the waistband of his fatigues like it was shy about being seen.
She stared.
And stared.
And forgot to blink.
Sinclair watches her pupils eat the red of her irises until there's almost nothing left but black, and something vicious and pleasing twists hard in his gut.
"Pervert," he says, voice pitched low, amused, a little mean.
"Fuck off." But it came out hoarse.
He lifted one arm, slowly, letting her see the way muscle shifted under skin that had spent too many seasons under open sky instead of bus fluorescents. “Go ahead. Trace them. You’ve been thinking about it since I didn’t vanish.”
Ryoshu’s fingers flexed at her sides. “I haven’t.”
“Liar.”
She stepped forward anyway.
Her touch was cool at first—hesitant, almost clinical—like she was inspecting a blade for flaws. Then her palm flattened against the starburst scar and stayed. Heat bled through. Her breathing changed.
“You got these after you left,” she said. Not a question.
“After I left the bus. Yeah.”
“How are the others in the future holding up?”
“It’s… complicated.”
Her thumb followed the longest scar downward, stopping right at the place where his pants hid the rest of the story. She swallowed. Too distracted to comment on his poor response.
“You’re tanned everywhere,” she muttered.
“Everywhere you can see,” he winked.
Ryoshu's ears went red. Then her neck. Then the tips of her fingers where they rested against his skin.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she snapped.
“Like what?”
“Like you want to eat me.”
He laughed, the sound of someone who’d long since stopped being embarrassed by desire. “Would you let me?”
She glared. But her hand didn’t move.
He leaned in until their foreheads nearly touched. “You’re blushing so hard I can feel the heat off your face, Shu.”
“Shut. Up.”
She huffed. But her other hand came up, pressed flat against his abdomen, fingers splaying over the ridges of muscle he hadn’t possessed at twenty-two. She traced another scar—smaller, newer, still faintly pink. Her nail grazed skin and he hissed softly.
“Good pain?” she asked, suddenly very serious.
“Good everything.”
Her gaze dropped to the front of his pants. The way the fabric pulled tight. The way it outlined exactly how much her touch affected him.
She licked her lips.
“There are more down there, aren’t there?”
He didn’t answer with words.
He simply hooked two fingers in his waistband and tugged the fabric an inch lower. Just enough to show the beginning of another long, vicious line that curved toward his hipbone and vanished beneath black cotton.
Ryoshu’s breath caught.
She stared at that line like it was scripture.
Then her fingers followed, slipping just under the edge of fabric. Not pulling. Just resting there. Feeling the heat. Feeling the pulse.
“Ryoshu,” he murmured.
She looked up. Eyes glassy. Cheeks flaming.
“I want to see,” she said.
The words came out small, almost fragile.
“Then pull them down.”
"F-fuck... Shu."
The words come out cracked, half-swallowed. Sinclair’s voice has dropped so low it scrapes against the inside of his own throat. He doesn’t recognize it for a second and then he remembers exactly why.
Ryoshu is on her knees.
She doesn’t know what to do with any of it.
With the sheer fucking size of him hitting the back of her throat, with the way her jaw has to stretch so wide it aches immediately, with the heavy velvet weight of him lying hot and thick across her tongue like he’s trying to choke her without even moving yet. Her hands are braced on the fronts of his thighs—fingers digging in hard enough to leave crescent moons because if she doesn’t hold on she’s going to shake apart—and she can feel the tremor that runs through the big muscles there every time he breathes too deep.
She’s never done this with her present Sinclair before.
Not like this.
They usually did it at her pace.
Not with someone who looks down at her the way this future Sinclair is looking now: eyes half-lidded, pupils blown wide, mouth parted around uneven breaths, one hand cupped loosely at the back of her skull like he’s afraid to push but dying to. The other is fisted in the sheets beside his hip, knuckles bone-white. No tears. No begging.
Not from him at least.
She can taste salt and skin and underneath it all the dark, animal musk that is just him. Just Sinclair. Older Sinclair. Sinclair who’s been places she hasn’t followed. Sinclair who came back scarred and sun-hardened and so fucking hard right now she can feel his heartbeat throbbing against the roof of her mouth.
Her eyes are watering.
Not crying but watering because she can’t breathe right, because every time she tries to pull back a little his hips give this tiny, helpless twitch forward like he can’t help it, like his body is begging even when his mouth is trying to be good.
“Shu—baby—easy,” he rasps. The pet name slips out like it’s been waiting for months behind his teeth. “You don’t have to—fuck—take it all. Just—Fu—just breathe through your nose.”
She tries.
She really tries.
But her nose is pressed so close to the coarse hair at his base that every inhale is just more of him—sweat, arousal, that faint lingering trace of smoke baked into his skin—and it makes her head spin worse. Makes her thighs clench together so hard she whimpers around him without meaning to.
The sound vibrates straight up his length.
Sinclair’s head drops back against the headboard with a dull thunk. “Fuuuck.”
His fingers flex in her hair and she feels the way his abs jump under her palms. Feels the way the long scar that disappears under her chin twitches when she swallows reflexively around him.
She’s drooling.
She can feel it—hot and slick—sliding down her chin, dripping onto her collarbones, probably ruining the collar of her shirt but she doesn’t care. Doesn’t care about anything except the way he’s looking at her like she hung the fucking moon while simultaneously looking like he wants to ruin her.
“God, look at you,” he breathes. Voice wrecked. “Look at your pretty fucking mouth—stretched so wide for me. You’re doing so good, Shu. So fucking good.”
The praise lands like a slap and a caress at the same time.
Her whole body flushes and she makes another helpless sound around him. Tries to pull off just enough to speak, but he’s so thick her lips drag all the way down the shaft as she retreats and the friction makes him groan like he’s dying.
“Waitwaitwaitwait—” His hand tightens. Not hard. “Don’t—don’t stop yet. Please. Just—stay there a second. Let me feel you.”
She freezes.
Mouth full. Cheeks hollowed. Eyes stinging. Thighs shaking.
He’s looking at her like she’s the only real thing in the City.
“Fuck, your tongue—” He shudders. “The way you’re just—sitting there with me all the way down your throat. You’re so warm. So wet. I can feel every time you swallow. Every little flutter. You’re killing me. I miss you— Fuck, you’re killing me.”
She whimpers again—higher this time, more desperate—and the vibration makes his hips jerk.
“Shit—sorry—sorry—” He’s panting now, chuckling a little. “I’m trying not to fuck your face. I swear. But you keep making those sounds and I—I can’t think straight.”
Her nails dig harder into his thighs.
She wants him to.
She wants him to stop being careful.
Ryoshu wants him to grab her hair and use her like he’s been missing it for a long time—because she knows he has. She has no idea how long they've been apart in the future but she knows enough.
She pulls off with a wet, obscene pop—gasping, strings of saliva connecting her swollen lips to the slit right on his flushed head—and looks up at him with wet lashes and flushed cheeks and lips swollen red.
“Stop holding back,” she croaks. Voice ruined already. “I.C.T.I.”
Sinclair stares.
For one heartbeat—two—his expression fractures. Something raw and starving flashes across his face.
Then he laughs—low, shaky, disbelieving.
“You sure about that?”
She doesn’t answer with words.
Instead, she leans forward and takes him back in—one long, slow slide—until her nose is buried against his pelvis again and her throat is fluttering around the intrusion.
Sinclair swears violently.
His hand slides from the back of her head to cup her jaw—thumb stroking over the place where her cheek is bulging around him.
“Good girl,” he breathes. “Such a good fucking girl.”
The words hit her like a punch.
She moans—long and broken—and the sound makes him buck once, hard, before he catches himself.
“Yeah—yeah—just like that—my perfect Shu—”
He starts moving then.
Slow at first—shallow rocks, barely pulling out before sliding back in, letting her feel every inch, every ridge, letting her adjust to the stretch, to the weight, to the way he fills her so completely she can barely think.
But she wants more.
She hollows her cheeks harder. Sucks. Lets her tongue drag along the sensitive underside on every retreat.
Sinclair’s control splinters.
“Fuck—Ryoshu—fuck—”
His hips snap forward—once—sharp—burying himself again.
She gags—eyes watering hard now—but doesn’t pull away.
Instead she grabs his hips—pulls him closer—begs without words: more.
He swears again.
Gives it to her.
The rhythm builds—still careful but deeper, harder. Each thrust slides him against the back of her throat until she’s choking, drooling, tears slipping freely now.
And still she doesn’t tap out.
She just looks up at him—eyes glassy, cheeks flushed, tears falling—and lets him see exactly how much she wants this.
How much she wants him too.
“You’re so fucking perfect,” he pants. “Taking me so deep. Letting me fuck your throat like this. Look at you—crying for my cock. My pretty Shu—my filthy fucking girl—”
Each word is punctuated by a thrust.
She’s shaking.
Whole body trembling—thighs clenched so tight she’s bruising herself—core throbbing so hard it hurts.
She’s soaked through her pants.
Never this wet. Never this desperate.
He sees it—the way she squirms, hips twitching, searching for friction against nothing—because his next words come out hoarse and ruined:
“Touch yourself.”
Her hand flies between her legs so fast it’s embarrassing.
She’s dripping, slick coating her fingers instantly, and the first graze over her clit makes her moan so loud it vibrates straight through him.
Sinclair’s rhythm stutters.
“Fuck—yeah—just like that—play with your pretty pussy while I fuck your mouth—let me hear how wet you are for me—”
How is this her Sinclair? Her sweet and submissive Sinclair?
She does.
Circles fast—messy—desperate—while he drives into her throat harder, faster, chasing his edge now.
The room fills with wet, lewd sounds—her gagging, his groaning, the slick slide of her fingers, the creak of the bedframe as his hips snap.
She’s close.
So close.
Just from this—from his taste, his weight, the wrecked praise falling from his lips, the way he’s looking at her like she’s everything—
Sinclair feels it, the way her moans turn high and frantic, the way her body locks up—
“Come for me,” he growls. “Come with my cock down your throat—let me feel it—let me feel you fall apart around me—”
She does.
Hard.
Whole body seizing—back arching—tears streaming—muffled scream vibrating around him as pleasure whites out everything.
Sinclair swears—broken, guttural—and slams in one last time.
He comes with her name on his lips, pulsing hot and thick down her throat until she has to swallow or drown.
Ryoshu swallows.
Again.
Again.
Until he’s shuddering, spent, petting her hair with trembling hands.
When he finally eases out, she gasps. Coughs once. Drool and come stringing from her swollen lips to his softening length.
Sinclair stares down at her like he’s never seen anything holier.
Then he hauls her up—strong arms, scarred hands—and crushes her against his chest.
“Shu,” he breathes into her hair. Voice cracked open. “My Ryoshu. I love you. There's only ever been you.”
She buries her face in the crook of his neck.
Tastes salt—his sweat, her tears.
Feels his heart hammering against her cheek.
Feels safe.
Feels wanted.
“Idiot,” she mumbles against his skin. Barely audible. “You'll always have me.”
He laughs, a little disbelieving.
“Yeah,” he whispers, pressing a kiss to her temple. “I know.”
Ryoshu wakes slowly, body heavy, deliciously ruined.
Every inch of her aches in the best way—muscles lax and used, throat still raw, inner thighs sticky and tender. Bite marks bloom like dark roses over her collarbones, breasts, the soft inside of her hip; faint handprints wrap her waist like ownership she never asked to be released from. Inside she’s still full of him, warm and leaking slowly onto the sheets she doesn’t care about ruining.
She turns her head.
Sinclair—her Sinclair, the one who still blushes when she looks at him too long, the one who hasn’t yet collected all those scars—is asleep beside her. Naked. Peaceful. Face soft in a way the future version almost never allows anymore. One arm is flung across her stomach, possessive even in sleep; the other tucked under his cheek. His hair is a wreck. There are fresh scratches down his back that she doesn’t remember putting there, and a faint hickey at the base of his throat that matches the shape of her teeth.
Ryoshu watches him for a long minute, something familiar settling behind her ribs.
She doesn’t speak.
Doesn’t move to cover herself, doesn’t reach for a cigarette.
She simply exhales, smoke-free, and lets her fingertips rest against the inside of his wrist, feeling the steady thump of a pulse that isn’t racing.
Then she closes her eyes again.
The ache feels like proof.
She lets it stay.