Chapter Text
Thick, wet heat licked up his neck, along his cheek, stringing his heart along with it so that it raced breathlessly, even as his chest squeezed tight and his skin tingled with hypersensitivity. That same heat traced along the cup of his ear, leaving a trail of dampness that cooled quickly on his hot skin, wracking his body with electric tingles.
“Su… kuna…”
He only got those three, dear syllables out before his mouth was occupied again with a set of lips and tongue, sliding against his own, stroking, slicking, sucking, stealing every noise he made. He lifted his hand; his hand was pinned against the floor, fingers threaded through fingers and holding tight.
He bucked against the weight draped over him, partly in rebellion, partly in desperate desire to affirm that he wasn’t alone, and was pushed over and put on his stomach as a result. The hands captured his again, and that slippery heat glided up from the knob of bone of his nape up to the edge of his hairline.
He squirmed and a third hand closed over his nape, held him down, and a thick tongue traced a searing line up his spine, from the cleft of his ass all the way up to—
He twisted his hips, rocked his body, rolled over onto his back. He opened his arms, pulled the one who was like him close, and held him in place because that was where he was meant to be.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe.”
The taste of salt and smoke and blood hit his tongue, and it tasted nostalgic, like he had returned to the place he had come from.
“I’m yours.”
He didn’t have as many hands - they were the same and shared a body - but he clutched at anything he could reach with them, because letting go was a betrayal and not trying hard enough brought only regret.
“I’ll never let you be alone again.”
And there it was: a response.
Sukuna reached into him, through skin and flesh and bone, even though they existed only in that soul-space that no one else could possibly access, and brought forth—
Yuji opened gritty eyes and realised that he was alone again.
He couldn’t breathe. His chest was tight but his throat was tighter. He didn’t hurt anywhere, not really, but he couldn’t make any of his limbs move. How strange was that, when he had continued to fight despite all his accumulated injuries in Shibuya, and then as a player in the Culling Game?
Yet, this wasn’t so different from when he had woken up on the riverbank several days ago. Hadn’t he picked himself up then, gathered all his things, and then moved on?
Yuji pressed one of his palms against the ground, his skin scraping against the rough stone, but the rest of him refused to cooperate. He drew in a shaky breath, exhaled, and tried again. His body felt like a bag of rocks.
But it was different this time. This time, Sukuna had chosen to leave him there.
Go on. Just lay there. You don’t have to do anything, at least not immediately. A few minutes, an hour, a few days—what difference does it make? He should get used to the idea that he was likely to die alone and unknown, his existence more futile than a raindrop or a whisper of wind.
‘Save everyone you can, every single person you can reach,’ his grandpa had said. ’That’s how you make sure you won’t die alone,' was what he had meant. But how could Yuji do any of that if the only one he knew was Sukuna?
There had been so much blood in that house. There had been so much fighting too, but why hadn’t they run? If they had run, they wouldn’t all be dead now. Yuji wouldn’t have to think about all those frightened, stubborn faces, all the incomprehensible sounds they made, and he wouldn’t have to think about the rest of it, about the lack of everything that should have been there, how out of place everything was, the slaughterhouse stink, the tobari, and it hadn’t started at that house that wasn’t really a house—
His thoughts made no sense; his feelings were a mess.
Time marched on, life went on, oblivious to his predicament. Unlike the night before, the woods were alive with insects and dialogues between unseen birds, the air filled with vitality. The more Yuji noticed it, the more he resented it, and with that came the sense of an unmistakable absence that he couldn’t shake. He couldn’t imagine going on—would tomorrow be that same absence, and the endless tomorrows stretched ahead a similarly eternal smudge of nothingness?
He dug up the names of his friends and all the people who mattered to him. He sifted through their noises, their laughter, the way they looked at him in various states of delight and misery and excitement. He had been there with them, and them with him, a part of their lives no matter how small his role had been. He had no role here, wherever ‘here’ was, beyond that of a nameless terror.
He missed the simple physical presence of his friends too. He would give anything for even the little things, like the weight of Fushiguro’s hand on his shoulder, or Kugisaki’s small but strong hand when she smacked him in the back of his head for some imagined transgression.
He missed Sukuna too. It was twisted, it was vulgar, but he missed him most of all, and he couldn’t even remember half of what he had felt like.
Why was he still fighting? Who was he carrying on for?
For himself? For Sukuna?
(This place wasn’t home.)
Even if he never met his friends again, he couldn’t let Sukuna go on a rampage unchecked.
That was it. That had to be it.
He rolled over onto his side, curled his legs up to his torso, and stopped.
He didn’t know what he needed to do, he didn’t know where to start, but he needed to get up.
He closed his eyes.
This couldn’t be it.
He shifted until he got his feet under him, then his hands. He was on all fours by then, and when it was a decision between lying down on his side again, he chose instead to stand up.
His head swam at the sudden motion and he very nearly collapsed. He swayed drunkenly but righted himself before he crashed on the ground again, and that was just as well—he didn’t know if he had the will to get up again if he had fallen.
He felt better after taking a few steps, but he knew that a bath would make him feel even better. He felt sticky and itchy, and the more he thought about it, the more his skin crawled, as if a million ants were swarming all over him, covering him from head to toe.
The river water was cold but it washed him clean, making him feel almost human again. He’d read somewhere that people washed with river sand, but he couldn’t really see the appeal after several minutes of painful scrubbing, where all he had done was trade the itchy sensation with stinging pain. He forgot all about that when he noticed that the double bands on his thighs had turned black, and that pink ones had appeared on his biceps. His distorted reflection rippled on the surface of the water, but his face was still bare save for the scars under his eyes.
It was happening. It was really happening.
Was that why he’d been able to cast the tobari over that house, when he had no recollection of ever casting one before? He had suspected Sukuna to be behind it, but a part of him knew that simply wasn’t true.
Yuji rubbed water from his face, then from his arms, but the marks remained, just as indelible as the invisible scars Sukuna had left on him, on both heart and soul. Yet, no matter how bad things got, Yuji promised himself that he would never use Cleave or Dismantle, and certainly not Malevolent Shrine, even if - when - they were engraved on his body.
He had to find Sukuna again. He had to see him again. He had to kill him. He needed help to do that, but he also wanted to keep it strictly between him and Sukuna.
Yuji clenched his hands into tight fists to curb the urge to hold his head or tear at his hair. It was all-consuming and overwhelming, but it faded quickly, laying in wait for the next time it could pounce again.
Residuals. Yuji could look for those first.
Except Sukuna had left without a trace, without leaving even the physical markers of his passage. Yuji would use logic, then, and follow the most obvious route. That would give him somewhere to start.
He didn’t know what he was thinking as he wandered to a clearing, where he could smell the faintest hint of smoke from a cooking fire. There were still trees nearby, close to the pitted dirt road cutting through them. Even as Yuji thought to hasten his steps and to move on, a distressed noise made him turn and change his path.
The noise was loud though he didn’t understand the syllables they formed. It didn’t matter. It didn’t take a genius to realise that someone was in trouble. As he ran down the road towards the noise, another more familiar sound rang out: a bear’s roar.
Yuji picked up his pace and found the bear in no time. It was impossible to miss it: it stood on its hind legs, towering over two figures cowering before it.
Yuji sprang towards them and threw a punch with all his strength. Cursed energy sparked to life too, bursting out of him whether he liked it or not. There was no resistance even when the blow should rightly have connected with hard bone, but blood exploded around his fist anyway, spraying grey and pink and red in all directions. The bear slumped over, into a growing puddle of its own leaking filth, expelled at the moment of death.
Yuji stared at his red fist, even as the bear’s blood, still hot, dripped down his face. It tasted like salt and iron, not so different from human blood.
The two people he had saved - an old man and a boy - gibbered in terror, and they stayed exactly where they were, mashing their faces into the ground, even as the pool of the bear’s blood reached them and painted them red too.
“Hey, it’s okay. The bear can’t hurt you anymore.”
Yuji put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, only to have him flinch away violently as if Yuji had stabbed him with a red-hot poker instead. Another stream of nonsense flowed from him, incomprehensible, and so foreign to Yuji that he couldn’t begin to decipher its meaning.
That was fine. Yuji was getting used to it now. He simply had to rely on context clues and do his best to guess what was being said. Right then, the old man couldn’t be more transparent with his state: he was distressed because of the bear, even more terrified by Yuji’s monstrous display of strength, and it was up to Yuji to reassure him.
Yuji remained crouched and hugged his knees to his chest, making himself small as if speaking to a child. He tried to show them that he meant no harm, and that he had killed the bear for them, until their fear eventually mellowed to wariness, and then to a twitching sort of gratitude. Yuji plastered on a smile and tried to remember what it had felt like to do that, and though he felt nothing but a surge of desperate longing, it seemed enough to convince the old man and the boy to look him in the eye.
It was evident that they didn’t understand who he was, or even what he was. Yuji couldn’t blame them. He had been spoiled by the short, sweet months with his friends, and he had never once thought about what a regular person might see when they looked at him. He wanted to pull the sleeves of his uniform lower to hide the dark bands around his wrists but that would only draw the villagers’ attention to them, if they hadn’t already noticed.
Yuji kept trying to communicate with the villagers, as if he could somehow break down the barrier between them, to no avail. The old man and the boy couldn’t understand a word he said, just as Yuji couldn’t make any sense of their noises. In fact, with the exception of Sukuna, not a single person Yuji had met in this strange place spoke a language he knew. Was he simply not trying hard enough? Was he missing something obvious? Yuji wasn’t the best at learning languages, but he liked to think that he caught on quickly when he’d heard enough of a given one—he’d picked up innumerable super cool lines from English movies and he found every opportunity to use them, to Fushiguro and Kugisaki’s great exasperation.
But now—
“I need your help.”
This time, the villagers listened when he spoke, albeit with deep frowns etched into their brows. Whether they were willing to help, or they were simply curious, Yuji could only guess, but it was better than nothing.
“Do you know where Jujutsu Tech is?”
The frowns stayed; the confusion in their eyes wavered.
“How about the Gojo clan?” Gojo-sensei always talked about how he was a one man clan, but there must have been other clan members, even if they were non-sorcerers, right? Stricken by a sudden pang of doubt, Yuji added, “Maybe the Zenin clan?”
Still no reaction. The old man narrowed his eyes as if concentrating harder would help him. The boy scratched at his neck where the bear’s blood was starting to dry and he shifted where he knelt, his straw shoes scraping the ground.
Before he could think too deeply, Yuji blurted out, “Can you help me find the Fujiwara clan?”
That got a reaction. Finally.
A sinking sensation filled Yuji’s belly, opening a pit of dull dread. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what was bothering him and he fought to convince himself to brush the feeling aside.
Yuji licked his lips, then rasped, “I need to speak to the Sugawara clan.”
The villagers smiled at him, bright and wide. It was such a surprising turn of events that Yuji found himself smiling back automatically, never mind that he couldn’t understand what the relief in their expressions meant. “So you know the Sugawara clan?”
The old man nodded once, firm and brimming with confidence, his gaze steady. The boy clapped his hands and bowed to Yuji repeatedly, all while chattering excitedly.
The grey pit in Yuji’s stomach grew larger, deeper, and he had the sudden thought that none of this could be real. Maybe it was all a dream, or something close to it, constructed by the last pulses of electricity in his dead brain.
Had he died at Sendai Stadium, while Sukuna hovered in the air in their shared body?
They had merged.
No, they had been separated.
Just what happened?
Did it matter?
Sudden movement snapped Yuji back to the present (past). The old man waved a hand at Yuji’s face again, clearly trying to get his attention. He gestured behind himself, pointing out a cart Yuji hadn’t noticed earlier. It had been overturned, its precious cargo strewn in the dirt, but both wheels still looked intact and the cart would probably still function if it was righted. The boy gave it his all but the cart remained on its side. Good thing Yuji was there to help—his terrible strength was useful for something other than damage and destruction after all.
The boy gave Yuji a petrified grin and the old man joined in with some reluctance, but it had been so long since Yuji had been greeted with something other than violence and hatred that he soaked it all up. It was easier to breathe then and the air was sweet with the faint fragrance of apples.
Yuji helped pick up the limp sacks of what must be grains and vegetables and loaded them on the cart. Whatever had pulled the cart was long gone, so Yuji took it upon himself to take its place while the boy walked next to him, directing him with wild flaps of his arms and energetic babble. Though he had initially protested Yuji’s position in front of the cart, the old man had since climbed on top of the sacks of food, offering only occasional grunts and rumblings when the boy started to lapse in one-sided communication.
If only Yuji could understand. He would gladly have joined in. He bit back a wistful sigh but there was nothing he could do about the dull feeling in his chest. He missed everyone. He missed being understood, even on a surface level, and understanding others in return. He felt even more alone right then, walking down a dirt road next to a boy who saw him but never saw him.
He wondered if his friends ever felt like that. They had grown up with cursed techniques, while Yuji had lived a normal, uneventful life before he had swallowed that first finger.
What had it been like for Sukuna, who had never looked human to begin with?
Yuji scowled and that was enough to cut the boy off in the middle of his enthusiastic babble. Sympathy didn’t suit Yuji, and Sukuna didn’t deserve sympathy.
Yuji was forced to reconsider that sentiment when they arrived at the edge of a riverside village and the old man made his wish for Yuji to stay right there very clear. He waved his wrinkled arms in broad, arching motions, his eyes were so wide the whites of them flashed, and his noises were low and drawn out, like the plaintive groan of an injured deer. If not for the fact that the old man had left the cart with him, Yuji might have assumed that he had been left behind again.
But Yuji understood. He couldn’t be seen. No one else would understand. Looking at the way the old man and the boy hurried away from him, he was forced to revise that thought: no one understood.
Maybe it had something to do with the dried blood on his face. Yuji sank down next to the river and half-heartedly dashed cold water in his face. Maybe it was the scars under his eyes.
The dark red washed away from his hands and flowed pink from his face. His skin was still a soft tan underneath. He was still him.
He was still him.
He reached into his pocket for his phone, a gesture so habitual that he was genuinely dumbfounded when he found nothing and his hand poked through the pocket lining and out of the tear in the right leg of his trousers. That was right. He’d moved his phone from its usual spot to his left pocket.
The phone’s screen was still cracked and it remained dark. The SIM was intact though, and so was the memory card, filled with precious memories and irreplaceable experiences.
But they were just slivers of plastic and metal now.
The phone squeaked in Yuji’s hand. The spider web cracks grew, frosting the screen entirely.
Yuji had the wild urge to crush it, them, all of it. If he destroyed it first, then it couldn’t be destroyed. That logic made perfect sense for a heartbeat, then lost all meaning in the next.
He couldn’t. He had to. And wasn’t it the same with his uniform? Had the red of his hoodie really dulled that much, or was it just the quality of light as the sun started to set?
He would be home soon. He had to be.
He stared at his hands and Sukuna’s wrists were all he saw.
He couldn’t go home. He really shouldn’t.
He touched his skin, right hand over left wrist, his own hand, over Sukuna’s banded wrist. He dug his nails into the mark closest to his hand, dug in hard, until he was satisfied that what lay underneath was red instead of black.
He was still himself. He wasn’t Sukuna.
He was fine. Everything could still be fine.
He could fix this.
It was dark when he heard footsteps approaching him. A swaying light accompanied it, growing larger and brighter with every step. The desire to hide rolled through him in a thick wave, but Yuji set his jaw stubbornly and stayed where he was, in front of the cart.
It was the old man again.
Yuji’s shoulders slumped as the tension melted off his frame. The old man had come back alone, the boy probably hidden away, just in case Yuji did anything heinous. Yuji could see it in the old man’s cringing manner and the deep grooves bracketing his mouth. He truly didn’t want to be there and seeing Yuji again only made him even more uncomfortable.
With halting sounds that grew fainter the longer Yuji showed no reaction, the old man tried to explain something. Yuji could only pick out ‘Sugawara’ here and there, but that alone wasn’t enough to get him anywhere.
The old man grew frustrated. He sighed and bobbed his head in short, blunt motions. He tugged at his long beard and heaved another sigh. None of it helped.
Muttering something under his breath, the old man thrusted the lantern at Yuji. He dropped into a deep squat and then started scratching at the dirt. No, he was drawing a crude map. The winding line next to Yuji’s foot was the river and the wobbly squares were the sparse village. He added a thinner line and ran it along the river, traced over it repeatedly with great vigour, until it branched off into what looked like a field of scratches. The thinner line continued, hugging close to rolling, undulating lines that had to be mountains, before terminating in a lopsided rectangle which he circled aggressively.
“Is that where I can find the Sugawara clan?”
“Sugawara!” More nonsense, more gibberish. All Yuji wanted to do was leave. “Sugawara!”
Yuji itched to get his phone out and snap a photo of the map, until he remembered that his phone didn’t work anymore. The battery was probably fucked too.
It was fine. All he had to do was follow the river, past the village, and then cut through the scratchy lines, and continue some more until he saw three peaks arranged just so. The estate had to be large, so there was no way he could miss it.
He could do this.
But what exactly was he doing?
Yuji stopped walking in the middle of the path and stumbled on rain-wet rocks.
He was looking for the Sugawara clan because they were what the Gojo clan once was, a thousand years ago. And if he was looking for the Sugawara of that time, didn’t that mean that he was in Fukuoka?
This couldn’t be Fukuoka.
(But it also couldn’t be over a thousand years ago.)
What was he going to do when he found the Sugawara clan?
Yuji followed the river all the way to a bamboo forest and took the overgrown path through it. That made little sense, considering how much of a big deal the Sugawara clan had been in ancient times. He would have thought that the way to their estate would have been cleared and wide enough for carts and carriages to feed their aristocratic lifestyle, even if Sugawara had been exiled.
He walked.
He kept walking.
He deviated from the path and climbed a mountain just because he could, because he had to, and because having that elevated view might help shed some light on just where he was.
It was pointless.
Right at the peak, above the thick sea of clouds, all Yuji saw was the sky and the setting sun. When the moon rose to the middle of the sky and the stars came out, a total, all-consuming darkness engulfed everything below. On top of the world, Yuji felt like he was on another planet, irrevocably cut off from the vast universe.
Yuji sucked in a lungful of biting mountain air. It burned inside him, made everything shift around weirdly, and when he opened his gritty eyes again, it was noon and his skin felt tight and impossibly fragile, as if it would tear at any moment.
He walked down the mountain and woke up halfway down another one, tucked into the embrace of an old tree’s lumpy roots.
Hey, brat.
“Sukuna?”
Sukuna, of course, wasn’t there. No one was.
Yuji kept going. He rounded mountains, looped back around when the trail seemed to lead nowhere, then started again on the path he had stepped off earlier. Every time he started to get close to a village, he challenged himself to walk right through it, if only to prove to himself that he could, but quickly realised moments later that he had no reason to do such a thing. He quashed the wretched feeling twisting in his guts and skirted around the village instead.
He encountered another bear after one such village and he made dinner out of it. He entertained the thought of making a cape out of its fur, but quickly realised that he didn’t have the first clue how to even preserve the fur after he had skinned the bear.
Was Sukuna hungry too? Was he cold?
Yuji made a bed out of hinoki branches and leaves and slept swaddled in coarse bear’s fur. He snorted awake to the stench of singed fur and his throat coated in ash, with the unpleasant feeling of sleeping too close to a fire.
He kept walking. He went back to sleep. He killed another bear. Leonardo DiCaprio wished he had Yuji’s bear assassin skills. He nearly cried tears of joy when he caught ayu fish in the river.
He passed by another village, got into a disagreement with three hunters, but hurried past them before the situation could devolve into an actual fight. He splashed through the river, slept again, and then he was there.
The Sugawara estate wasn’t what he had expected.
For starters, the outer wall shouldn’t feature so much broken stone, should it?
There was no one guarding the entrance. Yuji found discarded weapons on the ground, as if the guards that must have patrolled that area had simply dropped everything and left. If the messy collection of footprints were anything to go by, they had done so in quite a hurry.
Something zipped through the air overhead, cracking branches, before landing heavily just a ways behind Yuji.
Everything was eerily quiet otherwise. There were no startled birds, no insects, and the air was thick and stagnant. Yuji’s skin crawled but he still turned on his heel and went to investigate the dark object in the grass.
It was a man. A very dead man. The cause of death was obvious: though there were barely any marks on him, his neck was bent at an unnatural angle. Was there a fight already? Had someone attacked the Sugawara clan? Yuji couldn’t remember what had happened to them after they were exiled, and he cursed his poor grasp of history.
The man’s eyelids twitched and his eyes rolled towards Yuji. It made Yuji jump back in fright—the man wasn’t dead at all. It was worse than that. His purple mouth opened but no sound came out. His lips trembled and curled in vain, his teeth clacking together viciously, but what he tried so desperately to say remained unvoiced. Yuji wished he could tell him to save his breath.
“Just— Just wait here. I’ll get help!”
What was going to happen to the man out here? Who would come to help? How was the man even still alive?
Yuji pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind and ran into the estate, hoping against hope that he wasn’t too late. A tobari stood in his way, likely erected right after the poor man had been expelled, but it wouldn’t be the first time Yuji had taken one down before.
The tobari shuddered at the first punch, cracked at the second, and when Yuji threw a third punch, it shattered like so much spun sugar, disintegrating into a shower of glittering pieces as he ran full tilt inside.
A ring of men with naginata closed in on a pale-haired child, trampling over crumpled bodies as they did so. It was obvious what was going on there.
Yuji grabbed the man closest to him and dropped him with a swift jab to the face, breaking the circle. He dispatched the man next to him in a similar manner. To his surprise, instead of engaging in the fight, the remaining men dropped their weapons and fled. Several of them even stopped to pick up the fallen to bring with them.
An uneasy feeling sloshed around in Yuji’s stomach.
The child climbed to his feet then, red-faced and frowning, but his expression cleared when he goggled at Yuji with luminous blue eyes. There was no doubt about it—he had to be the Six Eyes of the current era.
“Are you—” Yuji choked down the strained noise that was trying to climb out of his throat. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
The child blinked his large eyes at Yuji and smiled. There was no trace of concern or fear in that smile, as if he hadn’t just been attacked by a number of armed guards. It reminded Yuji so much of Gojo-sensei that his throat closed up and his eyes burned with emotion. The child’s voice was light and playful, filled with delight, just like Gojo-sensei.
Unable to help himself, Yuji dragged the child into a tight hug. It was so strange to feel such a tiny body in his arms, and it was stranger still when the boy just patted him on top of his head indulgently. The Sugawara child giggled and continued to say things Yuji couldn’t understand.
“What awful men, attacking a child like that.” Not that any ancestor of Gojo-sensei’s would need protection. How much of his cursed technique could the Sugawara child use at that age anyway? Did he have Limitless along with the Six Eyes?
Still, powerful or not, Yuji would make sure he was safe. Yuji took the child’s hand in his and led him away from the mess of dead bodies in the courtyard. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up. Are you hurt? Hungry? Thirsty? Do you know where your parents are? Or do you have caretakers instead?”
After a moment of blank surprise, the little boy trudged along beside Yuji. He sounded confused, but there was no way around it, and all Yuji could do was laugh awkwardly.
The boy stopped walking. Because Yuji was still holding his hand, he was forced to stop too.
“What’s wrong?”
The corners of the boy’s lips turned down.
Yuji tugged on his hand again. When the boy didn’t budge, Yuji gave his hand a firm tug.
The boy stumbled forwards several steps. It must never have happened before, judging from the way his eyes grew wide and glowed blue. His small mouth dropped open in a black O too, before twisting into a crooked grin.
“Yeah, I’m kind of strong.” Yuji pulled a face and growled in what he hoped was a comical manner at the child. “I won’t let you push me around.”
The child mimicked his growl and bared his teeth at Yuji. He dissolved into another gale of giggles that made his entire face light up with simple, guileless joy.
Yuji kept pulling him along to the well he had spotted in the garden. Pulling quickly became dragging, until it turned into an all-out tug of war. The kid probably didn’t understand what he was trying to do. Maybe they should look for his parents or caretakers first—they’d know how to deal with him.
The child’s face fell when Yuji stopped trying to drag him along. He chirped something sharp and short, but all Yuji got from that was the fact that the child was upset. He stamped his foot then and pointed insistently at the ruined wall Yuji had seen when he had arrived at the estate.
“Do you want me to look at that?”
The child wrapped both hands around Yuji’s hand, tugging hard. He dropped his hand a second later, and stamped his foot again.
“Huh?”
Visibly frustrated, the boy raked his small hands through his fluffy white hair. Yuji wished he could help, but just as he was about to speak again, the boy straightened abruptly, wearing that broad grin once more. He said something, then held an index finger up.
Yuji didn’t need to understand what he was saying. He hadn’t seen it up close before, but he knew exactly what was happening.
Yuji jumped out of the way before the Sugawara child finished casting Red, boosting himself out of the path of a second blast of Red with a powerful kick to an external wall.
“What are you doing? Stop that!”
The child laughed with unbridled glee, as if this was all a game. Yuji hadn’t been too late, he had been absolutely wrong about what the situation was.
Sukuna chose that moment to appear.
Sukuna was here.
“Sukuna—”
Blue light ignited the air. Sukuna was suddenly right there, Yuji was falling, and when had Sukuna grabbed his arm like that?
Sukuna was really here.
He was going to kill the Sugawara child. Yuji could feel it in his gut.
“–stop. Stop! Please, don’t do anything, this is all a big mistake!” Yuji wrapped his arms around Sukuna, trapping his arms by his sides. If he couldn’t use his hands, he would have a hard time using his cursed techniques, right? “Stop it, Sukuna!”
Sukuna wrenched his arms from him, shook him off, and shoved him out of the way. Red light rushed between them, searing green afterimages in Yuji’s vision. And even though Yuji had dodged the child’s Red entirely, sharp, sudden pain ripped through his shoulder and made his knees buckle under him.
It had to be Sukuna. It hurt.
“Sukuna, please, don’t—”
Before his eyes, Sukuna ignored him, ignored Infinity, ignored whatever it was the Sugawara child was laughing about, and plucked him out of the air. Everything that happened next played out like a scene out of a splatter movie.
Sukuna’s face didn’t change, didn’t transform, but the bite he took out the child was impossibly large. There was definitely blood this time. Hot, red blood, so much of it that it dyed the child’s clothes red in a matter of seconds. Blood continued to spurt rhythmically from the black hole where the child’s arm and shoulder had once been, and then—
“Sukuna, stop! Stop!”
Yuji scrambled to his feet to stop the inevitable but he slipped on the bloody ground. He screamed until he was hoarse, until it felt like his body had been scooped clean of all its organs, and all he succeeded in doing was catch the twitching lump that the boy’s body had been reduced to.
That wasn’t the end.
Sukuna had the child’s head in his hands. He pinched a crystal blue eye between his fingers, and then he popped it into his mouth like it was a fish ball. Yuji could feel it bursting on his tongue and he was sure that he could taste it.
His stomach lurched violently and he gagged. Stomach acid seared the back of his throat. He would have thrown up right at Sukuna’s feet, but he was too busy screaming in horror at the large hole in Sukuna’s chest.
Hollow Purple wasn’t supposed to be able to do that to Sukuna. He’d survived much worse in Shinjuku, hadn’t he? But then again, Infinity shouldn’t have been so easily bypassed either, but the Sugawara child’s lifeless body rested on the ground next to him while he stared inside the ruin of Sukuna’s chest. He could see splintered ribs and shredded organs. Was that his lungs? Or was that his heart, blasted into an unrecognisable paste?
Sukuna collapsed on top of Yuji and Yuji caught him instinctively. He was heavier than Yuji remembered, larger too, but none of that was going to matter if Sukuna died.
The past weeks, months, cascaded through Yuji’s mind like a series of overexposed images, with large white spots blooming where a lack of any meaning leached all enjoyment out of life. Among them all, the ones with Sukuna, as bloody as they were, shone brightest of all. If he died—
“You’re supposed to be invincible.” Yuji put Sukuna on the ground and rolled him over onto his back. His heart nearly stopped at the sight of Sukuna’s closed eyes and his still chest. “You wouldn’t die when I wanted you dead! You can’t just leave like this!”
Separated. Merged. Were they going to be separated again now?
Panic gripped him, but so did joy and anger. Desperation took hold of him and his veins flooded with adrenaline, but he was already where he had to be and there was nothing he could do.
“Wake up!” Yuji grabbed two of Sukuna’s arms and shook him roughly, not caring if the back of Sukuna’s head bounced against the ground. “Come back!”
He tried to shake Sukuna again but his strength seemed to have drained out of him along with all his warmth. Sukuna had saved him from Red, hadn’t he? Why had they saved each other if they were going to die right there, in someone’s empty home, where no one would recognise them or even care that they had lived?
He should be happy that Sukuna was dying, and that he was dying after him, his role rendered obsolete. Yet, when the blind terror receded, all he felt was an overwhelming sadness.
He didn’t want Sukuna to die.
He didn’t want to die.
“Please come back. We don’t need to be one, but we don’t need to be torn apart either.”
He tried to redirect what had once flowed from Sukuna to him, back to Sukuna from him. If he had spontaneously learned how to use reversed curse technique by way of his unique connection to Sukuna, then he had to be able to use it on Sukuna himself. Besides, Sukuna could do the same thing, and all Yuji was doing was jumpstarting the healing process so that he had some sort of chance.
Yuji couldn’t remember working harder on anything else in his life. Everything had to be aligned: the fluid energy in his belly, in his head, in his chest, the huff of his breath, and the shape of Sukuna’s soul encased in his fleshy body.
Yuji put his hand over the gaping hole in Sukuna’s chest and tried to envision where his own reverse cursed energy meshed with Sukuna’s, and how it would repair the ruined organs and other parts. Sweat dripped from Yuji’s forehead, blood trickled from his nose, and at some point, the sky split open and poured rain down on them, turning the bloodbath into a pink lake in a muddy garden.
When Sukuna’s chest started to rise and fall under his hands, he knew he had succeeded. He was so tired that he could barely hold on to any thought, let alone string a sentence together. Stripped of all delusions and functioning on little more than instinct, Yuji spent a long moment just holding on to Sukuna, hugging him tightly, so grateful that he was still alive. He might have wept, but if Sukuna noticed at all, he gave no sign of having done so.
Yuji dragged Sukuna out of the rain, into the nearest hall. He went back out into the rain to gather the miserable remains of the Sugawara child, who had tried to kill him for reasons unknown. Yuji wrapped the little body in a large coat he found in the house, a dark one, covering him up in an attempt to show some respect, but also so that he didn’t have to look at the pitiful child’s body.
How had things gone so wrong?
Yuji’s chest seized. It ached so much it was hard to breathe. He unbuttoned his jacket and pulled his hoodie away from his body to check if he was injured, but there was nothing on his chest. It must be some sort of phantom pain emanating from Sukuna. It would go away eventually.
Exhausted, Yuji flopped down next to Sukuna on the wooden floor. With clumsy hands, he peeled off his sodden jacket and tugged the hoodie over his head. His trousers were drenched too, so he kicked them off and left them in an unsightly heap near the door he had hauled Sukuna through.
“Why do you keep doing this?”
Ah, it was nice hearing Sukuna’s voice again. It was nicer still that Sukuna hadn’t got up to leave again. Not that Yuji would have been able to keep him there if he didn’t want to be there. Besides, he had found Yuji again of his own volition, not the other way around.
“Doing what?”
“Just stumbling into aristocrats’ estates. You seemed like someone who would care about things like that.”
Yuji stared up at the wooden ceiling, painted and lacquered with luxurious colours. He kept staring until his eyelids grew too heavy to hold up. “I fought bears and made dinner out of them, Sukuna.”
“I haven’t had bear before.”
“Fish is nicer.” Yuji’s words slurred and he couldn’t be bothered to enunciate more clearly. “Maybe that’s what it all comes down to. The ban on other meats, I mean. Fish is more manageable anyway.”
“You wouldn’t say that if fish was most of what you ate all your life.”
The rain kept pelting down outside. It made everything grey and cold, but it didn’t have to be, not when Sukuna was so close next to him. Yuji rolled over, only to find Sukuna’s arm just a hair away from his side, resting between them. He scooted closer and put his head on Sukuna’s chest before his nerves could get the better of him.
“I don’t know when it was invented, but I guess you’ve never had sushi before. It’s the most amazing thing, where I come from.”
Sukuna grew very still, digesting Yuji’s words, before asking, “Where are you from?”
“Sendai.” Yuji watched Sukuna and was deeply comforted by the ease with which he could read Sukuna’s face and understand his words. “You probably know it by another name now.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
That was hardly surprising. Unfortunately, Yuji couldn’t remember its old name, though he was fairly sure its Edo period name was Date-han. It wasn’t important, and it was doubtful that Sukuna would even know it if he was from a small village. “Why did you come here looking for me after you left me behind at the campsite?”
All this while, Sukuna’s gaze had remained on the ceiling, all four of his eyes unblinking. Now, Sukuna turned his head and stared right into Yuji’s eyes. “Because I wanted to.”
Sukuna’s answer explained nothing, but it was everything Yuji needed to hear. He cast aside all dignity and leaned on his elbows so that he could press his mouth against Sukuna’s. Sukuna froze, likely taken aback, but Yuji took the opportunity to tilt his head so that he could better slot their lips together, tease the seam of Sukuna’s lips open, and let his tongue steal inside his mouth.