Chapter Text
Sukuna swipes a back hand across his mouth. The knuckle comes away with a trail of scarlet red that matches the temple at his back.
His blood.
He can’t remember the last time he bled. Perhaps it was the last time he had his own form. No. Before that. When he had his fingers severed and sealed.
Sukuna glances up, across the gorge of his domain. The girl stands assured across the sea of black stone, a matching smear of blood on her knuckles, a similar grin spreading across her mouth.
She’d hit him.
She’d hit him, and made him bleed.
“You ready to tell me about Kenjaku yet?” the albino little monster chuckles, head cocking.
Sukuna laughs, and he laughs hard. “No, no, no,” he slips his arms free from the sleeves of his yukata, lets the fabric fall to his waist, lets the tongue on his belly maw lick out hungrily across the expanse of his stomach. “We have only just begun having fun.”
The girl doesn’t shrink back, doesn’t shiver. Her grin only grows. “Ayo, the hard way it is.”
Promises, promises.
How long has it been since he had a worthy fight?
That Sukuna can’t even remember.
The door to the house swings open, a scuffle of shoes shirked and shoulders skimmed, and Gojo’s voice echoes down the hall. “We’re back! And I bought Wagashi with me-“
His feet pad down the hall, towards the living room, a second step repeating his own. He stalls in the doorway, Miss Granger stuttering to a stall too at the scene that greets them.
It’s not every day, you see, Gojo thinks, that you come home to your student Yuji Itadori spread out on the tatami mats of your home like some sort of satanic sacrifice, his friends Nobara Kugisaki and Megumi Fushiguro panicking by the window, and your frazzled husband pacing grooves by the pushed-out-the-way kotatsu.
Gojo pulls his glasses down over the ridge of his nose, takes another look, just to be sure what he’s seeing is what he really is seeing, before he slowly turns to Geto, who meets his gaze across the madness, looking a little, just a little, sheepish.
“Geto,” He asks in the ensuing freeze, in the sudden silence when the inhabitants of the room spot the Six Eyes standing in the door well. “Why is our daughter inside Yuji?”
The maw on his belly opens wide, salivating, about to bite, but the little monster is fast, keen, and she has him by the tongue before Sukuna can get a bite, can have a little taste. She grabs it, grabs him, and she squeezes, digs her nails in because she’s mean, cruel in a way that only gets Sukuna’s blood thumping harder, faster, and then… well, then she’s fucking flinging him like a frisbee across his own domain.
He doesn’t fall, of course he doesn’t, Sukuna lands on his feet, and finally, finally, he throws a Cleave her way.
It hits, of course it does, Sukuna never misses, but he is unusually disappointed when he watches the little monster begin to split, slice, slop apart-
That is until her own blood shoots out like puppet strings, fastened to her fragments, and pulls herself back together again with a snap and a twist.
Then, oh then, she stands there, whole, complete, not a drop of blood or cut in sight, grinning. “Wrong move, big boy. I like that one.”
She does the impossible.
She fucking throws his own Cleave right back at him.
Gojo crouches low in the middle of the room, right over the sprawled Yuji, and uses a long finger to tap at the boys forehead like a curious child would against the glass of an aquarium. “She’s definitely in there.” Is his final declaration, his expert opinion. “And whatever they’re doing, Sukuna’s and Hemlock’s energies are going off like Christmas tree lights.”
“They’re fighting.” The still boy adds, careful, as if he was afraid to change, afraid to do much more than move his jaw. “Or flirting? It’s hard to keep up with them-“ Yuji suddenly winces, jolts as if he’s been shocked by electric, before he goes cross-eyed as if he could stare into his own brain. “Hey! Easy! I think that was my childhood memories you guys just trod on in there!”
“I’m sorry,” Miss Granger nervously chews at the thin skin of her thumb, perched beside Gojo’s husband. “I should have seen it coming. Hemlock’s own history with Riddle and Horcruxes might have made her malicious-“ Miss Granger stumbles a little, shrugs, correcting herself. “More malicious to the prospect of something like Sukuna. I thought I might have time to explain before she ran into him.” She eyes the boy and his still white-faced friends. “Apparently not.”
“Well, there’s only one thing for it. Time to be a dad.” Gojo edges around, plants his feet on either side of Yuji’s head, hands cradling the boys cheeks. Where, quite suddenly, he begins to fiercely shake the poor boys head as if it were a snow globe. “Oy! Hemlock, you have twenty seconds to get out of there or so help you are grounded for the next week!”
The fight turns nasty, spiteful, vicious, all the foul and violent things Sukuna has missed for centuries, has woke up and found missing in this new world with its sanitised sorcery and its chump change curses.
The little monster gives as good as she gets.
And she’s mean about it too, hungry almost. She gets the chance to break his arm, but she doesn’t just snap it, no, not this little monster, she crumples it from wrist to shoulder joint. She steals his Cleave and doesn’t aim for his head, his torso, fast and sure deaths, she tries to whittle him down with it, nip-nip-nipping with his hands and his feet and his ears and his tongue. She conjures fire, keeps it hot but not too hot, just enough to scorch his skin off but cool enough to keep the nerves of his muscles alive and singing in blinding pain.
Soon enough the maw on his belly isn’t the only thing salivating.
Undoubtedly, if Sukuna had all his fingers this fight would not be as it were. If he had his own body, she’d be another bug to crush under heel, but the fact that she’s not only holding her own against him now when no other has (That white-haired fool didn’t count. Sukuna had just acquired this vessel when they fought, was only one finger strong, was dazed from the transference), no, not just holding her own, having fun with him now, well… can you blame him for letting the fight drag out?
Just to see, just to taste, just to know how mean the little monster would get if let off her leash.
She’s young. Alive for barely a blink to something like Sukuna.
If given the chance, given the right… teacher, she would make something truly malevolent.
“Ready to speak now, old man?” She holds up the severed pink appendage, wiggling it tauntingly at him. “Or cat got your tongue?”
She laughs at her own joke, Sukuna grins along with it, running a hand through his hair as all his injuries fall away like smoke rolling over a pond. “Perhaps.” He cocks his head. “But it will not be free. Nothing in this world ever is.”
The little monster throws the tongue away from herself, dusts her own hands off, shirking her own injuries to nothing as Sukuna had just done. “Sorry, I forgot to bring my wallet. How about you just put it on my tab and-“
“Nothing so mundane as money.” Sukuna takes a step closer. She doesn’t back away, this little monster. Of course she doesn’t. “I want something more… tangible in return.”
Her eyes slit, the green a sickening glow in the dark. “How… tangible are we talking?”
Sukuna grins. “Brat!”
“Uh,” Yuji suddenly blinks into the domain, shuffling nervously when he spots the two staring at him like sharks in the ocean. “Oh-oh.”
“Did it work?” Gojo asks Yuji on the floor, but the boy, eye’s swimming dizzily, shakes his head as best as he can while it was still clamped in his sensei’s hold.
“Nope. They’re still fighting and talking.” Yuji grimaces. “I don’t think she even heard you-“
Yuji suddenly sags, limp in Gojo’s hold-
Unconscious.
“Yuji?” Gojo asks with another tentative shake to the boys head, perhaps not the best action given the concussion he likely had from having his brain shaken like a bottle of champagne only minutes before.
Yuji doesn’t rouse.
Gojo is quickly shouldered out the way by an irate Geto, who tries checking the boys temperature with the back of his knuckles. “What did you do?!”
“Me? Me?!” Gojo bites back just as shrilly, offended and more than a little petty. “If this is anyone’s fault this is yours. I wasn’t the one who let our daughter go slip and sliding into the subconscious of my student to go poking the King of Curses with a stick!”
“Well maybe,” Geto bats back, “you shouldn’t have jiggled the poor boy’s head like a goldfish in a plastic bag from an amusement park! You always kill the goldfish!”
“I do not,” Gojo argues, insulted, “That last one I won on the skeeball machine made it all the way home!”
“Yeah,” Geto scoffs, “where you killed it by trying to feed it doughnuts!”
“Oh, come off it,” Gojo leaps up, hands up in mock surrender. “Fish food tastes awful. Have you tried it? I thought it might like something a little sweeter-“
“The fact that you know what fish flakes taste like does not surprise me,” Geto now stands, whirling on his husband, “but I thought you knew better than to believe merely shaking the boy around would somehow dislodge our daughter-“
“I didn’t see you coming up with a better plan.” Gojo crosses his arms over his chest, “In fact, when I walked in you were doing nothing at all but prancing around in a panic-“
“I do not prance-“
“You do, actually, like a peacock-“
“Guys,”
“At least my brain isn’t the size of a birds-“
“Guys,”
“I have a good size brain! At least the same size as an otter-“
“Guys,”
“An Otter with a lobotomy, perhaps-“
“Guys!”
The two arguing husband snap around, ultimately, to the voice, to Miss Granger, to the room of five pairs of eyes staring at them.
Five.
Yuji was awake again, perfectly fine, blinking, as he sat in the middle of the room. Nobara and Megumi were now crouched beside him, checking the boy over but finding nothing amiss. Miss Granger was still in the spot where she stood near Geto before the man had rushed for the unconscious boy, not looking at them but at the sofa near the window, to the fifth pair of eyes.
Hemlock Potter sat on the cushions, Gojo’s shopping back stolen from the door well from where he dropped it beside her hip, a tray of Wagashi already cracked open on her lap, one sweet treat already making its way to her mouth where it’s chewed and swallowed whole. “What? Why is everyone looking at me like that?”
“Hey,” Hemlock blusters indignantly, “The sweets!”
Geto seemingly doesn’t care about the tray of now mushed sugared delicacies, as he pulls back from the crushing hug he’d dragged the small girl into, back to cradle her head, tilting her chin this way and that as if checking for injuries. When he found none, the ire came. “What in the world were you thinking?!”
Hemlock tries to wiggle her head free, but that only gives Geto the chance to check her arms and hands. “I was just introducing myself to everyone present,” Her green gaze dart to Yuji on the floor, a breath of silence, and opening to dispute the boy doesn’t take. “I was told it was rude not to.”
Hastily, Gojo’s head pops over Geto’s, a long pale finger jabbing at his daughter. “You are so, so grounded.”
“Grounded?” Hemlock finally steals her arm free, affronted. “I’ve never been grounded before. You can’t ground me.”
Somewhere behind, Hermione snorts. “Yeah, we can tell.”
But the interruption does not deter Gojo, who smiles like a wolf who caught the scent of a limping lamb. “Oh, but I can. I’m your dad, and as your dad-“
“My dad for all of one day!” Hemlock cuts in.
Anew, Gojo will not be discouraged. “As your dad,” he pointedly repeats, “I can ground all I want, and you are grounded for seven days-“ his finger flies higher, “No! Ten days!”
“Geto?” Hemlock tries to divide and conquer, but she finds no aid as the dark-haired man pulls back completely, sternly crossing his arms over his chest.
“I say a month.” Geto nods to himself.
“A month!” Gojo echoes.
“A month?!” Hemlock splutters, she turns her attention to her friend, who is already warding her off with her hands up, a silent plea not to be dragged in.
“This is ridiculous,” Hemlock swoops down, plucking up the squashed tray of sweets, seizing them tightly to herself, doing the only thing she can think of. Be petty. “I’m taking the sweets, and you can’t stop me!”
She turns on her heel and marches out the room, the bang, bang, bang of the footsteps echoing on the stairs.
Gojo follows after her, head poking out the hallway. “You better not slam that door-“
Slam.
Slowly he slinks back into the room, and despite what just happened, perhaps because of it, maybe because he was Gojo of all people, he was grinning wildly. “Well,” he claps his hands together far too cheerfully. “I think that went rather well!”
For the first time all afternoon, Nobara speaks up. “I’m sorry but what the fuck just happened and who the fuck was that??”
“Hemlock,” Hermione knocks upon the closed door at the end of the upstairs hall, “It’s me,” she adds rather pointlessly as she pulls the sliding door open and slips into the room. Hemlock most likely knew who it was from the bottom of the stairs, what with her strange eyes and all.
The room is empty, no furniture, no posters, not even any carpet to save the tatami mats.
Hermione wonders what this room was saved for, only to realize it was likely for the very girl in question. And there she was, sitting in the barrenness, Hemlock Potter with a tray of mangled sweets on her crossed legged lap.
“They were only worried,” Hermione begins but does not get the chance to finish.
“Oh, I know,” The green-eyed wonder grins, popping a sweet into her mouth. “I kinda like getting grounded. No one’s cared enough about me before to try. It’s… nice, I think.”
The admission, sincere in a naked way Hemlock never really is, reminds Hermione of Hemlock’s past, of the cupboards and the beatings and the being raised to die, of just how twisted her first years were. It breaks her heart a little that being grounded, to someone like Hemlock, is possibly one of the first acts of parental love she can put a solid finger on.
It also aggravates her to no end.
“Then why did you storm off all the way here then?” Hermione questions, only for Hemlock to pop another sweet in her mouth.
“Gotta keep them on their toes,” She grins, she shrugs, “don’t I? Plus that’s what happens in the movies, isn’t it? They yell, you yell back, the kid runs off, doors are slammed, then later one of the parents sneaks a chocolate cake into the kid’s room. I’m rather fond of chocolate cake. Who do you think is going to bring it to me? Geto or Gojo? I think… Geto. His name sounds like gateau.”
Again, Hermione’s heart breaks a little, a lot.
The only point of reference her dear friend has for normal family life is movies. She’s trying to connect in the only way she can address. By Hallmark cards and Disney channels.
“Hemlock,” Hermione starts softly, gently. “Life isn’t a movie.”
Hemlock puts the sweets down finally. “I know that.” And here it comes again, that bare earnestness Hermione isn’t used to seeing, a vulnerability that feels like a paradox to witness. “I just don’t know anything else.”
Hermione bites back the tears, she doesn’t think Hemlock would appreciate them, nor would she really understand why Hermione is hurting for her friend. “You should speak to them.”
Hemlock chews it over, before finally shrugging. “Maybe you’re right.” She stands up, dusts herself off, makes her way for the door. “But I did really want that chocolate cake.”
And there she is.
Sarcastic, bombastic Hemlock.
Hermione snorts, shaking her head. “You deserve a smacked arse.”
“Ooooh,” Hemlock whistles as she slips out the room past Hermione. “Kinky. If you wanted me over your knee, ‘Mione, all you had to do was ask-“
And, with that, whatever honesty was lost, depth lost, a peak bellow the calcium shell Hemlock hardened herself in gone. Yet, Hermione glances back, back to the empty room with a crushed tray of sweets now sitting abandoned in the middle.
The room that was saved, that might now, just might, not always be so empty. Maybe a bed will be put in, maybe some posters, Hemlock was quite fond of the Muggle artist Billy Idol, with clothes left strewn across the floor, and homework left deserted on a desk, a crushed box of sweets stashed in a drawer.
Maybe her friend can have, perhaps not what was in the movies, but a real home and a real family life.
Hermione smiles and slides the door shut.
“I might be sorry,” Hemlock starts not so greatly at the edge of the kitchen door, where Geto and Gojo stood cooking together. Dinner in pots and pans for the confused teens now loitering in their living room still trying to wrap their heads around not only Geto and Gojo having a daughter, but a daughter with a third parent and one who had somehow blasted her way into Yuji’s mind as easy as hopping a garden fence. “A little.”
“Might be?” Gojo swivels with a spatula in hand like a weapon. “A little? Ugh-“ a sharp elbow to the ribs shuts him up, Geto pointedly eyeing him as he wipes his hands clean with a dish cloth.
“Okay,” Hemlock sags like the wilting flowers Geto can never keep alive in their shared office. Lily had been the one with the green finger, now all they could keep was plastic grass in a cup. “I am sorry. A large sorry. Very big sorry. The next time I want to go subconscious diving I’ll give you the heads up.”
“The next time?” Anew, Gojo is silenced by an ow, and a wince, and a sore rub to his ribs.
“We only care.” Geto answers, throwing the dishcloth on the side. “Sukuna is not one to mess with, and if anything happened to you in there where I could not get I-… I…” His voice drops low, breaking in the middle. “We only just got you back.”
Hemlock grimaces as if she was hit, as if she was hurt, her gaze refusing to meet anyone else’s even as she waves her hand generally in their direction. “See, I don’t know what to do with… that.” She grimaces again. “No one’s really… people see me and they just assume I won’t die, so they aim me where they want me and… it’s just a given I’ll win.”
Gojo slowly puts the spatula down, frown softening the corners of his eyes to something feathery light and delicately sad. “Not dying is not the same as getting hurt.” He says quietly, as if he knows. He does. “Sometimes the worst hurts aren’t the ones that leave marks.”
“I don’t know what to do with that, either.” Again Hemlock says, again she refuses to meet any eyes.
Suddenly, it clicks for Gojo. The word she’s refusing to say. “You don’ have to do anything for it.”
Her green eyes break to his, locking, the uncertainty she’d been hiding on full show. “So that’s it, then?” She asks innocently, confusedly, frown pulling down tight, lips fitted. “I don’t have to save the world or kill Sukuna or die in one huge sacrifice, you’ll just… give me a room in a house and cook me meals and… and… and love me… just like… that?”
“Oh Hemlock,” Geto catches up, looping cross the room in long, sure strides, snatching the girl by the shoulders and dragging her to him before she can fight it, before she can see the wetness in his eye. “You never have to do a damned thing for our love.”
“I don’t understand,” Hemlock whispers into his chest, a little loose, jumbled and messy. “Back home they only liked me when I killed Tom. They only loved me when I died for them. Even Ron only became my friend when I bought him sweets. Hermione only began speaking to me when I saved her from the troll. Love… you have to give them something before you get it.”
“Not here,” Gojo refutes, making his way over, leaning on his husband, laying a hand upon her head and stroking the curls. “Not with us.”
“You really don’t want anything?” She’s still bewildered, can’t seem to believe that love might not come with a price attached. “Nothing at all?”
“Just you.” Geto says, and it appears to be the right thing, the only thing to say.
Slowly but surely, Hemlock raises her arms and hugs back. It’s awkward, a bit tangled up as Gojo bends to join too, but it’s… it’s… warm in a way Hemlock can’t describe.
A warmth she hasn’t had before.
They stay like that, the three of them, huddled in the kitchen as the sweet potatoes burn in the oven, warm and whole and quiet until- “Am I still grounded?”
Gojo chuckles, stroking morphing to a pat. “Oh, definitely.”
Hemlock’s answer is muffled into Geto’s shirt and snort. “Dammit.”
Yuji lingers in the hall as his friends begin slipping on their shoes by the door sensei holds open for them, toeing his own shoes on so he can walk them back as the other girl, Miss Granger if Yuji remembers correctly, speaks quietly to Geto sensei about visiting tomorrow.
Silently, unwatched, he backtracks into the living room.
He finds the other girl, Hemlock, packing up dishes into a pile in the middle of the kotatsu. “Are you sure we shouldn’t tell sensei about-“
She’s up and at him in a blink, snapping her fingers by his face, hissing. “Shhhh!”
She stays there, uncomfortably close and as still as a statue. This close Yuji can see her eyes are slightly yellow in the green, like buttercups in a field, perhaps how they’re so vibrant, and Yuji’s cheeks burn when his gaze drops to her mouth and-
When she’s satisfied the noise in the hall has stayed the same, she grins at the taller boy, slapping a hand on his shoulder to squeeze, jolting him out of whatever thoughts he was spiralling down. “Listen, all you have to do is keep quiet, and keep enough space in that pretty head of yours,” playfully uses her free hand to flick his forehead to hammer her point home, “and I’ll do the rest. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“I don’t like lying.” Yuji argues as the hand on his shoulder retreats, flopping back to Hemlock’s hip.
“We’re not lying,” Hemlock rolls her eyes, “we’re just… omitting some facts. Completely different. Completely innocent.”
Spotting how unsure the pink haired boy was, Hemlock smiles at him kindly. Well… as kind as she can. “Look, it’ll be over before you know it. Me and Sukuna have this in the bag.”
That’s sort of what has Yuji so worried to begin with. Yet… his reward in the bargain is too tempting to turn down.
Sukuna knows that.
The bastard.
“Alright,” Yuji finally breaks. “Alright, I’ll keep my mouth shut. For now.”
“Good,” Hemlock chirps, skirting around him for the living room door, holding it open and ushering him through. “I’m still grounded, so come over when you have some spare time and we’ll start. Now piss off, pinky.”
Yuji chuckles, ducking under her arm to get through. “Nice meeting you too.”
From over her shoulder Hemlock winks. “Not as nice as it will be for me watching you walk away in those little trousers of yours.”
If he’s cheeks were burning earlier, they’re positively on fire now.
Hemlock merely cackles, slamming the door shut in his face.
“Yuji!” Nobara shouts from down the hall. “You coming or what?”
“Coming!” He yells back, darting past the stairs.
The tell-tale stretch and ache on the back of his palm precedes Sukuna’s gruff taunt. “Don’t fucking ruin this for me, brat.”
Yuji slaps a hand over his other, smothering the forming mouth with, perhaps, more than a smidge of spite. “Shut up.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Sukuna laughs.
Sukuna: *after getting the shit beat out of him by a five-foot-fuck-all gremlin with abandonment issues*
