Chapter Text
Ryei wakes up back in the blood pool.
Which is—
A bummer, honestly. Apparently years of repression do not magically resolve themselves in a shower of sparkles just because you acknowledged your issues once. Who knew.
The blood pool is… softer this time.
Warmer, too.
Wait.
The blood pool?
He definitely did not fall asleep here.
The back of his neck prickles.
Not-Ryou is watching him. There’s a strange look on his face.... almost hungry—
Ryei immediately looks away.
Nope.
Not unpacking that.
Instead he fixates on the fact the hallucination is perched atop a massive hill of bones like the world’s most melodramatic gargoyle.
Which... tracks, Ryou had always been a theatre kid at heart—
Focus. Blood pool. Focus.
“You put me in here?” His mouth feels numb in the way it always does after oversleeping.
“You drool like a rabid dog.”
“Hey.”
Indignation immediately burns through the cotton-heavy fog in his skull and Ryei pushes himself upright, surprisingly dry.
Not-Ryou looks—
Oh, that is smug.
The bastard.
Ryei narrows his eyes, which is a mistake because the world blurs violently.
His balance vanishes out from under him and he topples directly back into the pool with an undignified splash.
Oh.
Oh that little shit distracted him on purpose.
Classic Ryou move.
Two can play this game.
Ryei puts on his best obnoxiously condescending sibling voice.
“Aww,” he exclaims theatrically, clutching metaphorical pearls. “you were worried I’d be uncomfortable.”
Not-Ryou’s eye twitches.
Wait. Wait a minute. He did! His angry part is warming up to him!
This is progress. Dr. Mariam would be so proud of him.
Ryei can practically feel the irritation radiating off him— hallucination, dream fragment, subconscious projection, whatever.
And it’s delightful.
Good to know baiting people has survived both psychiatric medication and severe emotional collapse.
Not-Ryou flicks his wrist again.
The world splits cleanly in half.
For one nauseating instant, reality becomes fundamentally wrong.
Then it snaps back into place.
Ryei blinks.
Huh, he thinks. Another flash hallucination probably.
Ryei discovers very quickly that the shrine is genuinely structured like an intercostal space.
Ribs.
Sternum.
Membrane flooring.
Air thick with blood and copper.
It is objectively metal as hell. He spends ages wandering through it.
At some point, though, the silence starts getting uncomfortable.
Even back home there was usually noise— Mimi and Nano causing chaos somewhere in the background, or Sato reminding everyone of his existence by slamming cabinets and speaking at volumes medically concerning to mankind.
Ryei doesn’t like silence very much.
Silence usually means being left alone with his own thoughts.
And Ryei has already medically established that his own head is kind of a terrible neighborhood.
Because silence means thinking.
And thinking eventually drifts toward the original owner of the face Not-Ryou is currently wearing.
Who is now sitting atop the bone hill with his back turned, pointedly ignoring both Ryei and every question he asks.
Which—
Fair.
It’s not like Ryei spent years shoving every inconvenient emotion he had into a cardboard box and sitting on it.
Besides, yesterday’s impromptu therapy breakthrough thoroughly exhausted his emotional processing quota for the week.
So Ryei does what Ryei does best.
He starts talking.
“Is this inside our body?”
No answer.
“But you’ve gotta admit this place is cool though.”
He grins despite himself.
The shrine genuinely does feel like an anatomy museum designed by someone clinically insane.
Ryou would have loved this place.
Or pretended not to while secretly imploding inside.
He’d probably be trying to identify every bone by now—
Ryei bends to pick one up near a rib arch.
“Hey,” he asks absently, turning it over in his hands, “are these real?”
Silence.
“Well. Obviously.” He answers himself.
The bone— something.. no someone's humerus, probably — feels solid beneath his fingers. Dense. Real.
Its surface scrapes faintly beneath his nail. Dream mechanics, right.
“Alright, that one’s on me,” Ryei mutters. “Stupid question.”
He carefully sets it back down.
He isn’t sure how long he spends exploring.
Everything is structurally repetitive and yet his excitement never fully fades.
Unfortunately, neither does Not-Ryou’s silent treatment.
No favorite color.
No favorite food.
No responses at all beyond the persistent sensation of being watched whenever his back is turned.
Deep down, Ryei knows he probably shouldn’t anthropomorphize a hallucination this much.
Unfortunately, his brain appears to have made that decision without consulting him.
Besides, it’s just a dream.
He probably won’t even remember it properly when he wakes up.
Which is honestly kind of a shame because this place is interesting and— God he’ssolonely.
Has been for a while now.
Ever since Ry— moving out of Guru and Sato’s place the apartment’s felt too quiet and—
Focus, Ryei.
You’re ruminating again.
He traces a hand along the underside of a rib arch.
“—this place sure is persistent. The bone feels really real—”
He taps it experimentally. He muses out aloud. “I wonder if it tastes real too—”
He already knows what bone tastes like from unsupervised time around his brother’s collection. He also knows each species' bone tastes different.
So naturally, he leans forward.
A hand immediately snatches him backward by the collar before he can conclude that the bone, in fact, tastes like bone.
(Somewhere outside, Yuuji Itadori sneezes.)
Ryei startles hard enough to nearly bite his tongue.
He’s being held suspended by the back of his robe like an aggressively misbehaving cat—Wait he's wearing a robe? His brain has been so fogged he didn't realize, it is pretty comf—
Ryei focus.
“What,” Not-Ryou asks with terrifying calm, “are you doing?”
Every instinct Ryei possesses screams at him to shut up before this thing tears him apart.
Unfortunately, indignation arrives first.
Ryei crosses his arms.
“What does it look like?”
Another eye twitch.
The claws— claws!? — tighten slightly against the fabric at the back of his neck.
Then suddenly—
Ryei’s feet leave the floor entirely.
Not-Ryou lifts him one-handed like he weighs absolutely nothing.
Ryei blinks.
He is, apparently, being carried.
Why is his anger taller than him? Is there symbolism here?
“You are a pathetic and disgusting creature.”
Ryei’s face lights up at the realization. Several days late.
“Oh my god, you talked.”
“There was silence before you arrived. I now understand its value.”
“Still talked.”
A muscle jumps in Not-Ryou’s jaw.
Ryei grins wider.
He is still not being put down.
Which is becoming concerning.
Unfortunately, the gentle swaying convinces some traitorous part of Ryei’s exhausted brain that this is naptime.
His eyelids start drooping.
And—
Not-Ryou abruptly drops him onto the fleshy floor.
Ryei hits the ground with a deeply offended noise.
“Stay here,” Not-Ryou says coldly, “and remain quiet or I will kill you.”
Ryei rubs sleep from his eyes. But Not-Ryou’s already gone.
He’s been deposited at the foot of the bone hill. —Bone throne?
He pokes a nearby horn experimentally.
Ow.
Very pointy.
Ryei squints upward.
Wait a damn minute.
Is he in time out? Did his angry part just put him in time out?
Not-Ryou is already seated back atop the hill doing… whatever the hell he does up there.
“Is that even comfortable?”
A long suffering sigh echoes downward.
“Did I not tell you to remain silent?”
Ryei beams.
They’re talking!
This is progress.
He immediately ignores the order and starts climbing instead.
Because honestly?
This is the most interesting thing that’s happened to him in months and his previously presumed-dead dopamine receptors have latched onto it with religious fervor.
The bones are strangely sturdy beneath his palms despite constantly digging into his skin.
Halfway up, his muscles start burning.
How the hell does Not-Ryou sit up here all the time?
Never mind.
Dream physics.
By the time Ryei finally drags himself onto the flattened top, he’s wheezing.
Between the two of them, Ryou had always been the athletic one. Ryei mostly specialized in moral support from the sidelines.
“How,” he gasps, “do you do this—”
“Weak,” Not-Ryou says automatically. Somehow it doesn’t feel like an insult.
Ryei immediately collapses onto his back beside him, breathing hard. The spot is weirdly comfortable.
The air feels denser up here somehow.
Well, if he's going to be staying here for a while, he might as well make himself comfortable.
He turns his head toward the apparition.
“So, do you come here often?”
(Somewhere outside, Yuuji Itadori develops a headache.)
Ever since the creature appeared in his domain and claimed to be part of him, Sukuna has known no peace.
The creature did not die, did not react properly to pain, and— most importantly— did not stop talking.
Of course, Sukuna could rip its jaw out again, and again, and again. But even that was bound to lose its novelty eventually. Additionally, there was no telling whether damaging the fragment would damage his own soul in turn.
That was the only reason.
The matter of souls was… fascinating. Sukuna had spent years pillaging settlements and civilizations in pursuit of jujutsu knowledge. None of the scrolls or scholars spoke of this. Not even the delirious scribblings of mad monks hidden deep within temple vaults.
The coexistence of two souls in imbalance.
He had always known he “ate” his twin in the womb. As their wretched mother had liked to remind him.
Sukuna had believed he absorbed the twin wholly— essence, cursed energy, all of it— creating the aberration he became.
But he had been wrong.
The fragment had survived.
Fragment, because the thing was obviously malformed. Sick. Unstable. The innate domain itself had preserved its existence somehow. It had lingered here for days now.
And it would not stop talking.
“Not-Ryou,”— how dare it— “do you ever sleep?”
“Not-Ryou, does this place have snacks?”
“Not-Ryou, this place is awesome. Did you build it?”
(It was their soul space, idiot.)
“Not-Ryou, your tattoos are sick.”
(How dare he! The creature was the one who was sick and unstable.
But the creature had seemed .. appreciative. Strange thing.)
“You know purple’s a really good color on you, right?”
(Why did it care about colors?)
The creature spoke as though silence physically pained it.
And when it was not rambling, it was sleeping. Curled into crevices of bone and flesh where the domain might have consumed it entirely if Sukuna had left it there.
(The creature had nuzzled into him in its sleep once.
Trusting.
Mumbling “Ryou” against Sukuna’s throat like the nickname belonged there.
The fragment had only existed separately for days. And yet it spoke as though it had known him its entire life— their mother, their curse, their hunger.
Not only that.
The creature had apologized.
For not finding him sooner.
As though Sukuna had not devoured him before either of them had even drawn breath.
And then— worse— it had thanked him.
Thanked him for surviving.
Sukuna would have ripped its throat apart for pity alone.
But there had been no pity in those clouded, wet eyes.
Only grief.
And something worse.
How dare this malformed, half-rotted scrap of a thing—
(Why would it say those things?)
The creature slept curled in the blood pool within Sukuna’s direct line of sight.
For observation, obviously.
It was only a matter of time before the fragment dissolved fully and reintegrated into him, as it should. The blood merely stabilized the process.
That was all.
(Colors. Why would it care about colors?
The food question had been worse.
Fatty human meat roasted over spit. Bone marrow split fresh. Venison charred black at the edges. Moose slow-cooked with mountain herbs and wild onion—
Why was he even entertaining this?)
He had not thought about preferences in centuries.
Before that—
No.
Sukuna’s attention snapped back toward the creature currently attempting to “shape his cuticles” using someone’s sharpened finger bone.
“You don’t tell me your favorite color, but your nails and your robe embroidery match,” the creature rambled, focused entirely on Sukuna’s hand. “Which is pretty, by the way. Goes with your whole… vibe—"— this hare-brained creature and its annoying made-up words—"—But what I’m saying is there’s clearly a theme happening here.”
Its hands were rough with old calluses.
Careful anyway.
Sukuna stared down at the top of its bowed head.
The creature kept talking.
And despite everything, Sukuna did not stop it.