Chapter Text
He was lying flat on the deck, glaring up at the distant bone-ceiling grievously, when the tug happened.
The tug, however, wasn't in his body. That was the strange part. There was no pull at his gut, no ache in a muscle, nothing his very thorough knowledge of his own anatomy had a slot for. It sat somewhere further in, or further out, he couldn't decide which, a thin insistent thread hooked into whatever it was that made him him, tugging gently but with absolute certainty toward the far wall of the cavern——toward a stretch of rib-lattice he was fairly sure he'd already dismissed as boring bone.
He sat up slowly. Then, he tilted his head. The pendants around his neck and chest shifted and clicked against each other. Click, clack.
The tug came again like a line testing to see if he'd bite.
Sukuna hadn't felt anything worth following in forever. So he didn't think about it or question it, and didn't even bother grabbing the harpoon off the wall. He swung himself over the rail and slid into the red water, and let whatever had hold of him start reeling him in.
He came to short.
Not short as in woozy or dizzy, but actually, physically, short, a foot or two gone missing from where his head usually sat in the world, and for one wild second he assumed something had cut his legs off before he registered that no, everything on his body was simply smaller, compacted, wrong.
He looked down at himself and found hands. Ordinary hands. Fleshy, stubby-fingered, unclawed, unpadded human hands, the kind normal humans used to hold spoons and doorknobs, and he stared at them with the particular horror of a man discovering his own fingers had been replaced overnight.
"What," he said, only to notice even his voice had changed, gone higher and thinner, unfamiliar in his own throat.
His eyesight traces from his hands upwards, following the sleeves of a bright yellow hoodie. The texture is soft, entirely unsuited for a live on the ocean. It’s very comfortable, though. He might keep it once this ordeal is over.
Sukuna twisted around to check on the rest of the damage—specifically, urgently, his tail—and found only more of a regular human back, without any extra weight swinging behind him. His tail was gone!
He spun again, faster, certain he'd simply missed it, but only succeeded in stumbling in a tight, undignified circle on a rooftop that most certainly was not his boat. His feet, covered in fancy laced-up shoes made soft pat pat noises against the grey concrete floor, the roof of an unfamiliar building made with unfamiliar architectural style.
A growling noise cut his spinning short.
He looked up.
There was an extremely ugly being now around fifty feet away. He couldn’t call it an animal, since was hulking and wrong, like how a hadal zone creature looked once brought onto land. It was large, exceptionally so, a dozen meters tall and equally as wide. Ugly lime hair and an extra set of arms covered its body.
Teeth big enough to be individually used as shields filled it’s oversized mouth, glinting in the moonlight. It had a similar amount of eyes to him, equally red but with far less intelligence.
It was stupid, but worse than that.
It was weak.
He could tell that much before it even moved, the same way he could tell a fish's weight from three feet underwater. Barely worth the swim.
But there seemed to be some vestiges of strange emotions in his chest, ones that compelled him to destroy. Fear, anger, protectiveness. They wanted Sukuna to annihilate the monster in front of him. Well, he did love destruction and whimsy, so he obeyed. Sukuna sprinted forwards, slower in this strange vessel’s body, and closed the distance in a handful of looping strides. Wind rustled his hair, and he felt his canines grow a little bit longer.
The monster screams, well, warbles, in anger or frustration, and opens its mouth wide. The inside of its mouth is even more disgusting than the creature’s exterior, the fat fleshy tongue covered in dozens of sightless eyes. It was even more reason to destroy this beast, for the crime of hurting his eyes.
What Sukuna had believed was a surplus of unfamiliar energy in his cavern’s water was a mere droplet compared to that floating in the sky right now. He channeled it into his limbs, the feeling familiar, with perfect control and mastery. It flowed through his veins, igniting his cells and blood, boosting his power tenfold.
Sukuna leaps up into the air with a burst of energy, the floor left in an impact crater around his feet. He kicks into the monster’s face hard, and watches as it crumples in on itself. It isn’t dead yet, so he tests out the strange anticipation that lies heavy on his tongue and hands.
It’s just like the feeling of a sleepy limb, unused, but begging for action. An instinctual knowledge for how to move, how to utilize fills his arms.
“Dismantle”
His voice is sonorous, it fills the air.
The monster falls into pieces, diced like a massive butchers cleaver had hacked it down. Sukuna curiously peers at its insides. He couldn’t smell any blood or organs from afar, and he couldn’t see any up close either. It smelled like rotting meat, decay, or garbage left out in the heat. The biting odor stung his nose somewhat as well.
Underneath the strange skin of the beast, there was simply a strange purple goo. It slowly started to seep out from its confines, pooling on the rooftop, while the edges of the beast started to disintegrate.
Sukuna knew instinctively that if he’d put in more power into his attack, he probably could have dissipated it in a single shot. But, that wouldn’t have given him this opportunity.
Granted, this opportunity was just his intrusive thoughts winning over rationality.
He picked up a piece of the monster.
Then, he bit into it.
The taste hit and immediately disappointed him; it was thin, sour, faintly rotten, like meat that had been left out for months if not years. It was similar enough to the disgusting flayed mackerel from before, but without the pleasant texture variety and crunch of bone or cartilage.
He groaned in frustration. He'd forgotten that lesson lived in more than one kind of body.
Weak things tasted weak.
He spat, wiped his mouth on the back of one stubby human wrist, and looked back at the curse, which was now shrieking in pain. Wow, it was still alive. He plopped the morsel of flesh he’d taken a bite out of onto the floor, and kicked it back into the pile with its disgusting brethren.
Sukuna flexed the stubby hand, unimpressed at the vessels mediocrity. “Huh."
Surely he wouldn’t be trapped in this thing forever? Then again, rising and regaining his power to go from weak to strong would be a fun pastime. He’d read some interesting light novels with that premise as well, though most were pirated. It wasn’t as though he could return to fishing. He couldn’t feel Mother Ocean’s grace in this world, no matter how far he reached his consciousness to search.
He could always just pretend to be the human he was currently residing in, and take over their life. He did hope the body wasn’t female. If he had to deal with periods like the ladies in town, he’d have to rip out the uterus itself, which might spark unnecessary questions. Though, the chest of the vessel was flat, which was a good sign.
Up above, the clouds slowly cleared away from the full moon, casting light upon the residents of this pathetic world. It was not Sukuna’s Mother Moon, a different moon for a different world.
He basks in it, so touch-starved from his brief stint in isolation that he was willing to receive affection from any Shen whatsoever, as long as they held him so. “This… is how moonlight is to be enjoyed.”
The soft light made long shadows on the rooftop, silhouettes of weathervanes crisscrossing the surface like old scars..
Sukuna allows the moonlit breeze to ruffle his hair, the faint apologetic note in the moon’s energy betraying its otherwise well kept knowledge of the fact he was not from here. It seemed that the celestial beings recognized his travels from afar.
He sighs. “The flesh of the beast was weak and disgusting.
Yet the oceans here stay barren and dull
What should I do, in a world so bleak?”
Sukuna tilts his head. “There may be stronger beasts or warriors. I suppose I should settle for that.”
He walks over to the edge of the rooftop, looking over the bustling town below. His silhouette remains dark against the backdrop of gold lights. The stone beneath him is cold. He leaves his hands in his pockets.
“This era, no, this world looks very kind. Humans crawl everywhere without enough fear.” He mutters.
He spreads his arms out wide, to bask in the moonlight, when suddenly his right arm yanks back and grabs onto his face. It’s disorientating, having a limb out of your control.
The force of the sudden movement sends him swinging back a few steps to regain his balance. Sukuna blinks, surprised.
What are you doing with someone else’s body?! Give it back! A voice inside screams.
Eh?
So the original owner of the body wasn’t dead. How strange. Interesting, though.
“Why are you moving?” Sukuna asks the vessel. As far as he knew, vessels were only inhabitable if the original occupants were gone. Two souls in a single body was too much, the fleshy container would crack apart painfully. Two minds was the maximum that a body could handle, comprised of a soul split in half.
This is my body! The person is indignant.
It has the voice of a child.
A little child… suppressing him?!
He’s suppressing… Sukuna?
“Don’t move!” A voice snaps Sukuna out of his musings.
He turned. A boy stood a short distance off on the rooftop, dark-haired tat looked like a sea urchin, sharp-eyed like an angry cat, dressed like he'd wandered out of a school he had no intention of going back to. Whatever mild, cataloguing calm had been on that boy's face when Sukuna first spotted him drained out of it in an instant, replaced after he’d seen the newly emerged markings on his vessel’s face.
What a cute child, he thinks. The kid’s far too skinny, however.
Megumi had gone still.
Not the still meaning calm, though; He froze like prey, the stillness of a creature who realized their surroundings contained a predator several orders of magnitude beyond what it had braced for.
His eyes weren't on Sukuna's face anymore; they'd dropped, helpless, to the markings blooming dark and deliberate across borrowed skin, tiger-stripe patterns sprawling all over the human boy's arms, and further up, to a mouth that hadn't been that wide a second ago, corners stretching toward ears in a grin that belonged to something that had never once needed to smile to be believed.
“You’re not human anymore!” Megumi's voice cracked on his words. Megumi finished his sentence anyway, because some things had to be said out loud to be believed, and immediately hated himself for how thin his voice came out. He took a step back before he could stop his own feet from doing it.
He knew who had incarnated into Yuuji’s body. A beast of a man, or a man of a beast. A hunger sitting behind red eyes that had nothing to do with the boy those two eyes were supposed to belong to. Well, four eyes now.
“Eh?” Sukuna asks.
He can feel a matching bafflement come from the baby inside of him, which triggers his non-existent maternal instincts.
Hello, little child, Sukuna cooed inward, the way he'd greet a cute little something small and outmatched that had wandered too close to his hook. He is met with snarling and slight confusion. The presence in his chest shrieked back, wordless and furious, entirely too loud for how little space it actually took up, throwing itself against the inside of Sukuna's borrowed skull like it thought sheer volume might work where force hadn't. Sukuna waited it out, patient like a larger animal with a much smaller one making a great deal of noise about a fight it had already lost.
Hush, child. I won’t hurt your body. It wouldn’t make sense to capsize my own boat!
The child, now much more apparent of its age once calmed, eases slightly. It’s anger—fear—making way for curiosity instead.
Sukuna liked the child immediately, in the same uncomplicated way he liked a fish that fought back. They proved fine entertainment.
Megumi continued, unheeding of the internal conversation residing within the tiger-shark’s head.
“According to the laws of Jujutsu society, Itadori Yuuji,” He presses, crouching down and bracing with his hands out to summon a shikigami.
“As a curse, I will now have to exorcize you!”
He didn't know he was staring at something else's king entirely, wearing the same crown by pure rotten coincidence. All he had was a thousand years of inherited dread and a body on a rooftop that fit the myth close enough to collapse every ounce of his composure at once.
Both of the beings in Itadori Yuuji’s body blink in astonishment. Am I a curse? The child, no, Yuuji, asks. Sukuna furrows his brows. “I think he might be talking about me?”
He says.
Let me switch over for a second to talk! Yuuji demands.
Fine, Sukuna said at last, and meant it, mostly because there was nothing here worth the trouble of staying for. Your body, your rules. I'll go back to being bored somewhere else.
He let go.
This time, he didn’t return to his cavern yet. He was still within Yuuji, watching from behind Yuuji’s eyes. If he truly tried, he’d probably be able to wrestle back some control.
Yuuji’s mouth moves.
“Wait, there’s nothing wrong with me!” He blusters.
The tiger stripe markings on his body fade away, the dark crimson bleeding into skin toned flesh.
“More importantly, both of us are pretty beat up! Let’s go to the hospital instead, okay?” He asks, innocently.
Megumi panics instead. I can’t tell if it’s the curse speaking, or Yuuji right now.
This was bad.
Damn, what should he do?
"Under the regulations of Jujutsu society," he repeats, each word clipped and formal, like he was reading off a card he'd memorized a long time ago but hoped to never use, "anyone who comes into contact with a Special Grade cursed object is to be found and executed. As of this moment, you're marked for exorcism. You do not have a choice in the matter.”
Oooh, little pupy’s got claws! Sukuna crows.
Yuuji hisses at him to shut up.
Sukuna shrugs, and allows himself to disconnect from Yuuji’s body, similar to a boat undocking from a pier.
The rooftop, Megumi, little ashes of the monster he’d tasted, all of it thinned and receded like a wave drawing back off sand. Now, he was somewhere red and familiar again, with his deck creaking underfoot and his tail settling back into place behind him like it had never left.
Goddamn he’d missed his tail. It helped so much with his balance, it was like losing a leg or a chunk of his thigh.
He crossed his darling’s cabin in three long strides and dropped into the seat behind the wheel, finding that the big blue-glassed window in front of him wasn't clear anymore. It no longer showed the sights of red water or bone pillars. It now had a wide angled view of Yuuji.
Currently, it was showing a rooftop with a boy standing on it, wide-eyed and breathing hard, staring at his own hands like he expected them to still be someone else’s. Poor kid.
It was really funny, because the window’s perspective of the scene kept shifting focus. One second, it would watch Yuuji’s face close up, the next panning over to show the whole rooftop. It was as though there was a shot list or screening that the boat was following.
It truly did make the viewing experience more enjoyable, though.
Sukuna grinned, leaned back in his comfortable customized chair, and reached for the little brass microphone bolted beside the wheel. That one only ever picked up a single channel for music, one he hardly used. It was designed to broadcast his words into the speaker at the back of the boat, but now broadcasted Sukuna’s voice to that of the kid.
"So," he said, voice crackling faintly out into the world on the other side of the glass, warm with delight. To a man who had just found something new after weeks of nothing, anything was interesting. ”you're Yuuji. Nice to meet you. I'm the evil voice in your head.”
On the rooftop, only Yuuji flinched at the sound of his words. Megumi’s face didn't so much as twitch, which told Sukuna plenty about who exactly could hear him.
Megumi, for his part, hadn't so much as blinked through the handoff, already squaring his stance, still unsure who was in control.
"H-hang on, wait, can we—can we talk about this—“
Sukuna giggled in his seat, watching the scene unfold. It wasn’t the best form of entertainment, but he now understood why so many aunties loved soap operas.
"So dramatic," Sukuna murmured through the microphone, delighted, to an audience of one. Yuuji swore within his mind, his chibi face contrasting with his harsh words.
Please stop making this worse! He begs.