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The humans present her as his wife.
Sukuna thinks it’s a ridiculous title for a girl who’s going to end up dead anyways. His ‘wives’ never lasted more than a few days-a week if he was feeling generous-, but in the end their cries became annoying. He always ended up breaking their necks to shut them up. Their only usefulness was when Uraume cooked and served them as his meal. The girls were softer than the warriors in the battlefield, and he liked to indulge in the flabby meat from time to time.
The humans that he allows to live near his shrine know this. They know exactly what happens to the daughters they send every month, and yet, they continue to call them his ‘wives’. They dress them in expensive wedding gowns; they put makeup on their frightened faces, and carry them in an expensive palanquin made out of dark wood to their certain dead.
Sukuna never thought much about how the girls were presented at his feet. It’s Uraume the one that insisted on all the fanfare. ‘It gives them a sense of respect towards you, my Lord.’ they had said once, even if the humans were already terrified with the simple mention of his name.
However, the woman that comes out of the palanquin is different from the ones offered in the past.
She wasn’t crying and shaking.
She was calm and serious.
She wasn’t wearing a wedding gown, and Uraume at his side frowns at this.
The woman is wearing a kodose and a red hakama.
A shrine maiden.
The people of the city he so benevolently allowed to live gave him a miko as next wife. Uraume speaks his anger.
“This is unacceptable.”
The humans kneeling on the ground flinch and shake at his wrath, fearing for their lives like the maggots they were. But the woman steps forward with her head looking up at them.
Insolent thing.
“It is not.” She speaks.
Uraume’s taken back by the firmness in her voice but quickly snarls at her.
“How dare you-“
“I’m the shrine maiden that has come to fulfill her duties in this place,” she interrupts again and puts her hands together, bowing her head as greeting. “I’ve come to be the ‘wife’ of Lord Ryomen Sukuna.”
So newly trained miko came to his shrine like some Shinto temple. Like he’s a God and the people of the city have sent him a virgin to perform her Kagura dance to entertain him.
Well, they weren’t wrong.
He is a god to the humans with his monstrous form, four arms and second stomach. To the curses, he is a king. And to the jujutsu sorcerers, he’s the plague incarnated.
Uraume’s ready to protest but Sukuna raises his hand slightly. They immediately bow their heads, stepping backwards, and Sukuna can’t help but to notice just how similar the shrine maiden and the monk look.
They contrast with one another. But in his mind, they match.
He liked that balance.
“I allow you to stay, shrine maiden.”
The villagers behind her visibly relax and Sukuna cuts their head off with a snap of his fingers. The woman’s eyes open slightly when the hem of her hakama is tinted with the blood that forms in a pool behind her. And Sukuna can’t help but to smirk cruelly.
“Let’s see how long you last.”
*...*
Sukuna had never paid much attention to the way his shrine ran. Uraume was in charge of that and he instructed the low grade curses to do it. Which they did, but their work was poorly done, them preferring to feast on the scraps and the bones of his meals. So the sight of the shrine maiden sweeping the leaves in the early morning with a bunch of curses following her example is different. Bizarre.
And the smell.
Incense.
He hadn’t smelled it in so long he had almost forgotten about it. He was used to the smell of blood, iron, charred skin and Uraume’s cooking. The low grade curses that try to ditch the cleaning task are immediately reprimanded by the woman, who pushes them back in line with her own broom. Sukuna now sees her minute curse energy flare up slightly around her like a halo.
“Foolish woman. They’re going to eat her in her sleep.” comments Uraume as they serve the humans from yesterday as his breakfast.
But days pass and Sukuna notices that those low grade curses were now scared of her, flinching in fear when she got angry at a poorly done task. Truth to be told, Sukuna was more preoccupied with war and massacre than the thick layer of dust in his home. And Uraume as his loyal follower wasn’t able to supervise the curses in their long absences. But he wouldn’t deny that coming back to a clean shrine was much better than a bloody battlefield.
A week passes and the shrine maiden lives.
But she’s almost frozen to death when she sticks her nose in Uraume’s kitchen. It’s clear that the monk doesn’t want her there, and it’s clear that the miko doesn’t care for their opinion considering how she threw a cup aimed directly at their head after a heated argument.
Because of that, his food arrives late for the first time in years.
“My deepest apologies Sukuna-sama.” Uraume says as they present the meal, a deep frown in their stoic face. It was unusual to see them like that and Sukuna’s genuinely curious.
“What has the woman done for you to be this upset?”
Uraume seems hesitant to share it with him but one firm gaze is enough to get them talking.
“She asked why Sukuna-sama didn’t eat vegetables with his meals.”
It’s so ridiculous he could have scoffed. He doesn’t because Uraume would get more upset than they already were.
“And what do you think about that?” he inquires instead.
His servant looks confused for a moment, but answers nevertheless.
“I hadn’t really given a thought to that. You always preferred meat, my Lord. So I gave that to you.”
Sukuna takes a sip of his cup of sake “Why didn’t you kill her?”
A simple solution to their problems and the one he always used when something bothered him. Uraume bows slightly.
“Because she’s your wife, and only you can kill what belongs to you.”
“First, the shrine maiden is not my wife. Second, your reasoning is correct. Only I can kill her whenever I see please.”
On a whim, the woman’s head could roll in the ground and be his next meal. He wonders for a moment what would be the taste of a religious virgin woman.
*...*
If he's feeling generous, he would host banquets with the other curses that have enough intelligence to stand by his side as ‘allies’. They’re an annoying bunch that enjoy the same things as him: chaos, murder and blood. They drink the finest sake he owns and kill the slaves his allies bring to his shrine, soiling the floor with their blood as they feast with their intestines.
The woman is nowhere to be seen, and Sukuna completely forgets her existence until the next day when the headache of a hangover looms over his shoulder and she’s kneeling next to him.
“Good morning, my Lord. Oh, but the sun is halfway to sunset, so I should say good afternoon.”
The insolence in her voice is palpable and he would have ripped her head off had it not been for the sluggishness in his body caused by the alcohol.
“That attitude of yours is going to get your tongue cut.” he says.
“That would be a shame my Lord, for I need it to run your shrine in the way you find it pleasant.”
Before he can answer or cut her body in half with the snap of his fingers, the woman hands him a kettle of tea. By the smell, Sukuna recognizes it as the tea Uraume makes for him when he has drunk excessively. But where are they? They should be at his side, not the shrine maiden. Feeling his head throb, Sukuna pours down the content of the kettle in his second stomach, and it’s pretty obvious the woman finds it amusing. Without a word, she hands him another one.
“Where’s Uraume?” he finally asks by the third kettle.
The miko fixes her sight on the floor. “Cleaning your throne room. You slaughtered many people there yesterday.”
“You’re oddly calm about it, shrine maiden.”
The woman keeps quiet and one of Sukuna’s arms slams next to her body, making her flinch.
“You always answer to me when I speak to you, miko.” he growls. It was obvious she didn’t approve of what had occurred the day before. But the woman hides the disgust in her eyes by bowing her head.
“I am no one to judge the actions of the master of the shrine I serve.”
Sukuna barks a cruel laugh. Spoken like a true shrine maiden. He decides to taunt her more.
“What an easy way for you to ignore the suffering of your fellow humans! Tell me, miko, is that what they drilled into your mind in your training? To never question your God?” His second stomach smirks mockingly. “I bet you were going to be sent to a normal shrine, but instead your own people gave you to me!”
The woman keeps silent, frozen in her spot, and Sukuna empties another kettle.
“I was given to you because I’m a cursed woman.”
Her voice comes out stoic, as if those words had been repeated many times before like a mantra. Sukuna smashes the kettle with his hand.
“Never speak to me unless I tell you to.”
She nods and bows her head. Sukuna then notices the green leaves in a tray. Uraume never did that.
“What is this?” he hisses.
“Mint. For your breath.”
The curse stares at the woman at his side who confuses his silence with ignorance.
“You chew them.” she explains, and her lips curve in a small, mocking smile “Would you like some more for your other mouth?”
“Get out of my sight.”
*...*
The presence of the shrine maiden starts to fit in his life and that of his subordinates. It’s strange, but not unpleasant.
Sukuna likes to think she’s like a cat one sees around its house and sometimes you give food to. The cat in this case is an insolent miko that started to pave her usefulness in his temple. Uraume’s the first to notice that. The way she kept a close eye in the cleaning, the organization of the low grade curses, and cleaning of the pantry and their kitchen. And the humans were less afraid of her when they brought their offerings to Sukuna, even providing more ingredients for Uraume’s cooking.
And she knows how to sew. Uraume was good at cooking, but they pricked their fingers a little too much with the needle and ended up staining Sukuna’s kimonos with more blood than they already had. Not that Sukuna complained about that, given that sometimes Uraume would let him lick the blood in the tip of their fingers.
The shrine maiden not only helped them repair the kimonos, she teaches the low grade curses how to wash them. The low grade curses jump on the wet cloth with their feet-or something akin to feet- in the hot water filled with soap, rivers of pink running across the dirt because of the blood that stained most of them, and the shrine maiden sings with a smile as she dries the clothes, making the curse spirits around her follow her orders happily.
A simple use of jujutsu.
Sukuna has seen Uraume chat with her in their kitchen with a cup of tea. Of course the woman would open first to them, as they were the most akin to a human in his temple. So he asks his question to them.
“The villagers and her mother thought she had been cursed.” Uraume tells him one night, carefully pouring sake in his cup. “Her mother sent her to the temple to train and hopefully get it exorcised.”
“Scars?” he inquires as he drinks. He knows Uraume has washed her back more than once and she had as well.
“Some. Beatings, I presume.”
It wouldn’t be the first or last time this happened. A child with the gift of jujutsu that saw curses and asked their mothers with fright, ‘What are those monsters?’. At least the shrine maiden hadn’t been executed like many of those children born outside the jujutsu clans that had the talent, and their fellow humans killed them out of fear.
Sukuna wonders if there’s hate in the shrine maiden’s heart for what she had been put through, which might explain why she wasn’t too perturbed why the killings in his temple and the curses that floated around it. Had her mother understood her, had she known what her daughter had then she would have sent her to the jujutsu sorcerers who would have welcomed her in their ranks.
But with her amount of curse energy, the miko would have been a peon at most, someone that died as soon as the battle started.
However, in what the woman lacked, Sukuna admitted that she compensated for it with character. That fierceness is what made the low grade curses respect her, and what made Uraume give her recognition as a servant in his temple.
And now, it has made Sukuna grant her the honor of his presence.
She’s visibly shaken when he explains that she’s, in fact, not cursed but blessed.
“It’s called jujutsu. You’ve been using it to assert your will on those low grade curses to do your bidding, and you didn’t even notice.”
The last part sounds like he’s annoyed with her ignorance, but he’s not. The woman’s gaze is unfocused as he takes a drag out of his pipe, and after a moment, her voice comes out in a whisper.
“Some days I thought I was cursed like everyone said. And some days I wanted to think it was a gift from the gods.”
Sukuna chuckles sardonically at the ridiculous word.
Gift.
He bows the smoke in her face, making her scrunch up her nose. “What’s your name, miko?”
The woman stares at the city in the distance, her gaze lost in memories.
“My mother called me Uta, my Lord. Because that was my only blessing according to her.”
Uta. Sukuna’s nose wrinkles at the simplicity of the name, one character.
It’s unacceptable.
“I’m giving you a new one.” Sukuna cleans the ashes of his pipe. “From now on, you shall be Utahime.”
His shrine maiden-Utahime-outlines a smile. For the first time she arrived at his shrine she seemed genuinely happy.
“I’ll treasure it, my Lord.” she says, bowing her head.
There’s a moment of peaceful silence between the three of them until she breaks the silence.
“This jujutsu...did it give you your arms and mouth?”
“Yes.”
“Will it do that to me?”
“Yes.”
The woman’s horrified expression rips a chuckle out of his stomach.
“Does it hurt?” she asks in a whisper tinted in fright.
“Very much. You’ll suffer.”
Behind her, Uraume hid a smile with their sleeve, clearly entertained.
“I-“
“But I can dull the pain. Come closer, Utahime.”
She slowly approaches him, and Sukuna extends one of his arms. When her hand is close enough, the tongue of his abdomen licks it. The shrine maiden yelps in surprise, and Sukuna laughs out loud along with Uraume’s polite snort, making her face tint in carmine.
“My Lord, that is disgusting!”
Uraume’s shoulders shake trying to contain their laughter and the miko’s face gets redder than her hakama.
It’s truly amusing.
*...*
His monk and shrine maiden start becoming bolder with their friendship to the point they openly criticize him even when he's smoking behind them.
“The first time I had Sukuna's-sama kimonos tailored to him, the seamstress looked at me as if I was crazy.”
“I can understand that, Uraume-dono. After all, what woman is taller than two meters?”
Sukuna frowns. He’s taller than that.
“Shut up or I’ll slice you to bits, maiden.”
But his threat is completely ignored. How dare they. Other humans would be groveling at his feet, begging for forgiveness.
Uraume frowns slightly with worry. “It saddens me that they immediately get dirt. Have you noticed that Sukuna-sama has the bad habit of not cleaning his mouth after eating?”
Utahime laughs behind her sleeve. “I’ve paid notice to that as well, Uraume-dono. Such a shame that we can’t tell him directly.”
“I’ll crush both of your heads with my hands.”
But that doesn’t stop their chatting. On the contrary, it makes them come closer together, and Sukuna can’t help but to stare at Utahime’s long dark violet hair contrasting with Uraume’s short white one.
They contrast and they match. He would never grow tired of that visage.
“Have you noticed how the food flies out of his mouth and makes a mess?” at Uraume’s nod, she chuckles. “Even a newborn has better table manners.”
Sukuna takes a drag from his pipe and the hand closest to them pulls the blanket they’re sitting on, sending his servants barreling down to the side. They cackle like hysterical housewives and that makes him growl annoyed.
When the rain season comes, his monk and maiden huddle as close as they can next to him to diminish the cold of the strong winds that shake the shrine’s foundations. While the storm rages outside, Utahime entertains them by performing her Kagura dance, the lower curses getting excited at the performance. Sukuna lies that he has seen better and from then on, she only performs to Uraume and the curses until he admits his slip of the tongue.
One day, Sukuna wakes up from a nap realizing that his shrine maiden is sleeping next to him resting on his kimono sleeve. He decides to wait there, even if he’s starving. Minutes later, Utahime woke up very grumpy, telling him she couldn’t sleep because of the growling of his stomach. For that, after she and the lower curses have varnished the wooden floor, Sukuna makes sure to step on them with his feet covered with dirt and blood, Uraume looking at him tiredly. For that, Utahime slips pepper in his meals even when Uraume was standing right here, looking at her with the same expression.
Uraume refuses to join Sukuna in bed, and also refuses to engage in chit-chat with Utahime until both of them stop playing pranks on each other.
When the snow falls, his shrine maiden lands a snowball in Uraume’s face with surprising accuracy, ripping a chuckle out of his stomach. Uraume chases her down while she laughs excitedly, and they end up dropping a snowbank on her, making Sukuna bark a laugh. But then they’ve the audacity to throw snow at him, and he retaliates mercilessly.
There’s a parlor in her garden she attends carefully under the snow and when Sukuna asks her about it, she answers that she’s growing strawberries. He arches an eyebrow at this.
“What do you need them for? Just ask the people of the city for them.”
Utahime shakes her head. “No. These are my own. They’re for daifuku,” she turns around to see him with a smile, her cheeks red from the cold. “When the spring comes, you and Uraume-dono will love it.”
Sweets never appealed to him, but the shrine maiden doesn’t care for his option.
She never had.
*...*
Spring comes and with it, a curse that comes bearing news of the new alliance between the three clans of the jujutsu sorcerers and the one man that leads them.
A man from the Gojo clan.
Sukuna sighs at this, knowing fully well who that man is and whose descendant he was. So it was best to crush his little rebellion before the people started to feel hope.
Uraume stands by his side before they leave the shrine and Utahime hands him his weapons.
“Utahime,” Sukuna calls before departing.” When I return, I wish to taste your daifuku.”
The woman smiles and bows her head.
“I understand, my Lord. I’ll make a hundred to welcome you back.”
She wishes them a safe trip.
The killing of the sorcerers had been too easy. Too quick. And the man who leads them wasn’t in the camp. Sukuna couldn’t even call it an honorable battle, so he walks back to his shrine with Uraume in a foul mood with his hands drenched in blood.
At the distance, the smoke that comes out of the city now burnt to the ground makes him realize that it was a trap. But unlike the city, his temple looks untouched and both him and his servant rush to it. On the stairs, there were residuals. A single set of feet walking up to his temple. There were traces of a fight. The spear Utahime used to practice her forms in her spare time with Uraume was destroyed in splinters on the floor, and there’s a trail of blood that leads inside his shrine.
It smells sweet.
It’s Utahime’s blood.
Before he can open the doors, Uraume blocks his path.
“Sukuna-sama, don’t look.”
There’s horror and rage in Uraume’s eyes, and their voice comes out in a bitten out whisper.
“Move aside.” He orders. Sukuna already knows what awaits him on the other side. Uraume hesitates for a moment and complies.
Even when they had ripped half of her face, Sukuna recognized her. Utahime lies on the floor surrounded by the corpses of the low grade curses she had befriended in the time she spent in his shrine. When he kneels by her side, he can see that the slashes in her stomach are actually words.
‘Curse worshiper’ is carved out in the belly of his shrine maiden.
Uraume has rage in their face.
“He tortured her before putting her out of her misery.”
The splinters under her bloody nails were proof of it. When Sukuna carries her body, Utahime’s neck hangs limp backwards. For a moment, Sukuna’s sure she’s going to wake up, annoyed at him by the way he’s carrying her like when she fell asleep on his kimono next to him and Uraume and he was taking her to the futon.
But the dead don’t feel.
His shrine maiden wouldn’t complain anymore. His shrine maiden would never greet them after war with a smile at the entrance of their home. The shrine maiden wouldn’t make fun of him with Uraume by her side.
Utahime was gone from this world. She was slaughtered and left like that for him to find by the jujutsu sorcerers.
By the man with white hair and azure eyes.
Sukuna traces the wound on her face, blood coating his fingers.
“They call that Six Eyes a savior, when he’s just a monster.” Sukuna stands up, and Utahime’s body hangs limp and bloody in his arms. “Uraume, we’re building a grave. Then we’re killing all the jujutsu sorcerers in this land.”
Before they depart, Sukuna notices a plate with daifuku near his throne. Only two remained. Someone had eaten the others with their fingers covered in blood that dripped on the plate.
They had been eaten with Utahime’s blood.
Sukuna eats one slowly and breathes out. “Uraume, is daifuku supposed to taste bittersweet?”
The monk bows their head so Sukuna couldn’t look, but he heard the pain in their voice.
“I wouldn’t know, Sukuna-sama.”
*...*
“You’ve got to cut that out, dude.”
The brat Itadori sighs tired after slapping his mouth for the umpteenth time today. “I think I’ve learnt more ways to curse people from your nasty mouth than movies.”
Sukuna growls inside his mind, making him sigh again.
“Look, I know you don’t like Gojo-sensei but do you’ve to be that rude every time we see him?”
“You know nothing, brat.” Sukuna answers curtly.
Itadori frowns. “Of course I won’t if you never explain it to me!”
“You wouldn’t understand. You have maggots for brains.”
The brat makes an indignant noise with his throat, raising his hand in frustration.
“Sukuna again?”
Gojo Satoru approaches his vessel with a mocking smile with a trolley and a box on top of it. The brat sighs and nods.
“Yeah, he’s just being really annoying.”
“He keeps threatening me?”
“Yeah.”
“What an honor!” Gojo Satoru smiled and clapped his hands. “Now get inside the box, Yuuji!”
The brat mumbles under his breath that he doesn’t see any honor in that before stuffing himself inside the box. The man’s joyful voice comes from outside “Ok, let’s go meet everyone!”
“You seem awfully excited Gojo-sensei!” screams Itadori from inside.
“Yeah, because my favorite person in the world is coming to see me!”
“Who?”
“You’ll see! You’re gonna love her!”
All that screaming makes Sukuna’s head throb, especially every word that came from that man’s mouth.
Sukuna knows. He knows that Gojo Satoru wasn’t the same person as the one from a thousand years ago. A descendant, perhaps. And yet, he can’t stop his blood from boiling every time he sees him.
The same taunting voice.
The same smirk.
The same eyes.
The brat feels his internal rage, but confuses it with the anger of losing in their first encounter at that school rooftop. Had the brat not suppressed him, he would have killed Gojo Satoru. Sukuna sighs and rests his head in his palm.
No matter.
Once the brat had consumed all his fingers, he would extract the vengeance he had sworn to the grave of his shrine maiden. He would do the very same things the Six Eyes had done to his miko to his own descendant. He just needed to be patient.
But after all those years alive, Sukuna knew fate wasn’t kind to him. Fate liked to play cruel games with him.
When Gojo Satoru pronounces her name, Sukuna wants to believe he heard wrong because he was the one who gave that name to his shrine maiden, and no one else should have it.
“Utahime!” the annoying voice the man sing-songed next his vessel, and it’s followed by a click of a tongue.
A familiar one.
He had heard it so many times when he ate voraciously and his clothes ended up covered in blood.
‘Uraume-dono and I have enough work to do, my Lord,’ his shrine maiden clicked her tongue. ‘Honestly, you’re such a child.’ And Sukuna would smear his bloody fingers on purpose in her hakama just to make her angry. ‘My Lord!’ she would scream indignant and he would laugh at her anger.
Sukuna opens the eye in Itadori’s marking.
A familiar name.
A familiar voice.
A familiar face.
Standing before his vessel was his shrine maiden with the same wound that had been left there a thousand years ago by the same man that was trying to grab her hand with a cocky smirk. The woman-his shrine maiden, his Utahime-makes a disgusting face and tries to move away from him, but the man cornered her with a smile.
And the piercing words of Gojo Satoru’s ancestor echo in his ears.
‘Her last words were your name and that of your servant.’ the sorcerer smirked mockingly at him in the middle of the battlefield. ‘What a good miko you had, Sukuna. I enjoyed ripping the skin of her lovely face.’
Utahime didn’t want to be touched by that man. And yet, Gojo Satoru’s hand finds its way to pull the ribbon on her hair.
Sukuna flew into a rage.
“DON’T TOUCH HER!”
Everyone around his vessel flinched, startled at the shriek that came out of his cheek. The brat slaps himself with enough force to bruise but Sukuna’s mouth is already in the back of his hand.
“Utahime!” Sukuna yells. “Step away from the Six Eyes in this instant! I order you!”
The woman-his shrine maiden, his Utahime-looks confused and alarmed, and the Six Eyes stands before her, shielding her from his sight.
“Utahime!” He calls and tries to regain control of the brat’s body. “What are you doing standing next to the man that killed you in cold blood?!”
There’s shock and confusion in her eyes when she hears those words and for the first time he meets him, Gojo Satoru becomes serious in his presence.
“Brat!” Sukuna yells, seeing that he won’t relinquish control. “Remove the Six Eyes from my shrine maiden immediately!”
A heavy silence falls around Itadori.
“Ammm....no?”
The King of Curses shrieks furiously. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘NO’?!”
His vessel fidgets nervously in his place. Not only was everyone’s eyes fixed on him, Yuuji was sure that at any moment half of them would jump in to murder him if he just stepped a little closer to the teacher. One of the students from the other school had a freaking gun pointing at him.
“Yuuji.”
Gojo Satoru had removed his blindfold, and Sukuna stared into the same eyes from a thousand years ago.
The same eyes.
The same voice.
The same face.
A reincarnation.
Sukuna almost wants to laugh at the irony of the situation. Fate was giving him the opportunity to have the revenge he couldn’t fulfill a thousand years ago. But fate was also being cruel by making Utahime stand next to Gojo Satoru as an ally, even when in the past he had tortured her because she refused to betray him.
‘What a loyal miko you had, Sukuna.’ the words for the Six Eyes echo again in his ears. ‘Her daifuku was really sweet.’
“What business does Sukuna have with Utahime?” is what comes out of his reincarnation’s mouth as he raises his fingers.
Sukuna’s mouth forms a cruel smirk in the brat’s cheek. If fate wanted this, giving him again his shrine maiden only for her to stand by the side of her murderer, then so be it. He would play by its rules but in his own way.
Past lives were repeated like a curse. And the scar in his maiden’s face was evidence of it. Sukuna already knows who caused it.
He lets out a cruel laugh.
“Tell me, Six Eyes. Did you enjoy giving her that scar?”