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I'm so surprised you want to dance with me now
I was just getting used to living life without you around
I'm so surprised you want to dance with me now
You always said I held you way too high off the ground -The National
Yuuji pushed his window open, jumping through the frame when he saw Sukuna pass by from below. It didn’t matter that his dorm was on the second floor, Yuuji was conditioned to leaping before he thought. His body acted on its own. And he had jumped far worse before. Yuuji hadn’t seen Sukuna in a month, not after their last mission together. The time between then and now had stretched on far too long, but Sukuna had been elusive. It was raining hard, the ground had already softened into mud. Yuuji didn’t care that his clothes were quickly weighed down with water. He kept his angry stare on the man in front of him, glaring at his back.
He was technically still supposed to be healing. Yuuji had almost died while they were fighting a grade 1 curse together. It had an unpredictable fighting style that nearly cost Yuuji his life. The memory left a bitter taste in his mouth. It had been raining then too. All Yuuji could remember was Sukuna’s usually stoic face warped with worry. Sukuna had carried and talked to him the entire way back, but Yuuji couldn’t remember what he said. Though he dreamt he did.
“They said you weren’t staying,” he said with a strong accusatory tone. People had been talking about it enough. Yuuji’s skin crawled each time he heard the pitying conversations about it when they thought he wasn’t listening. Yuuji was Sukuna’s partner, wasn’t he supposed to hear it from Sukuna himself? Sukuna turned to him, the rain seemed to favor his form over Yuuji’s. Sukuna didn’t seem quite as drenched even though he’d been in it longer. The line of his shoulders seemed rigid and controlled like he was treading carefully. Yuuji's stomach dropped. He knew then it was true.
“I don’t understand, Sukuna, you’re being stupid. It wasn’t your fault.” Yuuji’s hair dripped droplets to his nose, his pink strands dark from the rain. It was cold, his body shivered, but for more reasons than the weather.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Sukuna said, cryptic as usual. Yuuji let out a frustrated growl, stepping closer to Sukuna, and reaching for the collar of his uniform. Mud splashed on the back of Yuuji’s pants from the movement, but he didn’t care. He had Sukuna’s clothes held tightly in his hands and yet it felt like his teammate was slipping farther away by the second.
“You can’t just leave,” Yuuji argued. His voice was breaking, cracking its pitch. You can’t just leave me, is what he meant. He looked at him, daring him to try.
“You’re weak,” Sukuna said, and he said it so sharply Yuuji felt it stab him in the chest. Sukuna stared at him as if he were a corpse. There was no emotion of light behind his eyes. Yuuji had already lost him it seemed. He let his grip falter, shocked. Sukuna took that momentary lapse in Yuuji’s hold to break free.
The rain didn’t stop.
“I can go too,” Yuuji said. It was embarrassing to sound so desperate, but he felt it. Sukuna had been with him since he first found out about sorcery. He didn’t want to be without him. Sukuna had always been there at his side, teaching him with a cold kind of love that Yuuji sometimes took for granted. “I’ll go wherever you’ll go, let me just get my–”
“No, I don’t want you to come.”
Yuuji felt the same stabbing pressure from before. He brought his hands up to his throat because he imagined it constricting. His heart said it was a lie, but Sukuna’s tone said otherwise.
“Yuuji Itadori!” Shoko called from the window. She was upset he could tell, by the frustration in her voice. Yuuji turned back to wave to her, bowing in apology as she rudely gestured for him to come back to his bed and rest. “You are still healing, get back here now!”
Yuuji ignored her, turning back to find Sukuna had gone. The rain pelting down on him started to feel like a wave. He looked around but found nothing. He took a step forward, and the puddle in the grass splashed as he put his foot down.
Fushiguro was there then, putting Yuuji’s arm around his neck and maneuvering him so that he could be used like a crutch. Shoko was still shouting in the distance. Yuuji felt like he had drowned.
-4 years later
Yuuji had finished a mission dealing with a pair of curses who’d been causing trouble in a cemetery. He’d won the fight but was bleeding badly down his left arm. The one curse’s claws had been longer than Yuuji expected, but it was fine. He was fine. He was used to getting roughed up, he was used to bleeding. He pulled out his cell phone to text Ijichi he finished, but found there was no service.
Yuuji sighed, letting his body slump against the nearby mausoleum, careful not to put pressure on his arm. He looked out in the distance, feeling like he was being watched. He turned on his phone’s flashlight, lighting up the angel statues nearby. The angle of the light gave them gloomy expressions that made Yuuji quickly move his light away. He was suddenly reminded of human earthworm three.
He checked again and even after holding his phone up over his head, he couldn’t find a single bar. Feeling annoyed, Yuuji put his phone away and braced himself for the long walk out of the cemetery. He was standing near the middle of it and the path back to the main gate seemed farther away than when he first came in.
He walked, listening to the gravel crunch under his shoes. Crickets were singing all around him, filling in the silence. Thankfully, there was a light up ahead to keep the path in view. It was an old, yellow glow, and Yuuji could already make out sprinkles of bugs dancing around it. He kept his neck bent upward, staring at it until it became blurry like some distant, ugly star. When he got closer, Yuuji noticed the silhouette of a man standing under the ray of its light. He paused, feeling slightly unsettled. The man was standing there, turned straight at him. His outline was intimidating.
Yuuji continued to walk towards him, remembering that it was a cemetery. People came here to visit their loved ones all the time. He thought that the man might have seen him first and had the same gut reaction. It was silly.
“Hey, I’m not a ghost, don’t worry,” Yuuji yelled out, waving at the stranger, trying to lighten the mood. He continued his trek toward the light, stopping when he noticed red eyes. Not a human then.
Yuuji swallowed, reaching for his injured arm. The blood there had started to dry and cake along his skin. It still ached deep and dull, and he doubted he could put up much of a fight. He had no idea what level this curse was, but Yuuji knew the more human they looked, the worse they were.
“You look like a ghost to me,” the curse spoke back. Yuuji’s mouth opened at how well it was able to communicate. He swore it sounded familiar even. It made his heart dance.
“I’m not, so, I’ll just be going now,” Yuuji said, hoping that it could end at that. He started to veer off the path, walking through the grass in between headstones. Yuuji looked back once to find the curse had gone. He felt nauseous.
“No partner? I thought all sorcerers had a partner,” the curse spoke from above. Yuuji cracked his neck to look up at those wild, red eyes from a nearby tree. It had teleported so seamlessly. It was closer than before, its voice carried by the soft breeze that went straight to his ears as if the curse said it right beside his head. Yuuji’s tongue tingled with some word or name that was on the tip of it, but he wasn’t sure yet. Was this curse just toying with him?
“My partner left me a long time ago,” Yuuji answered honestly. He didn’t know why he even admitted that painful memory to a curse. It just came out so easily, it always did.
“You didn’t find anyone else to replace him?”
“He wasn’t replaceable,” Yuuji admitted. His eyes widened in the realization that he never specified what gender his partner had been. The red eyes vanished in the dark, leaving Yuuji to look around, blind to where it would teleport next. Yuuji pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight. Nothing. He took off then, not wanting to stick around to play cat and mouse. Yuuji ran past graves, dodging the bulkier ones, trying to be as respectful as he could while running for his life. There was a joined headstone larger than the others with two angels reaching towards an embrace that he tripped over. His phone fell out of his hand, landing right along the words written on the stone.
‘Lovers’ it read and it made Yuuji’s heart grow heavy.
“Lovers,” Yuuji said out loud, still dazed from his fall. He had landed on his bad arm and the pain was making him dizzy. He sat up, staring at the names written on the grave when the red eyes came out of nowhere, rising up from behind the headstone. There were four eyes now, and with Yuuji’s cellphone light shining right on him, he could see the curse much clearer now.
His face was so familiar and cruel that Yuuji thought he hit his head too hard. The lines of his jaw were stronger than before, his lips more full. Yuuji would know that cocky smile anywhere.
“Sukuna,” Yuuji said. His voice was shaky, just as shaky as it was all those years ago when he was calling out the same name. “You-you're a–”
“You always were slow,” Sukuna teased. His voice sounded the same even though he looked different. With four glowing eyes, and a different type of presence Yuuji wasn’t sure what to think. Sukuna put his hands on the headstone, revealing long, sharp claws on the tips of his fingers. “What’s the matter, Yuuji? Curse got your tongue?”
Yuuji closed his mouth, anger replacing the shock. Sukuna was here, Sukuna was…a curse.
“What happened to you?”
Sukuna looked down, ignoring Yuuji’s question. He read the words on the grave, tapping one of his claws against one particular word.
“Lovers, huh.”
Yuuji pushed himself up off the ground. He swayed twice before he could properly stand on his feet. Yuuji licked his lips, making his hands into fists at his side. Sukuna watched him, amused.
“You’re not happy to see me?” he asked, voice still holding that teasing charm.
“You left me four years ago. I haven't seen or heard a word from you since. People said you were dead, but I knew better,” Yuuji’s voice grew louder as he continued. He shook his head in disbelief. “And now, you pop out of nowhere, as a...as a curse, and expect me to be happy to see you? God, you’re the same asshole you’ve always been. I can’t–”
He stopped his words when he felt them tumble too fast out of his mouth. Yuuji felt lightheaded and hurt. He had just gotten used to being on his own, he was doing fine and then Sukuna had to come fuck it all up again. He turned, putting his back to Sukuna and walked away. Or at least he tried. His good arm was seized by a clawed grip, tugging him backward until he nearly collided with Sukuna’s chest.
“I didn’t expect you to celebrate,” Sukuna said, the amused tone no longer in his voice. “But I’m not letting you just walk away.”
That did it. Yuuji ripped his arm free, hissing as Sukuna’s nails grazed too roughly against his skin. He swung at the curse, hitting him square in the jaw.
“You’re a curse Sukuna! I don’t know why or how, but I know that it’s not any of my business, it hasn’t been for four years now.” There were tears running down Yuuji’s face, but there was nothing he could do to stop them. In truth, Yuuji didn’t know what to do. “I have to go, I have to let you go,” he took a step away, but Sukuna grabbed his arm again keeping him hostage. Yuuji closed his eyes, unable to look at him. “I have to let this go.”
“You can’t though, can you?” Sukuna asked, though he already knew the answer. “You almost died. I had to get stronger–”
“But this–” Yuuji interrupted.
“Yes, this–” Sukuna quickly answered, running a hand along his face. His fingers danced over the tattoos there, showing them off. He grinned to expose fangs that weren’t there before. “I did what I needed to. This world is crawling with curses, some with power you couldn’t even fathom, so I decided I’d become the King over all of them. What was I supposed to do? You almost died, Yuuji. You almost left me first!”
Sukuna pulled his face forward, kissing him like he’d been starved for years because he was, they both were. Yuuji kissed him back, and for a moment, he was transported to a time before when they were younger and there wasn’t all this pain between them. It tasted like those soft, secret kisses they used to share like soft victories after each completed mission.
But then Yuuji tasted blood. His own blood. Sukuna’s fangs nipped the bottom of his lip, on purpose or on accident it didn’t matter. He was no longer human and Yuuji was rudely reminded of that. He broke away from the kiss.
“You always decided things on your own,” Yuuji spat, “And I’m allowed to decide for myself too. We’re not even on the same side anymore. I won’t report you, not right away, but I won’t see you again. I can’t be the one to… to–”
A dark laugh stopped Yuuji from finishing his words. It was evil. It rumbled deep down inside Yuuji’s chest filling him with a strong sense of dread. Sukuna looked at him, with all four eyes, blinking them off-beat.
“I don’t need your permission to do what I want, Yuuji.” He laughed again, louder this time. The ground shook with it. “I’m a fucking King now.”
And there Yuuji saw it, the difference evident in his old partner. Sukuna might have only looked like one before, but now, Yuuji could feel that he had truly turned into a monster. He reached for Yuuji again, kissing him on the mouth until Yuuji nearly passed out from the lack of oxygen. He held his face in his clawed hand, breathing hot air over Yuuji’s chilled skin.
“We can rule the world together.”
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