Chapter Text
It’s an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon when Yuuji first starts seeing shadows move.
He’s at the coffee shop in the student union when he gets a feeling like static down the back of his neck. Nothing seems unusual, and he doesn’t know how he knows, but suddenly he just knows—that he’s being watched. He picks up his drink and turns around, slow but feigning casual, and catches just the edge of a hulking figure disappearing around the corner towards the gymnasium.
He’s almost forgotten about it—chalked it up to too much caffeine and too little sleep—by the time it happens again, no more than a few days later. He’s at the stadium bus stop waiting for his bus home after a late soccer practice, and there’s a rustling in the bushes. This itself is not unusual, so he pays it no mind. A squirrel, he figures, or a raccoon. Then a branch cracks, gunshot-sharp over the lulling hum of cicadas, and Yuuji registers in some slow, animal part of his brain that the sound belongs to something far larger than a raccoon could manage.
The back of his neck burns. Yuuji resolutely does not turn around. The bus pulls around the corner, headlights sweeping wide, and Yuuji boards. Out of the corner of his eye, he’s sure he sees the outline of a man standing in the dark of the trees, sees the glint of blood-red eyes fading as the bus turns away.
He tries to brush it off, tells himself he’s being paranoid. Even so, he takes the long way home the next day, the street that passes behind the subway station with that hardware store. Even so, he finds himself at the register, paying for a security lock. He’s being silly, he thinks. Even so, it can’t hurt.
When he leaves for class the next morning, he spends half a minute trying to work his way around the new lock to rush to class. He’s too frazzled, late as usual, to notice that even with the portable lock in place, the deadbolt was already undone.
–
It’s been 1,111 days since Yuuji last saw his brother. In his memory, Sukuna is being led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. He turns at the last second, and the grin he shoots over his shoulder is aimed at Yuuji. It’s dead on.
Assault in the Second Degree, the conviction had read. The murder charges hadn’t stuck, all three of them—two parents, a grandfather. But the police had never found the murder weapon, had never found DNA evidence. Nothing past the circumstantial—an account from a concussed eyewitness, not so sympathetic for sharing a face with the suspect. The assault charge, the victim a random passerby, had been a desperate swing by the prosecution, a miracle hit. It wasn’t enough, but the justice system rarely was. They patted themselves on the back in any case, and dropped Yuuji back off at his house where he could still see the phantom blood on the doorframes.
Yuuji’s moved three times since Sukuna was incarcerated. He hasn’t kept in touch. He’s deleted social media, changed his last name, switched universities. He’s tried to move on, tried to pull himself out from the tar pit that Sukuna has made of their lives. He’s been getting better. He has new friends now, ones that don’t recognize him from the regional news or, if they do, at least have enough tact to not mention it. He goes to study groups at Kugisaki’s, plays pick-up basketball with Yuuta. He’s building a life: budding, tender, his.
–
It’s been 1,111 days since Yuuji last saw his brother, but there he is—an ink-black smudge in the night of his room, the shape of which Yuuji couldn’t forget if he tried. For a moment he can’t move, he can’t blink, he can’t even breathe. He thinks, wildly, that this is sleep paralysis. He’s seeing things. The clock on his nightstand blinks 3:00AM. The world is still.
And then suddenly Sukuna is there, a hair’s breadth away, the bulk of him caging Yuuji against the sink of his mattress like he’s a kid again and this really is just a bad dream. He wishes against hope that it is, but he can feel the weight where Sukuna’s hands press him down. The clock on his nightstand blinks 3:01AM, and he knows that no dream could feel so real.
“What are you doing here?” Yuuji manages, the scratch of it up his throat enough to turn his stomach. Sukuna puts on a hurt expression, something that couldn’t be misconstrued as genuine even by a blind man.
“What do you mean?” Sukuna asks, faux-confusion sickly sweet, “I’ve come home, Yuuji.”
The gash of his smile cuts through the darkness.
“I couldn’t very well leave my dear baby brother out here in the big, bad world all alone.” He drags the word baby out like a promise, like nectar, like rotting milk. Like they were not so dearly identical in every way one could see, and so dearly different in every way that mattered. Like he was not the reason Yuuji was so, so alone. “After all, who knows what he could get into without me to take care of him.”
Sukuna’s grip on Yuuji’s shoulder tightens, a dog with a hard-won bone, and Yuuji can feel the fight being wrung out of him before he’s even had the chance to grab a hold of it. Yuuji’s chest is tight, his head spinning, his limbs numb. His voice is lost somewhere between “welcome home” and “get out.” He might not be breathing, or he might be breathing too much.
It’s been three years, and this is still what Sukuna does to him. Three years of scrapping together this new life, and mere minutes for Sukuna to remind him how threadbare it all is.
One touch and he’s gossamer thin, like the wind could blow him away without Sukuna’s hand hot like a brand against his side.
One touch and he’s fraying at the edges, peeling apart where those fingers toy at his seams.
One touch and he comes apart in tatters, spreads like silk across the bed. Sukuna follows him down, matching every inch, pressed together like mirror images. Like they’d always been.