Work Text:
The feeling of killing someone one holds no ill nor fond intent towards is an unsurpassable encounter nothing else is quite able to achieve.
That is what Sukuna has told Yuuji, at least, on more than one occasion. The boy isn’t quite so convinced killing someone is worth whatever feeling the curse has come to describe as “what it means to be whole” and “what it feels like to take your first breath of fresh air in over three hundred years”. Every time Sukuna takes over his body and wreaks havoc, the only feelings he encounters are helplessness and dread.
…Maybe that’s exactly what Sukuna hopes for, when he rips curse and human heads from trembling shoulders and grins in the wake of their despair just like any good madman ought to.
In accordance with his regular habits of not fully understanding the brain of a man gone mad despite one living in his head for what feels like an eon or fifty, the world has ended long before Yuuji is able to come to this conclusion. When the world he fought so hard to keep alive dies right before his eyes alongside everyone he has ever known and loved (starting at his grandpa, because really, had the man not cursed him to die surrounded by loved ones? Does it count if everyone he loves dies around him instead, or are they just cursing him further?), everything suddenly becomes worth much too much effort to feel concerned about.
He finds a little corner in Sukuna’s innate domain and curls up in a ball and wishes he had any tears left to cry. But the skull of thrones behind him fills the room with an unquenchable thirst–a bloodlust so powerful the atmosphere reconsiders its very composition. Yuuji is sure he should be reconsidering some things, too, like why he ate the first finger in the very first place. Of course, there were other parties aside from his former classmates banking on the fact that he would officially become the vessel of some great and ancient evil. It wasn’t as though the idea to eat it came from nowhere, and it wasn’t as though he couldn’t have become his vessel in some other matter of the word further down the road.
His life is an obstacle course of premeditated pit-falls and gaping chasms spitting lava against his airborne feet like that. Because, in the end, he would always be destined to fall prey to his own empathy, his own will and want to help people–to save people.
…Has he always been like this? From a young age, Yuuji found himself in need of the company of friends and of trusted individuals and of family near constantly. How far would he go to protect those bonds? How far could he push the boundaries of his ideals before they could no longer drive him forward like they used to?
Now, standing above the rubble of Shinjuku, somehow back in possession of the cursed form of the scummiest sorcerer in all of Jujutsu sorcery, Yuuji isn’t so sure saving bonds that snapped a long time ago was worth it in the end.
If his grandfather had never told him (cursed him) to die surrounded by the people he loved, where would he be now? What kind of person would Yuuji have become without the constraints of someone else’s ideals upon his back? How far could he have gotten in life without the knowledge of curses and sorcerers and the heavy burden he would need to carry in order to save the ones he cared about? How many battles would have been lost without him there to support them?
How many lives would have been spared? (Thousands.) How many of his friends would still be alive today? (All of them.) How many friends would he have made in a regular sense of the word; friends who knew nothing of curses but the taboos which they alight? (Just enough.)
It wasn’t fair.
“Nothing is fair, brat,” he hears Sukuna say with his mouth, scars twisting at the amalgamation of eyes and mouths and arms crossing and uncrossing (yes, all four of them) in front of his chest almost restlessly.
Yuuji curls further into himself and presses his forehead against an invisible barrier. How unfair is it that he could not walk through the snow just a bit longer? His whole side and back are wet from the murky waters of Sukuna’s domain, and Yuuji has to fight off the urge to shiver and give Sukuna yet another method to betray his weakness.
“I know,” he whispers, but the volume doesn’t matter, at least not here. In Sukuna’s domain, his word is law, and nothing happens without his consent or him knowing.
“It appears as though you have no reason left to live,” says the curse, who hums and calmly walks forward as he speaks. “So why, pray tell, are you still speaking?”
Yuuji bites his lip. The answer is a hard one to swallow, with the way things ended. The longest answer: he still has things he needs to do–strangers he has to save–and the boy has never been one for backing down even from the most dauntless challenges. The shortest answer is that he is lonely.
When Yuuji next pays heed to the location of his body–of Sukuna–he sees the towering form of a nameless office building. The walls are practically made up of windows, tinted glass obscuring even the slightest glimpse of what lays inside, who lays in wait. A sudden urge strikes him like lightning arching down from the heavens and splitting through an ancient tree, and he groans in the strongest attempt at slowing Sukuna down while he is left hopeless and helpless as he is.
The noise causes his body to pause for a step, but just as soon as the lapse in movement has occurred, it has ended. Sukuna keeps walking. He does not question the thick concern and hate which tumble and tussle within his innate domain, simply preening at the feeling of uselessness flowing from his vessel in waves.
If this is the way things will always be, he thinks, I will not allow for it to ever end.
He enters the office building.
The light concrete flooring of the building, shining with the brilliance of years of polishing and wasteful management, is cold beneath his feet. Air whirs through vents and down upon himself. It seems no one thought to alert the people of this building that the world was ending. There are none who could benefit from a running AC unit in death.
Sukuna narrows his eyes and smells the blood of another–two others–roaming the building somewhere to his right and part-way up the height of the building. He licks his lips and stalks forward.
A small waiting room is what he finds at the end of the open space of the entrance, an imposing staircase to his right, leading only upwards. There is a strip of caution tape separating the stairway from the first floor. Cork board tacks line the first few steps like careful ants in a row, covering every other square centimeter of concrete in a wish for tetanus or for a doll’s bed of nails to sleep on.
The fickle attempt of faceless and nameless things at protecting themselves from any unknown danger is of no consequence to one Ryomen Sukuna. In fact, the sight is such a useless display of defence he can’t help himself from laughing out loud. It is a boisterous thing, sounding more like the bubbling and recoil of a waterfall in the way it bounds and bounces around the open space.
He smirks when Yuuji flinches from his fetal position in the shadows of his throne of skulls and jumps over the thumb tacks like they aren’t even there. The extent of his searching goes quite smoothly after that. All beings–big or small, animal or human, curse or manifestation of death in the form of a cursed technique–have their very own, unique cursed energy signatures. Being the King of Curses and all, it is his duty to be able to locate anyone of consequence at any given time. Whether it be to execute them or save them from harm, any and all beings are within his grasp in his honed skills of, practically, cursed echolocation. All that to say: Ryomen Sukuna is good at his duty. He is great at his duty, some might argue. Although their words and beliefs are of no concern to Sukuna, hearing those he deems interesting enough speak of him in such a way is something of a blessing.
Where would his power come from if not the malleable fear of others? Wherefore art the worms that tremble at the sight of his might, the presence of immeasurable power at his disposal?
Ah, he thinks, restlessness aging and the moths of fire and fury fluttering within his stomach as they so often do, there they are.
There is an open door to the right of the top of the stairs. Inside hides a woman. She cowers beneath the light brown planks of a barley oak desk built into the wall. Plants line the walls on metal and wooden shelves, draping them with their emerald vines and leaves. Across the room is a short staircase made up of the same material, leading somewhere unseen and unheard of. But Sukuna senses the man hiding up at the landing, his cursed energy wild with anxiety and the weightless press of facing an unknown foe.
He enters the room and examines what he could not see from the hallway with awe. To the right are two walls which frame the short staircase. Light wooden tables frame the entry, but they don’t matter much in comparison to what he spots propped against one.
“A rifle…” Yuuji supplies from within the depths of Sukuna’s innate domain.
The curse smirks and grabs the weapon. It’s loaded. He flips the safety and drops the hammer in accordance with Yuuji’s insistent memory of movie scenes in which the villain grabs a gunmetal weapon as a last ditch effort to maim the protagonist or his friends.
The brat may be useful for this one thing, I suppose.
Before Sukuna can so much as aim the barrel, the man bounds down the stairs towards him. His form is round and big, and the stark blackness of his clothes thoroughly disrupts the serene atmosphere of the room. The woman, stricken in her fear, makes no attempt to support him in subduing the man in robes. Not that it would have done any good in the end anyway.
The man holds something that glints like crystal in the sharp office lighting–a knife or a cleaver or something of little effect–but there is no use in recalling such useless details, so it is not paid much attention to. Sukuna raises the firearm and fires.
The bullet shoots through the man’s forehead, but no blood leaks from the wound, at least not from the entry point which he can see. Yuuji starts yelling something, finally breaking away from his misery for the time being, but Sukuna could care less what he thinks or says, so he ignores him to shoot the man again. Another hole appears beside the first, but still, no blood flows.
How peculiar, Sukuna thinks, because there is no reason to speak directly to beings so much lower than he.
The man swings at him with the full force of his hulking body, arm swinging down to strike Sukuna with the fervor of a man twice scorned. He fires the rifle again and the man falls to the concrete in a dead heap.
Sukuna releases the gun with one hand and lets it hang there for a while before tossing it away. Modern inventions never quite live up to the expectations humans hold for them, do they? There is always something left to improve by the time public access is expected–no, normalized–yet their standards never waver. Even in the Heian Era, there were those who always expected greatness and wallowed in its unachievement.
He turns to the woman and does not hide the grin that splits his face. Somewhere deep within him, Yuuji is crying. The least the poor brat deserves is an entertaining show, no?
She cowers and winces as Sukuna approaches her, footfalls light and presence overwhelming. To her knees she falls before him after crawling out from beneath her useless hiding place. She is bowing to him, the poor louse.
If Sukuna were human any longer, he may have felt sympathy for her as she begged for her life at his feet. But alas, he is not. He smiles and tucks in his pointer and pinky fingers. Brings his hands together. Smirks a little wider.
In his overbearing form of concurrent hematomas below fingernails and the never ending twisting of ink-black snakes; the animalistic presence of four arms and the disappearance of humanity in how his eyes twinge and spread across the better part of his face, Sukuna speaks. “Domain Expansion: Malevolent Shrine.”
The world is bathed in an eerie red.
The woman sits up and moves to scuttle away, but her legs fail her when the moment arises. Sukuna raises a finger.
“Cleave.”
Her left ear falls to the ground in a splat of blood, red as the water Yuuji cries into.
The curse hums discontentedly. The woman says and does things, most likely in an attempt to get him to spare her little life, but no sound she makes reaches his ears. He is bored, suddenly, with her utter lack of resistance. He sighs.
She could have been crying. She could have been praying. Sukuna has seen all of these reactions before, all the way to making a final stand, although foolish attempts at inhibiting his reign of terror were often few and far between. He doesn’t care to look upon the souls he tears apart these days. They are of no interest to him anymore, not after all the time he has spent ending the lives of others over the course of his life.
He is sick and tired of maggots blubbering and squirming and begging for their lives. How about they try something new, huh? Entertain him a little. It’s the least they could do after wasting so much of his precious time.
“You’re demented,” Yuuji laments roughly from within him.
Sukuna does not correct him. He only rolls his eyes and makes to leave the room. Yuuji slumps in relief, but his brows furrow in confusion.
The King of Curses flicks his wrist as he exits the room. “Dismantle.”
The body of the stranger falls to the ground in a pile of a million fleshy cubes. Her remains resemble mincemeat–Sukuna scrunches up his nose as he enters the office building corridor–or maggots.
How distasteful.