Chapter Text
He streaks into the city like lightning. The sky is still dark, and it’s mostly quiet.
Some screaming has begun though, catching the air’s edge and carrying through the city. Whoever it was is snuffed out, because the silence comes back quickly, with only early birds giving their warning cries.
The air is cold despite the sun that is slowly crawling its way into the sky. The whole world is an orange red, claiming the horizon in its crimson tide. Toji doesn’t linger to watch it.
He sends groups away when they cling to him for guidance. He knows they’re scared, he expects it, but still. He brushes the last of them off, and embarks into the still.
He follows shadows along streets — he can sense cursed energy in waves, not exactly the way others can, but it works enough for him, and better yet, he has no cursed energy himself to sense. He’s a ghost as far as sorcerers and cursed spirits are concerned. He uses it greatly to his advantage, side stepping smaller curses, or following some along to groups.
He passes a clump in an alley, watching with disquieted satisfaction at the sight of the orders being carried out. A soldier stands atop a father and mother, slain against the cobblestone, and holds their child in his hands.
Toji turns his gaze from the sight, and tries to put it out of his head. He keeps moving, it’s the only option. If he stops, he fears he’ll falter.
Some hours pass and he finds nothing. Soldiers approach him, some ask guidance, others simply pass him by. He chases off stragglers and shoos away anyone hoping to avoid their duty by lingering near him. The rest of them, he doesn’t see much. He’ll catch glimpses of shadows, curses slinking in the dark — he kills ones that stray too close, and follows after some to see if any lead him anywhere, but nothing turns up. If it does, someone is already there dispatching the child before he can.
At one point he even sees Gojo and Geto, attached at the hip as usual, but they don’t stay and linger. They see him and practically vanish. Toji sighs, turning away.
He knows what their true feelings are — he can’t overlook it with how each glance they take at him makes his skin crawl. He can’t imagine they’re trying their hardest to do their jobs now, but he can’t stop them at this point. He just has to do his job and theirs.
He sighs irate, turning. He stops in his tracks at the long alley. It’s dark, the lights having been shot out and candles snapped in half or blown out. Two shadows linger at the end, frozen stiff at the sight of him.
He takes a step into the dark, frowning at the familiar face. “Haibara..” he warns.
“Toji —” Haibara starts, his face washing with relief at the sight of his upper classmate and not a more senior knight or soldier. For a brief moment, he even forgets that Toji is King. “It’s not what it looks like, I promise.”
Haibara is holding in his arms one swaddled bundle, tucked carefully against his metal clad chest. His sword is drawn but it’s not to strike down the child like he’s been sworn to do. A woman, young with auburn hair, is knelt behind him, her face stained with tears. She’s flush from running, Toji suspects.
“Haibara.” Toji says, “give me the child.”
“Toji—” Haibara starts, but the crowned King takes a step forward. “Toji, don’t, please.”
“Haibara I’m not gonna ask a second time.” He says, and it’s a miserable task he knows but he’s going to do it anyway. Because he knows what’ll happen if they don’t stop it, he’s seen Naobito’s disfigured body, and that wasn’t even the King of Curses, it was just a preceding warning. He doesn’t want to witness the real thing.
“Give me the child. It won’t feel a thing, I swear.”
“You hear yourself, right..?” Haibara asks, voice shaking as he returns the child to its mother to face Toji head-on. He’s never liked conflict, not with his friends, especially not those who were his upperclassmen. Not those who were now King. Not those whose orders are law.
“Haibara. Stand aside or I will go through you.”
And this must make it click in Haibara’s head. He blinks once, straightening as his eyes dance some invisible line of standing between the blood-soaked king and the child that could or could not be the end of the world as they know it.
Haibara, with trembling hands, shifts. He takes a step to the side, head down as he tries to search the world for the answer that he’s doing the correct thing. Toji feels relief flood over him as his former underclassman takes a step to the side to reveal the mother’s horrified anguished face and her child swaddled against her.
Toji sighs, “you did the right thing, Haibara.”
He strides toward the fallen mother and child with an empty face. He’d put his feelings aside about this task a long time ago now. He can’t afford the weakness of emotion when his world is at stake. If it had been simply him, maybe he would not have cared so much.
But everytime he closes his eyes, it’s Megumi and Chie’s faces that he sees. And that’s all that he cares about.
That’s all he can afford to care about.
The mother shrieks, but he ignores her. He barely even hears her. He stretches his metal clad hand toward her. But he doesn’t grab in time.
Haibara buries a sword into his side, tucked beneath his chest plate with carefully placed efficiency. Haibara huffs, hands trembling as he watches the King stagger for a moment. It’s not necessarily lethal, Haibara is too kind a man for that. Too stupid, too.
“Haibara you —” Toji grits his teeth, yanking the sword from his side with a tug and turning it in his palm. “Why the hell did you do that..?”
“I-I couldn’t stand there and just do nothing, Toji.” Haibara says. The earlier tremble from his voice is gone, replaced with a certainty. He knows now that there is no returning from this — he’s already facing imprisonment for trying to foster the March babies to safety. Jujutsu society would demand his death now for treason against the execution order and for attempted regicide against Toji in his process.
Toji swats his own blood from the blade with a grit out sigh, lifting cold eyes to Haibara. “I wish you hadn't done that, Yu.”
Haibara, now weaponless save for his Jujitsu, lifts his arms to defend himself, a final little stand for what he believes is right and wrong. Him right, Toji wrong. It was, for Haibara, as simple as that. It was just as simple for Toji. Black and white — there had been grey space before, but not anymore, not while they stood opposed, Toji bleeding from his ribs and Haibara the only thing stopping the King from ripping the child’s life apart for good.
Toji sighs, eyes finding only empty space to linger in as he pushes out a thin exhale through grit teeth. “I'm sorry...”
It’s quick, and he’d like to imagine painless. He strikes out like a snake, using Haibara’s own sword to cut a swatch out of the young sorcerer, up his chest and marking a deep gash into his cheek and face. Haibara gurgles, gasping air in lungs that are filling up with blood.
Toji watches him drop, heaving. It was a one sided slaughter, there was no chance. Not that it makes it any better. Haibara twitches.
He turns to the boy and mother.
They’re both crying. Or at least he imagines they are. He can’t… hear them, he can’t see them. Not really. They’re blobs, shapes of pale pink skin and clumps of cloth. His ears are ringing, a high pitched long noise, whiney and complaining into his skull until it rattles.
He reaches for the boy first, lifting it easily from the safety of his mothers arms. He cries louder, incessantly and wailing — Megumi had never cried like this, never been so irritating. So bug-like, noisy and easily squashed.
Toji sighs before killing him instantly.
His crying stops immediately, the wash of half silence filling the darkening alley. The mother is shrieking, sobbing at the sight and lack of sound. She staggers, and it must’ve been her ankle, strained or snapped that had caused her to be found by Haibara, because she stumbles with a cry. Not as much as he’d expected, considering the pain she must be in, but still — he goes to kill her all the same.
He lifts Haibara’s sword against her, but said man manages to drag his way toward him.
Haibara’s blood stained hand latches onto Toji’s ankle, fragile and twisted just as his face is. Toji looks at him, but he doesn’t see his face either.
He doesn’t see him anymore. Not in any way that matters. All he can see is Megumi and Chie. And when he blinks, maybe his brain supplies a chemical reaction, a response of the fear or guilt he should be feeling, by showing a monster where Haibara lays.
He sees the King of Curses clumped in the dark, writhing and chatting and babbling. Whispering promises of carnage, echoing tales of the coming days of curses, of more mangled bodies to lie in the castle, of monsters plucking men, women and children from their houses and devouring them whole. It whispers of the four eyed beast hiding beneath their beds.
He shakes Haibara’s hand off of him with as much effort as it takes to flick a bug from one’s shoulder, and pushes the King out of his head. He uses Haibara’s sword to cut the mother through, her body slumping alongside her baby. Her arm manages, in her final moments, to collect her mangled son toward her.
Toji looks down at the sight and sighs.
Haibara draws his final breaths shortly after, hand outstretched, reaching past Toji’s iron clad boot toward the infant and mother. Not that there’s anything to be done now.
Not that there is anything to do at all.
The King stands above them, hands trembling at his side. He watches the three of them carefully, as if waiting for something to come up and collect him from hell, expecting the ground beneath his feet to split open and devour him into the brimstone and fire. But nothing happens. Not even the wind blows against him.
He shoves his fingers down his throat, chasing the repeated reflex. Blood and iron stain his tongue, filling his senses. He breathes the smell, the scent clinging in his esophagus, rising with each tired breath he takes.
He manages to coax the purple worm curse from his stomach, gagging it out into his palm. He holds it until it unfurls in full length, where it then wraps around his torso. He bends, lifting the infant into the worm’s mouth, watching as the curse swallows him whole, along with the mother. It’ll store them for later, when they burn the bodies.
He looks at Haibara, hesitant. He sighs, pinching his brows between metal clad fingers.
He turns away without him.
He trudges back toward where he came, the darkening overhead sky their signal to call in and return home, at least for some. A handful will scour the walls, the rest along the perimeter of the city. If the King of Curses survived this night, he’s still trapped within the city limits — he won’t get far.
He begins his trek back, following the path he took to get this deep into town. His side is thriving, aching, with each step igniting a lightning flash in his ribs from where Haibara’s blade punctured his flesh.
He doesn’t realise he’s moving, his mind glazing over to spare him the day’s events, until a shrill cry catches his attention. Metal clangs against cobblestone as his boots stop him before the rest of his body can carry home on instinct.
It’s the scene from earlier, the mother and father’s blood having been long cold by the open air. But the baby still remains, forgotten and shivering and screaming. Toji moves toward it without thought, bloodied hand extending toward the shrieking infant. He picks it up quickly, flipping it over in his arms as he examines it.
It’s a girl — Toji sighs. She’s older than what they were meant to be looking for. In fact, she’s probably older than Megumi by a month or two. No wonder she was left behind, not worth spilling blood or dulling a blade over. The thought makes his stomach twist the more he looks at her red screaming face, teary eyed and petrified.
He nearly leaves her. Someone else will deal with it. But her little hands cling to him, desperate for comfort and safety, to be off the freezing stones and back to being held like she must be used to. Toji looks to her parents on the cobblestones, blood long since pooled into each crack and crevice. The baby’s feet are red and sticky, the blood clinging up her arms and rubbed on her face from where she’d cried.
He sighs. “Fuck.”
He holds her properly then, shifting his cloak from his shoulders to wrap around her to chase off the cold, tucking her into his arms and trying to soothe her miserable shrieking.
“Okay.” He mutters tiredly, “alright. It’s okay now.”
He holds his new cargo carefully, and limps back toward the castle. He finds his entrance, one used for high ranking officials and noblemen to pass through in and out of the castle in secret, guarded.
Kinji stands there, fully armed and prepared as Toji has commanded he be. Beside him is Chie. She hasn’t slept, it seems, or done much of anything except worry today. Her hair is askew, her eyes tired and she looks all over exhausted. Toji frowns at the sight.
“Have you been here all day?” Toji croaks tiredly. Chie’s sad frown makes a knot twist in his stomach.
“I couldn’t rest.” She says quietly.
“Where is Megumi?” Toji asks. Chie pulls down her coat, revealing the sleeping prince tucked up against her, thumb in his mouth and blissfully unaware.
Toji wants to reach out and touch them both, but when he lifts his arm he becomes aware of two things. His hands are still covered in blood, the red crimson rusting the metal in dark long stains. The other, Toji, remembers almost second-handedly.
He pulls back the cloak to reveal the girl. She’s awake, but quiet, blue eyes wide and still teary. Her nose is snotty and her lip trembles when he looks down at her.
“What—” Chie mutters.
“She’s probably older than Megumi.” Toji begins tiredly, “…she’s.. alone, now.”
Chie’s frown only grows at the sight of the wet eyed baby girl, whimpering and miserable even despite Toji’s attempts at comfort, holding her firm and even rocking her slightly, not that it’s helping.
“It’s only the first night.” Chie whispers miserably.
“They’ll be more thorough.” Toji cements, but it does nothing to ease his wife’s understandable anger about the situation.
“You need to speak with Tengen again.” She says sharply. “Surely this isn’t what she meant.”
Toji doesn’t reply. He’s heard Tengen’s demand from word of mouth. Never from her directly. It’s been a passed on thing, something from the higher ups in Jujutsu society so it must be true, even if they hadn’t agreed with it.
“It’s what it is now.” Toji mutters tiredly. “There’s no going back about it.”
Chie looks exasperated, eyes searching his face for something worth rescuing, a glint of hope or a shred of sense, of reason, of the thoughts not tainted by sorcerer society. But she can’t find anything.
Her husband is as far away as ever, for a group that had rejected him for decades.
“Bring Tsumiki inside before she catches a cold already.” Chie snaps quietly, turning on her heels
The King blinks. Tsumiki? He looks down at the bundle in his arms. She’s stopped crying now, and though she’s awake she looks like she wants to sleep, but her circumstances haven’t allowed it. She’s cold, and wet and blood clings to her hands. But she’s watching him, still.
Where Chie chose the name, he doesn’t know. But he won’t ever ask.
He whisks inside after Chie and Megumi, listening to Kinji close the door behind them, chasing out the miserable cold and dreaded deeds the day had brought him.