Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Itadori doesn’t know when he got hit. He can’t remember that part. 

He knows it’s bad when he puts a hand over the wound and the blood pushes out between his fingers like it’s trying to escape. A shuddering breath leaves him, accompanied by the feeling of blood rising up the back of his throat, onto his tongue.

His vision is a vague kind of blurry when he looks up. 

As far as he knows, everyone is dead.

He can’t even grieve, not when the demon stands over him, grinning like he’d won the lottery. Both mouths curled into a smile sharp enough to cut bone. Yuuji clutches the gash in his side and struggles to stand; he’s missing half his ribs. 

His vision blacks out before he can make it to his feet, swaying. There’s blood on the ground, not just his. There’s fire licking up behind his legs, warmer than comfortable. 

Tokyo is on fire. 

Sukuna stands, having cut the city down into a throne just for him, having razed the ground, millions dead, and he smiles.

He won.

Yuuji doesn’t know where Choso’s body went, discarded on the ground somewhere. Yuuji doesn’t know where Gojo-sensei’s body is. Or Okkotsu’s. He knows he is about to join him, the way things are going. 

He’d be quietly happy if it weren’t for the fact that it meant leaving a monster to the world; he’d be glad if it meant seeing them again, and not failing. But his lungs, or what’s left of them, choke up more blood that hits the ground in a splatter, and Yuuji can’t keep up the fight.

He’s not Gojo, he’s not Megumi, he’s just Yuuji. And he failed so catastrophically that the skyscrapers behind the demon in front of him burn like the sun, a false sunrise, smoke curling around the clouds.

Itadori Yuuji failed. He chokes back the water in his eyes, or maybe the heat from the flames does it for him. 

A quiet apology directed to everyone he failed is all he can do; it’s not good enough, but he doesn’t have the time for anything else, nor the strength. The only thing left of him is the anger. 

If he had the energy for it, the vitality, he would be fighting, letting the hatred he feels kill the stupid god before him. If he could, he wouldn’t stop at twenty pieces to scatter the curse’s body. An inferno in his chest, tampered by the blood spreading inside his lungs. If he could, he’d incinerate him, leave nothing left. Hate is not a strong enough word. 

Not when Yuuji’s lifeblood, Choso, Gojo-sensei, and everyone else buried in the rubble are all dead. 

He failed. The curse rubs it in his face when he descends the pile of rubble and comes closer to the dying sorcerer, lips cracked into an undying grin. Yuuji hiccups some more copper onto his own tongue, and the curse, the monster, leans down until they are eye-level. Yuuji doesn’t have the energy to grimace; he doesn’t have the energy to spit in his face.

When the curse talks, his smile doesn’t abate, all teeth flashing like a predator around the prey’s neck. Yuuji struggles to keep his eyes open even as the words slither over his consciousness. He doesn’t have the energy to fight; he doesn’t have the energy to move. 

Yuuji is dying. Quickly, at that. He’s watching the world slim down into just the sickly gaze of the curse and the ruined skyline. He’s dying, guts on the ground, blood escaping through his fingers.

And yet he’s still awake enough for alarms to ring in his head, still awake enough for concern to seep into the slow drag of his thoughts. Yuuji is dying, but he still hears him before the black finally swallows the rest of the horrible view, the world shutting down around him, he still hears him.

“You’re not done yet.” 

When Yuuji wakes up next, he’s screaming.

The scent of smoke clogs the air, drying blood, and the rancid smell of death thick on his tongue and choking into the back of his nose until he doubts there won’t be a day where he can’t smell it, where he can’t feel it strangling him into silence.

The soles of his shoes have been rubbed thin, dragging on the gravel, the dirt, and slowly thinning away more as he walks. Yuuji struggles to maintain any sort of stride, anything stable enough to be called a walk. His legs are heavy as if sand fills them. His shoulders ache and pinch every time he moves, his throat burns in the air, and his tongue is thick and dry. 

It would have been easier, he thinks, if the rubble hadn’t been so scattered. It would have been easier if he hadn’t had to stumble over cement blocks, bitten off buildings littering the ground. And it would have been fine, completely fine, if he had water. Any sort of water, he doesn’t care anymore if it’s stained red. He doesn’t care.

And, most importantly, it would have been easier if he hadn’t been paraded around the ruins.

His wrists ache, rubbed raw and shooting fire up his arms any time the chain clinks. 

Yuuji does not look up. 

He does not look up even if he trips on rocks, doesn’t look up to see where they are going. He doesn’t look up no matter what sound he hears around them, guttural groaning, the picking sound of crows circling the remains, the bodies. 

Pools of blood drift past, dried and flecking in the wind, he never gets to look away fast enough. If he had anything in his stomach to throw up, it would have joined the blood, mixing the smell of bile with rot in the air. 

He does not look up.

His legs shake. Yuuji refuses to let water shed, not with him here. Not when he was walking behind him. That would be a victory for him, and Yuuji refuses to let him win anything more. Not if he can stop it. 

He jolts, ribs aching, when a scream from a distance shatters the crows’ song and the shuffle of footsteps. It’s blood-curdling and terror-filled, the way a human might shout in terror, shivering off the crumbling walls of what was left of Tokyo’s highrises and sinking like jaws into Yuuji’s skin. He gasps; he does not look up.

The scream cuts short abruptly, like the cut of a rope. The last of the sound peetering out before dead silence finally roars in his ears. Yuuji will not cry. He can’t. He can’t give that to him. 

He’s already hunched into himself when another rings out into the silence, following the other in a matter of seconds. Then another. And another. Yuuji’s hands cinch over his arms, around the biceps, cutting off circulation, probably giving himself bruises. Yuuji does not look up. He doesn’t breathe.

They cry in the distance, a whole group of them, wailing like the world was ending. And it was for them, abruptly cutting off, silenced. A chorus of screams fill the hollow echo in his head, bouncing off his brain until he gasps for breath and does not allow himself any. Weight crashing onto his chest, he screws his eyes shut. He does not look up.

Finally, like an eternity, they snuff out one by one. He ignores the elated shrieks of curses flittering among the screams. He only digs his nails out of his own skin when the last one stops. And like the first, the only thing that is left is silence loud enough to cut his ears. 

He hates that he prefers it when it’s quiet. He hates himself endlessly because he’d rather not hear it, he’d rather it go to a far corner where he can ignore it and not think about it again. The thought makes him recoil in disgust. Bile rises, and he swallows it down like rocks through his throat. 

He’s shaking; he can’t cry. He can’t cry.

He can’t do it. He can’t let him win.

A tear slips down his cheek.

His vision narrows like a tunnel, black encroaching the centre of his sight until all that’s left is the ground below him, the gravel, the puddles of old blood. He realises after a second that it’s because he still hasn’t gasped for a breath. He can’t.

When he does, the returning air comes out as a sob. It’s light, strangled at the throat on instinct before he even realises he’s sobbing. He doesn’t breathe, and then his chest shakes open like a rusty tap and he gulps air back in, clearing the blue filter over his vision until it turns red and then almost clear again. Clear if it weren’t for the fact that he’s still crying. He can’t.

The air in his chest all comes out as a series of half-strangled sobs, quieter than the heartbeat in his ears. He stops walking when his legs feel like they are shaking apart. His knees hit the ground.

He can’t. 

He shivers like his sides are being ripped open, and he chokes on the next sob. The chains rattle when they hit the ground. The movement ahead of him is still.

He can’t.

All of his muscles scream at him, shaken by his trembling limbs, scrapes and pain jostled by the sharpness of the ground and his own meltdown. The next breath barely comes out, his chest is colder than ice, colder than thousands of feet high in the sky, colder than Uraume’s cursed energy. His face stings with every drop of water shed on his cheeks. He can’t let him win.

But he is. He sobs, brokenly, with too much restraint, enough to act like a hammer to his aching ribs. 

He must look pathetic, on his knees, chained, in the centre of the tomb of Tokyo, while people were actively being slaughtered, hideouts found and raided until the last traces of human life filtered out into the outskirts. Here he is, giving another victory to the perpetrator of it all.

Belatedly, he hears the crunch of gravel in front of him, the chains slack and slink across the ground like a metal snake. A hand lands on his back, and the weight on him increases tenfold, not because it pushes down, but because Yuuji cannot do anything to remove it. A second settles over his head, in his hair, pushing the strands away from his face. Yuuji is too stuck in his haze to process it properly, but still, he looks up and finds the eyes of the King of Curses, his form blocking the sun like a solar eclipse above him.

Yuuji stifles the sobs in his chest, forcing them down like packed ice, and still cannot control the way another one silently punches out of him. He does not bother stifling the pure vitriol in his eyes, staring up into the red blaze of his eyes. Not Megumi’s, pure red, one side cast in a plate of carved and hardened material. 

Megumi. The thought forces another strangled sob from him.

Sukuna, crueller than Yuuji ever thought he could be, leans closer and pulls Yuuji against him. 

Yuuji would rather be Dismantled and Cleaved than this. He’d rather have Sukuna kill him a thousand times over than this. He’d rather fight the sun. He’d rather curl up into a ball alone and die.

A hand rubs up his back, and Yuuji shivers unconsciously, phantom pain of a time that hand dove into his chest and ripped out his heart. It’s affectionate, in a sickening way, in a way that makes Yuuji scream in his mind. Because Sukuna does not do affectionate, Sukuna does not do anything even close to nice. He’s a curse, he’s a calamity born on the Earth for the simple act of destruction. 

Sukuna does not do this. 

Four arms closed around him, Yuuji feels like a caged animal. There’s one in his hair, pulling softly, Sukuna is not soft. Two closed around his waist, keeping him trapped against the curse’s massive chest wrung in black bands and stripes. One detaching his hands clawing at his arms, wiping away the blood and leaving them caged against the curse’s body, wrists still encircled by cuffs. 

This is worse than being cruel.

It’s worse than cruel, especially when Sukuna shushes him like a coddled child, returning one arm to rub up his spine as he heaves, struggling to breath. 

The confusion has been suffocating. Sukuna, the same curse that slaughtered the students of Jujutsu Tech, the same curse who killed Gojo-sensei, hums to him as he is wracked with sobs. That same curse had kept him close and closer the last two days as they walked, practically on top of him. 

He cannot make sense of it. No matter how hard he tries.

Because the last he’d seen of the curse, he’d been tearing through the bodies of Yuuji’s friends, of his teachers. The last time he’d seen him, he’d been cleaving a hole into his abdomen and laughing at the spillage of his lungs. 

“It’s okay.” His words curdle like rotten milk. Yuuji can’t tell if there’s a smile in them or not. 

It’s not. He thinks. But the only sound that escapes him is another shuddering gasp as his lungs seize and the curse’s hand rubs out the tension in his back. It’s patient, as if he is truly trying to comfort Yuuji. Sukuna does not give comfort; he takes it, and if he can’t take it, he spoils it like a mould.

Yuuji doesn’t think the comfort is helping at all, not when it coils like nausea in his stomach and makes him want to run like a frightened animal. But eventually, his lungs stop spasming and he can draw in even breaths. 

The hand in his hair cards the pink strands even after his breathing settles and his bitter-given tears stop. 

“Better.” The curse mutters, and strangely, sickeningly, it sounds like praise. Yuuji wants to gag, wants to throw punches until his knuckles split, wants to kick until he’s desperate. Maybe he is just desperate. 

His legs are a dead weight, all energy sucked from them with the sobs that had been forced from him, his arms do not respond. The only reason he isn’t slumped on the ground is because he is being supported by the massive body of the curse, neck tucked into his skin.

The thought causes a shudder to ripple through him, disgust actively warring with the exhaustion, unfortunately the exhaustion always seems to win. The curse above him shushes him again, Yuuji fantasises about burying a fist into his two-face skull, and yet it’s half-hearted when his eyes are shutting on their own.

They sluggishly snap open when he is suddenly shifted, dead-weight legs off the ground, suspended in the curse’s arms. Not again. No. The chain is winded around the curse’s arm until it doesn't drag on the ground, and Yuuji is carried like a child, back and legs supported by arms larger than his thighs. Yuuji makes a noise of disagreement. He can’t. He can’t. He’s just letting the curse win again. 

One leg finally listens, kicking out and hitting one of his arms, but the hit was powered by scraps of energy and is pathetic to even his lethargic mind. The curse jostles him in his arms, Yuuji’s ribs briefly scream in an aching pain before they settle again, and Yuuji squeezes his eyes shut. “Still yourself.” The curse chuffs, and Yuuji ignores the extra tone in his voice. He has been for two days.

The tone of fondness he hears. He imagines it. He has to be imagining it.

He ignores it for all he’s worth, and every other weird thing the curse does. If he didn’t ignore it, he wouldn't know what he’d do with himself. The confusion is suffocating.

From there, he travels with Yuuji in his arms, and Yuuji feels helpless to do anything about it. Not with the cuffs on his wrists, choking his cursed energy like stuffed cotton, chaining him to the curse like a promise. Not with his limbs unresponsive and his brain slowing the further they go.

Before sleep takes him, he swears he sees the sight of Sukuna smiling down at him, two of four eyes locked on his retreating consciousness.

Everything else slips away. 

Sukuna does not give him water that is not tinted red.

He has not asked yet. He wishes he already did, just to get it over with, instead of living a constant battle with himself. 

If it’s blood, he’s going to throw up. 

He can’t ever tell if the metallic taste is from the water itself or from the red tinge; he can’t tell because he hasn’t had normal water since Sukuna kidnapped him, and the first time he'd received it, there had still been blood in his mouth for a long while. If it’s blood, he’s going to throw up, and then rip the curse to shreds.

He doesn’t know a single thing it could be other than that. He doesn’t know why Sukuna would even go through the effort to do that. Sadistic amusement? A very possible theory.

Either way, Yuuji barely stomachs it, gags a couple times, but it never comes back up. He’s too thirsty, too drained, to complain. Plus, if it was sadistic amusement, he never catches Sukuna smirking like a smug bastard when he greedily gulps it down. He only watches, eyes maybe slightly more intense than usual.

It creeps Yuuji out. But that only adds to the very large pile of emotions steadily growing every day he is with the curse. He wants to curl up in a ball, die there maybe. But the curse keeps him on his feet, or off his feet some days. The thought makes him sick. 

Yuuji has been locked in a room for three days. 

It’s suffocation, but he doesn’t complain because it means he’s away from Sukuna, and he has time to think. Or not time to think and simply curl up on the bed and try to breathe through the mass of feelings sitting like a heavyweight on his chest. 

He feels like he’s drowning, no light in sight and no air in any direction, doomed to swallow around water and hope for a gasp of oxygen. 

Sukuna hasn’t stopped pretending to be gentle.

It puts Yuuji off like one foot stepped over a cliff, but finding solid ground, expecting the drop. 

Yuuji lives in a state of bafflement these days, and he hates how he’s getting used to it, getting used to being confused about what Sukuna is doing. The red in his water, the hands in his hair. 

Yuuji is suffocating. 

He's just glad Sukuna left, doing gods know what, because it alleviates the pressure somewhat. He didn't leave him unattended, though. Uruame wanders the halls of the building and silently hands him meals through the only door in the room. He assumes there's a kitchen somewhere, for them to cook food, or maybe it’s delivered.

He hadn't seen the outside of the building when they'd arrived, he'd been asleep. He's ashamed by the memory, considering he could have known how to get out if he needed to, even though the cuffs feel like they burn into his wrists, chained to the floor.

The exhaustion had been catching up with him, and, disgustingly, Sukuna had used the opportunity to carry him the entire way here. 

Yuuji has spent the blessed time alone rolling around in the bed they’d given him, grieving and thinking until he drove himself insane. The ‘what ifs’ spinning like a tornado around his tortured mind, haunting him. Yuuji just spins in the futon again and buries his face in a pillow that smells of dust and tears.

Gojo’s dead. Yuuji tugs at his hair, mussed from sleep. 

Nobara, Nanamin. Both dead. Yuuji tries to make the pillow suffocate him, but it’s apathetic to his suffering, and air still makes its way through the thin fabric.

Choso’s dead. The pillow hits the wall with a smack. The silence afterwards is even more deafening.

The sobs come freely with the memories, no longer strangled other than muffled against the bedding, no longer pitched into a wheeze through an angry throat. Yuuji doesn’t try, not when Sukuna isn’t nearby, not when Uraume has disappeared into the building.  

He feels pathetic, but those thoughts only add fuel to the fire, so Yuuji lets the storm circle his head until it settles.

Eventually, he falls asleep, eased by the absolute silence radiating around the halls of the quiet building, exhausted beyond thinking. Sleep is a mercy for him, as no dreams torture him, and the waves of unconsciousness take him willingly. 

Yuuji wakes up with aching muscles soothed, the tension in his shoulders wrung out until smooth. Yuuji wakes up slowly, covered in warmth that balms the frigid cold in his chest, body and mind lagging due to the transfer. The bedding is the same, the room is the same, Yuuji stares at the wall in front of him in a half-awake daze, waiting for his brain to come back online. 

A hot push of air lands on his shoulders. 

Yuuji startles, every muscle in his body tensing so suddenly it hurts; if he wasn’t awake before, he is now.

Only then is he aware of the body behind his. It was producing heat and keeping the blankets warm more than Yuuji ever could with the dropping temperatures outside. Yuuji belatedly understands it’s Sukuna, knows that it couldn’t really be anyone else. Yet still, it takes him another minute to process the information, stuck in a whirlwind of surprise, confusion, disgust, and indecision.

Panic wins out before he even realises.

The curse hits the floor with an audible grunt.

Yuuji, stuck between the warring sides of shock at himself and righteous anger directed at the curse, spins around in the bed again, away from where he’d twisted and kicked, and dove under the covers. He’s aware he looks like a petulant child, avoiding the aftermath of his hasty decisions. But the curse is out of the bed, and he is in pain, both a win for Yuuji, even if the animal panic of invoking a beast is swallowing him whole.

Right when Yuuji thinks his head will be gone within the next second, he hears a breathless sound, and only processes that it’s laughter after a moment of confusion. The curse is chuckling, shifting on the ground until Yuuji can feel a subtle dip in the bed behind him. 

“That’s no way to treat your host.” The curse says, and thick layers of amusement riddle his words. Yuuji doesn’t respond, blankets drawn tight over his head, maybe instinctually shielding his neck from the curse’s technique.

The demon seemingly doesn’t need a reply, and when Yuuji feels a sharp poke on his back, he holds in a sharp gasp lest the curse hear it. The curse chuckles again, and somehow Yuuji feels like he lost either way. 

“Is this the infamous ‘silent treatment’ I’ve heard about?” The curse’s voice rumbles, amusement laced through his words. 

Yuuji had taught him that when he was still Sukuna’s vessel, when he’d accidentally broken something –he can’t remember what anymore– of Nobara’s and she hadn’t talked to him for three days, and the curse had called her insolent.

Yuuji uncovers his head from the blankets, slowly twisting until he can see the curse out of the corner of his eye. He’s sitting with his chin laid on the palm of his hand, elbow digging into the futon so he isn’t hunched over the low bedding. 

The way he’s staring reminds Yuuji of the times he’d sunk into the other’s domain in his mind, how the curse had gazed down like he was a bug flailing around. Except this time, there was an inexplicable fondness in his eye. It’s the same kind of look Yuuji’s been receiving for the last few days. 

“Why?” His own voice comes out before he could really flip the question around in his mind. It comes out scratchy and strained, deprived of water. 

“Why what?” The curse’s lip curls, a slithering smile on his face.

“Why are you doing any of this?” He forces out through his scratchy throat. Why am I not dead? 

The curse sighs, it plumes in the air and moves the pink hair out of his eyes briefly. The larger two of his eyes move to the ceiling, observing the architecture, while the smaller set stays locked on him. “Am I not allowed?” 

“No.” This is Yuuji's first response. The curse chuffs amusedly, as if Yuuji was just being difficult. 

“I’ve finally rid this city of the sorcerers, and you still fight back.” The curse grunts, annoyed. “I had hoped you would see that any more pushback is futile.”

“You killed my friends.” The growl in Yuuji’s voice was unintentional, but he meant it. All four of the curse’s eyes landed on him again, and Yuuji felt the weight of them pushing him down as they scanned over him. Then the curse lifted his head from his hand, sitting up straight and no longer looking at Yuuji with that same fondness.

“After our meal, I request your presence outside.” Request simply meant demand, Yuuji doubted he had any choice in it at all. Also, ‘our meal’? Like hell he was eating with Sukuna.

Yuuji turned back over in the futon, letting the demon take that as a reluctant acceptance. He couldn’t fight back in any way other than verbally; he couldn’t escape. He was trapped, and he was now being forced to have dinner with the curse that murdered the people he cared about.

“I hate you.” He says quietly, mostly to the blankets. If Sukuna heard him, he wouldn't say anything.

Yuuhi feels sick. It was only after the curse left the room with the slide of the shoji door that Yuuji let out a harsh breath. 

When dinner came, Yuuji was called by Uraume, their white bob of hair the first thing he saw when they ducked through the screen. So far, all they’d been was respectful, if a bit reserved, in their interactions. Yuuji’s mind was stuck on when they fought instead of when they poured him steaming tea at the table. It was a hard parallel to push into one person.

The good news was that at least they make good tea. That was about the end of the good news, except they also cooked good food, which was begrudgingly admitted. But yeah, that was it. 

The rest sucked.

Yuuji is seated on Sukuna’s left, knees folded on the pillow, quietly picking at his food. Even if it tasted good, somehow it wasn’t appetising. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Yuuji was sitting uncomfortably close to the curse, or maybe it was the fact that it felt like his tongue was made of ash anytime he thought past nearly a week ago. 

Which was hard to do when sitting next to Sukuna.

“You’re quiet.” The curse breaks the silence; his smaller set of eyes lands on Yuuji when he takes a quick look. 

“I wonder why.” He snarks, shoving a mouthful of fish into his jaw to make a point despite his appetite. 

“Have your tea.” Sukuna says, like he’s dismissing the thought in general. Yuuji bristles but doesn’t speak any more than he has to.

He waits the necessary amount of time after the curse’s words to drink the rest, just so it doesn’t look like he was doing what he said. He’s glad Uraume could make proper tea, probably a mix of green leaves with a copper taste to go with it, when he was in such a sour mood. Tea usually has the great effect of soothing his headaches, which were growing the longer he was in the curse’s presence.

Although the copper hint among the earthy and spicy tones wasn’t doing him any favours in the headache department. The warmth from the cup helped unfreeze his rigid hands and the liquid thawed the icicles in his chest marginally. Yuuji rubs a hand over his temple, hoping to ease the pain and takes another sip of miso.

He detested his entire situation, the curse, Uraume, the building he’s stuck in. He’d give himself a week, a week until he gets out of here, breaks the chains somehow and escapes into the city. If he let it go any longer than that, then he doesn’t think he’d survive. 

Chapter Text

The walk outside takes his confidence away.

A blanket of snow rapidly builds, covering any green Autumn had left. Yuuji gapes, fingers tightening into fists. He barely notices the cold breeze snaking over his arms. The city, easily seen as bright fires in the distance, lies beneath the pewter white curve of a mountain, weeks away by foot. The snow falling over the city looks like ash. 

The curse beside him chuckles. 

“The city looks much better in flames.” His voice rumbles, delighted, and that cruel bit of the curse Yuuji is used to slithers into his tone. It makes more sense than whatever else the curse had been treating him to, the fondness, the sickly pretend affection.

The curse moves away, trudging through snow parallel to the sight of the razed horizon. Yuuji wouldn’t have followed him; he would have run into the woods and hidden with the snow if it weren’t for the fact that Sukuna still holds the chain, and it drags through the snow and cuts a metallic path into the white. 

Three steps behind Sukuna, Yuuji watches the sight, watches the smoke curl among the clouds. He wants to throw up, but his food stubbornly stays down. 

A clink of the chains signals Sukuna turning over his shoulder, observing Yuuji walking behind him with a smile. More of those same smiles, it makes Yuuji sick.

He bristles when the curse slows, shortening the chain around his hands until Yuuji is forced to walk beside him, no longer able to see the skyline unless he looks directly around the curse. Instead, Yuuji looks to the snow, imagines suffocating in it.

“What are you fighting for?” Sukuna unexpectedly rumbles next to him, one set of eyes on Yuuji and one set trained forward in the estate. 

Yuuji watches the snow, watches it grow before his eyes as fresh pewter fills it in. He doesn’t dare answer. Doesn’t want to know his own answer. Because he tries to think of something, and nothing comes to him. Everyone is gone, the world is under the siege of the curses, the last of the sorcerers are being wiped out –if they haven’t already– and Yuuji has no plan of escape. 

It’s looking pretty helpless. 

There’s a blurry memory that surfaces of a different time, of friends and summer and laughter in a world that would swallow them whole given an ounce of opportunity. Hadn’t it, in the end? Flashes of people, ginger brown and black spiky hair. Yuuji can’t name it, he can barely see the girl’s face in his memory. What was her name again? 

What could he do, anyway? If he escaped, where would he even go? He’s more likely to be killed out on the streets, overwhelmed and exhausted, the next time too strong a curse comes by, if not Sukuna himself for daring to run away. 

What would he even do, anyway? 

Sukuna seems to take the silence as an answer, being that Yuuji is both too confused and also doesn’t want to answer the question himself. If he stopped fighting, it’d be pathetic, but what’s the point of doing so beyond exhausting himself? The curse chuckles next to him, and the sick, triumphant look on his face makes Yuuji feel like he lost either way. 

His bare feet sink into the snow, building up to his ankles; the heavy oppression on his shoulders is steely and iron-clad, irremovable. It sinks Yuuji’s feet further into the ground and forces his knees to shake. Or perhaps that was just the mental exhaustion.

The curse stops after a minute. Yuuji just realises that, looking closer, a slight veil of steam rises off of him, snow melting underfoot, and cold air shocked by the skin. Stupid curses being weird in their biology, Yuuji would do anything for a blanket right now.

Except whatever this was. Anything but this, he thought, hair in the snow.

He’d blinked, and he was on the ground, cold and wet seeping into the clothes he’d been given, losing feeling in the skin on his back due to the frigid temperature of the ground. But above him was purely warmth, a thick blanket on a winter night. Except this time, it was a curse two times his size and much heavier for it. 

He kicks up, legs grappling with a thick waist and keeping his toes away from the teeth of the extra mouth, arms twisting under the hands holding them down. Soon, he gets underhanded and kicks as far as he can, aiming for the curse’s crotch. He misses, purely because the curse rocks back slightly and avoids him completely. Yuuji snarls at the smug face above him, chains clinking when his struggle pauses. “Done?”

Yuuji readies spit in his mouth, but clearly something on his face gives him away as the curse brings one of many hands down over his mouth, smothering him with one grip. He can barely feel his hands in the cold, even as they twist savagely into the fabric the curse wears. 

Yuuji’s head thrashes, neck straining as he attempts to rip the hand off him so he could finally see something other than outrageous smugness on the curse’s face. Over a second of deliberation, Yuuji decides to shift enough to get his jaw slightly free and bites down into warm flesh. 

With his teeth wedged between the gap between the thumb and the pointer finger, Itadori flicks his gaze up as he tightens his jaw.

It takes a second for blood to spew into his mouth from where his incisors dig into flesh harder than bone. He doesn’t get a chance to wonder why the curse didn’t rip his hand away before the blood sinks to the back of his throat in one torrent flood and chokes him. 

His teeth release all at once, only getting the chance to cough once before the same hand he’s mutilated settles like concrete over his mouth. Desperate confusion lunges inside him as he thrashes once again, this time out of desperation rather than fury.

Copper, burning and rotted, swirls on his tongue like bitter alcohol. Yuuji can’t get a breath in from where his nose is pinched shut. His lungs revolt and his gag reflex kicks, yet Yuuji can’t do anything with the hand still over his face, leaking red all over his cheeks from the quickly-sealing cut. 

Swallowing it felt like losing a battle he hadn’t known he’d joined. 

 Sukuna chuckles lightly, and when he deems it, he takes his hand off of Yuuji’s mouth.

Yuuji uses the opportunity to intake air through it, gasping slightly, eyes burning in fury and sincere disgust. From the back of his throat springs an ache that he can’t itch, blood settling heavier than cement in his stomach. “Get off.” He growls, bucking up against the curse’s belly once again, trying to dig in, to find a soft spot. It’s futile, but he’s determined. 

A ferocious headache blooms over his temple, fueled by the gross tang of metal still on his tongue, and sloshing uncomfortably in his stomach. He hadn’t known the curse could bleed so much. On instinct, his tongue darts out to clean his lips, sticking together from dried blood. Immediate disgust repels him from doing anything more, but the satisfied look the curse above gives him is enough for him to settle on fury.

His head feels like it’s snapping in two, breaking under the force of the copper bar forced down his stomach. Like headaches piling on headaches. Blinking does not clear it, only seems to intensify the longer he thinks about it, so instead he refocuses and tries to ignore the ache between his temples. 

“I don’t think I will.” The big galomph muses, an airy laugh in his voice, before collapsing the rest of his body weight over Yuuji’s smaller frame. The action takes the wind out of Yuuji’s lungs, and he strains to breathe in again. Reduced to a wheezing body under a titan of mass. The urge to bark for the curse to stop was strong, only obstructed by the fact that he currently had no air to speak with. Instead, he thumps a fist against the man’s ribcage.

A sparking rumble echoed through Yuuji’s chest, starting from the body above him and reverberating through all of his limbs. Sukuna is chuckling, clicking his tongue at Yuuji’s pathetic attempts at escape. A share of mercy seems to pass through him as he relents, and Yuuji sucks in a gasping breath. Which was immediately used to insult. “Asshole!”

“Hah!” Sukuna shifts until he’s overtop of him again, peering down with the blood of thousands in his eyes, turned sickly sweet as soon as they land on Yuuji. Anger curls inside his ribcage and demands repentance, yet Yuuji’s strained limbs lack the energy to fight back. For now, at least.

“Such a blaze.” Sukuna murmurs, something disgusting settling in his gaze, something that makes Yuuji want to dig into the centre of the earth to get away from. The curse lowers his head until he could peer at the boy from the side of his gaze, blazing red too close to amber brown. Tufts of dark peach red mingle with Yuuji’s lighter hair, blending in a gross gradient of pastel red. 

Yuuji used to like his hair; it was different, unique from the usual black or brown. The first day he saw the curse’s true hair, Yuuji had wanted to rip his own out from the roots.

“I love you.” The curse whispers, like dropping the sun on his head. A terrifying, empty horror blazes through every bone in Yuuji’s body at once, a dawning terror gripping every cell of his being as his stare sinks daggers into the curse’s skin. 

What?

The curse isn’t looking at him, from where his vile breath blankets over Yuuji’s shoulder, from where their cheeks nearly brush against one another. Tattoos on a scar. 

The snow wasn’t as crisp as the deep, sinking dread smothering his being. 

“No.” Yuuji breathes, nearly inaudible in his panic. But the curse’s ear lay right next to his mouth. Sukuna shifts, dark peach parting from cherry blossom locks as his head tilts to make eye contact. Hot air spreads across Yuuji’s cheek, too close for comfort. No, comfort was lost weeks ago; now there is simply disgust.

Yuuji’s face twists into a grimace, and he averts his stinging eyes away from the face of the man he hates. When Sukuna talks again, Yuuji can feel it in his skull. 

“I’m sorry.” Spoken close and desperately against the side of Yuuji’s face. Yuuji feels sick.

“I hate you.” He practically wheezes, fingers curling into white-knuckling fists where they grasp at the crumbling snow, tethering himself to the ground through the dying grass under the ice. Desperate for reprieve, but given none. Something about all of it seems so incredibly off.

The curse doesn’t repeat himself. Yuuji lies in wait for a trap to snap over him. Nothing comes, only the bruising cold underneath him and the endless sky above to bear witness to their pocket of insanity. “What are you fighting for?” The curse asks again, a mimic of the earlier question in a much more sombre voice.

Yuuji only hesitates for a second before blurting the first thing that comes to his mind, unwilling to submit to the idea of giving up. “Fushiguro.” He quietly snaps, barely a breeze in his sails. It was better than nothing, yet the name sounded like nothing in his ears. Who-?

Something dark and twisted surfaces on the curse’s face. “No point in fighting for the dead.”

Yuuji cannot see Sukuna’s face. Yuuji is stubbornly staring at the treeline away from both of their bodies, at the black sky that slipped between the nearly invisible treetops. Yuuji does not, will not, react. He will not let the curse think he’s getting to him. Yuuji’s face remains blank, watching the snow fill in. 

“Brat,” Sukuna utters, softer than Yuuji thinks he’s heard it before. “Why are you angry?” He asks, like probing for a reaction. But there’s something in the curse’s eyes that makes it feel like a question beneath a question. Why?

Fury swallows everything else like the roar of a bonfire. His teeth knash together, and his tongue spits fiery rage at the man’s face, meeting blood red with the rage of Yuuji’s sun. “Why?!” His vision tunnels, rage so snapping and vitriolic that it drags him down into a pit and thrashes him, urges him to do the same to the curse’s throat. Urges him to wrap his hands around a neck and squeeze, to land hit after hit until he can’t recognise the curse above him. He wants it so desperately that it makes his lungs collapse and expand in excruciating breaths, and his face descends into deep-seated, poppy red under sun-kissed skin.

“Because-!” He cuts himself off when his mind blanks. 

Why?

Because he hates the curse. He hates with his entire chest, and he would scatter him a thousand times over and leave him for the surface of the sun to devour. He needs to see pain etched into Sukuna’s skin; he needs to see genuine fear replace his infuriating smug look. Yuuji needs to see Sukuna’s heart clenched in his fist, to watch it sputter and die under his own fingers. Did he really need a reason?

Why?

Somehow, the question plagues him, and no answers come forward. The curse tips his head forward, intent on watching Yuuji struggle beneath him. “Because?” The curse echoes, attention split and divided and centred all on Yuuji. Foreboding expectation layered in the pits of his pupils. 

Doubt crept up like corruption into Yuuji’s mind, before he could lose too much confidence, he retorts with the hot thing that bubbles in his chest. “I hate you.” He seethes, this time poised to answer the question.

The curse hums, an insidious amusement crawling over his mouth, one that further breeds the doubt in Yuuji’s mind. “Why do you hate me, my love?” He purrs, sickly sweet, like candied sugar coating a scorpion.

Nothing surfaces when Yuuji prompts it. Not even a scrap of knowledge. Why was he angry? Why did he hate him? A blank gap swallows his memory; nothing to pull from that could answer his questions, not even a hint. Like forgetting where you put something important, except it’s half of your memory. Yuuji panics. 

Why? He hated so abhorrently, but why? Yuuji’s throat constricts on itself, his trachea thinner than a needle prick. Air does not come to help answer his questions; his heart does not stop its thunderous beat inside Yuuji’s chest. The world swirls around him, turning red as the panic mounts and grips him from every direction, swamping the anger in its entirety. 

In hindsight, the high-pitched croak that came from his mouth would have been embarrassing had he not been on the verge of a breakdown. What was wrong? What was missing? Why did he hate this person so much? What did he do? What did Yuuji do? Why couldn’t he remember? 

Manic fear rips his hands to his head, gripping tufts of hair, trying to ground himself amongst the turmoil. There was nothing, not even a speck. How did he know the curse’s name? How did he know the curse at all?

Hands grip his arms, tugging them away from the death-grip they had on his skull and pulling them close to a warm chest. Sukuna was shushing him, asking him to breathe for a minute. Yuuji tries to comply, suddenly utterly confused by the anger that pours in him like water from a leaky faucet. He was still angry; he still hated. Why?

“Better.” Sukuna murmurs as the world stops splitting in two under Yuuji’s eyes, and his throat tears air through it in an agonised breath. The next minute was spent trying to wrangle Yuuji’s breathing under control, counting the seconds as his chest tried over and over again to reignite the surge of panic every time he remembered the gap in his memory.

His chest hurts, but he powers through until the sky looks like the sky again and the man’s face materialises in front of him.

It had changed since he last saw it. Where shallow concern lay, underneath amassed latent, ungodly wonder. Yuuji knew this face; he knew those tattoos. Where?

“It’s okay now,” The man breathes, sharing what must be his version of joy, and with a growl in his voice that froze every vein in Yuuji’s body, spoke softer than the fall of the snow around them, “my little sorcerer.”

Emotions cancel each other out until all that is left is confused numbness, one that gnaws on his instincts, begging him to do something. If he knew what he was supposed to do, he would have done it already. Instead, he lets the curse move him like a doll as everything swirls into a messy, confused stupor. Barely able to tell apart the snow from the sky from the estate's grounds. Barely able to tell apart the fires of Tokyo from the lovesick look in the curse's eye.

Yuuji barely moves when Sukuna rips him up from the sodden ground and spins them as if they were performing a macabre dance. The vapid confusion that warred with an alien grief kept his limbs still and pliable. And Sukuna’s mouth meets Yuuji’s dead one in the open field. 

 “I love you.” Is spoken against his numb lips. Yuuji barely has it in him to react like he had before. Why?

He doesn’t get an answer.

Yuuji stares at a familiar wall. 

He knows it well because he’s been living in this room for days. The grey colour and the subtle scratches lining the side. He’s seen this wall over and over again every time he wakes up. 

Yuuji is confused. The kind that circled like an ache in his chest and gave him a headache. 

He feels wrong all over, like his soul is a storm off to the side, taking everything he has with it. His mind and spirit forgetting their balance, misaligned with each other and repeatedly multiplying Yuuji’s confusion. What is wrong with him?

Behind him, Sukuna stirs slightly, enough to make Yuuji’s limbs plank and for the grip around him to tighten subtly before it loosens. With four hands, the curse had much farther reach than he, as Yuuji lay in a tomb of limbs surrounding all sides. 

When the curse is still again, Yuuji lets out an anxious breath and agonisingly coaxes his muscles to loosen one by one. The sheets are comfortable, he thinks. Focus on anything else. 

Every time he tries to retrieve more memories, they seem to slip from his grasp more easily than the wind. Distant words on his mouth, familiar feelings in his chest, escaping through a crack he is blind to. 

He had been angry earlier today; he had been throwing a fit with his pillow as his victim, yet concepts that had been so easy to grasp in the moment eluded him now. He tries to approach the concept, to reach the same agony-filled feelings from before. 

Yet, almost like a second party in his own brain is working against him, it grows foggy and intangible as soon as he tries. Incapable of being grasped. It crumbles in his hands. Frustration sparks, and it's all he can do is not throw hands with the wall in front of him. He can't move, so instead his muscles tense and his hands grasp for memories in the air that aren't there. Desperate. 

Yuuji is so incredibly tired. 

Something feels so incredibly wrong to be resting in bed with Sukuna, to be encased in limbs and held so close to his slumbering chest. Yuuji should drive a knife through his chest, but he doesn’t remember why, and that thought terrifies him. 

He tugs the blanket closer to his chest, mildly praying that it wouldn’t wake the beast behind him. Some part of him was still defiant to the curse in any sense, even the warmth he granted Yuuji through their shared touch. 

Yuuji was forgetting something. That was the feeling triggering his frustration. Like having only half the puzzle at your disposal, the image being blurry and spotty. Yuuji grimaces and digs further into his own brain, clutching the blanket in a white-knuckled grip to ground himself to the bed.

As far back as he could remember, Yuuji had a grandfather; he knew that. He went to school with Sasuke and Iguchi, and he participated in the occult club. Yuuji wasn’t a great student, but he had the attitude to make up for it. But he didn’t stay there. Where did he go? 

Sorcerers, curses. Cursed energy. Definitions floating in his head with no base. How did he learn these things? He hadn’t learnt about any of it in class, and he felt like he sure as hell would have noticed if it was in the curriculum. 

Something in the back of his mind nagged him incessantly. It cried out for something, lashing his skull and turning his frustration into a headache. He was forgetting something. What? What was he forgetting?

“Calm.” The lazy drawl of the curse at his back brought out of his mind sprawl with a start. He hadn’t noticed that Sukuna was awake. Did he even sleep?

After a second of anticipatory silence, Yuuji willed his muscles to untangle in his limbs, his back to straighten, and his breathing to resume. After a minute of forcing his body to his will, Sukuna seems content. Yuuji can feel the heaviness of his gaze lift, and the tension around his heart loosens on its own.

It wasn’t exactly easy to relax with a predator sitting at his back, with its hot breath washing over his neck.

Yuuji forced himself to refocus. Forced his gaze back to the wall.

Yuuji went to school, like any normal kid. When did he stop? Yuuji had friends that he kept in contact with over the holidays. When did he stop? Yuuji didn’t hold grudges; he tried not to, at least. When did he stop? Yuuji knew who Fushiguro was. When. did. he. stop?

Somewhere near the end of Yuuji’s life, his memory draws a blank. The last parts of a painting torn off and burned before he could witness it. What was different? Would he even know? Remember?

Working from the start wasn’t working. Yuuji furrows his brows and closes his eyes, scars scrunching with his face, and recounts everything from now. Yuuji and Sukuna in the field, the dinner, Uraume, days spent in a room not his own, the trek to the estate he wasn’t wary of, the drag through the battlefield, the battle-

The battle. Who was he battling? Why, why was he fighting at all? Why was Tokyo on fire? Why was the Earth burning? Why were curses set free over Japan? 

Yuuji felt like screaming. It crawls up his throat, frantic to release into the air as loud as it could. Yuuji clogs it back down like a man desperate. 

It had to be somewhere in the middle, somewhere inside his grasp. If it wasn’t, Yuuji just might cry regardless of consequences. 

Sukuna, a weird presence in this new life of Yuuji’s. Somehow, a sickening kind of loving, betraying the fact that Yuuji didn’t know why it was repulsive. Like having both hands sunk in a pot of boiling honey. 

Uraume, practically an extension of the curse plaguing Yuuji. 

Who did he know other than them? Who else did Yuuji’s universe place on its axis? Sasuke and Iguchi were gone, whether they survived the curses razing Japan, or if they were simply a conjured image of Yuuji’s false life.

Only the gods knew the hour of night Yuuji was sunk in, whether it be closer to dawn than dusk. Yuuji can't sleep anyway, with dried eyes and a rushing mind. In the morning, Yuuji would have to get up and pretend like he wasn’t breaking apart. Like he wasn’t missing a fundamental part of himself. In the morning, he’d have to sit at a meal with the King of Curses –a title that held a chorus of voices uttering its words and not a single one that could be distinguished– and eat reluctantly good food and tea that left copper in his mouth-.

Yuuji’s entire body coils tight like a spring all at once, condensed enough to burn. The fragile beat of his heart stutters and spits in his chest. His lungs silently choke on nothing. Yuuji’s entire body freezes as his eyes snap open. 

That fucking tea. 

In a split second for a decision to form, Yuuji notices the curse at his back stir as if on cue. The weight of his stare crushing him like an anvil into the futon. This time, Yuuji would not ‘calm’. 

All the curse could utter before something started that neither of them could take back was, “Brat-”

And Yuuji flung himself off the bed. 

The ground lands beneath him, and his body is an extension of his soul, intrinsically combined and synced wholly as Yuuji twists and braces for impact. When his eyes find their target, the curse is already sitting poised over the bed, staring directly into his soul and ripping it apart with the knives in his gaze. 

Near breathless, Yuuji sneers. “You did something.” His hands balled into fists by his sides, the chain acting as a searing weight on his ankle, blocking every attempt Yuuji makes at summoning cursed energy. 

“A witless accusation.” Sukuna hums, though the easy lightness that had been apparent and irritating Yuuji for several days on end is missing from his gaze, replaced with a sobering intensity. 

“That fucking tea.” Yuuji rasps, fingers squeezing crescent moons into his palms. He watches as the intensity swimming in the blood red doubles in severity. Yuuji was fucking right.

“There is nothing wrong with your tea.” Sukuna chides, flicking only the primary set of his eyes in what could have been an eye-roll if you squinted. The curse was attempting to lie to him. Gaslight him.

Yuuji’s brain works twofold. The blood in the tea, the blood in his mouth from Sukuna’s hand. Something happened. “What did you do?” Yuuji snaps, his teeth clicking together in his rage. Every iota of his being vibrates in one easy thought. He forgot something. 

This time, Sukuna is quiet. Deathly still. A dark shroud hangs over his face, and Yuuji notices the suffocating cursed energy that hangs over the curse like a curtain spikes in annoyance. Yuuji’s jaw grinds his teeth together. 

“You don’t understand what you are talking about.” He finally says, one hand landing on the futon, and then another as the curse approaches as if Yuuji were cornered prey. Slowly and with poised intent.

“Then enlighten me.” Yuuji sneers, dropping into a stance with his fists raised. If he could, they’d be charged for a punch, but the manacle practically stings on his leg. He knows he stands absolutely no chance, that any second his head could be severed from his shoulders. But who even is he without his memories?

A second passes, stuck in a tense stand-off as Sukuna chews on his teeth. Yuuji is prepared to throw hands, regardless of who would win. He just needs a warm, bleeding body to land his fists in. It doesn’t matter if it ends with him dying anymore, had it ever?

“Whatever it is you are concocting in that compact skull of yours is null. Nothing is wrong. You’ve been stressed lately. It must be affecting your capacity to think.” Sukuna’s voice rumbles like hot coals; they burn on Yuuji’s skin like rage incarnate. Yuuji feels his fists tighten. Did the curse just call him ‘stupid’ twice?

“I’m thinking fine!” He snaps, hoping to crush the curse’s words in the air with his teeth. “I can’t remember how I know you. I don’t remember the last six months of my life. I don’t remember how I know Uraume.” One after another, they tumbled out of his mouth in a growl, slowly gaining confidence.

The next comes out as a snarl from deep in his chest that shakes his ribs and makes his eyes sting. “I don’t remember who Fushiguro is.” 

The curse is silent for a mere moment, Yuuji notices something curling thick and indescribable buried deep in the curse’s expression, or perhaps amongst the shroud of his cursed energy. “You must have hit your head.” 

Does the curse take him for an idiot?

“Don’t lie to me!” Yuuji seethes. He crumples the melancholy feeling in his chest that surfaces at that unfamiliar name, one that burrows into his core, and instead turns it into fury. Hopefully, whoever it is, is okay and hasn’t ever met the blasted curse before him. “I can’t stand here and pretend like everything’s fine! I can’t play this confusing game of house with you when I can’t remember where I’ve been for months!” 

The curse is quiet. Yuuji’s face feels red. He doesn’t really notice the curse’s approach in his fit of anger.

“I don’t know why I know you! I don’t know why I hate you!” Yuuji’s head aches from how loud he’s yelling.

 “I don’t know why every time I look at your face, I cannot describe the need for your blood to be shed on my hands, or for your last breath to be because of me." He feels like he's breathing through a straw, face red and desperately trying to get somebody, even him, to understand. "I don't know why I need you buried beneath the Earth's core, burning.” 

"You swoon me." The curse chuffs, somehow, a smile on his face despite Yuuji's anger. Who is he? Why does he not care that Yuuji would have him dead a hundred times over?

"Answer." Yuuji growls, shaking with the effort, trying to ignore the curse's advances for now.

“Side effects.” Sukuna simply says, Yuuji barely notes how he’s standing off the bed and much closer to Yuuji’s face. It’s fine, Yuuji would need to get up close and personal to beat the shit out of him anyway. 

“Of what?!” He practically shrieks.

“You were hurt in a recent battle. I admit I’ve been asking Uraume to add another ingredient to your tea.” A hand comes up to brush around Yuuji’s ear. Startled, Yuuji flinches, the hand stills but does not leave, and Yuuji doesn’t know how to feel about it. “Only for your own health. Your skull was injured, and you needed additional help with healing.” 

Something about it rings like a lie, but Yuuji doesn’t know if he trusts his gut instincts anymore. Instead, he finds the most plausible gap in the story and bites at it. “Why didn’t you tell me, then?!” 

Sukuna simply tilts his head, an odd action when he towers over Yuuji so easily. The image of a dog doing the same doesn’t fit well. “I figured you were already dealing with so much, you didn’t need to feel belittled by me further, love. Wouldn’t you have just insisted you were fine and continued on with your injury?” The curse’s words sound velvet-laced, soft and easy to digest. Easier than the fire burning in Yuuji’s stomach.

He hates how that sounds like something that he’d do. Probably done before. Has done before. 

“Who is Fushiguro?” Yuuji asks with the last flickers of the fire. 

There is a contemplative look on the curse’s face before uttering in a quiet voice. “Your friend, killed in the battle.” 

“The battle.” Yuuji mutters, exasperated. This battle he cannot remember. 

“A battle between those trying to keep us apart.” The curse says easier than the sun’s glide across the sky. Easier than a bird to air, a fish to water. Something in his voice is softer than the softest furs. 

Yuuji stutters, brain splitting apart beneath the curse’s hands in his hair. He closes his eyes tight and tries to block the world out. He just needs a moment, just a moment to think. 

There’s a quiet ‘no’ escaping through the gap of his lips. It’s wrong. All of it is wrong. Why can’t he remember? “I hate you.” He says quieter than the wind, trying to pull away, but the curse keeps his grip gently in his hair and Yuuji crumples into himself.

“I hate you.” He says, gaining some confidence, even if it’s shallow. “You’re a plague on my mind, a sickness. I hate you. Why?” 

“Maybe. But I’m your sickness.” The curse mutters like syrup. Yuuji’s gaze snaps to the curse, genuinely baffled. 

“You have something wrong with you.” He croaks, gaining back some of the anger, even if just a shred. Because actually looking at the man’s face somehow always makes him angry. 

“Perhaps.” The curse says easily, still smiling. 

“You are ill. You’re a scourge.” A word comes to mind unbidden and leisurely. “A walking calamity.” 

Sukuna laughs. Yuuji feels the anger briefly roar. 

No thought is taken when he lunges at the man, fist raised in the air and hits him square in the jaw with the force of a truck at highway speed.

He grunts as they both hit the ground, Yuuji caging the man beneath him to the unforgiving wood, his knees subtly hurt, but it’s nothing compared to the torrent of feelings in his chest. His lips form a snarl unbidden, and Yuuji makes sure to lean his weight on the man’s chest to keep him pinned, his gifted clothes tucked between his legs. His hand raises again, threatening violence with it's mere presence. The curse doesn't even blink, doesn't even seem affected by the fact that Yuuji just hit him with enough force to cripple a concrete wall.

“I can’t remember,” He sneers in Sukuna’s face, so incredibly desperate that it rolls off his shoulders in waves. “How do I know you?” Why do I hate you with every fucking breath I breathe?

There is something horrible on the curse’s face, something like adoration. Something like love. But, he just threw the man to the floor, and that can’t be right. Curses can’t feel love. And yet how does he know that? From where?

The curse’s lips form a jagged smile, crooked and framed in inky black tattoos. Yuuji already fears the response before it leaves the man’s lips. “We are wedded.” He says like he’s uttering something truly magnificent, like he’s boasting his greatest triumph. “You are my husband.” The man says with such finality that it’s hard to find even a single line of fault in it.

Something in Yuuji shakes to the core. He doesn’t know what it is, not anymore. But those words bring a horror he couldn’t describe, one he couldn’t explain either. He hated this man, but he was married to him? No, his brain is splitting into two. He’s falling apart. 

“What.” He shakily speaks, hands balled on hardwood beside the curse’s head. Dark peach hair is splayed like a halo on the Sugi wood, somehow looking like a fallen angel, the devil overtop of him, threatening destruction. Yuuji cannot comprehend the world correctly; it splits and falls into a dozen realities, and Yuuji is helpless to it.

That can't be right, that can't be it. That cannot be the answer. Yuuji feels reality splinter in his hands, warping and curling like burnt paper. Yuuji cannot breathe. It hurts to think about it, it aches like a pulse in his temple. Yuuji cannot think; it hurts to do so. This is all wrong. How did it come to this? Yuuji was not married; he wasn't going to get married. Why would he-? With him-? Yuuji doesn't even know him; who does that make the wrong one? 

A new ache arrives at his chest, this one uncorrupted by natural means. Completely and utterly brutal in the way it ethereally and single-handedly tilts the whole world on its axis. His vision goes white-rimmed, his skin blazes under the man’s gaze and in every point of friction between them. Yuuji falls apart from mere words. 

Yuuji feels his heart shatter. 

Sukuna watches him, watches as Yuuji falls apart on top of him, as Yuuji can barely keep his arms underneath him. A tattooed hand brushes past Yuuji’s cheek, and this time, he barely flinches, mostly because he's dived head-first into a mental breakdown. 

The hand splays across his face, curling softly cruel around his ear and jaw, thumb brushing past a red-lined eyelid. His hand is rough, black nails kept securely away from damaging skin. Yuuji feels betrayed by his own emotions. He hates this man. Why? Why would he ever hate the person he married? How did he end up marrying a curse in such a short amount of time?

Two more hands come up from the curse’s torso, perfect replicas of the first that circle around Yuuji’s shoulders like an attentive vice, aiding his stance, making sure he doesn’t collapse with quiet nudges. It fits what the curse had said about not wanting to be in Yuuji’s face about helping him so well that Yuuji almost physically recoils. 

Somehow, in a part of Yuuji that denies it vehemently, he is comforted by the gesture. Warmth spreading through his face, through his chest, thawing out the ice there. He's so tired, and the heat sears against his heart and settles curled around his chest like a hug. Yuuji desperately refrains from melting into it, trying to remain stiff.

Yuuji’s head breathes pain, fire down his skull, a pounding ache like hammers put to his temple. He’s sweating, he realises, what is wrong with him?

Yuuji's husband. The word is foreign; it stings on his tongue for reasons unknown. 

“I love you.” The curse mutters softly-sweet. Yuuji starts to think the man is trying to worsen his headache at this rate. His arms tremble with the effort to keep himself up, to avoid practically straddling the curse on the floor. “I have never loved any being but yourself. You should know the accomplishment that you hold.”

“Stop.” Yuuji squeaks, rough as if sandpaper lines his throat. He wants to slam his balled hands into the curse’s face, he wants to separate the man into a thousand forgotten pieces, devour everything that he is and keep it in the sepulchre of his chest, where it won’t infect anyone else. He wants to split the man apart with his hands and bury him in a star a thousand fathoms deep, where he could hear the torturous screams from above. Yuuji does none of this, not when he feels like absolute shit for wanting to do so. 

How could he hate someone who loves him? Yuuji never thought he would be so low. The guilt tides over the anger, bringing with it a desperate, poisonous confusion.

“I will not. I have waited much too long to say it.” What does that even mean? Yuuji’s head thrums. 

The red in his water, the copper in his tea. Yuuji feels sick, he hates the person he was supposed to love?

“I’m sorry.” He breathes before he can even process the words. Something in his chest squeezes tight, tight enough that he nearly chokes on it. A smile splits Sukuna's face, the curse grinning like a maniac in a way that surfaces age-old fear along the lining of Yuuji’s stomach. The wooden-like plate over half his face stretches with his tattoos from the force of it. 

Yuuji feels sick. “You do not need to say such a thing.” The curse is still grinning, a fiery glint glows in his eye, exasperated by the sliver of light coming in from the open door to the engawa. “Everything will be fine, my love.” He chuffs like it’s a promise. Yuuji lets the guilt take over, swallowing whatever doubt crawls like a pest in his brain. He’s still confused; some things don’t make sense. But the familiarity at least checks out; the anger simply confuses him further.

The hand on his face brushes over his cheek, but then catches slightly on something. Yuuji barely notices, stuck in a whirlwind of emotions, but he does take note of the curse’s gaze snapping to it quicker than a predator on prey. The thumb rubs over it once more and comes away with colour tinting it. Sukuna’s gaze is still at his cheek, but his mouth parts in raw wonder. 

“How long have you been hiding this?” The curse breathes, his other hand coming to Yuuji’s other cheek and repeating the motions with a certain open reverance that leaves Yuuji breathless. Caught like a ship at sea, at mercy to the tides, Yuuji follows the curse’s train of thought and sneaks a hand to brush over the same spot.

It’s sensitive, hurts slightly if he pushes too hard. Yuuji doesn’t remember this, but that has long been a non-surprise. He tugs at the feeling and startles silently when his vision nearly doubles. 

Sukuna’s expression somehow gets worse, and Yuuji can see every detail of it with the third eye open on his cheek. He doesn’t remember that. Last time he checked, he only had two. But, as the fourth opens on his left cheek, blinking a couple of times to settle the weird blur, he finds it’s hard to panic with how precious Sukuna is treating this development. 

“Concealer.” The curse murmurs, rubbing off the last of the dried liquid and letting the full glory of the eyes blink open. Yuuji’s headache only increases with the extra input. “Why would you keep such a thing secret?” 

Yuuji just shakes his head. He doesn’t know either; he didn’t even know they were there. Once again, he agonises over the lost memories. Something he should know, lost out of reach. Four amber eyes blink at the curse below him, and Yuuji feels the curse rub carefully around them with a gentle diligence that clashes with his general mien. 

Yuuji stares down at the man with all of his eyes, and four similar ones stare back. They complement each other, he realises with a vague sense of mixed horror and wonder. Sukuna’s is a mirror to his, yet the shock is replaced with avid elation, warring with the blatant adoration on his face. It’s a weird mix on his stiff features.

“Brat,” The curse starts, and Yuuji is tugged out of his trance. “Every day you seem to further bewitch me.” He tugs Yuuji’s face downward, closer to the curse’s, and Yuuji follows like a sun to the moon, begging for a solar eclipse. “If you keep this up, I’ll never let you go.” 

Yuuji wants to yell; he wants to hate this man to death beneath him. I’m not doing any of this on purpose, he wants to scream. But Sukuna looks at him like Yuuji’s his whole world, the love of his life, and the anger makes a sickening little hole in his stomach and then dies there.

Ryoumen Sukuna, the living calamity, the King of Curses, leans forward to lay kisses lighter than a butterfly’s wings over Yuuji’s closed eyes. Yuuji doesn’t know where he learnt those titles, but he does understand the weight to them, the force of nature that lies content between his knees. His cheeks warm like a bonfire, and something in him cracks and shatters before he can even lift a hand to salvage it. 

“You don’t seem to know what you mean to me.” Sukuna smears the words against Yuuji’s eyelids, the secondary ones along his cheekbones. The one’s Yuuji’s had for his entire life stare down at the curse as he invades Yuuji’s personal space, and he’s sucked into the endless blood pools that spiral around a pupil blacker than a dead sun. 

“I love you.” Sukuna whispers against Yuuji’s skin, softer than flowers. Yuuji cracks and breaks, and something like brittle acceptance fills the cracks. Because he wouldn’t have married a man he didn’t love or even like. And that means he forgot about his husband, and yet he still so willingly loves Yuuji. As if he doesn’t care that Yuuji forgot. 

“Fire comes to me at will, and yet I can not beckon it to burn brighter than you. My Yuuji,” Something about his name rolling off Sukuna's tongue is unsettling, but Yuuji shoves it down where the anger died. “I hope one day you will say it back to me. I can wait.” 

It twists in Yuuji’s heart; he can’t stand it. “I’m sorry.” He says, quick and sure; so incredibly guilty. The curse shushes him quietly; it reminds him of the trek back to the estate, when Yuuji had broken down on the road. 

“Stay.” He shushes, kissing along Yuuji’s cheek like a lover. He supposes they might be. “We should go back to bed.”

In a daze, Yuuji only nods.