Chapter Text
Sukuna had been returning from taking the trash out when he met him. Their meeting wasn’t something as spectacular as a family reunion organized to welcome a new member into the family. No, their family had been broken from the start. Twin souls who were supposed to be inseparable lived different lives, one a puppet of love and the other agnostic to the concept. They hadn’t talked to each other in years now, which is why his presence takes him completely by surprise. He wasn’t even aware there was a child in the middle.
Twenty-three. Not quite an adult—not in the sense of someone who has figured out what to make of their life—and no longer a kid. That’s the age Sukuna is when he returns to his apartment with a kid on his doorstep wearing little else but a long scarf wrapped around his neck. The worn material loops down his small figure and into the ground, bottom edges dirty with a combination of soil and something else.
Sukuna breathes, the warm air condenses into visible flecks of moisture. It’s winter. Ten degrees out. Sukuna is wearing a T-Shirt and some shorts, slippers on his feet. But his body is grown, experienced across multiple winters with the natural developed resistance against associated diseases.
Crimson eyes catch sight of a crumpled piece of paper held between the shivering red fingers of a kid who couldn't be more than four or five years old.
Sukuna steps in front of him. When he peers down he discovers coral pink curls peeking out the bundle of synthetic fibers. It is the distinct hue shared between brothers of the same blood, conceived by a mother and a father—parents they never got to meet. That is his first hint, and the only one he needs to understand what situation he’s been dragged into.
He lifts an arm and snatches the note clutched between small fingers. He reads:
Keep an eye on him, yeah? - IJ
He slams the door open, startling the amber eyes the boy shared with his procreator, and sneers, jerking his head inside the apartment. It is winter. It is evening. Sukuna doesn’t have much of a choice. He will bring the kid down to an orphanage later that week. Not even six years old and already discarded. Tragic, but the boy wasn’t his and he refused to play nanny for another guy's seed.
Cold-flushed cheeks disappeared behind a scarf as the boy nodded in understanding and stepped into the genkan. The door swings shut behind Sukuna. There’s a click, the sound of a lock being put in place. The boy stands to the side, waiting to be shown in.
Sukuna storms past him and resumes with his daily activities.
He washes dishes, does the laundry, and follows his usual routine. It was a Sunday, he had work the following day. His recent acquisition was sitting on the couch, scarf still loosely hanging around his neck. After a while, the kid must have realized Sukuna wouldn’t be addressing him further. A mismatched sock stepped into the apartment, waited for a voice to be against his entry, and when it never came, he slowly treaded into a scarcely decorated living room with a single sofa. The boy climbed onto the piece of furniture and sat with legs left hanging on edge of the seat.
Sukuna ignored him and continued with his work. He didn’t hear or see another hint of movement until he was finishing sweeping the hallway. He turned around, feeling a pair of eyes watching him.
“What?” He said, detached and cold. The boy was standing in the mouth of the hallway with hands in front of him. There was a mutter, most of it was lost to the acoustical dampening of the fabric covering his mouth.
“Take off that piece of junk already,” Sukuna snapped, crouching down to pick up the accumulated trash with a dustpan. There was a rustle, Sukuna accounted it to the boy unwinding the scarf from his neck. Then he uttered again:
“I need to go potty”
“Other hallway. Right—” Sukuna glanced up, pointing to the direction of the bathroom when he noticed something on the boy’s face now that there wasn’t something covering it.
“What’s this?!” He hissed, shooting a hand out to take hold of him. His fingers dug into a pair of full cheeks. His skin was cold to the touch. Sukuna tilted his head from side to side, silently inspecting the thick black marks below his eyes. On the corners of each, where a line was close to reaching an eye, skin was peeling off to show the tender muscle underneath. He hovered a thumb over the mark, realizing it was a scab, one on each side of the boy’s eyes.
Sukuna’s eyes flitted down. The boy shifted in place.
“Mommy said it was for staring too much” He said, holding the scarf to his chest like the thing was worth more than a rag found in a dumpster in some random back alley. “She doesn’t like it when I stare too much”
“She did this to you?”
The boy nodded, fingers lifting to touch the marks. Sukuna held the hand away before he managed to.
“Don’t scratch at them even if they’re bothering you,” he said, taking the boy’s hand on his own and directing him to the bathroom himself. “Here. Give me that thing” he pointed to the scarf huddled between his arms, but the boy refused, clutching it tightly to his chest.
“It’s beaten and torn. It’s better if you don’t hold on to things like that or you’ll get sick” Sukuna tore it out of his grasp. He held a hand out to keep him from grabbing it again when the kid moved forward, hands reaching out for the old piece of fabric with a wobbly lip. The head pushing against his palm halted at those words.
“Mommy doesn’t like it when I get sick”
“So leave it. I’ll store it in a nice place for you, so go do your business” He motioned to the toilet and the boy finally relented. Sukuna closed the door behind him. He walked past the living room and headed towards the kitchen. He pressed a contraption with his foot and at the sign of a lid opening, Sukuna threw the old piece of scrap in the garbage can.
Sukuna’s face was free from any expression, but inwardly he wondered what the fuck his brother was doing with his life.
Soon after that, Sukuna was standing outside the bathroom door holding one of his T-shirts and a towel. He was staring at his fingers, rubbing off the grime that stuck to his nails when he had grabbed the scarf.
The boy was filthy. God knows how long he had gone without a proper shower. And here he was sitting on his couch and walking around his recently cleaned apartment in that state. Nothing he owned was expensive, but it was clean, and that was the only condition Sukuna had for anything entering his home. He lived a modest life. After all, he didn’t live in the best of neighborhoods, and he’d rather die scorched to death than to reward any burglars with anything of minimal worth.
The door to the bathroom opened to reveal a pink-haired boy. Sukuna edged past him and began fiddling with the water valves of his shower.
“Take your clothes off. You’re taking a shower”
When he was done, he placed the kid in the middle of the bathtub with a bucket of lukewarm water, a washcloth, and a bar of soap. He closed the lid of the toilet and placed his shirt and towel on top of it. He picked up the clothes on the ground and left the four-year old with a “Do the rest yourself” before walking off to shove the dirty clothes into his washing machine.
Sukuna finished cleaning up and even took out leftovers from his fridge to reheat for dinner when he went to check on the boy’s progress. He glanced at the clock, fifteen minutes had passed.
He stood in front of the door only to find the boy standing in the same spot he had left him, appearance completely unchanged from the last time he had seen him. Sukuna pinched his eyebrows together, a tone depicting impatience about to slip from his lips when he noticed that the boy was shivering. His cheeks were flushed pink and a bottom lip jutted out as fat tears rolled down his face.
Sukuna sighed, all emotion abandoning his body. When he spoke, his tone was neutral, void from the anger that had surfaced when he first had taken sight of him.
“I told you to shower earlier. What happened?”
“I–I I don’t kno…” An ugly nasally tone resounded across the tiled bathroom walls. The boy let out a noise, out of breath, soul-digging. He sobbed, a balled fist rising to wipe the tears away.
“‘You don’t’ what? You don’t know how?”
The boy shook his head, coral pink hair swiveling in the air.
Sukuna stepped into the bathroom, growing more exasperated by the second. “Didn’t your folks teach you how to do it? How don’t you know how to do something as basic as—” Sukuna let out a deep breath before retrying. “Did your mom or dad shower you… at all?”
“O—only on the days m-mom wasn’t busy”
Today was a weekend. Did the woman only shower him once a week? Sukuna reached over, dipping his fingers in the bucket of water. It was cold.
“Move to the side” He poured some water out before filling it again with more hot water to balance out the temperature. “Wait here” He said, walking out of the bathroom and returning with a stool in hand.
It was another fifteen to twenty minutes later that the boy finally exited the bathroom, dried and changed. The kid walked behind him with a T-shirt that was absurdly big on him. The fabric dragged on the floor with short sleeves that looked more like long sleeves by how they fell down all the way to his wrists, but at least the shirt was thick. Sukuna had half a mind to wrap him into something thicker, maybe a hoodie, but then the sleeves would be impossible to deal with. He didn’t have anything else to put him in while his clothes were still in the washing machine and he wasn’t about to leave him walking around naked when he’d already been exposed to the cold for so long.
Sukuna’s eyes trailed to the boy walking behind him.
“Go wait on the table” He pointed to a chair and left the boy to go switch the clothes from the washing machine to the dryer. When he returned, he served himself and the boy some leftovers.
The two ate in silence, seated on opposite ends of the table.
Sukuna would have to look into nearby orphanages tomorrow morning. The boy shared his blood, but he’d never been one to let the concept of family tie him down before. It was better this way. They would find the kid a decent home and attentive parents who provided the level of sensibility Sukuna knew he lacked. He wasn’t a natural caretaker and he refused to carry the regrets of an estranged brother on his back.
“Thank you for the meal” The boy whispered into his bowl with fireflies on his eyes. Sukuna stirred his own meal with a spoon.