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Tranquility is a double-edged sword. Leaves rustle in the eminence of Autumn, every presence of a fading Summer inconsequential as they are uninhabiting in the region’s infinite, icy atmosphere. The sun gazes down upon him like a disinterested parent, flickering heat upon his silks like water to a stream, considerably unhelpful and constantly moving away from him.
Sukuna is not so used to being unregarded.
Regard, reverence, hatred; he’s used to experiencing myriadal facets of all these mortal things in every waking day of his life. Reliability, abandonment, loneliness: all taught-pulled notions; remnants of his solitary childhood in the east, none of which he has held hands with in quite some time.
He lets the warm breeze of the fading season wash over him; lets the chill of the coming solstice root him in place. Unbecoming, perhaps, is the act of ignoring the past as a forbidden archive left for time only to wander; for the future to bring to light in his stead. Impossible, in turn, is the act of letting it go.
Ryomen Sukuna, seated stonily on the snow outside his home, stares into the blank skies and cries. It’s an expression of mourning much unbecoming of a catastrophic act of nature such as himself; such is the life of a fool enraptured by the gympie gympie’s tantalizing touch.
He has no right to feel sorry for himself, not after what he’s done and who he’s killed. The regret of the past is something that also belongs to it. There’s no sense in grieving something he never truly cared for in the first place, let alone when he watched it burn and wither and die.
And yet, tears fall.
This isn’t really mourning… no, it couldn’t be. Loathing, potentially, or perhaps a deep-seeded irritation that burrows into place between his joints like a weed through the cracks in a path of inlaid walking stones. Regret, sure. Inconsequentially impossible grief for the loss of a sharpened tool left in the shed, unloved and unwielded.
But mourning? No. Ryomen Sukuna does not mourn, let alone miss the presence of a mutt he only cared for out of an unnamed obligation rather than sentimentality or necessity.
It’s been forty years.
Sukuna does not bother to wipe the tears away, halt them, or shy from the light of day. As unbecoming as it is that he may cry in the first place, it is unbecoming further still to acknowledge his unprecedented pain at all. Some might call this act of ignorance a true act of folly. He, however, will call it a necessity and leave it at that.
The final tethers of Summer pat at his back in a gale, attempting to rock him but making no headway. Sukuna smells the inherently disgraceful appearance of rot and decay on the horizon, and he breathes it in no matter how putrid the action. In a single act of inconsequential self-punishment, he breathes in deeper. His nostrils sting and his eyes water further, but Ryomen Sukuna has already accepted his melancholy as a consequence of his own perpetual folly, so he spares his physical reactions no regard.
The mind wearing a new man’s skin enters his field of view, and the miasmic stench settles into place around them. He does not appear as he once did before, with novel brass lenses and wiry, black hair pulled away from his face with a taught-pulled twine, but in the form of a man with more muscle mass than he deserves (albeit not much in total) and a face still as shrewd and conniving as the last. Perhaps a requirement for his peculiar cursed technique is the presence of an inherently punchable—hardly tolerable in appearance—face on his vessel
“Ryomen Sukuna,” the leech greets eagerly, bowing at the waist with hands tucked into draping sleeves in front of his face. This evil, too, presents himself in smooth and silken robes. “Good day.”
Sukuna’s top eyes remain fixated upon the sky, but he allows his bottom ones to drop down to the kitsune-cunning sorcerer with eyes that grin and lips that do not part for a show of teeth. All it is is simply a non-threatening gesture, an expression meant to lower guards and placate worries in the presence of far greater evils than the man himself is capable of consorting.
Sukuna regards his face with the even measure of a man misguided and self-scorned twenty thousand times over. Kenjaku only remains in place, grinning and stalking patiently; so is the scheming nature of a fox.
“What have you come to ask of me?” Sukuna questions flatly, not one for absurdly frilly gestures such as false courtesy when there is no reason for them.
“Oh, I’ve not come for anything of the sort,” Kenjaku replies easily, lowering his arms but not moving forward one single step.
Sukuna hums in regard to his blatant hesitation. He is a smart man, if nothing else.
“Really?” the lord asks, voice detached as it is disbelieving. “Then you’ve come all this way to walk back home. A pity.”
Kenjaku laughs lightly, and the sound rings around them. Like cotton, it stuffs itself into his unwilling ears. Like bells, it jostles his senses into a precautionary sense of betrayal and smoking incense.
“Quite right,” he agrees, which only warrants a disbelieving scoff in return. “I shall depart simply as soon as you hear out my request.”
“I am wholly uninterested in partaking in the mad schemes of a madder man, let alone in discussing them,” Sukuna replies with a sigh. He places his chin in his hand, an elbow on his knee even as his eyes remain glued to the heavens. “You may take your leave now, or forever hold your head.”
Kenjaku breathes out a hesitant laugh at that. Despite his hesitation and the commonplace certainty of his imminent death hanging over him should he outstay his shallow welcome, the sorcerer opens his mouth to speak.
“You miss him, do you not?”
His words hit Sukuna’s chest like a mallet to a beating drum. His blood thunders dangerously in his ears, to his eyes, beneath his skin, and he glares four red irises at the perpetually grinning man standing above him.
“No,” he says slowly, measuring Kenjaku’s insolence with squinted eyes. The man simply tilts his head like a rabbit hearing the wolf, and Sukuna feels deep ire towards the miniscule action. “There is nothing more he could have offered me. Even in death, he remains useless.”
Kenjaku hums appraisingly. “You speak much of him for one who holds no fond regard.”
“My words reveal nothing,” he replies evenly, as though hiding fluctuations in tone will bore the sorcerer enough to warrant his departure. “You are not unmistaken, let alone unmisguided.”
“Then did you not care for him as I am so inclined to believe?” Kenjaku asks him, stepping forward almost begrudgingly, like an unwilling man on his way to a preordained slaughter (or a young boy dragging his feet and glancing behind him with tears in his eyes and more in his throat, with deathbed words left unspoken and a will to save everyone left wholly unsatiated within his heaving chest).
Sukuna scoffs heavily. “I care for nothing,” he states factually, as if believing his own lies will make them true, or at least make the sting of hearing them in the cadence of his very own voice hurt less.
Kenjaku hums, unperturbed. “I see,” he says, voice drawn out and sullen as he draws spirals into the snow with the tip of his sandal. “Then you must not be interested in this.” He reaches into the folds of his robes, and every hair stands on the back of Sukuna’s neck in resonance.
Sukuna feels the hapless, wasted, dying, bent and twisted cursed energy before he even sees its source. Yuuji.
Kenjaku procures an object from his pocket. It’s a small, wrapped thing, pitiful as all get out, and yet. And yet. It’s too familiar to be a coincidence; that cursed energy which semblances nothing else and no one else other than him.
It’s a finger, bent and burned, and although marginally similar to his own, it is not his. It once belonged to a young boy named Yuuji. Sukuna knows this fact to be true as well as he knows his own name.
“Where did you get that?” Sukuna questions, voice stern and fingers curling in the fabric on his legs. “Have you gone digging through his gravesite? How have you managed to become madder than you once were?”
“Nothing of the sort,” Kenjaku replies lightly, as though being illy regarded as a graverobber is the highest form of praise he’s ever been given. He passes the wrapped object from one hand to another and watches in delight as the Ryomen Sukuna’s eyes follow its swaying motion. “I’ve had this much longer than I have known you, Sukuna.”
It does appear… shorter than most human fingers are.
Dread drops in Sukuna’s stomach like a seventy pound weight. He feels all the air burst out of his lungs without his permission, and his throat burns for it. “You mean to say…”
“You see,” Kenjaku continues, taking smooth and measured steps now, as he paces from one edge of Sukuna’s vision to the other and back again, “When young enough, the finger of an infant will continue to grow; that is, if only one portion above the knuckle is severed.”
It all clicks into place, suddenly, the reason why Yuuji had been “sent” to kill Sukuna in the first place. Their meeting had been preordained; this connection built and tore down with careful and measured hands. It–
“Things were not meant to end up as they did; at least, my son’s early death was not my initial intention,” Kenjaku says lightly. He shrugs and turns his head towards Sukuna, although he remains pacing, keeping his blood flowing, keeping his brain afloat. “The end does not precede the means, nor does it remain unjustifyable. He was always meant to die.” He grins. “We all are, in theory. Yuuji, well. If he did not find a way to make himself useful, I would; his death spells out the step towards a world full of sorcerers. He may have died a martyr, but his fate is not unbecoming. You understand this, yes? One way or another, his death would benefit me.”
Kenjaku turns the finger in his hand, appraising it with wide open hands. “Inevitable was his end, just as his usefulness too, is inevitable.”
“You would subject your own son to such a fate,” Sukuna questions flatly, his expression wholly unamused. “As though letting him rest is not something he deserves.”
Kenjaku claps his hands together, grinning cheerfully. “Of course! All in the name of science, I assure you,” he elaborates, as though his sins may be shredded into hapless strands with the sound of his own grating voice.
Sukuna scoffs. “Science means nothing when there is no one left to share your mad advances with.”
“Is that not why you remain here, speaking to me?” Kenjaku questions, his grin more irksome with his son’s finger held beside his face. He wags it back and forth like a dog bone and wishes for Sukuna to bite. “Do you not wonder what it is I exactly plan to do with what is left of him?”
He does.
“Tell me,” Ryomen Sukuna commands, raising his knee so as to prepare himself for a quick action at a moment’s notice should the leech’s answer dissatisfy him. “Speak, fox.”
“No, Ryomen Sukuna, you tell me.” Kenjaku grins. “Have you ever wished to see how the world will appear many millennia from now?”
………
“I will consider your offer. That said, there are things I must first accomplish; preparations to be made. Return in twenty years time. Then and only then will you have my answer.”
“Fine, then. Grow strong enough to find peace in this era for all I care. In two decades, when I return, nothing will be left for you here, and I’ll know just what to expect.”
………
“Your answer?”
“Yes.”
………
The next time Sukuna opens his eyes, it is to the sight of a crisp, night skyline that glimmers with lights far too low to be stars. It is, objectively, a beautiful sight. And yet.
And yet… This boy is named “Yuuji”, but he is nothing like the mutt he hoped to find here. Bitterness enraptures him.