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Tonight, the world lies silently. The moon is a first quarter one, which matters little and he cares about less. It’s an interesting thing to note, however, that the celestial phenomena is the exact same as it was when his world got spun on its head in the very first place. Seldom does anyone in the surrounding land dare to approach his stately home as the boy without a name had.
His cursed energy had felt simple at first contact; burning and open in a way an open flame flickers, unrestrained by novelty rather than disregard. Inherently, different from his own. In practice, familiar. To say Sukuna’s interest had peaked would be a stark understatement. The lord of the land is not one for frivolous feelings gone undisclosed.
So, when this strange and simple-looking boy raps incessantly on his front door and glares holes through his skin, Ryomen Sukuna leans closer. The boy neither retreats nor looks away. Curiouser still, he leans in.
Ryomen Sukuna’s face is one remarkable to the unfamiliar gaze, with two eyes in bark and two eyes in skin, and yet the stranger regards the sight of him with a burning hatred quite unbridled. It is an expression of loathing usually reserved for those whose families he has slaughtered or livelihoods he has stripped of them, not young and starving boys who dare to approach his estate expecting no consequence.
“Sukuna,” he had greeted quite impolitely with two, human hands pressed against either side of the doorframe to prohibit the slider’s closing without his permission. The shaking of his appendages had betrayed the steely resolve, that impossible (potentially mislead) authority in his tone. As if Sukuna himself would allow one so far beneath him to command any portion of his proximity. “I’ve come to kill you.”
Well. As far as overzealous assassins come, this boy may have been the very epitome of foolishness. Never before has the Ryomen Sukuna been subjected to such horrible secondhand embarrassment, let alone by the hand of one meant to take his life. That said… he hadn’t appeared nearly as put-together, prepared to, or capable of executing his greatness without chipping the wood.
“You do not spark amusement,” Sukuna states plainly. Accepting the boy’s insolence for a moment longer, he leans against the wall of the genkan and raises a brow. “Speak, boy. Who sent you here?”
The boy flicks his eyes to the side briefly, as though searching for an answer in the wings. Sukuna smirks in reply, a sharp and grating thing that might have chilled any ordinary soldier. The boy, however, had kept his nerve.
“You do not even know the reason for your hiring,” Sukuna says, smirking mirthfully. “Folly does quite become you.”
His words must strike some unseen nerve, the invisible strings of a harpsichord which trills dissonantly in the silence that follows them. The boy furrows his brows tightly, scrunching the bridge of his nose like a folding of unclean drapery sent to be drowned and then beaten.
“I have my own reasons,” he replies indigently, gripping the doorframe harder, as if chasing his sudden irritation with a shot of clear and burning logic unbecoming of the actions Sukuna has witnessed of him thus far will give him the strength to press on, “for hating you.”
“Most do,” Sukuna replies easily, two arms crossed over his midsection while one he examines the nails of. “What of it? I have wronged you in some way, that much is clear. Have you not been sent here by your own misguided belief in your own capabilities? Lesser men have made smarter attempts to kill me.” He grins, leaning towards the boy slowly, like a creaking and falling oak. “And lesser men have died in my place.”
The boy grits his teeth, and Sukuna watches in bridled amusement at the whipping and untamed state of his cursed energy, a childish boon all things considered. For all its agitation is worth, the energy that coils within him is drastically disappointing in quantity.
“That’s what makes you so horrible,” the boy says silently, as though Sukuna’s blatant disapproval at his continued speech is physically palpable in the space between them. “You escape extermination like a roach even when death is all you’re good for.”
Sukuna hums in consideration. “And a weak and lousy excuse for adequacy such as yourself has inexplicably inherited the mantle, I take it?”
The boy grins. The expression is one of a tense grit, teeth hard-pressed like the mortar between a novel structure’s smooth and unfractured stones. “Yeah,” he replies quickly, quicker than one who has any brains to think with, grinning wider. “If death is what it takes, then death is what I’ll be.”
Sukuna kicks the boy out of his doorway and slides shut the door and then the bolt.
“The boy is a fool,” he convinces himself. “Nothing more.”
That familiar, snapping, taunting cursed energy burning on the other side of the wood suggests otherwise.
………
The boy returns not one week later. He feigns secrecy this time, at least, sneaking round the back of Sukuna’s estate and peeking through windows and the gap between the door and the wood paneling with all the inelegance of an amateur sleuth. Hazel eyes gaze into him, and although Sukuna has his back turned, he can feel them on his skin.
The feeling of being perceived is a phenomenon he has long become used to. Between the loathing glares of poor and dying paupers to the grating, icy stares of noblemen far lower than he, Sukuna is terribly accustomed to having all eyes on him. Even in the state they approach him now, from a considerable distance, and with the intent to kill in every measure, the feeling is familiar.
This insolent boy is not the first foolish human to seek him out for murder or for glory. Ryomen Sukuna is too used to the bitter glare of those he has wronged without remorse.
When the boy creaks open the back door of his estate, Sukuna cannot help but release a heavy yawn. He sets his mug down beside the fire and perches his chin on the back of his hand.
“Your work is amateur at best,” he laments, leaning into the sharp and sudden noise of an unnecessary gasp from behind him. “If you are to kill me, you must at least proceed with stealth.” He waves his unoccupied hand. “I will not kill you at this time. Go, now, before I change my mind.”
The back door slides shut with a windy, quiet whoosh.
………
Sukuna sees neither hide nor hair of the boy for quite a while, nearly two whole weeks by his count. This development means nothing to him. The foolish assassin has not become a constant nor a want in his mellow life, and Sukuna plans to keep it that way.
Despite the sudden chill in the air, he does not reside by the inlaid hearth as he often does these days. Instead, Ryomen Sukuna tucks himself away in his private quarters to script poems. A ceramic pot of tea sits at the top of his desk beside a chipping cup and a pile of precious washi, balled up and pitiful to look at.
He dabs his brush into a shallow pot of ink and sighs. The wet bristles drag across the page as he writes, words carving themselves–caligraphy–into the echoing silence of the empty paper. By flickering candlelight, a mad man’s sentiments do come to life.
This day, empty is
What semblance finds of me here;
all the daylight hours
Mean nothing to one who has
already become nothing
A bump at the other end of the estate catches his attention. Sukuna sets down his brush and resists the urge to smile. (Is this the challenger he has been awaiting so impatiently?) He stands from his desk and readjusts his robes according to the frumpling that comes from sitting down.
The moment Sukuna steps one foot out of his room, he notices something; something peculiar.
Despite the sound, despite his hope, he senses no unaccounted for sources of cursed energy within the expansive walls of his home. There is no whipping and wild fire that flicks to life upon meeting his scrutinizing gaze. Not even is there the calm and rushing waters of his own servant’s cursed energy; perhaps Uraume has retired for the evening in a place other than this. This sentiment is, perhaps, not as peculiar as it could be.
Ryomen Sukuna trails his hand listlessly against the panelling of the corridor as he traces down old ghosts towards the main living space. He spots the inlaid hearth to his left and the shut-tight and unassuming door to the right.
His tea utensils remain untouched, left stacked and tidy on the shelf just as he’d left them. Dead embers smoulder persistently, evading death in the silence even despite their lack of ample care. Sukuna hums softly, questioningly, at the state of everything being dustless, spick and spam, and exactly as he left them.
He takes one step further forward when he feels a sudden breath, hot and whispering on the back of his neck.
Sukuna twists his neck to the side, his left eyes turning with it, searching out the source of the displeasureably silent presence behind him. All that he sees is the dark and stretching hallway that he’d left behind in his gait, dark and reaching shadows stretching outward from the shallow glow of the candle on his desktop.
Copper, glowing, glints beneath his chin. And, in the matter of seconds, a sharp and thin needle has pressed itself past his skin, into his throat and the fabric behind.
“Sukuna,” the one whose perplexing return he had been awaiting speaks. “Good day.”
Ryomen Sukuna grins wildly at the boy’s words; blood presses past his gums, trailing in reddened rivers down his chin and the lackluster gore of his throat. “Brat,” he remarks, more lively than a dead man should, his spirit somehow revitalized by the foreign concept of being in the presence of death. “You’ve returned.”
The boy presses the needle deeper and deeper still; the side of his fist presses against Sukuna’s jugular like a collar fastened too tight. He raises his arm around Sukuna’s shoulders and jabs another pinpoint into the side of his neck. “Of course I did. I said I would kill you, and I will.”
Sukuna coughs out wetly at the additional impalement. He is in pain, this much is clear, and yet his smile only grows madder. “You will, will you?”
Foregoing wariness for the threat of losing his bearings, the boy hefts his feet off of the ground and allows gravity to pull him down. His hands remain tightly clasped around the needles in Ryomen Sukuna’s throat as he dangles there, digging in, and now downwards.
Sukuna sputters blood from between still-grinning lips and sighs. It’s a sad and garbled sound, with holes pierced through his trachea and the whistling, rushing air that accompanies his heavy exhale. It sounds like the sound made by someone who is really, truly dying.
The sound of it sends shivers down Yuuji’s spine.
“You have proven you are not useless, at least,” Sukuna remarks gravely as he reaches behind himself with his bottom two arms. “Foolish, surely, but not incapable.”
Yuuji grits his teeth as Sukuna’s hands grab onto his arms and dig in their claws. Blood soaks into his draping sleeves like the spreading of a milk or cream in a clear-brothed soup, but he remains in place. His target is still not dead. There is nothing else for him to do.
“Dismantle,” Sukuna commands, and Yuuji’s arms fall off at the shoulders.
The boy falls haplessly to the ground, writhing in pain, rolling side-to-side at the sudden and unexpected loss of limb. Wordless cries fall out of his mouth like the water of a rushing river, unending and unadulterated in volume.
“I’ll kill you!” he shouts out, like the lackluster rebuking of a man on death row with tears rolling down his face in a final ask or goodbye, “I swear I’ll kill you!”
“You are wrong,” Sukuna replies dryly, removing the weapons from his neck in two clean pulls. His neck stitches itself back together like it had never been impaled at all, and he clenches his fists around the needles until they bend under the pressure. “But at least you are confidently so.”
Sukuna bends down to the boy with no arms and regards the bent needles in his hands with distaste. He turns his hand to examine how his nails curve uncomfortably around the weapon and hums in contemplation.
Yuuji’s eyes widen; he kicks at the man weakly with legs that shake.
Sukuna stabs in deeply to keep them still.
The boy screams out once more.
“Confidence,” Sukuna remarks, twisting the mangled needle deeper still, “is something I can work with.”
………
Reverse Cursed Technique can hurt if the user deems it so. This is one of many things Itadori Yuuji learns during his first day at the Ryomen Estate.
He has two arms now, sure, but he isn’t so sure a night full of blood-curdling screams and literal ice holding him down had been worth it in the end.
“You will remain here,” Sukuna had told him upon his midday awakening, blocking wholesome sunshine from the wartorn eyes of a boy playing soldier.
“I will not,” Yuuji refutes immediately, because, hell no. He cannot do that; not now, not ever, and not under any circumstances whatsoever. “I will not stay here with you. You can’t make me.”
Ryomen Sukuna grins in the face of disobedience. This is a quirk of his that Yuuji is sure he won’t be encountering again any time soon; not if he has anything to say about it.
“You have no say in the matter,” Sukuna replies, voice even and light. It is the voice of someone who has already won a fight before the battle has even started, and while Yuuji stirs irritatedly at the unworthily omniscient tone, he feels nothing but dread deep within his gut.
He reels back anyway, pushing himself into a sitting position on the bare futon he has been given, glaring into Sukuna’s eyes with a fiery ire unbecoming of someone so young and otherwise full of life. “I won’t stay,” he decrees. “You can’t make me.”
Sukuna hums appreciably, pleasedly, as though he had been expecting his would-be assassin to say something to that effect. “You will,” he says, and his grin stretches wider. “Or I will kill you.”
Well. Keeping his life and living beside the worst evil he’s ever known (aside from ///////, of course), or being outright killed. With the options he’s been given, Yuuji picks the lesser of two evils.
“Yuuji,” he says finally, in a tense attempt at formality in the presence of discomfort. “That’s my name. Use it.”
Ryomen Sukuna hums in acknowledgement, curling his twenty fingers together in a fleshy abacus recalling the number of times he could count on one hand those who fought to remain in a living status after regarding him in such a displeasing manner. “Ryomen Sukuna,” he greets easily, the grin on his face sharp, all teeth. “Charmed, I’m sure.”