Chapter Text
When Yuuji’s life goes downhill, it happens in the stupidest way possible.
It’s because he loves loves loves dinosaurs. Studies them. Is insufferable to his spice (sing: spouse) about them.
Contrary to the popular belief— Yes he can study. He's spent ages curled over his dying laptop and clicking away page after page of prehistoric eras until he's either passed out or someone's dragged him off– metaphorically (Megumi) or literally (Kugisaki).
He could study and he studied because he loved them and he did because they were huge and magnificent and.. yeah.
He was at a prehistoric museum, looking at dinosaur bones, idly tracing one of them with cursed energy when the guide wasn’t looking so they’d last longer. And because it was cool, okay?
The world blurs. His stomach swoops like he’s dropped from the top of a rollercoaster, colors spiralling around him. There’s a brief moment of coherence where he thinks,
Oh. I’m fainting.
And then—
Fainting doesn’t feel like this.
He wakes because it’s so hot he can’t breathe.
Heat crushes down on him, relentless, his skin blistering and healing and blistering again under the automatic pulse of RCT. He reinforces his body with cursed energy on instinct, but cursed energy can’t create oxygen, and the air burns when it goes in, scrapes raw against the soft flesh of his tongue and throat as he tries to gulp down more.
But the air is wrong.
Too heavy. Too dense. It tastes chemical, rotten—like bleach, like rotting eggs.
He stumbles to his feet. His legs feel heavy, uncoordinated, like they belong to someone else. His vision keeps smearing at the edges, colors splitting apart into a kaleidoscope haze before snapping violently back into place.
It stabilizes enough for him to see red earth stretching endlessly around him. Barren. Red.
For a moment, he thinks he’s in Sukuna’s innate domain.
But that can’t be right. Sukuna is dead. Yuuji killed him. Sukuna died—
Focus, Yuuji. Focus. Analyze your surroundings.
Yuuji drags in another breath of the dense, oily, wrong wrong wrong air and forces himself to look.
It’s not the domain.
The domain had been silent, broken only by Sukuna’s cruel voice echoing through it.
This place is alive.
The air vibrates with noise—buzzing, droning, clicking—like mosquitoes and flies amplified into something monstrous, layered so thick around him it feels physical.
Buzzing buzzing buzzing—
Breathe.
He can’t.
There’s no grass. The trees are wrong. Tall and sparse and unfamiliar, bark dark against a washed-out sky. Nothing looks natural. Nothing looks survivable.
His chest spasms violently. He doubles over and vomits black-red sludge onto the cracked earth. It pools there, thick and dark, leaving copper on his tongue.
The ground looks too red.
Everything is red.
RCT is trying. It’s healing him as fast as his body fails, but it isn’t enough. His bones ache like they’re being split open from the inside. His eyes burn. His lungs won’t contract properly.
And deep in his bones, in something older than instinct, Yuuji knows:
He’s dying.
No.
No, no, no—he can’t die.
He still has exhibits to visit. He still has to drag Kugisaki to them while she complains the entire time. He still has to hunt Fushiguro down and bully him into coming along. He still has to eat more overpriced museum ice cream.
He doesn’t want to die.
He digs his shoes into the wrong wrong wrong earth and screams through burning lungs, delirious and furious and terrified all at once.
“I refuse!” It comes out garbled from vomit and blood and delirium and
Something answers.
There’s a violent tug somewhere inside him, deep enough to make his soul hurt, and suddenly the world is spiralling again.
Colors and not-colors fold over each other. Shapes split apart into wavelengths his human brain was never meant to perceive.
And in the center of all of it, Yuuji thinks, distantly, hysterically:
So this is what dying feels like.
He doesn’t die. Later, months later, with a child drooling on his chest, he clicks open his usual website to read about the Permian era and promptly drops his tablet.
The next time Yuuji wakes up, it’s because something small is eating him.
He jerks upright, gulping air greedily. Cool air. Damp air. Wonderful air. Air that smells like rain and soil and living things instead of sulfur and rot.
His head is spinning.
The creature startles, scuttles. Yuujis too busy trying to breathe to pay attention.
What the fuck was that?
Where is he?
What the hell just happened?
Was that some kind of cursed hallucination? A bad trip? Did someone spike his drink?
No, that’s impossible. The juice had been sealed, and he’d barely eaten all day besides overpriced vending machine chips.
And it couldn’t have been a domain. There hadn’t been even a trace of cursed energy in the museum. Yuuji had checked thoroughly. He liked dinosaurs way too much to risk curses near the exhibits. He’d practically scrubbed the place clean metaphorically and literally because the old janitor there was old and sweet and always gave him hard candy when he visited—
The creature growls.
The sound snaps Yuuji out of the trainwreck of his thoughts. RCT is still repairing whatever the hell just happened to his body and brain, but enough clarity returns for him to realize he’d grabbed the thing in his panic. He tries to blink away fog.
Only—
It isn’t an animal.
It’s a child.
A baby.
Four arms. Four eyes. Tiny blunt teeth clamped stubbornly around Yuuji’s severed arm.
There was an adequate response to this situation. Yuuji did not have it. He was too busy staring
Yuuji would know that soul in life and death. He knows it with terrible certainty, down to the marrow of his bones.
Sukuna.
The baby glares up at him while gnawing furiously on his ripped-off arm.
Yuuji’s last thoughts before passing out again are a loud, resounding:
What the actual fuck was happening?
In one of a zillion timelines, 285 million years after Yuuji's temporal technique doesn't activate;
A teenager with an obsession with dinosaurs and reincarnation mythos reads about the greatest paleontological mystery in human history to remain unsolved.
Deep within Permian rock layers, predating the emergence of dinosaurs by tens of millions of years, researchers discovered the fossilized remains of an anatomically modern human.
The scientific community spent the next century arguing over how a human being could possibly have died 250 million years before humans evolved.
No satisfactory explanation was ever discovered.