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A gasp comes from the corner of the room, and Sukuna flicks his lower human eye to the side to see a small, pale ball crammed into the corner of the hall.
“Uraume,” Sukuna exhales, rage leaving his throat. They're alive. They seem unharmed. Their pink eyes, though, are wide, and terrified, and Sukuna realizes this is the first time the child has ever seen him like this. Yes, they've shared meals of human flesh before, but never has Uraume seen him take someone's life, bite into something alive, drench his hands with human crimson. Never have they seen him burn a village or a temple to the ground. Never has Uraume seen him for what he is.
He turns his head as well as all his eyes fully to the child, grip on the foolish and now-dead animal slipping. Its body falls, and Sukuna's hands all do the same. Uraume continues to stare at him, and the desperate shouts and the horrified screams and the howling wind and the roaring fire from outside this small room all coalesce into a smothering layer that blankets over them both in a deep, tense moment.
Sukuna prepares for cowering terror. I'm going to have to build a new icehouse, his mind absently whispers, disappointed.
The child is scrambling to their feet, running, because of course they—
…aren't?
Uraume, instead of sprinting past him for the exit, has crashed into Sukuna's torso, arms under his robe and around his back. Their face burrows into his stomach above his belly, and he freezes, all four arms twitching upwards with surprise. He can taste the salt in the air around their face with his second mouth, which Uraume seems entirely unafraid of. Sukuna might think they were even comforted by it, if the way they shudder and twitch forward at his startled breath from both mouths means anything.
“I'm sorry,” Uraume whispers wetly, trembling. Sukuna expects it to be followed by something ridiculous like, ‘please don't hurt me for failing you,’ but instead, he hears something arguably worse: “I didn't think you'd come. I— I tried to fight them off, I swear. They were just so fast, and I—”
Sukuna blinks widely, all four eyes, still startled. When he lifts one hand, Uraume flinches into him and tightens their hold like they think he's going to pull them off or push them away. “Uraume,” he utters quietly.
Uraume shakes their head against the hard planes of his stomach, still unbothered by the mouth there big enough to take off their head. “They dragged me, I swear. I would've bit, but they hit my head when I struggled, and I'm sorry for— for making you come all this way. I'll make it up to you, I promise, just don't— don't—”
Very slowly, so as not to startle them, Sukuna’s large, clawed hand comes up to rest on Uraume’s head. “Don't leave you?” he finishes quietly.
Surprisingly (or perhaps not), Uraume nods. Theyre still trembling.
Sukuna exhales slowly, carefully, calmly, and gently scritches his nails into the child's scalp the way he's noticed they like. There is, indeed, a lump on their temple, which he carefully avoids. "I told you to stay close."
"I'm sorry," Uraume repeats, shaking.
Sukuna… didn't expect this. Something in him rages at the unfairness of the whole thing, the unchangeable and miserable nature of it in every direction. Sukuna, being a pillar for someone, when he hadn't had the same. His own twinge of jealousy over it, at a child who hasn't the faintest clue. Uraume, neglected to such a point that they cling to him for fear of abandonment. Him. Something is wrong with the world if a child is clinging to the King of Curses.
He thinks, if they were people, their lives might be what others would call tragic. But they're not. Sukuna and Uraume are blights on the land, curses to their surroundings, walking omens of death who bring devastating environmental havoc wherever they go. They are, the two of them, irrefutably not people, though they bleed red like humans do. Ugliness is a sign of bad character, so the world says, and Sukuna, with his many deformities, and Uraume, with their pallid coloration and reddish eyes not so unlike Sukuna's own, the both of them with their monstrous nature marked in face and flesh, were deemed demons even before his cutting and their cold developed. Uraume's terror stems not from the abduction, nor does it come from Sukuna's wrath or his beastly bloodlust, of his hair-raising form or his endless appetite— What Uraume is scared of is Sukuna leaving them behind, of him growing cold and disdainful at their actions or cold and still at their involuntary hand.
If the two of them were people, this might be tragic. But they are not, and so Sukuna says quietly, beneath the blanket of desperate shouts and horrified screams and howling wind and roaring fire around them, “Do you remember my words to you on our first night as companions, about cowards and weaklings?”
Uraume sniffs. Nods hesitantly.
Sukuna trails his claws down to graze at the thin fuzz of white at the nape of their neck. They shudder, but not with fear, because they sag into him with what seems like tentative relief. “Good,” he says. Then, eventually, he forces himself to verbally reassert, “I will not leave you behind or cast you away.”
It feels wrong to say. Undignified. Weak. Verbal reassurances are beneath him. Still, the child lets out a singular, lung-deep heaving sob when he says it, and he can't bring himself to take it back.
Rather than say anything more, Sukuna simply lifts up Uraume with ease, keeps his eyes forward, and scritches their scalp again with a free hand as he turns to start walking back down the stairs of the accursed monastery, and they drift off with red-rimmed eyes.
Ryomen Sukuna is not a man fluent in conciliatory behaviors, or kindness, or honesty. He is not someone who participates in such trivialities as consideration for others, and he certainly doesn't do anything so pathetic as compassion, but the frigid little child clinging to Sukuna is an icy mirror of his own childhood, and Sukuna is a self centered man. It's nothing so low as empathy. He simply sees himself, that is all.
He wonders if maybe that makes it worse.
It hardly matters either way, though. Caring about this child wouldn't be a weakness even if he did, because he is the King of Curses, a demon, a monster, the strongest one of all. Embarrassment is something beneath him, so he holds both his head and his child high as he leaves the burning monastery behind. Uraume belongs to him— that is fact, and no one is permitted to take something from the King of Curses and live. They are his obedient little shadow, his pale and timid echo, his little reflection, his property. This action he takes, of gently holding a child in their sleep, is not a thing to feel shame over. He is a King, and a monster, and it is the nature of both to be selfish.