Work Text:
The Bridge of Nagara's Pillars Endure
Yuuji does not usually fall into Sukuna's inner domain when Sukuna takes over. In fact, he never has. If not for Sukuna tearing out his heart and traumatizing Fushiguro for life in the process, Yuuji would have never known that Sukuna had an inner domain at all.
Usually, when he lets Sukuna take over, Yuuji simply ceases to exist. A part of him is conscious enough of it all to realize that things are happening around him and out of him, but not enough to make sense of it. He doesn't exactly lose his own physicality; he simply can't truly access it.
It reminds him of that period of his childhood, between the ages of six and nine, when he would sometimes feel an odd pressure in his chest and stop speaking or moving for a few seconds at random times. His Gramps would knock his head with his fingers and call him distracted, tell him to stop staring at nothing, when he saw it happen. It had only been a little quirk from a quirky little child until it started happening more often and Wasuke started to worry—and took him to a doctor, who directed him to a neurologist, who said that little Yuuji was simply experiencing epileptic seizures.
"He's not shaking around and pissing himself," Gramps had told the man in his usual style of courtesy.
The man had looked very tired. "Sir," he had replied, with the air of someone who had said this a great many times for a great many years, "if generalized seizures were the only type of epilepsy in the world, my job would be much easier."
Yuuji doesn't remember much about all the medical terms the neurologist used to explain 'his type of epilepsy'. Something-something half of his brain instead of the whole thing. Conscious but not really. It's okay, sir, many kids have this, it often goes away after a few years. So Gramps had mumbled half-thanks and half-curses, paid the man, and taken the prescription.
Gramps stopped calling Yuuji distracted after that: he called him absent-minded instead, and laughed loudly at his own joke—absence seizures, get it, kid—and Yuuji complained every time he heard him, once the few minutes of post-seizure confusion were gone and he was capable of articulating words once more.
It had taken a year to get a proper diagnosis. Yuuji managed for all of one month to take his pills diligently every morning, and then forgot to do so every other day, bringing the seizures back until Wasuke noticed and pretty much started to shove the things down his throat every morning to make sure he wasn't being an idiot. And after two more years, the seizures stopped on their own, and the whole thing was forgotten.
Letting Sukuna take over reminds him of that. Something-something half of his brain, conscious but not really. A state of altered existing where things fail to be understood. He can still decide to stop it and take over whenever he wants, but it feels like the grogginess of watching five movies in a row and then having to stand up again.
This time, Yuuji doesn't want that; he stopped fully existing the second Mahito sat on his chest and forced open his mouth, and disgust has enough of a hold on him still that the thought of remaining absent-minded makes his very soul retch.
So he stands in Sukuna's inner domain, alone.
It looks the same as the last time. Yuuji doesn't remember exactly what happened before Sukuna brought him back to life—and feels, each time he thinks of it, as if something is poking at his brain in warning—but he does remember the stupidly typical throne of bones and the great lake of blood. The blood still doesn't cling to him, feels and looks more like water than blood at all, but he supposes it's all about the aesthetic.
From here, he can't feel, or hear, or see anything going on with his body. His head is completely clear. He looks around himself, watches the spread of the domain past the giant thoracic cage curving over his head. Everything out there is so black. There are no light sources. Yet, within the cage, he can see just fine.
He walks toward the hill of bovines' skulls. He wonders why bovines, why not people, when, as far as he knows, Sukuna's history of natural catastrophe tore humanity asunder, and not cows. He steps on one of the skulls as he reaches the hill: it breaks under his foot with a sharp crack.
He doesn't want to, but he feels for the exit through his own mind, tries half-heartedly to grab onto anything and lift himself out of Sukuna's domain. There is enough of himself still within him for shame, when he finds no exit, when a dry sob of relief escapes him. He wants to laugh. His throat burns. Don't let her see, he thinks again and again. He doesn't even know what he doesn't want Kugisaki to see. Is it Sukuna? or is it just Yuuji laid over the dirt, done in by a couple of bruises and some bad touch?
Yuuji envisions, for a second, climbing to the extravagant throne and sitting there until Sukuna comes back. Sukuna would probably cut him in two for the gall, and then Yuuji would be back in control of his body. Easy-peasy. But his legs shake when he tries to move them, and suddenly he falls on his behind in the water-blood and cries out.
His throat burns. His neck is a collar of pain that he can't bring himself to touch. His mouth is full of a taste much worse than copper. He can't close it, feels as though a solid piece of curse-flesh is still holding it wide and gaping. It doesn't taste soapy, like Sukuna's fingers do, but bitter and rubbery. He retches again as he grabs for another of the skulls, and it dislodges from the great ominous pile and takes him fumbling down with it. His arms are too weak to support him. He has to crawl like a shapeless worm until he finds enough purchase to sit up. He thinks of Junpei's body stretched to deformity and feels as though he is the one gone grey and monstrous. He sees Mahito's deranged smile in Junpei's high school's stairway, and then he can feel him crushing his lungs and strangling him and forcing the blade of his cock down his throat.
Yuuji cries and shakes, sitting in blood with his back against a hill of corpses. He's never cried so much before. He should have, when Gramps died, when Junpei died, or even when his hand and fingers were cut off, if only from the pain. He's barely in pain now, but he cries like a baby in need of a fucking diaper change.
He tries to think of what Gojo-sensei would do in his place, and then laughs and sobs harder, realizing that this could never have happened to Gojo-sensei in the first place.
It's so stupid. God, it's all so stupid. But at least in Sukuna's domain, while Sukuna is out there doing whatever he wants, Yuuji can't be seen.
That thought kicks him out of self-pity at last.
Sukuna is out there. The last time he was out, he nearly killed Fushiguro. Yuuji remembers in a jolt that Kugisaki wasn't far when he found Mahito; if Sukuna sees her—
Yuuji breathes, stretches his mind again to palp at the edges of the domain and find somewhere to hoist himself out.
"Brat."
He drops his metaphorical arms and looks forward.
Sukuna is standing in the water a little way ahead. His arms are crossed into the sleeves of his loose clothes, and all four of his eyes are open and staring at Yuuji.
"You're back," Yuuji says.
He nearly strangles himself on the words, so dry is his throat, after all the empty retching and all the useless gagging.
"You're here," Sukuna replies flatly.
Welcome home, Yuuji wants to snark, but he can't. His neck aches and his mouth is full of thick, bitter flesh. So he shrugs instead, never looking away from Sukuna. He isn't so pathetic yet that he'll show his nape to a curse.
He doesn't even feel scared, right now. Not of Sukuna at least. Mahito has pulled all of the terror out of him as if pulling out his entrails; Yuuji doesn't think anything will scare him anymore in this life, unless it wears Mahito's face and laughs in Mahito's voice.
He can't speak to ask Sukuna to go ahead with it, to cut off his head so he can be back in the forest and look for Kugisaki. He lifts a hand instead and makes a slicing motion in front of his neck; he adds in a bit of attitude for flair, one insolently lifted eyebrow, so Sukuna will get angry.
He is driven only by his pleasure and displeasure. That's what Gojo-sensei told him. If Yuuji displeases him enough, Sukuna should make quick work of it. Yuuji doesn't relish the idea of being tortured.
He feels like he's been tortured enough for one day, now matter how futile the torture.
Sukuna does not cut his head off.
His brows do not furrow and his mouth does not bend. He steps forward leisurely, cross-armed still, and the water-blood leaves no stain on his white clothes. He doesn't stop until his feet meet Yuuji's and Yuuji has to strain his neck to keep holding his gaze.
"You shouldn't be able to come here on your own," Sukuna muses. There is nothing to read out of him, not even the degrading disgust he usually reserves for Yuuji when their thoughts cross.
Yuuji finds his voice: "I'm full of surprises."
"Why did you come here?"
"Why do you care?"
Yuuji is starting to fret. He doesn't like this Sukuna standing above him with no hunger in his eye and no violence on his tongue. He hates any Sukuna, the hungry, the violent, but this Sukuna—he's worse, somehow. He wants him to stop talking and cut off his head already.
There are more important things than Yuuji's feelings toward Sukuna, however.
"What did you do to Kugisaki?" he rasps.
"Who?" Sukuna replies lightly.
Yuuji clenches his teeth and feels like he's chewing on skin, feels like he's going to retch again, and this time, his entrails will come out for real.
But Sukuna huffs softly and says, "I have no interest in that female."
Yuuji breathes. "Okay," he mutters. He swallows and aches. "Then—go ahead with it. Don't let me keep you from your great throne of trash."
"Won't you show me gratitude?"
There's the fear at last.
Sukuna joked about gratitude as well after killing Yuuji. He does remember that. Although his voice was different at the time, his mood a lot more power-hungry, Yuuji can't think of any peaceful way this conversation could end.
He says, "There's no gratitude to give someone just for not killing people."
"Ah," Sukuna replies; "and what about gratitude for killing someone?"
Yuuji's chest ices over.
"Wh-Who did you—"
"Although, I suppose that curse could hardly be called a person."
A brief silence ripples over the blood lake before Yuuji mutters, "What?"
Sukuna stares at him. None of his four eyes blink. Wherever the light in this domain comes from, its reflection over the lake dissipates any shadow: his face is a vivid portrait of black, white, and red. Each stroke of the delicate marks over his cheeks and forehead has neatened to the millimeter.
Then Sukuna looks up, two of his eyes breaking away from Yuuji's glare, and says, "I let it go away. You should truly thank me, boy."
As Yuuji tries and fails to make sense of his words, Sukuna crouches before him. Yuuji's head jerks back so quickly that it hits the wall of skulls behind him painfully, pushing a grunt out of his mouth; but before he can parse the shock and lift a hand to rub the spot, fingers have grabbed onto his hair and pulled him forward once more.
Sukuna isn't eye-level with him. He would never lower himself this much. His face hovers a slight bit over Yuuji's, all of his eyes boring into Yuuji's again.
"So go ahead," Sukuna murmurs. His cool breath passes over Yuuji's forehead. "Show me your gratitude."
Yuuji's eyes are still watery from his earlier crying. He can't help but let a tear escape, although this one is only born of fatigue. "Why should I be grateful that you let him go?" he asks.
Sukuna's fingers tighten in his hair. Curiously, they don't tear off his scalp or hurt him at all. It doesn't stop Yuuji from feeling like a man at the edge of a precipice.
"That creature is your kill, isn't it?" Sukuna asks back.
Yuuji's heart thumps, harsh. His own exhale strokes Sukuna's chin.
Sukuna's hand relaxes in his hair. His fingers spread, their claws blunted, and his palm rests over the spot that Yuuji hit a moment ago. It presses down gently. Goosebumps rise up the length of Yuuji's nape in answer, and they are not disagreeable.
"It's gone," Sukuna says. His voice is still soft, his breath still cool, his hand still massaging the back of Yuuji's head. "You won't be bothered for a while. That girl was looking for you."
Yuuji's upper body rises out of its slouch at the mention of Kugisaki, but Sukuna's hand grabs him still, a sharp demand for obedience, as one would grab a kitten by the scruff to quiet it.
"I had to restrain myself quite a bit, you know," he goes on. His palm goes back to its kind hold, and Yuuji hardly notices that the pain is gone at all. "That thing is nothing but a pest to me, but even a weakling can make for an enjoyable time. You so rarely let me out. Perhaps I should have skinned it bit by bit and roasted it in front of its open eyes. Taken my time and had a meal."
"Then why did you come back?" Yuuji asks, just as quiet. "I wasn't trying to take over." Not really, at least. Not with his full strength. The guilt sears up his lungs.
"Yes. That made me curious."
He moves his hand, and Yuuji's head with it. His upper eyes keep holding Yuuji's stare. The lower ones, the ones whose eyelids have left indelible marks on Yuuji's own face, look at Yuuji's throat, at his mouth. At the places Mahito has bruised. Yuuji lifts a hand to his own neck, and Sukuna catches it in an instant. Like the ones holding Yuuji's skull, these fingers don't hurt him, and simply prevent him from moving.
Yuuji was immobilized only minutes ago, when Mahito held him by the neck to bite his mouth open, his many-limbed form pressing Yuuji's arms and legs into the soil. He had thought, then, that he had never known anything so scary as not being free to move. But Sukuna's hold doesn't frighten him.
Sukuna's mouth stretches thinly. A smile, or an approximation of one. His thumb strokes the pulsing veins of Yuuji's trapped wrist.
"The curse is gone," he says again. "Your injuries are gone as well. Your little friend is looking for you. So why are you still here?"
"Don't you have to kill me to make me leave?"
"I could. But it's not the only way. You know it."
Yuuji does.
He thinks of Kugisaki looking for him outside. He doubts that Mahito lingered after Sukuna did whatever he did to put the fear of God in him, but there could be other curses around them. He reaches out once more and…
He can't do it. The path out of Sukuna's domain feels so long and so twisted. It feels to be going upward endlessly. Yuuji is too tired to climb Mount Everest now. He wants to sink into the water, he wants to rewind time; to be sitting with Gramps in front of the TV and getting knocked in the temple by old fingers, to get out of the seizure and find laughing eyes looking at him.
Yer brain left for a stroll again, Yuuji.
"Just do it," Yuuji says, tears dripping one by one along his cheeks. He doesn't care to smother them anymore, he feels too languid for pride. "Kill me."
"I will," Sukuna replies.
Sukuna frees Yuuji's wrist and lifts his hand to Yuuji's neck, and Yuuji relaxes at last.
Yet no cleaving burst of energy comes to separate his head from his body.
Sukuna's fingers only touch him. One finger-pad, then two, then all of them. They follow a twisting line under his jaw, over his Adam's apple. The traces of Mahito's strangling tingle in their wake and cease to hurt. Sukuna doesn't take his hand back yet, however: his palm presses fully against the side of Yuuji's neck and, with the help of the one still holding Yuuji by the hair, forces Yuuji to turn his head. Yuuji forgets all about baring his nape to a monster and lets it happen.
Sukuna's face closes in, right over his shoulder and right against his pulsing arteries, in the space left open for a beast's jaws to mangle. His breaths are no longer cold.
"I will kill you," Sukuna repeats, "one day."
Yuuji feels more goosebumps prickling along his skin.
"Perhaps once you have absorbed all of me, perhaps before then. I will kill you. It will be painful," Sukuna adds, an afterthought, a pleasurable detail, "and I will make it last as long as pleases me. But, Yuuji…"
Yuuji, echoes through the emptiness. Sukuna has never called him by name before.
Sukuna's nose brushes under Yuuji's ear. "Yuuji," he says, and Yuuji can't breathe anymore. "Only I get to decide how you suffer."
"Asshole," Yuuji lets out.
Sukuna chuckles. His mouth is a branding iron about to press to skin. Its heat makes Yuuji's hairs rise as if aching to touch it and self-immolate. He must be hungry. His lips test the give of Yuuji's skin, and Yuuji readies himself for a bite that doesn't come.
Sukuna pulls away and lets go of Yuuji's head. Yuuji turns back, faces him again, and Sukuna has hunger in his eyes and violence on his tongue, at last; a known hunger, an expected violence, the familiarity of which made Yuuji choose to fall here instead of remain connected to his own body. A familiarity which made him decide that between Mahito's presence and Sukuna domain, one was safer than the other.
Sukuna is lying, of course. He doesn't give a damn how much Yuuji gets hurt or how. He has let Yuuji get hurt and watched with glee many times. Yuuji has long learned not to rely on him for anything.
"Some things I will allow, and some things I won't," Sukuna retorts to those thoughts.
Yuuji gives a glare that makes the curse's smile widen. "Don't I get a choice in this?"
"No."
In spite of all of Sukuna's obscure words, Yuuji is too tired to feel offended. Sukuna chased Mahito from him, didn't attack Kugisaki, got rid of his injuries; Sukuna once killed him, tried to kill his friends, laughed as Yuuji despaired. He is now crouched before Yuuji rather than standing over him, touching him without hurting him, and yet promising him death and torture. Yuuji can only look back at those red eyes and remember that, minutes ago, teeth bit into his lips and a cock pushed into his throat, and that those teeth and that cock belonged to the curse who killed his friend—the curse whom his friend made the mistake of trusting.
Sukuna's smile abates.
Quicker than Yuuji can parse, Sukuna takes hold of his chin. He still doesn't hurt him, but Yuuji still can't escape.
"I made sure to let that worm know not to touch my belongings," he tells Yuuji. "It will no doubt try to kill you again, and I'll savor watching you struggle. But it won't dare put its hands on you like this anymore."
"Why do you care?" Yuuji spits out.
"I care about what's put in my body," Sukuna says. His grip tightens. "Be it food, pleasure, pain. As long as your body is mine, I get to decide as well what pleasure and pain you experience."
Yuuji can only stare at him, wordless, shame and anger twisting round his insides, but Sukuna is not done speaking.
"No one will touch you like this. No curse, no human. Not that wench outside or the shadow-user boy, nor the owner of the Six Eyes. I fed that curse its own flesh for its audacity and let it go because I want to see you chase your quarry. I won't be so kind to it next time."
His smile is quaint, satisfied, as he makes this oath. His nose nearly touches Yuuji's.
Eye-level, Yuuji thinks.
"So I won't let it happen again," Sukuna says, eyes burning, tongue sweet; "I will punish those who try to take their pleasure from you, Yuuji."
Another tingle comes as Sukuna strokes the side of Yuuji's lips, erasing the indents left by Mahito's bite. Sukuna stills, then, for a long second. His thumb stays on Yuuji's cheek. For the very first time, all of his eyes look away from Yuuji's: down to stare at his finger, at Yuuji's newly-healed mouth. Hot air is exhaled out of him and the branding iron comes close once more.
Yuuji sees the black marks, the nose and the lips, until those brush close enough to his own that they become hidden.
"Speech pales," whispers Sukuna. His thumb caresses Yuuji's face. "To say how I feel for you, I have no words at all."
Yuuji drinks in the unknown words and wants to beg and plead. He wants to whine like a child and then be held, and it doesn't matter anymore if the arms around him are a beloved one's or those of the king of curses.
He says, "Fuck you," his voice shaking.
Two more breaths are shared between them before Sukuna leans back, humming.
He grabs Yuuji by the arm and pulls him up to his feet roughly. Yuuji stumbles, knocks into him chest-first, and Sukuna keeps him like this for a second, pressed against him, unmoving.
"Begone," Sukuna says. One last painless squeeze of his hand, and Yuuji is let go.
Sukuna strides up his hill of skulls without a look backward, his feet leaving barely any ripples over the lake, as Yuuji stands and watches him.
There is strength, now, through his limbs. His neck and mouth have stopped hurting, although he doesn't think he'll be able to eat anything without gagging for a long while. But he doesn't need Sukuna to kill him anymore in order to leave the domain. He can climb Mount Everest.
He reaches, physically and mentally, for the endless ceiling above. He feels the call of his own body and the smell of sap and dirt recently moistened with rain. He thinks he hears Kugisaki calling his name in the distance.
He looks one last time at Sukuna, who is seated upon his throne and gazing at him as well.
Itadori Wasuke's voice echoes through him, scolding him, laughing at him, all the sounds of a lonely old man trying to turn a child into a proper human. Say thank you when someone gives you something, you runt, Itadori Wasuke says.
Yuuji will not show gratitude to Ryoumen Sukuna, no matter what his heart and memories tell him.
"Goodbye," he says instead, and Sukuna looks, for a moment, at a loss.
Yuuji hoists himself up.