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Introspection, admittedly, has never been his strong suit—picking at the contents of his brain is like rooting around for spare change, lost between the cushioned crevices of a couch that reeks of mothballs, and neither endeavor has ever yielded him anything of value. That’s not to say he hasn’t tried, because he has: a teacher had once suggested Yuuji take a stab at meditation, and honest to god, he gave it his best shot—walked around the barren landscape of his mind and soul, scuffing his heel against the loose pebbles of an unkempt cobblestone path—but the longer he stayed, the more nauseating his studies in self-reflection became: like he was the ceaselessly spinning needle of a broken compass, helpless to the disoriented spiral induced by a vacant magnetic pole. There were things in his mind that he didn’t care to visit and revisit, that he didn’t care to dislodge from his towering stack of unexamined traumas because god forbid he topple the entire thing—but Yuuji’s experienced enough to learn that looking inwards for answers only ever gifts him with more question marks. And because the world beyond his brain is far more captivating, he only ever lets his eyes gaze outwards; forwards; dead ahead. The world beyond his brain has never been lonely, has never felt the cold, seeping dread of isolation; the tortoise-crawl meander of absolute loneliness that digs its blunt claws beneath his skin, forces him to confront the vacuum within him—so he spends as much time as he can experiencing the visible, immersing himself in the tangible.
And although introspection has never been his strong suit, he closes his eyes and sends an apology to his grandfather for betraying his dying wish, for already being guilty of violating part of that final request: don’t die with regrets. He supposes, now, that he regrets once being foolish enough to believe that his mind was a scary place, for being afraid at the loneliness contained within the hemispheres of his brain: because now that he shares that same mind space with a literal demon, he misses the vacuous oblivion.
Shockingly enough, Sukuna isn’t even the worst roommate that Yuuji’s ever had: sure, he’s transformed the barren desert of his most inner-self into his knock-off version of hell— I think it looks better than before; you just lack good taste —, and he’s responsible for maybe 75% of Yuuji’s problems (which, considering the circumstances, is actually somewhat respectable)—but, generally speaking: he’s an accommodating counterpart (not that he’d admit it), his own fucked-up brand of generous. Which, again: considering Sukuna is a literal demon, endowed with the power garnered from millennia of feeding on humankind’s very worst impulses, Yuuji thinks himself lucky. Most of the time, anyway.
And the worst thing about having to accommodate a housemate inside his head isn’t the mean-spirited, spine-chilling nightmares that Sukuna gifts him from time to time, nor is it the occasional emergence of an extra eye, an additional mouth—though that has gotten very annoying and he really needs Sukuna to quit doing that—: instead, it’s that privacy is no longer a possibility worth believing in.
Yuuji learns this the hard way:
Objectively, he’s aware of the fact that it’s lucky, really, that Sukuna has a penchant for being prim and proper: even without Yuuji’s martyr complex, their line of work leads to a lot of cuts and bruises throughout a typical workday. Yet, as Yuuji, Kugisaki, and Fushiguro catch their breath, reclining against the cold concrete that’s stained maroon with recently spilled blood, Yuuji finds he has no injuries; none at all: no scrapes, no bruises, no free-bleeding lacerations—even the fabric of his pants seems to have been restored, because Yuuji is sure that he’d torn open the knee at some point.
It’s possible, he thinks, that Sukuna heals his body out of some sense of obligation—“Wrong!” Sukuna’s voice says, reverberating in the bone marrow of his rib cage: “I just don’t like inhabiting a vessel weak enough to bleed.”—but Yuuji thinks he does it to be cruel. Yuuji sits up and feels like he could run a marathon: and it’s cruel, the way his lungs fill so easily while he watches Kugisaki clutch at her sides, her breaths thin and reedy and whistling through teeth clenched in barely-repressed pain. It’s cruel how he sees Fushiguro swipe his thumb across the thick cut over his eyebrow, corners of his mouth becoming hardened steel, an attempt to mask his grimace.
But the cruelest part is what comes later: because later, as they wait for Kiyotaka to come pick them up in his car, sitting on the stairs in front of the building they just cleared, he hears Kugisaki hiss through her teeth as she prods at her bleeding shin. Yuuji would have beat Fushiguro to it—but Fushiguro is sitting in the middle, so he gets there first—and since he’s not likely to be all that helpful, Yuuji simply watches. Watches Fushiguro remove one of his shoes, one of his socks; hears him mumble apply some pressure to it as he hands the sock to Kugisaki; he tears off part of his jacket sleeve with his teeth, the motion so fluid Yuuji swears he must have done it a million times.
His hands work deftly across the blood-slicked skin of Kugisaki’s leg, wrapping the fabric around her leg once, twice, tying it securely to keep the now soaked sock in place. Kugisaki rotates her ankle to test the hold. When the fabric doesn’t slide around at all, she beams at Fushiguro and thanks him. Yuuji learns that jealousy tastes kind of like lemons as it settles across his gums and stings like citric acid. I want his hands to fix me, too, Yuuji thinks.
In the confines of his skull, Sukuna laughs hard enough to make Yuuji’s ears ring for the next 12 hours.
By now, he should probably stop being surprised that the demon with whom he shares a body is continually trying to fuck with him—cut him some slack; he’s an optimist at heart!
(But if anyone could drive him cynicism—) “ Should we talk about what happened earlier? ”
Yuuji doesn’t need to look away from the magazine that he’s currently engrossed in to see the smirking lips that have manifested on his forearm: “I don’t think we need to talk at all, actually.”
The mouth scoffs and briefly disappears, only to show up on his neck, just beneath his ear: “ Itadori Yuuji: allow me to offer you some advice— ”
“Hell no. Receiving advice from you is probably the worst thing that could ever happen to me. And you’ve literally killed me before.” He feels the mouth on his neck downturn into a pout—and abruptly, Yuuji feels a tremor wrack through his right hand. He attempts to fight it, but Sukuna manages to gain just enough control over the hand to contort it into the fuck you gesture, effectively causing Yuuji to flip himself the middle finger. Dick.
That night, he dreams of long and steady fingers fluttering across his skin; gentle, but deft; coated in his blood. He dreams of Fushiguro’s stupidly long eyelashes and the way his blue-almost-black eyes crinkle at the corners when he’s fighting the urge to laugh.
“Can we talk about it now?”
(In the morning, Yuuji subtly asks Gojo if he can start knocking him unconscious in the evenings. Gojo agrees without asking why. Yuuji should probably be more offended.)
Most of the housemate situations that Yuuji has seen turn to shit have to do with a lazy housemate, or a messy housemate, or a housemate who is entirely and totally inconsiderate: Yuuji’s had experience with all three at some point or another. The resolution, other than moving out and finding a new housemate, is usually for the problematic housemate to become a contributor: do some extra chores, and clean up after themselves, and ask beforehand if it’s ok to watch three entire seasons of American Love Island on the couch in the main living space for 36 hours straight. And Sukuna clearly isn’t the poster-demon for Best Entity to Share a Space With, regardless of the circumstances: but he’s also not the worst. He just has a really, really unconventional way of sharing his contributions.
The first years have just defeated a particularly grisly curse, and Yuuji already knows that they’re all inevitably going to be sore in the morning: but they’re alive, and that’s really all he can ask for. He prepares to sit up, bracing himself for the tidal wave of inevitable guilt he’s sure he’s about to drown in, the juxtaposition of his uninjured self and his battle-battered friends sure to make him feel like slamming his fingers in the car door when they leave this place, and—“Itadori, your hand.”
“Huh?” Yuuji turns towards Kugisaki, confused because nothing on his body hurts at all—and then looks at his own hands: one of his palms is bleeding, marred with a gaping laceration that Yuuji doesn’t remember getting.
He’s confused, but he doesn’t want his friends to worry, so he opens his mouth to say that he’s not hurt when two hands caress his own: “Stop moving.”
The words die in Yuuji’s throat at the sight of Fushiguro’s furrowed brow, his slightly-downturned mouth laced with the flavor of concern, and Yuuji is certain he’s forgotten how to breathe; is certain he’s accidentally yielded control of his basic motor functions to Sukuna because his heartbeat feels like a key stuck in the ignition of a car with a dead battery. Fushiguro looks up from beneath his stupidly long eyelashes, his blue-black eyes soft: “Want me to stop the bleeding?”
Yuuji dazedly nods; Sukuna’s snort echoes in his chest.
And how can anyone’s fingers be so steady? How can someone with all of the fervor, all of the white-hot rage that the universe is capable of offering also manage to be stability personified? Fushiguro’s fingers trap Yuuji’s hand, cage him in like an animal: he dabs at the blood pooling in the center of his palm, staining his heartline, his lifeline, his whatever-line in hues of stomach-sick pink. And how can anyone be so gentle with someone like Yuuji—Yuuji, who is made out of elements the scientists know they’ll never find in this corner of the universe; Yuuji, who has broken more fragile things than anyone ought to be capable of.
(Yuuji, who is almost always the figurative bull in the figurative china shop: which one is he now?)
His eyes don’t leave Fushiguro’s face until he feels Fushiguro’s hands pull away from his; he looks down at his palm, no longer gushing blood—and beneath the makeshift bandage fashioned from Fushiguro’s pant leg, Yuuji feels the wound close up; almost as if it was never even there. Sukuna is a bastard, no doubt about it—but he has his own particular brand of caring, and Yuuji will take what he can get.
(And in the car, on the way back to the school, Fushiguro sits in the middle seat, and Yuuji sits to his left: and when Fushiguro’s pinky finger, silent and steady, wraps itself around Yuuji’s, Yuuji is certain: he is the china shop, he is the china shop, he is the china shop.)
(He thinks he’d let Fushiguro shatter every last piece of ceramic if he wanted to.)