Chapter Text
Sukuna is currently trying to light a damp stick of incense. Raindrops speckle the epitaph in front of him and a persistent breeze keeps snatching away the struggling flame. This particular brand of incense with its powerful, nose-tingling menthol fragrance always gives him a headache, but it was his grandfather’s favorite, so.
He takes in the sensation of loose soil and dewy grass soaking through his clothes and the prickle of cold vapor on his skin. The nostalgic smell of yesterday’s rain. Damp, spongy bark that leaves residue on his fingers. Dark stone. The breeze runs through the interlocking leaves of the canopy overhead, making it shudder and release a spray of hidden raindrops.
One of the last things Wasuke said to him was, “take care of your brother.” His voice was soft and reedy but it delivered a powerful curse all the same. The moment Sukuna heard those words, he lost everything he ever dreamed of: his chance to become a strong sorcerer, to live life as he pleased, to use his own money to buy luxurious food and drink, to surround himself with only the most inspiring and entertaining people in the country.
In being shackled to Yuji, he lost his right to individuality. He was forced to dedicate every waking moment to his useless, helpless little brother who couldn’t even clean his own damn hair out of the shower drain. Sukuna had to come home at 9pm sharp to put groceries in the fridge, and god help him if he was a minute late! Yuji would start blowing up his phone, Sukuna, where are you? Hey, are you at a friend’s house? Should I lock the door or will you be back soon? You good?
Once, Nanami leaned over his shoulder to read the texts. "He just worries about you, that's all."
"Him? Worrying about me? Who does he think I am? This is just insulting."
At that, Nanami raised an eyebrow, then shook his head dismissively.
Annoying texts weren't even the worst of it. Sukuna would divide his hard-earned stipend between bills and food and clothes until everything was stretched too thin and he had nothing left for himself. If he ever had a moment to relax, Yuji would ruin it, prodding him awake, intruding on his space, pestering him like a needy dog.
Train with me, Sukuna!
Wanna get takeout?
Learn anything new today?
How was work?
No matter how many times Sukuna rebuffed him, he’d always spring back as if nothing happened. He’d go around with his little friends at jujutsu tech—that boy, Megumi Fushiguro, and the girl. He’d talk about Sukuna’s accomplishments as if they were his own, my brother did this, my brother did that, as if Sukuna had even the remotest opportunity to do anything truly worthy of praise while confined to the city with Yuji!
Sukuna hated him. He’s certain of it. He hated Yuji. He fiercely assures himself of this, gritting his teeth.
Dammit, why can’t he light this thing?!
“Knew I’d find you here.”
Sukuna turns. Gojo is standing behind him with an umbrella hoisted over his shoulder even though he has no need for such a thing. When he leans forward to shield Sukuna from the rain, the flame finally catches and the virgin stick of incense begins to smolder.
Sukuna is disappointed in himself for failing to complete the task alone. He feels weak and it’s unbearably humiliating. “Get lost,” he says.
This should be the part where Gojo makes up some kind of witty retort and they start fighting (a few harsh words, a friendly broken arm maybe) but today his expression is careful and neutral. “When’s the funeral?” he asks bluntly.
Sukuna scoffs. “There isn’t going to be a funeral.”
This seems to take Gojo off guard. His eyes widen marginally. “The hell do you mean, no funeral?”
Sukuna returns his attention to the epitaph. Wasuke Itadori. They didn’t even have ashes to bury, so here he is at Wasuke’s grave once again. Yuji tended to it meticulously, but now, for the first time, a small fuzz of moss is beginning to grow in the lettering.
The sight prods at a raw open wound inside of Sukuna and he lashes out. “I mean,” he says sharply, “that there’s no point putting on a performance for an empty theater.”
“You’re not the only one who lost him, you know,” Gojo retorts.
It's true. Gojo was one of Yuji's many friends. He seemed taken by him, for some reason. Attracted to his bubbly personality and bright smile. If Yuji were to text him all day instead of Sukuna, no doubt everyone would be happy, but unfortunately that's not how fate unfolded for them.
“I’m his only living relative," Sukuna says.
“Yeah, some relative. You’re cool with just sweeping it all under the rug and letting everyone forget his name?”
“If a funeral is needed to remember someone’s name, then it wasn’t worth remembering in the first place.”
“I can’t believe you. That’s your brother you’re talking about. He’d want a big sendoff and you know it!”
“What does it matter what he would’ve wanted? He’s dead.”
He hears the sharp snip of Gojo’s umbrella being shut and once again rain begins to beat down on his back. Gojo turns from him, abandoning him to the cold. Good. Right now Sukuna wants to bear all the pain and discomfort in the world, just to prove to himself that he’s still the dauntless man he always built himself up to be.
“Fine, have it your way,” Gojo says. He takes one step down the incline, before pausing. “It’s funny, we managed to kill each fragment of that curse so easily.”
Sukuna isn’t interested in talking about what happened anymore, so he stays silent, focusing instead on the weakly burning incense.
“I know we’ve been doing this job for a hell of a lot longer than those kids, but still—wow. Really throws me for a loop sometimes just how weak they are,” Gojo continues.
Sukuna bristles, but continues to ignore him. He isn’t emotional, never has been. He keeps control of himself and is always calm and collected, always—
“You were never around, so you wouldn’t know this, but he was always talking about you. Said it was his life goal to be on your level. Can you believe it? He really thought that if he trained hard enough, one day he could just maybe stand alongside you.” Gojo laughs bitterly. “What an idiot, right?”
Sukuna grabs the incense and its tray and hurls it at Gojo as hard as he can. It doesn’t hit him of course, and the scant few grains of ash that have accumulated simply sparkle harmlessly in the air around him, suspended in his infinity.
“If you’re done taunting me, get the hell out of my face,” Sukuna spits. Right now, all he can see is a red haze as he boils over with useless, infantile anger. Gojo arrived at the scene first, so he was the one to kill the curse. Sukuna got nothing. No outlet for the rot developing inside him, no corpse, no curse, nothing.
Gojo is staring at him impassively. His lack of reaction is humiliating.
“If you don’t arrange a funeral, I will,” Gojo says flatly. “I’ll give you a week to decide on the date. If I don’t hear anything from you, I’m gonna go ahead and pick a day that’s sunny.”
Finally, he leaves.
Sukuna rakes a hand through his hair, wanting to rip it all out. A month has passed and it still feels like yesterday. They were called out to exorcise a special grade. Should’ve been a walk in the park. He picked up coffee on the way and arrived late because he saw no reason to take it seriously.
He cut the curse down the middle, splitting it clean in two.
“Boo, sniping my kill again? You’re no fun,” Gojo said. He had been toying with it, sharpening his reflexes, and Sukuna had spoiled his game.
With a smug smile, Sukuna turned to walk away, but then he realized that he never actually heard the curse hit the ground. When he looked back, he saw it still standing upright, which should’ve been impossible. Its insides were exposed—an incomprehensible mess of orange, blue and red—but it kept moving as if nothing even happened. Like an earthworm, it had separated into two distinct entities.
Gojo whistled. “Interesting.”
It was interesting, but Sukuna still wasn’t taking it seriously. All he saw in that curse was a way to pass the time. He finished off his coffee and tossed the cup and got ready for a fun fight. The two halves of the curse worked in tandem, each of their attacks leading into the other’s. If Sukuna were anything less than today’s top sorcerer, it might’ve managed to lay a finger on him, but as it stands he received nothing more than a pleasant workout. Once he saw an opening, he split a half in half again, and then they had three curses to deal with.
“What the hell did you think that was going to accomplish?” Gojo asked incredulously.
Not much, really. Sukuna was just experimenting, like a child pulling off an insect’s legs to watch it struggle. He could be cruel like that, he’ll readily admit. After a long battle, it became clear that the only way to exorcise the curse would be to crush it, or else completely obliterate it so it had nothing left to mobilise.
…He didn’t notice because he wasn’t paying attention. Or maybe because he didn’t really care.
Gojo was the one who drew his attention to it when they were standing in the smoking wreckage of their battlefield. Sukuna thought they’d already won. He didn’t bother to keep count of the pieces they destroyed.
“Hey, where’d that quarter go?” Gojo asked, cupping his hand over his eyes and scanning the surrounding area.
Sukuna got a… bad feeling. To this day, he’s not sure how to describe it. Something cold settled in his chest. A premonition of something to come, like the telltale sensation of an encroaching black flash. He noticed tracks in the ground that snaked through the trees and out of sight.
“Crap.” Gojo gave chase, whipping off his jacket and abandoning it.
Sukuna followed. He wasn’t used to the feeling of urgency or panic, so he didn’t understand why his heart was racing. He was silent, trying to comprehend it. They followed the curse all the way to the shopping district, and then…
He closes his eyes, returns to the present. The rain on his skin helps to anchor him. Gojo is long gone and the incense stick is soiled in the mud. He collects it and makes a token effort to light it again, but now it won’t even splutter. He sighs and sets it beside the epitaph, slanted at first, but he belatedly returns to correct it so that it’s perfectly perpendicular. A paltry offering, but an offering all the same.
He gets home that night to an empty apartment. There’s nobody to welcome him home—there hasn’t been for a month, but the silence still feels unusual. He drops his keys on the counter and kicks into his slippers before heading into the kitchen to make a drink.
The fridge is mostly empty. He doesn’t have to fill it up as a chore anymore, since the only person whose health he needs to mind is his own. There’s no half-eaten plate of food wrapped haphazardly in film, no overly-sweet protein drinks, no weird science project collecting mold in the back. Just three empty shelves and an instant meal.
He heats this up and eats it alone at the table.
For years he has longed for silence and now he has it. He remembers Yuji’s music keeping him up, thumping through the walls. Remembers rolling around in bed with his pillow curled around his head until he lost his temper and marched over to Yuji’s room to kick his ass about it. He remembers tuning out Yuji’s incessant rambling when he’d invite himself to the table, and answering him only in noncommittal grunts.
His dreams have come true, he thinks to himself, staring down at the half-empty plastic tray and finding that he doesn’t have the stomach for any more. He slides the dregs into the trash and lies down on the sofa, because suddenly he doesn’t have the strength to climb the stairs and go to bed.
Besides, he has to walk past Yuji’s room on the way to his own, and for some reason the sight of it makes him bristle in—anger, maybe, is the emotion. He could pull the door shut, but that feels like admitting defeat. From what he can see in the glimpse he catches from the doorway, it’s still a mess. Dirty laundry on the ground that Yuji would’ve just dropped by the machine for Sukuna to deal with. A glass of water by the bed. The wire of his phone’s charger snaked underneath his pillow.
Never mind. He’s on the couch right now, so there’s no point thinking about it.
He stares at the ceiling.
Everything he has ever wanted is now within reach. All his money is his own to spend. He can stay out all night if he wants, and there’ll be nobody interrogating him about it. Just a month and he already has more spare time than he knows what to do with.
…And he hasn’t made use of any of it. Doesn’t have the energy.
He rolls over and turns on the TV, but he fails to find a channel that catches his attention, so he turns it off again and lies there in silence instead.
Just a quarter of a curse and it killed so many people. Powerless little non-sorcerer people, sure, but still. There were so many that it was impossible to identify them by ordinary means. The school’s gymnasium was set up to be used as a sort of… hub. Sukuna remembers entering with Gojo and the others. Obscured behind a row of panels were countless gruesome photos tacked up on the wall of all the bodies that were unearthed, and littered among them were the crisp, clean graduation photos of the missing.
Sukuna pored over them. Gojo and the others kept telling him to sit back and wait, to let them do it for him, but he was no coward. He wouldn't shy away from a little blood. All the dead kids started to blur together as he looked at each photo in turn, expecting (needing, wanting?) to prove that Yuji wasn’t there like they all thought. Around him, he’d sometimes hear the cries of parents finding their children among the dead, or friends finding friends.
Gojo started at the other end of the room, and at one point he plucked a photo off the wall and approached Sukuna with it.
“Sukuna,” he said seriously.
And he didn't need to say anything else. Sukuna already knew just from the tone of his voice and the look on his face. God, why? Why, in front of an audience? In front of all their classmates? The hushed, sympathetic silence. The restrained tears! Sukuna can’t bear even the memory of it. Wasuke’s curse made itself known with a vengeance then, punishing him for his betrayal. His heart wrenched more painfully than anything he'd ever felt and for a moment he thought he might faint. The words reverberated in his mind. Take care of your brother. Take care of your brother.
…Sukuna folds his arm over his eyes. Once again, he can’t sleep. Right now, everything is exactly like he always wanted, but he’s still lying on a sofa in the same old lousy apartment with nothing but stale microwaved noodles in his stomach. It seems he only ever had ambition to spite Yuji. Without him, all of his desires have turned to dust.