Chapter Text
Sukuna was dying and Yuuji didn't know how to feel. It wasn't as if he didn't know that, for the world and for Jujutsu society; it was a good thing. To get rid of the existence of a curse like Sukuna, all of them had sacrificed so much. And yet, Yuuji had been the reluctant host to Sukuna for months. Beneath all the rage, and the hate, and the ever growing boredom and pretend enjoyment was sadness, loneliness. To think that the great King of Curses was reduced to a blob, writhing on the ground like a particularly lively puddle, and that Yuuji felt bad. He should have felt overjoyed, victorious, proud, but, amongst the ashes of the city, the still burning hellscape surrounding them, he felt only pity. No sense of accomplishment, no feeling of victory, just the crushing realisation that maybe the only way to end the cycle of violence and curses was in fact more violence. That everything he had given was not enough, he would have to give up his hope as well.
He stopped in front of the crumbling form of the curse, gazed upon his wretchedness and the corruption of his friend. This was the last chance, wasn't it? The last chance for things to change, for the better or for the worse. Yuuji reached out his hand, as if to gently touch the object of his love and his hate, the cruel combination of his most precious and most loathed relations. He looked; and he saw. He saw a friend waiting to sacrifice himself, he saw a monster turning inwards, reminiscing, and he saw a sliver of hope.
Itadori Yuuji wasn't afraid of many things in life anymore. His strength, his losses, his past and his future, the bonds he had made with others and those same bonds who had disappeared in the dead of night, snuffed out by misery and invisible blades, all of them pulled him, just like a cog in a great machine, ever onwards to his demise and his triumph. Ever greater, every moment passing, was a call for rebellion. Rebellion against fate, against the unending cycle of death and pain that seemed to best represent Jujutsu society.
"What's it gonna be," he called out, breathlessly, "Sukuna?"
The curse lifted his eye, meeting his, and he barrelled on; "Release Fushiguro. Return to my body once more, and I'll spare you."
Yuuji took a deep breath, the next words catching in his throat before he managed to push them out, a strangled cry, desperate and scratchy,
"You are me."
"Sukuna... let's try it one more time," He blinked, the curse at his feet reacting, like a moth to a flame, or perhaps a butterfly to the return of spring; "Living not by cursing someone but by existing alongside them."
Against the very line of truth that had been carved into his brain, he felt Sukuna's remaining energy focusing on him, lily to his words.
"Even if no one else will accept you... I'll live with you."
Yuuji had expected many things from the remaining consciousness of that being once feared and revealed throughout the land, now splayed, defeated in front of him. He had expected anger, stubbornness, lashing out, anger, anger, more anger. A tear escaping from the curse's last remaining eye was entirely out of his imagination. He feared a trick, a last attempt at manipulation, like all the ones before. Yet instead he felt a flow of energy, a gentle current, the last of sukuna's cursed energy being used to perform Reverse Cursed Technique, and a blip, in reality, like the world was pausing for the first time to take a deep breath.
He moved back in disbelief. He felt Sukuna's voice, again in his head, for the first time since he had possessed his friend's body, "Brat... only you, in a thousand years of existence, spoke something like this... and meant it." He called out again, unsure, "What's going on... Sukuna?"
Yuuji felt it the moment Sukuna made his vow, raising his cursed energy to defend himself, but to his surprise, nothing felt like danger. Instead, for the first time ever, Sukuna smelled of poppy and spring instead of death and blood. He felt the curse's energy, now barely more than a sliver, reach out to him, as if to ask him whether he truly meant it. In his foolishness, or perhaps in th first act since eating that first finger that didn't feel like wasting away to a destiny he did not wish to accomplish, he accepted it unto himself.
Then, nothing.
════════════════════
He didn't remember the last time he had been bested so. Perhaps it simply did not exist. Was this the first time on this mortal plane he had seen the boots of his opponent so close, felt the cold feeling of death, so foreign to the divine flame he cradled in his heart? Not even the Fujiwara had managed to kill him; though they never stopped trying, he had simply let go of life once there was nothing more to destroy. Kenjaku had managed to convince him to lend his body, and he had felt no connection to it. The brain had made his death exciting, had brought the entirety of the clans to fight him, in a pitched battle the world had never seen, and would not even see upon his return. That was the price the manipulative bastard had paid, and it had been worth giving up his fingers. After all he hadn't needed them once dead.
His last battle. Bested by his own vessel, a brat barely out of his mother's jupon. Hah! Wasn't that fun to think about? To think that Kenjaku had schemed for a thousand years, brought alongside him the force of curse and ancient jujutsu and still failed, still failed to the brat looking down at his decomposing body. Or should he say the brat's boytoy's decomposing body?
Speaking of that other brat, he still felt awake. Cockroaches, all of them. Tenacious cockroaches, glorious enemies, stupid sentimental brats. The Zenin brat was struggling inside his soul, thrashing around, raving about retribution, proper lives. At some point, he stopped. Sukuna realised that his cursed energy was now too weak to prevent the brat's soul from touching his.
He could feel a gasp, the brat's soul shaking at the weight of his memories. From his earliest feelings of inadequacy and rejection, the looks and judgement cast upon his eyes and mouths and arms. The brat could feel it all, and forced him to relive it as well. Oh, how he loathed being so exposed.
How he loathed the brat's every gentler gaze on his life, how he loathed his every action, his every sin be examined, judged and then cross-examined. How he loathed the feeling of Fushiguro's pity, his hate and desire to kill him rescinding, and leaving behind them understanding and sadness.
And then his other brat started his spiel. Oh, curse be upon himself, he thought. He was stuck with sentimental fools, who reached to the deepest part of his heart and called out to him.
Was it truly possible? Was there truly a world where he could be, simply, immensely, totally? To live in simple peace, to be strong and loved instead of strong and feared? Was Sukuna strong enough to make that choice, now, after all of the curses he had brought upon this world? Yet brat number one, Yuuji, was calling out to him, full of hope. Having seen himself, all of it. His soul, and now Megumi's soul having seen his own, its entire breadth and expanse and judged it to be still human.
Was this love? He had never felt it, and as Yuuji still talked, his body crumbled further and his soul felt freer than ever before. But, as he gazed upon his vessel, his brat, his Yuuji, and gazed inward to his vessel, his brat, his Megumi, he felt it. A spark of selflessness, the sacred desire to save, to protect. Not just the lack of anger or rage; the casual disregard he had for Uraume and his other followers, disregard he could now feel to have been love, if hidden by his all-consuming rage. No, this was love. Love. The ideal of Love that had never been afforded to him, yet now coursed trough his veins as he felt his very essence die.
He made a choice. He was Sukuna, the King of Curses, Two-Faced, the Dishonoured One, the worst monster to have graced the earth with its presence. But in this moment he was also just the only one who could offer this kindness; his last and perhaps first one. And so he circulated his last energy, reconstructing his current body while letting go of his lash on its owner's soul. He let go of everything and he vowed, on that destroyed roof, on a nondescript building in Tokyo.
He vows to coexist with Yuuji, and for all his actions in the modern world to be erased. He exchanges his life, his consciousness, and vows to merge with Yuuji, to leave to him everything that makes him, himself, and to combine into something kinder that he could ever be, with the strength to protect those he holds dear and to fight for his justice. He vows this, now, and forever, that the existence known as Ryoumen Sukuna is to be no more, and that it be replaced with that whole.
Thus, he vows.