Chapter Text
When he woke up in his own bed - or, at least, the bed he remembered commandeering the night before after murdering the estate’s occupants - Sukuna’s mind was filled with the long, exceedingly strange dream he’d experienced. It had begun with being split into twenty fingers and spread throughout Japan. Continued with being incarnated in a pitiful child. Followed up with leaving that prison to enjoy himself, reveling in the violence and destruction of it all. And then, at the end, concluded with being pitied by that same child. As though he were something other than a curse.
A curse can neither deserve nor accept pity.
Sukuna pushed himself up in bed, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. It was a strange dream. Unrealistic at points, but generally in line with his character. It was certainly a path he could see himself taking. The question was why he’d had that dream. Was it some warning from the gods? A picture of the end he would meet if he continued down his current path?
With a laugh, Sukuna climbed out of bed and left to find his retainer. Even if it was, so what? A thousand years and some change was hardly a bad run of it, especially given how much he’d enjoyed himself. He scoffed at whatever god had thought such a thing would cow him and dismissed the dream from his mind.
But sometimes, Sukuna found himself thinking about it again. Generally, as nothing more than an idle curiosity, something to tell Uraume about for a laugh. Occasionally, though, he thought back to those very last moments, the bits that wavered in his mind, trying to escape his thoughts like normal dreams so often did, and wondered. When Kenjaku approached with his grand scheme for incarnating sorcerers in a later time, Sukuna knew for a near certainty that the dream had been true.
“Should there be a next time, perhaps it would be nice to walk a different path.”
He remembered saying it. He remembered with some amusement the sulking tantrum Mahito’d thrown at the words.
And yet, he was here, experiencing that next time, and he was walking down the same path. Was that truly acceptable? Did he really want to go through a story whose ending he’d already read? At the time, he’d been speaking of his life as a man, before he’d become a curse. That ship had well and truly sailed by the time he’d received the premonition though.
That said…
“I accept,” Sukuna told Kenjaku.
If the dream weren’t an invitation for him to take the path he’d spoken of, then perhaps there was yet a third path. He would, without a doubt, rewrite his story, even if fate hadn’t seen fit to offer him the opportunity he’d somewhat, vaguely desired.
***
Yuuji swallowed down the bitter pill of Sukuna’s finger, then flailed as he fell down toward the ginormous curse’s gaping mouth.
Ah… so even that didn’t…
The thought cut off short as a tremendous heat rose within his chest, threatening to burn out his nerves and overloading his mind with an electric mix of pain and pleasure. Was this it? Was he going to die now, unable to save anyone, least of all himself?
The world went white, and he knew nothing more…
…for what was apparently nothing more than a couple seconds. At the very least, he seemed to still be in the same place, but the crazy curse that had been about to eat him was gone. More importantly, his body was moving about, but Yuuji wasn’t controlling it. What the hell was this? Yuuji tried to reach out his hand, and that much moved, but without him consciously thinking about it, the rest of his body just kept going, and it was a bit much to try to think about all his body parts at once.
Frustrated, Yuuji grabbed his chin, trying to stop whoever it was that was using his body. “Hey, what’re you doing with my body? Give it back!”
To his surprise, the presence immediately receded without offering up any fight. Yuuji blinked. Oh. Maybe cursed fingers were like… a one-time deal?
Hardly, a voice said within his mind. But if consuming my finger hasn’t destroyed you, then I have no right to try to keep your body from you.
Well that was awfully reasonable. Yuuji turned to grin at Fushiguro, only to stop, surprised by the fear and hate on the boy’s face. “Hey, Fushiguro? You okay? You look kinda -”
“You’re no longer human,” the black-haired boy said. “Under jujutsu regulations, I will exorcise the curse known as Itadori Yuuji.”
Yuuji stared at him. The boy stared back. Yuuji squinted at him. “Are you sure you’re alright? Did you forget that you met me earlier? I mean, I know they say you are what you eat but -” He suddenly realized that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. “Woah, holy shit, where’d my shirt go?”
Fushiguro sighed. “Itadori?”
“Uh… yeah? Shit, is your memory like going? Do you have a concussion? Like, just a second ago, you knew my name but thought I was a curse and now you’re not even sure who I am and crap, I think you’re supposed to… oh don’t sleep! Stay with me Fushiguro! I’ll get you to the hospital! We just gotta, uh, my senpais too so um, if you ride on my back then I can carry one under each -”
A white-haired man suddenly appeared next to Fushiguro, startling Yuuji into silence. He wore a blindfold over his eyes, but his lips were twisted into a darkly amused smile. “What’s the situation?” he asked, but it kind of seemed like he already had an idea.
After a brief argument between Fushiguro and the newly arrived ‘Gojo-sensei,’ the subject of the finger came up. Yuuji raised his hand when it became apparent that Fushiguro didn’t want to admit to losing the finger. “Uh, I ate it. Sorry.”
“For real?” Gojo asked.
Yuuji got the feeling he was being carefully studied, even though he couldn’t actually tell where Gojo was looking.
Fushiguro sighed. “For real.”
Gojo leaned in, face way too close to Yuuji, then rocked back on his heels with a laugh. “Huh, no kidding. They really are combined. How’s your body feel?”
Yuuji tested it, stretching and bouncing on the balls of his feet, then shrugged. “Same as always, really.”
“Can you switch with Sukuna?”
“Sukuna?” Yuuji asked, confused.
“The cursed object you ate,” Gojo said pointedly, with what probably was a touch of ‘why the hell did you eat a cursed object, kid?’ in his tone.
Yuuji flushed. “Oh, yeah, probably.”
“I don’t much fancy taking over your body again,” the strange voice from earlier said. “Leave me alone, and I’ll happily do the same for you.”
Yuuji blinked at that. “Uh… wait, so you won’t come out?”
“I’d rather not. You were about to die earlier, so I ended up saving you without thinking about it, but now that I know you’re fine, I’d prefer to go back to my seclusion.”
Confused, Yuuji relayed all that to Gojo. “What’s he mean, seclusion?” Yuuji asked when he was done. “Is he some kinda monk or something, spending his time meditating… as a finger?” Maybe if you meditated long enough, your body withered away until there was nothing more than a finger. That was a little horrifying to imagine.
“Ugh, for fuck’s sake,” the voice said. “No, I was an asshole who killed enough people that they dubbed me a walking calamity. I’m certainly no monk, brat.”
“You don’t seem super calamity-like to me,” Yuuji pointed out. He wasn’t totally sure what the word meant, but definitely, if this guy was some jerk who just liked killing people, he’d have no problem using someone else’s body, right? “Anyway, just come out and talk to this guy for a minute. Maybe if you let him know you just want to go back to being a finger, he’ll help us out.”
There was an irritated groan, but a moment later that same electric heat rushed through him. This time, Yuuji was able to remain conscious. It felt, actually, like the voice - Sukuna, supposedly - had made an effort to be more gentle about taking over, though even without that Yuuji would have been fine. Probably. He had generally high pain tolerance after all.
“So?” Yuuji’s body said, once more acting without his input. “What did you want, sorcerer?”
Gojo frowned. “You’re… not what I expected. Answer Yuuji’s question. What do you mean by seclusion?”
“I mean I got sick of going around murdering people all the fucking time, so I let them store me away. I’m not exactly thrilled about suddenly being in a body now, but whatever. So mind letting me get back to my rest?” Sukuna crossed his arms, glaring at the sorcerers in front of him. “Or are you going to murder this kid just cuz your kind couldn’t keep track of my fingers properly?”
“Murder? Me?” Yuuji yelped.
Gojo hummed under his breath as he circled Sukuna. “You’re claiming to be, what, a benevolent curse?”
“No, I’m telling you that I’m a fucking dead tired one who doesn’t feel like dealing with a bunch of shit just because you people couldn’t do your jobs,” Sukuna snapped.
“You know, you weren’t kidding about the asshole part, were you?” Yuuji asked. Even so, Sukuna didn’t actually seem like a bad guy. He wondered why Sukuna’d killed so many people then. Maybe it was sort of inevitable if you were a curse? Like, maybe curses had to eat people to live. You couldn’t really blame them for that. Not that Yuuji was saying people should let themselves get eaten, but… he kinda got that Sukuna wasn’t about to let himself starve to death just because his food source didn’t want to die either.
“Hm,” Gojo said after thinking for several moments. “Well, for now, follow me.”
“Where?” Sukuna demanded, not moving.
“I’m gonna chain you to a chair in a room filled with more seals than you can shake a stick at, and then you two get to wait while I first take my precious student here to the doctor’s and then go argue with some old farts about whether you two get to live or not,” Gojo said brightly. “Of course, feel free to resist. I wouldn’t mind a good fight.”
Sukuna grit his teeth, then pushed Yuuji back in charge of his body with an annoyed huff. “It’s up to you. As I am now, I can’t take him.”
If Sukuna couldn’t, then Yuuji definitely couldn’t. He’d been entirely unable to do anything to that curse that Sukuna had destroyed in an instant after all. “Y-you’re arguing in favor of me living, right?” he asked the white-haired sorcerer.
Gojo glanced, strangely enough, at Fushiguro. The boy bit his lip, studied Yuuji for a moment, then slumped, nodding. Gojo grinned. “Sure am! And good thing too, because the official recommendation is to execute you first and ask questions later.”
“Can you really get answers out of a dead body?” Yuuji asked, morbidly curious.
“Not in the slightest,” Gojo chirped. “We just ask each other and make up whatever sounds best as our answers.”
That… wasn’t really reassuring.
“Sorcerer society’s as rotten as ever,” Sukuna muttered.
Yuuji kind of got what he meant.