Chapter Text
He needs to run.
There is ash in his lungs and blood in his eyes. The earth cracks beneath his feet as he stumbles through what used to be a street, now no more than charred dirt littered with corpses and debris. Pain shoots through his body with every step, but Yuuji grits his teeth and pushes through it. His wounds don’t matter right now.
Because he needs to run.
If he runs, he lives. If he lives, he can rest, recover, and come back to fight another day. If he keeps fighting, he can defeat him and avenge them .
It’s not too late. It’s not too late. He repeats those words like a mantra in his mind. He still has a chance, he just–
Boom.
A rush of heat and power slams into him from behind, and Yuuji falls. By some miracle, he doesn’t crack his head open against the pile of rubble beneath him – but his body aches , and he can’t stop the tears from welling in his eyes as he struggles to stand. His arm is fucked. His right leg is, too – Yuuji sucks in a sharp breath at the sliver of white bone peeking out between strips of torn flesh. His head swims, black spots dancing in his vision.
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
He bites his lip so hard it bleeds, then stumbles to his feet.
Smoke and dust rises in a plume all around him, obscuring his vision. He knows that he doesn’t have much time. Thankfully, although he can’t see, it means that his enemy can’t as well. This is his chance to finally slip away undetected.
He steadies himself against a slab of drywall, preparing to keep running–
“Where do you think you’re going, brat ?”
Yuuji’s heart drops to the pit of his stomach.
He pivots towards the voice, his remaining good arm curled into a fist, ready to unleash a punch – but before he can even swing something hard collides with his side and he’s slammed through the very wall he was just leaning against. He barely registers the pain before a strike comes again – then again, then again, then again.
Every time he falls back, he’s hit before he can even stand. Pain burns away at his nerves. He thinks he screams – out of agony or anger, he doesn’t know. Every movement he makes is futile, every attempt to fight back extinguished before he can even raise his fist.
Eventually, his legs give out.
“Oh?” The low, deep voice of his archenemy is tinged with mockery. Through half-lidded eyes, Yuuji finally sees him – the King of Curses, in all his violent glory, stepping through the cloud of ash and smoke to stand before him. One hand grips kamutoke , another hiten . The remaining two cross arrogantly over his chest as he stares Yuuji down with narrowed, crimson eyes. The edges of his lips curl into a smile.
“What a pitiful sight.”
Yuuji grits his teeth. “Fuck you,” he spits. “I’ll fucking kill you.”
“Really?” Sukuna raises an eyebrow. He circles Yuuji’s body like a hawk eyeing its dying prey, the smirk on his face growing wider. “And how are you going to do that, brat?”
Yuuji’s nails grind into the palm of his hand. God, he wishes he could punch that expression off his face. He wishes he could break every bone in Sukuna’s body, make him suffer for what he’s done. Sensei, Fushiguro, Choso – they’re all gone because of him. Countless other lives have been lost from Sukuna’s rampage as well, and deaths will keep on happening if no one stops him.
There’s no one else. Everyone is gone. Yuuji is the only one left.
He needs to do this.
A cry tears itself from his throat. With all his remaining strength, he leaps up, slamming both fists on the ground to scatter a cloud of dust and dirt as a smokescreen. Ignoring the pain in his leg, he whips to the left, going low and trying to get into Sukuna’s blind spot.
Please, kami-sama , he prays, as he gathers all the cursed energy he has left into his fist. One hit. Just one hit. I don’t have to kill him here. Just let me get away.
Sukuna hasn’t moved. This is his only chance.
Space distorts around his hand in black flashes as he swings at the back of Sukuna’s head –
Something pierces his stomach.
The first thing he feels is not the pain. Rather, it’s the heat of Sukuna’s breath by his ear, and the grip of his fingers around Yuuji’s throat. “Is that all you’ve got?” he hears Sukuna laugh, and then the world blurs around him and the wind roars in his ears and then his body hits the concrete and it hurts, it hurts, it fucking hurts, he’s dying, he can’t breathe–
Sukuna drives hiten deeper into his abdomen and Yuuji lets out a gurgling shriek. Blood rushes up his throat. He spews red on his shirt, chest convulsing. Sukuna smiles.
“Know your place, boy,” he draws. He twists the tip of his spear, tearing apart Yuuji’s flesh from the inside, ignoring the cries and screams that follow. “Your teacher is dead, your friends are dead, the people you’ve so foolishly tried to save are all dead – and yet you think you can kill me?”
Another twist. There’s so much blood. Yuuji’s vision grows faint.
“Don’t be stupid,” Sukuna continues. “You are nothing but an ant beneath my feet.”
Yuuji barely hears the last sentence. He’s so tired. Even the pain is starting to dull, the sharp agony fading into dull aches. It would be so nice to just fall asleep – to slip into the darkness, letting the world melt away around him. It’s hard to breathe, too. Every movement is an effort.
He’s just so tired. He tried to run and tried to fight and he’s just– he’s tried his best, hasn’t he?
“Look at you.”
A shadow obscures the sunlight streaming down upon his face. Yuuji blinks, and realizes Sukuna is leaning over him. His four eyes gleam as they stare him down, raking over his injuries with satisfaction. “Pathetic. Truly. Even at the end, your actions only serve to irritate me.”
In the past, Yuuji would’ve retorted, or jumped at the provocation to fight – but now he can barely even lift a finger. No words leave his lips, and Sukuna’s expression twists, just slightly – his eyes narrowing and his upturned lips freezing in their place for a nanosecond. Then, without warning, he rips out his spear buried in Yuuji’s stomach, wiping the blood away with disgust on Yuuji’s tattered trousers.
“Should I leave you here to bleed out?” he muses, more towards himself than to anyone else. “Should I call upon the curses and have them rip you limb from limb? Or perhaps I should tear out your heart, like how I did back then.”
He twirls his spear, then embeds the weapon into the ground by Yuuji’s head. It was meant as a threat, but Yuuji barely flinches. It feels like he’s underwater. Sukuna’s words are muffled, far away. He strains to focus, but it’s growing harder to do so by the second.
Sukuna’s eyebrow twitches. There’s that look on his face again – the same expression that Yuuji saw before, carrying an emotion that he can’t quite place. He doesn’t have time to think about it more, though, because in a flash Sukuna is grabbing him by the hair, forcing his head up so their eyes connect. He can’t help but let out a soft cry, but this time, Sukuna isn’t smiling.
“I don’t like being ignored, brat,” he growls, and though it’s obvious that he’s angry there’s something else in his tone, too. It’s not like Sukuna to be so worked up just because Yuuji isn’t reacting to his taunts. He’s done that plenty of times as a vessel, when Sukuna used to chatter away in his ears. So why now?
“Maybe I should eat you alive,” he says, and they’re now so close that Yuuji can feel his breath on his face, burning hot. His teeth gleam in the sunlight. “The humans I devoured centuries ago would barely last three bites – but it certainly was entertaining to hear them scream.”
With his free hand, he traces Yuuji’s cheekbone with the tip of his nail. There’s a slight sting when his claws draw blood. “Would you last longer than them, I wonder? They do say you’re special, after all.”
Is this meant to scare him? Yuuji blinks, dazed. Perhaps if he was less groggy, and his body not battered and bruised, he would be. Now, however, the words mean nothing. He’s tired. He’s hurting.
He just wants this to be over.
“Fine,” someone says, and it takes Yuuji a moment to realize that the voice is his own. He glances up at Sukuna’s face, and can’t help but feel a little satisfied at the surprise in his eyes. “Eat me. Kill me. I don’t care. But–”
His chest racks with pain as he spits out another mouthful of blood. For some reason, Sukuna does not move. He waits, eyes boring holes into Yuuji’s soul, and Yuuji almost wants to laugh. Funny how it takes him dying to finally capture the King of Curses’ attention.
“I promise you, Sukuna,” he rasps, and though his voice is weak his resolve has never been stronger than it is now. “In this life or the next, I will kill you.”
Silence. The world seems to stop around them. For a moment, there is nothing – no destruction, no burning flames, no corpses of humans littered around them. For a moment, there is nothing but the two of them that exist – the King of Curses and his vessel.
“Kill me, huh?”
Sukuna cocks his head. He seems to be chewing on the words, ruminating them in his head. Frankly, Yuuji doesn’t care if he believes him or not. He will not rest easy until Sukuna is six feet under in his grave.
But when Sukuna’s lips slowly curl upwards into a grin, a sliver of uneasiness pierces Yuuji’s heart. A new emotion arises, one that isn’t pain or weariness or hatred. What is it?
“Alright, brat,” Sukuna purrs. With his free hand, he grips at Yuuji’s injured leg, fingers curling around the exposed bone. “I’m looking forward to that.”
Before Yuuji can react, there’s a crack, then a tear, then the grip on both his head and his leg is gone, and he’s falling. Something hard slams into his skull and the world flashes black for a split second. Did he pass out? He blinks, trying to gain his bearings, and when his vision corrects the first thing he sees is Sukuna sinking his teeth into a human leg, tearing flesh from the bone.
A leg? Yuuji blinks. Where did he get that from?
He glances down.
“Lovely,” Sukuna licks his lips. “I’ve missed this taste.” He meets Yuuji’s gaze with a smirk, waving his torn leg right at his face. “It seems you’re good for something after all, brat.”
Nausea burns at his throat. Yuuji screams, vomits bile, and continues screaming. Blood gushes from his wound in gurgling streams. He claws at the ground, at his mutilated leg, at his throat. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts, please, please, stop, enough, please, stop, I can’t, I can’t, it hurts–
Something grabs him by the scruff of his neck. The next moment, he’s being lifted, weightless, into the air. Two arms hold his shaking body, caging him against a broad chest.
“Don’t die on me yet, brat. I’m looking forward to seeing how you’ll kill me, after all.”
Sukuna’s words sound faint and far away. The last thing Yuuji sees before darkness engulfs him is the curve of the King of Curses’ smile, and it’s then when it finally hits him. The emotion he had been feeling earlier, the one that had arose when Sukuna grinned down upon him–
Ah, right.
It was fear.