Chapter Text
Inside the Prison Realm, time dissolves.
It’s an almost physical absence, melting against his flesh and dripping into his mind. The ice-cold skeletons clinging to him offer little in the way of distraction. They’re silent and still. Empty eyes and bared teeth. The not-unfamiliar smell of charred bone. Too tame to instill fear, too banal to inspire interest.
The novelty of it all wears off before it can even take shape. He could’ve been in here for a second or an eternity; it feels the same. It doesn’t feel.
A twisted mirror of his own domain—karmic, if he believed in such things.
Satoru’s never been accused of being particularly sane, but he can count on one hand the number of times he’s flirted with true madness. This prison will either use up the rest of his fingers, maybe toes as well, or he’ll emerge just as he was, an unholy blend of anguished and resigned and aggrieved, ready to drench the world red in retribution.
He can’t hear himself breathe.
-
The end is as dramatic as the beginning—white-hot light splinters the darkness, the skeletons writhe and wither, and Satoru breathes in air that’s scorching in its freshness.
In a blink, the world assembles itself. It’s bright and burning, a riot of colors that take a long, long time to resolve into identifiable shapes. It’s a brutal assault on his senses, and Satoru’s glad to have been sealed with his blindfold securely in place. It’s scant protection with the Six Eyes active, but it’s better than nothing while he assimilates to the overload of sensory information.
The wrongness of it all is the next to strike.
Grass and concrete under his feet. It takes a too-long second for him to identity it as a cracked floor, plants pushing up from under. Some have flowers—shapes and colors he’s never seen before. A glance upward shows a caved-in ceiling. The sky above is a pale blue, bright and cheerful, but the sunlight feels strangely cool on his skin. All four walls of the room are in worse shape than the ground; cracks like chasms run along their length, with moss and vines spilling out in a vivid, hungry tangle. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t so grotesque.
But his physical surroundings aren’t what’s making Satoru’s hair rise from shoulder to fingertip in a prickling wave.
The air smells wrong, feels wrong. Cursed energy drenches everything like miasma, threatening to seep into his pores and devour him from the inside. It would be a weak threat against the swell of his own power even without Infinity, but not everyone is Satoru. Not everyone could stand this pressure and not be burned alive from the inside out. Certainly not non-sorcerers, and unless Satoru is mistaken, which he never is, this is the gutted remnants of an atrium. A mall, maybe. There are ghosts of a semi-familiar structure along the moss-eaten walls, and when he takes a testing step forward, glass crunches under his feet. His next step is muffled by a cushion of thick, green grass.
Wherever he is, it’s not an underground train station in Shibuya.
-
Not being in Shibuya, Satoru realizes later, is the least pressing of his concerns.
He still doesn’t know where he is. Japan, certainly. There are enough deformed but semi-legible signboards littering the streets to tell him as much. He takes to the sky, briefly, but the landscape below is empty desolation as far as the eyes can see, and when a twitch of movement has him rushing to the mouth of an abnormally dark alley, all he finds is a grade-one curse that dies before its shadow-like appendage can finish lunging at him.
For a long moment, he just stares at the dissipating shadows, thinking of a boy who could bend them to his will.
Where’s Megumi?
Where is—
He finds more curses after that. All of them are powerful—too powerful. There’s nothing lower than a grade two, and he finds a fair number that are borderline special grade. He kills them mechanically. The few that talk, he tortures, but that only yields insults followed by pleas.
It’s not even satisfying.
Satoru keeps walking, keeps killing.
He doesn’t know where he’s doing. His senses scour the area and come up with alien impressions. The entire world feels twisted. He searches for the slightest hint of familiarity, a beacon he can warp to, and finds nothing, so he keeps walking, the reverse cursed energy coursing through his body healing his feet before they can crack and bleed.
A hazy eternity later, Satoru realizes he is walking toward something, that he always has been—a blip on the edges of his senses, straining the Six Eyes even as it calls to him.
The cursed energy grows thicker, more viscous, till it feels like he’s wading through freshly spilled blood. The inverse happens with the curses, their number growing smaller and smaller with each mile covered, and then there are none at all, just Satoru walking through the corpse of an apocalypse.
He keeps walking.
-
He finds the sea—and a man.
No, that’s not true.
He finds blood—and a monster.
That’s not true either.
Maybe both are true, as neither is true.
-
The sea is the blood, the blood is the sea, and once-white sands are stained a deep, damp crimson that’s nearly black. The grains stick to his shoes as he walks over them, but Satoru registers them absently, eyes fixed on the humanoid figure sprawled on the shore.
Humanoid because it has four arms.
Humanoid because that shade of pink is burned indelibly into Satoru’s memory.
“Sukuna,” he breathes.
The figure turns its head. Messy pink hair, long enough to cover the creature’s nape but not to hide the segmented dark markings running down his back, shifts in the wind. He catches the edge of a sharp jaw, pruned of the last vestiges of baby fat that used to be there.
“Not exactly,” says the voice of Itadori Yuuji with the body of Itadori Yuuji, with markings and power and two whole extra limbs that say this cannot possibly be Itadori Yuuji.
But when the creature rises, turning to face Satoru, the eyes that meet his are the brown of autumn leaves, not the red of fresh blood, and even the two half-open eyes under those are more amber than crimson.
Yuuji’s eyes, peering calmly at Satoru from amidst Sukuna’s telltale markings.
“Hello again, Gojou-sensei. It’s been a while.”
-
Yuuji takes a step forward.
Satoru yanks his blindfold down.
Yuuji’s eyes remain that same warm brown. The cursed energy emanating from him is wholly his own.
Yuuji’s approach is a slow, measured thing. Satoru tries, with a desperation that drips like oil down the back of his throat, to find anything of Yuuji in it—the bright grins and boundless energy. The lack of the former, he can ignore. Nothing of the desolate landscape Satoru just trudged through would inspire cheer, and even Yuuji, who smiled so bright despite horror after horror, was bound to lose his light in the face of it. Satoru’s seen this world chew up enough sorcerers to have a gut-deep understanding of the blank-eyed, stone-faced expression Yuuji is wearing.
It’s the way he’s walking that has Satoru curling the fingers of his right hand, cursed energy coursing down his arm.
Yuuji walks like a dead thing.
Oh, there’s power in his movements. An unwarranted amount of it. The very sand seems to flinch from his feet. Cursed energy cloaks him, dense enough to make the air around him shimmer. But it’s an empty, mindless power, the sort Satoru is intimately familiar with. There’s no bloodlust in Yuuji’s demeanor, no fire in his eyes, no purpose in his limbs.
He’s never seen Itadori Yuuji walk without purpose, whether he was headed to his own eventual death or the steak place he cajoled Satoru into splurging on.
Cursed energy sparks and dies in Satoru’s hand.
Because, in the end, this isn’t how Sukuna walks either.
Yuuji comes to an abrupt stop less than a foot away from Satoru, with an economy of movement that once again has Satoru reeling from a deep-seated sense of wrongness. First, the thing puppeteering Suguru’s body and now this. He hasn’t felt this wrong-footed in almost a decade.
He hates it.
“Gojou-sensei,” Yuuji says softly—and doesn’t follow it up with anything. He doesn’t smile, and he doesn’t look away from Satoru’s eyes.
Yuuji! Satoru would’ve chirped once. Maybe he’d have echoed Yuuji’s words that day in the morgue, when he sat back and smiled like he hadn’t just regrown his entire heart.
I’m back, Yuuji!
Staring at Yuuji—this four-eyed, four-armed Yuuji whose miasmic cursed energy poisons the very air—Satoru can’t so much as summon an empty smile.
“Yuuji,” he says. “Yuuji, what happened?”
Yuuji blinks, still looking straight at Satoru. Straight, no longer up. Because Yuuji’s taller now, heavier, his body clearly having undergone its final growth spurt. Satoru’s still taller by at least a few centimeters, but even that’s a stark, unsettling difference given how this boy barely came up to his shoulders the last Satoru saw him. He’s broader too, with filled-in shoulders and a torso that’s packed with muscle in a way that’s slightly grotesque; it takes Satoru a moment to realize it’s because the muscular structure isn’t quite human, Yuuji’s torso having changed to accommodate the two extra limbs.
He should’ve realized when Yuuji first moved, but it seems like he’s missing a lot of things today.
That can’t stand.
“A lot of things happened, sensei,” Yuuji finally says, his voice gentle; it bites. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
Satoru smothers a flare of anger with clenched fists and gritted teeth. It wouldn’t be—fair. He’s not a good person or a kind teacher, but he resolved early on to break his students only in ways they needed to be broken. His temper shouldn’t be in the equation.
Yuuji waits—patient, listless, unwavering. He’s not blinked once in all this time, and there’s something about it that makes the Six Eyes ache.
Everything, he wants to demand, but that’s a childish, pointless urge, and he strangles it in his throat. If he has to choose—
Suguru. But that was just a body. Even if, there at the end, it—he—it was still just a body.
His students were there, in Shibuya. Shouko and Kento and Masamichi were there.
Yuuji himself. The fingers, the arms, his power—
Satoru breathes in sharply through his nose and lets it whistle out from between his teeth.
Prioritize.
“Megumi, Nobara, the second years—where are they?”
For the first time, there’s a flicker of emotion on Yuuji’s face—a twitch of the mouth, a slight widening of his second pair of eyes. And then there are four whole eyes piercing into Satoru, Yuuji’s focus intensifying in a way he can feel in his teeth. It’s a little like drowning.
Satoru sways closer, till the ceaseless pulse of Infinity is all that separates the two of them, and Yuuji doesn’t back away, doesn’t even glance at Satoru’s curled, ready hands.
“They’re dead,” Yuuji says, unflinching. “It’s been a thousand years, sensei. Of course they’re dead.”
Satoru’s ears start ringing.
“…repeat that.” His voice echoes, worse than it did the one time he spoke in the Prison Realm.
“They’re dead,” says Yuuji, always so obedient. “Ah, don’t look like that, Gojou-sensei. Most of them died proper deaths. The kind they wanted, at least. Last stands, savage duels—sorcerers love that sort of thing, don’t they? The number of incarnated sorcerers who came back just for a fight…” He shakes his head. “Some of them got pretty old too. Megumi made it to seventy—can you believe it? Cutest old man I’d ever seen. Grumpy too, even more than my own grandpa. Oh, Maki too.”
Satoru registers maybe half of it all.
It’s been a thousand years, sensei.
Don’t worry, the seal will let you out soon—in a hundred, no, maybe a thousand years.
A sudden, twitching motion.
Satoru catches Yuuji’s wrist before he consciously registers moving; Yuuji’s fingers have stopped a few inches from his skin, the air around them distorted by Infinity. If Yuuji minds the death grip or the naked evidence of Satoru’s distrust, it doesn’t show on his face. Satoru wishes it would. He’s never needed Infinity with Yuuji, branding him a non-threat less than a day into their acquaintance, and Yuuji didn’t register—couldn’t have—the significance of it, but Megumi did, and Satoru still remembers the narrow-eyed glare he received from his ward when Yuuji, the utterly inexplicable vessel of the King of Curses, was clinging to his neck and rubbing their cheeks together.
The Yuuji of the present is a far cry from that bright-edged memory, staring at his wrist in Satoru’s hand with half-lidded eyes and faintly parted lips.
“You’re warm, sensei,” he says quietly.
Satoru lets him go as if burned.
Yuuji’s hand hovers in the air between them, pressing idly, fruitlessly against Infinity, but still so close that Satoru feels phantom heat on his cheek. Yuuji is staring at his hand—half of his eyes, at least. The two on the left are on Satoru’s face instead. It’s an eerie sight, and Satoru wants to look away but doesn’t; he stares in transfixed horror at this fun house-mirror version of a boy he knew.
It’s just like—
“Suguru,” he whispers. “Yuuji, the man who trapped me, the fake Getou Suguru—what happened to him?”
Yuuji’s forehead wrinkles almost imperceptibly. “Getou Sug—oh. Mum. I killed them.”
“Mum?”
“Habit now.” Yuuji shrugs; his tone is absent, bland. “And novelty, I guess. I never knew…” His face darkens into a frown, and before Satoru can make head or tail of whatever the fuck he just said, Yuuji says, “I don’t like this dream anymore, sensei. There’s too much talking. Usually, you kill me by this point.”
“Yuuji—”
“Or I kill you.” Yuuji’s hand drops, and he takes a hesitant half-step back. Two of his arms curl around his middle, but the other two remain lax at his sides, open and ready. “I hate those the most.”
A dream.
Yuuji thinks this is a dream. He’s dreamed of this before.
It’s a relief to know that Yuuji’s strange behavior—the studied nonchalance, the careless answers, the empty eyes—is because he doesn’t believe any of this is real.
“I am no dream, Yuuji,” Satoru says—and sheds Infinity. He reaches out to grasp Yuuji’s shoulder, fingers digging in, and all four of Yuuji’s eyes focus on his face, his eyes, and were there always flecks of red in Yuuji’s eyes?
No, that’s—
Yuuji kisses him.
—that’s new.
Satoru goes very, very still.
Without Infinity, there’s no barrier between his mouth and Yuuji’s. It burns. Cursed energy laps at his flesh, and Yuuji’s lips are no less searing. Satoru doesn’t pull away, doesn’t lean in, doesn’t breathe.
His mind is white static.
Yuuji pulls away as easily as he leaned in.
“It’s not that kind of a dream either then,” he declares, nodding tightly as if to himself, and—and turns away, as if Satoru isn’t even there.
Satoru yanks him back, whips him around—
“Sorry, Yuuji.”
—and punches him in the face.
Yuuji flies through the air, crashing into the shallows in an eruption of crimson water. And Satoru didn’t pack that blow with the full force of his cursed energy, only intending to make a point, but he knows even that amount of power would’ve once sent Yuuji sailing much farther back, especially when caught unawares. Now, Yuuji is sprawled on his ass, one set of arms supporting him and the other held defensively in front of him. The water barely comes up to his knees, and his face seems fine, the skin Satoru struck barely red. He looks more puzzled than hurt.
“I,” Satoru enunciates carefully, “am not a dream, Itadori Yuuji.”
Yuuji’s eyes widen.
A curse emerges from the sea behind him, a monstrous thing with many mouths and serrated teeth, dripping blood and gore. Yuuji vanishes in a fierce wave of blood-like water, and Satoru’s already moving, arm pulled back for a blow.
His fist is barely an inch away from the curse when it disintegrates, shredded into minuscule pieces by cursed energy that’s distinctly not Satoru’s.
His arm falls to his side.
There, still sprawled in the water and stained with gore, is Yuuji—whole and unharmed and pulsing with cursed energy.
All four of his eyes are wide and wild, fixed on Satoru with the whites eating into the irises.
The unsettling blankness of his expression shudders.
Shatters.
“Sen…” Yuuji’s voice cracks. “Sensei?”