Chapter Text
Yuji Itadori realized many things as he began blinking back into consciousness.
One: the sky is wrong.
Two: the ground hurts.
Three: he is still alive, which is starting to feel very personal.
He lay on the ground there for a moment, face down in dirt that smells old–like historical reenactment old–while his brain attempts to catch up with the rest of reality.
“Okay,” Yuji says to the ground. “Cool. Great. Love this.”
The last thing he remembered was fighting a curse that had escaped the Veil of Tokyo.
What the hell had the newest batch of sorcers been doing?
He had literally laid the groundwork; he went to Tokyo once every twenty years to maintain the barrier. All the sorcerers had to do was stick a seal on it, and it would hold.
–Oh well. It wasn't like mistakes didnt happen. He could clean up after the kids.
He’d been fighting the curse in a worn-down warehouse filled to the brim with old paintings and even older-looking scrolls that looked like they would crumble into dust if he merely hovered near them. And he had learned a few things. Like how the curse apparently had opinions.
Which he felt, in his own very justifiable opinion, that the curse absolutely should not have had opinions about time, space, or causality.
How did he know this? You may ask. Well… it had screamed something very dramatic.
Something like “Return! Return! Return!” but on the third word, it started to sound weird.
Don't get him wrong, it still sounded like Japanese– the phonemes, but the pronunciation?
Yeah. That was more twisted than a curse when faced with Inumaki-senpai saying, “Twist”.
And then the curse apparently had a functioning brain with actual braincells because it had shot an attack of purple bile at one of the old artworks. Yuji protected it with a shield made out of blood.
That’s when the curse had grabbed him by the leg and had ragdolled him through three buildings and what felt like the concept of linear existence.
So now, Yuji lay on the ground, regretting basic life choices, and dragged himself to a sitting position, only to immediately regret it.
As he looked around, he realized many things in succession. There was no city skyline. No gray concrete. No power lines that covered the sky like connecting siderwebs. Just rolling land, thick forest– Filled to the brim with large trees–and surrounding him was an abandoned-looking shrine that looked like it belonged in a museum exhibit titled “Before Things Got Better”.
He squinted, looking at his surroundings as if he stared hard enough, they would magically change back into something, anything familiar-ish.
After a few minutes of staring, waiting for a miracle, he gave up looking at the sky. He muttered under his breath. “...You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Yuji suddenly felt too old to be doing this type of crap. This was something younger him would accidentally get himself into. Not present him, he knew better!
Yuji rubbed his nose bridge, realizing that he hadn’t told anyone where he was. Hell, he's been performing the greatest vanishing act on sorcers' society for the better part of 80-something years.
He’d stopped aging sometime after the Culling Games ended.
At first, it was subtle. His classmates got lines on their faces. Sorcerers retired. They had kids. Memorials went up. Yuji stayed eighteen, then nineteen, then functionally the same forever.
He’d joked about it once—something about finally getting ripped for eternity—and then never joked again.
Immortality, it turned out, was less “cool superpower” and more “cosmic prank.”
Yuji didn’t know how immortal sorcerers like Kenjaku or Tengen dealt with it without going insane. Maybe they had gone insane. Maybe that was the magic secret.
Still, this?
This was new.
Yuji stands, brushes dirt off his hoodie—which immediately marks him as a problem—and takes in his surroundings. He can feel curses everywhere. Thick. Old. Hungry. It reminded him a bit of how Sukuna's curse energy felt. The air is humming with curse energy so dense it makes his teeth itch, and the second pair of eyes underneath his own slightly water up.
“Oh,” he mutters. “Oh, this is that era.”
The Heian era.
Arguably one of the worst ones he could realistically be in.
Before he can spiral properly, he hears shouting.
Yuji turns just in time to see a group of people burst from the tree line—armed, tense, and absolutely ready to kill something. They wore plain kosode paired with kukuri-bakama. Some wore hitatares, things Yuj only thought he would see in a museum. The thing that caught his eye the most was the weapons, most of them drawn and pointed at him. He realized that nearly all of them were imbued with curse energy; every detail of them practically screamed ancient sorcerer.
They froze when they saw him.
Yuji froze back, unsure what to say. There's not exactly an instruction manual to deal with a situation like this, is there? If so. Yuji would greatly appreciate a copy.
One of them says something—fast, formal, and completely incomprehensible to Yuji.
Yuji blinked and decided to lean hard into gut instinct and politeness. “…Hi?”
Apparently, that was clearly the wrong response.
They start talking all at once. The language is technically Japanese, in the broadest definition. But it was higher-pitched with faster flow, with even more unfamiliar grammar. There are barely any vowel sounds that he can hear; in the fragments that he did somewhat understand.
Yuji catches fragments the way you catch debris in a flood, in shock and even more dread with every hit.
Blood.
Face.
And a name.
A very bad name.
One of them whispers, horrified, “—by the heavens.”
Another drops to one knee.
A third point, directly aimed at Yuji, says something sharp and urgent.
Yuji only understands two words.
His.
Blood.
Yuji feels his stomach sink in real-time to the other side of the Earth and plummet into space.
“Sorry,” Yuji says carefully, gesturing at himself. “I don’t… understand?”
They stare hard.
He tried again, slower. “I’m not… a curse? I’m not—” He waved his hands, struggling. “Related?”
They begin murmuring among themselves. The tone shifted—less fear, more awe.
Yuji caught more fragments now.
Child….Resemblance…. Eyes.
Someone said something that sounds like unformed marks.
“Oh no,” Yuji mutters.
“Nope,” he said louder, shaking his head hard, practically about to give himself whiplash. “No. No child. No son. Wrong guy. You're connecting the wrong dots.”
This, apparently, was the second most worst possible thing he could have ever said.
Several of them visibly flinch.
One bowed so deeply that their forehead nearly had nearly hit the dirt and spoke in a reverent, trembling voice.
Yuji understands exactly one word.
Sukuna.
Yuji can't help himself, he laughed. It comes out wrong—sharp and humorless. “No. Absolutely not.”
They interpreted this as something significant.
“I don’t know him,” Yuji insisted, pointing to himself, then making an X with his arms and repeating this motion a few times, as if that would do anything. “Never met. Don’t want to meet. Please don’t say that name near me.”
They exchange uneasy looks with each other.
One of them says something slow and careful, like speaking to a dangerous animal.
Yuji caught denial, fear, and lineage.
Seeing how this is a losing battle he's not going to win today, he very reluctantly admitted defeat. Muttering under his breath, “Yeah.” Yuji sighs. “That tracks.”
They don’t attack him. They don’t restrain him. Instead, they gestured for him to follow—respectful, cautious, like escorting a natural disaster that hasn’t decided whether it’s active yet.
Yuji does consider running for a brief moment.
But admittedly, he decided that it would probably make the situation even worse.
By the time they reached a settlement with wooden buildings etched with wards, the air thick with incense and dread, the rumors had already arrived ahead of him.
People stare.
Whisper.
Point.
A child asks their mother something rapidly and excitedly.
The mother looks at Yuji in terror.
“No,” Yuji says, already assuming the worst automatically. “I’m not going to eat anyone.”
This causes several people to recoil.
“…Great,” Yuji mutters.
Someone offers him food with shaking hands. Someone else bows. A third speaks carefully, slowly, clearly asking a question Yuji does not understand—but the word father is unmistakable.
Yuji chokes on rice.
“I don’t have one of those,” he says flatly.
They nod solemnly.
Yuji has the distinct feeling that meant something very different to them.
Night falls heavy and thick. Curses whisper just beyond the wards. Yuji sits on the edge of a roof, staring at a sky without satellites or mercy, rubbing his face.
Immortal.
Time-displaced.
Barely understandable.
Mistaken for Sukuna’s kid.
“Unbelievable,” he mutters. “I save the world, and this is what I get. I want a refund.”
Somewhere far away, something ancient stirs.
However, Ryomen Sukuna is unaware of Yuji Itadori's existence.
And honestly?
With this language barrier, Yuji plans to maintain it for as long as humanly possible.
For now.