Chapter Text
Throughout heaven and earth, he alone is the honored one.
Yuuji mouths the words as he reads them, again and again, engraved into the figurine he is examining under a lamp. The unnamed creator of this carving - one of some dozen unearthed in a decades-old archaeological dig in the Hida province and, in keeping with the times, hoarded in some collector’s house until everything was donated anonymously - must have worked meticulously for days with the sharpest knife they had. It is one of the most detailed of all the Sukuna artifacts he is slowly sorting through.
The wooden statuette bears the vague shape of a kneeling worshipper; the words spiral out from where its mouth would be, as if to emphasize they are being spoken in praise of another. Yuuji doesn’t know, yet, whether it is truly ancient, as are many things in the museum’s collection, or if it is in the sub-category of items produced by the small mountain village in Hida-no-kuni whose dwindling population persists in regarding the mythical Ryoumen Sukuna as a folk hero even to this day. It’s not his business to know, really; he’s literally only been here a week - as an intern - and yet his supervisor just sat him down in the basement with these walls of priceless artifacts and tasked him with filling in the whole catalog.
Which, per said supervisor’s instructions, includes copying down any text he can decipher on each carving. So he does.
Throughout heaven and earth, he alone is the honored one.
On the one hand, Yuuji is honored to be assigned an entire project like this only a week into his year-long archival internship. Really, he is. It’s just that, on the other hand, he’d kind of hoped to have company, and instead Gojo-sensei is out with Fushiguro Megumi-kun, the other intern, for the third day in a row - something to do with Megumi’s family. (Yuuji tries not to be jealous of the obvious nepotism going on there.)
It means Yuuji is alone, with only his thoughts for company, and his thoughts are going in directions they don’t need to be - and wouldn’t, in other circumstances. He glances to the side, where the scanner is slowly working its way down a delicate ink scroll that does belong to the ancient artifacts - a depiction of Ryoumen Sukuna fighting a dragon, which so happens to show him barechested, the better to include all four of his arms and the dense rippling muscle that clings to his form.
…Is it weird that he finds Sukuna hot?
“Throughout heaven and earth, he alone is the honored one,” Yuuji mutters under his breath, completing his transcription of the carvings and shaking out the stiffness in his hand. The figurine goes into a carefully-lined box, which is in turn tied with string and labelled with the catalog number matching the page of notes Yuuji’s just finished writing, and is set aside. He rolls his shoulders and reaches for the next one.
Like he’d said, there are items in the collection representing centuries, if not millennia, of Ryoumen Sukuna mythology: stories, figurines, carved tablets, and - from the anonymous collector, Yuuji assumes - journals. These latter items are a mix of surprisingly-well-cited records, transcriptions of festival speeches over the last couple decades, and what amounts to academic fanart in the form of ‘artist’s interpretations’ of what the legendary figure might have looked like. These, at least, Yuuji doesn’t have to transcribe by hand; they’ve already been scanned and digitized. If he reads through the journals anyway, lets his gaze trail, um, lovingly over the drawings, that’s done on his own time.
…Mostly.
An hour later, having completed the cataloguing of a set of metal offering bowls - listed in one of the journals as part of the collection unearthed from a buried shrine - Yuuji is about ready to head home for the day, when Megumi bursts into the room like he’s being chased by a pack of hounds and slams the door shut behind him. He sags back against the door, sweating, and stays there until he settles his breath. "Yuuji." Dark eyes fix on him when he looks up. "Have you opened these doors at all today?"
Yuuji blinks. "No?" Why would he? It's a self-sufficient space - the breakroom is right through an ever-open door on the other end of the workroom, with its own bathroom. Once he enters the building and takes the elevator down to this floor, he generally stays all day. (The breakroom is kind of awesome. It's got shelves of movies and a TV set and a fully stocked kitchen, and Yuuji isn't really taking advantage of the clearly well-funded museum facilities by staying after hours sometimes to watch old horror flicks with fancy popcorn, right?)
Some of the tension in Megumi's frame goes away. "...Alright," he says, and turns to head into the breakroom. The door is conspicuously locked behind him.
Being that Yuuji's finished his shift, he gets up and follows him. "Why did you ask, though?" he wonders while Megumi digs through a drawer full of sauce packets to go with his conbini bento. "Did something happen?"
Megumi pauses in tearing open a soy sauce packet. The sauce wells at the torn corner. “Someone was trying to use the staff elevator. They threw a tantrum upstairs, like a child, and were escorted out.”
Pfft. Seriously? Yuuji can’t stifle a giggle at the thought of somebody being dragged out of the museum by the security guards. “I can’t believe I missed that! It sounds hilarious.”
Megumi hums, noncommittal, and opens a second soy sauce. Yuuji follows him over to the kitchen table, resting his chin in his hands. “So, what, are they doing a sweep of the building? I was gonna clock out and go home when you came in.”
His coworker looks up at him with a mouthful of rice. (There’s a rice grain on the corner of Megumi’s mouth. It’s unexpectedly cute.) “Gojo will unlock the door when he gets back. Stay until then.”
“Eh, alright.” Yuuji glances at the TV area sectioned off from the rest of the breakroom with wonderful soundproof glass. Considers the stack of DVDs he was going to go through at the ends of his next couple of shifts. “Guess I’ll watch tomorrow’s movie today.”
Megumi doesn’t stop him, so he flops onto the couch with chili-butter popcorn and hits ‘play’ on The Wicker Man.
(And attributes the vague unease he feels to the horror movie, even though it’s been present most of the day.)