Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

          Dark. It was dark and ugly. It was all sound; all bones. Flesh being whittled away to the core of it. The core of being. Or whatever was left. It didn’t matter anymore. Sukuna couldn’t feel his own mind. Behind him it stood. Watching and lauding the blood. 

Videre et laudare. Monstrum laudamus.  

Fountains of magenta like the line of a bullet through air. Spurting up from vein to skin and leaving those beautiful, purpling blossoms that Sukuna had grown so closely acquainted with and come to love so darkly. So dearly. 

He lifted his fists proudly. In flashes, he could see his nails turning from their usual pale, peachy colour to a necrotic black. It was like some kind of rot that was travelling up his bones. He imagined that it delved down deep, rotting into his flesh like black mould, and rising up his arms. Like a fire pit.

Sukuna threw down a cumbersome punch, and was rewarded with that horribly, terribly addictive crunch of bone through bone. He couldn’t hear anything. 

His soul stood behind him. Watching like a proud, waiting soldier. 

It was an episode again. Sukuna had grown well acquainted with them. His skin greeted the flood of virility and vileness that hit his neural connections like a hand outstretched to an old friend. What was an episode? It was the pressure. It was the tick, tick, crash inside his belly. More, more, more. It was the beast. It was his soul standing behind him.

Blood splattered onto his hands, his palm glistening and sticky as he pulled it back. He let out a neurotic, spastic laugh, running his hands desperately down his face. Where was he? There was nothing to be sure of anymore. No solid truth, nothing solid at all. Like a body that was pulverised to nothing but mush. No meat; not muscle.

All that Sukuna knew was that there was something to kill beneath him, and he had the means to kill it. Up and down. Again and again he punched and bit and tore until flesh cleaved from bone and he was reminded that a human was really just a bag of flesh ripe and ready to be taken in whole. There was the weight, the burning ache of something within him that he could not understand. 

Sukuna existed on a plane, in this state. The dark crept around him like a blanket. His vision was tunnelled. He could only see his hands and the black that was slowly consuming him. He could see the distant foggy memory of something else, too.

A dog at his door.

A desire.

To cut to slice to feed.  

Sukuna tore at his skin, slippery and unsuccessful, and then he collapsed, his knees hitting hard against something. 

And he screamed. He sat there, tormented and wild, and he screamed. It was incorrigible and intolerable, even to his own ears. Maniac, maniac, maniac. Monster, monster, monster. Sukuna had something inside him that could chop and burn and destroy. Sukuna had something inside him and he needed it gone. He needed it out, out, out.

“Out–” he croaked, his straining, craning voice box mimicking the hell in his head.

Sukuna’s entire body was launched backwards by a force on his collar. 

Sukuna yelped as the nape of his neck hit an unexpected vertical firmness behind him. A wall? Was he walled? Was Sukuna trapped? 

His soul shook its head and dissipated back inside him. Sukuna’s screams grew worse. Less than human, more like a dying wolf. Louder, louder, they grew. 

Sukuna saw the bloodied body in front of him. 

He could not see anything but flesh. Nothing but it. His entire field of vision was blurred to the physical, gripping sensations of thick, tender meat.

In the immediate moment within his breaking mind, Sukuna saw not the frightened face of a young girl begging to hold onto consciousness. He recognised it enough to merely note that he could not recognise it for what it was. The episode was abating. The process of the horror dwindling into muddy confusion always began with a realisation of a lack of realisation. 

Sukuna was still in it presently, however. And his fingers collapsed like rolling stones around a boxcutter. And he staggered, like an abysmal recreation of a zombie, toward his target. The target screamed when Sukuna’s knees collapsed on either side of its head. Sukuna’s hand grabbed its jaw. He was slapped away. 

The sound of skin slapping against skin as tussle became brawl froze Sukuna’s mental ineptitude. He wanted to use the boxcutter. He wanted to bring down the blade and so easily cleave open what was beneath him. He wished nothing more than to let the cascade fall, to let the world turn with smooth blood like oil through its cogs. Then his mind let out a howl. A chafing, brutal howl. 

Something that sounded like a plea to stop, and a memory. A beastly, struggling thing. Telling him to choose differently. Differently? Differently than what? What choice? Sukuna had a sack of meat beneath him, and he was a butcher. Why would his mind plead, beg, for him to rescind his birthright. 

His neck snapped up to the roof as he drove the boxcutter down one more time, into the hardness of floor tiling and not the blissful, carnal beauty of flesh. There was no spurt of a clogging artery. There was no glory of death, no skin to peel, and no corpse to set into rot. The whites of his eyes strained. His cornea rang with the heat of cold, impersonal, sterile lights about him. 

Sukuna’s vision blurred, trying to burst him from the black hole he was trapped in. His soul, his soul. The very thing that animated him. The blood. Oh, the blood tasted dark on his fingers. And his hands. He dropped the boxcutter, trembling. He closed his eyes. He could not be forced to suffer the perils of sight any longer.

It was cruel! 

It was a cruel and unnecessary punishment. He was too confused to make any sense of the visual, so he would not condemn himself to trying to decode it. 

The blood on his hands was, or at least tasted, gangrenous. Sticky and sour. But he licked. He licked through every line on his palm and every knuckle of his fingers. Sucked long and slow. 

Carefully, he mapped the inches and ages around his fingernails. His fingernails; which in his madness he had been so sure he had twenty of. Twenty, of which all had been long and razor sharp. Razor sharp; like the talons of a bird of prey.

Half had evaporated with the pounding in his temples as it had washed away like a tide. In tandem, the necrosis of his skin, too, had mystically disappeared as his fever boiled down. 

The world turned once more, and things slowly came into focus. The sterile lights he had so dreaded were the strip lights of his English classroom. Desks were thrown askew. His collar had been yanked, and the hard vertical force he’d hit had been the wall. There was someone under him. 

She was a nice enough girl. Asked too many questions in class and got under Sukuna’s nerves, but he could see her. Whatever her crimes, they surely did not warrant…

Sukuna looked at his own position. He was straddling her neck. The boxcutter he had so carelessly grabbed from a nearby table mocked him;  jammed as it was into the linoleum next to her temple. Her hands were on his thighs. Her mouth panting desperate breaths, and mumbles of ‘please’   left her over and again. Her cheekbone, delicate bone, placed high in the face, was stained this ugly mauve colour. Both of her eyes were swollen shut and yet she had been crying so badly that there was still the subtle glisten of tears at the edge of her eyes.

Sukuna wasn’t quite sure how to react, so he just gave his thumb one last, long suck. These episodes disturbed him, truly, but in all his life, Sukuna had never been the type to be overt in any kind of display of any emotion that wasn’t rage. Those who knew him (a scant few, considering the way seemed hellbent on isolating him) thought of him as quiet, perhaps uncomfortable in his own skin – except for the brief and scarily strange occurrences of his seemingly supernatural strength and unexplainable rage. There had been times in Sukuna’s life where he had wanted to explain that he, too, had no understanding of these events, but it was a useless ambition. 

Sukuna could not explain himself any better than he could be explained by the folk that surrounded him. He was a shadow; an entity crafted out of mystery and misunderstanding. On occasion, Sukuna had found that it was easier to be unexplainable than to be human. Or simpler, at the very least. 

Simplicity was something he lacked in grand heapings. 

The hand that landed firmly on Sukuna’s shoulder caused him to falter and spin around, met by the still hazy, clamorous face of his teacher. The old man’s eyes were firm. There was a bruise on his high cheekbone that Sukuna must’ve caused in his fit. There was a ritual to coming out of an episode that Sukuna had long, long drilled into himself. It began with a breath; a deep one until the coolness of the oxygen he was intaking smothered away the remnants of the burning blood inside his pierced, bleeding heart. 

Sukuna’s heart did bleed, it was true. He was an enigma wrapped up in a young boy’s skin. His heart did not bleed red and mournful. 

As embodied by the strewn chaos that surrounded him, he bled out in swaths of pure wildfire. Uncontainable, irrational. 

“Son, we have to get you out here.” 

Sukuna tried to pay attention to the old man’s face as he spoke. The way his skin peeled and drooped off his bones in that ungraceful affliction that all elderly people seemed to suffer from. Sukuna had always consolidated himself with the fact that it was highly likely he’d never have to watch his own appearance turn to rubble and ash. The boy was acutely aware that with the way he lived, he’d be hard pressed to make twenty-five.

Sukuna shrugged off his teacher’s grip, redirecting his eyes to the girl, who was now surrounded by swaths of his classmates in such a pathetic way that it resembled an anthill. They looked at him with fear in their eyes, as if he were the boot come to kick it over. 

“You’re calling my worker?” he asked his teacher flatly. There was no point in mincing words, Sukuna knew what was and was not acceptable. And this situation was horribly, hideously unacceptable. In honesty, the poor girl he’d attacked was lucky to be alive. 

It was a hard thing for one to steel oneself to; the knowledge that one slip, one edge, one fall, could wind around the curves of one’s existence and define the rest of one’s life. Sukuna had no keen interest in ending up in jail, but nor did he have the energy to extend mouth-frothing sympathies to his victims. 

There was only one affront Sukuna ever apologised for – the personal. His episodes were deeply apersonal. Beyond it, even. They struck a violent ring all the way down to complete amorality. A beast on a rampage did not see to what it was rampaging toward. The societal thing to do would be to apologise. The congenial thing to do would be to apologise. Sukuna already had had so much drawn out of him by the episode itself that he did not have an ounce of blood left in him that worried for the well-being of the subject of his episode. 

The girl was not dead. Sukuna would just be taken for another staunch reprimand by his social worker. Occasionally he wondered if he’d still be like this if his parents had not died. Somehow, he thought not. In the same breadth, however, such a notion of himself as anything but how he was was so inconceivable that Sukuna was hard-pressed to imagine a singular universe in which his soul was cradled by elder, godlier ones. He was not the kind of child born to have parents, in essence. His substantial form was as such that there was a loneliness in him that did not connect with any other human. The only thing that shared his fever was the blood he spilled. 

Sukuna licked the last of it from under his fingernails. 

His teacher met his eye. The old man never looked at him like the rest. No fear. Perhaps he was too old to fear a sixteen year old boy. Sukuna found him foolish. 

“I have no choice but to, son,” he said. 

“I know,” said Sukuna, “I’ll be in the hallway.” 

His hands found their way to his pockets, and the classroom brightened up fully as he walked through it, kinetically clearing up the black mass that had swallowed him whole in the last ten minutes.

          “You do know that all of us are sick and tired of your outbursts, yes?”

The boy’s ears and mental serenity were currently being grated down to dust on the floor of the shitty Toyota Corolla that he and the owner of the unforgiving and unfavourable voice were currently occupying. 

God, what I would give for this woman to shut up. The thought passed Sukuna’s mind in the irritated tone that most of his thoughts took. If there was to be an in into his brain, Sukuna had always thought that people would be in awe of just how heavily curated he was. Even his tone, his attitude, the breadth of his own thoughts were managed semi-subconsciously to the nth degree. Sukuna wanted to portray irritability, so he conditioned himself to think in an irritated Manner. Curated. He had to be. He lived with lurking fear and lurid knowledge that his hands could bring death at a breath of God; or in a gust of wind. If, in fact, those two things were not the same. 

His social worker was an unfavourable woman. Her eyes were always downcast like a low rolling storm, bringing with them the grinding gears of someone whose care was that of obligation and not of authenticity. Yet, still, Sukuna too had an obligation to her. His arrangement was simple – after a particularly ruinous episode had left him virtually un-fosterable, Sukuna had been assessed and granted a special order by the courts stipulating as such: 

So long as he made his school attendance without an unexplained absence, and so long as he attended his weekly (most nearly daily, in practice) meetings with his social worker and any professional that she saw beneficial to wrought upon him, he was entitled to live on his own. 

Sukuna’s eyes caught the edge of the highway. He rode down the way twice daily, usually in the heightened clamour of a school bus. Usually on the edge of a breakdown because something or someone was too loud; or because the engine was too hot under the base of his seat and jostled him around with every vibration. The boy shifted his backpack in his lap, trying, with due stress, to not react to his social worker’s unkind words. 

“I know," he responded succinctly, knowing that if he did not respond, the pale, lanky woman would most likely start on some other topic of  his that was to a dissatisfactory standard. 

She was like the weight of the blanket of a mother without any of the warmth or familiarity. It was honestly in the times he was burdened with her presence that he most felt a yearning to know what his own mother would’ve been like. Likely, she would’ve also chastised him, but perhaps in a different manner. One that tasted like honey and milk and childhood TV shows and late mornings on weekends. Not one that stank of an overworked and exasperated employee. 

“So why do you keep doing it?” she snapped. “Your aggression is getting out of control. We’ve tried everything with you, and you reject everything.” 

Control. As if Sukuna had ever been in control. He found it almost comical. It was true that his episodes had increased in length, frequency, and severity over the last year, but the neurologists he’d been referred to found nothing. The therapists he’d been sent to found him irritable and unwilling. Sukuna did not blame the system for tiring of him. He was tired of himself. Yet his soul had its demands, and Sukuna was in no place to clash against those binds. Blind was the world to it, and Sukuna had a strong, ungainly habit of never opening his mouth. It would take too long. Bare him too freely. 

“It isn’t something I can help," Sukuna said succinctly. 

“It’s something you should at the very least show remorse for! Your teacher told me you nearly killed that poor girl!” 

Sukuna’s lip curled, the lines of his face making themselves apparent in a manner that seemed beyond his age. What good will remorse do me? Sukuna thought arrogantly and apathetically. Such was the state of his world that empathy was entirely bled out of him. Born without the ability to feel it in his gut, doomed to the mind of his that understood it all perfectly. His own chance at contentment was focusing on the illusion that his dangerous exterior created and injecting unto that none of his chaotic interiority. Sukuna did not like things that felt bad, nor did he think feeling such things diminished the gravity of his bad-ness. It was nothing but consolation, and Sukuna was no consolationist. 

“If I did, you could’ve finally locked me up and been done with it. I should be charged for assault anyway, shouldn’t I?” 

“Shouldn’t you…”

A vexed, tight chuckle left her mouth along with the rhetorical question.

“Yes, you should. You should be in a ward. But… the system seems intent on letting you squander chance after chance, so there’s little I can do but put up with it," the woman said icily. 

There was a brief moment of silence between them in which Sukuna locked his heartbeat onto the rolling, smooth thumping of the car engine. It burnt through fuel the way he burnt through blood. Sukuna watched the treeline come and go as the main road turned into dreary suburbia. As the calm of the roads wrapped itself up in brick house after brick house that supplanted the place of nature in an orderly fashion. Organised and inorganic. Sukuna had expected to be driven directly back to his apartment. That was what usually happened. 

And yet, there was no sign of his usual path. Sukuna watched, first silently, as his social worker drove them directly through his suburb like an arrow through air, without the singlest shred of hesitation. 

He pondered on his words momentarily before his mouth opened and he spoke. 

“Are you going to drive me somewhere to kill me?” he asked simply. 

The woman chuckled abrasively, the dark circles under her eyes standing out on her pallor complexion. She always looked tired. Even more so when she’d been sitting with Sukuna for an extended period of time. Sukuna wished his mental incense could also reflect so easily on his face. 

“As much as I wish I could,” she said flatly. “Not this time.” 

Sukuna shifted in his seat, his fingers playing with the zipper on his bag just subtly enough that he hoped she wouldn’t catch onto the crack in his curation of self. The anxiety within him was churning like lava, and it demanded some physical release or even just a simple explanation. He tapped his feet along the floor of his seat impatiently. 

“Where are we going?” he managed thinly. Sukuna did not like things that were out of routine. They made him want to shut down and claw his eyes shut. He could already feel his brain pounding at the sides of his temples. Could feel his vision start to blur and the voices circling at the very back of his mind like whispers. Sukuna knew how swiftly a whisper could whip up into a roar. 

“A psychologist that recently moved to this area,” said she, “I think he’s quite odd, but his record is immaculate and apparently he’s the best at what he does.” 

“I don’t need another shrink,” Sukuna protested, his hands squeezing with tension around the straps of his ratty schoolbag. The weight of the thing was comfortable. Like an anchor. An episode in a car could spell mass danger. Sukuna tried to push it down. 

“You don’t have a choice," said his social worker, making it clear she was not tolerating even the temptation of an outburst. 

Sukuna opened his mouth to speak, his eyes widening. 

“I said you don’t have a choice," she repeated quickly. “I wouldn’t be shocked if the state sent this guy here just for you.” 

Sukuna’s lip curled in distaste. He could already imagine. Boring, older man, probably ugly and balding and probably had an office that smelled like jelly beans given to toddlers and sterility. All medical facilities carried with them the same air. Any space that was passed in and out of by too many people was bound to inherit the same affliction. As if all the stress and anxiety and putridity piled up and was left at the door. Shrinks were the worst. Sukuna had been to upwards of fifteen different psychiatrists or therapists or psychologists in his life, all insisting that all he needed was to find the right one. Sukuna gritted his teeth and let the air pass in and out of his teeth. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he growled in distaste, shooting a glare at the woman next to him. “You could’ve told me I had an appointment. You’re meant to tell me things, you know. It’s your fucking job.” 

“Don’t curse at me," she said stiffly, “and this is an emergency session. You were meant to start next month, but after your outburst today, we gave him a ring and he said he was keen enough on your file to take you right away. He’s doing you a real honest favour, Sukuna.”

Sukuna looked away stubbornly, his hand on his chin. 

His social worker let out a long breath of air, seeing his haughty and disinterested demeanour. 

“You know you have to buy into it for it to work, right?” 

“There’s nothing wrong with me! ” Sukuna shouted, the youth in his voice straining against the weight of his frustration. 

“Then stop trying to kill people.” 

“The shrinks aren’t gonna fix it.” 

“They’re not trying to fix you, they’re trying to help you.” 

“They can’t help me," Sukuna insisted stubbornly. 

Silence swallowed the car up. Like a black void taking the air from both him and his social worker’s lungs. The inevitable was the inevitable was the inevitable. Sukuna supposed this was always going to fucking happen. He’d be shepherded off to institution after institution until his death for something he couldn’t control and seemed unable to explain that he couldn’t control.

Sukuna took a deep breath, the pounding and swirling of blood in his brain abating like the autumn leaves that were falling from the trees and whipping by the car windows. 

“Fine," he mumbled.

          Chhkk– Clunk.

Sukuna unclipped his seatbelt when the car came to a rolling stop on an unassuming curb. His social worker opened his door for him and he stepped out. Stiffly, though without protest. The car was wedged at an angle against the ungainly curb. The street they were on looked suburban, idyllic. The exact kind of place that Sukuna had a thorough distaste for. He kept his eyes trained low, more toward the curb than to the woman standing in front of him. His school shoes shuffled around in the drifting yellow leaves that dotted the monotonously cobbled footpath like exploded, squashed bugs. Sukuna felt as though looking up at the place made it real. 

Alas, once that cognition impressed itself upon him, it was inevitable that Sukuna would lift his head. For Sukuna was not afraid of the place being real. Sukuna was not afraid of anything. It was another re-written thought. Something to scold himself for thinking in the first place. 

His fingers wound around the straps of his backpack, twisting uncomfortably as he drank in the sight of the quaint little place. 

It was an old house; the rafters swirling corrugated iron in some old baroque style; painted over white in the fashion of old clapboards in colonial history textbooks. The porch overhung the out-of-use front door, old style lamps hanging symmetrically from either side. Trees bracketed the white-painted brick frame of the building, every gust of wind blowing off a new jetstream of leaves that swirled up and gave everything a blurry flash of colour. It had clearly been repurposed quite recently, as the gate and mailbox were still set up in a rather residential fashion. 

Sukuna followed wordlessly behind his social worker, trying to ignore the way his heart thumped in his throat in a manner that was most unbidden by the wonts of his spirit. He should be calm. He’d been to a hundred shrinks. The boy reasoned with himself that there was naught to be different with this one. Hydrangeas lined the back, tiled path to the side door that was actually used to enter the psychiatric office. This door was much newer – remnants of a family home still scattered like puzzle pieces over a floor. Sukuna caught the edge of a clothesline still present in an overgrown and overgreen backyard. 

When his social worker opened the door, Sukuna was struck in the the very distinctive smell of every medical facility. The air he had been dreading fumigated outward in the most obscene smell. Even standing on the footpath metres away, Sukuna could recognise it.

It was, as Sukuna had been anticipating, that distinctiveness that seemed to transcend all lines and walls in the medical field. A sterile smell. Almost reminiscent of chlorine, but without the rush of nostalgia that would flood one’s mind with images of pools and summer and childhood. No, this smell hung dreary over every GP and dentist and psychiatrist like the accumulated hopeless memories of the sick people who’d wavered through them like a Venus fly trap caught unwitting flies. The smell being so sterile may have led one to the notion that it should’ve been crisp. Sharp. Cold. And yet, Sukuna had found that the reality of it was quite the opposite, and that was half the horror. For the feeling of the scent was warm. Of a yellowish tinge when he closed his eyes and tried to picture it in physical form. Like wisps of smoke burning slightly closer to beige than grey. 

The receptionist was typing away like a mindless drone, the tick-a-tack-tack of the keyboard drowning out the sound of one’s own breaths and thoughts until one was rendered just as mindless and hypnotised as the worker themself. Sukuna’s social worker was forced to ring the bell on the high counter before the two of them got any form of attention. 

“Yes, we had, ah, an emergency appointment coming in?” She said, fumbling through her handbag for the manila folder that she kept all of Sukuna’s government documents and aid cards in. 

Sukuna’s senses were hypnotised away from the routine and dull conversation that was happening at the front desk, however. 

There was a low echo of thick music burning down the hall. Sukuna could only just make out the rattan sound of cheery brass, licking up through his nose before his ears, almost washing away the discomforting and ugly smell of medicine and healing. It was a familiar tune, so bright and old that it could in an instant become horrifying. 

The recording quality on the voice that overlaid the bouncy beat was rough and coarse; Sukuna did not think it was coming out of anything digital, most likely a turntable. It was a long, looping melody. ‘Down, down, down, and the flames went higher,’ called the lyrics, seductive as the voice that came to Sukuna in the depths of his episodes. Seductive to him as hot honey smeared over his heart’s most craven desires.

Sukuna walked further down the corridor without even thinking strangely of it. His feet seemed to move on their own. He could just make out the edge of a leather shoe-clad foot tapping the carpeted wooden floor to the ‘one-two-three-four’ rhythm of the drums that filled in the gaps in the music. 

The corridor was just around the side of the house. Sukuna could see the hydrangeas through the thin curtains that covered the strips of glass that made up the windows. He could not explain it, but the mere sight of the flowers made something catch inside him. It was incomprehensible and a feeling he’d never happened upon before. Like a lurking cloud suddenly and instantaneously descending on his head. Telling him something. His haze seemed to deepen. He inched closer and closer to the music. He inched closer and closer to the shoe that was tapping along to the beat.

An arm caught his wrist, and Sukuna flinched, as if he had been on edge for hours, like he had entirely lost his sense of where he was and what he was doing. He spun indignantly, a protest already forming on his lips, but the icy glare of his social worker shut him down. 

“Wait. In the waiting room," she hissed. “I can’t handle another outburst with you today, it’s–” 

She would’ve continued. Sukuna knew very well that the woman was no stranger to berating him whenever she thought it necessary. It was like her method of stress relief. The way she alleviated being associated with the burden that was Sukuna himself. 

Yet she did not get the moment to, because a calm, masculine voice broke over the chilly air between them, instantaneously returning to Sukuna the exact rush he had felt when he had seen the hydrangeas in the window. 

“It’s quite alright. I’m ready to see him now.” 

Sukuna immediately did not like his smile. That was the first thing. The man was not old; not in the way many shrinks were. He had with him a familiarity that would have communicated ease and friendliness to most people, but in Sukuna, made his skin prickle like the hackles raising on the back of a wolf. The man immediately spoke to Sukuna of inferiority. Of a sense that Sukuna did not know what was going to happen next, and that he could not easily take into his hands the outcome of his interaction with this man. It was an interminable, intolerable feeling. 

His social worker let him go, and the man; the shrink, beckoned Sukuna to follow him into the office he had just been peeking into. 

The music was so infernally loud when Sukuna sat down that he was half sure it was going to drive him mad if it repeated for another minute. And it was a turntable. An old style, made up to look like a gramophone. Climbing brass, looping, unsettlingly happy music. 

Sukuna’s eyes trained on the psychologist as the man clicked the door shut, locking them together. Sukuna had been alone in a room with many ‘professional’ adults in his life. His general philosophy was that it was the opposing party that was trapped alone with him and not vice versa, but… all philosophies were faulty. There was always an extraneous variable that Sukuna could not account for. Always a distinct moment that challenged him on a foundational level. Sukuna did not feel like this man was trapped in the room with him. Sukuna felt hot-glued to his mockingly comfortable seat. He felt sticky and sweaty, and he could feel his heart in his chest like it was a foreign organ strangling him from the inside out. His ribs were transforming to caging spears, and with every expansion of his lungs, he could feel them stabbing the air out of him. 

The shrink had a short cropped fade, his bangs hanging over the first inch of his forehead, spiking up in a messy, uncurated, natural look. It was a shade of blonde that, under a trick of the light, could appear closer to a salmon pink than anything else. Sukuna sheepishly lifted his hand to his own hair, knowing, disturbingly, that the exact same could be said about his. 

The man’s chair creaked with a strain as he sat down in it, folding one neatly trousered leg over the other. He leaned his elbows forward on the warm, dark wood of his desk. He smiled at Sukuna again, but Sukuna could only pay attention to the strange, smile-shaped curves under his eyes. Were those scars? They looked too perfect – too precise to be accidental. Had this man carved them himself? That was deranged. Surely, a man who worked in psychology would not have ever had the constitution to permanently disfigure himself. He looked so self-assuaged. He looked so relaxed. He looked so put together. He looked so, so disturbing. Sukuna’s spine stiffened in his chair. 

“You’re Sukuna, aren’t you?” 

The man said Sukuna’s name like he’d said it a thousand times before. Like he was greeting an old friend after years, not like he was meeting a stranger. His voice was thicker and warmer than it had been in the hallway. Sukuna could’ve closed his eyes and drifted away with it. Sukuna was unsettled; Sukuna was completely complacent. 

“I’ve been waiting for you.” 

Sukuna fumbled to accept the handshake that he was offered. For a moment, all the boy’s heavily curated perfections and irritations were stripped away from him, and he was dumbfounded into a sense of tamed politeness. What was this man? He’s not going to get the better of me, he was able to reel the thought in desperately, like a struggling wild shark caught on a fish hook . Sukuna schooled himself, yanking his hand back to himself, his expression re-assuming the disdain that came to him with trained excellence. 

The man just laughed, as if Sukuna was no more than a pouting, toothless kitten. 

“My name is Yuuji," he said gently, his hand pressed to his chest and his eyes locked onto Sukuna’s. The sunlight filtered into the room in such a way that the brown of his irises was swept up in it. Luminescent and pungent. “I hope that I can be some help to you.” 

“There’s nothing to help," Sukuna said quickly. “We can get right to that so we don’t have to waste–” 

“Nonsense. Let’s not get straight to business. C’mon. Let’s know each other a little,” Yuuji hummed jubilantly.

He got up again from his chair again, strolling around the room and pulling shut the curtains. Sukuna felt a bead of ice-cold sweat drip down the back of his neck. It left a long, frigid trail. The skin that it passed over stung like it was sensing pain.

“Would you like a drink?” Yuuji offered, flicking on the power board to a small kettle that sat on a small benchtop that jutted from the wall in the east end of the office. The wood varnish of it matched Yuuji’s desk. 

Sukuna didn’t quite know what to say. Yuuji (Mr Yuuji? Dr Yuuji? The man had offered no title and no surname) had already pulled down two ceramic cups, so Sukuna supposed he didn’t have much of a choice in the ‘drinks’ realm. 

The hum of the kettle only exacerbated the silence. Yuuji walked past where Sukuna was sitting to procure a small carton of milk from the minifridge next to the end of the desk. He stopped right next to Sukuna, air leaving his nostrils in a huff. His hand rested on his hip as he gave Sukuna a pointedly encouraging look.

“Oh, don’t be a stranger, Sukuna,” he said softly, leaning down a little bit to deliver the rest of his message, “no one’s a stranger in my office. Least of all someone like you.” 

Sukuna tried to speak, but he was blocked by a thick, mucous glob of spit in his throat. He was forced to choke it down.

“Do you–” He stammered, uncharacteristically anxious to be speaking. He usually dealt without hesitation when it came to facing adults in his life. Usually, his snark was a mask. He felt stripped of it. Yuuji knew who he was and why he was there. And he was staunchly unafraid. “Do you mind turning the music down?” 

Yuuji bonked himself in the head in an exaggeratedly ditzy fashion, taking the milk over to the kettle and the cups before strolling to the turntable.

“Ah, sorry. I forget how loud it is. It’s a lovely song, though. I saw you trying to get a peek in,” he teased, his finger hovering over the switch. He paused, and Sukuna watched him close his eyes, as if drinking the music in through his nose. “I love that line. Don’t you?” said he, entirely without warning.

Sukuna, caught off guard, had not at all been paying attention to a singular word of the music, and he fumbled to try and recall the line that had just walked past them entirely unhindered. 

“Uh- What?” Said Sukuna dumbly. Yuuji gave him an endeared eye roll and switched the turntable off, walking over to his now-whistling kettle. He picked it up with a pop and poured two-thirds a cup of hot water into each cup. He followed the water with a teabag, lifting and dropping each one meticulously a few times more.

“ I fell for you like a child.” Yuuji withdrew the teabag and set it aside on a small, gold-rimmed saucer. “It’s such an interesting expression, linguistically.” 

Sukuna did not know what dissecting a love song had to do with Yuuji attempting to ‘fix’ his dangerous behaviour.

“...If you say so,” he mumbled. 

Yuuji let out an indignant sound, as if Sukuna had done something horrible, horrible thing to offend him. As if Sukuna’s apathy was not something to be discouraged by, but something to take personal offense to, and to find in said offense, a challenge.

“No, not if I say so. Sukuna, come on,” Yuuji shook his head. His tone was so disappointed that Sukuna felt like a scolded child. Like an idiot. It was clawing at his skin. “Do some thinking with me. Let’s walk through this together. Why might you think I find that phrase interesting?” 

“I really don’t know,” Sukuna said, falling over his words. He felt inept. Yuuji was making him feel inept. It was equal parts irritating, exasperating, and enchanting.

Yuuji paused for a second, stirring the milk into the teacups, as if organising what he was about to say.

“The interest to me is in the word ‘fell’. It’s such an interesting thing to say. Why do we say we fell in love like we fell for a lie? Is there a connection there? Linguistically, it seems to suggest that it is the same process of illusion and delusion from love to lie,

So, adding in the sense of naivety just feels… I don’t know how to describe it. I suppose a longer form of that line could be ‘I fell in love with you like a child falls for a lie,’ surrendering a helplessness to the object of our affections that is both freely given and yet still unearned. It makes love seem quite scary, doesn’t it?” 

Yuuji finished his tangent by putting a cup of tea in front of Sukuna and sitting back down in his own chair, taking a careless sip.

“Oh,” Sukuna said, his mind still trying to chase the meaning in Yuuji’s monologue. But it felt like words were hitting the surface of his brain and breaking right off; a plastic film over his deepest mind kept them from penetrating his brain.

“What do you think?” Yuuji asked, his eyes twinkling keenly.

“I– Um. You said it all. I think?” laughed Sukuna awkwardly, scratching the back of his neck.

Yuuji shrugged, a soft, breathy sound coming out of his mouth as he looked to the curtains that were shrouding them in. They did not block the light, per se. But they gave everything a slightly muted tint that made the space feel as if it was crowding in; intimate. Like walls, if walls were like arms. 

“You’re probably thinking this isn’t psychologically relevant,” Yuuji sighed.

“A little.”

Yuuji hummed, giving a conceding, yet confident nod.

“I read your file. Your track record is… well, it’s nothing short of impressive, to be honest. All my years in behavioural science and behaviour management, and not a single person as hellbent on avoiding help as you.”

Sukuna interjected,

“I’m not hellbent on avoiding help, there’s just no help that can–” 

“You haven’t tried everything,” Yuuji said firmly.

“It’s impossible to try everything,” Sukuna mumbled. 

Yuuji didn’t respond for a moment, and there was a brief second where Sukuna thought he’d thoroughly misjudged the man in front of him. That there was no specific, devilish weirdness about him and this is where it would end, just like it had with dozens and dozens before him. Sukuna was nearly ready to get out of his seat. 

Then Yuuji spoke.

“Do you mind if I begin with some preliminary questions? My sessions can get… intense, so I want to make sure that I’ve covered the barebones basics before we begin," he said, and Sukuna slumped back into his chair.

He looked at Yuuji, wary and cautious. Intense. The boy was unaware what qualified as intense. He wasn’t sure if intense was meant to be a strategy to be deployed on patients with pre-existing mental instability. 

“That’s… fine. You’re wasting your time, though," he mumbled.

“Are you sad, Sukuna?” Yuuji did not miss a beat.

“What?” Sukuna felt knocked backward into his chair by the question. It was not something normal to ask so directly, nor so bluntly. Yuuji’s eyes had gone still and hard, like rippling water that had all of a sudden frozen entirely. 

“Answer the question, please," he said.

Sukuna looked around the room nervously. He cleared his throat, shifted his hips a little where he sat, and spoke.

“I- I guess not? I’m not particularly sad, no,” he said, intertwining his fingers in his lap, picking at the calloused skin at the edges of his fingertips.

Sukuna did not even have a second to intake a breath before Yuuji shot him the next question.

“Are you lonely?” 

The taste of air on the inside of Sukuna’s mouth made his cheeks and gums and tongue dry. He couldn’t help the way his jaw had fallen ajar. It was not a hard question, but the simplicity of it made Sukuna fumble over himself. Questions were usually easy to avoid. Yuuji’s were not.

“No," he said firmly. He was not keen on playing Yuuji’s games. Not keen on bending to the whims of this strange man who thought he could disarm him with tea and soliloquies and bluntness. Sukuna was sure that it would not work.

“Your parents are dead. Do you think of them often? Do you wonder if things would be different if they were not dead?” Yuuji hummed, leaning on the desk. 

Sukuna was unfortunately reminded of the way he’d been reminiscing about that very thing no less recently than on the drive in.

“...Anyone would," he managed.

Yuuji smiled again. This time, the disgustingness of the smile was even more apparent. It matched those scars (for now, Sukuna was sure that they were scars) in a way that made every inch of Sukuna’s skin crawl. If he were to have an episode around a body such as Yuuji, he was sure he would attempt with every limb of his; every finger, to kill him. Yuuji made him feel the shadow at his back. Yuuji’s voice sounded like one he had heard before. He was so on edge, and he could not explain why. 

Even the curtains seemed to have darkened. The room didn’t feel intimate, instead, it was starting to warp. Warp to that void that Sukuna saw all too frequently. The electric pulses in his brain throbbed at his temples. Blood began to roar in him like fire through a forest.

“You feel like a wretch. You feel like you don’t even know yourself. Am I correct?” Yuuji observed.

“What are you–” Sukuna stuttered.

“You hear things.” 

Sukuna could not reply.

“You are so sad and so lonely that you hear things, just to have something to speak to you. Someone, someone who is behind you; or above you. Plucking your thoughts out of your head and replacing them with raw, unfettered actions.” 

He shook his head, desperate and afraid. Sukuna felt like he was watching himself over his own shoulder. Every single one of Yuuji’s words was not going to him, but pushing him out. Pushing him out of control.

“Stop,” he pleaded.

“Do you feel that?” 

“I don’t want to do–” he begged.

“Answer the question, Sukuna,” Yuuji said. His voice was distorting like an echo, pitching down and curling. Sukuna tried to cover his ears, but his arms would not move.

“I don’t want to,” Sukuna insisted indignantly.

“Stubbornness won’t help you. Answer the question.” 

“I can’t–” he gasped.

Sukuna’s eyes darted around desperately, but everything grew blacker and blacker spiralling the long and ugly way down to pitch.

Yuuji’s eyes flashed like beacons in the dark.

“Answer.” 

“Yes!” he cried out, his voice cracking.

“Thank you,” said Yuuji calmly, taking a drawn out sip of his tea. Sukuna panted, his heart racketing in his chest like an old, unruly neighbour beating pots and pans. The room lightened again. Like Yuuji could control it. Like he could control the pressure of the air with no more than his voice. “How old are you?” 

“H-huh?” the question was comparatively so easy and mundane that Sukuna nearly did not comprehend it.

“Will I have to repeat myself again?” Yuuji chuckled good-naturedly. Sukuna quickly shook his head.

“Sixteen. I’m sixteen. Seventeen in the summer," he said on a long exhale, shuffling uncomfortably again, trying to pull himself back to a state of calm. Back to a state where he felt in control. 

Losing control was no stranger to Sukuna. But losing control to a beast within himself and having control snatched by an outside force was very, very different. Yuuji had set up a game. Sukuna had fallen for it. 

“Good,” Yuuji smiled. “Full name?” 

“Sukuna Ryomen,” Sukuna mumbled.

“Have you ever gone by any other name?” Yuuji’s voice drew back to a much softer, normal tone.

“No?” Sukuna asked, though even through his easily verifiable answers, he found himself unsure. Like Yuuji had established, in mere moments, a rocky foundation that Sukuna could be pulled from at any given moment. A doubt of everything. A cartesian stratosphere.

“Has anyone ever told you you’ve gone by any other name?” Yuuji asked.

“Not that I remember,” Sukuna said grittily, shaking his head. He was pensive, cautious of when the strangling questions would return. 

Then they did.

“Do you feel like sometimes you feel something inside you that is not you?” Yuuji’s eyes flicked up from his teacup to Sukuna, training on him in a shockingly non judgemental way. Like he felt . Like he understood.

“I–” Sukuna stuttered, trying desperately to drag his mind back to his body.

“Stop being in two minds. Just answer. Yes or no. We’re proceeding into the session,” Yuuji said gently.

Intense. Yuuji had said. Intense.

“Yes.” Sukuna breathed out, his eyes falling to half lidded. Suddenly, answers were easy.

“Does this thing feel like yourself in shape or essence?” 

“Yes.” 

“Do you dream of something behind a screen that you cannot quite reach?” 

“No.” 

“Have you ever had one of your ‘episodes’ while asleep?” 

“No.” 

“Do you feel whole when you are having an episode?” 

“No.” 

Sukuna followed Yuuji’s movements. The man stood. Why was he standing? What was he doing? Sukuna was unsure. But he followed his movements. He came closer, closer. Like a magnet finding its target. He knelt down on one knee in front of Sukuna’s chair. He smiled once more. He extended his hand. Sukuna was lifting to put his own in it before Yuuji had even begun to formulate the vocal sounds that would make up his questions.

“Do you trust me?” he whispered, letting the air between them hang.

Their palms clasped together.

“...Yes,” Sukuna breathed out.

Then, it began.

          The soft sound of a piano keys. And Sukuna’s heart being vomited from his stomach out onto Yuuji’s desk. There was a hand on his shoulder. Sukuna couldn’t tell if he was hallucinating or not; for he could see his heart thumping and bleeding in front of him, but so too was it still thumping and bleeding in his chest. Yuuji was saying something – his voice was the very last anchor in the fog. The very last mast on a disappearing ghost ship, and Sukuna clung to it like he would cling to a memory. Or a friend. Or a lover. Or a soul. 

That was before the pounding began. Not like a bell or the heavy, comforting beat of a drum, but like a nail. Like a nail carving in two a perfectly intact plank of wood. The seams of a board being split unfairly and painfully apart, leaving chips and shards and broken bridges of flippant, fragile splinters in between the divided halves. No, no, this hurts. This isn’t helping. This hurts–

Sukuna smashed his forehead into whatever was in front of him, but Yuuji’s hand – that strong, gentle, cool hand against his feverish skin. 

“Listen to me, Sukuna,” Yuuji whispered. His words came in and out of Sukuna’s brain like a kaleidoscope. “Find him. Find him for me–” 

Flesh. Bloody. Taste. Carnis. Pulpa. 

Sukuna tried furiously to shake his head. 

“No, no, what are you saying, make it stop, just make it–”

Then the second voice came. Like a loop. Like a repeating beam around the back of his brain. Like a searing mallet into the temporal lobes. Ring, ring, ring. And it wouldn’t stop. Sukuna’s hands twisted into Yuuji’s shirt. The boy staggered hopelessly from his chair, leaning his full weight on the elder man. Begging with naught but his eyes to be able to breathe again.

He opened his dazed, sloppy mouth to speak, yet all that came from him was that dark, dark voice in his brain.

Anima incesta habes. Tu! O, Tu! Habes mihi nomen et habes mihi anima.

“S-stop–” Sukuna croaked. 

He had not blinked in minutes. His eyes were dry and blistering against what seemed like infinite light. 

“You’re alright,” Yuuji said to him; spoke to him like he was speaking to some higher order. “Find it, Sukuna. I know you can hear it.” 

Sukuna fell deeper into Yuuji’s arms, pawing at his chest. Sukuna did not know what Yuuji had done to him; how it could be that the mere touch of him had sent his entire body yearning and reaching and writhing for something it wanted to know.  

And that voice! That horrible, repeating, infernal voice! It repeated. Score and score again. Up the valleys and down the hills of Sukuna’s brain. He could see it all in flashes. And what was ‘all’? Not even he had those answers for himself. He was incomprehensive; the feel of Yuuji’s shirt and body under his hands felt like melting goo; felt like torture and it felt like heaven. His episodes left him a body. Whatever this was left him as less than that. He didn’t have a body in this state. Forget tasting, he couldn’t see . Or he could see, perhaps, but distorted, as if through a blackened fish bowl. He could see, but it was not him that was doing the seeing. 

“It’s- I can’t-” 

“You can, ” Yuuji sounded desperate. 

He sounded so desperate. 

Why did he sound desperate?

I understand everything you’re saying, brat. I feel… absolutely nothing.

Sukuna didn’t know who was saying that. He did not know what was the voice from which it came. He couldn’t comprehend why the words felt so natural on his tongue. His tongue that was not his. His mouth that was not his. His entire being and body and existence and the pure method of his thought that felt, as a felled tree, in freefall. In catastrophic descent. 

“Look at me, Sukuna!” Yuuji had grabbed Sukuna’s face. Was holding it in his two hands, was holding him like he was dust that was seconds away from dissipating through his very fingers. 

Sukuna could see, just for that second. He stopped taking a backseat, and he flashed forward, almost jolting, as his body spasmed with rigidity at the control it had suddenly rediscovered. 

“I’m scared,” Sukuna whimpered. 

The sound shocked him. It was what he had longed to say for so long – to all that discredited and cast him aside. To every person he’d hurt in a fit. To every sidelong glance that was thick with awareness and caution. But it shocked him that he let the words slip out of his lips. Anima. Sukuna shivered. The voice again. Messy and incongruous. He looked around. Sweat beaded from his brow down to the sides of his neck. 

“Can you hear it too?” he begged Yuuji.

“You’re hearing something?” Yuuji stammered uselessly instead. Then he dropped Sukuna from his grasp. Sukuna nearly sobbed at the weight of Yuuji peeling himself from his body. 

“Don’t go!” he shouted like a stubborn child. All the caprices of his persona stripped away, he was left just as that. As a shivering adolescent in a psychiatric office. 

Yuuji shone a medical torch right into his eye, and Sukuna flinched hard away. He had not seen it coming. For the moment Yuuji had stepped away from his touch, it was like the man had ceased to exist. Evaporated from Sukuna’s inner plain of skulls and blood and water and became all at once uncontrollable, like Sukuna was on the inside and Yuuji was on the out. 

But he was back, and there was that light in his eye. Sukuna tried weakly to shove Yuuji’s arm when he insisted on keeping it direct in his face. 

Yuuji was laughing. He looked happy. Sukuna didn’t know what Yuuji had found or expected to find in him, but he didn’t feel like this moment was a laughing one. He didn’t know what anything was. There was a wave, suddenly, awash at the back of his lungs like a tsunami of pressure, and it hit him so hard he doubled over onto the desk, hacking and coughing. 

Or did he? For he felt that he did, but half a second shy of the instantaneous moment that followed, he was standing perfectly, tritely still, like a doll for Yuuji to inspect and marvel at. 

“Look at that…” Yuuji whispered. His thumb carved a line against Sukuna’s subtle birthmark. It was one small stripe under his eye. Sukuna could taste Yuuji’s breath in his mouth, and subconsciously, his tongue darted out to catch it. Just for a second. The scars on Yuuji’s face looked grizzlier this close. They were not done with any sort of gentle, sharp blade. They looked more like sacrifices than cuts.

“W-what?” Sukuna managed to choke out, despite the suffocation in his oesophagus. 

“Your eyes, Sukuna.” Yuuji clicked the flashlight off, and pocketed it succinctly. He produced from his desk a small, handheld mirror. Pressed it into Sukuna’s hands with a disturbing sense of pride.

Sukuna staggered back when he held it up. He reached for balance and flicked the switch on the turntable, and the music began blasting once more at full throttle as he tried to comprehend what he saw from his reflection. 

And it burns, burns, burns. Sung the jazzy, rhythmic voice.

Sukuna’s eyes were blood red.

          The boy was unusual on his way out of the psychiatrist’s office. Anyone who had been around him for any length of time would’ve noted as such. The lack of tremors in his hands. The calm, blank expression on his face. Every single one of his movements was perfectly coordinated. Without hurry, without the strife that had so seemed to follow him every step of every way around the avenues of his life for said life’s entirety. His social worker gave him strange looks from the corner of her eye as they drove through the suburban streets that were equally as blank as his eyes. 

Sukuna paid no heed to it. He felt like there was water in his veins in lieu of blood. Relaxing as the taste of the ocean.

“...Do you think that helped?” the woman asked, the shape of her voice almost wary in a way she never had been before. 

She’d long become desensitised to Sukuna’s behaviour. Every sharp quip that came from his tongue. Every barb that covered his expression and every time his brows furrowed and his fingers twitched. But here he was, staring, straight ahead, out the car windshield. He was almost like a different person. No longer so jerky and erratic. The chip on his shoulder seemed cleanly knocked off. 

“Yes.” When Sukuna spoke, his tone was flat, giving nothing away. “Yes, I think it did.” 

Sukuna was left alone in his apartment. 

He put his bag on the floor of the entranceway. He took off his shoes, then his jacket, then he walked through the house. Footstep following footstep, the cold of the linoleum filtering through his socks and hitting his feverish skin. Left through the kitchen, sharp right to the bathroom. He unzipped his jeans and took a piss. He flushed the toilet. He washed his hands. He washed his face. He pushed his hair back, and stared at himself. 

He lifted a hand – slow, touching the waterline of his left eye. His eyes were brown again. The soft, chestnut brown that they had always been. Perhaps leaning toward burgundy or maroon in a certain light; like sunset, when all the oranges and yellowish hues brought out a different shade over every colour they touched; but still. Brown. A normal, standard brown. 

Sukuna washed his face again, trying to shake off the calmness that seemed to have seeped into his bones. How did he get home again? Right. His social worker drove him. He saw his eyes in the mirror, Yuuji rubbed his shoulder, Yuuji asked him a few more questions (the content of which Sukuna couldn’t remember), Yuuji said goodbye. Then he checked out with the receptionist. They gave him a calling card for his next appointment. The very next day. Yuuji had said he liked to follow up quickly after sessions. Ten-thirty in the morning, sharp. Sukuna had put the calling card into his pocket, and left with his social worker. Then his social worker had driven him home. Then she had left. Then Sukuna left his school bag by the door. Then he’d walked through his apartment. Now he was in the bathroom. He pissed, he washed his hands, he washed his face.

Sukuna ran through the events a few more times in his head. Every time, they became clearer. But not clearer in the way that he could remember them better – but clearer in the way an actor’s blocking became muscle memory, or in the way a hypnotised patient began to more comfortably repeat the words that they were instructed to repeat. Sukuna could see the memories, from that moment Yuuji had shown him his eyes, with vivid clarity. They didn’t feel like his memories. More like implants from an external source. Something that Sukuna couldn’t verify the innate reality of in his own head. 

His head was pounding. Like there were two extra hearts in his temples, and the sensation was almost like a pulling; a tugging on his brain. It came with every tug. A gap between his thoughts and his world. A distance that was uncomfortable at best and terrifying at worst. 

Sukuna stared at himself in the mirror. 

Forehead, eyebrows, eyes, nose, lips. He pulled an expression, just to see if he could. Just to see if he was real. He smiled. He frowned. In an exaggerated, cartoony way. He opened his eyes as wide and bug-like as he could, furrowed his eyebrows, and let out a loud, ringing laugh. He stared at his reflection to become afraid of it, then he let his expression fall back to normal. 

He looked down at his hands and nearly fell when he saw the distance between his eyes and his hands looked like it had doubled. And his nails – his nails looked like black was creeping up the bottom of them. It looked like black flesh was eating him. 

Sukuna slammed the bathroom door shut behind him, and panting, he searched through his closet for gloves like a maniac on the loose. He needed to forget it. But everything looked further away. Like he was seeing his life from a wide-lens camera. Shaky. Handheld. The cinematography was bullshit. There was no meaning in any of the shots. Everywhere Sukuna looked, things just grew more and more absurd, not less.

Sukuna wasn’t digging through his closet anymore. Because he blinked and he could see an icy hellhole. Corpses; strewn, bent, blue. And he could see a small, huddled up body of a child. Looking so lost; hair white against the identical scape of the snow that they forged. Sukuna remembered feeling something. He remembered. Then it was gone. Glitching out again. Glitching out again. 

I’m pathetic.  

Sukuna was in front of the mirror again. He tried to retrace. His hands were turning black. He’d left the bathroom to go look for gloves. Then he’d seen a cold little child. Now he was in front of the bathroom mirror again? Pathetic? Who’d called him pathetic? 

Sukuna looked around himself for where those words had come from. Then he looked back at the mirror when he found nothing. He was crying. 

“Please…” he mumbled to his own reflection. He wanted Yuuji’s comfort again. He wanted the hand on his shoulder and he wanted the eyes looking into his and he wanted the voice in his ear to coach him through this. One more time. Session, red eyes, leaving Yuuji’s office, social worker’s car, home, bag down, bathroom, brown eyes, hands turning black, closet, memory, mirror, crying. Memory? 

Why did you not get cold, being by my side?

Sukuna was sobbing into his hands. He couldn’t contain it. It was a sadness that felt a thousand years old. Like he’d blinked and missed his entire life. Like he was missing something. That voice inside him. That scary feeling. All the anger, all the brutality, this.  

Sukuna hit the side of his head on his bathroom sink as he fell to the floor. He was groaning like he was in agony. He was curling in on himself like he was being knocked full force out of his own body. 

A tree, being cleaved in two. Sliced in half. But the splinters stayed lodged. But the splinters built a bridge. Cleaved apart, but remaining. Two sides of a whole that shouldn’t be able to remember what a whole was anymore. 

He lifted his hand helplessly, trying to strike down the centre of the air like he expected something to happen. Like he expected a cut to occur. Why? He could not explain. There was a power that his brain and body longed to remember. But when Sukuna’s hand cut air, nothing happened. 

Flowers in a bush on the edge of an empty city. Indulgence. Giving in for a moment. A stiff upper lip and a hammering heart.

A morning glory. 

That’s a hydrangea, you moron.

Sukuna squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could. He covered his head with his hands. It was helpless to try and stop the flow of his tears. So he kept crying. He’d been so calm for a minute. The fear had been gone for a minute. 

Sukuna wanted that back. Yuuji had, for a second, replaced the fear with emptiness. Emptiness was eons better than this. Than being this.

For all he was now was a crying child on a bathroom floor, alone because he couldn’t be trusted to be around anyone else without butchering them. That was what his life had been. Horror turned fear. Fear turned violence. Violence turned loneliness. 

You are so sad and so lonely that you hear things, just to have someone speak to you. 

That recent, recent memory felt no more recent as the child or the flowers. Sukuna was lonely. He always was. A millennia of loneliness. He knew it well. Close calls, not close enough. A hand in his, much smaller, icy cold. The heat of blood spat over the skin of his face. Someone who wouldn’t move, no matter how much Sukuna pushed him. A refuge for his soul. 

Like the refuge Sukuna had felt for a second when he’d left Yuuji’s office.

Sukuna screamed as the pain in his head grew louder and louder. He could see a thousand things, all his flashes and trashy visions that shuddered and blurred and became completely incomprehensible. It was like an old TV show. It was like a 3D image without a 3D lens. Red and blue crossing over each other again and again. 

          Sukuna woke up in his bed. It was the middle of the night. How he’d gotten there and when he’d gotten there, he didn’t know. What had happened in his session – the red eyes, and the black fingers, and the rest… It felt made up now. Sukuna reasoned that he probably dreamt it all up. Sukuna let himself fall back into his bed. He was tired. So tired.

          “You look like you hardly got any sleep,” Yuuji sighed the next morning. He put a cup of coffee down in front of Sukuna, just like he had done with the tea the day prior.

Sukuna scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. He’d slept, but it was a fitful and confusing night. He remembered nearly nothing of it. Just that he’d wanted to come back to Yuuji. It was odd – all his life, all the attention he’d been afforded by professional after professional, and Yuuji was the first to ever tug something in him deep enough to make him actually want to do it all again. 

“Last night was weird,” Sukuna murmured. “I don’t know why, but I think it…” He bit off the end of his sentence, his pride rearing its ugly head again. He reached forward and grabbed the coffee cup. The thin porcelain seemed dangerously delicate in his hands. 

“How do you feel?” Yuuji asked calmly, sipping his own coffee, kicking his feet up on his desk. One hand in the pocket of his dress pants. It was funny; how put together he looked in juxtaposition with his messy, floppy hair and his youthful expression. 

Sukuna shrugged. 

“Alright, I guess.” 

“Not close to another episode?” Yuuji said it with almost a teasing lilt, and Sukuna’s eyes snapped upward, glaring. 

“I don’t have them every day, you know.” 

“I know, I was just pulling your leg,” Yuuji added a wink to the end of his words. Sukuna let out a quiet scoff. 

Sukuna rubbed his thumbs against the cup for a few moments. He took a sip, letting the warm, thick liquid peel slowly down his throat. He put the cup back down against the desk and spoke again. 

“So, what did you even do, yesterday? Like, I mean, how did you–” 

“I’m very good at getting people to be honest,” Yuuji said. “That’s all that happened, you were honest.” 

Sukuna frowned. 

“There’s gaps. I don’t really remember the last ten minutes or so of-” 

“It happens. Your brain is very sensitive, Sukuna. That’s why you have your episodes in the first place. I…” Yuuji sighed, firing up the monitor on his desk and tilting the screen toward Sukuna. “I emailed all the neurologists you’ve ever been tested by for reports, obviously I’m not a neurologist, but, you know… comme si, comme ca. Feels like relevant information. All they could give me is that you probably have a mild case of epilepsy.” Yuuji explained so calmly and so easily that Sukuna just nodded along compulsively. 

“So that affects my memory?” 

“Probably. We probably probed you too hard, that’s all. But you did really good, and if you feel better, then that’s all that matters,” Yuuji hummed, turning his monitor back to himself.

“We’ll do more today?” Sukuna asked, trying to conceal how keen he was for that sense of calm. 

“Yep. And hopefully we can have you back in school so you aren’t falling behind, hm?” Yuuji grinned. 

Sukuna frowned.

“I usually get a two-week suspension after an episode–” 

“I called them,” Yuuji said, cutting him off. “Medical incident, not any fault of your behaviour.” 

Sukuna stared at Yuuji, dumbfounded. Sure, a medical incident. His episodes were well documented. But Yuuji mentioned nothing about Sukuna not showing enough terror or remorse. All he said was ‘not your fault’. 

Yuuji tilted his head gently. 

“What? Have I grown four arms or something?” Yuuji grinned, his lips curling upward as if there were some esoteric joke hanging in the air that only one party in the room was aware of. 

“N-nothing. Just. You know. I… really hurt that girl …” Sukuna said the last part as a mumbled kind of slur, like he was almost embarrassed to admit that he knew his actions had dark and dire effects. 

Yuuji shrugged. 

“Your brain made you do it. Hopefully, between you and me, we can get that sorted so it won’t be so much of a problem anymore.” 

“...Sure. Okay,” Sukuna whispered. 

Yuuji cleared his throat, finishing his coffee and sitting a little bit more professionally, pulling his chair into his desk. Sukuna’s hands curled on the knees of his pants. 

“Now, Sukuna, before we start, I’d just like to ask you some preliminary questions… ”