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The first time is quick.
At the meagre age of ten, Yuuji learns what death is. After years of slow wasting, his grandfather leaves behind an empty, echoing household that gathers dust as the months drag on, and two young grandchildren who do not cry when they bury him behind the old house. Four months after Itadori Wasuke passes away in his sleep, tucked beneath the soft sheets of his sickbed, Yuuji is killed by a strange man who had come to their front door.
Well, almost.
The scars on his face have long healed over, but Yuuji never forgets the bright pain from when he first got them. Sometimes in his unwilling dreams, his mind reconstructs the glint of the blade that swung towards him. He has seen it replayed hundreds of times by now, he thinks. Hundreds upon hundreds. Thousands, maybe. He has seen the sword going for his neck more times than he has seen the wild geese flying across the sky. He's seen Sukuna's red face more times than he can count.
"Get up," Sukuna had said, his eyes colder than ice. "Get up, or I'll make you." So Yuuji got up, and then they were gone, leaving the shadowed house behind.
Yuuji never asked what Sukuna had done to the man, but he remembers how the blood sprayed, and how his limbs seemed to dwindle. Sukuna refuses to tell him. These days, he doesn't tell Yuuji much at all. He is gone from their campsite most hours of the day and comes back smelling like rust and salt. 'Where do you go?' Yuuji asks him. Sukuna shoulders past without a word.
It's unfair, because he always asks Yuuji where he goes. 'Come back before dark,' he demands when Yuuji goes to forage or to collect firewood. 'Be quick.' His mouth is almost always a firm line across his face, a deep indent of displeasure. Growing up, Sukuna only ever smiled when other people were hurt. Yuuji never thought that he'd miss it. He doesn't. But there's a part of him that aches at the memory.
He looks down at the stream. There aren't many fish today. Yuuji hasn't been able to catch any for their evening meal, and nor was he able to yesterday. He bites his lip worriedly thinking about what Sukuna might say. He might be furious. Might storm off to catch his own food, something hot-blooded that will properly sate him instead of the grain sludge they default to in times like these. Or he might be disappointed. He might look at Yuuji with his cold eyes and tell him that he's outlived his purpose and that now he should leave. He might turn away.
Standing up, Yuuji frowns and clenches his fists. What else is there? Maybe downstream, where the water begins to pool.
"No," says Yuuji to himself. "That's too close to the village." Wherever they go, Sukuna says to stay away from the villages. 'Don't attract attention', he says. 'Being the idiot you are, you won't be able to stay unnoticed there. So just stay here and wait for me.'
Then upstream. But upstream, the current is too strong. So not from the stream, then. From somewhere else. Something else, maybe? Something rustles nearby and Yuuji whips his head round, locking eyes with a trembling thing in the undergrowth. He blinks, and the rabbit flings itself away.
Sukuna likes rabbit. He doesn't say so, because he never says anything about what Yuuji makes, or does, or tells him, but Yuuji's watched him dig his teeth into the red meat enough times to tell that he likes it. When they were younger, he'd watch their grandfather skin rabbits for stew. But rabbit is hard to catch, and even harder to kill.
'Just do it,' says Sukuna, looking at him with dark eyes. Yuuji trembles as he hovers the blade over a small, furry body, frozen with fear. 'It's easy. Just slit its throat.'
Rabbit would feed them well for the night. And they have traps.
If their grandfather had lived longer, perhaps Yuuji would be able to make them better. If Sukuna didn't insist on them moving so much, perhaps Yuuji would have more time to perfect his clumsy designs. But time always turns out to be shorter than expected, so Yuuji only has messy holes in the dirt and prayers to spirits he has no offerings for.
The first trap he checks is empty. It's the one closest to their campsite, and Yuuji edges gingerly around the clearing they've chosen to sleep in for these few days before Sukuna makes them move once again. He can hear Sukuna moving around. It's a rare day that he's chosen not to venture out to do whatever he does while the sun is up. Sometimes he knocks things over and Yuuji wrinkles his nose thinking about how he'll have to set everything back into place when he comes back.
When he comes to the second trap, he sees that it's been disturbed. There's nothing caught in it, though. Only the displacement of the leaves around and a thrumming disappointment that makes itself at home in Yuuji's chest, slipping into place next to his worry.
He imagines Sukuna's tight frown. The derisive decline to eat. He keeps going.
Partway through the forest, he stops and crouches. The sound of voices filter through the trees. They're far away, and Yuuji can't quite hear what they're saying, but they're speaking loud enough that he can hear the intonations through the leaves, their human voices an obvious strangeness amongst the birdsong and the breeze. Yuuji remains in hiding until they fade away.
"Phew," he laughs. "That was unexpected!"
The third trap is caved in. Yuuji leans over, and for a second he thinks that it is just another fruitless disturbance, but then he sees it. Pressed against the side. Trembling. The white of its eyes showing, soft fur mussed. A rabbit. Small, small rabbit.
"Hey, hey," Yuuji croons, as if he isn't going to kill it. He kneels and reaches down and the rabbit flinches from his hand. He tries not to think about how scared it is. He thinks instead about Sukuna. Sukuna will be pleased. He takes a deep breath and closes his hand swiftly around the scruff of its neck. It grunts with terror and kicks out.
Yuuji takes his knife and holds it carefully. The death is quick.
He heads back to camp with its little body dangling from his hand and he tries not to feel too guilty. If it hadn't been him, he reasons, it could have been something else. A fox. A wolf. A hawk. There are many things in the world that kill, and it's not bad that Yuuji is now one of them. He says this to himself as the rabbit's head lolls bloodily from its neck.
Sukuna will be pleased. Sukuna will be happy. Sukuna will—
Yuuji drops the rabbit. Its body hits the ground.
"Sukuna!"
Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. Yuuji's mind goes numb and it thinks, distantly, that, well, if it goes like that, if it keeps going the way it seems to be going, then Sukuna won't be pleased or happy or anything about the fact that Yuuji has brought him something he has killed, just for him, oh no, Sukuna won't be anything if there is no Sukuna at all.
Yuuji's breath trembles in his lungs and Sukuna's arm ends in nothing but a stump—a clean, red cut.
"Hm, that's a surprise," says the man. "I was told it was only you." He is holding a blade with blood dripping down, standing over Sukuna's body on the ground, slumped against a tree. Their cooking pot sprawls beside him, scattered grain in the dust. There's a wavering quality to the air around them. Some thin, watery barrier, hovering in the air. "It seems our information was wrong."
"Obviously," says Sukuna, baring his teeth in a vicious grin. "I doubt that you fools would be right about anything."
The man tsks. "Just for that, I'll be taking your other arm." And he brings the blade up, then down. Sukuna shouts. Yuuji chokes on his own spit.
"He isn't like you, is he?" the man says, glancing at Yuuji and furrowing his brow. "How odd. Have you been keeping him from us for a reason? But what use would a curse have for a human? And a normal one at that. How odd." Yuuji thinks frantically, more confused than he has ever been. Curse? A curse? Sukuna is not a curse. What does he mean by curse?
"He's more like me than you'd think," Sukuna grits out through his teeth. Yuuji does not notice the way that the flesh is creeping forward from the stump of his arm.
The man makes a curious noise. "Oh, already? So fast! I see now why you've been so difficult to deal with. You've certainly made a lot of trouble for us. Well, curse. It ends here. We'll have to take your human pet in for questioning, but rest assured, he'll stay alive for as long as he's useful!"
Useful? Yuuji does not feel useful. He is a burden, if anything, and he is nothing more than a body needlessly filling up space at Sukuna's side. He is unnecessary weight. His life is a kindness. Just a whim.
Sukuna must think the same, as he throws his head back and smirks through the unimaginable pain he must be in. "Useful? As if that brat's ever been useful in his life. Go ahead and take him. I bet he'd let you."
Yuuji whispers. "I wouldn't."
"Hah?" says Sukuna, twisting to face him. His arms keep bleeding into the grass, but slower. Yuuji imagines him fainting from blood loss. Bleeding out.
"I wouldn't leave you," says Yuuji quietly. 'Don't leave me.'
Sukuna stares back at him through the reddish strands of his hair. His markings have never seemed so stark. So dark. So vivid against his skin. "Then you're an idiot," he says.
For a moment, Yuuji feels pinned by his gaze. Sukuna is bruised, beaten, his arms sliced off his body as if they were nothing but ornaments. As if they had never held Yuuji by the wrists when they left their old house at the base of the mountain. As if they had never taught Yuuji to cut open the neck of something alive.
Yuuji feels like the rabbit in the trap, his heart vibrating relentlessly in his chest, thrumming with panic and fear and confusion and above all else, a hot energy, hot as blood. He wants to cry.
Sukuna's arms are growing back. Yuuji has finally realised. The man must realise it too. He raises his sword once more. One more time would do it. It would be quick. He's already proven himself to be fast. Strong too.
Sukuna has made a lot of enemies, Yuuji realises. There is a lot that he is not saying. There is lot that he is doing when he is away, and today, he has finally brought part of it home.
The strange man is fast. But Yuuji is even faster. He throws himself across the clearing in a blur of I thought he wasn't—the barrier—what? and he flings himself between them and reaches upwards and drags the blade of his hunting knife across the warm lines of the man's throat to the tune of Sukuna's pleased hum, blood spraying and landing in splatters on their faces, the man's eyes gone wide and glossy. The rabbit lies a short distance away, its body going cold in the evening.
That night, Yuuji makes the stew in silence, after he buries the corpse and has stripped the rabbit of its skin.
"Who was that?" he asks Sukuna as he shuffles close and tips the bowl to his mouth. Sukuna is smirking. The shape of his mouth is satisfied. It becomes more, not thoughtful, but more idle when Yuuji asks.
"They've been hunting us," he says. "That was a Zenin."
"The Zenin. Oh, okay," says Yuuji. He sips from the bowl himself, moving the rim so his lips touch a different place to where Sukuna had drank from. "Why?"
Sukuna sits and doesn't respond for a while. He looks at Yuuji. Then he says, "Because I am not human."
"Oh," says Yuuji again. He looks at the growing stumps of Sukuna's hands. His palms have reformed already, red meat knitting over a lattice of bone, and now his fingers are bubbling back into existence. They appear first as bulbous lumps, swollen like tree burls, and then the finger bones sprout from the mess like saplings.
"You killed him for me," says Sukuna.
"Have I finally done enough for you?" says Yuuji.
"No," says Sukuna. Yuuji digs his nails into his thigh and doesn't flinch. He holds the bowl up again to the other boy's mouth so he can take another gulp of stew, watches it goes down. And then Sukuna amends, "I didn't keep you around for that reason. Yuuji. You'd kill for me, would you?"
"Yes," says Yuuji.
Sukuna smiles at him. It's a sharp thing, probably vicious. It curves up to his cheeks in a red line. "Good."