Chapter Text
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AT THE CENTER of the great hill, the sole dog digs with a fury into a shallow grave of earth. Its master, the one who has disciplined it for its keen nose and yet did not mean for such a skill to intrude here, at this hour, he can only keep his fruitless grip on its leash, as behind them looms the quiet power of the estate.
Like the front of a face in the night, the house glows with yellow eyes through shuttered screen panels. Momentarily closed and yet, segments upon blinking segments all shaking in space, seemingly sensing the show before them.
The dog snuffs with discovery.
Its master crouches to the dirt, brushes the dog’s stained nose aside, and with his fingers sinking in the wet, blind dark, finds the first opening hint of the grotesque.
It is summer. Past the most silent part of the night.
Something akin to alarm bells sounds in the encroaching distance.
“We’ve got the warrant,” Fushiguro says, wearing a smile that belies much more than his usual mask of calm.
He gestures to the grand estate on the hill, a mound now swarmed with shiny beetles at the bottom, red and blue alternating across their bisected bodies in broad daylight, and a steady stream of uniformed ants traveling back and forth from these empty exoskeletons to the top.
Last week, one of the patrolling officers had found human remains on the very fringes of the private estate.
Today, they finally have permission to investigate.
Crouched in the gap of the half-opened car door, Fushiguro is the one to wrangle a leash over the sharp snout of a German Shepherd.
“So that’s why you’ve got that look on your face, hm,” Itadori prompts, cheerily reaching over his head.
Fushiguro tosses him the leash, a blind whiplash snap through the air.
Standing, he slams the car door shut with equal abruptness. Abrasive in his excitement.
“Come on,” and Itadori holds the dog’s leash, but Fushiguro jerks his fingers under its collar with just enough harsh direction towards the estate and the upturned scenes of crime.
Despite his earlier wordless denial, the grin he gives Itadori is nothing short of vindictive satisfaction.
“We’re gonna tear this fucker’s estate open from the ground up.”
。
So they do - the sniffing police hounds, the actual cadaver dogs tugging at their leashes, the forensics team trailing the clean stench of polyethylene past every scene of freshly revealed rot.
They force deep pockmarks into the earth, each one turning up as an unmarked grave. And the forgotten shame of the nameless bodies beneath.
What they are standing upon, what they have unnervingly unearthed, is a mass burial ground of worthless criminals.
The master of the house looks over the heavy swarm of black, blue, and white with eyes narrowed in pure disdain.
“I could have spared you, of all this,” and his tone heavily implies otherwise, of who truly would’ve been spared the most trouble, “ransacking my grounds and dirtying your own hands in turn—if you had simply decided to listen first.”
Itadori supposes aloud, “There was a dead body found on your grounds. What else should we have suspected but murder?”
The man looks at him, truly, and Itadori glances back, noticing for the first time, a face cut into the uncanny shape of his own.
The owner of the estate, built upon the turned corpses of eras past, Ryomen Sukuna.
The police inspector, unable to hide his expression of shock, Itadori Yuuji.
The leash of Fushiguro’s German Shepherd is lax in his hands, the dog itself heaped in a panting pile at his feet. Off in the distance, by the turn of another walkway, he can hear his partner’s barking commands emanate, and the clipped sounds of flat speech grow resonant, rhythmic by the inner distortion of the estate’s walls, walkways, doors.
“How auspicious then,” Sukuna speaks after the moment’s pause, allowing the voice to fade before it interrupts his own, “that it was neither murder on my part or foul play by any other suspect.”
“Indeed,” Itadori sighs, a small laugh that exposes too much of his obvious disappointment, “what an uncanny coincidence.”
Sukuna seems to share his odd amusement, but his words imply a different source, a masked idea—
“Inspector, our meeting is no coincidence, uncanny or otherwise.”
Itadori feels along the cadaver dog’s flank. The poor thing is hot enough for its expelled heat to seep through fur like a bleeding wetness. By now, the entire mobilized force resembles the body of an overworked animal — shuffling every mass of exhausted flesh in labored increments, working if only to finish a fruitless task.
“You don’t say,” he mutters, distracted by the red of the setting sun that burns through the open square of the roof, “We’ll be out of your way soon enough.”
The master of the house gestures to the shadow of the walkway behind them. A hand half-opened as he folds the long traditional style of his sleeve beneath his elbow.
He says with that act of poised invitation, “I’ll see you soon enough, Inspector.”
。
By the end of the week, they have had to begrudgingly retrace and remove the smeared tracks of their steps; red imprints, practically from the upturned earth oxidized in the open air. The bodies, of course, are too long past death to be the real source of any blood.
The well-preserved state of the corpses is certainly a curious thing, more so a marvel meant for history museums than their local lab. The bodies, desiccated of all flesh, leaving behind only the leather hide of skin to stretch on frames of broken bone. They’ve determined a meager pattern in the course of their impromptu excavation — if separated, the torso and legs are buried usually within the span of a few paces from one another. If headless, a lost cause.
For what it’s worth, they transport away as many pieces as they can for proper investigation and disposal.
Sukuna wears a smug smile on his face the entire time they’re forced to shuffle back and forth, stinking of nitrile, chemical cleaning solutions, and indefinable, underneath, the disturbed earth of his estate.
“It’s impossible,” Fushiguro accuses under his breath, palms pink and tight beneath the gloves, “how the hell can a guy live on an estate with dead bodies and not be responsible for a single one of them? It’s shady as hell.”
“Sure is unbelievable,” Itadori agrees with a sharp whistle. This entire situation, the impossible innocence of a man whose house is built upon the foundation of human remains, if nothing else, stinks of the uncanny.
The master’s voice sounds behind them - “Inspector” - and they both shift on cue.
In the latter half of the week, with the bodies already unearthed and their former spots marked with little yellow cards like impromptu gravestones, they’ve foregone the packs of cadaver dogs. Now it’s only Fushiguro at Itadori’s side, teeth grit in a grimace as if he’s caught a particularly bad scent in the air.
Sukuna’s gaze glances over Fushiguro, the lines of his eyes and his mouth settling into a quick mask. By the time he decides to speak, it’s smooth dialogue directed to Itadori alone.
“It seems we meet when it’s grown late again.”
Itadori checks his watch, only to catch the plane of shadow obscuring its glass face. “You’re right, it’s practically dark,” he remarks in surprise.
“Yes—we’ll be going now,” Fushiguro clips in briskly. He turns, Itadori following with an incredulous gaze still on his wrist, but the beat of Sukuna’s voice stops him again.
“Inspector,
You don’t eat well enough for that body of yours do you?”
What a statement. Itadori is more confused by the sudden assumption rather than outright offended.
“I don’t?”
Sukuna smiles in a way that Itadori could never imagine on his own face, so smooth a shift to persuasion.
“Come. I’ll make sure you eat well tonight.”
It is an invitation meant for one.
Fushiguro’s eyes burn blue in the retreating dark of the walkway, his footsteps forced to a rigid drum beat, each one marking the dragging shuffle of Itadori’s as they part over the wooden slats of the engawa.
In the house of the host, the rudeness of denying an invitation is on par with overstaying your welcome.
So Itadori sits at the counter of a wide kitchen, all hinoki wood, the darkness of an open garden at his back. The room is of the appropriate style as to fit in with the rest of the estate. Four fusuma panels, a structured space of four walls that can slide in and out of configurations.
If they had taken a different route, opened the door to one walkway as opposed to another, Itadori is sure he would’ve found himself in a room of the same appearance, exact except every empty space flipped, every door mirrored to face its twin. Like a paper maze, cut at blind seams, and unfolded to reveal a matching double set for each incision made. And below it, the craftsman’s hands manipulating the map for simple, curious eyes.
So, he sits and watches as Sukuna prepares his food. The only thing not of this timeless traditionalism is perhaps the freezer.
“Do you eat meat often, Inspector?” Sukuna prompts as his hands work.
Itadori answers easily, “Sure, a cheeseburger for long nights.”
He gets a poorly hidden glance of derision for that.
The meat on Sukuna’s thin knife hangs, red and appetizing. Watching it, Itadori is aware of his own rare hunger, a wet aching sensation tucked at the hinges of his mouth.
“Is it too late to say I was joking?”
Sukuna’s preparation continues. With bare hands, he transfers the cut of meat to a bowl, dips it, coats it in something liquid that makes it shine, even redder and as raw as beef.
“I’m not so completely lacking in humor. I had already promised after all — you would eat well tonight.”
What he makes in the end: four neat clusters of nigiri, the same slick slices of red meat draped upon pods of white rice. At the side, layered ginger, wasabi measured out to perfection, and a dark dish of soy sauce. No chopsticks, but a clean damp washcloth for afterward.
Itadori is jarred by the amount. Eat well doesn’t equate to a full stomach, it seems, in a professional’s hands.
He puts his own together in thanks anyway.
“Itadakimasu.”
It is the host’s turn to watch the guest eat, propped across the counter with fingers fresh and wet with the cool scent of the meat. He makes no comment of the man’s great mouthfuls, but the kusaridoi bells outside alert him with a single, ringing chime—
A final comment on the dish before it is finished: “Tuna nigiri, for your quick leisure before the rain comes.”
Itadori has barely finished giving thanks again - clap! - “gochisousamadesu” - when the hush of the storm intensifies into raucous applause at his back.
On beat, Sukuna’s steps mark the path of departure. Three, sliding silently toe to heel, to the open shoji, and by the fourth, with Itadori’s pace rushing to meet him, his as loud as the beating storm, Sukuna offers a red-eyed wagasa.
Itadori takes it and tries to mellow his shock from the sudden storm, turning over the handle of spindled wood, the cover of stained oil-paper, spinning up a striking color in the gloom.
He props it over one shoulder, with hands still damp from the food. “Thank you,”
Sukuna motions him off, and once more, just like the day before, his silhouette becomes still in the dark.
Still, Itadori hears his voice project, as if chasing his motions, a resounding echo in what is only the frame of a paper theater.
“See that you return it to me in three days' time.”
。
From the top of the hill, where the drizzle starts clean and clear, directed by the periodic chimes of the kusaridoi, flows the heavy rain logged with dirt, mud, and whatever else it has dragged up from the loose earth, to crash repetitively over the flood at the foot of the estate.
Fushiguro stands hunched beneath the small roof at the gate, as wet as a waterlogged shadow.
“Yo, Fushiguro—” Itadori knocks him out of his silent watch with the wooden creak at his back, with the burning red eye of the wagasa held abovehead. “You’re still here.”
Fushiguro gives him his own glaring eye, entirely darkened in the storm. “You were certainly gone for a long time.”
“Was I?”
A disbelieving motion to the sky, the sickle moon, and only the dimness of a single street lamp to cast a drying glow on his soaked face.
Itadori tilts the wagasa over Fushiguro’s head and the linseed oil laminate succeeds in diverting a perfect path from the dripping roof to a drooping spike of hair.
He’s already wet enough that in this bad humor, Fushiguro only snorts and hunches closer. “Fancy umbrella to go with the dinner too?”
“I’m sharing it with you now, aren’t I?”
“Mm,” Fushiguro acquiesces. “Hold it still then.”
In lieu of their version of a proper hot meal, quick and greasy on the road at the end of long nights like these, he coats his tongue with cigarette smoke instead.
Obediently, Itadori holds the umbrella still and huddles in to form that space of heat between their cheeks, dry enough for a small fire to catch.
He watches the habitual way Fushiguro’s cheeks hollow, paler, wetter in the rain, his lashes closing with the most minuscule flutter, a tension formed and smoothed in tandem above his brows—
Fresh from his meal, to Itadori, it truly seems like Fushiguro is tasting something delicious.
He bumps the umbrella up against the pitter-patter, disturbing the quiet rhythm. “Lend me one?”
The heavy smoke dissipates, changes form, deposits ash to mist on the indent of Fushiguro’s top lip.
“Why now?” he asks, even as he reaches for another stick, lets Itadori take it easily by eager mouth from his propped fingers.
The ensuing flame hisses and burns blue between them.
Itadori hums, as lighthearted about tempting nicotine addiction as an amateur can be with a habitual smoker right before him.
“You made it seem particularly appealing tonight is all.”
Distinctly, through the shared bloom of smoke, he licks at the edges of his teeth, and the taste of the fish there is still unlike anything he’s ever had before.
“Itadori.”
“Mm,”
Fushiguro stares at him with the boldest, darkest of eyes. “There’s no way that man isn’t a serial killer.”
。
By the time Itadori recalls the red-eyed wagasa, two days have passed behind him. Naturally, he follows the third to stand, facing the double gates of Sukuna’s estate.
The overt traditionalism is tiring in its inconvenience. The heavy wooden gates, a good moment of panting, pushing strain required for entrance, the stiff-rimmed wagasa that he only ever attempted closing once before abandoning the impossible action completely.
Like torii, the shape of the double gates marks the separation from one world to another. Two horizontal bars capped across pillars rising heaven-ward, and the space between, the single entrance.
“Big place for a single person,” Itadori greets finally when he finds Sukuna. Every shoji screen had been without locks, and yet, nothing about his journey through winding walkways of filtered shadow had been welcoming.
It does make him consider, the sudden awareness of the ease of hiding a dead body here; here, where it’s easy enough to lose even your sense of self to the rhythm of your footsteps on endless wood floors.
The wagasa changes hands, its spindled cover hiding the space between their faces for the moment.
Then, it is worn upright, the light wood handle on Sukuna’s shoulder, the red underside of the paper umbrella cast upon the white expanse of his kimono. Through the screen of sunlight, he smiles at Itadori and the shadows on his face play, specter-like.
“You found your way back, did you not?”
“I did,” Itadori snarks, “no thanks to your lack of direction.”
He receives the low sound of Sukuna's laughter for that offense. Different from the diaphanous chimes of the kusaridoi or the steady hush of the ensuing rain that had marked a departure, this laughter winds about his wrist, beckoning, a repeated invitation.
“Come,” Sukuna says, and he turns so that it is instead the red eye of the umbrella that watches Itadori, “I’ll show you a proper way out.”
A proper way out hugs the corners of the external engawa, a route that provides the scenic view of every discovered grave, pockmarks empty of flesh in the ransacked earth. The navigation of the maze from the outside by its master is necessarily a different experience from that of a guest set into its internal structure.
Itadori winces at the uneven lumps in the ground.
From beneath the umbrella, Sukuna waves a hand, dismissing his guilt without a glance.
“Inspector, you should know, even if your officers had every intention of ransacking my grounds, it would have been impossible to find even a fraction of the corpses.”
The so-called story goes back to the Heian era,
“Criminals had their bodies segmented to match the crime — if you look closely at the pieces your dogs had retrieved, you might see there are dark lines marking the cut - with those who had committed the most severe infractions split into so many parts, even as the most stubborn spirit, they wouldn’t have been able to drift from this burial place.”
They reach a blunt end. With the genkan right before him, Itadori toes the line of the step and comments, “So you choose to live upon the dead and are in turn, haunted by their ghosts.”
Sukuna has already turned to leave, but that parting image of him, a great grinning profile under the red shade of the wagasa haunts Itadori in the light.
“There’s no need to be so morbid, Inspector. After all, I am still of flesh and bone.”
。
“Are my eating habits so bad you have to keep inviting me over to ridicule them with your food?”
Sukuna sets a single bowl of soup before Itadori: mussels of the pebbled sort that bloom orange with a light stain of red when boiled, dried seaweed that soaked becomes fingers of dark, eel-slick hair, and shriveled mushrooms scraped from tree bark that drinks in the juice of the sea broth and bloats itself into crested caps.
All dried ingredients, invigorated, the raw nature of their taste re-animated for the purpose of teasing at Itadori’s appetite.
Sukuna’s mouth seems to follow silently with Itadori’s as he swallows down the soup, lips pursing and working back the heavy spit that should follow from such heavy flavor.
“In this case, call it a matter of . . . taste.”
He presses a damp square of white cloth to the anticipated mess at Itadori’s chin, and the color of the soup travels with the water, staining as vivid as blood.
Simply, he smiles.
Simply, “You interest me, Itadori.”
。
Their latest case involves an alert sourced to a plain mass of earth scattered with weeds and gravel from the road, a few rolling steps away from the ocean. After the initial confusion of the missing caller, with officers left to listen to only the brisk breeze in the night, there had been the realization of a frantic pounding underfoot.
With keen eyes, Itadori follows Sukuna as he beckons from his garden beyond the open shoji.
“Chicken, pit-roasted with potatoes, carrots, and flavored with horopito leaves.”
What he sees, a mound of dirt. The obvious lump seems to rise, heaving with trapped heat.
His host hands him a small trowel, folds his hands cleanly under his sleeves.
“Inspector, I believe you should have to work for your dinner at this point.”
By the dark ocean, there had been a body found alive, gasping and almost asphyxiated in the buried dirt.
Here, Itadori digs up a whole chicken cooked to its core, ripe and spilling with vegetables soaked in the fat of its peeling skin.
He tears off a piece and eats it right there, hot, puffing from the taste of meat smothered in the heated earth. The flesh falls apart the moment it touches his tongue.
It’s too good. The taste of pepper, the spice lent by the wrapping leaves most likely, pierces through the mealiness of the chicken and vegetables, makes the meat something else entirely.
Begrudgingly, he says, “Just because I’m legally allowed to shoot, don’t expect me to go hunting wild rabbits for your dinners.”
Sukuna’s laugh is another sound that colors the night. Sharper than the smoke that stings as an intangible bloom, his mouth evokes the knife that threads a line of red in its silver wake.
“My dinners?” Another slitted smile, precisely cut in the shape of its intentions. “Oh no, no,”
“Inspector, when you hunt, it will be for the sake of your own hunger.”
。
There is no talking allowed during proper theatre.
And certainly no eating, not until the interlude at least. Itadori bites his tongue, cursing the habit of hunger he has come to associate with these visits.
At this point, is it any surprise that Sukuna’s ancient estate holds the complete four-pillared frame of an indoor Noh stage?
"Kore wa kono atari ni sumai-itasu mono de gozaru."
"This is the person who resides in this place."
Upon the open stage, Itadori watches in confusion at the play of stiff, hieratic figures. They’ve entered from the left, a long stretching bridgeway connected to some other room, and now take up residence in the square eye of the main stage.
Two figures:
An old man, in plain robes, his mask of tanned wood. From the carved sallowness of his cheeks, he seems to wear an expression of perpetual worry.
A young lady, a princess perhaps from the elaborate color and draping of her robes. Her mask, a smooth white lacquered expression, smiling as if greatly pleased by herself.
Their actions are the most simplified parodies of human expression. A hand lifted to a masked face by a slow, unbending wrist — the old man weeps. The stamp of a foot to interrupt the steady shuffling walk of another — he angers.
There is something about the drum that is hung from the laurel tree placed at the forefront of the stage.
The old man beats it, but no sound emanates.
The old man’s body lowers slowly, and he walks away in that torturous, methodical shuffle.
Soon, he reappears on that bridge again in the mask of a fearsome demon.
This time it is the princess’s turn to cup a hand to her face and weep.
He strikes out in vengeful motions, forcing her to beat soundlessly at the drum, and every motion is uncanny in its controlled pace.
He stomps again, dissatisfied and yet, at a certain conclusion.
That is how the play ends, on a haunting note of distress and despair.
The entire time, though there had been no movement of the wooden mouths of the masks, there had been a chorus of four men, chanting to the song of drums and flutes. Their language, incomprehensible in its limited tone, its lengthy repetition. A droning evocative of ritual, a haunting of men through the words of gods.
Yet every word had marked the action of an actor, every beat compelling the old man to strike at the soundless drum, every hysteric trill driving the frenzied steps of the princess in her retreat from the demon.
It is only in silence, that the theatre seems to finally stop.
When the actors file out from the internal bridge, Sukuna finally breaks the silence with restrained clapping. Itadori follows awkwardly, unsure of the rhythm of his own action.
The stage empties and they are left, just the two of them, alone in the seated section before the stage.
“Alright,” he turns upon the host with unrestrained impatience, “now you have to explain everything to me.”
Sukuna smirks. He gestures with a wide sweep of his hand to the stage, the emptiness, the extreme simplicity of it.
“A classic story in the time of Emperor Tenji of the 7th Century. At Katsura Pond of Kinomaru Palace, an old man sweeps the floors of the palace garden and falls in love at first sight with an imperial consort. She is beautiful, of noble standing, and especially young and cruel. Of course, his love is one-sided. She hangs a drum from a laurel tree, and she proposes that if she is able to hear the beating of the drum, she will appear before him.”
From a muffled distance, a dull knock thumps through the walls of the estate.
“The old man beats the drum over and over and no sound is ever produced — for it is a trick. She has hung a drum covered in twill, not of hide or skin. Thus, he despairs.”
An echo haunts them in the form of creaking wood.
“He drowns himself in the garden pond.”
The echo rises to a moan.
“The lasting distress of his death drives him to become a ghost. He seeks vengeance with the fury of an oni. He makes the consort mad with grief as he forces her to beat the twill drum until a sound is made.”
“Of course, no sound can be produced. She regrets her actions greatly. He retreats into the pond, grudge unsatisfied.”
Sukuna claps once again and all sound falls silent in the ringing aftermath.
“How simple,” Itadori admits. “How simple and yet, incomprehensible to an outsider like me.” He seems embarrassed, lightly infuriated by Sukuna’s explanation and the ease of knowledge unavailable to him.
“Do you mean to make fun of me again?”
Perhaps, the cruel beauty of Sukuna’s lilting smile is a shadow of the consort’s pale mask.
“For the most traditional forms of Noh, a strict ritual sense is required. The actors completely stylize their expressions through masks and every gesture is limited to the most basic of movements. The texts are practically memorized beforehand so that the experienced audience requires little dramatical convincing to follow along. Essentially, it is a theatre of symbols.”
And in this extreme simplicity, everything is a suggestion, an implication to a greater, indefinable reality.
Itadori scowls in silence. He has not understood a single thing, not even remotely. He couldn’t come close to this level of sophistication, not even if he donned Sukuna’s robes and schooled the uncanny resemblance between them into a perfect mask of the other man’s expression. Pure imitation is of poor form for acting.
Sukuna speaks again, contemplative. “You know, there are modern adaptations of Noh plays.”
“Yeah?” Itadori snorts, “And they must be cheap imitations for dumbasses like me right?”
Sukuna ignores his bitter deprecation.
“In a renewed version of the play you saw today, the old man is a janitor in a law firm who falls in love with a wealthy heiress who frequents a couturière directly across the street from him.”
He gestures with two palms, showing the parallelism of the setting in the frame of the empty theater before them.
“The same course of events takes place. A twill drum, soundless beating, a suicide. Except this time, the frustrations of love are given a reason. She is not cruel for the sake of being a cruel beauty. She is cruel because she yearns for love, but is incapable of it herself. Thus, even as the ghost of the old man haunts her, in the end, her inability to hear the drumming represents the deafness of her heart.”
Sukuna’s voice falls away and the motions of his hands rest. “How is it?”
“What do you mean, did I understand it? Sure, it’s all modern now,” Itadori quips, his irritation having faded into more of a sullen mood.
Sukuna’s eyes flicker quickly to his mouth, his own turning sharply at the corners. “It is true, the crudeness of your taste.”
Itadori’s anger flares once more, “Hey—!”
“But,” Sukuna folds his fingers to his lips, the blunt curve of his knuckles hiding his expression, “the point is that any old play can be re-contextualized with the same characters. A story can be retold in many ways and still have the same ending.”
Itadori tilts his head, crossing his arms with a slight frown. “. . .Yes?”
Sukuna stands and sighs abruptly. “I’ve already talked too much for my part.” He gestures towards Itadori, his palm open, fingers pressed together in simple direction. “Come, I’ll make you dinner.”
Food is the taut line that tugs between them. Itadori takes his hand willingly.
As they leave the empty scene, Itadori mutters, “You really say the oddest things, chef-sama,” and Sukuna’s ensuing smile is hidden as a small aside.
。
—it wouldn’t be an exaggeration on Itadori’s part, as he strides through straightaways, marks corners and boundless turns by the instinctual rhythm of heat pushed against the wood with every placement of his foot, to expect to see Sukuna waiting in his uncannily poised manner.
Not a stereotype either to imagine him in full, proper seiza, overlooking his stone gardens with fingers, spider-like, in their beckoning weave.
Instead, he turns the corner and there’s Sukuna, standing.
Instead, there’s a collared western shirt, a hand deftly rolling up a pressed cuff as a greeting. He smiles, and in this preparation, he is still the picture of a perfect host.
He invites the eye towards the hidden side of a half-shadowed shoji screen, and along the way, Itadori gazes at the two black rings imprinted around his wrist.
Sukuna doesn’t comment on it, but the rolled cuff leaves the broad expanse of his arm bare, the display evoking something of an accidental lewdness to the observing eye.
As the host, he is to open his house and display it like a body of curious wonders.
As the guest, Itadori should suspend his disbelief and step right along.
“Tonight,” Sukuna turns and draws back the clattering entrance to the evening’s dinner, “I will be serving you steak.”
It should be no surprise that, with his tendencies for the dramatic, he serves it flayed, tendered, pink and rare enough to be raw. It is also the first time he has served Itadori meat this red.
Itadori cuts a piece, knife and fork dragging serrated points along the plate, and when he spears it into his mouth Sukuna watches, watches from the moment his lips press to the silver, his tongue curling around the meat, the drip of subcutaneous fat and some other fecund taste squeezing into his throat, almost too full, too heavy, heady — and he swallows.
Sukuna watches. Itadori finds some of that spare juice caught across his lip and on instinct, he darts his tongue out to taste it again as he meets Sukuna’s eye.
The host blinks and smiles indulgently.
Tonight, Sukuna begins his esoteric poetic as he brings a post-dinner platter of oranges, peeled, dark as oxidized flesh, in the delicate shape of a flower. Itadori indulges in his senses, as always.
Tonight, the meaning is rather simple. Red, raw, and upfront. Plates, all centered on the color of blood.
“Red should excite humans for many reasons. It is the color of blood, and thus when spilled, arouses the senses in a litany of expressions. To see red, is to anger; to bleed red, is to be hurt most intimately; and to eat—”
Sukuna smiles, indulgently timed as a cut rind scrapes its way past Itadori’s teeth.
“To eat,” Itadori supplies, almost too brash, too bold if he had not hesitated in swallowing, in allowing the overpowering taste of meat and fruit to catch in his throat.
He decides with his tongue swollen in sweet juice, pungent blood, to be too bold after all:
“Clearly, you’re coming on to me.”
Sukuna’s eyes grow slitted, his mouth a twisting smile as his propped fingers twitch beneath his chin. His is a mask of pure satisfaction, the cat and the cream, and yet Itadori is the one with red steak and bits of blood-orange smeared on his mouth, struck by a deep hunger at Sukuna’s expression.
“Itadori,” the host directs, “finish your food.”
So he does, and perhaps the host can sense his guest’s hurry, for he allows this mistake in etiquette, and then, the final infraction as he dares to push his mouth onto Sukuna’s.
The platter of oranges spills, russet blood sluicing across the counter to drip, drip, drip, into the seams of the floor.
Deeper, the wet has a tendency to work in deeper, so as the floor soaks slowly through to the earth, so does Itadori, swallowing harder, hungering greater. He can taste, vividly, the remains of his meal dragged along Sukuna’s tongue, and in this allowance, Sukuna mouth twists in its willing generosity.
。
A dream by the shadow through the shoji screen:
In the moonlight
the knife pares with its sheen of silver
a sliver of meat from his palm
and like the tiger behind the cage
Itadori lunges with teeth too sharp for his mouth
to eat from the hand that would feed him.
。
In the bruising blue light, night not yet morning, Sukuna rumbles, as vulnerable as he will ever be, propped besides Itadori as he emanates the thick scent of heat and sleep from his bare skin:
“Here, feel.”
It should be wrong, all wrong. Not only out of expectation, of complete character, for Sukuna to have Itadori touch him, but to touch him like this—
Fingers tracing the space of his ribs, pushed into the resistance that exhales between and expands back. Human flesh, living.
And yet touching him like he is, simply, a valuable piece of meat to be inspected.
“Inspector, indeed,”
A hand spreads his, fingers threading his knuckles to have him open his palm and feel the tendons of a breathing, working throat.
“颈肉.”
From there, a path traced down the sloping triangle of the trachea to press unevenly over the indents of collarbones, the thin plane of the upper chest.
“前排肉.”
Pushed to the side, his fingers are made to cradle the joint of a shoulder, grasp the round bone and the slight dip around it that is covered by muscle.
“肩肉.”
His other hand has come to rest, practically grope against the swell of a chest. Beneath the pliant crease, if he digs in, pushes up, he can feel a heartbeat flutter against his knuckle.
“胸肉.
心.”
The hard segments of Sukuna’s stomach ripple with laughter, and Itadori is drawn by the movement, the directions of Sukuna’s body, to trace, to taste with only the tips of his fingers.
Before Sukuna can lead him lower, lower, (loins, a panting smirk), Itadori catches him by the wrists. When he finds the line of a raised pulse beneath the stark black rings, the kisses he places there are soft enough with a hint of teeth.
。
For dinner after a day spent languishing indoors, Sukuna offers him the handle of a butcher’s knife with the curved blade angled back along the line of his own wrist.
He wears a grey kimono, well-used and rumpled from a lack of sleep, barely wrapped at the waist. Diligently though, the sleeves are still pulled back, white straps bound around his shoulders to leave his hands, joined to the rest of his body by those striking black tattoos, free for the kitchen.
Itadori assesses the blade. A single pull, even an offhanded one, would slice Sukuna clean open.
He is not sure why he imagines this, all vivid red veins, split, spilt, just for the moment.
The strange dream in the waking night passes quickly enough — he takes the knife by the handle.
“Tonight you’ll be doing your fair share of work for the meal,”
and Sukuna proceeds to guide him through the dismemberment of a lamb.
The work is brutal.
The butcher knife is suited for large cuts. He can begin from one flap of skin, bring the curving arm around until he is deep enough to scrape against bone, and struggle free with a joyous wrench, heaving, holding a slab of bleeding meat.
The peeling of flesh from bone is not where the trouble lies.
No, it is when he must abandon the knife entirely, to pop the joints of legs and shoulders from their sockets, cut tendons and leave strings of hanging sinew, to disfigure the animal entirely from its original construction. Using his bare hands, he gets unspeakable things caught under his nails.
“An animal extraordinarily large for its size,” Sukuna murmurs at his shoulder. His fingers are coated in rust as well.
Itadori shudders at the smell. There is a wet splash across his jaw.
Sukuna’s hand wipes it away, leaving the both of them smeared, dirtied in the remains of the lamb.
The worst part of the smell hits the back of his throat. He gags and collapses with a knocking thump to the wooden floor.
He comes to, brows furrowed, mouth speared open, all the way on Sukuna’s fingers.
There is the immediate taste of the animal, pushed into his esophagus.
He gags again, louder, on the violence of its apparent rawness, and this time, something comes back up.
“. . . there, it’s alright, I suppose. Let it come back up . . . you weren’t quite ready for that meal, were you?”
Itadori gurgles through the mess at his mouth, breathing in the air, oddly moist as if rising from the earth after a heavy rain. A respite nonetheless from the scent expanding, pushing inside him. He exhales, relief, a hollow sound in his throat.
Then, Sukuna’s hand clamps onto the back of his neck, and he is filled, force-fed again as a wild animal caged against the floor.
“Just one more piece, before we’re due for the intermission.”
The piece of lamb is a slick lump - forced to swallow down whole - and he blacks out.
The first thing he recognizes upon waking is, incessant birdsong.
It’s warm and exceedingly bright outside of the scene set by the screened shadows of Sukuna’s estate. The chatter of the park is loud, without rhythm, and there is no echo of solitary voices, of groaning footsteps on ancient wood.
It’s warm and everything smells of fragrant water and flowers in the summer, Sukuna has laid him on his lap to feed him small sips of tea and bites of wagashi, and through it all, Itadori suffers the unnerving impulse to laugh and laugh and laugh.
Suddenly, his odd comedic urge is sobered by a strange thought. How long has it been since he’s been outside like this? Since he’s even seen Fushiguro? Outside? What goes on beyond dinners and long nights at Sukuna’s side?
“Don’t think too much,” Sukuna interjects smoothly, “After all, this should be a moment of levity and rest.”
“Go ahead,” he says with a crooked grin, whispering through his teeth as if sharing a secret, “you should laugh.”
So, on time with the chime of a passing bike bell, Itadori lets his head fall back against Sukuna’s thigh as his ribs shake, as his voice stutters into uncontrollable fragmentation. Close enough to laughter—paroxysms bordering on slight hysteria. His face pulled into the shape of the smiling skull beneath his skin.
“You—you really say such strange things, I can’t ever understand, ever, hgh—” he chokes on an invisible sensation in his throat, gasping with cheeks flushed from the sun, the feverish sun.
Sukuna's fingers cradle the hinges of Itadori's jaw, and he laughs right along.
Lately, Itadori has learned a form of insolence.
The feeling arises in his chest, unfamiliar in its irritation yet left to fester with the same incongruity he associates with Sukuna’s smile, when it looks upon him and its leanness, the gape of its mouth and the uncanny yet incomprehensible knowledge that spills forth, it makes anger strike a hot and dangerous sound in his chest.
He eats every piece of meat now—and in his insolence, impudence bordering on feral defiance, he even dares to snap at the hand that would feed him.
“How do you want me?” Itadori will snarl. His resistance wavering, unsure of its own wildness, if this is only feigned play, or if Sukuna happened to slip, if he let his hands travel from the weak bend of the spine to a place too close to the parted mouth - if in his reverie, Itadori might truly bite.
For now, his control is a perfect line. He holds Itadori down with the whisper of his own mouth over the other man’s shoulder.
“I want you to use your teeth when the time comes.”
These kinds of strange sentiments, buried so hastily at the surface, allude to something else entirely.
Recently, all this thinking has made Itadori go a little mad, dramatically so.
His division’s psych evaluation is due soon. He’s going to be dragged in along with Fushiguro and get whatever it is checked in, evened out, and rubber-stamped away with safe approval for dismissal.
But before that, he sleeps.
The shadows through the shoji screen are cast onto Sukuna’s expression, and they highlight his cheek's edge, the bisected slash of his forehead.
In this light, his face is frightening, artificial as if etched onto a mask, but uncanny, with something pushing, unhinging, threatening organic emergence through the holes.
This is where he must be dreaming, because Sukuna is on his knees, pressed against the floor on all fours, and his mouth is a wet gap, tilted at level, so Itadori must be on the floor too, dreaming, dreaming as he spreads his legs to make space for that slowly crawling body—
He wears a white kimono lined with blue so dark, it must be black in this nightmare.
From the lacquered gape of his mouth, a dangled piece of flesh.
He comes close enough to intertwine the limbs of their bodies into stiff knots that splay and bend at wrong angles, and in this inextricable labyrinth, he feeds his mouth against Itadori’s.
Itadori swallows
and
wakes.
He feels along the ridge of his bottom teeth, toward that thick piece, coarse and tickling at the back of his jaw.
His finger closes on a matted texture, he hooks his nail around it and pulls.
The splitting separation leaves him coughing, spit dripping into the seams of the wooden panels. He pounds at the floor with a fist, pounds again and again to hear the sound reverberate with an enhanced chorus of voices, beating drums, as sure evidence of his own madness.
“What the hell . . .” he whispers, then as the chanting rises in its tone,
“What the hell have you been feeding me?”
A deep voice, projected from everywhere, in the shifting of the clattering shoji, the wooden frames of the house, the earth itself that rises — and yet, nowhere is there the body from which the sound originates.
Itadori roars, wearing an animal-like visage.
“Only the meat that was meant for you.”
The darkness opens its body through the sliding walls, and Itadori sets off in his hatred, his hunger, to hunt.
(A wailing siren-song that is growing quickly in its urgency sounds. In the foreground is the sharp crackling of static, in the background a pack of snarling hounds. The chorus continues its chant, lowered into a droning murmur, as another urgent voice breaks sharply through).
‘Itadori, shit what did I tell you from the start?’
“Fushiguro, bring your gun, I don’t have mine but I’m going to find him and—”
‘You’re running off on your own again, like before, like always, wait goddammit, Itadori, wait for me—’
“When you find me—just, shoot.”
(Static cuts, radio silence, the cries of hounds fade, and only the rhythmic dance of Itadori’s footsteps chasing another set to the beating of drums and ritual chanting can be heard).
On the Noh stage, performing in the spot of the shite:
Itadori
(a thundering stomp, a sharp strike from the crook of the elbow, as if extending the unflinching edge of a knife)
Bastard, I’m going to kill you—
Sukuna
No, that’s not it, that’s not what I promised you before. What is it that you truly want?
Itadori
I want . . . (he struggles to talk, as if his mouth is too full with spit - or perhaps, too empty to fathom the weight of his want)
(finally, with raw intensity)
I want to skin you with my mouth.
Sukuna
Such a terrible impulse—and?
Itadori
I want to peel back the fat of your flesh, until I can see every string of sinew connecting muscle to bone.
Sukuna
(a cupped palm, gesturing directly across the stage and then sweeping beyond. he moves towards Itadori, drawing him into a circling dance)
And then?
Itadori
I would watch you struggle, struggle until you’re close to breaking — and then I’d snap every tendon so that the wet thread holding you together would collapse your body into useless caverns of flesh.
Sukuna
(close, with satisfaction that rises to a frenzy — and the deathly moment of quiet at the climax)
Finally, you're growing honest.
So tell me, what is it that you want?
Itadori
(an expression made with a parting of teeth; he, the boy, a hungry one)
You, I want to eat you alive.
Sukuna
(his loosened robes reveal the black lines that mark his body, lines that should have been obvious all along)
Brat, make good on those insolent words.
I’ve told you before—I expect you to use your teeth.
THE SCENE is set in the very moment of arrival.
From the shadowed hall of the hashigakari, is FUSHIGURO, frozen with one hand on the shite-bashira. His face can be clearly seen but almost incomprehensible in the stillness of it - that is, an expression of abject horror. On either side of him, east and west are the paper frames of the estate, shutters and shoji screens marking parallel engawa that have been revealed behind the cracked wall of the kagami-ita as distortions of proper structure. To the south, from the stage’s exit, the bounding steps of hounds chase after an approaching darkness. The stage is shifting, mimicking the turning of a great body that has finally become aware of its twin shadow.
At the center of this scene, ITADORI clutches a half-body to his chest, poised with a snarling twist of his mouth, torn at the edge, working, wet, as if it had just been buried in the trailing crevice of the body’s meat.
The only thing of the body that seems to be moving is the stomping beat of its heart, and the small twitching smile of the owner that once bore it.
Below, a deeper south, the earth roils as if threatening to turn itself over and swallow the set whole. From ground to sky in a sinking, stinking darkness.
A final strike of the kotsuzumi drum, and FUSHIGURO’s fingers curl against the pillar’s edge. A flute signals, chiming in with the chanting voices as one disphonious chorus, and ITADORI moves to embrace the gaping body in his arms, with fingers slipping through the welcome slits of a ribcage. His mouth bloodied in the meat that has been made for him.
The gun is pointed towards the sumi-bashira, aimed, as if to shoot.
The hounds are upon them, and with a resounding clap, the cascade of shoji screens shutter closed.
完