Chapter Text
ACT I, SCENE 1:
A wolf is a reckoning; this, Fushiguro Megumi knows in his bones. He flicks his canine ear, scratching behind it as he rifes his fingers through his hair. Megumi is quick to irritation, but slow to true anger. He has not been angry for a long time.
There is no providence in the fall of a hunting dog. Hunting dogs are born and bred to die. There is no need to want better, even if he is a wolf, a canid, but not a dog . More in common with a wild fox than a greyhound . But he has a dove’s grey coat in his second skin, and that’s why they chose him to be Ryomen Sukuna’s sacrifice.
“Megumi-sama. To the dais.”
The -sama is surely ironic, but the monks believe if they pretend to “honor” the sacrifice then heaven will not hunt them down for what they’ve done to it. Oh, I’m sorry, him . Not even as though that’s right, either.
Do wild wolves consider such things as how a man must act to show proper respect to men his elder? Do they know how girls are treated, or how Megumi has learned that the difference between girls that work the red light and girls like he is…it’s that 『Men who pride themselves on being men treat all girls the same. Anything they consider a girl? It’s a wet hole for his cock. A girl is not a girl, but a fuck-sock.』
Now, of course, women are different, women are what become wives . Men don’t marry girls.
They come in possession of them.
“Megumi-sama.”
The monk prods Megumi with his staff as though he can’t bear to dirty his hands.
Megumi sighs and ambles up to the dais in the middle of the mountain clearing, wearing nothing except the thin funerary whites he will be buried in, if there’s anything left to spare after Ryomen Sukuna is done with him.
He feels nothing. Not in particular about it, or anything. I inherited the glory of my clan, before the grounds were razed to cinder and white ash, leaving not even serpents snaking through the grass, after the clan head refused the kind offerings from the monastery missionaries that wished to establish themselves on Zen’in lands.
Not that his father was an exemplary Zen’in in the first place, or that he was anything but a reject through and through.
All that was left of the Zen’in Clan were babies and bastards . I was both.
Megumi knows he could run. Escape. But where to? He was intentionally raised to be illiterate amongst monks and ex-capital scholars. So he is a backwater boy who can’t read, and while he inherited the raw, shadowy potential of the Zen’in’s bloodline ability, he is utterly untrained, and too old by far at twenty to begin studying 呪術 （jujutsu) in the imperial capital.
If he could survive the run there.
It’s better that he serves the purpose he was born for. A sacrificial offering. A blood-hound.
Megumi stands on the dais the monks staged in the middle of the woods. It is beautiful, in the way of holy ritual things, bearing a fragility and keenness in the woodworking of the dais and the pedestal across which Megumi is supposed to kneel, like a supplicant. The white lacework inscriptions on the wood, the way the stage is plastered with the deceptively fragile rice paper talismans, the way the anti-curse bell that looks just like a cursed bell stands like an enormous mockery of a new year shrine ritual above the dais, Megumi kneeling up into the very maw of it, the bell held too low for Megumi to even hold his spine straight…
Theirs is not a monotheistic religion nor a polytheistic one. It is, supposedly, or somewhat or somesuch, something about solely believing in the sake of fates and rebirths ( but in reality, in practice, the monks and missionaries serve only one goal : to rape). Megumi has heard enough of reincarnation as it is preached.
What you do comes back to you.
But what they have done to me …Don’t be a fool, Megumi. What they have done to you is called religion.
Megumi is not faithless. But he derides faith that is spoken of in tongues of cock-worship.
『Oh, sorry, was I not supposed to say that? That religion is nothing more than a way for men to praise their own dicks and whatever prestige and power nature has seen fit to bestow them in the pursuit of the subjugation of all other living things. 』
Megumi has a cock but is not a man in the sense of cock-haver. It doesn’t matter if he has a cock because he is a girl, and a fuck-sock.
I wonder if he’ll be kind to me. Yeah, right, Megumi, and he’ll croon sweet pathetic lullabies the same way every monk that besotted himself with getting in your bed did to you.
Before Megumi knows it, it’s time.
The white veil they put in front of his eyes is nearly opaque, unlike the sheer funerary whites that reveal every line of his body. Behind it, Megumi can only see shadows and shapes and silhouettes as he anticipates his own r– - -.
The sun shines hard on his shoulders where he sits, directly in its zenith. In its line of sight. 『O Sun, if you have ever had any mercy for me…please, now would be a good time.』The warmth prickles with the heat of an incoming burn, but peeling skin is the last of his concerns. He probably won’t even live that long.
But then there’s a choked gasp, a crunch in the grass, and something hot and wet splattering on his face. Megumi stays perfectly still, dawn-gray canine ears flattening in irritation, tail picking up and thwacking against the lacquered timber dais, but then the screaming starts and everything shuddering inside the viscera twisting and winding and curling and finding… the smallest sliver of hope? But hope was scooped out of him like a yolk from the whites of an egg.
There is no replacing such a thing, and even if the precious heavenly egg of his heart…where it should be, even if that emptiness clenches around nothing.
That doesn’t make it something again.
Megumi waits, tension heavy in his head, filling it with liquid stone that fossilizes, petrifies, with something beyond something, Wanting, I think it’s called , and clenching his fingers into his papery robes and grimacing at the loud, steady twack of his tail as it lashes independently of him.
There is an enormous clamor, and then the sound of a (dead) body thwanging across the bell causes the clapper to swing and the CLANG! from inside the bell’s hollow splits Megumi’s skull in two. It is only through long practice that he keeps the nausea from spewing out as vomit from the way his head pounds, dry and heaving and sick.
When everything fades to silence and Megumi can hear again, shadows filling his ears, a thick hand rips the veil from his face, coming away completely wet with what Megumi realizes only belatedly is blood, and a lot of it . Megumi licks his dry lips, and they come away with the bursting flavor like salmon ikura. Salmon egg.
Megumi shudders, wiping the blood dripping from his eyes with a papery white sleeve that tears immediately.
“FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” the man in front of him yells.
Man? Boy? Megumi can’t tell his age. Men are only men when they turn twenty. But boys around that age, just shy of twenty, look identical to those who are twenty.
Megumi’s eyes skate down to his robes and the strange undulating that seems to be…happening…in there. The 十二単， the twelve-layer robes… indicates a noble… woman? The fuck?
Megumi stares blankly. “Did they make an exception for you or something?”
“What?” he spits.
Megumi’s head hurts but the nightfall that has apparently taken place though it was midday not just a few moments ago…sure has helped! Megumi tries to form a thought, licking his lips to the salmon egg taste again.
“You’re in women’s clothing.”
“Are you fucking stupid?” The strange undulation seems to stop, and it’s only when the man has stripped to one final robe, white and lazy, almost, loose and thin (but not paper), accented with a bold black edge with a metallic embroidery wire-thin and shining through it…It’s only then that Megumi realizes the undulations were two extra arms sprouting from beneath the ordinary set of arms most people have.
“I can wear what I goddamn want, bitch.”
“It was a reasonable question. Bitch.” Megumi looks down his nose at the man.
And then the moon shines at its zenith, directly above them, where Megumi could have sworn the sun had been just before… and the curse marks cover his body, the intricacy and symmetry inscribed in such a way that indicates heaven’s providence, DIVINE JUDGMENT, and…
Well, Fuck.
“I guess they were right about the boy-king becoming god. Just not the kind they wanted.”
“Fuck are you talking about, spiky-haired bitch? ” Sukuna looks like he is going to start screaming if he doesn’t figure out how to rip enough holes for his extra arms. The mouth that severs his abdomen nearly clean in half when it opens gnaws at the fabric of the last kimono layer.
“My name is Megumi,” Megumi says simply. “Just take it off.”
“I’m going to be cold if I just walk around bare-titted, you indecent little pussy .”
“It’s summer.”
“WHAT’S SUMMER. DO I LOOK LIKE I’M STUPID.”
“A little.”
“You fuckwad, help me for god fucking sakes.”
“You’re god.”
“I’m what don’t fucking pretend I was like…”
“What?” Megumi says, unfolding from the dais and wading through the guts, intestines, limbs, and slush of blood and flesh, looking for the silver glint of a tanto.
He finds one, and then smacks at Sukuna’s hands fussing from where they’re caught in his robes. Megumi cuts two extra arm holes for him, Sukuna pouting, a ridiculous wrinkle between the diamond studding the space between his eyebrows, framed by two inked fangs.
“Don’t fucking pretend I was born yesterday,” Sukuna mutters, “But I can’t remember a goddamn thing before I saw you on the dais. It’s like it’s all blacked out.”
“Yeah, I’d expect that. The monks wouldn’t have raised such a fucky-mouthed little boy-king.”
“ Stop fucking calling me god and king and shit, I hate it. I’m gonna…I’m gonna…I’m tired.”
“You did slaughter most of the high-rankers in the monastery.”
“What the fuck is a. Stop it. You. Pussy. Come with me. Explain.”
“My name is Megumi. Fushiguro Megumi.”
“ Pussy , just fucking. We need to get out of here. Bitch.”
“Okay, Cock . Gods like mountains, right? Even curse-gods?” Megumi puts a finger to his lips. Then he starts walking towards the misty peaks, and when Sukuna seems to just stand there staring at his…ass? Megumi wiggles his hips and then slaps his thigh. “Come on, come here, bitch.”
“ I’m not a fucking dog. ”
Megumi yips, wagging his wolf tail, showing that he is one, and whistles. “C’mon, girl.”
“My name’s not girl .”
“Yeah, it’s Cock.”
“Fuck off , Pussy.”
“Oh, I always wanted a disobedient dog.” Megumi rolls his eyes. “Shut up and follow me.”
Sukuna grumbles, but he follows, an enormous pair of leucine white wings opening like mist-ghosts behind his back.
Gray like the dawn.