Work Text:
Present
That which comes in waves can never stay.
The outline of grief was impossible to trace. Finding holes in walls where there were none before. A tension; a release. Yuuji’s feet hit the damp sand as he padded across, foot by foot, step by step. Each grain rubbed up his soles and seemed to shed his skin off in that microcosmic atom which it hit. Yuuji really did wish that flaying was that simple. It seemed to him it would be easier that way; to slither from the shimmery confines of the casings that had been wound around him by life. To find within the enactment of that, new life, and move forward untethered.
His hands found their way to his pockets, and he watched the foamy water lap at his ankles and the hems of his jeans. The fabric stained darker in those inches that did not hover above the endless murky blue. Yuuji could taste the salt off the frigid sea even standing his full height above it. It was in moments like these that Yuuji thought of his twin. Moments that had become so terribly infrequent in Yuuji’s life. The last week had been a tornado that had separated Yuuji so completely into states of before and after . And at the current, as he dreamed of drifting off into the mocking horizon, he was in neither. He was stagnant and only existent in this sick, rock-kicking purgatory in which he was holding weight.
Dead and buried, was what was usually said.
But Sukuna was dead. And he was not buried.
So, neither was the first twenty years of Yuuji’s life. He hung, idle and untransformed like a chrysalis of empty. On a rocky, sombre precipice that he could not make move off of. Or at least, not yet. Yuuji could only stand in the ocean and think and dream and dread all his duties. He had to pretend he cared for managing his brother’s funeral. Yuuji leant down and scooped some of the salt water into his palm, watching how the murky surface of the sea transformed into crystal clearness as it was divided from its main body into a tiny fragment.
For a moment he debated drinking it and too being done with this mortal coil. But he did not. Yuuji could never do what Sukuna did. He could never be the cause of his own death. It was not something within him that was in the slightest way imaginable. For someone like Yuuji, the concept of suicide was baffling. It made sense, then, that Sukuna had been the one to confront Yuuji with the reality of it. Sukuna was always bringing up baffling things to Yuuji and forcing him to make his peace with them.
Peace and peacemakers.
War and warmongers.
It was like there had always been a swing set inside their home. Yuuji swung one way, Sukuna swung the other. Two incongruous halves of an unintelligible whole. It was laughable, then, that they’d spent so much of their childhood being mistaken for the other. Their twinship was not a conjoining, it was a reflection. Yuuji was born with his heart on his left. Sukuna was born with his heart on the right.
Yuuji could’ve stood there for hours and watched the ocean line swallow the sun. If Sukuna had been there, he would’ve done it. Nature had always appealed to him like that. Maybe it gave him some kind of break to the twisting and hyperventilating wires in his head.
The times Yuuji had seen Sukuna in the trees were some of the only times he’d seen him relaxed enough to be certain that they did truly look alike.
Sukuna would’ve stayed in that ocean for hours. But Yuuji could not. The winter wind whipped past him and he waddled his way back to shore in undignified steps. A honk snapped him out of his haze and he looked up at the car park one wall-climb above him. The world was so alive and vibrant. Yuuji had a funeral to manage. His parents wouldn’t do it. Yuuji didn’t even blame them. Sukuna had run away at sixteen, then again at seventeen, and then at eighteen they no longer had the power to drag him back to the house. He was only back enough to twist Yuuji into what he wanted Yuuji to be.
And Yuuji had always let him. Because it was a point of pride that he understood his brother’s mess. He wore his blood soaked mop like a badge of honour. Scrubbing, cleaning, clearing, excusing, defending, loving. Yuuji chewed on his cheek and wondered what his week would’ve been if he had not been so arrogant.
Alas, he supposed he’d never find it.
It was funny, though. For all the work he had subjected himself to when Sukuna lived, living in a time without him was not bearing on Yuuji’s shoulders like a rock. Yuuji just felt sort of blank about it. There was a hole, to be sure, but less a gaping chasm in the middle of his immortal being, but moreso a place vaporised; a history that never existed at all. Yuuji didn’t grieve. Yuuji wasn’t grieving. He wasn’t really even missing. He was re-adapting. Re-calibrating.
‘I move on fast and hard,’ he’d said to Nobara the day after Sukuna’s body had been found. She had leaned on her hand and asked him solemnly if he was really okay. Yuuji did not like the tone in her voice.
The challenge was infuriating. The blank and quiet and undisclosed accusation that Yuuji was lying about his capacity to forget and erase. Yuuji honestly meant his blankness. Not even in a depressive way. Just that he was empty. That what was always erasable had been erased and now he was tired of hearing about it. Was death not something that was, finally, final? Was that not the ultimate tying of a loose end? Yuuji did not understand why people were so hinged on this idea that he must extend this horrible purgatory further than the physical means of getting Sukuna’s corpse in the ground.
What could Yuuji do? Make Sukuna un-kill himself? Perhaps some people would’ve fought tooth and nail for love. Fallen down to hell and death to chase after it.
But Yuuji wasn’t sure if he believed in anything that strongly. Not even himself.
He played his part in his life and watched it carry like a movie. Like a paper boat down a stream. Asking him to grieve was like asking him to defy the rapids in that tiny, flimsy paper construct. There was no point in fighting what could not be fought; so there was no point in feeling defeat in it, either.
Yuuji rinsed the sand off his feet at the top of the beach walls, the grains falling away as easily as they had stuck. He tried as best he could to dry the clinging droplets by waving his hand at them, trying to let the air soothe the water into his skin. It didn’t really do any good. When he put his socks on, they were cold and clinging and mildly damp. It was an unpleasant sensation. Like a thorn in his side.
Yuuji looked back to the beach.
Ah, he’d accidentally stayed until sunset anyway. He had a habit of doing that. Sukuna’s proclivities made their way into Yuuji’s bed; both figuratively and literally. Yuuji always ended up crawling around with activities Sukuna did, mainly because he did not think he had anything better to do. Sukuna was obsessed with getting a rise out of him. The suicide must’ve been a last ditch attempt.
Yuuji was almost disappointed by his own complacency.
He was bubbling, boiling. Somewhere deep tucked away in his heart he had always been on fire. But there was no point to it. Because his complacent nature was the only thing that trapped him to his sense of self. Some part of him desperately wanted to feel. Wanted to know what it was like, just once, to cling onto something and let it in all the walls. Sukuna was the closest thing, but that was because his genesis had been within Yuuji’s walls.
They’d always been attached by the film of glass that made them diametrically opposed. What two things in the world were as close to each other as opposites, after all. In another world, Sukuna’s blinding fits and passions would’ve been tamped out in one body by Yuuji’s apathy and distance. In another world, they would’ve not been so cruelly divided into two lives. They were never meant to live separately, Yuuji deduced. It was not ethical. Not moral.
They were both so incomplete. Sukuna lacked space and Yuuji lacked substance. Sukuna had only been calm in Yuuji’s embrace. Yuuji had only felt when he was in Sukuna’s. When they were as close to one another as separate bodies could be.
Yuuji had known Sukuna to be his soul; his flame; his best friend; and his brother.
And all of it had been true, at the time.
And he didn’t grieve.
Because all of that, Sukuna had indeed been.
But Sukuna was now gone. So there was no point in loitering in something that simply needed a shovel and a few dozen reinventions to forget.
Seven Years Earlier
Yuuji’s memories of his early teenage-hood were fuzzy, but he recalled one incident with such gleaming clarity that even his brain’s habits and efforts could not forget it.
A slamming open bathroom door. It was a small one; tucked away on a second floor of a hallway wing no one ever really went into, but that Sukuna had become awfully fond of vaping in. Yuuji hated the stench and though he looked stupid, but trying to argue with Sukuna over anything was a Herculean task he was most often too lazy to commit to. And after all, Yuuji had staked in with an argument. He wasn’t about to divert his precious mental resources.
“What have you done?” he snapped, his fury so uncharacteristic that Sukuna had deigned to raise an eyebrow at him.
A strong display of care, in those days. When Sukuna was tied up in his youthful edginess and found his maniacal behaviour before his maniacal expression. He became more a loose emotional cannon in later years, but in those earlier days, he was quite stoic and stiff, preferring to let the work of his craziness speak for itself.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said calmly, slipping his vape into his pocket.
Yuuji could recall the scene quite clearly.
Sukuna. The way he was situated ad-hoc to the 1990s model hand dryer. The way he was sitting so carelessly on the toilet sinks. They were old, cracked things. The mirrors were all foggy, and the absence of natural luminescence that was not perverted by the acrid blue tint on every window gave the entire bathroom kind of a dreamlike feel. If dreams could smell so putrid. Due to the bathroom’s unpopular nature, Yuuji was willing to wager the pipes had not been changed in quite a few years, and as such, the spit-back of sewerage and piss and shit was nearly suffocating if one of the windows was not open (the windows were never open).
Yuuji had heard on the wind that Sukuna had already managed to get himself suspended. The teachers were looking for him to drag him to the office and call their parents. Yuuji had found him before the teachers had.
“Bullshit! Mum’s gonna be so mad at you, you know that, right? I can’t believe you, Sukuna! It really isn’t that hard to stay out of trouble.” Yuuji stomped his foot, his voice coming out higher and whinier than he intended. God, there was so much, even then, that pissed Yuuji off when it came to Sukuna. But it was funny, how petty his issues seemed in retrospect.
Sukuna chortled an ugly and throaty laugh, lifting a foot and resting the arch of it over the bend of the sink.
“God, were you always a whiny bitch or has it sprung up over the last year. It’s not even that big of a deal, Yuuji,” he taunted.
Yuuji could still remember the way his fortitude just snapped.
“It’s such a big deal! A brand new school! A new place where finally I’m known as more than your brother and teachers aren’t hassling me and holding me up in hallways because they think I’m you and you try and throw it away within the first week!”
Sukuna scoffed and looked away. There was a sheepishness to his expression that let Yuuji know he knew he had done wrong; but that miniscule expression was nothing more than a private consolation prize. Sukuna would never admit fault. He never did, not even when he’d moved past the teenage arrogance that had made him so unbearable for so long.
“I didn’t even mean for you to find out until later,” he muttered.
Yuuji stalked up to him and grabbed him by the shoulders. Yuuji had, at the time, just wanted to see if he could get Sukuna to listen to him by forcing their eyes to meet. By forcing Sukuna to look at the damage he was doing.
This, of course, had been a naïve mistake on Yuuji’s part. Sure, at the age of thirteen Sukuna was disquieted by Yuuji’s desperation and frustration, but the more Yuuji pushed it onto him, the more addicted to the discomfort Sukuna became. To the point that Yuuji distinctly remembered that in the later days, Sukuna would be the one grabbing him by shoulders and making their gazes lock.
“I got told to report for fucking detention, Sukuna. Me. I haven’t done anything! But already everyone knows you,” Yuuji paused to take a deep breath. The pungent air sucked up through his nostrils. Yuuji still remembered how uncomfortable that had felt. The temperature of it was lukewarm. Humid. “You still haven’t even told me what you did.”
Sukuna rolled his eyes, leaning back against the foggy mirror. It was broken in the top left corner and had a crudely drawn permanent marker penis on it.
“Called a teacher a cunt. And the detention was for tearing some bitch’s notes in half," Sukuna drawled.
The hair on the back of Yuuji’s neck had stood like hackles on a dog at those godforsaken words. Sukuna was meaningless , and that was what pissed Yuuji off the most. Everything Yuuji did always had to have a reason. A route. A point-A-to-point-fuckin’-B. Sukuna being so laissez-faire was incomprehensible, and frankly, offensive to everything Yuuji did and how he was.
Yuuji paced back around the stalls for a second, pausing in front of the urinal and leaning his left hand on the wall. He ran his right palm down his face. The salty smell of his palm just made the pounding in his head expedite.
“There’s something properly, clinically wrong with you,” he groaned.
“Don’t we all know it?”
Yuuji ignored him, turning around and pacing the tiled floor, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaking with every sharp turn.
“Mum’s gonna be so mad…”
“So? That doesn’t even affect you.”
Yuuji still remembered how that bitter, chortled laugh had felt in his throat at the time. Like a lump at the back of it. Like his larynx was tensing and about to drop. The sheer disbelief in him at a time when he was not yet fully realised to just how batshit and selfish and ignorant Sukuna could get. It was one of the first times. Yuuji tried to give himself grace in retrospect, but he wished he had just responded stone-faced and careless. Whatever. What was past had passed and there was naught to do dwelling on it.
“Oh, you’re dense. You’re actually dense. Thick in the head, man. Thick in the skull,” Yuuji pointed a finger at his twin angrily, “you know Sukuna, you can’t ruin my life forever.”
He tried to turn heel and leave after that, but that grating, clawing voice reeled him right back.
“I’m doing you a fuckin’ favour, ay!” Sukuna’s voice always had a habit of tumbling through silence with all the elegance of a bulldozer. He had no tact and appreciation for a lost argument. Just fought his way through like a soldier in a crowded street would man a tank. “At least this way you get some fuckin’ cred in here! Instead of being just the fiftieth nobody weirdo quiet kid to walk around like he owns the place and is above everyone and graduates friendless!”
Cred, Yuuji wanted to laugh. Sukuna was so ignorant of the fact that all press was, in fact, not good press. Yuuji would’ve taken ambivalence over malice any day. Especially from their school and peers and teachers. Yuuji wanted nothing more than normalcy and keeping himself to himself, but Sukuna seemed to think that his chaos was a gift to Yuuji’s invisible nature. He was always seen and recognised so long as he was in conjunction with Sukuna. Maybe that was the point Sukuna was trying to make. Not that it mattered. He was wrong.
“I have friends!” Yuuji had said, because explaining all his feelings on the matter was fair too much for his young and clumsy mouth to manage.
“Friends as fucking weird as you,” Sukuna said with a disgusted and dismissive tone that made red light begin to blare at the edges of Yuuji’s eyesight.
Yuuji tried to breathe. Tried to calm himself. He did not want to stoop to his twin’s level. He was better. He had to be better.
“Sukuna, I’m actually begging you to stop. Tone it down. I can’t– I can’t have your bad behaviour making my identity hell again,” Yuuji pleaded. Deaf ears. Sukuna wouldn’t have known disconnected empathy if it smashed him in the face.
“I’m not doing anything,” Sukuna shrugged.
Yuuji paced right up to him. Sukuna responded in kind by climbing down from the sink and standing face-to-face with Yuuji, their eyes meeting on the exact same level. Such similar shades of brown. But Yuuji always could tell how Sukuna’s had a red undertone in comparison to the orange that glinted when the light shone on Yuuji’s.
“You don’t need to cause problems! You don’t need to call teachers cunts and you certainly don’t need to rip anyone else’s notes up!” Yuuji gestured emphatically with his arms.
“Not all of us are like you, Yuuji,” Sukuna said, hands in pockets.
Yuuji’s lip curled.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Not all of us sit still like a little mouse when someone throws shit his way. Sorry, but if someone’s pissing me off–”
“Everybody is always pissing you off!” Yuuji whined, stomping his foot like a petulant child.
Sukuna’s brow furrowed, the lines around the crinkle of his nose making him look older and scarier than he actually was. Not that that did, or would ever, work on Yuuji. Yuuji was never scared of Sukuna. Other people were, and often were, in fact. But Yuuji never saw Sukuna as a threat, in truth. At least not to his safety. There was nary a person Yuuji actually trusted more with his physical safety than Sukuna.
“You’re pissing me off pretty fuckin’ badly right now,” Sukuna growled.
Yuuji got lower, his voice climbing higher in his throat until it broke in a boyish and emotional way.
“You’re ruining my life! Everything about me ends up being about you!”
For some reason, when Yuuji said that, Sukuna’s expression morphed from mildly peeved to something of extreme disgust. Looking back, Yuuji could easily see what it was. He had, in saying that, failed to step up to Sukuna’s challenge. Sukuna had tried for a couple short years to make Yuuji into a copy of him, and tried to provoke him in a way that he himself would have responded to. And Yuuji’s resignation and pleading was something Sukuna could hardly tolerate. It truly, deeply offended him. In the same way Yuuji was offended.
“And if you weren’t such a–” Sukuna emphasised his words by shoving Yuuji hard in the middle of his chest, “pussy, you’d do something about it!”
Yuuji staggered back, his fists curling and mouth tightening into a hard line.
“Stop.”
Sukuna stepped forward again.
“C’mon, Yuu. Hit me. C’mon. Give me your best fuckin’ shot, you won’t. You won’t, and I know you won’t. I ain’t even gonna be in school for the next two weeks so what’s the worst you could do–”
“I’m not doing it.”
Sukuna laughed, getting so close to Yuuji that Yuuji could taste the heat of his breath and the flecks of spittle off his lips. His pupils were tight and contracted. His voice was dark and throaty, like coming up from the base of his very being.
“Bullshit. There’s that fire, boy! There it is,” he purred. Yuuji’s memory from that point was frosty. It was big strokes, not fine details. He just remembered feeling angry. “That’s my brother, ain’t it? That’s my fuckin’–”
Yuuji threw the first punch that day. He could still see clearly in his head how Sukuna had looked when his fist met his cheekbone. The surprise, followed by the laughter, then the elation. Ringing out from every airless sound he made like a dying bell. Ding, ding, ding. Yuuji’s head rang, too. But more in a dizzying, sharp kind of sound than the echoes of Sukuna’s breath.
It was the first time he had his brother’s body on him in that way. Their first encounter where Yuuji could distinctly feel something beyond brotherly. Those terrifying and crude passions that would extend and uproot their inner morality from the inside out. No, not uproot. Because in truth, neither of them had much of that to begin with. But even at that tender age, there had been an appeal in the heat of their skin smothering and yelps and breaths mingling that Yuuji could not describe.
It was not yet purely erotic; but not without passions that distinctly belonged between themselves.
Yuuji’s back hitting the wall. Sukuna’s hand clasped over his mouth. The taste of blood when Yuuji bit back. Lightning in a bottle, really.
It was a universe, and it was a microcosm. It was the first time Yuuji had felt alive in the little terrarium he called his life. Spurling out in something he did not know was even within him to begin with. As if all his complacency was absorbed into Sukuna’s fire.
To the very last, Sukuna was the only being who was able to provoke such a reaction out of Yuuji, and even that dwindled with time. There was really no other timeline or butterfly effect that led to Yuuji throwing that punch on that day. Yuuji couldn’t conceive of any other reality where he behaved like he did. He couldn’t, even staring back, dissect it enough to understand.
Maybe Sukuna really had gotten to him enough in that moment to change him. Maybe that was so. But like a switch with a timer, instead of like a permanent yanking of a rusted lever.
They spilled out of the bathroom in a ball of hits and yells and bruises until some passing girl squealed and ran to the closest teacher she could find. Yuuji could still sometimes feel the hand on the back of his collar, choking him back like a leash.
They were pulled off each other. Sukuna’s face was all bloodied up. There was a purpling bruise at the edge of his eye that had swelled the lid shut for weeks. Yuuji was still yelling words he couldn’t even recall. Voices and noises and lights all blurred into nothing and all he could see was Sukuna’s grinning face, blood running down the white of his teeth.
Yuuji got slapped with a suspension too.
Present
Clink, plonk, plop.
The milk in Yuuji’s cup of tea swirled out like silken clouds into an orange, dusky sky. The sound of the spoon hitting the rim was a cheery little melody that brought sound to the otherwise derelict apartment.
Sukuna’s body had been cleaned out the day he’d been found. Overdose, Yuuji had been told.
He’d been phoned late at night, since his contact was the only one that the police found in Sukuna’s phone. Apparently some neighbours hadn’t seen him in a while and despite their abject dislike and fear of him, had called a wellness check. Yuuji supposed he was grateful. But not enough to bother stopping by and thanking them personally. He almost felt like he was doing a better favour that way; to not remind them of Sukuna more than they already were, no doubt feeling haunted about the psycho in the upstairs room that’d now died. Yuuji felt almost ashamed, in a way. To be the one left behind.
Sorry that my brother killed himself. He almost wanted to say. Sorry if it made you feel anything.
It was just more people who were there to be disturbed by Yuuji’s quiet calmness.
‘We can have the apartment cleared for you, son, if it’s too much–’
One of the cops had offered, and Yuuji had dismissed it with a wave. It was fine. They were just things. Not like they were going to jump out and bite him. Besides, Yuuji was half sure Sukuna had some things that he didn’t really want the police getting into.
Yuuji looked out the kitchen window, his hips leant against the kitchen bench as he took a sip of his lukewarm tea. He hadn’t been patient enough to let the kettle fully boil; and adding cold milk didn’t help. But it didn’t really matter. It was just something to drink.
Yuuji looked out over the boxes that littered the joint kitchen and living space. He’d boxed up most things. Bathroom, kitchen/living, laundry. Sukuna didn’t keep a lot. He’d found a couple drugs here and there, but nothing major. A packet of razor blades and a stash of bloody ones tucked away like trophies under the washing machine. Sukuna was weird.
Yuuji’s eyes drifted down to his own scarred forearms. He’d had a nearly methodical approach to self-harm. Never too deep, perfect lines divided in rows by about one centimetre. You could nearly read his short-long-short strokes like Morse code. The hairline white of long-faded scars was also vastly different to the blaring red and aggressively lumpy skin of Sukuna’s arms. Sukuna always tried to kill himself with the cuts. Cut to the fat, to the tendon, to the bone.
For Yuuji, it served a different purpose. A micro dosing of pain. Pretty, aesthetic lines. He didn’t care if his cuts weren’t bad . He just needed them to exist. Little fireballs that never had any detriment on his ability to live a normal life and walk the appearance of functionality. Yuuji had never harmed himself to a point beyond plausible deniability. And he never would. He didn’t understand how minds like Sukuna’s worked.
To him, it was vice and self-control.
To Sukuna, it was vice and self-destruction.
Yuuji had very little respect for the warpath.
Or maybe he was just a coward in an intellectual’s skin. Or it was just the fact that he didn’t want to die and never really had. Beyond getting a rest. And he could get a rest by isolating himself enough. Possibility and future was a leash on him. And it was the sanest leash he could have.
Yuuji put his half-empty teacup down and decided to busy his hands again. No point standing around and letting the day slip from him in thought. He still had Sukuna’s room to pack. Sukuna had been found on the bed, with syringes in him and already in a state of decomposition, Yuuji had been told. So they stripped the mattress down to the frame and disinfected the whole place, just leaving personals. There were still bloody and repugnant residue stains that had made their way to the carpet. Yuuji scrunched his nose. He didn’t like thinking of his brother that way.
All bloated and yellowing. Blood-stained. His mouth probably gasped open and eyes rolled back like some sick freak junkie.
Yuuji stepped around the bed frame and yanked out the third drawer of Sukuna’s dresser. He’d been here just a two and half weeks prior, and to his annoyance, Sukuna hadn’t bothered to do even the slightest of clean-ups before offing himself. He had always been a fan of polaroid cameras, which Yuuji had told him was awfully girlish for a man like himself. Sukuna had promptly told him to shut up and kill himself. Ironic.
Yuuji flicked through the ones that Sukuna kept so close, and it was not at all a surprise to him that most of them were nudes. Nudes of Yuuji. In varying ages. All asleep. Prick, Yuuji whispered under his breath.
In some, Sukuna’s hands were visible, twisting and contorting Yuuji into whatever posture pleased him most. Posed like a doll. Yuuji held one up to the light. How old was he here? Sixteen? Younger? Part of him felt strange. Most of him didn’t care at all. It was like watching a relic from the past. It must’ve been taken on one of the days when Sukuna came back home when their parents were out. How they’d waste the day on junk food and video games. Then they’d make out, maybe masturbate together, if Sukuna felt like it. Cut. Then Yuuji would invariably go to sleep, his system shot from all the high energy.
Yuuji never even noticed. Sukuna must’ve been meticulous with how he undressed him and redressed him.
Yuuji’s heart gave a little pause when he flipped to the last polaroid in the stack. New, still glossy. Yuuji’s thumb traced the curve of his own spine. He remembered this one. Which was how he knew where to find the photos in the first place. Cum leaking from his tired ass. His eyes over his shoulder with a soft smile on his face. Sukuna had taken this one right after they finished fucking.
Yuuji didn’t realise his brother was so sentimental.
Yuuji boxed up the rest of Sukuna’s things and threw the polaroids in the trash when he was done. He didn’t need those outliving their owner any longer than they already had.
Five Years Earlier
“One little one,” Sukuna had said.
It was a humid evening. Mid-summer, right when the sun’s heat lingered through the concrete around their family’s suburban house well into the shroud of night. Sukuna had dragged Yuuji to his room, and they were sitting on his floor.
Yuuji didn’t remember much of the scene other than that. Maybe that the window was open. Or the curtains; fluttering softly in the din.
Yuuji’s eyes were more focused on the blade that Sukuna was holding out to him. It was a sharpener blade; Yuuji had watched Sukuna methodically disassemble one at the back of their English class only days before.
Yuuji held out his open palm, feeling the feather-light weight of it as Sukuna dropped it. It was still dotted up with his blood. Dried to the silvery metal like splatters of pain. It was rusted along the top, too. The coppery colour smoothing into the crimson red like a sunset from hell.
Sukuna’s arms were exposed. Yuuji’s eyes followed up the open, gaping cuts with wonder. The way the flesh seemed to part like cutting through a leather seat, or like a jacket unzipping. It was really quite strange. Yuuji realised at that moment that humans truly were nothing more than bags of flesh. All ready to be butchered at a moment’s notice like the freshest kill at the market.
Yuuji stared dumbly, his mouth feeling numb, his words feeling clumsy.
“When did you start?” he asked, like a complete idiot.
One of Yuuji’s biggest regrets (if he could be said to feel regretful for anything) (which he didn’t). He gave his memorialising monologue some more thought. Something Yuuji considered to be a regret most expected of him to hold was his enabling of his twin’s self-harm.
Maybe if he was different or better he would’ve reported it the moment he discovered it, and let Sukuna be dealt with by a proper adult authority. But he didn’t. There was a part of him that felt it was a loyalty issue, another part that kind of expected this kind of behaviour from Sukuna. Especially as each year passed and he grew more and more unpredictable. Yuuji was more shocked that Sukuna was dragging him into it.
Sukuna leant back, moving his arms to support his weight. The cuts tensed. Spread. Blood oozed down. Sukuna looked unbothered. It had to be painful. Yuuji cringed just at the thought of the wind brushing through all that exposed matter.
Sukuna shrugged,
“A little while back. It doesn’t even hurt that bad, y’know? Releases serotonin or something.”
Yuuji gave him a quizzical look for a moment, his fingers curling on the blade and getting it into position like he was following predefined movements.
“..I don’t think it works that way,” he mumbled.
“Just trust me, Yuu. It’s like drugs for losers who don’t want to try drugs. You don’t have to cut as deep as me,” Sukuna grumbled, folding his legs and moving forward, helping to roll Yuuji’s thin pyjama sleeve to his elbow.
“That doesn’t make me want to do it any more,” Yuuji grumbled, glaring at Sukuna through his lashes.
There was a little night light that was switched on over on Sukuna’s bedside table, and it doused half his face with warm light. It was half a year before the tattoos, so that night ended up being one of Yuuji’s last memories of his brother’s face without them. Sukuna had started pushing his hair back at that point, though. And he was filling out faster than Yuuji. Both of them were strong for their age, but Sukuna was just stronger.
Sukuna pouted, his lips curling down. Yuuji giggled at the sight.
“For me, then,” he huffed, with puffy cheeks and a big lungful of air. “I’ll… Ugh. I’ll be nice to you, if you try it.”
Yuuji laughed again, harder this time. He could still feel those laughs in his throat, sometimes. How Sukuna could pull them from him. Yuuji had not laughed like that in the week and a half following the phone call that informed him that his twin was dead. Maybe that was a mournful thing to say. An expression of grief. It was practical. He had no reason to laugh anymore, so he didn’t. Not such a thing to mourn as such a thing to observe. Hm.
“That’s a shitty plea bargain,” Yuuji had rolled his eyes, a big, shit-eating grin on his face.
Sukuna lifted and dropped his hands in exasperation, blood droplets hitting the ground in little splats as he did.
“Well what do you want me to say, Yuuji? You’re so stiff all the fuckin’ time,” he groaned.
Yuuji shrugged,
“I’m not gonna say no. I’m just being annoying.”
Sukuna tried to look irritated, but really, he looked a mix of giddy and fond. He fought a smile as he replied.
“You’re always being annoying,” he murmured. Yuuji lifted the edge of the blade to the middle of his forearm. Sukuna helped with the angle of his hand, tilting it down so the sharp corner was braced almost surgically against the skin. “There you go. Right there.”
Yuuji paused, a moment of hesitation that he could tell was irritating to Sukuna. The blade left his skin.
“What if someone–” Sukuna tensed his grip on Yuuji’s forearm, half forceful, half reassuring.
“No one’s gonna see,” he insisted.
“It’s summer,” Yuuji replied, his mouth clumsy again all of a sudden.
It was often like that for Yuuji. When he was just at the beginning of making a turn, his brain would force on the brakes. Reminding him of respectability and logic and his deep, deep fear of drawing negative attention to himself. What would he do if everyone hated him? What if they already hated him to begin with? These were things Yuuji knew Sukuna would never understand; these were things he never bothered trying to explain.
“Shh. You’ll manage. I manage,” Sukuna assured.
“We’re a little different,” Yuuji choked.
Sukuna pressed the sharpener blade back onto Yuuji’s wrist.
“Not that much.”
In all honesty, Yuuji was shocked by how little it actually hurt. Sure, there was the expected sting of the blade on the wound, but no more than a papercut or a light graze. It felt concentrated, like a pillar of fire underneath his very mortal entrapment.
Yuuji laughed, honestly.
His first instinct was to laugh. He sped up the cut, dragging the blade fast and hard off the edge of his arm as blood began to bead in pretty little dots along the line. It felt like something was coming out of him that wasn’t meant to be seen. He looked up at Sukuna. Sukuna was entirely focused on the wound. His hands were shaking as he held Yuuji’s forearm like a relic. They didn’t really need any words. The humidity faded away. The nightlight faded away. Yuuji made another cut. Lower, this time. Just as perfectly straight. A short, small one. Dot, dot, line. Dot, dot, line.
Sukuna was close to trembling as he watched Yuuji open himself.
Yuuji never was able to understand why his self-harm made Sukuna as happy as it did. For all his brain-wracking and his subsequent fatigue of brain-wracking, Yuuji couldn’t wrap his mind around the sheer devotion that Sukuna had to his wounds and blood.
Sadism was the easy answer.
Sukuna wasn’t built out of easy answers.
“Shit,” Yuuji hissed, waving his arm a little as the feeling began to set in.
“Yeah, it hits after," Sukuna muttered, blowing on the cuts.
There was a moment of quiet between them. When they looked up and their eyes met. It was the first time Yuuji could recall true eroticism.
Sukuna shifted awkwardly where he was sitting.
“Yuuji,” he whispered, like he was about to say something very bad. “I usually jerk off before I go to bed, but-”
“I’ll go,” Yuuji offered.
“Don’t,” Sukuna said, his voice darkening. “It’s- the blood- it helps. I can show you.”
Yuuji didn’t know, at that time, nor later, what possessed him to agree to stay. But suddenly there was no other thing to do. And he swallowed, his throat drier than a desert.
“Okay.”
Sukuna moved forward, closing the gap between them. Yuuji felt a flutter in his chest that traced slowly all the way up to his throat. Tensing. Closing. Opening again. Like he had been underwater and was just surfacing.
Sukuna took Yuuji’s wrist and circled his hand around it. Yuuji winced at the pain, but Sukuna shushed him, his eyes catching Yuuji’s like a safety net. He slowly dragged his fist down, smearing the red along Yuuji’s skin like a painter coating a masterpiece in varnish. Easy, long strokes. Yuuji’s stomach twisted at the thought of those hands touching him elsewhere.
It was natural; intrinsic. Sukuna and Yuuji were two halves of the same body, after all. The ways that they knew how to touch each other needed no practice and no explanation.
Yuuji moved his head forward slightly, chasing Sukuna’s lips. He didn’t know why he did it. But it felt right. Sukuna hesitated. It was about the last time Yuuji saw him hesitate for anything.
The kiss started slow and rhythmic. Sukuna continued to rub his hand up and down Yuuji’s sliced wrist like he was stroking him off. Their lips danced in an awkward, fluttery kind of motion. The remaining parts of their innocence evaporated in the air between them that was being eaten away bite by bite.
Yuuji opened his jaw to accommodate Sukuna’s tongue. The glide was slick and easy. Hot. Humid. Yuuji moaned into the kiss and grabbed Sukuna’s forearm in return. The wetness of his blood was addictive, and without thinking, he plunged his nails into the apex of one of the deep, jagged cuts.
“Ah…” Sukuna let out an audible groan, his head tilting back as their lips parted, connected by a thick string of saliva.
“Fuck…” Yuuji cursed, moving on top of Sukuna’s lap, his fingers entranced with the motions they were making in his brother’s viscera.
“Yes, Yuuji… Yes, like that…” Sukuna praised darkly, his free hand moving to yank Yuuji’s pyjama shorts off his hips.
His dick sprang free, hard and red already, slapping against his stomach, and Sukuna grabbed it with his bloodied hand.
“Mn!” Yuuji lurched forward, his head burying in the crook of Sukuna’s shoulder, his nose brushing against the skin of his neck and drinking in his scent like a man dying of thirst.
He was so sensitive. Yuuji rarely even touched himself. The lack of control he had as Sukuna’s thumb delved into the tip of his cock was overwhelming.
“Please…” he whispered, whiny and high in his twin’s ear.
“You do me,” Sukuna mumbled back. Yuuji could only give a shaky nod as his hands scrambled to pull Sukuna’s boxers down.
His cock was veiny and thick in Yuuji’s hand, and he gave it an uncertain squeeze as he tremulously ran his hand up and down it.
They were both panting; their exertion so heavy that their bodies were quivering against each other. Yuuji thrusted like a bitch in heat against his brother’s palm.
The slickness and stickiness of the blood only made things feel filthier. Filthier in a way that for Yuuji, bordered on the edge of holy.
Sukuna’s hand tightened like a vice right under Yuuji’s swollen glans, and a choked sound broke from his voice box.
“Fuck! Ah- I… hah… feel like m’ gonna die…” He groaned, his lips kissing the edge of Sukuna’s neck, tasting the salt off his neck.
Yuuji couldn’t wipe that taste from his mouth. The taste of Sukuna’s sweat. It was so heady and intimate that for some reason, it stuck with him. For years, it had hounded him. The feeling of being so pressed into his twin’s body that the very flavour of him embedded itself into his palate…
“Yeah, s’ the blood loss, oh, God, Yuu… keep going, I’m so fucking close, please- m’ gonna cum, I’m gonna–”
Sukuna was more vocal than Yuuji had expected him to be. Yuuji looked down, watching the transparency of the precum mix with the maroon shade of the blood. He felt so fucking lightheaded. None of it felt anywhere close to real.
Sukuna grabbed Yuuji’s cuts again, and Yuuji yelped in pain, his hips spasming as cum splattered onto Sukuna’s shirt. Sukuna came seconds after, and for a minute, neither of them quite knew what to say.
Sukuna broke the strained silence.
Yuuji was glad he did. Because Yuuji had been entirely ready to forget and circumvent back into his hole of purity. But Sukuna licked the blood and cum off Yuuji’s hand without quarrel.
“That’s kind of fucked up,” Sukuna said. “That you agreed to that.”
“I don’t really care.”
That had been Yuuji’s response.
He neglected to think of it at the time, but it was possible that Sukuna had interpreted his words in a completely different way than he intended. Yuuji wasn’t the rebellious sort, and his assertion of apathy had been closer to a blanket statement of disinterest than an off-the-shoulder scoff. Maybe Sukuna had taken it as one, though. Maybe that was why they ended up tumbling into each other as often as they did. Yuuji was honestly surprised they didn’t go the whole way sooner. Maybe the bleeding pacified their baser instincts. Yuuji never asked for more. If Sukuna wanted to do something, they did it.
Maybe his lack of instigation lifted moral responsibility.
Or maybe Yuuji really was just a coward in an intellectual’s skin.
Present
“Two-hundred and fifteen dollars, is that savings or checking?”
Yuuji’s least favourite interactions that occurred as a courtesy of his brother being dead were those that he had with shop attendants.
The estranged pity; the siphoning of their humanness into their business-like little packages that tried to establish distance while breaking into all the most horrible and disgusting little twinges of empathy. It pierced Yuuji deep in the uncanny valley. If he could’ve done all the organisation for Sukuna’s funeral without having to speak to a single person, he would’ve done it. Yuuji didn’t mind genuine condolences. Like his mother calling him, or his father coming by his apartment to drop off some food so Yuuji was spared the effort of cooking. It wasn’t like those platitudes were necessary either, but as they came from a place of depth, Yuuji didn’t feel inclined toward the same vitriolic disgust as he did when strangers pitied him.
“Savings.” Yuuji mumbled, taking out his card and feeding it into the eftpos machine without so much as glancing at the florist cashier girl.
Yuuji considered buying flowers about on the same level as an ‘I’m so sorry’ from a stranger. It was pointless, really, but with Yuuji’s attitude, he supposed the least he could do was give Sukuna a normal funeral. Consolation prizes. He wasn’t full or normal enough to give his brother proper grief, so he saved up his bank of respectability and put together a send-off that Sukuna would’ve hated from the deepest core of his being.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the cashier blurted, breaking out of her façade of professional aloofness.
“It’s fine,” Yuuji muttered. He knew where this was going.
“It’s horrible to lose someone. I never like seeing these orders come in and I feel worse for making people pay for them.” The girl continued.
Yuuji didn’t understand why so many people had so many things to say about his situation. It wasn’t their business, in fact, it was the complete opposite. He’d never extend his arm unnecessarily to someone he didn’t know. Grief was supposed to be a very personal thing, no? Not something to be shared and tossed around the community like this week’s run of a hot magazine topic.
Yuuji didn’t reply to the rant. He didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to explain the complexity of his situation in a way that wouldn’t make himself seem more human. That always made people ice off. When Yuuji didn’t melt like they expected him to. He could see the judgement in their eyes and it did nothing more than irritate him.
“...Can you help load the flowers into my car?” Yuuji asked.
The cashier was (expectantly) taken aback by the formal change of topic.
“Yes, sure, that won’t be an issue, but if they’re kept out of water too long–”
Yuuji didn’t care if they wilted.
“I’m driving them straight to the funeral home. It’s fine.”
“We can do a delivery-”
Yuuji was sick of everyone trying to help him in any way they could. He was so, so tired of it all. It was done. Why could no one see that he was just trying to get it done?
“It’s fine. Thank you,” he said coldly, taking his card out of the eftpos machine a little too hard, making the girl reach to grab it before it clunked off the counter.
He ignored her dumbfounded expression and paced, hands in pockets, out to his car.
The flowers were loaded in the boot of his hatchback. A shit tonne of white roses that to Yuuji, smelled saccharine and sterile. The complete opposite of Sukuna.
If there was one small mercy to Yuuji’s entire situation, it was that Sukuna had died in the winter. Yuuji wasn’t sure if he could stomach all the driving and roads and the blearing emptiness in his head if all of this had happened in thirty degree heat. If the car melted into a hotbox and his hands were scalded by the leather of the wheel without so much as a featherlight touch.
No, the winter was a comfort. Yuuji could turn on the seat heaters and the windscreen wipers and just tear down the roads with his eyes trained on the back wheels of the car in front of him. The rain drained out the song on the radio; some shitty piano ballad. Yuuji didn’t move to turn it off, though. He needed the noise to fill the ringing white space that fogged his mind.
Yuuji needed to bury this fast, or he’d lose his mind.
The funeral home was cold, just as clinical as the flowers. Yuuji knew the place decently well, in the times that he’d been in and out, organising, consulting, paying... Yuuji had no love for the director and all the plans and ideas that he tried to sell. There was a pomp to death that he saw that Yuuji did not. Yuuji nearly wished he’d just buried Sukuna in his backyard.
“Just dropping these off. For the funeral,” Yuuji mumbled, pushing the bouquets of flowers at the confused receptionist. “Oh, uh. Itadori,” he said awkwardly, realising that the poor intern probably didn’t have the fuzziest clue who he was.
“Ah… Usually we provide…” she stammered, her hands unsure as Yuuji just offloaded the flowers without any real care.
“Yeah, well. Saves costs,” Yuuji said, “I didn’t need as many flowers as was offered in the package thing anyway. Just give these to the crew dressing him up. Thanks.”
He turned on his heel and left.
Yuuji ended up loitering around the back of the place, though. His car felt unfriendly. And he instinctively knew his home would feel worse.
There was a packet of cigarettes in his jacket pocket that he’d taken from Sukuna’s apartment. He never smoked; never saw the appeal. When they were seventeen Sukuna had dragged Yuuji out in the dead of night and tried to taunt him into it. It succeeded, of course, because Yuuji lacked a fucking spine, but he never caught onto it after that.
Yuuji fumbled out the packet, flicking off the top, ignoring the gory image of a tar-bleeding eye that was strapped around the front. Smoking kills , the pack read, in bright, bold, blocky yellow letters.
Sukuna had smoked half his life. Smoking didn’t kill him. It didn’t get a chance to.
Yuuji reckoned that people who smoked like that were too competitive to let something as pedestrian as a cigarette and lung cancer to do them in.
There was a certain lameness to psychotics, Yuuji thought. There was a kind of self-absorbed idiocy he could never be in really mentally deranged people. People that burned themselves down and killed themselves or cut deeply or got hooked on drugs or alcohol or couldn’t keep up the appearance of functionality. At a certain point, Yuuji thought it was pathetic, honestly. He didn’t understand the appeal of being a wreck, nor did he understand the concept of being unable to just keep it together. Yuuji could keep it together even if he was hollow inside.
Yes, there was a screaming beast in him somewhere.
But he was smarter than that. Too aware of himself for that. Watching his own life and criticising with a microscopic lens.
Yuuji shucked the warning package off the carton of cigarettes and took one out.
He was the brand of mentally deranged that wasn’t pathetic, he liked to think. His subtlety allowed for nuances people like Sukuna could never understand. When he took a deep drag of smoke, it wasn’t for anything but the way it heated his lungs. He watched the sparks drop off at the end. The orange turned to black as they hit the rain-stained pavement. How apt. Yuuji didn’t finish the cigarette. He lost his nerve the second his throat started feeling a little clunky and dry. He threw the half-smoked stick onto the ground, stamping it with his heel.
He looked around like a scared child, as if there was someone just waiting in the wings there to grab him and scold him for misbehaving.
What an impractical idiot he’d been. Yuuji walked over to his car, pushing down the feeling in his heart that was tethering him down like a stone to the pit of his stomach. He turned on the radio again. There was a different song playing.
Plunking, twinkly, rhythmic notes. A smooth rhythm. Words that Yuuji’s mind glossed over. But there was an apathy to the melody and the tightly packed harmonies that Yuuji was able to recognise. To lose that pathetic angst he’d been mulling with in his head since the day had started.
A reinvention. It was a simple thing. One more. He could leave this stage of Sukuna’s funeral planning behind, too. The funeral was days away. Yuuji was so close to stage exit. His character wasn’t meant to linger. Once the curtain fell, Yuuji never had to think about his twin ever again.
What a grand way to go.
How much Sukuna would’ve hated that.
Three Weeks Earlier
Yuuji’s spine hit the bed sheets first. They smelled like Sukuna; his sweat and cum and overall muskiness that Yuuji had gotten so used to.
“Mnn–” Yuuji moaned into Sukuna’s mouth.
This memory was a fresh one. Sharp and acrid as the day it had happened. Yet still, it remained somewhat shrouded. Not like perfectly transparent glass, but clouded; opaque, where clear movements rounded out at the edges into the fantasy of past; ready to be moulded and shaped into something just romantic enough to fall into the epoch of antiquity; to sit on a shelf with other artefacts of eras bygone.
Sukuna’s hands were on his waist. The roughness of his palms bled into Yuuji’s skin. His fingers traced Yuuji’s ribs, counting each one in a slow, methodical rhythm.
“Fuck…” Sukuna breathed out. Yuuji kissed the edge of his ear.
Both of them had been a little tremulous. Agreeing to sex was one thing. Going through with it was proving to be another beast all together.
“Are you going to do something or keep smelling me like a freak?” Yuuji whispered.
Sukuna laughed a little, leaning up, his elbow bracketed above Yuuji’s head.
Yuuji could still see his eyes.
The soft swipes of a dark, murky purple that curved under the sallow, bleak red of his irises. Yuuji cupped his face in his hands, pressing a chaste little kiss to the edge of his mouth.
“Relax, Kuna.”
“I am relaxed,” Sukuna mumbled, rocking his thigh between Yuuji’s legs.
Yuuji let out a wanton moan, his head tilting back, bearing his throat to his twin. He involuntarily rocked his ass down to try and more, more, more of Sukuna. It was in moments like these where he was granted the brief reprieve of pleasure, and his mind was fogged in. The weight on his brain like a weighted blanket on a body.
He could peel back every layer and simply accept what this, this twisted, secret, incestuous affair was. Happiness.
(Yuuji regretted thinking that at the time, and he continued to regret it over the course of events that played out in the weeks following. It was a simplistic thought borne from passion and ecstasy. Nowhere near a true estimate of Yuuji’s feelings toward his entanglements with his twin. It disturbed him; how in some moments, all he was was a charred ball of devotion, and his beast was drawn out to play.)
“God, ngh… Just hurry up,” Yuuji writhed in Sukuna’s hands, getting increasingly frustrated with the way Sukuna just kissed every inch of him.
Kisses down the side of his jaw, love bites on his neck that burst the blood vessels under the skin in fireworks of red and pink and purple. Kisses down his collar bones and sternum. Yuuji couldn’t help the way he twitched from every wet patch left behind. The way the air tickled his body and left him covered in goose bumps.
“Take this off,” Yuuji insisted, tugging up the hem of Sukuna’s shirt. Sukuna obliged him, throwing the offending item of clothing off to the side of the bed, before delving back down to worship Yuuji’s body in excruciating detail.
“Ah… Nnn… ” Yuuji closed his eyes and let his body fall limp. Sukuna licked around his nipple, leaving the firm pink bud glistening under the murky bedroom light. Yuuji couldn’t fight the need to look down at him. The exhaustion on his features; the fresh scars and bruises and burns on his body; the slack way his usually pushed-back hair was falling over his tattooed face… To Yuuji, he looked like the cosmos. Something that was too colourful and grand to exist on the planet that housed humanity.
Not broken, but engulfing. All encompassing. Religious.
A shuddering wave, peaking and crashing and dispersing over a shoreline. Yuuji’s hands brushed his shoulders like he was following him from coastline to coastline.
Yuuji did not know it would be the last time he’d ever follow Sukuna’s lead.
“Yuuji…”
The way Sukuna whispered his name was delicate as crystal. Yuuji just drew him into another kiss. This one was slower, deeper.
Their tongues ran together, and Sukuna let out a darkly satisfied groan as he took hold of Yuuji’s jaw, licking around the insides of Yuuji’s mouth like he was trying to imbed his taste into the atoms of Yuuji’s flesh. And it worked, oh, it worked. Yuuji could still taste him. In the back of his mind, if he focused his mind, the heat on his gums and cheeks and tongue was the same. Still tingling with Sukuna.
Yuuji hooked his thumbs under the elastic of his underwear and peeled the cloth from his body in a smooth, fast motion. Sukuna’s hands immediately clasped over the meaty flesh of his hips and ass, nails digging in and leaving crescents in their wake.
“Yes… Yes…” Yuuji moaned, his muscles tensing as Sukuna gripped and tugged on his cock. He was already hard, and he dribbled precum down his engorged shaft, slicking up the veiny sides of it. A shrill cry broke out of his lips as Sukuna jerked faster and faster, his wrist twisting in a way that spread the pleasing pressure evenly over every inch of Yuuji.
Sukuna fumbled to grab the lube from the floor next to the bed, giving Yuuji a moment to lean back and catch his breath.
“We’re really fucking doing this?” Yuuji whispered.
Sukuna’s hands were shaking as he flipped off the cap.
“Don’t tell me you’ve found your moral objection now.”
“I never had a moral objection,” Yuuji scoffed, lifting his knees to better open his legs. “Just feels weird that you waited so long.”
Yuuji remembered how Sukuna paused after he said those words. How for a second, his motions stilled. Some of the lube dribbled through his fingers and stained the mattress. It was a horrifying thought, in hindsight, that in a week, Sukuna would’ve rotted that mattress completely through with the viscera of his decaying corpse.
“Maybe I wanted you to say something, hm?” Sukuna said. There was an undercurrent of bitterness in his voice that Yuuji recalled from their youth. That grating, goading tone that demanded more of Yuuji than he had inside him.
“Yeah, right. You know me,” Yuuji muttered under his breath, trying to keep himself still as Sukuna prodded two fingertips against his tense hole.
Yuuji grunted as Sukuna breached him, his rim clenching down hard against the intrusion. Every jolt over Yuuji’s folds of muscle felt like he was being stabbed from the inside, and he had to bite down to avoid cursing Sukuna out.
“Shit, go slow,” he grumbled, trying to school his breathing into something calm as to not give away just how fucking painful this shit was.
“It’s not that bad,” Sukuna grumbled, pushing his fingers in further until they had entirely disappeared into Yuuji’s body. Yuuji didn’t look him in the eye, trying to zone out by counting to ten as Sukuna began to spread and scissor him.
“More lube,” Yuuji demanded. Sukuna rolled his eyes, but obliged.
The slick, cold sensation made Yuuji’s entire body shudder. Every time Sukuna curled his knuckles or tested Yuuji’s pliability, Yuuji had to stifle a groan down the back of his throat.
“Who’s not relaxed now?” Sukuna goaded. Yuuji slapped him over the arm.
“You, hah, you try taking it up the ass, bastard,” he sneered.
Sukuna just shrugged, an expression of ambivalence on his face.
“I have.”
“Oh.”
In a certain sense, it was strange to conceive of Sukuna in a passive sexual role. In a different sense, it was the most natural thing in the world. Yuuji didn’t know if Sukuna chased control or escape; pain or pleasure. Yuuji supposed that Sukuna didn’t know, either. His self-destructive behaviours made him a passive entity to life. Yuuji shouldn’t have been shocked that that sentiment was reflected also in his sex life.
Sukuna jutted his fingers against a soft ridge near the back of where his fingers were pressed, and fire shot up Yuuji’s spine like it was travelling on an overshot nerve.
“Shit!” he gasped, his legs closing, clenching tight. Sukuna forced them back open.
“Just stay still. I’m trying to get you warmed up.”
“Fuck, you’re being a prick about this,” Yuuji moaned his words into the pillow. He was losing his clarity, bit by bit. His eyes fuzzy with tears and his body fuzzy with pleasure. His dick had fallen to half-hard, but it was still twitching against his lower belly. Sukuna’s fingers inside him were starting to feel more welcome and less forceful as his body gradually accepted the strange strain that was being placed on his internal musculature.
“Enough… enough… ” Yuuji whined, pushing Sukuna back by the shoulder until his fingers pulled out of him with a pop.
Yuuji writhed back, lifting his thick, well-defined thighs and holding the undersides of his knees with each hand, spread wide and gaping for his twin. He was sure he looked debauched; his slicked up hole clenching and unclenching around nothing; swollen and tender from Sukuna’s thorough warming.
Sukuna chuckled at the sight, pulling his own cock free from his boxers, using his messy hand to glide back his foreskin, revealing the taut red tip. Yuuji licked his lips instinctually.
“Fuck me,” Yuuji whispered.
“Say less,” Sukuna purred, moving on top of him and slowly positioning his cock against Yuuji’s entrance. Yuuji whined as Sukuna slowly pushed in, every centimetre of depth as painful as a sword slotting into Yuuji’s gut.
“Ah…” Yuuji breathed out, his eyes wide and focused on Sukuna’s concentrated face. The knitting of his brows, the way his lips were parted and glistening. The thrum of his heartbeat was so close and heavy that Yuuji could not only hear it but feel it.
Sukuna let out a loud groan as he began to rock fully into Yuuji’s body, the fronts of his thighs slapping against Yuuji’s ass. The sound was wet and sharp; tinged with lube and precum and sweat. It was a mess. It was all a mess.
Yuuji’s hands fisted into Sukuna’s hair as his moans climbed louder and louder. Sukuna sucked a necklace of hickeys around his lower neck. He drew blood with his bites and forced it back into Yuuji’s mouth.
Yuuji felt tears running down his face, though he couldn’t explain why. It felt right. Them like this. Two souls, one merged, combined physical presence. Yuuji didn’t want to be torn from it. Sukuna could tear and tear out of him, but fuck, as long as he pushed back deep, deep inside, there was no harm, no foul.
Stay, stay, stay, Yuuji replayed in his head like a mantra.
“Yes, Sukuna, Sukuna–” Yuuji whimpered, his legs locking around Sukuna’s hips as he thrusted in and out of him like an animal. “Ngh! I’m close- I’m gonna cum, oh, god, Sukuna, I’m gonna cum!”
He sounded pathetic, even to his own ears. But Sukuna did not treat him like he was pathetic. He wrapped his hands around Yuuji’s neck and restricted his airflow. Kept him still as if Yuuji was the flight risk between them; kept him still like he couldn’t bear to see Yuuji move.
“Cum for me, Yuuji,” Sukuna’s voice was deep and hoarse and some part of it travelled all the way to Yuuji’s heart. Yuuji clawed down Sukuna’s back. “I love you.”
Yuuji never said those words in return.
From a young age, they were awkward to say when he meant them. Most times, a ‘hm’ or a nod sufficed. Yuuji’s body responded this time by drawing back and releasing, his cum splattering onto his chest with a deep and guttural cry.
Yuuji’s tears had transformed to full on sobs, and without thought, he buried his face into Sukuna’s shoulder as his twin chased his own pleasure.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Yuuji mouthed the words against the crook of Sukuna’s shoulder.
No amount of intellectualising why Yuuji had done that. Sukuna died not knowing that moment had ever happened. Yuuji preferred to forget it entirely. It was not a moment worth remembering. No material consequence of it existed; it did not exist.
Sukuna threw a towel over at Yuuji, and he caught it in his fist, an irritated, hot burst of air leaving his lips.
“Ugh,” he grumbled, wiping down the sticky, putrid residue from his ass and thighs.
Sukuna watched him with his arms folded. He had stood up, leant against the open window frame. The wind rustled through his hair. The sky was grey, almost backlit. Like there was a light pressing against a wall that longed to shine through. Clouds drew themselves in swirls around that moonish scape. From where Yuuji was lying, propped up on one elbow, they seemed to form a halo around Sukuna’s head.
“You wanted it,” Sukuna said. He had an unlit cigarette in his hands and was fiddling with it. Yuuji took the hint and threw him his lighter. Sukuna caught it in his hand.
“You asked,” Yuuji mumbled in return.
“And you said yes.”
“I always say yes.”
“I know,” Sukuna paused after that common exchange of theirs. Even on that day, when Yuuji was still solidly in the ‘ before’ stage of his life, he’d noticed something different about Sukuna’s demeanour. He was not as frantic and expeditious as he’d been in past years. There was a solemnity to his movements that mirrored the gray sludge that made up the light that trickled into the bedroom.
Every single one of his words was slow in a way that Sukuna never was. Like his tongue was wrapping around the sounds differently. Yuuji should’ve known. Yuuji did know. He pretended he didn’t. Yuuji was a helpless agent in a predestined life that he was tragically privy to script details of. Life happened to him. Sukuna’s death happened to him. There was nothing Yuuji could’ve done to prevent it, even if he’d spoken, even if he’d arranged himself in a slightly different way.
What good was fighting that which could not be fought?
The tide would always draw back to the sea. Water would slip through one’s fingers if they attempted to claw at it.
Sukuna took a long drag of his cigarette. The tufts of smoke left his mouth and dwindled up to the sky; matching the clouds.
“You think you’re better than me for it,” He muttered.
Yuuji had to swallow before he responded to that.
“I don’t think I’m better than you," he said. Sukuna, of course, was right. It was logically impossible for Yuuji to not think he was better. But he was smart enough to know that if he said that to his brother’s face, he’d face a consequence he had no energy to deal with. Sukuna was too unstable to speak truth to, so Yuuji had learned well how to wade the waters.
How to keep him placated. How to dress a participation trophy in gold plating. How to make the screamer heard; even if listening still bled the listener’s ears.
“You have to,” Sukuna said, “otherwise your world would implode.”
Yuuji was taken aback by the statement. What did Sukuna mean by that? Yuuji responded quickly, trying to bury his confusion in snark,
“That’s dramatic. Aren’t you usually the one calling me dramatic?” Yuuji crossed his arms over his chest, shuffling up against the headboard.
They found that headboard stained with blood. They found the sheets stained with leaking fat and piss and shit. He was melting into the bed. He was melting for so long and no one came to look for him. You didn’t look for him. You didn’t call.
But in the memory, Sukuna looked over at him and broke the tension with a laugh.
“I’m being honest,” Sukuna drawled, his eyes lowering to that teasing, smug, half-lidded expression that he always had when he was needling Yuuji. “And besides, Yuuji, you’re the one who considers brooding and a walk to the beach the deepest depths of experienced emotional turmoil.”
“I do not,” Yuuji shot back.
Sukuna paused for a second.
“You don’t really do anything, Yuuji,” he said.
Yuuji frowned. More things he didn’t understand. Yuuji did plenty. His life was solid. His mind was solid. His existence was rock solid. Sukuna was the moocher. The junkie. The adrenaline addict. The risky one. Yuuji did so much more to build something worthwhile than Sukuna did.
“Oh, and you do?” Yuuji sneered. He couldn’t hide the distaste and resentment in his words when he said that.
Sukuna’s eyes flared. He finished his cigarette, throwing the butt out the window and stalking back over to the bed.
“Yes, I do,” he sat down with a grunt. “I put my fuckin’ money where my fuckin’ mouth is!” “I’m just saying you don’t do anything that makes you feel fucking anything! Aside from what I put you up to, maybe. It’s like you don’t want to do a thing at all. You aren’t living, mate.”
Yuuji didn’t respond to that. The words came out too fast and too rehearsed, like a newsreel. When his mind finally caught up again, and he opened his mouth to talk, Sukuna got the better of him.
“I’ve got plans to commit suicide,” Sukuna said sternly.
“Don’t be stupid,” Yuuji’s words spilled out before he could school them. Just according to script. Yuuji wasn’t overlooking. He was just acting like he’d been programmed to. “You always— you always say stupid shit to get under my skin. Give up. It hasn’t worked since we were thirteen.”
“I’m not being stupid, I’m telling you ahead of time so you’re not surprised,” Sukuna added casually. “I’m killing myself. I don’t belong here.”
Yuuji shook his head.
Again, Yuuji didn’t really understand the concept of suicide. It was beyond his comprehension beyond being the subject of droll doomerism he occasionally indulged for the sake of the deeper parts of his soul. What possibility was there in death? To Yuuji, it seemed pathetic. A grab at a chance to control fate. What did one earn? There was nothing waiting. And fate won anyway. Deeper in Yuuji’s mind, however, there was a screaming bell that told him what he was really scared of. What he really spent his life avoiding.
Pain. Humiliation.
The humiliation of everyone knowing how terribly ruinous he was. Yuuji would not be able to stomach that on his name. It would drag around his ghost like a skeleton in a carriage, clunking side by side. Shame was the one thing Yuuji was sure could transcend life.
“You don’t belong anywhere that I’m not,” Yuuji scoffed, leaning his chin on Sukuna’s shoulder. He kissed his neck, tasting the salt off his skin. “No one can put up with you but me.”
Sukuna looked over to him, breathing out through his nose.
“…You can‘t put up with me neither,” he whispered.
Yuuji licked up the side of his jaw.
“Yes, I can. Who am I, if I’m not putting up with you?” Yuuji meant that.
And he supposed he was right. At that moment, at least. But Yuuji was an innovative reinventor. He wasted as much time mourning who he was with Sukuna as he did Sukuna himself. Which was to say, no time at all.
“Yourself. Because you can’t.”
Yuuji scoffed.
“Hell won’t be able to stand you. You won’t belong there just as much as you don’t belong here,” Yuuji wrapped his arms around Sukuna’s back, clinging to him, feeling the heat of his skin and the weight of his body.
“…Hell, huh?” Sukuna mumbled. His eyes grew far off and distant. “Religion, really?”
“Oh, shut up. I’m just saying. You’re just poison, so you may as well keep poisoning here,” Yuuji said, poking his hip.
“I’m just shocked you believe in any biblical sort of genesis, or any biblical idea at all. It’s kind of optimistic, all that faith/belief bullshit. You should’ve outgrown it when it came to me a long time ago.”
Yuuji shrugged.
“What can I say? I’m stuck in my ways.”
“No, you change a lot. Frequently. It’s hard to keep up,” Sukuna said with a slow shake of his head.
Was Yuuji really multiple versions, compounded and erased over and over again? Or was he always the misanthropic, careless image that was at the heart of his ever-changing being? Was Sukuna’s assessment right? Or was Yuuji more boring than that? Yuuji wasn’t sure which was better. Wasn’t sure which framework of viewing himself was more or less depressive. Was he nothing? Or was he concretely doomed to lose everything a million times?
“I change?” Yuuji had shot back sarcastically. “I’m the one that changes?”
Sukuna shrugged him off, rubbing Yuuji’s knee like a father might console his son. Yuuji didn’t like the air of superiority that was carried in the action.
“We’re not gonna agree on this. Let’s drop it,” Sukuna muttered.
Yuuji was unable to ever shoot down anything Sukuna said, really.
“…Okay,” he agreed swiftly.
Sukuna looked disgusted by it.
“There he goes again. Complacent.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing,” Sukuna whispered.
The memory dwindled after that. A few more jabs and jibes and kisses, and Yuuji had left. He’d thought Sukuna would call him the next day, but he didn’t. He didn’t call for nearly two weeks, but that wasn’t out of character. Sukuna often went off on benders.
But then, Yuuji had gotten the call.
Present
Yuuji didn’t end up attending the funeral that he planned and paid for.
He didn’t see the point to it. The pomp felt tired. He didn’t want to read out a dozen words to an empty audience about how good his brother had been and how dearly he’d be missed. It wasn’t true. That was reflected in the people that attended. Staff. Yuuji was pretty sure that was it.
His parents didn’t go. Yuuji had invited his own friends, not knowing how to contact Sukuna’s, but since he didn’t go he was pretty sure they didn’t make the effort either.
It was early morning, two days after he’d so unceremoniously skipped the funeral. Yuuji was staggering sleepless through the streets with a tight grip around three or four red roses he’d torn from a wild bush by the edge of the park that he and Sukuna used to go to when they were children. Like he was being dragged by the pied piper of Hamlin, Yuuji couldn’t feel his legs as they carried him.
The light burned his eyes and the beauty of the morning was lost on him. The shine on the roads just seemed mocking. The morning mist was terrible company. The cemetery wasn’t even open; Yuuji had to jump the fence. He’d never been good at climbing things, and as he staggered over the wall, his hoodie caught on the jagged old stone and he was sent for a metre and a half tumble, scraping his palms against the rough bristle of the ground under him.
Yuuji stood up.
He marched through the rows, his neck snapping frantically this way and that for the newest tombstone. The shiniest one.
And there it was, glimmering like a star.
It was probably the lack of sleep, Yuuji rationalised as he felt his body violently lurch toward it. It was probably the lack of sleep, Yuuji repeated as he felt the tears building in his eyes as he traced the carved edges of Sukuna’s name with his trembling thumb. It was probably the lack of sleep, he thought one more time as his forehead hit the stone and he collapsed onto his knees in a position of prayer.
His skinned palms shoved the roses to the foot of the tombstone, and for that singular minute of his time, Yuuji couldn’t pretend it was the lack of sleep anymore.
He couldn’t pretend it was the weather.
He couldn’t pretend he didn’t care, or that he’d reinvent himself again, or that he was only doing this because he wanted to forget and move on.
Yuuji couldn’t pretend it was anything but exactly what it was. And he missed his twin. And he was lonely.
And Yuuji couldn’t believe this was happening to him. And he meant none of his words and none of his thoughts and he meant all of them.
And he was still so, so helpless. Yuuji knew in his heart he’d been right about one thing. He’d never have been able to change Sukuna. Sukuna didn’t belong with the world, just Yuuji. And Yuuji was not enough to outweigh the world; nor shield Sukuna from it.
They were never meant to be split. Their fate had been written the moment they’d come apart inside the womb.
Sukuna’s fate to not exist. Yuuji’s fate to exist at every other cost. Opposites standing on the banks of the river Styx.
It was just a minute of Yuuji’s life, but he let his tears water the flowers, and he let his bleeding throat cry for his brother.
What was trapped in the past suddenly felt more real than everything else in Yuuji’s world.
He’d never be who he had been with Sukuna again.
Maybe that was the real hole of grief. A marble cataclysm.
That which comes in waves can never stay.
Yuuji stood up, and his tears felt ridiculous. Frankly, most of what he’d just done felt ridiculous.
It really was the lack of sleep getting to him. He should’ve just attended the funeral.
Yuuji arranged the flowers on Sukuna’s headstone with the practicality and rigidity of a craftsman laying a brick, and he sat back, crossing his knees under him like a primary school boy, and just stared ahead.
The morning light really did make everything look a little better. The cemetery was endless; rows of graves like the neat scars on Yuuji’s left arm. Sukuna’s was just one more dot. Yuuji wondered if his parents had been to visit. He doubted it. Sukuna had caused them so much trouble in life that he acutely understood their decision to not let his death cause him any more problems, either. Yuuji, though, had a duty.
Yuuji stood, brushing his hands off on his hoodie, and wiping the mud from his pants as best he could. He had work, and he had things to do. He’d sent the last of Sukuna’s things, whatever was in good enough condition, off to charity. Sukuna’s landlord had been kind and accommodating, which was all Yuuji could’ve really asked for. Sukuna was now dead and buried.
And maybe Yuuji’s confusion and helplessness did, for the first time in a long time, still choke him like a leash; like a dog trying to understand why it was being restrained. Yet it was all in waves. In the slow motion that matched the tide.
Yuuji knew that time was the only thing that could loosen that leash. And it was early days. It was a lot, to be sure. The erasure of a personhood. But there was nothing inerasable. There was no bloodstain so thick that it could not be washed out, and no memory so painful that it could not be forgotten.
Sukuna had been his best friend. Sukuna had been his twin. Sukuna had been, for all of Yuuji’s twenty years, his reason.
And that was a genuine, honest truth. At the time.
But it was nothing a shovel and a few dozen re-inventions couldn’t bury.