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It’s been 317 years and 192 days since I bound myself to the king of curses.
317 years and 192 days since Satoru died.
It’s been 4 hours since I had last remembered him.
4 hours since I had last remembered Megumi Fushiguro.
Megumi.
Megumi.
I tried to push the thought of him away. Tried to shove it deep inside a corner of my heart, if theres even anything of a heart left inside of me.
But I failed again. Like I always do. And like always, the tears followed the thought of him.
I’m always surprised that I’ve even got the energy to cry, the tears to fall.
Probably the last shreds of anything that could resemble an emotion:
Sadness,
Anger,
Hate.
He should be dead by now.
Did he die of old age?
Has his last thought been me?
Was my name the last word that left his lips?
Those soft lips I’ve missed every day for the last centuries.
Or did he manage to forget me so he could live the happy life I’ve always wished him to live?
Probably not.
I know he did not.
And so have I not. Not for one single moment have I been happy. Not since I’ve sold my soul to Sukuna to be cursed for eternity.
If only I had damned just myself.
If only it was just me who has to feel utterly pain through every second of their existence. Who never gets to live.
Live and not just survive.
All I had wanted was to save everybody.
I had just tried to save them. The only people who have ever loved me. The people who have showed me what it is to be loved.
I was the reincarnation of Sukunas past soulmate, or so he had claimed.
But there was nothing like love I felt towards my alleged “soulmate”. No, there was thoroughly nothing I felt towards that curse other than hate. I hated him. I hated him with every fiber of my own being. God, I was not even my own being anymore.
Not since I had offered myself like a whore to him in exchange for my friends lives.
I thought I would save them by doing that, but I had only just damned them.
I had not only sold my own soul to the devil himself but also my friends‘.
I hadn’t thought about it when I had begged him to stop. When I couldn’t take watching him kill them anymore. So I had begged him to take me instead of them.
And he had done just that, but before, he had still taken the only one I would have ever wanted to call my dad. The only one I had ever loved like a dad.
Maybe Satoru would have won if I hadn’t distracted him by selling his daughters soul to the accommodation of all evil. Maybe he then wouldn’t have looked at me with so much pain in his eyes, realizing what I had just done.
And if he still had died, then maybe he would have died with a smile.
But he did not.
And I don’t think he will ever smile again. Or any of my friends.
Because eternity includes the after life meaning not even after death will we be united again.
Not even after death will I be able to hug them, to kiss and love them. To tell them how much I loved them
I can never ask them for forgiveness.
I can only ask myself:
How long will it take for me to never be able to feel absolutely anything again?
To feel utterly empty.
Until there is nothing left of that girl that had once loved to brighten the day of her friends, her father, the love of her life.
I’m sorry…
“What are you sorry for?”
I flinched at his smooth voice while realizing I had said it out loud. Loud enough for him to hear. The one holding me tight against his chest, his arms wrapped around my body like he owned me. Which he basically did.
I felt sick against his touch even though I should be used to it by now. He had after all not let one single chance pass to wrap his arms around me, pull me against him like it was a crucial part for his survival.
He did, thought, never touch me sexually. At first I had thought that he was just not into rape or simply not interested, but I learned better than that. I had felt him, many times, getting hard behind me and yet he had never made any attempts of trying to touch me in response to his body. That, of course, never stopped him from bringing in whores to fuck. I had heard them. Many times. According to what I’d heard, I was surprised at how many girls actually survived the procedure. And those who did, he killed. Butchered them like animals after fucking them like one.
I did not care about the screams of those women, their pleads and cries. Not anymore. All of it had never bothered me. Never. I was glad he was getting his pleasure through them instead of me.
But then it had started to bother me.
Frightfully. Once he had started to moan my name like a prayer trough the night. I had went rigid the first time that I heard it. But not only to the fact that he was moaning my name while taking other women, but more to the feeling that had gone trough my body.
I had felt such sensations for a long while now. Sometimes, when he was with me I felt them shooting trough me like a foreign body. That’s what they were. Foreign. Like they didn’t belong to me. Not anymore.
Like a Déjà-vu.
The first time I had felt it was when I had first met Yuji. The moment I had met his eyes, it had not been the sweet little boy I had been looking at.
It was the monster inside.
At that moment I might as well have been dead, for all I saw was its maliciousness deep inside those brown puppy eyes, for all I tasted was its cruel cursed energy on my tongue. For all I had sensed was its atrocious presence consuming every last inch of my body.
Then I had felt it, something else dancing in tandem to his existence, like a melody spinning alongside its beat. It had pulled on my soul, dragging it to somewhere it had once belonged to.
And I had never in my life felt so incredibly scared like at that moment. Because I knew that if I’d give in, into that beautiful scented breeze, if I let myself drift with it to a place of warmth and sweetness, I would never find such a place.
Never inside those tattooed arms that made me feel sick.
Disgusting.
Loathsome.
I wanted to burn and cut off every single part of this body his hands were currently touching. I wanted to wipe out every trace of his touch until there was not a single drop of his sickening presence left on my soul. I wanted to-
“I asked you what you are sorry for, woman.”
I flinched again. His voice dropped to its usual deep tone but that was never the voice he used for me. He always spoke carefully and you could almost call it softly to me - if that was an adjective you could use for anything regarding the king of curses.
But when he did lower his voice, it was the clearest sign of him getting mad. It was something that pulled at my nerves and burned them alive. A fire not even the cold shudder that went down my against his chest pressed back could extinguish.
There were two rules I learned in all those centuries living with the king of curses.
One: Never mention the woman I’m supposed to be reincarnated into,
and second: Never do anything that could potentially make him mad. It just wasn’t worth the risk.
Everything inside me was on high alert ready to jump out of his grasp even thought I knew that was impossible.
He would never let go of me.
Usually I just tell him the truth. Like I said, it just wasn’t worth the risk. Somehow he always knew if I lied or told the truth so I didn’t even dare try to lie and potentially make it even worse.
But this time, the truth would be way more unpleasant than being caught lying.
He hated it when I spoke about my friends or anything regarding my past life at all.
He hated it when I was sad or when I cried over them. He hated it when I cried in general no matter over what.
He hated a lot of things I did actually.
He just never said it out loud. But I knew better. I knew the way he would look at me and make those small “tsk‘s” or the way he would roll those four crimson eyes I sometimes lost myself in.
It had been deep blue eyes before. The ocean in all its fierceness and passion. It would drag me down into its darkest depths veiling me in a coat of warmth and shelter, drowning me slowly in such a beautiful way.
But those crimson red eyes… those hot burning flames… they would devour me like a dying fire trying to grasp anything to burn on in despair of survival. Like a starving man at the end of his strength trying to die as painless as possible. But that was impossible. Those crimson red flames, they hurt. They pained me. They stained my soul in blood.
Crimson red blood.
Looking into those flames hurt in such unimaginable ways on such unimaginable places.
And yet I looked into them.
Again, and again.
Every single day of eternity.
And I wondered: when would I burn to nothing but ashes?
So I said: “I‘m sorry for being so weak.”
It wasn’t completely a lie but also not the whole truth. It was an allusion to what had happened earlier. When he had found me crumpled up in the corner of my room, 4 hours earlier, sobbing like a toddler at the paper cut on my palm.
It hadn’t been the wound I’d been crying about, I did not care about new scars but I did care about the still fresh scars which covered my entire being getting ripped open once again before they could even begin to heal.
The blood.
I couldn’t handle seeing any blood since then. Neither mine nor anyone else’s.
I saw them being killed all over again. Butchered, slaughtered like cattle.
Blood.
It had been everywhere. On my clothes, on my hands, my face, my mouth-
I could still taste it, smell it. The iron stinging my tongue, the metallic odor enveloping my nostrils.
The tiniest drop of blood brought me right back there. To where I had thrown out everything I loved straight into the vicious claws of a monster.
It had found me, the monster. Scooped me up into its broad tattooed arms and carried me to bed.
His hand was wrapped around mine blocking my view from the memories.
The grip around it tightened at my words.
“It is not your fault”
I wasn’t sure I was breathing anymore and I didn’t particularly care.
I knew what he was implying. I knew he wasn’t talking about my outburst.
I knew his view of the world. How the thought, what he thought.
He would never be able to understand me and he wouldn’t even care to do so.
All he cares about is himself. He’s selfish, reckless, obsessed with himself.
He thinks this is fine, I am fine.
He is wrong.
But he just does not seem to understand. He never understands. He did not when I hadn’t been able to eat or sleep for months and neither when I had tried to kill myself and he had found me bleeding on the ground, crying hysterically while screaming at him to let me be finally free. But as selfish as he is, he hadn’t. He had completely ignored my begging and used his reverse cursed technique to stitch up my arteries as if he was just sewing a doll back together.
Pathetic.
No, arguing with him is useless. I’d be better off yelling against a wall.
And yet I said:
“Yes, it is.”
I don’t know why I said that. Normally I just shut my mouth and refuse to acknowledge his horrible existence.
He does not push me when I do that. He never does. And I never give him reason to do different, so why am I now?
Why have I still not given up on life yet? Why am I still alive and breathing? Why do I still have thoughts inside my head even though I’m dead inside?
He shifted behind me and I was pushed on my back when he bent over this body.
Broad shoulders leaned into my view and I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see those four eyes and I did not want him to see the tears that were building up behind my eyelids. His hair tingled my face and a cold shudder went down my back when I felt him breathing against my chin.
I swallowed hard. I could imagine how close he was to me, how close those crimson eyes were staring down on me.
How close those beautiful lips were to mine.
“Look at me.”
His words brushed my lips and I clenched my teeth to keep my jaw from trembling.
I felt him move even closer when I didn’t follow. He breathed against my lips to let me feel just how close he was to touching them with his own.
And I did not trust myself of refusing him.
Everything inside and outside of me yearned for anything that could count as affection. Anything that could make my heart beat in joy again, make my eyes shine with excitement like they once did before. Anything that could make me feel less dead and more alive.
I wonder if one day, when I finally lose my mind, I will give into his manipulation.
His little lies, disguised as soft whispering, tarned as fleeting touches.
Maybe I could believe them.
Maybe I could believe the thought of being loved by the king of curses, Ryomen Su-
I opened my eyes wide.
No. No, I wouldn’t. I- I couldn’t.
I was met with those 4 crimson eyes I could melt into, let its flames devour me whole.
They were staring down at me like a predator about to rip its prey. The tears I’d hidden from him now clearly visible.
Once, even the thought of crying in front of that monster had deeply disturbed me but now it had almost become something I could get used to. I don’t know why I even tried to hide them from him after he had seen them so many times already.
There was no weakness to hide from him anymore, for I was the weakness.
I had become weak.
If there had once been a livid fire inside me there was now nothing left for the flames to burn on so they turned into ice and darkness instead.
I don’t know how long we stood frozen in that position. He was still hovering over me, staring into my eyes as if searching for that fire that had long been wiped out.
My head felt dizzy from the lack of oxygen trough our shared breaths. He always smelt like fire, debris and death. As if he just destroyed a village, which might actually be possible.
But if I inhaled his scent deep enough for it to completely intoxicate every one of my senses, if I paid enough attention trough the fog I could smell out something sweet.
Not the cotton candy or the melted sugar kind of sweet, but the sour kind that stings your tongue and makes you yearn for more. The kind you get to pick up just a few times in your life, that makes you breath in deeper, makes you search for it in hopes of inhaling it just once more, that beautiful sweet breeze.
Without even realizing you look out for that one specific scent but you could never make out it’s source.
Where it comes from, and why.
You will never know, only that you will never get enough of it.
“Let me free…”
It was a whisper. Nothing more than a silent breath grazing my vocal cords.
I wouldn’t even have believed that I’d spoken it out if his eyes hadn’t narrowed slightly as if he was really contemplating the request.
I don’t know why I’d even asked that. It’s stupid. He would and will never do such a thing. Never.
And yet he looked at me as if considering the possibility of doing it.
Letting me free.
Letting me be with the ones I loved.
Letting me be finally happy.
Would I even still know how to do that? How to be happy?
After everything I’ve done would I even deserve it?
His eyes followed the tear that lastly left my eye and I felt his rough finger catching it half way on my cheek. I watched him as he frowned at the contact, as if the tear had burned his flesh like acid.
A shudder went down my back when he traced the tear trail back up my cheek. His finger moved achingly slowly, his coarse skin scratching mine in the act.
“No.” he said simply, his eyes shooting back to mine.
I knew it. I knew it from the start. So why did it still hurt..?
Another tear left my eye but he did not catch that one, instead he lifted me up and scooped me into his arms once again.
I did not resist. I did not move. I don’t think I even breathed. I just felt more and more tears travel down my cheeks as he carried me out of the room.
And I can‘t help but wish that it was not the king of curses, Ryomen Sukuna but the love of my life, the one I ache to be with, the one I miss every second, the one I want to be with for the rest of my life.
Megumi Fushiguro, who is carrying me in his arms into another day of infinitely many to be spent together for every single day of eternity.
I miss you, Megumi.
I miss you so much…