I DON'T CARE IF IT HURTS

I WANT TO HAVE CONTROL

creep,

You have this very specific image of your mother in your head.

Warm eyes that teeter with this placid hue, the colour of a sultry sky when daylight peeks out. This quiet, rare smile, reserved for few and the edges of her lips feel gently bent when that sheen of laughter glistens. The hugs, the bedtime stories, the singing in the kitchen.

And then her convulsing body, skeleton jumping in and out, limbs twitching and eyes gaunt. The death rattle swallows up her voice, removing the last words. And then, she is gone. Out like a flame before it had even been lit. She'd be slumbering if the warm blood coated her like a blanket.

It wasn't always like that. Smiles, forehead kisses, chin-on-shoulder hugs.

Sukuna had shown you that there was someone else. Clear tears glistening with the disdain of the person you were becoming, removing all the memories of your old self.

You're standing outside of her room - Mother's room - and you feel like you're crumbling. A cold hand on an equally cold door and the carpet feels like it's peeling back layers of your psyche with brittle bones. Skin hanging on by that one never-ending thought, that scream that doesn't stop.

One memory and you're falling, falling into a pit of words you can't say, words that remain trapped behind clenched teeth and bitten lips - the truth... it's the truth, right? You know she was misunderstood, that she saw those things, those curses, too .

It feels like your mother was a flower of death, a red spider lily webbing you into it's petals, and when you clamber to escape, you fall down the curve back into the pit of the bud. A laugh from her is the most alive you've ever felt.

The weight of love is heavy; it is the most exquisite form of self destruction. You know in order to face the next day that you have to destroy what you already have.

So you open the door. You open it.

The past screams inside your head the moment your foot touches the creaking wood and you feel like you've been torn apart before you even knew how to sew. And the dust that gathers like faint, fake little snowflakes is just a reminder your seams are all jagged and you're stuck with crooked edges.

Everything's still, blank and unseeing, wading through this candid portrait of a perfect stare and nothing moves except you, slow shuffles moving dust. It's unbearable how the world moves on after death. You can weep your ichor, love one like a death wish, but love and death only rot on earth - the pretence of an eternal emotion gives us false hope.

You don't like how it feels like six years never happened. Twist that time around your wrist like metal chains on a braclet, listening to clinks and cries and watch souls wade and burn. Six years and this room is strange. It was your parents' room but you know that after Mother died your Father moved to the guest room, not literally, and not physically. He'd moved in a state of mind, sunken to the seabed of the ocean that was grief. He'd let terrible things pierce his breath and choke him until he pretended that room didn't exist anymore.

Maybe it was the liquor that did him in, hug a bottle of gin and grin when it clinks because he can pretend it's two and not one and not him and not her.

You suppose a similar case ensued with you; you mirrored that glazed look in his eyes, blotted out that door as if it was a painting, smeared it over and waited until it dried. Then it was non-existent. Gone. Just like her.

Until now.

Mother smiles, until now.

You know what you're looking for - not redemption, vengance or justification. Could you justify it? The thoughts and theories bleeding into crevices, the poppies to the dreaming brain. Sukuna's voice bites and snarls and he hisses over and over again; I used to let your family carry my blood.

No, no, no, no. A knife down the middle and the blood washes over. No, no more.

His lips curl like he's unsatiated, I can interact with you because at some point in your pitiful and weak life, you drank my blood.

Is that what you're looking for here? Inside wooden drawers and in the shadows under the bed. Blood? Sukuna's blood. Evidence that he wasn't telling a lie that you ate up so quickly?

Such a shame though, because you find it. You find everything that you needed and nothing you wanted.

The diary was hard to get. Up on the top of the wardrobe, in a special little wooden box, symbols engraved on the sides with this potent elegance. Old and frail, it trembled gently in your hands. Remnants of bloody handprints hug the rough cover, blotches of red that have dried across the century.

Inside, you recognise your Mother's handwriting instantly. The way she dotted her i's and crossed her t's were always so precise, so delicate as if she was worried about snapping the pen in half with her soft hands. Her words are sprawled across dozens of pages, mix and matches, blurs and clears - essentially half-truths and half-lies.

You're reading and reading and reading and you can feel your legs aching so you collapse to the floor, bare knees rubbing against wooden boards. Maybe you would have been reading forever were it not for the fact that you heard your phone's ringtone kill the dead air in the room.

Fushiguro's name blinks back in the darkness that suddenly swallowed up everything and you accept his call, wondering when you had seen him last. Part of you was shrouded in this guilty feeling about neglecting your friends, being a bad friend yourself, making them mad at you. You wonder if everything you do makes them not want to be your friend. A ripple caused from one thing. You chase it and chase it and try to stop it before it reaches them but it always reaches them - always.

"Megum- oh, I mean... Fushiguro-kun!" Something stirs within you, a wave crashing upon your face, like salty water fills your lungs so you can never say the words you want to say.

"You can call me Megumi," You can tell by his tone that he's nervous - he never struck you as one to call. Text maybe, but calling seems too extroverted for either of you. "How are you... [F/n]?"

You look around, inhaling sharply, suddenly reeling from the coldness of the room, as if all the warmth was leached out at the penchant of your misery. Your thoughts leave all at once, throwing and crushing your mind to the ground, used and suffocating - yet no one's hands are wrapped around your throat. The anxiety tugs at sultry lips, threatening a white lie.

Oh, I'm doing just fine, Megumi! Absolutely fine. Hey, do you wanna hear about how self-destructive my mother was? No? Aww, maybe next time.

You feel like you're going to throw up; the book flies out of your hand, a thud on a ground when it stirs dust and lands out of shaking hands.

"I... I'm getting by, I guess," You shrug, leaving the book on the ground, watching your hands start to shake. "It's kind of weird being home after a while," You chuckle a little - light, temporary laughter to choke the life out of you.

You hear silence on his end, and then, "Take your time... by the way. The break is for your own good, right? The Kyoto Exchange is in two days."

"Oh yeah, the Exchange Event..." Your lips purse, "I think I'm still taking part in it. Well, I'd still like to take part in it. I really want to try testing out my fighting skills. I never really get a chance to show off like you."

"Show off?" He seems baffled which elicits a laugh from you, "I've barely done anything."

Even if he can't see you, you still smile, smile in that dead, empty room where your legs might come crashing down again, "Nobara and I have seen you in training, Megumi."

It feels like he rolls his eyes, and you take the short silence and leap to open your mouth and say the words, ask him something you had been dying to ask. Do you miss him? Do you miss Itadori?

Because here it is, here is you, a girl with a heart that has been glued and stitched until there is no pulse, only the adrenaline of this giving you a pulse, cowering away from the light when a ghost whispers across your lips.

The question never gets asked, Itadori falls behind like burnt paper and even though you have his number in your phone and you text him every day, you wonder about him still.

You hear a jolted shout downstairs, eyebrows quirking in confusion and all Megumi gets is a half-hearted goodbye as you hurry down the stairs, scared that a curse had made it's way into the house.

A frenzy engulfs you, dragging you like a massive tide back into the tightened swirl of your anxiety - it's the first time you've had genuine concern for your dad in years. All sorts of images creep into your head. A monster with phoenix eyes lit up from the ashes, viridian tongue biting down on the sizzle of flesh. Junpei. His mother and her severed corpse, the ice cubes pooled at her jagged torso, water and blood scrambling against each other. Like you'd have to swim through blood and gory organs just to see the dead - will you do what Junpei did? Clump the ice cubes to bring him back to life.

When you reach the kitchen, you find your father standing over a small dot on the ground, a tiny sanguine blotch marred onto grey marble. He's cut his finger while chopping vegetables. Nothing can describe the relief that drowns out the frenzy in your head - it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. It's just a cut.

"Oh my god, with the shout you let out, I thought you were being murdered or something," You exhale, already moving to help him.

His eyes are dry and alert, hand slightly twitching from withdrawal. He looks at you with a shaking head, quickly backing away, "Oh no, no, [F/n]. I can handle it, I don't want you to worry."

Your head tilts in this doleful manner, wondering what was up with him, "Dad, let me get you a plaster, at least. I'm pretty sure you don't even know where they are."

"I'm serious, [F/n], please don't look at the blood, I know it's going to hurt you. I really don't want you to be in pain, so please don't look at the blood."

You don't have a clue what he's babbling about you half-wonder if it's a side-effect from those nicotine patches he's wearing to ween off his addictions. Still, it's one of those things where you do it anyway. Please don't look at the blood. So what do you do? You look at it.

It isn't even one of those conscious actions, words aren't spoken, silence is deafening, blood drips. And you see how it's not a small little cut, not a tiny little thing that you can smudge with your thumb and feel it tingle when you wash it away under the tap. It's deep and it's dark and cardinal red shines like a metal blade.

The blood unearths something inside you, something screaming to get out, breaking and cracking your ribs to burst open and steal your mind. It stirs solid thought, makes your courage collapse and unravels the repressed memories. Blood, running like a waterfall in order to fill up your lungs, slipping through your fingers like sand. Blood that gurgles and froths and darkens in the pit of midnight under the celestial sky.

Blood in a bowl that looks exactly like what it is and so much more. And then the taste of it, tangy and metal on your tongue, spinning a mirage of flavour you swallow.

It's a choking feeling - the feeling that claws at your skin, ready to unstitch scars. Blood and blood and blood. You're shaking violently, like a ghost is prattling away in your ears, pulling at your roots and ready to open you up and spill. That subconscious brainwashing, Mother's words a whisper into the depth of your heart, the desire to give everything and devote anything. A frightened smile dried out on your trembling lips, wondering if your head was going to explode. You have this itching, awful voice, where you have to do it. You have to give everything to the God because that's what Mother said.

Bones, organs, you'll tear out all your teeth, spread your palms wide with red-soaked ivory bones. If you look in a mirror then you know that your mind will want a gory corpse in it's place.

The blood evokes a sickening sensation across your body as once; it feels like your inwards are being replaced by some sort of black hole. You stagger back, mind swirling when you feel the stretch of darkness, breaths shallow and you collapse, still as a corpse, feeling Sukuna's hand drag you back. Back to the hell that was his Innate Domain.

"Get up, brat," He scowls, voice laced with irrefutable malice, "I've been wanting to have a word with you."

The ground is hard and bruises your skin. Slowly, you get to your feet, still nauseous. Your hands cling to the wrinkles of your jumper, but there is no warmth, not in this place.

Sukuna has his chin in his palms, eyeing you from atop of his throne, the rotting skulls that are piled together and drilled to spite the gods. Bones of old demons, of victims, of conquerors and conquered. "So now you know, hm? You read her diary."

"No, I didn't," The lie comes out faster than you initially thought. You don't even know why you lied - you're not scared, just furious.

(He can't kill you here. He can't kill you here. He can't end your life permanently. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay.)

(Nothing is okay.)

He throws a small rock at your head but you narrowly avoid it, "I almost laughed at that. What is it that you have - loyalty or stubbornness? Because, I know that with the way you act, it's going to get you killed."

"Why don't you get down off your high horse and actually talk to me? Why did you bring me here! And you don't care about my death unless you're the one who gets to kill me."

You don't even address what he said earlier - you read her diary. (Push it away. Please. PLEASE.)

Sukuna's eyes narrow, a shallow darkness emerges within them, deceptive ebony that almost elicits fear in you, were it not for the fact you were slowly growing accustomed to his grandeur. "I didn't bring you here. You brought that upon yourself when you triggered one of your old memories. And I ain't one to brag but, I will kill you, I just have to play the long con."

The long con, you purse your lips. He has a plan, a goal, an endgame. Do you want to put a stop to it?

"I've been flitting between you and that other one - the pink-haired brat - for a bit and I am annoyed," He continues, drumming his fingers with a bitter expression, "You're unbelievably naive. Or maybe ignorant. The truth is staring you in the face all you care about are these mundane things, things I don't understand."

"That's probably because my mother's special scrambled eggs weren't invented in your time," You sulkily roll your eyes - is he throwing a temper tantrum? His boredom is evident. Maybe it's because he's locked up. He's shackled to me.

You swallow back momentary fear, urging yourself to press him for answers... for answers about the million things that bubble in your head from Mother's room. "Now tell me, what am I to you? What... what did you do to my mother?"

A cheek-splitting grin appears on the Demon King's face, an expression of utter maniacal laughter, "How about you give me control of your body? I think two vessels will more than suffice for possessing this world."

Then, a strike of courage, and an unnerved singular response comes definitively from your lips, "No."

He flashes before your eyes, a blinding light that's bright even to pull out your eyes but dark enough to sink into your flesh. You feel a sharp attack and then - death.

He'd taken off your head. When you return, summoned again at his powerful will, you collapse beneath him. Sukuna's webspace chokes your throat, clamping up your mouth as he lifts you from the ground. "You dare say that? Do I need to kill you a million times to get this into your dense head?"

You're fuming that in the one moment you need your jujutsu the most, it has retreated into the skin of your body like a snake curling up for hibernation, making itself so small it could be killed entirely. The pain is excruciating, like he's tearing out your veins in order to prove how much of a god he is.

"You're not meant to be a copy of that other brat - he was a lucky mistake," Sukuna looks to be more than furious, like he's exhausted from your attitude, "I perfected you after generations, [L/n]. So, you're going to prove to me what my disciples can do, or I'll throw you aside when I'm done."

You know now that Sukuna is more than words in a history textbook, more than hushed whispers in corridors and a string of letters to make a demon name. He's nothing like a human - you thought he threw away his humanity but still had some of it left in his hands.

But he proves you wrong, proves to the world that he's ready to be king again. How? By unhinging your jaw, reaching in, and pulling out your heart.