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It starts on a dark night, the longing. The night is darker than the ones that came before because the city has fallen asleep long ago. No porches left to illuminate nor the method in madness left by the sullen roads. Nobody left to wander them at all so no use in the light anyhow.
Yuuji is probably an exception. A boy left in an old man’s skin with the wrinkles up there. He hoists his flag and prays for one last time and then he starts digging. Nails in the dirt but the grit is a reminder. He isn’t perfect. He isn’t spotless. He’s done with this cycle, this undying ouroboros. He’s finished eating himself and his own mouth is all that’s left. Nothing worth saving. So he keeps digging.
He digs himself a grave, a deep trench to lie down in. Cleaves into the earth with the cursed energy that haunts him and a yawning echo of his relentless inadequacy. Never quite enough to matter. Never quite too little to care.
The hole isn’t something he can live with, but it’ll make a nice grave.
He’s all alone in the darkness, and the silence beats like a drum on his chest. Maybe that’s his heart, regrown twenty times over. Or maybe it’s the fingers in his throat and the way they scratch up at the base of his tongue in want. In hunger. The fingers are always hungry. Even when he isn’t, they are.
When the ditch is as wide as he is tall, he goes down. Down, down, down all the way to the rocks and the mud, way past the grass and the dew and the loose dirt that falls in the dips his bleeding fingertips leave behind there.
This resting place isn’t a happy one. All he’s got here is himself and his grief and it eats him until his skin is all that’s left. No one is around to mourn his death. No one is around to help him dig.
It’d be nicer if he had a circle, a few friendly faces to catch him up on the life he’ll miss out on. If they’re generous, they might even bring a spade, maybe a hoe or a torch or anything to help him out in this miserable darkness. He gets the dirt all down on his own, fingertips bleeding, but it isn’t ‘cause of a mistake he must relive, a city torn to shreds by his own two hands, so he lets them bleed. All down to the hypodermis, but that’s alright. He’ll have time to heal in his pit.
Yuuji lies down in the dirt and crosses his arms on his chest, all neat and simple like pretty paper on the day of his Savior’s birth. It might feel better in a coffin, but he doesn’t have one of those.
It might feel better with an eulogy. No one is around to write him one or speak it out. He closes his eyes and thinks up one all on his own.
It’d be something like wild flowers and rocky mountains and life and death and all those pretty things. All the daisies he’d be pushing up when the sun sets or when the dirt’s pushed over. Laid to rest in a soft and solid thing, silk on pine like a throne deserved by no one. All alone in that dark and empty space. Lonely in there. Far too quiet to regard good any. All locked up with nowhere to go. All wrapped up in earth. Red and green and just as the Good Lord intended. All evil things go back to the earth. And then they move on.
He wasn’t evil in the beginning. He wouldn’t even call himself evil now, but Sukuna is a parasite to every side of him, matching him pace for pace. It’s hard to feel innocent when there’s murder in your head and a finger on your plate. All funeral wax and that soap grandpa used, the musky one with the mountains on top, the mountains that rubbed off with some use.
It isn’t as if Yuuji hates himself during every hour of the day; just most of them. Just enough to make his misery worth something, a tablet to scratch over, a checklist fulfilled.
Hate yourself. Check.
He takes a breath and sighs it out. He’ll have to pull the rug, soon; drag all the dirt over the rims and press himself into the ground if he can help it. Maybe someone will come along to finish the job in due time. Or maybe he’ll rest uneasily in an unfinished grave for the rest of his life.
He’d like to think he’d grow a meadow, somewhere green. Maybe some flowers would sprout up there, and they’d be something beautiful; much more beautiful a thing than he could ever create on his own.
It isn’t as if Yuuji hates himself during every hour of the day. He only wants to die.