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On the best-worst day of Fushiguro Megumi’s life, Itadori Yuuji reached into his own chest and yanked out his heart.
“For you,” he’d said, a spectacularly large grin on his face, the blood from the still-beating organ dripping through his fingers and forming a cushion on the muddy soil, before he’d toppled over and died.
“This is pathetic,” Sukuna said, sprawled across Yuuji’s couch. The older vampire had a toothpick in his hands and was cleaning out dirt from under his nails, brushing it off onto Yuuji’s floor. While normally he’d yell at his older brother for it, Yuuji was too distracted pacing across his apartment to say anything.
“I just want to show him how much I care!” he repeated, for the sixth time in the past hour. “I feel like he doesn’t think I’m serious about him. He always tells me to go hang out with other people.” The puppy eyes he shot at Sukuna were doing nothing to endear him to his dilemma.
“Who cares?” Sukuna drawled. He grimaced as he stabbed himself too hard underneath a pinky. “I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal to you, anyway.”
“That’s easy for you to say!” Yuuji yelped. “You and Uraume have been serious since like, four centuries ago! I have to beg Fushiguro just to let me throw him a birthday party and you two have followed each other through epochs!”
“Do you even know what an epoch is?” Sukuna asked. He chucked his toothpick at Yuuji, but it bounced off his hair.
“Don’t you dare change the subject. I came to you asking for help, and you can’t even pretend to care!?”
“Well I don’t know why you came to me in the first place,” Sukuna said. “You know I don’t give a fuck about your bullshit romance issues. From what you tell me, you’re basically already there. Why do you need to do some grand gesture, anyway? Seems like a waste of time.”
“You’re the only older vampire I know.” Yuuji had abandoned his pacing and was now shredding one of his couch cushions into little specks of white fluff with his bare hands, his teeth grinding against each other. “Fushiguro’s from a traditional clan, right? I bet he’d love some weird courting ritual like - like, uh, I don’t know, me bringing him a live animal to suck the blood out of? This is why I need your help!”
“You know he’s not a -” Sukuna cut himself off. His previously scowling face had transformed into something much more sinister, the type of smile that had led humans to tell folktale warnings about him centuries ago. “Nevermind. I’m interested now. Tell me more.”
“Thank you!” Yuuji ran over to the couch and threw an arm around his brother, groaning spectacularly all the while. “Grand gestures are romantic, right? I need to show him I’m serious - him and his coven leaders. That I’m willing to stay with him for the undead eternity.”
“Sure,” Sukuna said. He patted Yuuji on the head and grinned when the younger vampire pressed into the affection happily. Dumb kid was whipped to shreds.
“So…,” Yuuji prompted.
“Commitment for the afterlife?” Sukuna repeated. “Just involve him in your transition. You’ve been waiting to do it for a couple of years already now, and you said you wanted something traditional, right? What’s more traditional than that?”
“Woah!” Yuuji yelled, jumping up from the couch. “Who knew you were such a romantic, man! That - that’s perfect. Wow, I can’t believe you actually helped.”
“You came to me!” Sukuna argued, outraged. He leaped to his own feet and grabbed Yuuji by the scruff of his hair, digging his long nails into his sides. “Take that back, loser.”
“No way! I know what you are!” Yuuji giggled and whacked at his head, but despite his super strength he was no match for a fully-realized vampire. Eventually, Sukuna got him into a headlock and wrestled him to the ground, grinning deviously all the while.
“I’m going to do it on the new moon,” Yuuji announced. “You know, for like, new beginnings or something. That seems significant, right? And I was thinking – you know those woods at the edge of town, where you can sometimes see those wild bunnies eating the berries? That’s a good place, right? What if I invite him there? Plus, it’s private.”
“Didn’t ask, don’t care.” Sukuna pulled his pillow over his eyes, wondering how the hell Yuuji had managed to clamber his way into his room before the sun had even fully set without Uraume taking a knife to his face.
“Dude,” Yuuji whined, grabbing the sheets off his bed and pulling them to the ground. Sukuna briefly considered slicing him to pieces then and there, but it would probably be in bad taste. “You promised you’d help me with this!”
“I definitely don’t remember doing that,” Sukuna said slowly. He peeled the pillow off his face to shoot Yuuji a dangerous look. Too bad he was too lazy to clean up blood from his bedroom. Mess was saved for the basement or the roof.
“You gave me your word! We made a blood oath!”
“Why the hell would I do that with you? And it’s too fucking early for all of this. Where’s Uraume?”
“I told them it was a matter of true love,” Yuuji said dreamily. He sat down on the bed and grabbed Sukuna’s hands. “You’re my only hope, man. Please?”
He groaned and pulled his hands free. “You’ll owe me big time after this,” he warned, before grabbing Yuuji by the shoulders and throwing him bodily out the window. “Wait down there for me to wake up, asshole!” he shouted to the sound of glass shattering and the thud of a body falling three stories.
“Fuck you!” Yuuji yelled back up at him.
Sukuna took his damn sweet time rolling out of bed and dragging himself down the stairs. He let the sun disappear over the horizon until there were only small glimmers of purple atop the mountains before he finally opened the backdoor to see Yuuji sprawled across his back porch, eyes to the sky.
“Finally,” Yuuji said.
“Brat,” Sukuna retorted. “You better get used to only being able to go out at night soon.”
“Oh, god,” Yuuji said, his face paling. Sukuna couldn’t believe how idiotic this kid was; he’d had over seven years to prepare for the transition from half-human to full vampire (something Sukuna had wanted to do a month after he’d first turned, but whatever) and he still hadn’t even thought about crisping up like a piece of pork belly in the sun. He was lucky Sukuna had taken responsibility when Choso had brought him to their tiny coven all those years ago, because he absolutely would have been mauled by some chimera or something equally as avoidable before even reaching maturity.
That didn’t mean Sukuna didn’t get a kick out of messing with him, though, and this was the perfect opportunity to get him back for all the bullshit he’d pulled when he was first getting used to his super strength.
“I don’t know why you’re asking me,” he said. “Your plan already sounds good. You wanna show him how you’ve got your heart on your sleeve? Be my guest. Just give it to him.”
Yuuji nodded thoughtfully. Sukuna could see his limited brain cells attempting to whir under that stupid face of his, and thought it only made him look more idiodic.
“You’ll help me set up the location, right?” Yuuji demanded. “I’m thinking - flowers. Cherry blossoms! Oh, or roses? And maybe, like, a picnic for after, with those hard ginger candies he likes. Vampires can eat those, right? Do you think Fushiguro’s already transitioned, too, or should I make sure to also have solid food for after?”
“I bet he’d like raw meat,” Sukuna said smugly. Yuuji perked up at his contribution and didn’t question how Sukuna would know such a thing despite not ever having met Fushiguro.
“Alright! Yeah, I can do that. I’ll hunt it myself!” He sat up with all the energy of a supernaturally-enhanced pre-vampire, making Sukuna wince as his porch groaned in protest. “So you’ll bring the flowers? On the new moon?”
“You want me to?” Sukuna questioned. “Me?”
“Well, yeah,” Yuuji said. His brown eyes are irritatingly huge, shining in gratitude and in the light reflecting on the moon. “You’re my brother.”
Sukuna almost felt bad. Almost. Hey, this gave him an excuse to be in the area and laugh when Yuuji finally realized his own stupidity.
“And you’re rich,” Yuuji added on. “Roses are expensive.”
“Ah,” Sukuna said. “I see. You just want me to do the dirty work for you.”
“Absolutely,” Yuuji agreed. “Thanks, man!”
Sukuna should have thrown him to the wolves all those years ago. Well, he still had a chance to do that now.
“I’m so stressed,” Yuuji groaned in relief as he spotted Sukuna emerging from the trees, a surprisingly large bouquet of flowers clutched in one hand and a suspiciously dark plastic bag in the other. “Dude, you did not bring me booze.”
“Heh?” Sukuna asked, tossing the flowers at Yuuji’s chest. He glanced around, raising an eyebrow at the somewhat pathetic decorations that Yuuji had attempted to throw together. He’d brought soft blankets and a few sets of string lights that he’d neglected to realize he wouldn’t be able to plug in anywhere. He’d put them up anyway, and sometimes the moonlight caught on the reflective plastic, but it definitely wasn’t anything Instagram-worthy. “I brought you blood.”
“Blood?” Yuuji said stupidly.
“You’re going to need to recover after the ceremony,” Sukuna pointed out slowly, as if speaking to a toddler. He rustled the bag menacingly at Yuuji. “What, you want to go on a blood craze right after confessing your feelings?” When Yuuji failed to answer for a few seconds, his face flattened. “That answer should be a ‘no,’ by the way.”
“Ohhh,” Yuuji said. “Yeah that… makes total sense. Okay.” He pressed a hand to the heart beating furiously in anxiety in his chest. “Oh man, is it gunna… be weird after? It’s going to be so empty down there.”
Sukuna shrugged. Yeah, Yuuji didn’t know what he was expecting; the dude had transitioned a few centuries ago. He probably didn’t even remember what being a human felt like. “Might want a jacket after,” he finally offered. “It’s a little colder.”
“Didn’t bring one,” Yuuji said sadly. Sukuna snorted and threw the plastic bag at his face.
“Yeah, yeah, you’ll be fine,” he promised. “Now get set up; you said nine right? That’s fifteen minutes.”
The two of them scrambled to scatter the flowers across the ground and hide Yuuji’s blood stash in some bushes at the edge of the field. Sukuna ruffled Yuuji’s hair out of the too-slicked gel he’d shoved in it and made sure to shove a stick of deodorant at him because he was probably stinky with stress.
“Okay, okay, get out of here,” Yuuji hissed finally, shoving his brother away from him and pointing at the path back to his car. “He’ll be here any moment! You are not helping to set the mood.”
“You sure?” Sukuna snorted. “I could hide in the bushes. Sing you a little serenade.”
“I hope you die a second time,” Yuuji grumbled, but he patted Sukuna’s shoulder appreciatively to show that he didn’t truly mean it.
“Good luck,” Sukuna smirked. He disappeared into the darkness, eaten up by the trees and overgrown grasses.
“Oh god,” Yuuji said once he’d gone, crouching down in an attempt to lower his stress levels. “Okay, you can do this. You’re the strongest, you – you prepared yourself by watching and taking notes on fifty romance movies! There’s no way this goes badly.”
“Itadori?” Megumi was coming up over the hill, looking like an angel rather than a member of the undead. He frowned beautifully, because he did everything beautifully, at least in Yuuji’s opinion, and stopped in front of him with a hand out to help him back to his feet. “Why’d you call me here?”
Yuuji’s tongue was suddenly too big for his mouth. Every word he’d thought he would say died a pitiful death in his throat and every line he’d been rehearsing for the past two weeks flew out of his brain faster than a phoenix lighting itself on fire. Megumi’s hair looked so fluffy, scruffy like a dog freshly awakened from a life-changing nap, and he was only in a thin, tight long sleeve that emphasized the curve of his biceps even without flexing. Yuuji sighed dreamily.
“Hello? Earth to idiot?” Megumi waved a hand in his face.
“Fu-Fushiguro!” Yuuji blurted. “Hi! Funny… seeing you here…”
Megumi side eyed him, his mouth twisting together in a pout that should not have been as cute as it was. “You invited me here,” he said slowly, enunciating each word as though he was worried Yuuji had received brain damage. Maybe he had. Megumi did dangerous things to his health.
“Yeah…” Yuuji trailed off. He’d made a plan for this, hadn’t he? What happened to all those grand thoughts now? In the face of Megumi, he’d lost all courage.
“Okay,” Megumi said. He held his hand out again, and like a puppet on a string Yuuji could do nothing but take it and let his best friend pull him to his feet. “You’re acting weird.”
“No! I’ve never been weird in my entire life,” Yuuji proclaimed.
“Right.” Megumi shifted on his feet, glancing around them at the unlit fairy lights and the flowers and the blankets. “What is this.”
“Uh,” Yuuji said intelligently, “surprise?”
“It’s not my birthday,” Megumi said slowly. “It’s not your’s, either.”
“Nope,” Yuuji said, popping the ‘p’.
“So…?” Megumi prompted.
Fuck. Yuuji opened and closed his mouth a few times. Yeah, he’d never been all that great at speaking, since before he was originally turned or after. He had a tendency to put his foot in his mouth. But Megumi had also never complained about that aspect of him before, and sometimes even seemed to figure out what Yuuji was trying to say before he’d really solidified it himself. He would do better off showing him through actions, not words.
“Here,” Yuuji said, bringing Megumi towards the center of the field, carefully steering him across scattered flowers (oh shit, neither he nor Sukuna had thought to take the thorns off the roses. Did florists usually do that? Would a florist Sukuna visited do that?).
“For you,” Yuuji said.
He brought his hand to his chest, feeling around for a moment to the place where his heart beat the loudest, already practically leaping out of his body in order to get closer to Megumi. He prodded the skin, testing its strength, and became glad that being a vampire came with super strength because a normal person would probably find it pretty hard to open up their chest. Yuuji would cry if he had to struggle in front of Megumi.
Sukuna never said it would hurt, and Yuuji couldn’t help but feel a little annoyed even though that would be the natural conclusion. His nails sank in first, stinging, and though he couldn’t quite explain exactly how it felt to hold his own heart in his palm, he could absolutely say that it felt strange and wrong. Pulling it out, though, that hurt. A lot. It was only through sheer willpower that he didn’t shriek or cry.
His heart was slightly squishy, and felt strangely warm in his hands, his fingers heavy with blood. It was even weirder still to feel his own fingers go numb, his head go light. He looked into Megumi’s eyes and tried to convey exactly how excited he was for their future lives (afterlives?) before the ground rushed towards him and everything went black.
Pathetically, when faced with the love of his life’s dying body flopping onto the ground before him like a fish pulled off a line, Megumi couldn’t do anything.
He couldn’t reach forward to stop Yuuji from slamming into the grass with a disturbingly wet sound, couldn’t summon a tear to his eyes or a breath in his lips. He couldn’t even move a muscle, couldn’t even drag his eyes down from where Yuuji’s chest had been a few seconds before.
The only thing that was working in that moment was his heart, pounding ironically in his chest as though rubbing in the horror of the moment. Megumi latched onto the sound for dear life, letting the thumping drown out the wind through the branches and the rustling of branches from some wild birds or bunnies and the shifting of Yuuji’s clothes as his body relaxed down into the grass. With his superior senses, Megumi could feel his best friend’s temperature cooling, dropping down in an unnaturally fast way that he wasn’t sure could be attributed to death or to something supernatural.
Megumi did nothing. He stood there and let the pit of his stomach drop down to the center of the earth and held his shaking hands by his sides and twitched in silent horror at the scene in front of him. It looked like a nightmare. Megumi was pretty sure he’d dreamed of something like this before.
Suddenly, Yuuji’s arm twitched in its cloth casing. Megumi noted distantly that Yuuji was wearing something a bit more formal than his usual t-shirts and ugly vests or distractingly bright hoodies. His torso was encased in an open button up and he was wearing boots, not sneakers. In those shoes, his leg jerked.
It was like every nerve holding Megumi back snapped. He found himself on the forest floor, clutching at his best friend’s shoulders and rolling him onto his back, tears thankfully blurring his vision so that the red spot bleeding into Yuuji’s clothes wasn’t sickeningly gory. “Yuuji?” he cried, his voice thick in his throat and sounding too quiet and too scared for his own liking.
Yuuji’s body gave another massive jerk, all of his muscles clenching and then relaxing in quick succession. Megumi had never seen something like it before, but he’d also never seen a person die before, at least not this close, so maybe this was normal. He clutched Yuuji harder, trying to keep him still. “What did you do?” he yelled at the corpse.
Yuuji’s big, beautiful, alive brown eyes popped open.
“Fushiguro!” he said happily, but his body was slow to respond so it came out slurred and almost intelligible.
“What the fuck,” Megumi said.
Yuuji attempted to sit up, but seemed to have forgotten how to move his limbs. He jerked upright stiffly, looking as though he’d never made the motion before. When he brought his hands up unsteadily to touch Megumi’s hands on his shoulders, he seemed surprised to find his heart still clutched in one fist, blood catching in the light of the moon.
“You didn’t take it,” he said faintly.
It took Megumi a second to decipher what he was saying, but once he did he jerked back at the words. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he shouted. “I don’t want - why would I want that?!”
“You’re rejecting me?” Yuuji said, stricken, somehow looking more upset at this than ten minutes earlier, when he had literally sunk his own hand into his chest and yanked his heart out like some shitty horror movie. Except it was worse, because it had been real, and Megumi had seen him bleed out on the forest floor. What was he doing alive now?
“Rejecting?!” Megumi felt strangely hysterical. He crossed his arms, uncaring of Yuuji’s blood still smeared across his fingertips. “You just died, Yuuji!”
Yuuji perked up like a dog, something so much more werewolf than vampire that Megumi had half a mind to begin laughing. He held it back, though. He had a feeling that if he started giggling now, he wouldn’t stop until the next full moon, and then he’d really kill Yuuji again himself for putting him through whatever it was that he just pulled. “You called me Yuuji,” he said, like an idiot.
“How are you speaking right now?” Megumi demanded. He knocked Yuuji’s heart out his hand, flinching at the wet squelch it made when it came into contact with the ground. He pulled at the wet fabric of Yuuji’s ruined shirt, peeling it away so he could see the skin underneath. To his shock, instead of the gaping hole he was expecting, Yuuji’s skin had closed over and was now smooth and shiny, though there was still a small dent in his chest as though whatever power had healed him couldn’t completely finish the job. Megumi couldn’t even appreciate the rare chance at feeling up his best friend’s chest, because his skin was still as cold as the nighttime air, and there was of course no heartbeat to match Megumi’s since Yuuji’s was laid out useless on the forest floor a few feet away.
“Oh my god, you made a deal with a demon,” Megumi guessed. “You sold your fucking soul. Were you secretly a zombie this whole time? Are you some sort of phoenix hybrid? Is this your ghost?”
“Woah!” Yuuji laughed. “Dude, why are you freaking out? It’s just vampire stuff. You should know.”
“Yuuji,” Megumi said, even more slowly than before. “Why would I know the intricacies of your… ‘vampire stuff’?”
Yuuji blinked at him as though he was stupid. “Because you’re one too.” This was a statement, not a question. How the hell Megumi ever became friends with a moron, he didn’t know.
“Yuuji,” Megumi scolded. He lifted a hand and released the hold on his wolf, wincing a bit as his delicate finger bones clicked against each other while rearranging and the hair pushed its way uncomfortably out of his human skin. He waved a paw at Yuuji, widening his eyes in mock surprise. “I’m not a vampire.”
“Huh.” It seemed Yuuji was at a loss for words at that. Served him right.
“I’m a werewolf,” Megumi said, drawing out the syllables of each part of the world. “You know, the one where I forcibly turn into a different animal every full moon? The full moons that I always tell you I can’t hang out for?”
Yuuji’s eyes had taken on a glossy quality. Megumi really hoped that it was from shock and not from a side effect of dying. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“What’s not to understand?” Megumi demanded. “What, do you want me to strip and transform right here and now?”
Yuuji’s face suddenly went red and he began to sway side to side, all woozy. Megumi had never seen a vampire as expressive as Yuuji, and he had always privately wondered how much blood he’d had to keep in him at all times in order to be able to blush. Clearly, it was less than however much was in him at the moment.
“I think I’m gonna pass out again,” Yuuji warned. He sounded sleepy.
“Hell no you’re not. If you die on me and don’t explain whatever this was, I will personally conduct a seance just to bring you back to this world and torture you again,” Megumi vowed.
“The blood!” Yuuji blurted. He gestured weakly at some bushes at the edge of the field before flopping back. “I’m just… I’m gonna lay here for a bit, I think.”
“Useless asshole,” Megumi muttered, but he dutifully got up and shifted aside the branches of the bushes, spotting the black plastic bag easily. It smelled both of blood and something distinctly more musky, more supernatural.
Yuuji’s eyes were closed by the time he made it back to his side, and Megumi took great pleasure in whacking him over the head to wake him back up. He dropped one of the packets on his lap, the liquid jiggling strangely in its clear plastic case. It was a rather morbid version of the water balloons Gojo used to scare Megumi with when he was a pup.
“Thanks, man,” Yuuji said. He tried his hand at the lid but only managed to twist his own hands off the pouch and knock it to the ground. Megumi hissed out a breath between his teeth. Truly, what the hell was he doing here? Love made you weak. He stuffed his messy hands in his jean pockets, unwilling to help.
Finally, Yuuji seemed to give up on the cap. He brought the bag up to his face and in one messy motion clamped his jaws around it.
It turned out that when you stick a liquid in a bulging plastic bag, it really didn’t take kindly to being pierced. Megumi flinched involuntarily as Yuuji’s fangs – hey, those were new, flashing in his mouth distractingly in a way Megumi could 100% for sure vouch hadn’t existed before (totally not because he spent a lot of time looking at Yuuji’s lips) – popped the bag and a splat of blood flicked its way up his face. They stared at each other as blood dripped off of Yuuji’s eyebrows and into his eye.
“Sorry,” Yuuji said finally. He brought the broken bag up to his lips and began gulping the remaining liquid down quickly, seemingly oblivious to the red liquid trailing down his chin and nestling into the folds of his collar. Megumi was pretty sure vampires were supposed to look more… graceful when they were drinking. Yuuji just looked like a desperate frat guy trying to get as much beer in his gullet as possible before the cops showed up to the party.
Finally he finished. Megumi hadn’t even realized that he’d been slurping until he’d stopped, and he found himself weirdly grossed out by the fact that he hadn’t been grossed out. Whatever. Yuuji at least looked a bit more put together, his face less pale and his head no longer swaying back and forth.
“Alright,” Megumi said, kneeling before him. “Explain.” He pointed to Yuuji’s heart, still on the ground with a few patches of dirt sticking to the still wet blood.
“Ah,” Yuuji said unsatisfyingly. He rubbed the back of his head. “Well, you know, I’m totally fine so this doesn’t need to be this big thing -”
“If you don’t speak right now,” Megumi said dangerously, “I will drag your body back to Gojo and have him string you up by your tendons atop the wall at the edge of town. I will incite a war between my pack and your coven and wipe out your entire bloodline, starting with you and traveling all the way back to your sire’s sire’s sire.”
Yuuji paled, returning to the greying pallor he’d been before drinking his blood pouch. “Okay!” he squeaked.
Megumi gestured for him to continue.
“Well,” Yuuji sputtered, “um. You know, I wasn’t always a vampire. Some of us are born that way, but most of us were just regular humans who were turned. After my grandfather died when I was young, I got in touch with my half-brother, Choso. You know how the government really doesn’t like placing human children with supernaturals? So, I decided to turn. You know, so I could live with him.
“Choso’s sire agreed to turn me, so I, well, drank the goblet, took the pill, whatever. But I didn’t do the transformation right away, because I was young and also Choso was overprotective and wouldn’t let me and he’d never helped a fledgling before because he was turned the latest out of all of his eight brothers because he wanted to follow them into the afterlife and – well, anyway, he took me to Sukuna and we decided to wait.”
“Transformation?” Megumi interrupted.
“Yeah,” Yuuji said. “Like, finally turning into a vampire.” He blinked innocently at Megumi’s confused expression.
“... You don’t automatically turn? After you’re bitten?”
“Biting doesn’t have anything to do with vampires,” Yuuji said. “You just need to drink enough vampire blood. It’s a whole process, and kinda gross. It’s clumpy.”
“You’re not a full vampire?”
“Well, now I am.” Yuuji snorted. “You just have to die post-blood drinking. In, like, a healable way. I think if you got put through a meat grinder you wouldn’t be coming back from that. Why, is it different for… oh.”
“You just killed yourself,” Megumi seethed, “so that you could come back as a full vampire. In front of me. Without telling me.” That might have been fangs growing from his mouth in his anger, and he could see Yuuji shrinking into himself.
“In my defense,” the idiot said weakly, “I thought you were also a vampire, so I figured you would know? Please don’t be mad!”
“So what, you finally decided to fully transform and what, you wanted me to sit there and watch you? Why aren’t Sukuna and Choso here?! What if something went wrong? What was I supposed to do about it?”
Yuuji mumbled something under his breath, shuffling his feet awkwardly and looking appropriately chastised.
“What was that?” Megumi demanded. He wasn’t about to let him off the hook.
“I might have thought it would be romantic?” Yuuji tried.
Megumi wondered if he could see steam rising out of his ears from the rage that was building in his gut. “Romantic? You thought killing yourself in front of me was going to be romantic.”
“Sukuna said back in the day that fully coming into your vampire was a big ceremony,” Yuuji rambled. “There’d be parties and everything and you’d do the whole drinking and then killing in front of a crowd. A lot of the time fledglings would offer their hearts to their sires or their lovers to prove their loyalty or show their gratefulness for their new life. It was symbolic cause, like, traditionally vampires would get hunted through stakes in the heart.”
“And you just believe anything Sukuna tells you,” Megumi said flatly.
“That’s what he and Uraume did!” he protested. “They gave each other their hearts and it was super romantic and really awesome and they vowed the rest of time to each other, or at least until one of them died horrifically in battle. So, you know, it’s kind of rude that you just chucked mine in the trash.” He wilted a bit.
Megumi stared at him in irritation. He’d kind of figured that Yuuji was into him, because he was about as subtle as a brick being thrown through a window, but he’d figured that Yuuji was just a little unsure or maybe shy. Not that he wanted Megumi to partake in some ancient ritual where he both literally and figuratively offered his heart to him. Didn’t he know that Megumi hated grand gestures?
No, who was he kidding. This was absolutely something Yuuji would do. He loved to drag Megumi out of his comfort zone, to make him do things that were sometimes embarrassing or out of pocket, because he knew that Megumi secretly enjoyed it. And neither he nor Yuuji were word people; they communicated better through actions and loyalty, not heartfelt words or long love letters.
“God fucking damnit,” Megumi said. He turned on his heel and stomped his way over to Yuuji’s discarded heart, because even if his face was red at Yuuji’s thoughtful, honest, idiotic gestures he wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of being outwardly gleeful about it. He picked it up and tried brushing off the dirt sticking to its side, then brought it back over to Yuuji, who was still standing shocked and clutching onto his empty blood bag.
Megumi couldn’t look at his hopeful expression. He lifted the heart to his face, considering it, wondering how exactly he could show Yuuji he was just as serious (and maybe as stupid) as he was, and then he gave up on any future dignity he might have ever had and stuffed the heart into his mouth.
Yuuji made a shocked cry as Megumi devoured it in a few bites, wincing at the coldness and the coagulated blood. It tasted vaguely like eating mulch. He forcefully swallowed, letting Yuuji watch the meat slide down his throat, his Adam's apple bobbing.
“Megumi?” Yuuji whispered. His hands had reached out but stopped right before he could touch as though he wasn’t sure he was allowed to.
“When werewolves court,” Megumi mumbled, “they start by bringing each other a hunt to prove their strength and show that they can provide. To accept, they eat whatever the other wolf brings them.”
“So you’re…?”
“Yes, moron, I’m accepting.” Megumi closed his eyes and buried his face in his hands. His face was more red than Yuuji’s blood smeared across his knuckles. What had his life come to, truly.
“Let’s go!” Yuuji cheered. He tackled Megumi in a hug, beaming brighter than the moon overhead. His skin was cold and slightly clammy, his shirt still sticky, but Megumi couldn’t lie and say he hated the feeling. It was new, but it wasn’t bad.
Still… “Get off me, asshole, you’re covered in your own blood,” Megumi hissed, but he grabbed onto Yuuji’s shoulders and held him close, sticking his nose into his pink hair. Stupid vampires.
“So let’s go wash off,” Yuuji said eagerly. “Can we shower together?”
“You’re disgusting,” Megumi said, but he dragged him towards the trail. “Wait, shouldn’t we clean all this up?”
“Nah, Sukuna can do it,” Yuuji said easily. “It was his idea. He owes me for tricking me.”
“I can’t believe you,” Megumi said, but his voice was too fond to be taken seriously. “The emotional whiplash you just put me though… fuck, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so many things in such a short amount of time.”
“This was the best day ever!” Yuuji shouted.
“You’re saying that now, but you’re going to come back to my pack with me and face Gojo,” Megumi warned. He knocked Yuuji gently on the head but couldn’t bring himself to seriously refute him. Best, worst, whatever. At least they were facing it together.