Chapter Text
1. The Ghost in You
In his dream, there is a moment.
The moment.
The one he can never take back…
In shades of dripping red and ominous black, there stands the shape of a tower, like an elongated chinjusha, looming in the distance. Its doorway bristling with serrated teeth. Its breath foul with cruel curses. Its slavering maw hungry to devour all who enter.
Waiting to swallow him whole.
This place is not meant for ordinary men, men with honor.
Nor any kind of men, for only gods tread here. Immortals, deities demanding worship.
Demanding sacrifice. Demanding blood.
He enters the temple thinking he is a wolf, not knowing he is a sheep.
A lamb set for slaughter.
From overhead, a set of fingers reaches down from the heavens. Fingers with blackened tips, red in both tooth and claw. He hears the summons from up above, the call, the command:
Open…
Then, again. Echoing louder:
Open…
***
Indigo and orange peer along the edges of the blinds. The subtle shades of twilight, seeping inside.
Sukuna’s eyes crack open. As if by command.
Open…
His head is foggy still with the remnants of sleep. With the remnants of a dream. With a scene of—
A towering shrine, crowned by a fading moon, eclipsed and edged in red. A single ring of crimson, like a fraying thread, splintering, growing ever fainter. Until the dark engulfs its form, covering and swallowing all…
He blinks away a residual image that flashes scarlet behind his eyelids. He turns, stretching, and looks instead at a different image that hovers above his head. An image of—
A gaping mouth with naked bodies tumbling out—
A floating eyeball, detached and watching from above—
Demons playing at a card table, coins littering the surface—
This print of Bosch’s Harrowing of Hell is tacked above his bed next to a picture of Van Gogh’s Skeleton with Burning Cigarette. The skull is grinning down at him and Sukuna grins cheekily back.
How he loves that morbid skull. The painting is one of his favorites. Still, Sukuna feels his grin begin to fade as he thinks of poor Van Gogh—his blood dripping on the floor, a severed ear on the bed. The smell of iron and madness thick on the air.
Madness on the canvas and in those frenetic swirls of paint. A vortex of despair, a—
—gaping mouth with razors for teeth, hungry, waiting—
—stop thinking about it, he tells himself. He pushes away the sense of agitation that lingers like a stray cat in the corner of his mind. That stalking beast, the slinking fallout from his dreams.
Because it isn’t as if he’s insane, after all. Not like poor Van Gogh. Just because he is plagued by vivid dreams and a vivid imagination, it doesn't mean his mind is broken like his. No…those things for him are a boon, a bonus. Those are—
—those are all fodder for his art.
Sukuna rolls to the edge of a narrow dorm bed. He looks down at the floor and frowns. Brushes and paint tubes and crumpled pages are scattered across the carpet like a debris field. It is unwelcome chaos.
Fucking Kashimo, thinks Sukuna, scowling at the discarded materials. It is unfortunate that his roommate at uni is such an unorganized mess. Flitting in and out of their room, talking at a brisk speed, always leaving chaos in his wake. Sukuna suspects he’s gone off his meds, is maybe on adderall or coke (probably both). Not that it matters in the slightest.
Sukuna dislikes the fidgety bastard in any case. The two of them have always butted heads. Always on the verge of constant conflict, always fighting.
Sukuna gets up, bare feet crunching over the discarded drawings. He refuses to corral Kashimo’s mess today. He stomps through it, a god stepping over a battlefield.
A battlefield covered in snow, marred with blood, flakes swirling through the frosty air…
A tinkling chime sounds from his bedside table, a harp strummed by an electric Cupid. Sukuna's grin returns, and he forgets his anger over the mess in his shared dorm room. Instead he rakes black nails through watercolor hair and lunges for his phone. He flops back down on his stomach, smiling excitedly like a schoolboy.
Transformed, all because of a single message on his screen.
Because despite all his aggression, despite all the piercings and loud tattoos and all his hard, sharp edges, Sukuna is, at his core, a hopeless romantic.
Specifically, an obsessive romantic, with the burning soul of an artist.
An ambitious artist.
Sukuna is reminded of this as his eyes are momentarily tugged from his screen over to the large sketch sitting beneath his phone. Discarded, forgotten, like so much chaff. He chews the inside of his cheek as he considers his own handiwork. There is a large scholarship, after all, riding on this piece, a piece that is far from being finished. Its partially rendered lines representing money, pounds, that Sukuna needs in order to fund his schooling.
But the competition is fierce. As always. In a way, it is like readying for battle. Still, the soft, seductive shades of dusk crawling around his blinds and the beckoning message on his screen are all conspiring against him, tempting him away.
Tempting him from his work.
Sukuna feels it then: the inevitable pull towards Hampstead, towards the heath.
To the place where Satoru is.
Come back to me…
Sukuna’s chin lifts at an unheard voice, a voice he hears only inside his own head. Sometimes that voice seems more real to him than the crumpled pages on his floor, the grinning skull upon his wall.
Come back to me…
He feels a festering desire, an ache taking up residence in the pit of his stomach. Need—simmering, gnawing, insatiable need—sinks its teeth in him. Like an addict’s craving pulling at his veins, pricking needles into his skin, it is inescapable. That whispering voice is calling, calling to him from somewhere outside, from somewhere beyond his room. Its tone decadent and dark, promising ghostly pleasures impossible to ignore.
He turns his head towards the window. Towards the darkening bruise that is filtering through his blinds, the color of thickening twilight. A fading bonfire shade that threatens to turn daylight into night.
Into their time.
Sukuna gropes blindly for his wallet on the bedside table. He checks to make sure his newly reloaded oyster card is tucked inside. He can feel his nerves humming with growing anticipation, can feel the tug of unquenchable thirst unfurling inside him. It blooms like a poisonous invasive flower, sprouting from a darkness that exists both outside and within.
He bounces off the bed. His mind spins scenarios of the most debauched variety as he starts rifling through his cupboard. He pulls out piece after piece of clothing: black, black, yet more black.
He dresses, turning himself into a walking vortex, a moving blackhole. A shiny metal blackbird. He turns himself into the direct antithesis of Satoru—Satoru, who is all pale and alabaster beauty, a moving arc of light, moonlight made flesh.
Sukuna glances back briefly at the sketch lying on the end table. At the smudged crossbar of the torii gate, the slashing lines of the staircase within its frame. The beginnings of the gaping maw waiting at the top.
The half formed figure standing ominously at its entrance.
A towering shrine wreathed in shadow. With red eyes staring down, red like the edges of the dying moon…
Sukuna shakes off the guilt that comes with ignoring his assignment. Instead he thinks of the pleasures found in pale white skin, in cold blue eyes. In an eager mouth that bruises under his every kiss.
Pulling up his collar, Sukuna abandons his room. He heads out into foggy whiteness, into the damp snow. He jogs for the tube station, with the demon of desire licking at his heels, and a ghostly voice calling from beyond.
Come back to me…
***
Long shadows spill like ink blots over the tube station floor. The rhythmic clatter of metal beasts echoes through the tunnels, from both above and below.
Sukuna rakes a hand through damp hair, slicking it back. His jog through the snow had turned into a run in the rain. A heavy fog has crept in with it, engulfing the city in icy gloom. Shivering, Sukuna rocks impatiently from foot to foot, boots squelching with water.
But no matter. He can deal with the cold and damp, with the wet hair and the wet clothes.
Because he knows Satoru’s house will be warm and comfortable and dry. Uraume keeps it ridiculously hot there, per their boss’s wishes.
And he won’t be wearing these soggy boots—or anything—for very long.
Sukuna stares down at his phone, scrolling through piece after piece of useless media. His ears prick up at the sound of an impending train. Its metallic growl vibrates the tunnel, the walls, the platform beneath his feet. Without looking up, he meanders forward, readying himself for the beast’s imminent arrival.
“You there, red eyed demon! I see you!”
Sukuna’s head is still bowed, distracted, over his screen. There is soft chatter and shuffling noises all around him, because it is close to the evening rush. The words don’t penetrate at first.
Don’t register in the din.
“Two faced abomination. Walking amongst us, you think you are hidden. But you are not!”
There is a whoosh of air, the screech of protesting brakes as the train pulls up to the platform. People push forward, and Sukuna moves with them, a fish swimming along with the current. But then from behind him he hears:
“They can’t see you, but I know what you are!”
The words, spoken a few feet from behind him are muddled by the overhead announcement about the car’s arrival. The words kings cross and king of eternal night blend together in his ears. Sukuna turns at the sound, glancing over his shoulder.
“A cursed beast with four eyes—“
He frowns at the man who is glaring at him. A man with long dark hair, standing with his back against the tube station wall.
“I see your two faces…” The man lifts a finger. He points directly at Sukuna.
The car doors slide open, and Sukuna is forced forward by the surging crowd. He stares back at the madman on the platform. The man’s lips are moving, but it is useless pantomime. His words are lost in the overhead announcement.
“Demonic entity, king of night…”
Sukuna stares silently at the man as the train doors slide shut. The man doesn’t move his back from the painted brick wall, instead he points and murmurs nonsense words, words that Sukuna can’t hear. Sukuna starts thinking of Van Gogh again. The image of a grinning skull flashes behind his eyes, while before him—
—the man against the wall smiles his own rictus grin. A second grinning skull that blurs from his sight as the train suddenly surges forward, departing the station.
***
It is into a soft wintry gloaming that Sukuna emerges, slipping through the slushy streets of Hampstead. Through lanes that look old, that seem out of time. Through a place where perhaps dead poets and painters once passed.
He turns onto a centuries-old cobbled street, across from a thick copse of trees that demarcates the start of the heath. But he doesn’t enter those wild lands. Instead, he slips through a rusty wrought iron gate, bounces up the steps of a tall narrow house.
He lets himself in with an old brass key. Once inside, he silently stalks down a winding hall, lit only by amber wall sconces. As he moves, shadows begin to flicker and unfurl from the corners.
In his head there is a whispering, from something or someone just out of sight.
He stalks through the beckoning gloom until he reaches Satoru’s studio. He opens the oil starved door, its hinges groaning in complaint. There is the familiar swish of a brush over canvas, the enticing smell of handmade paint. The sound fills him with warmth, the scent with a tender sense of nostalgia.
With longing, but for what exactly he cannot say.
Tied to these softer emotions is that other salivating thing. That constant addict’s pull, that insatiable sense of want. And it is this primal urge that propels him forward. He spies Satoru by his work table and springs. He wraps eager arms around him from behind, presses a hungry, toothsome mouth against his neck. He is heedless of the wet paint on the brush, heedless of Satoru’s own protests, the pointless chiding.
“Gah! You’re soaked! Why are you so wet?” Satoru says, complaining, squirming deliciously in Sukuna’s cobra-like grip. Like wriggling prey trying futilely to escape. But underneath his scolding there is a fondness, a warmth. Sukuna hears and feels this. The heat, the warmth, despite the wintery sweep of Satoru’s own profile, the ice chipped color of his eyes.
Because Satoru is winter personified: white snowy hair, pale ivory skin. Irises the color of a washed out winter sky. Lashes like frost spidering the window panes. His appearance is cold, icy, impervious. Perfect, like fresh fallen snow. At least that is how it seems at first glance.
Sukuna knows that a raging inferno lies just underneath. That if you crack the icy surface, molten lava flows out.
So Sukuna sets to work, attempting to thaw and warm both himself and his white, wintry lover, delighting in the way his lips and teeth mark and stain that perfect moonlight skin.
It’s like he is painting his own blank canvas.
Eventually Satoru’s complaints fall away entirely, becoming a familiar leitmotif of suggestive whimpers and soft panting breaths. Sukuna reaches down and pries the brush from his hands, lets it drop uncaring to the floor. For now there is only one objective: to turn those small whimpers into tremulous moans, to have the body in his grasp writhing, arching into his every touch. To make them both forget—
— forget those shadows lurking unseen in the corners, and the whispering ghosts that linger in the dark—
— to blockout the frigid world that waits outside. For Sukuna there is only now. There is only heat and desire and shared pleasure, shared warmth. There is teeth on skin, hot breath stuttering over flesh, and the pulse of desire: simmering, boiling over, until it is an all consuming inferno. All heat, all warmth—all for him.
All of it, always, all for him.
Sukuna sinks to his knees, falling fast in worshipful devotion.
Always him, him, him…
***
Satoru seems perfect at first glance. But he is, in fact, not perfect.
Sukuna first notices this imperfection while raining kisses down on his arm. An arm that is crosshatched with raised white scars. Like the icy frost obscuring the window panes, these pearlescent scars spiderweb the inside of his forearm. Secretly telling a story that Sukuna can’t (or has forgotten how to) read.
“What happened to your arm?” he asks him.
Sukuna is fascinated by wounds, by scars.
He feels Satoru still. He goes cold, like the ice on the heath’s waters, reflecting nothing. Frosty and silent and secretive. But after a minute he says:
“My arm went through a broken door pane. It was stitched up several times just…not very well.”
“You should have complained. They did a shitty job.”
“I don’t complain. They already feel bad about it. They’re upset they didn’t leave me perfect for you.”
Sukuna’s eyebrow arcs up. He can’t parse this response.
Satoru often speaks in riddles, like a sphinx. Sukuna has grown used to it, after their first few times together. Artists, after all, are an eccentric bunch, a separate species. And Satoru is like an exotic bird. Repeating nonsense words that mimic human speech but somehow aren’t quite right.
But there are other things, other behaviors, that Satoru does that make him seem less than normal, that are also not quite right.
Sukuna has observed these behaviors firsthand. He doesn’t comment on them though. Or, if he does, his beautiful and enigmatic lover waves them away. Dismisses them.
But the oddities, the eccentricities, remain.
For one, he only ever sees Satoru at night. Only under the light of the moon. Sukuna has never seen him in the daytime. Sunlight never touches his pale alabaster skin. Satoru is a purely nocturnal creature, stalking through the heath in the dark, ears listening for the call of the nightingale.
That, or perhaps other things.
Darkling, I listen…
Satoru also speaks to creatures, to others, Sukuna can’t see. Shadows that lurk, invisible to the eye. It is unnerving sometimes, to see him cock his head at his drafting table, listening intently to words only he can hear. Sukuna will see him peer into a stone platter spattered with paint, staring as if trying to divine the future in its glinting hues. He answers aloud questions only he can hear:
“Ah, but you always complain about the amount of binding agent I use. Perhaps I will switch to flaxseed next, just to piss you off.”
Satoru says these things, but he doesn’t say them to Sukuna. He always appears to be conversing, arguing with himself.
(Sukuna doesn’t realize how close to the truth this is.)
The art Satoru creates is also odd and unsettling. On the wall above the work table is a giant painted eyeball. Multiple shades of blue fleck its massive iris, glittering at him like so many shards of glass. It stares, always silently observing the room.
Watching and tracking Sukuna’s movements with its unnerving, all seeing gaze.
Then there is the painting of Satoru himself. In it he is looking down into a darkened pool, its surface shining like midnight oil. He stares down at his own reflection, but the image doesn’t match. The version of him in the water is wide eyed and open mouthed. His hands are raised desperately towards the light. And if you look closely, you can just make out the swathes of red wreathing his throat.
Sukuna sees a silent, open mouthed scream. Sees the grasping claws of a dying animal.
It’s a beautiful tribute to Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Yet Sukuna cannot bear to look at it. Like so many of the things inside the old house, this image of Satoru agitates him, unsettles him. Looking at it fills him with a sense of dread. Brings with it an immense guilt.
But he doesn’t know why that is. Only that he must turn away.
That he mustn’t look.
Because death, it seems, is everywhere he turns in the old townhouse. On every wall, in every corner. Memento mori darken the stretched canvases. Death flags painted by a morbid, moribund artist.
Death resides everywhere, hides in everything.
It resides in Satoru’s pale icy eyes, in his pearly scars, but most especially, in the diamond ring on his finger.
And it is this last thing that unnerves Sukuna the most: the shadow of the one who came before him. The one who gave him the ring.
The dead one.
The one whose presence hovers over all.
It is this lingering spector—this dead love, this gone yet ever present ghost—that rankles and unsettles Sukuna the most. Not because of the far away look he sometimes sees in Satoru’s eyes, the one that convinces Sukuna he is thinking of him. And not just because he suspects Satoru is subtly, perhaps unconsciously, trying to turn Sukuna into him. No. That’s not it.
It’s because of the unreasonable jealousy, the irrational poisonous feelings of possessiveness it provokes in him.
Sukuna knows it’s stupid for him to feel this way. To feel something akin to jealousy over a dead man (and he is dead, that much Sukuna knows). And yet it’s there. Sitting like a weighted stone, a bloated corpse, in the midst of all of his and Satoru’s intimate moments, their daily interactions.
A malicious ghost, a hovering wraith.
Darkling, I listen…
Sometimes Sukuna thinks he can hear and see him, this ghost. In a whispering voice coming from another room. From a shadow flitting in the corner of his eye, vanishing before he can turn his head. There is a malevolent presence that lingers in the house, impossible to catch and confront, yet also impossible to ignore. Sukuna feels it in every room, in the painted eyeball watching from the wall.
It speaks softly, calling from the shadows.
Calling quietly. But insistently.
Calling for him.
To be continued…
Art referenced this chapter:
Van Gogh’s Skeleton with Burning Cigarette
