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He is a collection of muscle memories and that is all.
“Geto!” someone calls, and the man in a sloppily-tied gojo-gesa turns. Long black hair hangs loose, greasy, and tangled. His body moves oddly, head twisting before his torso and legs follow suit - a delay of input. He doesn’t respond, only stares with a haze cast over his eyes. Who is calling? Does he know? Does it matter?
A poorly-puppeted marionette, that’s all that he is.
Suguru stares at himself in the mirror, breathing heavily. He’s nearly as haggard as he was in the final weeks of his time at Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College, his eyebags equally as purple. There are many reasons he’s been avoiding the sight of himself since he broke the natural order of things and returned from death. His sickly face is one of them.
The other one is what his eyes linger on.
The surgical wound – because it is no scar, the skin has not regrown, it isn’t closed, just held together with practiced stitches – is as horrifically large as ever. The seam splits Suguru’s skull in half. If he squints, if he pulls on his hair a bit, he can see a bit of white bone peeking through.
He hates it. He’s hated it since he retook control from the curse. When Suguru asked Satoru to “At least curse me a little at the end,” this was not what he meant. Suguru wanted his death to be permanent. Meaningful. And not one step in someone else’s revenge plan.
Every time he spots those stitches out of the corner of his eye, all he can see is weakness. He was weak for letting himself be controlled for a year. Satoru was weak for succumbing to sentiment and not properly disposing of his body. And he’s still weak for looking at himself, his walking corpse, and not finishing the job.
No longer. He’s going to do at least one thing right: for his family, for Nanako, for Mimiko, for the world he tried to build and instead razed.
His hand trembles when he raises it.
His hand hadn’t trembled when he used it to choke the imposter hijacking his body. He’s checked, repeatedly, to make sure that every movement he makes is his own again. Suguru pounces on this hesitation and grabs that hand by the wrist.
“You,” he hisses at it, “are not coming back. I refuse. This is my body, parasite .”
Oh, how mean, Suguru.
“Don’t call me that.”
It’s not going to work, you know. When the body is without a brain, what do you think will happen?
“You think I’m scared to die? As far as I’m concerned, that’s where I’m supposed to be right now.”
You’re not going to be able to finish the job, Geto Suguru.
Suguru shoves his hand down and uses the other to pick at the knot holding the stitches closed. It’s tiny, medically precise. His fingernails are bitten too short to pull it apart. Curse this curse’s expertise.
Sighing, Suguru reaches into Satoru’s bathroom cabinets. Amidst the hair pomades and fifteen steps of skincare are a pair of tweezers that he quickly snatches up.
There used to be times when they’d sit together with a similar pair of tweezers and Satoru would pluck Suguru’s eyebrows. His own were always perfectly trimmed, immaculate, and all it had taken was one evening where he’d stared at Suguru, unblinking, for three minutes straight before tackling him and attacking his eyebrows. “I refuse to be part of the strongest duo with a partner who’s growing bushes on his face!” he’d declared.
It had hurt the first time, and the second, but by the time it became routine, Suguru had stopped protesting it and let the pain fade into a distant buzz. He’d felt worse by then anyway. He’d even taken his own turns going after Satoru, pulling perhaps too many hairs out and leaving Satoru with memorably pencil-thin eyebrows. The teenager had gone to Shoko and begged for her to use reverse cursed energy to regrow his lost hairs, only to be told “It doesn’t work that way, idiot.” His sunglasses had been obnoxiously large until he could bear to show the upper half of his face again.
Just for old time’s sake, Suguru plucks an errant hair. He doesn’t feel a thing.
There is a ghoul roaming Shibuya. Where the rest of Japan has abandoned the area – partially because of the bodies left here, partially because of the bodies piling up everywhere else – the body cannot go anywhere else.
He shambles around the rubble, occasionally pausing at a large pile to grunt and turn over a few pieces, but otherwise remains mostly aimless. It’s difficult to pick out the motivations of a lonesome, wordless specter, especially when nobody bothers to get close enough to realize he exists.
How long it’s been since he arrived is unclear. How long has he moved without pause; no sleep, no sustenance?
Somehow, he manages to reach the lower levels of the subway station. All the fluorescent lights are shattered or dead, and the pungent scent of decomposition sits stagnant, but he doesn’t seem to care. He moves forward, perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by intention, and finds one particular corner of the complex.
Beside the bodies, of which there are surprisingly few here, and the sticky-sweet remnants of spilled sodas, there lies two things: a bloodstained, half-ripped stuffed toy, and a rabbit-eared phone cut in two pieces.
The ghoul grabs them with clumsy fingers and wails.
You’re making a mistake.
“No, I’m really not.”
You are relying on ignoring basic anatomical principles.
“Satoru survived fucking death.”
The Six-Eyes is an outlier and should not be counted.
“We were the strongest together , asshole. You think I couldn’t keep up?”
Remind me how I got your body?
Suguru sighs exhaustedly, staring himself down in the mirror like that’ll do anything. The tweezers tremble slightly in his hand, bright pink and deadly. He glares at them. This is his hand, his body, his life, and he will pilot it as he damn well pleases.
“When the mind fails, muscle memory takes over. And I have practiced nothing in my life as much as consuming curses. I don’t need to think, I just need to do .”
With that, Suguru directs the tweezers to that tiny, tiny knot and picks it apart, millimeter by millimeter. It takes an absurd amount of effort – apparently, he doesn’t quite have fine motor control back just yet – but he grits his teeth and unravels the smallest suture knot he’s ever seen until there are two unbound ends of the thread that holds his head in place.
No hesitation. No holding back. Suguru doesn’t even give himself the chance to take a preparatory breath before he grabs the thread again.
He pulls and winces, expecting pain, but there isn’t any. Just a smooth, uncomfortable sliding sensation as the thread embedded in his skin tugs free. Inch by inch, more of that silvery thread comes free. Suguru’s arm is almost fully extended. He can’t look away as stitches unravel into tiny, empty holes.
It should be grotesque, staring at himself as he, quite literally, pulls himself apart. But it’s not. It’s enthralling in the way hydrochloric acid eating away at tissue is enthralling. He’s horrifically curious. Is this how Shoko feels when she pulls a corpse apart? She’s addicted to seeing what makes a person tick more than she is to nicotine. Suguru supposes there’s a new shared vice between them now.
Well, it won’t be for long.
A shared vice between us, too , the curse adds.
Like Suguru said. Not for long.
With a final jerk, the end of the thread comes free, and all that holds the top of Suguru’s skull in place is gravity.
“Honestly, I thought you’d be putting up more of a fight.”
Why?
“Most things don’t like dying.”
Logic determines that you will not get as far in this task as you think you will. I’m simply curious as to how far you’ll get before your shell gives out. Scientific inquiry, if you will.
“Pragmatic.”
I like to think so.
Suguru grabs his bun and there it goes. He has his head in his hand. His brain is exposed to the open air in a way that would have any reasonable doctor clutching their chest with heart palpitations. And this is the interesting part, the one that nobody told him about.
Rivulets of cerebrospinal fluid run down his face, into his eyes. But the brain that rests in his skull – well, that can’t be his brain.
Brains don’t typically have mouths with teeth bared in a mocking smile.
And now you see .
“So I do.”
The moment you remove me from your skull, that’s it. It’s my cursed energy piloting you. You should be decomposing right now if not for me. I am the reason there’s oxygen flowing through your veins. You’re welcome, by the way.
“I didn’t ask for that. I’m fine with being a corpse. Now, if you don’t mind,” Suguru gently places his head down and grabs the parasite brain with a wet squelch , “I have work to do.”
You will try, Geto Suguru. And when you fail, what will remain?
He likes to think he hears that tiny mouth scream one last time as he digs his fingers in, but it might just be wishful thinking. Things get slow. The world feels like fog and molasses and Suguru is three feet back from his body and he’s tired. Stopping moving would be heaven. Perfection.
But he doesn’t want that freak of nature to keep existing. To turn him back into a meat puppet, or some other person that he’ll never know. Even a monkey doesn’t deserve that sort of fate.
The phone won’t turn on. It’s in two clean pieces. The glass screen is fractured. One of the case’s ears is missing. Not even wires connect the parts. There is no reason that it would still function.
But like a forgotten robot continuing a task long completed, the body keeps trying to turn it on. Fingertips, blackened with necrosis, press clumsily at the power button. They press, and they press, and they press, and nothing changes. The phone doesn’t change, and neither does the body.
Supposedly, the definition of insanity is repeating the same task over and over again and expecting a different result.
Look at the man. Look at the body. Look at its hair that falls in its face without ever being acknowledged. Look at the clothes half-falling off its shoulders. Look at the nails falling out of its fingertips without a single flinch. Look at the toy dangling from its grip by a horrific, fraying noose. Look at its unchanging face. Look at it pressing, and pressing, and pressing that button.
Can you really call it insanity if the person simply is not there?
The first handful squelches in his hand. Maybe Shoko would know better than him exactly what part of the brain he grabbed. Which mental faculties he tore through first.
Smooth and just a bit slimy from a mixture of blood and brain fluid. Suguru has seen pictures of brains before, has seen their remains from far too many corpses, but it’s different to touch it like this. It’s far more intimate. And softer.
For being a menace that has lasted for centuries, for having defiled Suguru’s body and orchestrated the upheaval of not just jujutsu society, but the whole of Japan, the brain in his hands is surprisingly fragile. It hardly takes any pressure to turn ancient sulci and gyri into nothing but miscellaneous fat.
If he presses just a bit harder, the tissue will flatten. If he picks at the blood vessels, it won’t bleed. And if he holds it to his nose, it won’t smell any different than a lump of fatty meat he could pick up at the grocery store.
Here’s to hoping it won’t taste any different either.
Suguru does what Suguru does best. He closes his eyes, shoves the handful of grey matter into his mouth, and swallows it whole.
It’s not terrible , he thinks, and it’s funny that the worst curse he’s ever encountered is the best-tasting one. Then: I suppose I’ll never know its name.
And then Geto Suguru doesn’t think at all.
There is a body in Shibuya. It may look like a man, may walk like one, but it’s nothing more sophisticated than a wind-up toy slowly reaching the end of its run. The key to turn it has been lost. Once it loses its momentum and finally slows, that will be the end of it.
In its possession are three items:
A red stuffed toy, burnt and sliced, dangling from a noose grasped in one numb hand.
Half of a cell phone in a green case, one edge severed so neatly it’s sharp to the touch.
And a grey cube with wide, frantic eyes on all sides that will only respond to the voice of a vessel that is slowly growing silent.
Eat it. Swallow it. Eat it. Swallow it. Don’t chew. Don’t think. Don’t taste. Don’t feel. Eat it. Swallow it.
It rests in your stomach now. It is part of you. It is yours now. You are its master. You have won.
Eat it. Swallow it. Repeat it.
This is how you live. This is how you die. This is what it means to be you.
You don’t need to think. It’s better if you don’t think. Don’t think. Eat it.
Eat it.
Eat it.
In life – when his life was properly his – there was nothing Geto Suguru hated more than the consumption of curses. Even their condensed forms were balls so large he always felt on the verge of choking on them. They all tasted awful, from lowly fourth-grade spirits that reminded him of vomit to special grades that were the very concepts of bile and rot compounded in on themselves until they filled his mouth and made him forget the flavor of anything else.
A black hole for containing others’ negativity, that’s always what he felt himself to be.
But no matter how much he hated it, he was good at it. He did it. Every time it was asked of him, he ate it.
When his body was not his own, the parasite piloting it only increased the frequency of that horrific procedure. His internal arsenal, at its peak, contained thousands of curses, every single one swallowed by him in the same manner.
That is to say, consumption is something Suguru’s body is intimately familiar with. Even empty, it knows this.
So it doesn’t need Suguru to think to do . It just claws away at the brain in its skull, ripping out chunk after fleshy chunk, and shoving them into its mouth, swallowing, swallowing. Indescribable juices run down its chin, blood stains its lips red-red-red, and the weight of its head slowly lightens by three pounds.
Fingers dig for the curse until there is nothing left. Until the head is empty of any passengers. Then, as if in some final, unconscious desire for common courtesy, it grabs the top of its head and returns it to where it belongs.
Time is short. There is only so long that you have.
One body is rapidly cooling. The other has been cold for quite some time.
Still, this is not the first time you have done it, and this will not be the last. The human body only lasts for so long before it degrades, eighty years if you treat it well, and you have always started with that time cut short. To last for centuries, you have to have perfected your technique.
Male, female, neither, both, it doesn’t matter. Their skulls always split the same. Your last hurrah in this body will be the delicate sawing away of the bone, and then the final separation of the brain from the rest of the nervous system.
First hair, then skin, then bone part for you. Your quarry has been revealed. With a thin film and a watery sheen, the body’s brain is nothing special. It looks the same as every other one you have removed. Still, you are gentle as you take it, placing it in a tray to the side. You’ll get back to it later.
For now, you tear your own stitches apart. The timer starts.
Hands that are no longer yours move you from the old body to the new. And then hands that have just become your own grab a needle and thread and begin suturing.
You have survived for a millennium. You are very, very good at sewing.
Its steps are getting slower and slower. Its balance is shot. It ambles to a destination nobody can divine. Two pairs of eyes, neither curse nor human, watch it with matching confusion. They follow, and it doesn’t seem to notice.
It doesn’t seem to notice anything.
Deeper into the station it goes, to a platform that has been cleaned only by the barest definition of the term. The bodies that once laid indiscriminately have now been kindly piled to the sides. White tile is streaked with pink in a way that speaks to an attempt at mopping up blood. The crater in the center of the platform, though, has not been touched.
And it is there that the body shudders to a stop. Even without a mind, the body has an innate sense of the dramatic.
Suguru stitches his skull shut again despite it housing nothing. Despite Shoko having called him a disgrace to the medical profession. Despite not having touched a needle and thread since the desperate years before high school.
Despite all this, his hands thread the needle in a single, blind attempt, and he reaffixes his head like he’s done it a thousand times before.
Maybe he has.
Yuuji follows his mother, and Choso follows his father, and they both stare and slowly realize that the body is neither of them. There is none of the gently condescending glare, no light at all behind its eyes, and certainly the body-hopper would not return to the scene of the crime, not like this.
“Kamo Noritoshi!” Choso shouts, to no response. Then, “Geto Suguru!” Still nothing.
“What is he doing?”
“Nothing good can come from him.”
“Yeah, but,” and here Yuuji wavers slightly, “he doesn’t really look all there?”
“Is that going to stop you?”
“No. Of course not.”
Yuuji clenches his fists, cursed energy surging eagerly like dogs just before they’re released to hunt. They’re about to leap down to face whatever the curse has in store, when it stumbles to its knees. The doll drags on the rubble. Clumsy, so clumsy that it cannot be the same person as the stunning martial artist they had faced not long ago, it digs around in its stained gojo-gesa and produces a grey cube.
“Gojo-sensei,” Yuuji breathes.
The phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” takes on new meaning when you learn there was a chicken that survived, headless, for a year and a half. Despite no eyes, no mouth, and nothing but a brain stem, it lived. More than lived, it followed its basic biological instincts to the best of its ability. It tried to peck at food, to preen itself, to make noise.
In the absence of higher processing abilities, all that is left is the body’s most intrinsic functions.
For Suguru, what else could that be but seeking Satoru?
“ Gate open ,” says a slurred, two-toned voice.
All of the clarity and charisma of the command are gone. It doesn’t matter. The Prison Realm responds nonetheless.
First grey bleeds red, then the cube expands. What once fit inside a person’s hand grows to the size of a wardrobe. The box separates, revealing a man held in the center by strands that call to mind muscle fibers. His eyes are shut. His bare arms are scarred. Beyond that, he hasn’t changed since the day he was sealed inside.
Yuuji leaps for his sensei, but Choso holds him back. The Death Painting stares at Geto and waits. For what, he isn’t sure. He’s never known what to expect from the ancient curse.
Finally, the Prison Realm releases Gojo Satoru, condensing itself back into an unnerving cube at his feet. Gojo blinks rapidly, raising a hand to shade his eyes. “Got lonely without me, huh?”
But Geto doesn’t respond.
“Oi, I’m talking to you, fake. What, you’ve gone deaf in your old age?”
No, Geto doesn’t respond. He does something far worse.
He collapses; limp, boneless, numb. And he doesn’t move.
“Suguru?”
Yuuji finally drops down, Choso following suit, but Gojo doesn’t pay them any attention. Oh, he definitely knows they’re there, but he has other priorities. Like kneeling beside Geto’s body and, with the tiniest application of Blue Yuuji’s ever seen, severing the knot holding Geto’s bizarre stitches together and pulling the wound apart.
And then pulling the scalp from Geto’s head.
If this had been before Shibuya, Yuuji would have vomited. As it stands, one night has shown him far, far worse things. He shudders, but he keeps watching.
Gojo removes the top half of Geto’s head, then stares at what’s there. Or, rather, what’s not. Yuuji is just as mystified. Where there is supposed to be a brain, something , is just an empty cavern of bone.
“Oh, Suguru, what’ve you done?”
Geto Suguru smiles. And he stays there, smiling, frozen, and soon, as Yuuji knows intimately well, dead.
Properly, this time.