Chapter Text
The line beeps, waiting.
At least it isn’t as dead as the body at her wiggling feet. With every beep, every heartline flattening and reemerging, her fingers cramp around the green plastic with more force and leave bloody streaks on it.
Their carpet is ruined. The blood thoroughly fills every crevice and crack in the soft, short plush. It stains the pink ruffles on her night gown as she shuffles her feet, unable to look away from the scene.
She carved his head in good. It looks like a peeled egg on one side. And a deformed, rotten mango on the other. Wet, open flesh, brain matter, and blood splattered like some sort of broken spaghetti bowl with tons of Bolognese sauce. It almost feels like the blood puddle around the iron murder weapon undulates, dances with a few stray lights shining in through the window as she waits for the other person to answer. When the landline finally clicks and the call goes through and is answered, she exhales, a gentle, short plume that freezes in the winter air coming in through the open curtains.
“Hey,” she starts casually, bubbling like her feet wobbling up and down in the wet.
“Do you like Italian?”
“It is three in the morning.” Her mind plays tricks on her. The body never moves, but as the lights in front of the curtains wane and waver, she almost thinks the corpse twitches, ready to stand up. It makes her laugh. The giggle comes out in a squeezed trachea and bitten, blistered lips.
“Bad timing?”
“I repeat,” the voice says sharply. Almost as sharply as the pungent stench of death slowly crawling into her nose. She breathes through her teeth.
“It is three in the morning, and I told you to never call me if it wasn’t a matter of utmost importance. So what do you want?”
“I swear it was kind of self-defense.”
There is a shuffle, a crack, before the iron-tinned voice on the other end sighs.
“Where are you?”
“At home, dummy. I wouldn’t call if I weren’t.”
“Are you alone?”
The blood is just sticking between her toes and soaking the carpet by now, a black tar pool in the dark. She wonders how it would move if she just stomped into it like a kid wearing rain boots running through puddles.
“You know, I was waiting for you to ask me out.”
For a second, she thinks the phone will just be slammed back onto the fork, and she will find herself in a cell. And prison food is probably not great for her skin. So she pivots as she stares at the way the head is carved in.
“That’s a yes, I don’t hear the other one howling.”
“She’s out of town,” Mika says.
The next words come out in a whine, hiding her disgust. She doesn’t really appreciate any kind of dirt and waste, human or otherwise, but the longer the blood soaks, the longer it’ll take to remove it. And there is way too little time before work.
“I didn’t mean to kill someone today. It just happened. I reaaaaally need your help. Please?”
A key clanks on the other end of the line, then scraping noises as something gets dragged.
“Stay where you are,” the voice demands. “If you touch anything, I swear I’ll put your body on top.”
“Sweet. The backdoor is unlocked. See you.”
And with that casualty, the phone dies.
So she sits down right next to it, staring at the spaghetti brain and the kitchen instruments used to crack it open. Mika stares at the swaying curtains, counting the dead line as it warns her, but the phone just dangles down on the wire, a pendulum that sways over her head now, the longer she stares at the corpse in her living room.
She makes near no sound, plopping into the blood where she stood before, silk drenched in rot and splattered organs. When a light clicks on in the kitchen, she almost screams.
Uraume stretches toward the doorframe carefully, pale face frowning, the longer they take in the scene. Mika takes a moment not to stare at the noodle brain and watches them instead. Which is inherently nicer, but alas, under these bad circumstances, not ideal.
So she just focuses on the slight tousle in the usually perfectly straightened out bright hair, the single strand that stands up unwillingly, above the frowning face, taking in the murder scene, and setting down a backpack.
“Can I move again?” She asks, crossing her bloody arms over her chest, and a pink ribbon itches over the sensitive part of her inner arm.
“Yes.”
Their eyes take in the blood in the half light, flicker over to the open window, then her body drenched in organs. At long last, they linger on the meat tenderizer, like it is some artifact in a museum, even if it is just three steps away on a plush, dirty carpet now.
“I thought your friend was the dumb one. How did this happen?”
She sighs.
“I told you, it was an accident. I didn’t invite him here; he just showed up.”
Plastic snaps as they right the gloves over delicate fingers. Mika takes two steps over. Her feet leave bloody prints on the PVC.
“You look nice for someone thrown out the bed.”
Uraume ignores her, consequently, assessing the scene with two more flickering looks before turning to her again.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” She unfurls her arms again as if to show that the only blood under her nails is the one from the corpse. “I just clobbered him. Straight to the head when he wasn’t looking.”
Uraume’s gloved hands waver over her arm, turn the inside, staring at the three scratches she didn’t even notice above the blue, pounding veins.
Their two fingers tap over the scabs once. It is a soft, almost clinical touch, but it does more than killing someone to her heart, weirdly. As if that is a much better high to chase.
“Oh,” she makes, almost wistfully, hoping the hand never disappears. “I must’ve scraped myself somewhere running around the house before I called you.”
“What happened?” They ask, still inspecting her arm with deeply unseated movements, barely touching her skin, as if it burns through the plastic of the glove.
“He was trying to blackmail me. Well. You, I guess, too.”
She shrugs, and a sticky, dirty, wild strand of red, bleached orange hair falls over her. Uraume’s fingers squeeze her wrist before they retreat, a cool but reassuring gesture that makes her feel more bold than before.
“Since we are in this together. I had to take that into my own hands.”
“I’d love it if your hands asked for a reason before you did this, Miss Tanaka.”
She stares at them now, with the small crusts of dried death under the peeled, neon nails, and wonders why it was so easy to just stagger a grown adult before brutalizing him. She wonders if she should feel burning shame, but everything is just a tinged blur of some sort of worry and pride.
Pride? That’s not new. But it might become worrisome. I might not only be the dumb one but the crazy one.
I guess Yorozu deserves an apology if I don’t end up in a cell.
Uraume walks around the kitchen, collecting things like it’s just another day, cleaning dishes, and frozen still in the kitchen in the bloody gown, Mika just watches before she decides to tap over and lock the back door to the miserable brown yard. It is chilly in the small house. The boiler protests when Uraume runs water until it turns into heat, swirling fog into the air.
“I don’t have to work until Tuesday,” she says, as if that means anything.
A car passes. For a beat, they both freeze, listening, but besides passing headlights, nothing happens.
“Then you better help to clean up,” they answer, before stopping her with a slow, insulting wave. The blade of the carpet cutter gleams in the single lamp lit in the kitchen, easy to stab her with and clean up two times, she guesses, but it simply slices through a line of plastic, and Mika follows the motion as if she is hypnotized.
“You never ask me to help with anything that isn’t delivery.”
“Everything has a first time, I guess.” Uraume sighs. “At least clean yourself. And bag the gown. Don’t run around like that.”
“Huh.” She swings the hem back and forth, and the blood is a copper crust at the seams by now.
“I really liked it. I got it as a birthday gift.”
“We’ll put it with the rest. But don’t track blood through the house.”
She wasn’t going to, she wants to say, because she is not that stupid, but words are really unimportant now, since time is money and money is short.
So, instead, all the while Uraume clicks a carpet knife open and works, and plastic bags silently rustle, procured in an endless parade from the backpack, she simply wipes her naked soles as best as she can and grabs the open bottle of bleach.
The gown slips off her shoulders by the bathroom door, burn scars and pink skin in a mirror, and then the bleach slips over her. The smell makes her head spin, nauseating in the green tiled space. The flowers on the wallpaper rotate and spin before they fly away like shooting stars. At first, everything is cool, before the pain starts to burn all her pores. Her skin grows tight as she scrubs her hands in it; the scratches itch and burn. It tickles, kind of, as she washes it away and repeats the process bit by bit.
She rather laughs it off than cry it away when the fumes sting in her eyes, blurry, jolly madness.
Her face is nothing but a blur in white and red in the distant mirrors before she trudges toward her bedroom, shivering. Since the house is so small, it is one of two bedrooms, and beneath a brigade of plushes, vomited out pink and magenta colors, there is nothing, just an empty void full of plastic, the longer she stares at it. That is so funny.
People always make fun of her for being vapid and stupid. She kind of understands now. That they almost see it. Past the facade. Under all the fluff and plush and ribbons is nothing. Or at least there WAS nothing. Who knows.
The jeans hang in marbled frays down her legs before she buckles the heavy belt tight, coral plastic clicking into place with too many rhinestones.
Her shirt is the same way, a basic old thing in faint, washed-out pink with a faded print and big, white letters on it.
Her burn marks shine past the collar as it slips off her shoulder, a print that blisters as angrily and festers as frizzled as her red hair, with taupe undertones that burn where she scrubbed herself in bleach. Mika fumbles for socks she doesn't hate.
The ones she finds are mismatched: one with cartoon cherries, one with faint polka dots, and a hole near the toe. But that’s fine. No one's grading her wardrobe while she’s dragging a corpse. Not unless it's Uraume, and they don’t count. They judge for sport all day long. Uraume doesn’t look up when she carefully tiptoes through the flower shower on the walls. They're kneeling down, bags packed and laid out like puzzle pieces, plastic furled like picnic cloth and wrapped like a present.
The body is already half wrapped in it, with most of the splattered brain gone. A single foot playing peekaboo speaks about its existence. And then there’s the murder weapon, of course. It rests between them on the ground, crusted in small scraps of skull from the second and third hits that fully carved the skull in.
“This isn’t how I imagined our next meet-cute,” she says, smiling with too many teeth. Her gown shakes as she stretches and puts it in a bag. Their house stinks, it stinks like all the wrong mixtures of chemicals burning everything away at once, until her sense of smell is broken and she tastes the chemicals on her tongue, and it keeps getting worse the more she lingers. Uraume doesn’t answer. They’re slicing the carpet now—clean, quiet motions that make Mika’s stomach bubble. It might just be the brain matter on the meat tenderizer that she stares at. But it’s beautiful, in a brutal way. She likes watching them work. She likes how they never stumble.
“I’m really glad you picked up,” she says softly.
“That makes one of us. This is very risky.”
Risky. Yes. Now that makes her fully unravel in quiet laughter, while she leans next to the plastic sheet and helps to squeeze the cut-out pieces of carpet over it without touching it bare-handed. Plastic on plastic screeches and squeaks as their gloves press the drenched, fluffy fabric in it.
"Hey, how many times have you done this?" she asks. They pause, look at her, and don't answer. She doesn’t know if they are simply so fed up that silence is preferable or if they are simply focused. Mika hums, unconcerned.
“Like, in total, I mean. Before he got caught.” Uraume’s hands choke the carpet before letting go, and she almost falls into the wet floor as they do so. “The way your harebrained friend rotates,” they say, and it is full of something sour and petty in the quirk of their lips. “I was sure she told you all about it.”
Defending her friend would be the valuable thing to do, but she doesn’t feel like it, and it isn’t like her roommate would ever defend her over a thing like this. Outside of deep hatred and unhinged detachments for murder, there is not much love to share right now.
“I mean, she did. She does nothing else, and I really don’t like it. I hate it more than her running around naked. Like, please, that is unhygienic. Not my kitchen.”
She rolls her eyes as far back into the skull as possible.
“And I don’t sleep in court, but still. I was just going to ask the real deal.”
Uraume slices through the last of the carpet with a fast, decisive pull, all sharp corners and focused eyes.
The plastic bags line up in a neat order at the edge of the space, one of them with her gown, one with the weapon, all fully soaked with sprinkles of blood staining the inside of the opaque plastic.
“I’ve done messier things than this, if that was your question.”
It wasn’t, and I don’t really care. Have you seen our predicament in these last weeks?
“I can’t imagine you being messy.”
The compliment shatters at the smooth exterior, but that never stopped her from trying, as she helps to finalize the cleaning, for now. The clock in the living room beside the couch blinks in an alarming 5:00, and Mika can’t decide if that is fast, sloppy, or if they miss too much time.
Soon, the neighborhood is going to be all awake, and having both a visitor and a corpse over are bad ideas.
“It’s time,” Uraume says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world, and if they read her mind. There is the smallest smear of dark copper over the white shoulder of their turtleneck, and for a second, she is sure they’ll cut that away too.
Like tumors, and she wonders if they’ll cut her away too, later.
The thought is useless, since she is too deep in this mess, and not just this one murder, but it makes her take a halt.
She doesn’t move for a moment, just watches them, blinking as the room feels suddenly very, very small and keeps turning in the sulfuric acid haze. Sure, she knows what they mean, but her head is slow to process things tonight, and her ditzy girl act takes over on autopilot.
“Right. Time for what?” Uraume turns to her, their eyes narrow with frustration, but the faintest trace of something else lingers in their gaze. Something hard to decipher.
“To get rid of everything.”
“You sure it’s safe to move him?” Uraume’s lips twitch, just the slightest curve, like they’re suppressing something darkly amused. It is probably the closest time she ever made them anything akin to laughing, so she takes it.
“Safe? No. Necessary? Yes. You take legs, I take what’s left of the head.”
The tone is cutting, but it makes her laugh. It is a brief, jagged sound that doesn’t feel like her own. She bites her lip, trying to settle her nerves, and fails, so she lets herself flutter in place.
“Okay, okay,” Mika mutters, swallowing down the rest of her unease. “But the house still stinks, and you cut out half my living room. You’re really not concerned?” Uraume doesn’t seem bothered.
“It’s temporary.” She blows a strand of orange hair out of her face.
“I trust your judgement.”
They turn away before she can didact if that was a good choice or a bad one, but it is all that she has, so she lets it slide.
The car parks one driveway away, next to an old shack. She guesses she can be lucky that even in the winter cold, there is no snow right now. Only soft frost that lies in a thin crust over surfaces, glazing them in ice in the dark.
The cold hits her with a fist when she holds the body hunched over, praying not to slip as they move. Crinkling between her stiff fingers, the plastic is heavy, but she’s not that weak. Killing a man with what basically is a hammer accounts for that at least. The neighborhood is too quiet.
Even with all the lights out, who knows who is watching them? Their breaths and steps echo as their feet crunch over the frosted soil and weak grass. The times before were different; she wasn’t in her home, and it wasn’t her carpet in bags, and not a body she had to carry out of her living room. Now, the world is too close, and it doesn’t sit right. It hunts her pulse in a chase, before she can calm her nerves, and the body almost escapes from her grasp.
After a short, uncoordinated struggle, they make it past the bushes and the neatly lettered mailboxes toward the old shack. The body barely fits the trunk, and she puts her weight on top of it, almost falling into the splattered brain, before retreating and finding that Uraume has already moved on to the other plastic bags.
“Body has to go first,” they say, as if that guidance is helpful. Outside in the ice, they’re draped in a dark trench coat. Mika holds her arms and shivers since she did not bring a coat.
“I’d burn your clothes, but I don’t have any gasoline. So we’ll sink it the same as the carpet.”
“Wait a moment.” None of the neighbors looks out their window, even if there is a single small light on the porch flickering in a bright white, and that is a blessing, as she sneaks back through the bushes. Her jacket hangs right next to the front door in the vapors, and she also grabs that, lining inside broken, fluffy faux fur collar rising over the cracked denim and the same kind og peeling rhinestones as her belt.
The gasoline is right where she left it the last time. When she returns with it, Uraume stares at her muddied, healing, scabbed acid acid-washed face, then back at the full, heavy canister.
“You don’t have a car.”
She hurls the canister over into the passenger seat.
“You don’t know how many things I had to burn with a roommate like Yorozu even before all this.”
For the first time tonight, Uraume seems genuinely pleased, before closing the door behind her and getting back into the driver’s seat.
Dumping the body into the water is the easiest part of this. It gets by extremely fast. They don’t sink the bags all in the same spot, and so the next hour and a half, they drive around the outskirts of the town and the dark, seedy parts of an industrial complex before there is nothing left in the trunk but her night gown and a few straggling pieces of fabric and interior that Uraume snatched earlier.
She’ll miss them, but what is to do? Keeping evidence is stupid. She is already exposed enough. Watching the pink ruffles curl together in pain and then die as they burn away, everything crashes in.
The gasoline burns all her senses away, or whatever was left after the stinging dry thickness of the bleach under her skin.
The longer she stares at the fire, the more all her scars tickle, until she crosses her arms and looks rather at the dark, empty sky and Uraume’s shadow flickering over the brick wall behind them.
“Thanks for helping me,” she mutters.
“Don’t thank me yet,” they answer, feeding the flames in the rusted barrel, burning the proof of this night away. “We aren’t done.”
A strange calm washes over her the longer she stares at both the shadow and the person throwing it. It is an orange lit, faint silhouette in black and white, with the smallest glimmers of color, strangely fitting right into the cold.
Maybe it’s the thrill. Maybe it’s the cold, methodical rhythm of it all. Maybe it is just the quiet. It is so rarely quiet; being with someone who never loses their head is nice.
But whatever it is, Mika feels it sink deeper into her chest the more she helps, and it tumbles in her stomach. She stares at the paper they stuff into the fire.
The letters on the newspaper peel off, but she sees a familiar face in a blurry camera shot in the courtroom, unblinking, unbothered eyes in a bored expression, hair slightly unruly in the image, tattoos gleaming through.
The image evokes a flicker of the last months, and with that, repeated whispers, hushed words, and knives. And so many bodies.
VERDICT FOR KING OF CURSES: DEATH ROW?
Sukuna’s face crumbles into a ball as the blood and cotton swallows it in the flames. Under it, barely readable as the second line on the page, a single word springs to mind: MURDER Mika bites her lip before she looks back over in the frosted morning air.
“After this,” she says, her voice softer now, almost tired, but she tries to give it more strength, some grit she never ever possessed. “Do you think we can get breakfast before you drop me off? I swear I am starving .”