Darkness surrounded him on all sides... yet he felt sheltered, serene and at peace. A gentle warmth embraced him, chasing away all his negative thoughts, worries and painful memories. He seemed to be floating in an ocean of well-being from which he would never have wanted to be torn. Everything was... perfect...
Yet, in the distance, an unpleasant murmur could be heard. At first it seemed to him to be no more than a faint wave disturbing the perfect surface of his sea of tranquillity, but it grew exponentially louder, making him cower in fear.
Not that... He didn't want to hear it... He didn't want him here... Alas, the voice was now all too audible, literally shattering his eardrums with its snide, authoritative tone. HE was there ...
"GAMIN!... GAMIN! YOUR INFERNAL OBJECT WON'T STOP MAKING HORRIBLE NOISES! GO STOP IT I NEED IT!" screamed Ryomen Sukuna, king of plagues, his unwanted guest and personal drama queen...
"Go to die..." murmured Yujii Itadori, his eyes stubbornly closed, curling up a little more in the warmth of his duvet.
Close by, the teenager, receptacle of the demon, could now actually hear his phone screaming with all its power. How long had the alarm been going off like that? Was he late for his classes at the exorcism school? He had no fucking idea. And, he had to admit, feeling Sukuna rant like that, despite the fact that he was already giving him an abominable headache before dawn, was well worth being late for. He didn't have much control over the plague and its interaction with his mind or even his body. So every little bit of revenge was immensely satisfying for the young man. Sometimes he even mentally counted the 'points' of annoyance scored by him or his unbearable roommate in the course of a single day. Unfortunately, Sukuna often won, but he still tried to hit him as often as he could.
"GAMIN!" mentally echoed the tattooed scourge, "BUT LEAVE ME THE PLACE SO I CAN AT LEAST SHUT THIS THING DOWN!
a slight smile played on yujii's lips, imagining his malevolent alter ego facing the technology of his phone that was unknown to him, probably ending up destroying part of the city just to stop the ringing because he couldn't just 'swipe' the alarm.
"In your dreams, man..." he sighed before stretching nonchalantly under his sheets, turning over limply before rolling the sleeping muscles of his back and arms against the mattress.
Against his ear, the budding exorcist could hear the other grumbling, giving him his first point of the day. Well... Sukuna had also won one for the migraine that was already twisting in his skull, but the tie was still a good start before 7am. Rather delighted, Yujii finally decided to get out of bed, sitting down on his mattress, still wrapped up in his duvet, the slight smile on his lips not disappearing. He cast a knowing glance at his smartphone still screaming on his desk, a few yards from his bed. He'd always been the type to miss his alarm clocks. Ever since he'd started secondary school, he'd decided to keep his alarm clock as far away from him as possible to avoid the alarms going off and him falling asleep again immediately, just to avoid countless warnings due to delays in his schoolwork... He would never have thought that this habit could one day become a torture for the man they called the king of scourges...
With a deliberately lazy gesture, even though the noise was disturbing him, it had to be said, he got up lazily to go and get the telephone. He stared at it for a few more seconds, silently thanking it with his soft hazel eyes, finally turning off the blaring alarm with a sweep of his thumb. Instantly, once the silence had fallen heavily on his room, the plague fell silent in his mind, relieved. Yujii couldn't take away this shared satisfaction... and it also exasperated him a little.
"At least now you'll both shut up..." he said as he rose completely from his bed, finishing stretching to rouse himself from his slumber.
"Impertinent... you won't be so impertinent when I possess your body and..." began Sukuna in his tenor voice...
So as not to hear him speak any more, the teenager immediately launched a musical playlist with heavy, powerful rock sounds, drowning out the words of his parasite neighbour in a noisy flurry of notes and songs that he would surely hate. He relished the thought... He sighed once more in the darkness of his room, lost in the dormitories of Tokyo's exorcism high school, banishing to the depths of his mind the complexity that his life had become since he had accidentally assimilated one of the demon's fingers. Never, just a few months ago, would he have imagined all this... The relics, the plagues, the exorcists, the war they'd been waging tirelessly for millennia, and his unlikely nature granting him the power to assimilate and 'manage' the most dangerous demon that ever existed ... It was as if everyone's existence depended on a fortuitous upheaval that could reveal so much that had been hidden until now...
And yet, now, all this was his daily bread. Enduring the incessant palavering of his over-powerful and detestable guest, who was only waiting for one thing: to steal his body... Studying as a future exorcist whose ultimate goal was to die once he had assimilated all the fingers of the aforementioned plague... And moving forward as himself to find a way to survive it all... He never thought he'd be carrying so much weight on his shoulders so suddenly. But hadn't his grandfather, on the brink of death, warned him of all this in some way? He didn't know himself, as if he were being tossed around like a nutshell in a flood of information that was completely beyond him... He never thought he'd be in the middle of such chaos... He had never been prepared for all this... He wasn't ready... He was lost and was just trying to move forward in the direction that seemed best to him, step by step...
"EH! Itadori! I hope you're awake!" cut him off abruptly in his thoughts by the voice of his classmate and misfortune, Fushiguro Megumi, on the other side of his bedroom door. "Gojo sensei is waiting for us, as long as it's on time! Move or I'll leave without you!"
For a handful of seconds he stared at the wooden partition, as if transfixed. Every day was now a complete unknown, a challenge for him, who until recently had been just another student at a secondary school, just a little better than average at sports. But in spite of everything, in spite of all the shadows surrounding him, in spite of Sukuna seizing every opportunity, in spite of everything that his demonic awakening could engender, the teenager knew that he was not alone. He could surely face all that...
"Itadori!" the brunet repeated authoritatively from the corridor.
Smiling for himself and against his personal demon, the young man crossed his room with a determined step, filled once again with his unfailingly positive energy (much to the perplexed dismay of the king of the plagues he was sheltering), going to open his door with a gesture far too full of dynamism, which slammed violently into the wall.
"I'm here, Fushiguro! I'm almost ready, wait for me!" he exclaimed cheerfully.
The young man with the cobalt eyes stared at him and his pyjamas for a few seconds, before letting out a deep sigh that made Yujii blush hard.
"You're not planning to go to school like that, I hope?" Megumi resumed, "You're hopeless, get dressed, I'll wait for you... But not for long..." he continued, an imperceptible smile floating across his thin lips...
