Stay of Execution 1.5

Content Warning: Cannibalism

"Wait, who're you?"

Before them stood Kinji, who by all means remained identical to the last time they'd met save for the color of his hair. Today's pigment was bright blue.

"Whatever do you mean, Ara?" Nigi asked, cocking his head to one side. "This is clearly Kinji Hakari—his hair has simply changed with the warming weather."

"Humans can do that?" She looked genuinely intrigued. "Like dogs?"

"Indeed!" The older curse replied with a confident nod, entirely satisfied with his utterly baseless assumption.

Hakari, for his part, smothered a snort and decided to refrain from correcting the misconception—it was funnier this way, in his opinion.

"Anyways," the sorcerer interrupted, "word is that people 'round here have been disappearing and then turning up dead and mauled, without much in the way of residuals. That means we're dealing with a curse that's at least a little smart." Kinji tapped the side of his head for emphasis. "All three of us are still overkill, but Teach wanted to know how you two goons would deal with something more complicated than 'go there, kill that'."

Ara made a face. "This is dumb," she declared, "...can you get us food after? Yuta does it."

"Of course he does." Hakari remarked with good humor. His underclassman really was too nice for his own good—except when he was fighting. Then he was a goddamn lunatic. "You know what? Sure. Someone's gotta do it while the guy's off training in Africa, and it sure as hell ain't gonna be Gojo." He paused, then added with a shrug. "Well, I guess it technically will be, since it's his money…"

They began walking, but the conversation continued. "Can you get me the meat bag?" Ara wondered. "Yuta got it for the dogs but each time I ask for it he asks if I want anything else instead."

…Right, Yuta had mentioned something about Ara eating dog food, hadn't he?

"Must you?" Nigi asked wearily. "I cannot fathom what you see in that slop—it smells positively foul, and even a flyhead has a superior flavour palette."

"The smell's the best part," she argued back, "you eat boba for the taste and meat for the smell." The curse stated this like it was obvious. "That's why you puke up the boba later."

Nigi replied with a particular strain of exasperation that could only have been born of familiarity. "Pray tell, then, where flyheads and putrescent animal carcasses land on the spectrum between boba and meat?"

She looked genuinely stumped at this. "Well, I don't puke 'em out later, so it can't be 'cause they taste good."

"And what does puke have to do with any of this?"

"So you can taste it twice, idiot." Ara retorted. "That's why it happens to boba."

Even Hakari, whose speciality was marching to the beat of his own drum, wasn't really sure what to say to that assertion.

It used to be a person, but something about it being dead made it look and smell fake.

A lack of cursed energy, maybe. Humans had different smells that tasted stronger when they felt something, so it made sense that dead ones who didn't feel anything wouldn't smell like anything, either.

It dressed like Ijichi, with boring colors and too much fabric, but something raked through its torso several times over, leaving splinters of bone and other weird inside stuff spattered across the floor.

Why was human blood red?

She opened her mouth to ask, but Nigi spoke up before she could. "What a senseless waste of life." His voice was soft as he stooped over the corpse, grey fingers trailing gingerly over its face before withdrawing as though burned.

She looked closer, trying to find whatever Nigi had that made him so upset. It just looked like a carcass, no different from the rats she found on the side of the road. It wasn't like they knew who it was, or that there was anything special about it.

Ara poked its cheek with a nail. It didn't move or anything. Gross. She wiped her finger on Nigi's hakama and stood back up.

…They were quiet. Why were they still upset?

"What do you do with dead humans when you're done with them?" she wondered. "Do you throw them out?" She hadn't found any lying around, so they had to be going somewhere.

"That would be wasteful." Nigi disagreed with a shake of his head, his voice still noticeably quieter than usual. Ara waited for a moment, but the expected elaboration didn't come, which was honestly as noticeable as Nigi's tone of voice.

Hakari, for his part, grimaced and neglected to answer Ara's perfectly reasonable question. Instead, the sorcerer crossed his arms and observed, "The residuals here are all muddled, just like Teach mentioned. We're gonna need to do a sweep of the area and see if we can't pick up anything else around here." He jerked his head towards the door of the apartment. "We'll swing by here again if we don't find anything better."

He and Nigi made to depart, and she prepared to follow. Something about his answer (or lack thereof) lingered oddly in the back of her head. Maybe it was something obvious. Humans had specialized storefronts where they could buy prepared corpses—perhaps dead humans were taken there?

How efficient. Using one's own dead to feed their young had a weird symmetry she was hard pressed to argue against. Then again, humans just threw away the bodies that got squished beneath their cars. Maybe leaving them for too long made them bad? Nigi seemed to think so.

She circled back around, crouched in front of the body in the hope she could figure out what the big deal was. A pallid finger traced the contours of its cheek and the swoop of its jaw before slowly making its way back up.

Surely they wouldn't notice if anything was missing, right? It wasn't a big deal.

Ara delicately dug her fingernails into the crevice between the eye and its socket. The sharp edges caught on something, and with a quick jerk to cut through, freed the organ altogether.

If curses were born from humans, then surely eating a human directly wouldn't be too different.

Ara bit down.

In the end, the closest comparison she could draw was to the boba she'd been offered so many days before. It was saltier, true, but it required a similar amount of force to rupture.

Once reduced into jelly, her cursed energy leeched residuals from the stuff too faint to be useful. Slowly but surely, bits and pieces fit together.

Something dark. Walking home. Work tomorrow. Pressure-

Overtime, underpaid, just a little more-

She frowned and dug deeper.

Your name is-

"What the fuck are you doing!?"

She swallowed quickly and jolted back around. Hakari was standing in the doorway, hands curled into fists and eyes wide.

For some reason, speaking up felt like a bad idea.

Why was he mad?

Did she do something wrong?

Something dripped down her chin. Maybe he wanted some?

She blinked and the corpse wasn't there. Or… it was, but she was on the other side of the room. One of Kinji's arms pinned her torso against his side in a vice grip. She squirmed fruitlessly. His cursed energy felt like sandpaper.

"You said you weren't gonna use it!"

Hakari stared at her, his expression of astonishment quickly giving way to anger. Before he could speak, though, Nigi walked into the apartment and froze, head turned towards Hakari and Ara. An expression of exasperation crossed his face.

"What has she done this time?"

"She was eating the guy!" Hakari barked, gesturing to the corpse with his free arm. They both ignored her protest of "only a little!"

There was a long moment of silence before Nigi replied, his voice puzzled. "...What of it? Life has long since departed that human—what remains is meat alone." Nigi crossed his arms. "If not her, then surely others would have partaken eventually, yes?"

"No!" Kinji exclaimed, eyes wide and anger slowly fading back to astonishment. He'd known they were morons, but he hadn't realized just how far it went! He exhaled, and loosened his hold on Ara—not enough to let her free, but enough that his jagged cursed energy was no longer scraping up against her. "We—humans—don't eat people."

"Well, of course you would not." Nigi agreed calmly and slowly, as though explaining something to a child. "Neither of us would slay a person for something as banal as food either—but this corpse is a person no longer."

They just didn't get it, Kinji realized. Whether it was because nobody had taught them otherwise or because of some instinct inherent to curses, the fact remained that they didn't understand the taboo of cannibalism—curses or not, the twins were too humanlike for it not to be cannibalism—or the importance placed on proper burial.

Perhaps mercifully, this wasn't the time to explain all the problems with their mindset. Less mercifully, Kinji knew he'd have to be the one to explain it to them—Gojo sure as shit wouldn't do it.

"...I can explain everything wrong with all that shit you just said later." Hakari finally settled on. "Right now, it's more important that we track down whatever curse did this."

Ara wriggled again, and when he refused to drop her, slumped into place. A globule of drool mixed with god knows what else fell to the floor. "Do we gotta?" she mumbled. "I don't think a curse got 'im."

Hakari jerked his gaze down to her. "The hell are you talking about?"

"A human did it. Whatever opened the body happened after." Ara said. "It gets muddy after a bit, though—maybe something hit its head."

"...Another part of that face-stealing thing you can do?" Kinji surmised after a moment. "Wait, why didn't you say anything before?"

She frowned. "'Cause you were mad at me for eating him." Ara looked back up. "It'd be easier to figure out if you let me have more." She didn't look guilty in the slightest. He got the impression what prompted that question was hunger just as much as it was an attempt to be helpful.

A wave of realization mixed with disgust washed over Hakari—a sensation that couldn't have been more diametrically opposed to the fever he so craved. "No." The sorcerer bit out firmly. "You—neither of you," he jabbed a finger at Nigi as well, "—are allowed to eat any more human corpses!"

Nigi raised his hands as though in surrender—and in fairness, Hakari had never seen the older of the two eat anything, corpse or otherwise.

"Not even a little?" Ara grumbled, but there was no heat behind it. "You said you'd get me food."

Even more than having to explain to them why what they did was wrong, Kinji was dreading having to explain this bullshit to Gojo in a way that didn't get the Blunder Twins executed.