chaos junkie

(they/he) | trans, queer, mad | 27 | writer AO3: parsnips_and_meth

[parsnips-and-meth]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

They stay up until the night ticks over into tomorrow. The moon is a waxing crescent, in the process of wasting away. Satoru wonders if Princess Kaguya might have been relieved to be banished to Earth if she had spent half her life running from the encroaching darkness.

But then, Earth is a little like that, too. It almost wouldn’t be worth it, if not for the people who buy him goldfish, just to make him smile.

——

… holy shit, lol. i did it

it is 2 AM right now so i’m going to keep this brief, as i mostly wrote what i want to say in the author’s notes – but the most important message is –

THANK YOU. honest to god i cannot emphasis that enough. a slaughterhouse, an outlet mall has been incredibly cathartic for me to work on, and there has been nothing but kindness and love from the people reading it. every comment made me giddy. every message even more so. i am incredibly, incredibly grateful.

i hope this final chapter meets your expectations. i would love to know what you think of it, and/or what you thought of the fic as a whole.

i will be back again soon for more nonsense – i have many projects planned and i will not be stopped. please stick around!

thank you again, for being here. all my love <3

[parsnips-and-meth]

was given a z-drug for sleep, which i think is really funny. zzz. haha. anyway, shame it doesn’t work

[parsnips-and-meth]

killswitch lullaby (extract)

SUMMARY: In which Death is a teenage boy, and Suguru is forced to live ad infinitum.

WARNINGS: canon-typical gore, suicidal ideation

this is a work in progress for The Monster Mash series... and i am very excited about it

———

The first time Suguru fails to die, he’s on the Uji Bridge at the entrance to the inner Ise Shrine – Kōtai Jingū. Merely paces from the home of the Sacred Mirror, gifted by the goddess of the sun, Amaterasu, to her grandson, Ninigi, and then eventually to Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan and divine in his own right.

According to legend, when Amaterasu bestowed her grandson the mirror, she told him to serve it as he would her soul: with clean mind and body. Maybe, if Suguru had just made it to the Temizusha beyond the bridge – washed his hands, rinsed his mouth, rid himself of impurity – then things would have played out differently. But he didn’t make it that far, and in the end, it’s irrelevant. There are no gods; only jujutsu sorcerers. Nothing is truly sacred. He lives that day and every day after because he was born cursed, and no body of water can undo that. 

As such, it goes like this – Suguru Geto takes his last breath on the Uji Bridge, but it is not the conclusion he expects. Instead, it’s a footnote. Because moments later, the audience calls for an encore, and he gasps like a newborn. He takes his first breath, again, and this will be Mark II. He has as little choice in it as he did the first time, when his mother’s cryptic pregnancy came to fruition on their kitchen floor. 

The first thing he notices is the afternoon sky. It’s still bright with sun and broken up by infant clouds, all of which have moved a little to the east since he last saw them. The wind is lazy. March is coming to a close, and the scent of sakura is teasing at the horizon.

The second thing he notices is a boy. He’s sitting on the balustrade, chewing a wad of strawberry gum. He has string-bean limbs and hair as pale as lilies. His tea-shades are too dark to see behind, and there’s a plaster wrapped around one of his thumbs. Beneath the hem of his basketball shorts, a pair of grass-stained knees. 

“Yo,” he says.

Now, Suguru is intimately familiar with the components of curses. At seventeen, he has swallowed so many that he can look at one and effectively predict its brand of foulness. This one will be battery-acid-sour, that one will taste like carrion, etcetera, etcetera. But this curse – the one currently blowing a baby pink bubble and swinging its legs with an air of idle teenage boredom – is difficult to discern. Because it is a curse, that much he can tell. But its energy is so unusual, so unique, that can it really be called a curse if it doesn’t look like any of the others? 

“Hello,” the boy-curse snarks, snapping his fingers. “You alive? I could’ve sworn you were alive.”

Suguru, stupidly, considers telling the curse that he wishes he weren’t. That he’s been thinking, recently, about the nature of being alive and the tyranny of it. That he’s been reading Kōbō Abe and Franz Kafka and other, non-sorcerer authors, and has determined that he, too, is loved conditional to his use and would like to die a cockroach. There’s meaning, at least, in that. 

(The irony, of course, lies in the misery of such novels, and therefore their sustenance of ‘the problem’.)

But Suguru isn’t dead, and he supposes it doesn’t do well to ruminate on ‘what ifs’. He somehow survived the encounter with the special grade he was sent to exorcise, if the orb burning through his pocket is any evidence. Although he could have sworn they went down in tandem – the weight of his own guts in his lap is not something he imagined. And sure enough, his trousers are sodden with browning blood. “I don’t understand,” he says very intelligently, to no one in particular, because he doesn’t. 

The boy-curse snorts. “Me neither. This is a first for me, too.”

“A first?” Suguru mumbles, realising he is still lying prostrate, peering up at what is, undeniably, a powerful being. It should make him feel vulnerable. It doesn’t. There’s something strangely soothing about the flow of its cursed energy. It moves like a snow flurry, laps like the inevitability of an approaching high tide. “What’s a first?”

“Well,” the boy-curse muses, “usually, when I come to collect, the bodies stay, you know…” He drags a hand across his throat and makes a sharp noise. “Dead.”

Dead. It’s possible, perhaps, that Suguru grasped the reverse cursed technique on the cusp, the Styx. It would be unfortunate – he can think of at least one person who deserved this epiphany more. 

(This generation’s Six Eyes, butchered in the courtyard, at the nexus, like a roast pig at the centre of a feast. The piece-de-resistance, with an apple in her mouth—)

But then the curse rambles on. “You were out for, like, a solid four minutes, too. No life signs. But your soul just kept… ” He makes a droning noise. It has impossible harmonies. Clatters at the back of his throat, distinctly inhuman. With the exception of its cursed energy, this is the first real example of fiendish behaviour. It might look like a teenager. It might have the posture of one, the devil-may-care – almost as though it has only ever seen, lived, teenage things. But…

For whatever reason, Suguru is in good order. There are no grazes on his hands. His intestines are in their proper place. The blood trailing from his nose is, at this point, decorative. Which means he has a duty to fulfil, and no excuse not to fulfil it, even if this peril was not on his original ticket.

He rolls onto his feet and pulls two curses from his inventory, gut tugging. A squadron of centipedes he absorbed only last week, and a special grade one with an incomprehensible number of tusks and a vicious domain. But that’s as far as he gets. Because the boy-curse whistles long and low, lips curling into a wily smile. He looks almost amused. “Ah,” he chides, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

He hasn’t moved a millimetre. Hasn’t flinched, hasn’t even acknowledged the sudden appearance of Suguru’s arsenal. And – his cursed energy hasn’t changed its flow, either, but it feels heavier, almost abyssal, like gravity has changed scale. The atmosphere swells with a heady scent that Suguru doesn't recognise; something earthy that isn't really earth, something ozone that isn't really heaven.

His curses are dismissed almost as quickly as they were summoned. The outcome of the fight has come to him as though a premonition; it's unequivocal. This curse does not feel like it can be shrunk, consumed. Exorcising it would be like slitting the throat of something completely bloodless. 

Suguru swallows a mouthful of acrid saliva. “What are you?”

“Good question," the boy, curse, thing, muses. "I’m difficult to define.”

“You're not a curse?”

“Well, yes,” he says, “and also... no.”

Suguru is beginning to feel frustrated. “That's not an answer.”

His smile widens. Sharpens, grows teeth. They don't crowd his mouth. They're blunt – human. “Do you know what people fear most?” he asks. 

“That's subjective.”

“Not really,” he retorts. Pulls his knees up to fold them criss-cross on the balustrade. “It's death.”

“Some people crave death,” Suguru counters before he can stop himself. It's too revealing, too damning – his guts are in his lap again. The boy gives him a knowing look. 

“Even then,” he insists. “It's impossible not to fear it, at least a little. Because death is beyond the telescope; it's the very quintessence of the unknown. And people will never be truly content with not knowing.” He pauses, Suguru thinks, for dramatic effect. It's weirdly childish. Then: “I might have been a curse once. But at some point, I became more significant than that. I am no longer optional. I am there whether I choose to be or not.”

It's a riddle. It's incoherent. But Suguru understands perfectly. 

“You're Death,” he resolves. Not the fear of death; Death, capital D, incarnate. A curse that, at some point, became so astronomical as to be undeniable. As to be necessary. Terror turned god, concept turned material. 

Death looks terrifyingly smug. “I’ve been called that. I've also been called the Devil, the Ferryman, the Reaper. A shinigami, though I can promise you – there aren't more of me. I am singular.” He leans forward so far that Suguru wonders if he'll fall from the balustrade. Tilts his head until he can peer at Suguru over his glasses, and—

He doesn't have eyes. He has worlds. That's the only way Suguru can describe them – they're fathomless, bottomless, an impossible spectrum of blues. They remind him a little of –

(A swamp of blood and a limp, limp thing – flesh turned inside-out, animal, an apple in her mouth—) 

“The thing is," Death continues, “you're singular too. Dead sorcerers turn themselves into curses all the time to cheat me – but you. You're a revenant. You're still living.”

“That’s an oxymoron,” Suguru points out. “Revenants haunt the living.”

“Maybe,” he acquiesces, “but souls are more complicated than that. And sometimes our destiny is to defy destiny itself.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Death says, smiling ever-wider, “that you can call me Satoru.”

And then he salutes Suguru with two fingers and tips backwards off the bridge, vanishing before he can hit the ford. Suguru chases after him, but it’s pointless. He might as well have been a hallucination. It wouldn’t be out of character for Suguru to picture Death as something pretty. 

He stares at the water skimming the rocks for a long time. The current does not reverse, and Death does not want him. His is an unreciprocated love.

[3-aem]

Sunset

[bvinhster]

[jyuzhi92]

[itadoriahh]

i wait, i wait, i wait

listening to laufey and thinking about satoru gojo 🥀

[rhhei]

left the classes to make out

[parsnips-and-meth]

killswitch lullaby (extract)

SUMMARY: In which Death is a teenage boy, and Suguru is forced to live ad infinitum.

WARNINGS: canon-typical gore, suicidal ideation

this is a work in progress for The Monster Mash series... and i am very excited about it

———

The first time Suguru fails to die, he’s on the Uji Bridge at the entrance to the inner Ise Shrine – Kōtai Jingū. Merely paces from the home of the Sacred Mirror, gifted by the goddess of the sun, Amaterasu, to her grandson, Ninigi, and then eventually to Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan and divine in his own right.

According to legend, when Amaterasu bestowed her grandson the mirror, she told him to serve it as he would her soul: with clean mind and body. Maybe, if Suguru had just made it to the Temizusha beyond the bridge – washed his hands, rinsed his mouth, rid himself of impurity – then things would have played out differently. But he didn’t make it that far, and in the end, it’s irrelevant. There are no gods; only jujutsu sorcerers. Nothing is truly sacred. He lives that day and every day after because he was born cursed, and no body of water can undo that. 

As such, it goes like this – Suguru Geto takes his last breath on the Uji Bridge, but it is not the conclusion he expects. Instead, it’s a footnote. Because moments later, the audience calls for an encore, and he gasps like a newborn. He takes his first breath, again, and this will be Mark II. He has as little choice in it as he did the first time, when his mother’s cryptic pregnancy came to fruition on their kitchen floor. 

The first thing he notices is the afternoon sky. It’s still bright with sun and broken up by infant clouds, all of which have moved a little to the east since he last saw them. The wind is lazy. March is coming to a close, and the scent of sakura is teasing at the horizon.

The second thing he notices is a boy. He’s sitting on the balustrade, chewing a wad of strawberry gum. He has string-bean limbs and hair as pale as lilies. His tea-shades are too dark to see behind, and there’s a plaster wrapped around one of his thumbs. Beneath the hem of his basketball shorts, a pair of grass-stained knees. 

“Yo,” he says.

Now, Suguru is intimately familiar with the components of curses. At seventeen, he has swallowed so many that he can look at one and effectively predict its brand of foulness. This one will be battery-acid-sour, that one will taste like carrion, etcetera, etcetera. But this curse – the one currently blowing a baby pink bubble and swinging its legs with an air of idle teenage boredom – is difficult to discern. Because it is a curse, that much he can tell. But its energy is so unusual, so unique, that can it really be called a curse if it doesn’t look like any of the others? 

“Hello,” the boy-curse snarks, snapping his fingers. “You alive? I could’ve sworn you were alive.”

Suguru, stupidly, considers telling the curse that he wishes he weren’t. That he’s been thinking, recently, about the nature of being alive and the tyranny of it. That he’s been reading Kōbō Abe and Franz Kafka and other, non-sorcerer authors, and has determined that he, too, is loved conditional to his use and would like to die a cockroach. There’s meaning, at least, in that. 

(The irony, of course, lies in the misery of such novels, and therefore their sustenance of ‘the problem’.)

But Suguru isn’t dead, and he supposes it doesn’t do well to ruminate on ‘what ifs’. He somehow survived the encounter with the special grade he was sent to exorcise, if the orb burning through his pocket is any evidence. Although he could have sworn they went down in tandem – the weight of his own guts in his lap is not something he imagined. And sure enough, his trousers are sodden with browning blood. “I don’t understand,” he says very intelligently, to no one in particular, because he doesn’t. 

The boy-curse snorts. “Me neither. This is a first for me, too.”

“A first?” Suguru mumbles, realising he is still lying prostrate, peering up at what is, undeniably, a powerful being. It should make him feel vulnerable. It doesn’t. There’s something strangely soothing about the flow of its cursed energy. It moves like a snow flurry, laps like the inevitability of an approaching high tide. “What’s a first?”

“Well,” the boy-curse muses, “usually, when I come to collect, the bodies stay, you know…” He drags a hand across his throat and makes a sharp noise. “Dead.”

Dead. It’s possible, perhaps, that Suguru grasped the reverse cursed technique on the cusp, the Styx. It would be unfortunate – he can think of at least one person who deserved this epiphany more. 

(This generation’s Six Eyes, butchered in the courtyard, at the nexus, like a roast pig at the centre of a feast. The piece-de-resistance, with an apple in her mouth—)

But then the curse rambles on. “You were out for, like, a solid four minutes, too. No life signs. But your soul just kept… ” He makes a droning noise. It has impossible harmonies. Clatters at the back of his throat, distinctly inhuman. With the exception of its cursed energy, this is the first real example of fiendish behaviour. It might look like a teenager. It might have the posture of one, the devil-may-care – almost as though it has only ever seen, lived, teenage things. But…

For whatever reason, Suguru is in good order. There are no grazes on his hands. His intestines are in their proper place. The blood trailing from his nose is, at this point, decorative. Which means he has a duty to fulfil, and no excuse not to fulfil it, even if this peril was not on his original ticket.

He rolls onto his feet and pulls two curses from his inventory, gut tugging. A squadron of centipedes he absorbed only last week, and a special grade one with an incomprehensible number of tusks and a vicious domain. But that’s as far as he gets. Because the boy-curse whistles long and low, lips curling into a wily smile. He looks almost amused. “Ah,” he chides, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

He hasn’t moved a millimetre. Hasn’t flinched, hasn’t even acknowledged the sudden appearance of Suguru’s arsenal. And – his cursed energy hasn’t changed its flow, either, but it feels heavier, almost abyssal, like gravity has changed scale. The atmosphere swells with a heady scent that Suguru doesn't recognise; something earthy that isn't really earth, something ozone that isn't really heaven.

His curses are dismissed almost as quickly as they were summoned. The outcome of the fight has come to him as though a premonition; it's unequivocal. This curse does not feel like it can be shrunk, consumed. Exorcising it would be like slitting the throat of something completely bloodless. 

Suguru swallows a mouthful of acrid saliva. “What are you?”

“Good question," the boy, curse, thing, muses. "I’m difficult to define.”

“You're not a curse?”

“Well, yes,” he says, “and also... no.”

Suguru is beginning to feel frustrated. “That's not an answer.”

His smile widens. Sharpens, grows teeth. They don't crowd his mouth. They're blunt – human. “Do you know what people fear most?” he asks. 

“That's subjective.”

“Not really,” he retorts. Pulls his knees up to fold them criss-cross on the balustrade. “It's death.”

“Some people crave death,” Suguru counters before he can stop himself. It's too revealing, too damning – his guts are in his lap again. The boy gives him a knowing look. 

“Even then,” he insists. “It's impossible not to fear it, at least a little. Because death is beyond the telescope; it's the very quintessence of the unknown. And people will never be truly content with not knowing.” He pauses, Suguru thinks, for dramatic effect. It's weirdly childish. Then: “I might have been a curse once. But at some point, I became more significant than that. I am no longer optional. I am there whether I choose to be or not.”

It's a riddle. It's incoherent. But Suguru understands perfectly. 

“You're Death,” he resolves. Not the fear of death; Death, capital D, incarnate. A curse that, at some point, became so astronomical as to be undeniable. As to be necessary. Terror turned god, concept turned material. 

Death looks terrifyingly smug. “I’ve been called that. I've also been called the Devil, the Ferryman, the Reaper. A shinigami, though I can promise you – there aren't more of me. I am singular.” He leans forward so far that Suguru wonders if he'll fall from the balustrade. Tilts his head until he can peer at Suguru over his glasses, and—

He doesn't have eyes. He has worlds. That's the only way Suguru can describe them – they're fathomless, bottomless, an impossible spectrum of blues. They remind him a little of –

(A swamp of blood and a limp, limp thing – flesh turned inside-out, animal, an apple in her mouth—) 

“The thing is," Death continues, “you're singular too. Dead sorcerers turn themselves into curses all the time to cheat me – but you. You're a revenant. You're still living.”

“That’s an oxymoron,” Suguru points out. “Revenants haunt the living.”

“Maybe,” he acquiesces, “but souls are more complicated than that. And sometimes our destiny is to defy destiny itself.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Death says, smiling ever-wider, “that you can call me Satoru.”

And then he salutes Suguru with two fingers and tips backwards off the bridge, vanishing before he can hit the ford. Suguru chases after him, but it’s pointless. He might as well have been a hallucination. It wouldn’t be out of character for Suguru to picture Death as something pretty. 

He stares at the water skimming the rocks for a long time. The current does not reverse, and Death does not want him. His is an unreciprocated love.

[parsnips-and-meth]

whilst i drag my very tired feet (willingly, i promise) through chapter 2 of terrarium, would anyone like extracts from my other WIPs. like tiny teasers

[temeyes]

my three beautiful wives

[lilmimy]

Stsg fairies

[bvinhster]

kiss

[parsnips-and-meth]

tomorrow they give me the good shit. i will sleep and wake up a new man. i’ll be five inches taller and turn everything i touch to gold. and by gold, i mean gay fanfic

[b40v]

(don’t repost) <33

print in shop

[parsnips-and-meth]

terrarium is on the move guys. it’s moving at a geriatric pace but it is moving

[getdiagnosed]