DEVIL'S ADVOCATE, yuta okkotsu

01, hell hound

last year i abstained
this year i devour

without guilt
which is also an art

(You Are Happy,
Margaret Atwood)

FRESH LINEN is painted mahogany courtesy of the man dead below the bed. The hunger for carnage has been fed for now; motel room 58 smells of sex and metal.

You do not recognize the girl in the mirror; a reflection of a stranger with splotchy poppy flowers splattered on her blouse and dark red tainting her fingertips stares back. Irises turned dull from akrasia bore into the deepest depths of your soul, looking for even a shred of guilt. There is none.

A sort of calmness blooms in your chest, but sometimes the calm are just empty. A void stands where the all-encapsulating hell once reigned; riveting orange is replaced by stark oblivion. The flames have darkened until all that's left is a dim spark (—waiting to be ignited.). There is some kind of foreign loneliness in a vast heart so empty, too, but you do not dwell on that for fear of the turmoil it would bring. Calmness, emptiness and loneliness bleed into eyes devoid of emotion and lips set into a line; and it's quite confusing, but you'd rather hang yourself than think about the complexities of human emotion.

There is not much to it; you eat someone's heart and the flames die down after your hunger does. You feed the promise made to rage and it will spare you. (Until it comes back hungrier because you've abstained for too long.)

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Word has spread: [y/n] [l/n], female, age fourteen, has murdered grade two sorcerer Hiroshi Tanaka, who was to be assassinated for embezzlement. His body, with his eyeballs gouged out from their sockets, was found by Arata Satō, a semi grade one sorcerer sent to assassinate him, underneath a bed in room 58 of a motel in Tokyo. Traces of cursed energy linger on his eyeballs which were found beside his corpse. The weapon used is a glass shard from a cracked cup and the girl is suspected of using a curse technique unknown to even herself to aid in the murder. Hiroshi Tanaka's cursed technique involves using his eyes to control objects around him.

Arata Satō has taken you to a table full of vermin. They play god and weigh out the cost of your life on a gold balance scale made of the tears of those beneath them; they are gamblers who will kill you off if the coin they flip lands on heads.

Fortunately (unfortunately), the silver coin dirtied with the dried blood of sinners (and saints) lands on tails. You get on all fours and canines become your kin; they tell you to wag your tail and you do.

They decide you will live to see the sun— as their dog.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

two years later, present day.

There is a man who believes he is god before you, and his voice goes an octave higher with every sentence he spits out.

There are other men who sit around the table— they too think they are graced with divinity from above; they take pride in hands of those they call peasants stained with reverence as they fall to their knees in prayer and lick at their feet.

How you wish you could dismember them limb by limb and make them kneel before you with what body parts they have left.

It is but a fantasy you indulge in from time to time; you know it is not the wisest decision because to turn on them is to turn the entirety of the jujutsu community on you. (You entertain the possibility of disposing of all of them occasionally, too. You think it would be quite enjoyable. But the repercussions are not— curses will roam free without sorcerers keeping tabs on them. And maybe you could crush them under the sole of your foot as well, but now it's starting to sound a little tedious. Plus, this job that they have given you pays well; it's not like you have anywhere else to go but beneath their heels, anyway.)

They are vermin to you— not because you are truly holy but because you are the opposite, an incarnate from hell. Naturally, the greatest threat to their supposed divinity.

Oh, and they know. It is clear in the windows to their souls— when you peep in, all you see is the unbridled, raw fear they try so hard to conceal.

They attempt to assert dominance; their word is the word of god, absolute and concrete. But to you, their blabbering is that of the disillusioned.

They are at the top of the jujutsu hierarchy, the very one you want to tear to pieces. You are at the bottom— the higher ups chain you to a leash and force you to beg like a rabid dog; they know that once you are released you will swallow them up and show them hell; you will force them to watch as you burn the heaven they've created six feet under.

There is a lump in your throat that grows whenever someone yells. Words struggle to get by that lump; you feel like you're choking when you try to force them out; you only manage to bark, like the dog (they think) you are. (They convince themselves you have no fangs because your lips are sealed and the only sound you can make is that of a wild animal.)

They think they have extinguished the flames with their divinity alone, that heaven has somehow made you obedient, but the fire is only dormant, lying in wait for something to spark it. It has been dormant for a while, replaced by a craving that drives every bone in your body.

They do not seek to purify, they know you are too far gone to be cleansed. So they force you to sin more than you already have, take more than you already have.

They do not want you to simply kill. No, they want you to reap— to send both sinners and saints to purgatory. And that's what you do, because you would be lying if you said it did not fill you with adrenaline when the names of the soon-to-be dead are whispered in your ears like it's your duty to seal someone's already foretold fortune. With a heart that only knows how to light everything around it ablaze, anything other than the feeling of hell in your chest is a feeling you savor. Unfortunately for your targets, that feeling is the urge to reap.

So you reap for the thrill and the feeling of blood on your hands. Like a dog to a bone, when the vermin tell you to chase, you do; you chase a high so bloody it drives you mad, so foul it makes you wrinkle your nose in disgust, so unbelievably sinful; yet you have grown used to the sight of twitching bodies going still.

You are the dog of the higher ups; their own tragedy of a girl that reaps anyone they tell her to— a natural calamity waiting to strike nicely wrapped up in a hound from hell.

NOTES.

updates cutely💯💯 i rewrote this like 3 times and i'm still not satisfied😞

sorry if the portrayal of the reader is more like an oc LBFAO bc this was supposed to be an oc book but i couldn't come up w a good name for my oc😇😇.......

interactions w other characters will come soon i promise,, yuta will (hopefully) appear in the next chapter‼️

also I'm thinking of starting a kobeni x oc/denji x oc book but i have no ideas😋😋