Yuji Itadori POV
I groaned and rapidly blinked until everything came into focus.
Where am I? The last thing I remember is leaving school and heading over with the rest of the guys.
When we were suddenly approached by this brown haired dude passing candy out.
Seeing no harm everyone ate one but I remembered what my grandpa had once told me about with strangers randomly offering candy to someone.
When I tried to warn them I suddenly felt really dizzy and then just fell asleep out of nowhere.
In an instant, I stood up only to bang my head against something metallic "oww!" I exclaimed in pain.
I look around only to see that I've been trapped in some sort of care, the place I was in reeked of shit "oh God what is that smell!" I yelled.
"Ooooh~ Rynosuke look. It seems like one of them has woken up and already he calls for that wretched God!" a disgusting like voice calls out.
A hunched over man stepped forward from the shadows along with the familiar brown haired man "hey who are you? What have you done to me and my friends?! You freaks!" I demanded.
The man was dressed in black cultish looking robes, oily looking black hair, and had eye balls that looked like they would pop out at any given moment.
"God," he repeated, tasting the word like something fine aged in a cellar.
His voice had a wet quality to it like words being spoken through a soaked cloth "how wonderful. How absolutely precious."
"My name," he said, pressing one hand flat against his chest in a grotesque pantomime of introduction, "is Gilles de Rais the former marshal of France and enemy of God!" he roared.
A sound crawled out of his throat that I think was supposed to be laughter "God abandoned my precious Jeanne and so I betrayed him! In this very moment he will soon abandon you, little one."
"I don't care. Just let us go right now!" I screamed.
I turned scanning the area when I soon saw a bunch of other cages full of other kids just like me including my friends "Kenta," the name came out of me before I could stop it. "Hiroshi, Daisuke!"
My friends were still out cold, slumped against their cage walls while some other kids were awake already watching and murmuring to themselves in fear.
"Oh, you know them?? What was your name again boy?" Gilles asked clasping his hands together in delight.
I gritted my teeth, "it's Yuji...Itadori Yuji," I replied.
His smile widened "Yuji Itadori how fortunate! How absolutely fortunate!"
Something in his tone turned my blood to cold water.
"What are you going to do to them," I said.
Gilles reached into the folds of his robe and withdrew something in a glass vessel.
Even from here I could see it moving a writhing, wet darkness contained behind thin glass, pressing against the interior like it understood there was an outside to reach for.
My stomach dropped through the floor.
"I am an artist," Gilles said softly, reverently, the way a priest speaks during a ceremony "and the human body. The child's body in particular is the most extraordinary canvas God, in his infinite and incomprehensible cruelty, ever saw fit to create."
He turned the vessel over slowly in his hands "I place my brushstrokes inside them, you see. I let my art inhabit them."
"You're insane," I said and my voice came out steadier than I felt "you're completely out of your-"
"But then you," he interrupted one long finger rising to point directly at me, "you called upon God. In my workshop."
The delight drained out of his expression like water from a cracked basin, replaced by something colder and far more focused "that is an offense, Yuji Itadori. A profound offense to me."
He turned toward the nearest cage.
Toward Kenta.
"No!" I lurched forward, slamming against the bars which dented just by a bit "don't you touch him-"
"You will watch," Gilles said pleasantly, his back to me now "every single one of them. You will watch all of it, and you will do so with open eyes, because if you close them," he glanced back over his shoulder and those popping, horrible eyes found mine "I will simply begin again."
Rynosuke looked up from his nails with a wide smile "ooh are you going to do that cool thing again Caster?" he questions with excitement in his voice.
Gilles didn't answer Rynosuke immediately.
He just walked to Kenta's cage.
"Don't," I said as the word came out cracked down the middle "please he has nothing to do with any of this none of them do. If you want someone to just take me instead, I'm the one who said it, I'm the one you're angry at-"
"Yes," Gilles agreed pleasantly, still not turning around "you are."
He set the vessel down on a small wooden table beside the cage. The thing inside pressed harder against the glass as though it could hear us talking.
"Which is precisely why you will remain intact, Yuji Itadori," he produced a key from somewhere in his robes "an audience must be kept comfortable, after all. A viewer who is suffering too greatly cannot truly appreciate the performance!"
The cage lock clicked open.
"Stop it Giles!" I roared.
My words were ignored and what I saw next was something I would never forget for the rest of my life.
Giles shattered the glass over Kenta's head.
Kenta's eyes snapped open.
For one horrible second I thought he was awake.
I thought he was fine, that I'd been wrong about what I just watched, that the darkness had done nothing because darkness couldn't do anything, it was just a trick just something to scare me.
Then his back arched off the cage floor.
The sound he made wasn't a scream.
It was something that happened before a scream, the breath that precedes it, the body's last honest moment before the mind catches up to what's happening to it.
His hands clawed at the stone floor and his heels drummed against the bars and the other children who were awake pressed themselves to the backs of their cages and some of them started crying and I.
I was already pulling at the bars.
"KENTA!"
The metal bit into my palms but I didn't care.
I wrapped both hands around the nearest bar and pulled, and pulled harder because Kenta had stopped arching and gone still in a way that definitely didn't look like he was sleeping.
"Remarkable," Gilles murmured, watching me "you are quite strong for someone your age. Rynosuke, are you noting this?"
"Totally!" Rynosuke had his chin propped in his hands "he's gonna bend those bars like, actually bend them. Ten thousand yen says he does it before the second one starts."
"Don't!" my voice tore apart in my throat "don't you dare open another one."
Gilles was already walking to the next cage.
Hiroshi.
The bar bent.
I don't know exactly when it happened.
One moment I was pulling and my vision was burning for some unknown reason, then there was a sound like a strained cable giving way.
The bar was angled wrong bent nearly forty-five degrees and the gap it left was still too small nowhere near enough for me to escape.
But the next one.
Gilles tilted a second vessel over Hiroshi's face and I heard myself making a sound I didn't recognize as mine.
Something low and continuous and animal while I grabbed the next bar and Gilles was reciting something in gibberish and then Hiroshi woke up the same way Kenta had.
The same arching.
The same terrible pre-scream breath.
I got the second bar.
By the third person my vision had sharpened and I could see everything in better detail and when I looked at Giles I could clearly see something that was anchoring him to the earth.
If only I could just cut it off then maybe this freak would die.
My grandfather had explained it to me once before he passed away that I wasn't exactly human and was something uniquely special from them.
The third bar came free entirely.
The gap was enough.
I hit the cage door with my shoulder and the lock didn't break so much as the entire hinge assembly tore out of the frame and I was out running toward Kenta's cage.
"NOO!" I ripped Kenta's cage open with my bare hands.
He was breathing that was the first thing I checked.
He was breathing and his pulse was there when I pressed two fingers to his throat but his skin was wrong.
Somehow a temperature that didn't match the room and when I lifted his eyelid his eye had gone the color of old water.
Something moved beneath his skin just below his collarbone.
I yanked my hand back in horror.
"Ah," Gilles said softly, behind me "now you understand Itadori Yuji there is no God! Otherwise he wouldn't have let this happen!" he exclaimed in madness.
Daisuke had gone still.
The other children in the cages were screaming now, the noise of it filled the underground space like water fills a drowning room, and Gilles stood in the middle of it with his hands folded and his horrible eyes half-lidded in something that looked obscenely like peace.
"Three," he said, raising three fingers "you freed yourself before I reached three. I confess I expected two," he tilted his head.
Something inside of me snaps like hot raging fire.
"YOU MONSTER!" I roared and the skin at the tip of my right index finger splits revealing blood that soon shapes itself into a ball...then without hesitation I just fired it off "piercing blood!" the words escape my mouth by instinct.
The ball of blood sloppily moved forward but not towards Giles or Rynosuke but rather towards the other cages shattering their locks.
The beam shot forward towards the wall breaking it apart "all of you follow me come on!" I ran out with all the other kids rushing after me.
"YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE NOT WHEN I STILL REQUIRE ALL OF YOU FOR MY JEANNE!!" Giles screams at the top of his lungs.
With a gesture of his fingers the figures of the three kids arose with a sickening crunch "bring them to me!"
-end of prologue-
A fair warning to all the readers...there's 50% chance I will probably fuck up some logic and lore...maybe...possibly.