Chapter Text
Yuuji dreams; he discovers. Is dreaming in a coma even possible? Well, it is now.
There's a person with white hair carding their fingers through his hair, leaving warmth in their wake. His limbs feel infused with lead. His eyelids are too heavy to lift more than a sliver.
He should know this person.
His chest hurts when he can't.
Brain damage, Yuuji notes with a yawn, brings way too much sleepiness with it. His head feels only marginally better. "Dad, I had the weirdest dream."
Silence.
"Dad?"
He realizes his cheek is pressed against bone and not Dad.
Dad's not here.
A spike of panic shoots through his chest. Yuuji sits up so fast his vision whites out from pain. When it clears, he finally spots him—half-obscured by bones, sitting a few feet away, watching him intently.
He must be monitoring Yuuji's brain injury!
He meets his gaze with a radiant grin, blinking away the remnants of sleep. "Good morning!"
Dad scoffs, as if amused.
Yuuji likes it. He will make Dad laugh, he vows.
"You are a dull creature, aren't you?"
Yuuji's grin only grows wider. "Aw, I love you too!"
Dad looks away so quickly it almost seems deliberate. He's probably embarrassed.
Yuuji crawls over anyway, careful not to crush too many flowers beneath his palms, and drops down beside him.
Someone's bones dig uncomfortably into his back. He wishes his brain—or soul—had been a little less creative and made pillows instead.
"Is this not uncomfortable?" he asks, plucking a stray spider lily.
Wisps of memory tell him that a pink-haired adult preferred quiet, but Yuuji can't help himself. The silence feels wrong.
"They are the bones of everyone I've killed."
There's a strange, pleased glint in Dad's eyes. Yuuji assumes it's mirth and plays along.
"Makes sense. People can be annoying."
The glint vanishes, replaced by something that looks like surprise.
"I ate people too," Dad says. "Would do so again."
Yuuji nods sagely. "I've always wondered what human meat tastes like."
He rolls up his sleeve and presses a thumb against the faint scar at the crook of his elbow. Shaped like someone small tried to take a bite out of it. It's old, but still deep enough to be noticeable. "I think I tried to taste myself when I was little."
He pauses. "I can't remember what I tasted like, though."
A memory surfaces. A pink-haired man shushing him while pressing a towel against his arm. Dad must've forgotten that incident. Good thing Yuuji remembers it for him!
He frowns. His head is starting to hurt again.
One corner of Dad's mouth twitches.
He almost made Dad smile!
The next time Yuuji wakes up. It's with a scream lodged in his throat.
His head feels wrong—like someone took a chisel to the inside of his skull and pried something loose. The sky above is still red, the bones still white, but everything looks sharper, brighter, painful.
He's curled on his side. There's a hand on his head.
"Dad?"
The hand retracts like he's been burned.
Dad's standing over him, eyes wide, expression unreadable. His chest is heaving.
"Stay still," he bites out. "Your brain is trying to reject the healing. Again."
Yuuji blinks, too sleepy to really understand what's being said. "Oh. Is that a bad thing?"
Dad doesn't answer. He just turns away, claws digging into his own palm.
Yuuji watches him go. He thinks, distantly: Dad seems tired.
He falls asleep before he can figure out why.
Yuuji dreams of a boy with spiky black hair.
The boy tells him to wake up. His voice makes Yuuji's chest ache.
He doesn't know who the boy is. Just that he's sad and Yuuji's the reason.
Yuuji loops the stem of a spider lily around a bone. The bone curves gently—a rib, maybe.
He scratches his head with a free hand. It's taken him a while to finish because the ache in his head keeps making the edges of his vision blur.
Either way, it's a tiara now.
He carefully balances it over one ear. It stays.
Behold! A spider lily crown!
Yuuji grins proudly at his creation.
A prickling sensation crawls up the back of his neck.
He's being watched. Which makes sense. Yuuji just had a terrible accident. He's still injured. Of course, Dad is keeping an eye on him.
Carefully removing the crown, he trudges through the field toward where his dad is sitting. This time, Dad has chosen to lounge against a mountain of animal skulls. How he manages to look comfortable against them remains one of life's greatest mysteries.
Flowers bend beneath Yuuji's feet as he crouches. A hand immediately shoots out and grabs his wrist before he can place the crown.
"Brat. What do you think you're doing?"
Yuuji is offended. "It's a tiara."
"Yes."
"It's supposed to go on your head."
Dad scowls. "I know what a tiara is. Never mind that. Why are you trying to put this abomination on me?"
"Because it's for you." Yuuji beams. "Do you like it?"
Dad's face does that complicated thing again. The thing Yuuji is getting increasingly tired of trying to decipher. The grip around his wrist loosens, leaving faint pink marks behind.
"It's adequate."
Yuuji whoops internally and carefully places the spider lily crown over one of Dad's ears. Then, pleased with a job well done, he flops against the man's side and loops an arm around his.
Partly because he likes being close. Partly because the world has felt a little unsteady lately. And holding onto Dad makes him feel less like he's drifting away.
Yuuji drifts in and out of a dream.
There are two bodies. They're both blurry. Their voices are muffled, as if his head and eyes are wrapped in wool. The words disperse as soon as they register—like dandelion fluff.
There's a sensation of liquid warmth in his veins, like someone pulled the winter sun into a syringe and injected him with it.
"Neural pathways... tricky things....Done all I could without actively lobotomizing him... up to him if he's going to wake up..."
He's sure he's heard the doctor say that. And he's pretty sure him was referring to him.
His body will heal on its own, then, he concludes, trying to slot a small bone into an incomplete ribcage. He hasn't been able to make it stick, and his brain keeps hurting in a way that means he'll have to sleep again soon. His muscles jerk wildly now and then, and his frustration makes it worse. He stops himself before he crushes the tiny bone.
Wait a minute. He gets up and jogs toward his father, who's reclining against a pile of bones.
"Dad! Do you know where this bone goes?"
Dad opens an eye, and another, and another, and another. And Yuuji stares even though it's rude. But four eyes! Dad has four eyes! He must have kept the other two closed.
"You're so cool!"
"What?"
Oh, old person. Right. "It means you look..." He gestures wildly, trying to find the word. It just makes his head hurt and scatters the rest of his thoughts. "Nice," he gives up.
Dad blinks—all four eyes! Cool!—
"When will mine open?" he blurts out. "The extra eyes, I mean."
"They won't." A pause. Dad's expression twists.
"They're a birth deformity. The other two are my twin's eyes." A flash of teeth. "Who I ate in the womb."
Huh. Dad is being dramatic. And silly. Yuuji's head is hurting too much for his filters to work. "That's not right."
A blur, and Dad's right in front of him. Yuuji would have thought his Dad was being menacing if he didn't know him. Which he does. His dad is being dramatic!
"Babies can't eat others—unless you're a tiger shark—" A clawed hand grips his skull, making it hurt more, but Yuuji's too distracted by fishes and embryos and keeps on going. "Babies might absorb each other in the womb. It's a biological thing! Not a personal one!"
The hand leaves his skull. Dad looks... unmoored. Before suddenly turning away.
"Tch."
Yuuji runs after him. He wants to do this puzzle before he falls asleep again. But his legs are getting heavier, and he just calls out, "Dad?"
Dad stills, before turning. "What is it, brat?"
Yuuji blinks through the fog and hurt, and lifts the bone. "Do you know where this one goes?"
Red eyes search his, and Dad turns again with an exasperated sigh. "It's the fifth rib, idiot."
Yuuji holds up the rib again. "Are you sure it's the fifth one?"
There's a blur before Dad snatches it from his hand. "I was healing my body long before Tengen learned to walk. I know where a rib goes."
He slots it in place with more force than necessary. Then he stops. Stares at the incomplete ribcage.
"...This would be easier if your soul would stop fracturing every time I try to knit it back together."
Yuuji tilts his head like a confused puppy. "My soul is fracturing?"
Dad's jaw tightens. He looks like he just said something he didn't mean to.
"Forget it. You wouldn't understand."
He stalks away.
Yuuji watches him go, frowning. Dad seems grumpier than usual. He still calls out, "Thanks! You're so smart, Dad!"
Yuuji grins and returns to his puzzle ribcage, slotting the opposing rib into the missing depression in the bone, making sure the tremors in his hand don't disturb it. Nearly done!
He curls up nearby into the flowers, a few meters away, so he doesn't accidentally kick the puzzle in his sleep, and closes his eyes. The lub-dub sound stutters a little underneath his ear. It has been for a while now.
He misses Dad's warmth. But he has a feeling Dad needs some alone time right now.
The next dream brings a girl with orange hair yelling at him. The words are loud, but her voice keeps cracking. Yuuji feels like it's his fault somehow.
Yuuji finds Dad sooner the next time he wakes up. Sitting a few feet away. Yuuji immediately crawls over to him, wobbling along the way, limbs uncoordinated like a baby deer—or a deer with prion disease—and curls into the warmth, hiding his face in fabric. It smells like copper and ash. Yuuji just finds it comforting because it is his Dad's.
His headache has stopped getting better after naps. That just means he should nap more, obviously! That's the reason he's sleepy as heck nearly all the time now.
He nuzzles into the fabric like a cat and pauses. What was he thinking about again?
"Dad—what's your favorite color?" The word slurs at the end. His tongue, too, falling out of coordination, making it sound like he's talking through a rock in his mouth.
"Blood."
"Cool!" Oh wait, Dad's old, he probably doesn't know what it means. "It means...." He looks for the word, but his thoughts dissipate before he can grab onto them. What was he thinking about again? Oh right, colors! He was thinking about colors!
"Dad, what's your favorite color?"
"It's red."
"Cool!"
This position is uncomfortable, he decides, and wriggles until his head is resting on Dad's thigh instead.
"Get off."
Yuuji just makes himself comfortable. "No."
Danger, something whispers. Danger, danger, move—
But Yuuji is already comfortable, already breathing slowly. A hand hovers over his skull. Claws extended.
Yuuji just sighs and presses closer.
The hand stays there for a long moment.
Then, slowly, the claws retract.
But Yuuji refuses to stand for it. He reaches out blindly to grab a wrist. He finds it and tries to bring it over to his head instead. It refuses to budge. Yuuji's head is hurting and the denial of hair pets makes him whine without realizing it.
The wrist finally yields! And soon he has a clawed hand in his hair, finger-combing it, and his eyes flutter in bliss.
"G'night, Dad. Love you."
"...—and I'll get you a lifetime supply of ice cream too, scouts honor—" The voice cracks. "...But you gotta wake up first, Yuuji-kun....."
There's a warm hand cupping his face, a thumb swiping underneath his eye, taking moisture with it.
He forgets about it before he can try to recall why he was crying in the first place.
Yuuji can't keep his eyes open anymore.
He's lying in the flowers, head in Dad's lap. He doesn't remember how he got here. He just knows it's warm, and Dad is warm, and the heartbeat under the domain is getting slower.
"Dad?"
"...What."
"Are you mad at me?"
Silence.
Dad's hand lands on his head. The claws are retracted. The touch is almost... careful.
"I am never mad at tools that break," Dad says. "I am mad at tools that break before I'm done using them."
Yuuji tries to parse that. It sounds like an insult. But the hand in his hair is gentle.
"Okay," he says, because he's too tired to argue. "Love you, Dad."
The hand stills.
For a long moment, Dad doesn't move.
Then, so quiet Yuuji almost misses it:
"...Tch."
But he doesn't pull his hand away.
"Dad, when I get better, we gotta go for ice cream."
Yuuji murmurs against fabric and lap. His thoughts feel sluggish, like a dropped cone puddling on hot asphalt.
The hair pets stutter.
"And we gotta do puzzles together too—"
That feels important. He can't remember what puzzle, but he thinks he left one unfinished.
"— and, and we gotta—"
What was he talking about again?
A clawed hand cups his face.
"You're dying."
Yuuji's thoughts are too heavy to register the words.
"I tried everything. Every angle. Every approach. The soul rejected every attempt." A pause. "Do you know how long it has been since I failed at something?"
Yuuji blinks slowly. His ears feel like they're full of cotton. Four eyes are looking at him. Four! Dad must've kept the other two closed.
He wants to ask if he's inherited the extra eyes too, but his tongue feels too heavy in his mouth, so he just nuzzles into the palm with whatever strength he has left.
Until that runs out, too.
A hand brushes hair out of a face that doesn't nuzzle into it, "Ridiculous."
The same clawed hand lands on a mop of pink hair, untangling the flowers from it.
"Ridiculous, ridiculous creature."
The hand that has slaughtered hundreds brushes hair away from unseeing eyes.
"Ridiculous boy."
A shuddering breath. Just one.
"In exchange for the ability to heal Yuuji Itadori's soul, I vow to forfeit ten percent of my cursed energy reserves."
Chains clink. Underneath bone, necrosed neural pathways start rebuilding themselves—billions of neuronal circuits waking up under the onslaught of RCT so fine it weaves micrometers into grey and white matter. Rebuilding what should have been there.
And erasing everything that came after.
The flower crowns. The bone puzzles. The favorite color arguments. The sleepy "Love you, Dad."
One by one. Until there is nothing left of them.
The flower crown lies near the king's feet. Flowers wilted, draped over the bone like corpses.
Yuuji Itadori wakes up with the King of Curses looming over him.
He immediately recoils, kicking away flower and bone, crushing it in the process, and screeches, "Get the fuck away from me."
The King of Curses remains impassive, surprisingly.
Yuuji wakes up with a gasp, headbutting Gojo, who was leaning over him to assess the disturbance in cursed energy.
"Whoa, whoa—you're okay, you're okay—"
Yuuji blinks. His face is wet. He doesn't know why.
But then Gojo's yelling and people are rushing in and soon Nobara's hugging him and strangling him at the same time and Megumi's aggressively petting his back, and Inumaki and Panda-senpai are making a ruckus, and Yuuji laughing, overwhelmed, alive—
-forgets all about it.