Chapter Text
Yuuta. Yuuta. I love you so much.
Even in the dark at night, Okkotsu Yuuta is never alone. There’s a voice in his head that shares the same and only heart he has and will ever have, that he knows like a lover, a friend, that he understands in a way like he’ll never experience a person.
But lately, there’s also been a mysterious song of the spring that echoes through Yuuta’s chest and paints off-white all over his eyelids. A song that only Yuuta can hear, that sounds over Rika’s voice at times, that he wishes was threatening, instead of beguiling.
Everyone leaves me, Yuuta. Mom. Dad. Grandma. The only person who stays is Yuuta. And that’s why—
That’s why I can never leave you.
You’re not thinking about leaving me, right Yuuta?
Yuuta wishes— no, he can only hope— that these two forces would be able to get along, but the vase on his windowsill says otherwise.
He gazes upon Rika’s tulip, once a radiant red that continues to hold its color even as the petals shrivel up, forming a heart to remind him of what remains eternal.
Crammed next to it, is the last of Inumaki’s daffodils that Yuuta desperately tried to salvage. The once-proud horn has dulled overnight, drooping with penitence even though Yuuta wishes to tell it, “there’s nothing to be sorry about.”
All that daffodil dared to do was live as a flower, in a place where one already bloomed. Yuuta thinks it’s a cruel fate, watching it die quietly beside its stronger contender. He makes note to throw it out tomorrow, when the sun rises.
Yuuta, talk to me. What are you hiding?
Nothing.
Look at me. Tell me you love me. Forever, like you promised.
Yuuta loves Rika. Yuuta will always love Rika, even if the world rips them apart from each other. Even if they can’t be together, until they’re ghosts.
I have nothing to worry about right? It’s just a flower, that’s what Yuuta says.
It’s just a flower, in the way that Inumaki-kun is just a boy.
Just a cursed boy his age, just a friend. Yuuta isn’t sure what’s become so complicated about these answers, but there’s a restlessness that bounces his legs and taps his fingers.
Then stop thinking so much. Come to bed. Let’s sleep together already.
Not yet.
Yuuta hastily grabs a familiar comfort at the edge of his desk— his prized stash of kneaded eraser, spherical and changeless, and plays with it in the palm of his hand.
He needs to wear himself down a little bit, before he surrenders to exhaustion.
“It’s just a flower,” Yuuta repeats with a hushed whisper.
He presses his fingers into the rubber. Now formless.
Yuuta undoes and redoes the shape against his palm, rolling a small egg under his index finger. Just a boy. He rips off a piece of paper, grabbing a charcoal pencil. A face. He presses down the tip so hard that it begins to flake, and he etches out the visage of a boy. Draws out a set of lips, locks them with a seal. A face that I can create and destroy. Yuuta smears ash over the boy’s face, blurring him beyond recognition. Gone, if I want it to be.
He takes his eraser and with one stroke, the face fades. With three and a gentle rub, it vanishes completely.
Yuuta, who was that?
No one. Yuuta crumples up the paper, and banishes it to the corner of his discarded works.
“No one you should worry about.”
He flicks off the light, and drowns out his thoughts with emptiness.
The sun rises with the beginning of a new week, sounding with an early bell that calls for the commencement of morning assembly. Yuuta walks out into the misty day and stretches out his arms, before slinging his signature katana holster over his shoulder.
He inhales in the crisp morning air, closing his eyes as he takes in the world around him. The smell of soaked earth and musky wood, brought out by a late evening rain. Early birds chirping amongst themselves in the brushes surrounding him. No curses within a forty mile radius. Something stirs in the base of Yuuta’s chest, rises up, and he opens his eyes.
He’s really going to miss all of this.
He steps into the courtyard, where Maki is perched on the steps, waiting. She looks up at him and gives a begrudging smile before averting her gaze, and Yuuta’s reminded of one of his neighbor’s cats that he used to feed. He waves, and she lets out a quiet hmph.
“That’s how Maki shows she cares about you! Good morning Yuuta!” booms a voice overhead. Yuuta turns to see Panda, who puts a warm paw on his shoulder.
Panda starts talking about his dreams, his rumbling voice telling a faraway tale of being chased by tigers, being rescued by Gojo-sensei, and running into Maki. Yuuta barely listens, timing laughter at the appropriate times while his own mind wanders away, to the looming thought that everything in front of him is temporary, and that the more he clings on to Panda’s words and Maki’s offhand displays of care, the worse it will be when he inevitably leaves.
His reverie is interrupted by a stifled lazy, yawn, trapped behind the collar of a jacket. Inumaki walks in late to morning assembly as usual, stretching out his arms and walking straight into a patch of morning sun. The light radiates off his alabaster hair, reflecting rainbow rays like a prism and for a moment, Yuuta finds his gaze lingering for far too long.
“Konbu,” Inumaki says in greeting, and Yuuta puts up a hand in response.
Their eyes meet for an arcsecond, before tearing away. There’s a tug in Yuuta’s heart, a cord that’s been pulled more distant lately, with every missed interaction that’s traveled between the two lately. When he passes Inumaki in the halls, the cursed boy darts past him, only sparing quiet greetings on occasion.
When Inumaki turns his back at an angle, casts a shadow that wordlessly tells Yuuta, don’t come close , he knows that the closeness they’ve built up is as much of an illusion and the happy days he has left at Jujutsu Tech.
“Have you become afraid of me too, Inumaki-kun?” Yuuta asks himself. “Is it better that way?”
Inumaki hasn’t been the same since their mission in Aichi-mura. He’d been cursed with silence since he was born, but now, that silence has become an impenetrable stillness.
And if it’s not fear… what’s wrong with you, Inumaki-kun?
One day, Gojo Satoru is met with a strange request from Inumaki, who asks for wisdom beyond his years to better understand the human emotion of love. He’s not sure what kind of jujutsu training Toge is doing alone, but he’s surprised that he, of all people, would be asked such a thing.
No one thinks of Gojo Satoru as a being of love.
If life could be represented as a universal balance scale with each existence modeled as a marble of a prescribed weight, Gojo is a smooth jade stone of infinite weight that sends the pans crashing down.
He wonders why people haven’t put two and two together— limitless, comprehension past human understanding… isn’t that the same way we describe love? Who would know the idea of love more than a man who grasps the full weight of infinity?
No one considers Gojo Satoru a being of love. Surface-level, he’s facetious at best, shrinking away from being pinned down by bonds and definitions. A master of evasion, a force that can’t be committed. But Gojo is in fact a being of infinite love, a domain that stretches over his precious students like a protective veil and wounds him every time those bonds are forsaken.
He’s surprised that someone as Toge, as sensitive as he is, would pick up on this side of him that no one knows. He wonders if there’s a curse of love burdening Toge, if there exists an untouchable boy that’s settled in Toge’s heart the way someone named Suguru used to live in his.
With humans and with curses, like always seeks out like. Gojo slides across the smooth, wooden floors, plucking titles out of his vast library of books and movies. Plucking titles and tucking them under his arm, he builds a stack of stories hand-picked with care, chronicling and communicating the human experience of love, and passes it off to his precocious student.
“Toge, I know this may be asking for too much, but if there’s anything weighing on you,” Gojo pauses for a moment, hand dragging down the sides of his mouth. “Well, tell someone, okay?”
Inumaki nods. For a second, he opens his mouth, only to feel the seed in his heart rattle painfully, as if to warn him that there’s a dagger at his arteries that will rupture if he breaks his silence.
No, Inumaki knows. If Gojo can’t see what’s afflicting him, then no one else in the Jujutsu world can. He thinks about how truly unfortunate he must be, to suffer the effects of a curse born from love and loneliness that only he can hear and feel. This is my own curse to bear. No one else’s.
Inumaki has decided that on the first day of the Summer Solstice, he will meet his death in the middle of a deserted wasteland. He’s come to this conclusion when after numerous nights of self-discovery and movies provided by Gojo-sensei, that he’s in love with Yuuta, that Yuuta is in love with Rika, and that getting in between that would be far more pain and misery than any of them have ever bargained for. Not to mention, he’d rather die than bother anyone else at this point.
His requests from the library and Gojo-sensei have reflected his increasing hopelessness. First, he asks about love, and studies it with the intent to free himself. He spends nights alone, at the foot of his bed, knees tucked into his pajamas as he watches men and women, women and women, men and men, fall and express deep human love. He holds his own hand, sitting on it until it feels less like his own hand and more like television static, and tries to replicate this feeling, wondering if loving himself would be enough to set him free.
It isn’t. The more he watches these films, he sees Yuuta and Rika in different, more fortunate circumstances. Then, he starts seeing himself, the chaser, and Yuuta, the beloved in different characters and stories, and one day, he collapses headfirst into his mattress because the ache is too much to bear.
He then asks his sensei for films and books on people falling out of love, wording his requests in a way to circle around the ticking time-bomb at the center of his chest, relieved that it doesn’t proc when he hits send. He devours these resources, only to realize that (1) it takes time , (2) expect yourself to fail at first (3) sometimes requires cooperation from other parties .
Inumaki doesn’t have time. He’s not sure how much his heart can take failure, with the stabbing feeling in his heart only increasing, and he’d rather die than involve anyone with his troubles.
He returns to Gojo and his requests are simpler. He wants maps, anthologies of places in Japan, and books on accepting fate. He brings them home, reads them and marks them up, and decides that he’s going to find a place in the mountains, under the ground, where he can bloom into a deadly tree where the winds barely blow and no one will discover the silent curse that’s pushed him out of his own body. He hears Lovefiend’s voice echo throughout his mind at night, leering at him for giving up.
He gives up hope, but rooms away, Yuuta hasn’t.
Why does it matter that he doesn’t look at you anymore Yuuta? Why does it make Yuuta so sad?
Because Inumaki is the only one apart from Rika who understands him. Because he’d thought that after doing missions together, going out into the city, and spending so much time together would bring them closer, instead of further apart.
Didn’t you want to keep your distance from him?
Yuuta thinks so, and wonders if Inumaki noticed, and started acting this way. What he didn’t bargain for, was that the feeling of Inumaki’s apprehension and coldness would affect him like this, and he tries to wonder if it was Panda or Maki instead. He imagines he’d behave the same way.
“He’s just a friend,” Yuuta says, running a cloth down his katana, polishing it absentmindedly. “And I want to leave this place on better terms with him, but I’m not even sure what’s happened between us.”
What if Rika got rid of him, for making Yuuta sad?
Yuuta freezes, spotting his blackened irises in the reflection of his blade. “Don’t,” he says, almost dangerously before correcting his voice. For a second, he imagines a world without Inumaki and it’s far lonelier than what’s going on now. “Rika, please. That’s not what I want either. I’ve almost experienced losing him before, and it’s not something I want to do again.”
You’re losing him now. Is that why Yuuta has been so quiet lately? Rika hates when Yuuta is so quiet...
He knows that it’s impossible to hide a secret from the other half of his soul, and that he exists to be a vessel for two. She knows his mind has been quieter than usual lately. Yuuta does that sometimes; hiding in the clouds that exist in the space between them. He reflects on the Inumaki who’s been acting strangely the past few weeks, when suddenly, he pinpoints a day that everything changed.
The day they returned back from their mission. The day that Inumaki went from joyful, mischievous and open to friendship to withdrawn, closed, and acting as if he was hiding some kind of secret. And then Yuuta thinks about the curse that he lives with, Rika, and how she lingered, and how that played out into his life.
He gets up from his chair. He remembers snippets of the memo from the day before Inumaki changed, recalling a curse that couldn’t be talked about, erratic behavior, a certain death, and then he thinks of his friend, who seems more trapped than usual lately.
Yuuta? The lights just came on. What’s happening?
“Something’s wrong with my friend,” Yuuta says, and it’s no longer a guess. He’s sure, and he knows he can’t tell anyone. “I need to help him.”
Yuuta strips all the information he can about the Aichi-mura case over the next few days. Pores over victim recollections, builds a repository of what he’s dealing with, and all signs point back to a curse that erodes a victim’s heart from the inside out. A man reports that the weight in his chest disappeared after a “kiss from his wife”, while a woman who had gone to see the village shaman and explained her symptoms, exploded into an infectious tree in medical barracks.
There’s not enough information on the mechanisms of the curse, but Yuuta can gather that talking about it is lethal. That would explain Inumaki’s silence. He knows that it has to do with love, because the victim’s final words always contain fragments of that sentiment.
He knows that Inumaki isn’t close enough to anyone in a way that could be construed as romantic, as far as he knows. (Inumaki was always a man of many surprises, so he couldn’t be too sure.) He imagines that just straight up planting an unexpected kiss on Toge’s lips may cause a dangerous situation, factoring Rika’s emotions and the possibility that their friendship would be ruined forever, and a possibility that it wouldn’t work at dispelling the curse at all.
But Yuuta knows that for Inumaki’s sake he has to try. He knows that it will take time to win over Inumaki’s trust, and Rika’s acceptance of whatever pretense he’s about to create to convince Inumaki to get that comfortable with him. He knows there will be more late night discussion, and almost hates himself for the road ahead.
He goes to Gojo-sensei to ask for resources about love. Gojo tells him that half of his library is still checked out, and Yuuta pours through the list of recently borrowed materials.
All Inumaki Toge. All point to exactly what Yuuta fears is the situation at hand. His eyes stop at the last title, a complete manual on the act of death, by Tsurumi Wataru and instantly recognizes it as a book he’d read, a year ago, when pondering over his own death to end a curse that he was afraid would hurt others. Yuuta clenches his fist, swearing at the loneliness that never seemed to escape the two of them. A bond he wishes they didn’t have to share.
Later that night on his way to dinner, Yuuta walks by the window looking into the courtyard, when he sees Inumaki, a lone lighthouse by the sea, detached from the merry Friday dinners that celebrated the end of the week.
Inumaki kneels at the edge of the pond, partially swallowed up by the darkness of the night—save for a small lantern at his side. He stretches out his hands and pellets rain down from spaces between his fingers, calling up a chorus of gold-flaked fish with hungry mouths. Nothing but kindness, undeserving of being so utterly alone.
Yuuta watches him, a window and a world away, his own transparent reflection imposed over Inumaki’s. A fleeting illusion of the closeness they’ve lost.
His fingers wrap around the handle of his blade, grabbing so tightly that the string tsuka ito pattern Maki had tied for him leaves an impression on his palm.
I’ll cut you free.
He utters a silent apology, for the person that he’s about to become for Inumaki’s sake. An apology for three.
Another sleepy spring weekend settles upon Jujutsu Tech, and true to his routine, Inumaki heads to the garden to tend to his flowers. Along the way, down a wooden hallway, he passes Okkotsu Yuuta. He nods curtly, turning his back as fast as he can to cut off premature saplings of attachments. Yuuta will be gone before the summer, and he will be gone when it starts.
What Inumaki doesn’t expect is for the feeling of fullness in his free hand. Yuuta reaches out, takes it, and catches him completely off-guard.
“Inumaki-kun, let me go with you.”
When Inumaki turns to see Yuuta, he sees the same smile that makes his heart ache in movies and images. He hears an undeniable sweetness that was never there before in Yuuta’s voice, that reminds him of everything he’s decided to forsaken, and for a moment, thinks he’s the most special human to exist.
Inumaki knows it’s too soon, and too foolish, but there’s a spark in Yuuta’s eye that alights a hope that he’s still clung to, against his better wishes.
Yuuta. Can I still be saved by you?
Inumaki doesn’t know that what he’s falling for is calculated charm.
Yuuta doesn’t know that he’s making a mistake.