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Gojou-sensei comes to him days after, in the infirmary.
It’s not that he’s hurt so bad. His broken bones have been set. Puncture wounds and gashes and scrapes have been carefully cleaned and stitched and bandaged and he’ll live. This is what he’s been told. You’ll live, Itadori.
Yuuji isn’t so sure that’s what he wants.
It keeps replaying in his mind, see. Fight after fight, all but a war. Like visions, a waking nightmare that follows him in and out of sleep. So many people dead. So many people that he couldn’t save. It clings to him like a second skin, steely, heavy, choking. The weight of lacking.
It’s so cruel, he thinks. So cruel that he had to watch.
And maybe that’s selfish of him to think, to feel; that maybe some part of him would prefer that Nanamin had died alone so that he wouldn’t have to see it over and over in his head.
Mahito's hand pressed to Nanami’s chest. Casual. The spray of viscera as Mahito had changed him. Nanami’s bones, ribs-spine-scapulas all bared in frightful clarity.
What is more intimate than blood? Than bones? Than a human being blown apart from the inside-out? It’s something Mahito didn’t deserve to see. Something no one should have seen but that Mahito above all didn’t deserve.
Yuuji’s hands curl into fists against his stomach, so tight his knuckles crack.
“Yuuji-kun,” Gojou is saying. There is cheer in his voice, the way there always is. It’s not comforting. Yuuji doesn’t look at him.
He listens to the scrape of a chair across the floor as Gojou settles next to him and exhales. He sounds tired. Exhausted, really. Fair enough.
“How are you feeling?”
Strange of Gojou to ask. It seems apparent that he’s not exactly feeling his best, but this is probably part of his job description. Checking in on his messed up students.
“I’m good,” Yuuji says to the ceiling. There’s water damage in one corner, just off to the right of his bed. He imagines it spreading, a dark stain across the rest of the ceiling and then the whole of the room.
Gojou hums.
“It’s okay if you’re not,” he says. It sounds sort of rehearsed, like he’s memorized the lines of a script. This is what to say to someone who has watched a person they care about die. This is what to say to someone with broken skin and broken bones and a broken heart.
Yuuji nods without enthusiasm. Sure, he thinks. It’s okay not to be okay. And he’s not okay, but it’s no one’s business but his own.
Gojou hums again, sighs through his nose. Scoots the chair closer. The sound of it skidding across the floor is jarring, has Yuuji’s fingers twitching against the bedspread. He’s too tired to do much else.
“Yuuji,” Gojou tries, softer this time. He sounds sort of unsure now. Maybe he’s going off-script, Yuuji thinks, staring at the stain on the ceiling. Willing it to spread. Willing it to swallow up the too-clean lines of the room and maybe him too.
“Yuuji,” Gojou says again, “Look, listen.”
Yuuji is listening. He is. He’s just caught up in something bigger than him, a yawning chasm, a darkness that feels like the bottom of the ocean. Maybe that’s what death is like. Like drowning. Like being crushed by tonnes of pressure into tonnes and tonnes of bedrock.
He feels very small. He feels… denser, somehow. Compressed.
“It’s not easy,” Gojou says finally, and Yuuji looks at him this time. He’s not wearing the blindfold today, just the sunglasses. He’s peering over them and he looks as serious as Yuuji’s ever seen him. “It’s - losing people. It’s hard. It is.”
So strange to hear him speak like this. So strange to hear Gojou Satoru, the most powerful sorcerer of their era, to let a lilt of hesitance into his voice.
“Kugisaki lived,” Yuuji says. Gojou blinks at him, a feather-flutter of pale lashes behind dark glasses. “I should be grateful for that, right?”
It’s not a good thing to say. He doesn’t feel good about it, when it comes out of his mouth. It tastes bitter on his tongue even if it’s true — he is grateful. He’s so glad and so grateful that she lived and that so many of his other friends lived too.
Why does he feel this way? Why does he feel so awful? This isn’t like him and the dissonance shows in the thinning of Gojou’s mouth.
“You can be grateful and still be angry,” Gojou says slowly. “You can be grateful and still be sad.”
True enough, Yuuji thinks. That’s how he feels, or how he’s pretty sure he feels. It’s muddled, dirt and water, too inexorably mixed for him to separate on his own. There is anger, yes. He’s aware of that but it’s from a distance, like he’s not really a part of it. He’s not a part of any amount of gratitude either.
It’s so all-consuming. The grief. The loss.
“Yeah,” he says, because he’s probably meant to answer. It’s polite to answer. He’s never been bad at holding a conversation, not even with people who aren’t willing to talk back. “You’re right.”
He is. He’s right. Yuuji knows this even if it doesn’t feel right in his heart, in the empty space that’s been left inside of it.
It’s unsettling when Gojou reaches across the bed and takes Yuuji’s hand in his. It startles Yuuji enough that he looks at their hands, joined, and then back up at Gojou. So strange to feel something other than pain. He wishes Gojou would’ve taken his injured hand instead. That might have hurt, and hurting makes sense right now.
The careful way Gojou touches him doesn’t make sense.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” Gojou says. He’s tapping the back of Yuuji’s hand with his thumb. “But you can, if you want. I’ll listen.”
Yuuji looks back down at his lap. At their hands. He thinks about another hand he’d have liked to hold.
“I think I-,” Yuuji bites down on his tongue, because this is too much. This is too much to admit to anyone but himself.
He’s never been shy. He’s never been restrained, or coy, but with — with Nanamin —
He’d never been coy or restrained or shy but with Nanami he’d wanted to be. He’d wanted to impress him, and he’d liked him like that even though he’d been a decade or more older. Yuuji had wanted to give something of himself to Nanami.
He feels like now all of that has been taken away. Something that could have been willingly given, stolen from him. Torn away. Not the clean amputation of a limb but the agony of an organ being torn out with jagged claws and bare hands.
Funny, that he knows what that feels like.
His bandaged hand moves without his permission to rest on his chest. The scar is healed now, months old as it is, but it aches sometimes. Itches. A reminder of what had happened, what he’d almost lost.
Funny. Funny that this time his heart feels like it’s been pulled out of his chest in a less literal but still more concrete way.
The first drip of a tear surprises him only because everything has been so muted. It’s warm on his cheek, and then cool, and then it falls to stain white bed sheets in a perfect, tiny circle. A second tear, this one catching on his lashes and then shaking free when he blinks and landing with a little plip against the bandages wrapped around his wrist.
“I just,” he tries again, licks his lips, swallows. Something to stall for time, to let him find whatever words apply to what he’s just. He’s just tired. He’s just sad. He’s just so fucking heartbroken that he’s not sure he’ll ever heal.
His bones will knit, in time. His skin will heal, scrapes and punctures and gashes will be paved over, pink and shiny. He knows this. He knows all of this but he doesn’t know how to fix the gaping, empty ache in his chest.
“I’m just - tired,” he whispers to his hands. To the back of Gojou’s hand, holding loose to his own.
“That’s okay,” Gojou tells him. He gives his hand a little squeeze. He doesn’t tell Yuuji to get some sleep. He doesn’t tell Yuuji that rest will help.
Yuuji has never appreciated the lie — it’s okay — so much in his entire life.
They sit in silence for what feels like a long time. A cart passes by outside of his room, one with a rattling wheel that he’s heard go by every day since he’s been here. The stain on the ceiling, when he tips his head back to look, hasn’t spread. It’s not overtaking the room. It’s just there, and it will always be there.
“Does it get easier?”
He doesn’t think he means to speak but he does, lets the question spill from his lips even though he’s pretty sure he knows the answer. He imagines what Nanamin might say. Imagines, in his voice, no. No, it doesn’t. That seems like something that he would have said.
For a second he’s so overcome with the idea that Nanami had ever been in this kind of pain that he nearly sobs. It’s ludicrous — empathy for a dead man, sympathy for a fabrication in his pounding head. He nearly bursts into tears right there, and a couple of tears are fine but anything more than what he’s already given up is too much.
Gojou hums thoughtfully. His other hand joins the first on the bed, slides under Yuuji’s so that it’s clasped in both of Gojou’s.
“No,” he says finally, like he’s given it a lot of thought. “No, I don’t think so. Not for most people.”
Yuuji laughs and the sound is bitter. Wet and crackling. “For you, though?”
Gojou taps his thumb against Yuuji’s knuckles and he hums again and Yuuji, for the barest of seconds, is so angry. Angry at how casual Gojou is about this, how easy it is for him to sit here and hold Yuuji’s goddamned hand when Nanami is dead.
“Yes,” Gojou says. “It got easier for me.”
Yuuji laughs again, shaking his head. Disbelief, but only at the admission. Any normal person would have lied.
“It’s not a good thing, I don’t think.”
It’s an effort to force his stinging eyes up to look at Gojou. This time Gojou isn’t looking at him, but staring sort of pensively across the room. Up into the corner where the water damage is.
Yuuji says, “No?”
Gojou smiles. It’s not a good smile, not a kind or happy thing at all.
“No.”
Convulsively, Yuuji squeezes Gojou’s hand, and Gojou turns his smile to him. It shifts so easily. That distant thing, like a far-off star, a pinprick of light, untouchable and cold. It melts and warms just a little, more like winter sun than a star.
It’s not Yuuji’s place to comfort his teacher but it’s something that isn’t the hurt and he’ll cling to that because he has to.
“It’s never easy to lose someone,” Gojou says, and he’s looking Yuuji in the eye properly. “I just chose to stop caring as much after I really, really lost someone.”
Yuuji thinks about Getou Suguru, and the body that once belonged to him. He thinks about the loss of a friend, a partner, and for the first time he feels like he sort of understands Gojou-sensei. What an awful thing to have in common.
He meets Gojou’s stare head-on and he thinks: What turns a boy to a man to untouchable? What makes a man so close to a God?
Nothing good, he has to assume.
There’s nothing to say in return. No comfort he can offer from an empty glass. Yuuji looks away, back at their hands. At Gojou’s pale fingers and his own bruised knuckles.
What else is there to say but it’s over?
Gojou seems to shake himself, then, like shrugging off a ghost.
“You did well,” he says as he turns Yuuji’s hand over, presses a fingertip idly to the meat of it. It’s a deflection, probably, and Yuuji thinks he understands. He wouldn’t want to talk about it either. He doesn’t want to talk about anything.
“Thanks,” Yuuji says. He’s not sure if he means it, but it’s nice to be praised. He doesn’t feel much like he’s done well. Doesn’t think he deserves the praise.
He takes it, though, because what else is there to say? Arguing the point would be exhausting and he’s already so, so tired.
The cart rolls by in the hall again. Gojou traces a line from the centre of his hand to his wrist, and then follows the trail of veins like a roadmap. Yuuji wonders what the lines in his palm say. Wonders if there is some part of him, pre-written, that could have predicted this and could tell him where to go, now. What to do.
“D’you want a hug?”
And Yuuji blinks up at his teacher again, eyes bleary and exhausted and wide because: what a strange, silly thing to ask. Does he want a hug? Does he want to be comforted, when it feels like there will never be comfort in the world again?
He listens to the rattling of the cart as it fades down the hall. He counts the beats of his heart in time with Gojou’s fingers, tip-toeing up his arm until they reach the bend of his elbow.
“Yeah,” Yuuji says. He does. He does want a hug and it makes him feel even smaller and more childish than ever before but he wants that. Wants to touch, wants to hold and be held and be told things might be okay, someday.
The chair scuffs against the floor again and Gojou leans over him, slips an arm behind his shoulders, pulls him to his chest. He’s warm and solid. His heartbeat is steady. He feels very much alive, blood thrumming and pumping and vital.
It’s awkward to get his good arm around Gojou but he manages, curls his fingers in the back of his teacher’s shirt and hides his face against the sharp ridge of a collarbone. He’s crying again. It’s okay to cry, he reminds himself, but that doesn’t mean he wants Gojou to see it happening any more than he already has.
“It’ll be okay,” Gojou says into his hair. His voice is soft and it rumbles in his chest like the purring of a cat. “Someday. It doesn’t have to be okay now, but someday.”
And Yuuji nods, helplessly, all bruise-tender and exposed nerves.
Someday, he thinks, and he clings to it the way he clings to Gojou; so tight that it hurts.