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The first thing Maki noticed about Yuuta wasn’t his growth spurt: it was that he wasn’t wearing his ring. She acknowledged a warm feeling of pride in the pit of her stomach. Better for him to keep moving forward. Good for you, Yuuta.
Plans were made to enter Jujutsu Society’s battle royale, and then Maki left wordlessly with a stoic wave, not looking back.
Yuuji and Megumi found their own way out quietly with bags stuffed with supplies that weighed nothing compared to the anticipation of the road ahead. Yuuji forced himself, hoping that maybe it would be easier to smile again soon if he got back into the habit.
Then Yuuta, before setting off on his own to be alone, again, decided to make one more stop.
Shoko groaned into the last cigarette of a crumpled up pack and explained that Inumaki was well enough to wander the grounds alone now. So, Yuuta made a beeline for the dorms.
It’d been so long since Yuuta had been in Toge’s room. He wondered whether it had changed at all over the past year before everything went to shit. Knocking softly at his door now, he lost himself for a moment. It felt like a typical evening when he’d sneak in between training and dinner to share a hot shower. Or a typical night where he'd clumsily slink down the hall from his own room after curfew, fooling absolutely no one.
On those nights he and Toge would sit side-by-side. Talking. Texting. Kissing. Exploring. Smiling. Laughing.
Did Toge still stash a stolen Jujutsu Tech tablet underneath his bed? Back then it was his sly way of getting them to watch movies snuggled up close, knees supporting the screen while they tangled their fingers together under the blankets.
no i didn’t steal it i borrowed it. yes i clear the cache often do u think im a caveman who wants his search history broadcast to the world? god
Did he get any better at making 3-pointers from his bed, or did his crumpled up notes still end up littered around his trashcan until Yuuta came around to pick them up?
sorry not sorry its just cute when u bend over and huff about it every time ok~
Did he still scribble things he wished he could have said each night before going to sleep?
hey remember all those notes? thanks for respecting my space and not you know, reading them. it actually meant a lot to me you know...
Yuuta heard rustling, tripping, and a raspy whisper that sounded like an expletive before the door cracked open. One bright amethyst eye looked him up and down wearily before quickly growing wide with panic. Before Yuuta knew it he was pulled inside. The door slammed behind him and his body filled with warmth as his breath hitched in his throat.
“Did you think I already left?” he wheezed painfully, wrapping his arms around Toge. From the way that the cursed-speech user pushed his head hard against Yuuta’s chest and squeezed him even harder with his remaining arm, the answer appeared to be a resounding yes.
Yuuta sighed and kissed his boyfriend’s head. Bunching up Toge’s sweatshirt in his fists, he held him tighter and buried his chin behind the crook of his neck. Despite their gripping embrace Toge still breathed somehow, fast and shallow.
Then Yuuta felt a hand wiggling between them, and they separated just enough for Toge to stand up on his toes and chase Yuuta’s lips for a rigid and frantic kiss.
Teeth clacked together and dry lips wettened beneath their desperate tongues. The two hardly parted as they kissed their way to Toge’s disheveled bed. First-aid kits and unopened packets of gauze were kicked unceremoniously to the side. Tall and awkward but strong and enraptured, Yuuta bracketed his arms on either side of Toge’s head and pushed down as the other pulled up, closing any remaining distance.
It was only when Toge ran his hand under Yuuta’s shirt and began digging his nails into his back that the special-grade snapped back into his body. He struggled to pull back just enough to finally get a look at the state of the room and let his eyes adjust.
“T-Toge, hold up.”
Though dim, the sun was setting and the light slotting in between the window-blinds was enough to show that the room was tidy. Tidy, if you ignored the mountains of crumpled up notes that flooded corners and cascaded out of trash cans and pooled around the legs of the bed. Toge huffed and let his head and arm bounce back against the bed in frustration.
Well, this was embarrassing. Clearly he hadn’t thought things through before dragging Yuuta into his cave of existential dread.
With a tsuna, he pointed impatiently to a legal pad sticking out from under the corner of a pillow. Yuuta slid off of him to retrieve it and give him room to crane over and write awkwardly.
He wrote furiously for a bit before handing the missive to Yuuta with a sudden meekness. He curled up as he waited, and instead of watching Yuuta’s face, he stared at his left thumb which rubbed against his middle finger, rolling a missing wedding ring around anxiously.
Don’t look. Just some shitty stuff from before Shibuya. You know the stuff I couldn’t say. Got out of the infirmary this afternoon. Now lots more shitty stuff from after Shibuya. Lots of stuff that I didn’t say. Goodbyes to people who aren’t here anymore. Thought you left already. Was still writing things when you came. Sorry hope that makes sense
Yuuta smiled softly. He folded up the note carefully with as many creases as he could before tossing it into one of the piles.
“Don’t apologize--I get it. I’m sorry about ruining the mood.”
Unsure of how to transition because of course Yuuta would turn his apology into another apology, Toge reached over and graced a fingertip over Yuuta’s naked ring-finger. A year ago, Rika had given them her blessing after her curse was broken--or so they assumed--because Toge occasionally used to fiddle with the band when they held hands without repercussion.
“Shake...tsuna?”
Yuuta stumbled with a couple of ums and uhs and hms . Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t remember when he stopped wearing his ring, either. At some point during the world’s biggest waste of time in Africa he just took it off and never put it back on.
Thinking it over he started to feel guilty, and as he considered how he hadn’t felt guilty when he did it, he felt even more guilty. He looked like a lost baby fawn waving his arms about in the air as he tried to grasp onto words that apparently had somewhere else to be.
Toge thought it was cute until it went on long enough to become second-hand embarrassing. He tossed the legal pad in Yuuta’s lap like a lifeline and rolled over, facing away.
Apologizing and thanking him for the privacy, Yuuta tapped pen against paper for a minute before neatly scribing something and draping the sheet over Toge’s shoulder. He couldn’t help but stare at how the sleeve of his sweatshirt was rolled up and pinned so that it wouldn’t hang.
I still have it. It just stopped feeling like it needed to be there, I guess? I mean, I still have feelings about it. A lot of feelings actually. But at the time it just felt OK to leave it off. And then it felt OK from then on. Does that make me a bad person? I feel bad about it now...
Shaking his head from side-to-side, Toge crumpled up the note. Even though he tossed it carelessly and without looking, it landed perfectly on a paper mountain in a trashcan in the corner.
“...Kobe.”
“Konbu?” the taller sorcerer asked reactively.
Toge rolled his eyes. He lifted both arms to mime throwing a basketball, only to whine over-dramatically because the motion couldn’t be completed without two hands.
Yuuta laughed, and he felt awful because he couldn’t tell if he was laughing at the fact that Toge actually used his words for an old meme, or that he was laughing at his boyfriend’s theatrical frustration in light of his new disability. Both were pretty bad.
But there was some silver-lining, because Toge laughed too. He snorted and wheezed and coughed until tears gathered in his eyes. If he wasn’t worse-for-wear, Yuuta would have tickled him until he sobbed and begged him to stop with any ingredient that came to mind.
Instead, he pulled Toge into his arms until their laughter stifled enough that they could shower each other with affection again. They gave lingering kisses and ran their hands through one another’s hair, and after a while they were satisfied with even less. Utterly exhausted from everything, they wrapped their limbs together and matched their breathing. Slow and deep, back and forth, waning and yawning together.
The silence was perfect, because it made it feel like they had forever. Because Yuuta had to say goodbye again. He had to leave again. His chances of returning alive were the worst, and they knew better than to lie to themselves. Even if he did make it back, there was no guarantee that Jujutsu High would be standing or that anyone inside would still have a pulse.
A cell phone buzzed so loudly in a backpack outside the room that the sound of a metal sword clanging in its case could be heard. An obnoxious and unwanted alarm. When Yuuta spoke again, Toge knew it was time.
“I hate this,” he squeezed his eyes shut and gripped Toge’s good shoulder hard enough that it hurt. “I hate that I have to leave. I hate that I have to be alone and I hate that I have to leave you.”
Toge shuffled against him, biting his lip and holding back tears.
But then, as he bit down so hard that he tasted iron, something riled and reared from deep inside his chest. An idea struck him like a hammer hits an anvil, and he saw sparks.
Yuuta could easily recount the number of times that he’d heard Toge speak in complete sentences. Even if Toge trusted him fully and knew that his cursed speech couldn’t hurt him with his near-unlimited energy, it just wasn’t in his nature to bother. Speaking was such a worrisome affair and they understood each other well enough without it. Toge had mastered emoting without words, and despite having an unnaturally large mental vocabulary, he saved showing it off for riddles and games: it was always a funny surprise when people assumed he couldn’t actually be the most articulate person on the planet.
The full sentences he did speak were always calculated, rehearsed, and consented to.
Now Yuuta felt Toge’s breath hot against his ear as he whispered something devious, spontaneous, and unsolicited. Yuuta was diving headfirst into his grave and Toge was probably going to die choking on his own blood anyway, so what the hell.
“I hate that I have to stay here,” his voice scraped the surface of something unheard by anyone before. “I hate that there’s nothing I can do to protect you--the person I love the most in this stupid world. If only we could do something.”
Toge radiated undirected cursed energy purely because he frankly stopped giving a shit. No individual words were more powerful than others, but for his own sake he still dodged saying anything that could be misconstrued as a command. Sometimes, he just wanted his words to mean something on their own, and with Yuuta he could do that.
If only we could do something...it means “What can we do?” doesn’t it, Toge?
Jujutsu sorcerers are spiteful and the best ones are insane. They go out kicking and screaming and bleeding and feeling. Some are so unhinged that they can flip the switch from negative to positive. Others are so stubborn that they alchemize positive to physical and the physical can go on to be negative again.
Lit from inside, Yuuta crawled on top of Toge, pushing down into the bed as he clasped his left hand in Toge’s right one. A cold ring lay cradled between their palms and began to grow hot with a glow.
His voice was low and deep in Toge’s ear, and a gut feeling told Yuuta that he was grinning that wicked grin. A precursor to plots and schemes and a curse to see in and of itself.
The bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff. The harder you go, the harder you fall. Wasn’t this supposed to be Hikari’s deal?
“Binding vow. Wear this on your ring-finger, and in exchange you will receive almost unlimited cursed energy--my cursed energy. For the length of time that you wear it, I’ll be helpless. My tank will be empty. Once you remove it, the vow is resolved. My benefit in this is that I know you and everyone who you care about in the area are safe. My love is as expansive as my cursed energy. My cursed energy is as expansive as my love.”
Once in the Culling Game, there would be no way for Yuuta and Toge to communicate. No way to know what situation either one is in. They could be locked in a pincer move with both at their wits’ end. In that case, Yuuta could be caught off guard.
Or, he could be sleeping in an abandoned business building. No harm, no foul.
“If I die during the Culling Game, this is probably the only way you’d know. You’ll get nothing from trying to activate the deal, and the enemy will probably kill you.” Yuuta pulled back, a bit of hesitancy breaking through in his voice. “Is it too crazy?”
Oh--His gut instinct was right. There was that smirk.
Yuuta knew that if it weren’t for the harm that his cursed speech did to his body, Toge would be a special grade. This man was brimming with top-tier, unadulterated crazy. He was just incredibly good at slipping under the radar. With that ring he could crank the volume all the way up. At that point, it wouldn't even matter if the enemy had ears.
“Yuuta, babe. SAY NO MORE,” Toge mused.
And just like that, the glimmer of the ring between their hands dimmed. Silence spread, leaving no corner of the room untouched.
---
Yuuta chuckled, struggling against the emotional numbness that started creeping into his core again as he prepared to go. He pressed his hand against the shape of the ring living in Toge’s back pocket.
“You were always into those futuristic movies--I bet if you had a bionic arm it wouldn’t affect the vow--” he backtracked as Toge lifted an eyebrow and snickered incredulously, as if saying "Seriously?"
“Like, because it wouldn’t a real part of your body--actually, forget it, that’s dumb. So dumb. I’m sorry.”
---
In the weeks that followed Yuuta’s departure, dreams and reality blurred together for Toge. This day could have been either without question. It didn’t help that bionics were on Shoko’s list of to-try’s, and that Toge wore the ring on his finger from the moment the prosthetic was fitted to his wound. Either Yuuta was right, or he was dead.
In this scene (Toge hopes it's just a vision, or a hallucination), Jujutsu High is a smokestack. It’s burning, and every building kindles the insatiable furor of an inferno filled with enemy cursed energy.
Only a few bastion sorcerers remain, and Toge is kneeling and wheezing. Soot quickly replaces the blood in his throat and mixes with his tears as they stick to his cheeks like a black caulk. He can’t see. It burns. Everything stings.
Suddently, a gust of wind clears the smoke just long enough that Toge is compelled to stand and gasp in the clean air. In the distance, his bloodshot eyes barely make out the blurry, floating figure of the enemy. A terrible silhouette that controls the flames with ease and the flick of a wrist. It’s looking Toge’s way, searing him with its gaze. It’s mouthing something.
How pitiful. Poor thing. But because I love all humans so much, I’ll free you from your worldly suffering.
A feeling rouses in Toge. It's the one that constricts and strangles his heart and makes his blood writhe and forces his spine to straighten and then rear backwards despite the pain.
Yuuta, if you’re there--if you’re here--thank you.
The ring screeches as he drags it off of his red-hot metal finger. After slipping it tenderly into place on his right hand, a toothy smirk slides across his face. His amethyst eyes gleam and his pupils turn sharp, viperine.
“You wouldn’t know love if it bit you in the ass."
"So, LISTEN."
"This. This is unconditional love.”