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Megumi can’t feel if the rain has stopped or not. Somehow, while he was soddened with blood and downpour, while his body was broken from the fight and heavy with shadow, it gave him the indignity of feeling none of it, as if the last moments hadn’t happened. As if it hadn’t mattered enough for his body to reflect.
Live a long life.
He hasn’t moved yet. Yuji’s body lies before him, hollowed chest to hallowed earth, and his own frame refused to move or acknowledge anything around him. His knees don’t feel the dirt when they hit it, but suddenly that mop of pink is closer, tangibly too close and his hands dared not touch, petrified that all at once all feeling would come back and confront the reality of what had happened.
“Itadori?” It comes out before he can catch it. His voice floats somewhere far away from him and hangs in the following silence.
What had he expected? A laugh, maybe, and a grin. For Yuji’s face to turn upwards, that characteristic puppy-like expression and maybe something like wow, that was a close one huh, hope you didn’t get too beaten up. Maybe for them to be sat waiting for tempura rolls on a tacky little plastic plates, with Gojo laughing at Megumi’s expense, Kugisaki and Itadori chiming in after with their own quips at how worked up he’d been for nothing. See Fushiguro, Itadori might say, I always come out alright!
He waited, momentarily, for this. It didn’t come.
He should call Nue to help him move the body, he knew this, but somehow the picture of his friend dangled like carrion was too much to bear, too dehumanisation for someone who embodied the spirit of life itself.
Recollection struck him; right, the Body. Megumi reaches out properly this time, his fingers touching Yuji’s hair for a moment before it reaches down and further, pulling at his shoulders and turning him gently – oh so gently, as if he were only sleeping, only blissfully, beautifully resting his eyes – onto his back. The wound in Yuji’s chest stares up, clotted and trickling out the last breaths of blood. His abdomen was already coated, and Megumi puts his hand over the hole with far more pressure than necessary. A tourniquet on a ghost-limb, a band-aid on a cadaver.
“You idiot,” His hands clench, his teeth grind. Momentarily, he goes to apologise for how his nails catch the wound, “I thought we were meant to save each other. You call this a proper death? How am I meant to save you now?”
His voice is caught between a whisper and a scream. He can feel the shikigami’s in his hackles, the divine dog baying for a hunt it can’t have, for how can Yuji ever be avenged when it was their own hands doing? Somewhere, elsewhere, Yuji’s heart was discarded on the ground by Sukuna like common litter, like it isn’t a treasure to hold and nurture. Megumi lowered his head to press his forehead against his friends, and even now he can feel the final gulps of warm in their skin. It bleeds onto Megumis own and he wants to say no, this is wrong, put it back, dear god please put it back he doesn’t deserve it. How could he dare strip the sun of it’s light?
He spares himself the abasement of tears, instead opting to pull himself away and reach for his phone. Perhaps it would have been smarter to call a window, or someone that could retrieve them from their conspicuous place – what would someone think if they saw them like that – but instead he dials twice, first for Gojo, then Kugisaki once Gojo had rung out.
“Megumi? Did you and Yuji get out already?”
He doesn’t respond for a moment. It catches him off guard that no one else could feel the loss, that she couldn’t feel the eclipse that had settled on their world.
“Megumi? You still on the line?”
“I made it out,” He settles on, briefly. His spare hand, the one not gripping the phone, is buried once again in Yuji’s hair, “Itadori didn’t make it.”
The moment stifled into silence. It was almost tranquil, in a morbid way, how this was the first quiet reprieve he’d had in the presence of his friends. He could hear her going to speak, once, before that too was suppressed, and she barely managed out an ‘we’re on our way’ before the call disconnected and he was left alone once more to wallow.
It wouldn’t be hard to find them. Sukuna had left a rivulet of cursed energy to follow, battered it into air and still it clung, even after Yuji’s own had dissipated, or perhaps been suffocated in the cacophony that was the monster’s trail. Megumi wanted to wash down the world of the curse’s presence, to permeate it with Yuji’s laugh, to tell the world he was here and he was beloved and worth remembering. Worth saving.
“I meant it,” Megumi gripped Itadori’s shoulders, pulling him up so he could pose the body for carrying, “I never regretted saving you. How could I ever?”
Even to what remained of Yuji, he couldn’t bring himself to say what he felt. This world was better with you in it. Your heart was too heavy a burden to carry, how could Megumi pick up the pieces of it now? It should have been you, damn it, to live a long life. How could a world exist that dealt out such unbridled unfairity on someone like him?
He’s raising now, back on his feet, and Yuji’s body is limp in his arms, drooped into a bridal carry that would be comical under any other circumstances. He pulled his friend up, so his head is resting on Megumi’s chest, and he remained cradled there as Megumi advanced back towards the detention centre, somewhere Kugisaki could find him more easily.
And if, when she found them, Megumi’s hands were clenched too hard onto Yuji’s skin, if his eyes were too red-sore and his lip pressed to a faltering line, if this is what she found when she arrived, she spared them both the misfortune of acknowledging it.