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Yuuji rocks himself on his heels while he debates his choices.
They'll already get the edamame and cream flavor for sure, because Yuuji knows Gojo's favorite and how he hasn't had it since before being sealed, before "you've got it from here," before eight-hundred-and-eighty-eight dead in a single night, before everything had gone to hell- before Shibuya.
Long fingers pinch the end of his sleeve and tug just slightly and Yuuji lets him without comment.
Maybe he should just get the green tea flavor? But he has always wanted to try the whipped cream kind... What was the one Fushiguro told him he should get again?
"Yuuji." The fingers tug just a little more insistently, and Yuuji turns his head to look up at the figure next to him, stained glass eyes behind black sunglasses and starlight hair hidden under a cap.
"Yeah? What's-" Gojo's index finger taps against his knuckles a couple of times and Yuuji sighs. Well, if it's not many sorcerers, maybe they can just lose them deeper in the city-
Gojo sucks in a tiny gasp and suddenly he taps the back of Yuuji's hand again, once, twice, three times, then so fast that he loses count-
Fuck.
"We need to move…" He should have figured the higher-ups would be waiting for them in Sendai, but he hadn't been back since the first time he left, there's no one else to tend to his grandpa's grave…
Gojo's fingers circle around his wrist to tug him along the sidewalk. "We'll come back, I can meet him next time." Yuuji moves up front, because he knows people will part for his scarred face now and he'd rather let Gojo concentrate everything he has on keeping watch. He's still not back to 100% after being unsealed, Yuuji can tell no matter how steadfastly Gojo insists that he's fine. It's in the way he leans into the wall whenever they're standing still, how he digs the heels of his palms into his eyes when he thinks Yuuji isn't looking. His Six Eyes are exhausting him, and Yuuji isn't sure what it means yet. Or what else it might cause.
÷÷÷÷÷÷
"Duck!"
Yuuji doesn't even have the time to react before Gojo's hand forces his head down and something whizzes overhead close enough to rustle his hair.
They've been running for what feels like hours, losing their pursuers and getting a short reprieve only for more of them to show up and start the chase all over again. Gojo muses aloud exactly once that he could just kill them all with a flick of his fingers and they could be done with this. He's normally carefree and cheerful, but Gojo has a separate, much shorter and much more explosively flammable fuse he reserves just for the higher-ups.
Yuuji had grabbed ahold of his fingers then and, whatever face it is he makes when he murmurs please, don't, Gojo doesn't bring it up again.
But now his legs are screaming, his blood steaming, reserves of cursed energy draining dry and all Yuuji wants is to stop . He just wants it over with.
Maybe...Maybe he should just turn himself in, then?
The only reason he had run away from his execution in the first place was so he could escape with the prison realm and unseal it. And he accomplished his goal. He freed Gojo. Besides, there are only a couple of Sukuna's fingers left, maybe they aren't even causing trouble. They'll stop resonating once he's-
"Nope!" He's knocked out of his thoughts when Gojo suddenly loops around behind him to scoop him off his feet. Yuuji hadn't even realized he'd slowed down.
"Sensei, I'm just saying-"
"Nope!"
"But-"
"Nope! We are not going anywhere with them," he huffs and Yuuji sighs, a little in exasperation and a little in relief, and resigns himself to being carried. "We're going to try something." Gojo veers around a corner while Yuuji pops his head up over his shoulder. He figures if he's not going to do any of the running, he can at least watch their backs.
"Hold onto me and don't let go until we land." The crack of techniques and weapons firing sounds off behind them. "And then get as far away from me as you safely can."
"Ok, got it!" He has no idea what Gojo is up to, but if it's him then surely it'll work. Gojo will make it work.
There's a single moment of charged silence where Yuuji feels him tense up… Is he hesitating? Gojo never-
Another projectile comes screaming at them, Yuuji's eyes following it's trajectory, and it's aimed right for…
"Watch out!!" He throws his arm out without thinking, trying to get there first, Gojo still isn't completely healed and healthy yet, he can't let him take a hit, especially not there, right in the back of his neck-
Gojo gasps when Yuuji hisses in pain, palm stinging and smeared with blood, and there's no more hesitation when he murmurs,
"Hollow Purple."
All at once, everything is different. His body is sectioning off, breaking apart in starbursts and becoming spacedust, Yuuji is scattering across the earth, through time and space itself, like ashes on the wind after a funeral and
and he can feel all of it happening, but only within the confines of his own body,
outside of himself there is nothing and nowhere, his eyes know no light, his fingers no feeling,
Gojo's jacket is seemingly gone from his grasp and all Yuuji can do is clutch for it blindly,
hope that he's holding on and
and that's all he needs to do right now. Just don't let go until they land. Don't think, just do it. Don't let go.
Don't let go, don't let go, don't let-
Yuuji's awareness pops back into being with a sudden and sickening lurch, a sucker punch that knocks him reeling and breathless.
The first thing he notices is that the scenery has completely changed. He's sure that even as far as they ran, they'd been nowhere near an ocean like this. And hadn't it already been dark?
The second thing he notices is that they're falling.
It's not so far a fall that Yuuji can't see the ground, but it's long enough that Gojo tells him it's ok, he has him, just keep holding on, while Yuuji is trying to wrap his arms around to protect Gojo's head.
He really does catch them when they land, easily and upright even with craters beneath his feet, right before Yuuji is dropped so suddenly that it's as though Gojo's arms have disappeared from underneath him. He could swear he even sees them, there and then not, but surely he's just seeing things. It's not until he's forcefully shoved away that Yuuji remembers the second part of what he was supposed to do.
'And then get as far away from me as you safely can.'
Yuuji stumbles for a few feet before he looks back and now he's sure he must be seeing things.
Because there's no way Gojo's body could be in pieces the way it is.
His upper half is split from the lower, floating at the right height to almost look normal, but way too far off to the side to actually be attached, misaligned. Yuuji rubs his eyes. Opens them, blinks. Blinks again.
Gojo's head is gone.
His body is back together, but his head is gone, taken clean off his neck, Gojo is just standing there without his head-
"Yuuuuuuuuujjjiiiiiiiiiiiiiii," wide amber eyes swing around and there, hovering just behind Yuuji's left shoulder, voice leaking out his mouth like the slow slide of a broken dimmer switch- "It's ok-k-k-kayyyyyyyyyyy…"
Yuuji wants to say something back, to agree and let him know he trusts him, but his voice is limp and dead in his throat because he just saw Gojo's leg disappear and reappear without the rest of his body even faltering.
The current of his cursed energy begins to pulse, flow erratic, strong and disorienting like a strobe light but not nearly as consistent, Gojo is a countdown timer ticking wildly out of control. The pieces of him continue to separate and rejoin, blinking in and out all over the open space they'd landed in, Yuuji can't possibly even hope to keep track of them all. And they're only moving faster by the second, a panic-quick pace.
No, it's not just that they're moving. They're teleporting.
"Ju-ust a...liiiiiitle...backl-laaaaaaa5h…"
Yuuji had heard that, at the goodwill event, Maki's twin sister had pushed her technique to the limit. It had given her a bloody nose.
Inumaki had done the same, used too-strong commands on a too-strong enemy. His throat had been crushed, until he'd choked on his own blood and gone unconscious.
Mai was grade 3, and only able to create one small object once a day. Inumaki was semi-grade 1, and able to enforce his will with only a word.
Sukuna’s barely-remembered words itch like a bug bite at the back of his brain. "If you pursue selfish gain beyond your means, you'll earn retribution."
So what kind of retribution is earned by someone labeled The Strongest?
The backlash works itself in deeper, no longer content to simply misplace Gojo's whole limbs. It pulls apart his seams and digs its fingers into his organs, into the meat of him, drags it all out and hangs it airborne like a public execution. It doesn't matter that Yuuji doesn't want to leave, he can't move anyway, can't look away from what he's seeing. Gojo's blood paints the wildflowers, then stains the sky, then smears the grass beneath their feet.
His disembodied head appears again, further away but in front of him this time. "Thi-1-is is whyyy9yy9yy-" Yuuji can count every single vertebrae hanging from his neck, all the way down the spindly white spire of his spine. "-Why you don't-t-#-t abu$e your...techniii!iiques%ss…"
Gojo is still smiling as he always does, but his voice is too forced, thick between his teeth, it's completely at odds with the stuttering staccato pace of what's happening around them, to him.
Something materializes right in front of eyes and Yuuji drops on instinct before he even recognizes what it is, or has even processed the sudden spike of upset in Gojo's buffering voice telling him to get down. When he looks up to see, he almost can't pick them out, they blend in so perfectly with the bright blue sky.
Yuuji's never been squeamish, but he avoids looking at Gojo's face (hopefully back where it should be) at that point. His stomach flips at the thought. He's not sure he can handle empty tell them eye it wasn't that bad sockets anymore.
And it's maybe because he's trying so hard not to think that it takes him a moment too long to realize that the cursed energy is starting to build. Not just flickering like a broken streetlight like it had been, but actually building up. It saturates the area, charges the air, Yuuji tastes ozone and static with every labored breath and the rhythm is quickening, the tempo increasing, Gojo is shouting like an alarm bell that Yuuji has to focus to understand over the rushing in his ears.
"Ba-ack up, ba€k upppp, b~ck u£, Yuuji, hurry, hu}}y, c'mon, bac% up, b&c< u¿-!¡!"
Something nudges against his arm, maybe a lobe of a liver or a lung, and it's only barely a brush, but it's enough to make Yuuji's soul scream. All of his edges are suddenly blurring, diffusing,
billowing over the borders of himself and
overlapping with the space around him, with every molecule in the air,
Yuuji is going to completely disappear into the atmosphere,
scattered away,
ashes to ashes
and dust
to
dust
When he's pulled back together, when his eyeballs don't feel like they're vibrating in his skull anymore and his vision stops tripling, then stops doubling, and the black bands disappear from around his wrists, Yuuji's body is already scrambling backwards along the ground, and he doesn't dare interrupt the momentum. Gojo's cursed energy hits its crescendo, crests like a tsunami, and it's all Yuuji can do to keep moving fast enough where he's told and not get hit again. He's not sure he'd survive it a second time.
"570-" Gojo's voice cuts off harshly, then reemerges on the complete opposite side of the clearing. "-0|*!!" Even if he had held completely still the entire time, though, there's no way Yuuji would have been able to understand him. His words are so distorted now that Gojo barely sounds human, more like a glitched recording, data too corrupted.
"570|*!!" Yuuji nearly trips over himself trying to avoid the abrupt appearance of what must be intestines, nearly tangling his legs in them. "`/|_||_|8111111111, 570-0-0-0|*!!"
And in a blink, it all stops. Everything looks just as it did when they had first landed. It just unexpectedly stops. Gojo's cursed energy stagnates right there at its peak, hanging in sudden and ominous suspension, a body at the end of a noose. Yuuji's breath stills in his chest.
"Sensei…?"
"D-Don-n-n't...mo-o-o-ove…" Each syllable comes strained, barely bitten out between the tension of his teeth with the effort of clarity. Yuuji doesn't move. And then, Gojo disappears from his sight entirely.
Instead, every single piece of him separates all at once. There is nothing there where he stood except for empty space, because all of his parts are scattered across the air. Somewhere to the right, Yuuji can see bone-white in his periphery. To his left, the soft slick pink of innards. And hovering only a few inches before him…
Red. Just slightly bigger than the size of his fist. Branches of muscle and tissue grotesquely rising from the top of it, like fingers reaching up through gravesoil. Ba-thump ba-thump ba-thump, that's suddenly all that Yuuji can hear, loud and droning in his ears, ba-thump ba-thump, his eardrums bulging with it, head filling with it, his eyes unable to unglue themselves from the disturbing, rhythmic undulations of it, ba-thumpba-thumpba-thump, some unnamed compulsion inspired by the sublime emotion between awe and terror dictating that he carefully cup his hands under it.
Gojo's heart convulses, suspended in the cradle of his palms as it beats. Yuuji's own skips behind his ribs.
It's beating. It's detached and out here in the open, but it’s still beating. So he must not be dead, at least not yet. Yuuji hasn't lost him yet.
And it's that one tenuous shining thread that he holds onto, that grounds him there kneeling in the dirt with his hands still hovering as if between candleflame and wind. Yuuji needs to do...something. He can't not. That's all he knows how to do, is to keep moving and do things. So he's going to guard this. Because Gojo is going to come back, because he always makes his way back, and he's going to need this when he does.
The sunlight suddenly blots out, and Yuuji turns his face up, steadfastly refusing to move his hands. Gojo's head lolls midair as though he were simply standing in front of him, looking down at him in their little training room and patiently explaining again that Yuuji needs to keep his cursed energy from bleeding dry even when he's fighting, curses aren't going to be nice like him and wait for it to return before they hit back.
His face is completely lax now, though, haloed by the too-bright sun peeking through his white hair and without a trace of any consciousness like earlier.
"Sensei…?"
No answer this time, not even a grin.
And then Yuuji watches as slowly, so slowly, his spine rebuilds itself, one vertebrae at a time, the bones slotting together until sacrum and coccyx hang pendulously below his neck. The heaviness in the air finally begins to ease as the backlash decides it's done, has wreaked all it sought to wrought, and begins to put Gojo back together piece by piece.
Yuuji doesn't move, it feels wrong to hide away when he was the one who'd left them no choice but to rely on this.
÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷
For the better part of an hour, he sits still and watches, Gojo's heart still beating steady in his hands, until it finally blinks away, too, back into safety in the cage of his ribs, the last part needed to resurrect the whole.
Gojo's entire body jerks, swaying forward with the sudden weight of awareness, Yuuji quickly spreading his arms in preparation to catch him. But instead, he defiantly stamps one foot out in front of him just in time to catch himself, impact hard enough for pollen to shoot up and tickle Yuuji's nose.
"Yuuji." His voice is hoarse. Gojo still hasn't pulled himself back upright. "I'm pretty sure I remember telling you to run."
"Well…" Yuuji's arms pull themselves back in close, fingers picking at the fraying hem of his shirt. There's dirt and grass staining the knees of his pants. "I couldn't just leave you. I didn't know what would happen to you. And there are still people looking for us."
Gojo stares down at him for a moment more before he sighs, "I suppose so," and then he lets himself flop down to the ground on his side, Yuuji almost reaching for him again before he realizes it was done on purpose. He hasn't dropped dead on him. And for lack of anything better to do, Yuuji flops down, too, next to him in all the wildflowers.
For a long moment, neither of them says anything, laying on their backs and staring skyward. It's almost nice, just the sound of the wind and breathing and...fabric rustling? Like a lot of it.
Yuuji casts his head sideways, and he can just see past all the tall grass between them that Gojo's hands are in his jacket pockets, moving restlessly across his abdomen as he inhales, exhales, holds it, inhales again, muscles tensing and relaxing in cycles and hands pressing down in spots like…
Like he's feeling to make sure he's still in one piece, Yuuji realizes.
He looks elsewhere again, if only because he's worried Gojo will stop when he notices him (heaven forbid he show that he's not infallible in front of someone), and then he really won't find out that something is missing until it's too late.
"...Where even are we?" He waits until all the fidgety noises beside him stop to ask it.
Another petulant sigh. "Somewhere far. I didn't have an unobstructed path, and I didn't have a specific location in mind. I just picked a direction and a distance and flung us."
"And that's what caused that?" Yuuji scoots a little closer, because now that it's done, and there's nothing left to do, the adrenaline crash is creeping up in the wake of the rush. He just wants something warm and solid to lean against.
"Yeah." Gojo doesn't say anything about it, but the shoulder Yuuji had been aiming for is suddenly gone as Gojo twitches away from him. "If there's any kind of obstacle in the way, it throws the whole thing off. It's not actually practical for situations like that."
Yuuji narrows his eyes as he tries to move closer again. Gojo avoids him like the plague, touch and gaze both. He can feel the warp of space that Infinity causes between them.
"Sensei, I'm fine," he grits out. "You didn't hurt me." Gojo had never treated him like he was weak or stupid or a child, and he'd always appreciated that. Yuuji isn't about to let him start now, dammit.
Gojo still won't look at him. "You almost died just from accidentally touching me, Yuuji. You're lucky it hurt Sukuna, too, enough for him to react and heal the damage." Sukuna stirs somewhere within Yuuji at the sound of his name, narcissistic bastard, still fuming that someone dare upset His Highness and muttering about- Wow, the next time one of his mouths manifests, Yuuji is going to cram a bar of soap in it. "Seriously, next time just run. I'm good for destroying, and not much else. It's no good if you get caught up in that-"
"That's not true." Gojo blinks, unused to being interrupted. "The destroying part, I mean. You're good at other stuff, too."
"Hmph, of course. I'm good at almost everything I try." This guy...
"No, I mean. Like…" Yuuji flails his hands, realizes that that doesn't do much to get the message across, tries again: "You use all that power to get rid of dangerous threats. Isn't that what protecting people is? Just making sure there's no threats to them?"
Gojo doesn't say anything back, so Yuuji steamrolls ahead. "Fushiguro told me once. About how you threatened the higher-ups to get my death sentence suspended. And how you forced the Zen'in into a contract to let him and his stepsister live freely. Then Ino mentioned in Shibuya that you made the other clans store their weapons at the school so Maki could use them, and that you've been keeping the higher-ups off Yaga's back for years, and that people with Inumaki's technique used to be regularly executed until you came along."
Yuuji hadn't realized it before, but now that he's thinking about it… "That room, too. Where you let me hide for a couple of months after I died. It was already set up and stocked and everything, even though we went there straight after the morgue. That was originally for someone else, wasn't it?"
Gojo had mentioned before that Yuuji's circumstances weren't unique. "Yuuta's situation was...unstable. Tch, one accident and they probably would've tried to kill him as soon as I looked away, too, buncha cockroaches…" The face he makes is that of someone who just found shit stuck on the bottom of their shoes.
"So see? That's just how you protect people." The next time that Yuuji inches closer, Gojo doesn't flinch away. Infinity is still there, ever-present safety net, but it's shaved down now, whittled away just enough that Yuuji can feel body heat radiating through it.
Gojo still doesn't say anything back, so Yuuji leaves his last words at that, something for him to chew on and digest later. For now, he's tired and just content with this, this quiet that is more companionable and not at all like the silence of living alone in a house in Sendai that used to hold two people, while Gojo allows him to lean into the space around him.