Work Text:
the end.
The one thing about death that was guaranteed: nobody knew when the last good day would be until it had long since passed. Such was the case of Itadori Yuuji, who everyone thought had more time than what Sukuna allowed him.
In hindsight, Yuuji’s last week of life could have been considered an extended period of terminal lucidity: the fog in his eyes cleared; the lines around his mouth a little less prominent. He was excited and upbeat, dragging Megumi into his dorm to huddle beneath a single blanket and watch movie after movie of Jennifer Lawrence’s filmography. Megumi complained about the films but never denied him his selection, because those moments alone with Yuuji were the ones he craved the most.
They were the moments he knew he would never get, glimpses of a life that would never come to fruition: bodies pressed close, Megumi’s cheek tucked against the sharp line of Yuuji’s collarbone, demon dog warming their feet where the blanket didn’t quite cover them. Yuuji, ever restless, fiddled with the collar of Megumi’s shirt, fingers slipping up to twine in his hair until Megumi fell asleep.
He was rarely brave enough to do more than dream.
Finding the twentieth finger had been unexpected; Sukuna swallowing it down through a mouth in the center of Yuuji’s palm should not have been. They weren’t even working an exorcism, and wasn’t that the bitterest pill of all to swallow? The last good day was a good one clear up until it wasn’t, when a finger appeared between the two of them (breathing, gasping into each other’s mouths) and Yuuji had picked it up to toss it off the bed, out of their way.
They never got the chance to finish what they’d (finally, finally) started, because the second the finger was gone, so was Yuuji.
The fight was brutal and bloody.
Every part of Megumi was broken during that combat: arm and jaw, spirit and heart. Every blow he landed on Yuuji, every strike of shikigami claws against perfect sunkissed skin gutted him, reminded him of the curse he was living.
When Sukuna punched a fist into his chest and took Megumi’s heart into his grasp, he thought that was fitting. Fitting for if not Yuuji himself then at least his body to hold Megumi’s heart in his hand, to feel it pulsing (beating, for him) in his palm.
It would not beat the same afterwards.
It didn’t matter that he was dying, that he’d failed. He counted the weak fluttering-pulse of his heart wheezing through drumbeats, gasped for pockets of air in the suffocatingly still domain. Sukuna (Yuuji) was broken and bleeding, teeth garishly red and blood weeping from open wounds, and still Megumi had not been strong enough.
He was going to fail Yuuji once more.
“He worries about you,” Sukuna ground out. He squeezed, Megumi’s body seizing with the forced contraction. “He wonders if you’ll go back to the loneliness you inhabited before he found you. What he doesn’t know—” and Megumi pulled one last weapon from his shadows, steadied it in the palm that was not gripping Sukuna’s forearm, plunged deep into his chest, “—is that you never left that loneliness, did you, Fushiguro?”
He’d never been someone’s best friend before. Not before Yuuji, not before Kugisaki.
Who would love him, now that they were gone?
Would anyone remember that he had loved, once upon a time? That a boy with peach-pink hair and the kindest eyes he’d ever seen had wormed his way into Megumi’s life, demanded his laughter and his happiness and asked for nothing else? Did that boy have any clue how loved he was, clear up until the end?
“I didn’t,” he said, “because he joined me there, instead.”
The dagger slipped between Yuuji’s ribs like butter, smooth and seamless. Megumi poured every last ounce of his own cursed energy into the exorcism, expelled the tainted shadows of Sukuna’s existence from Yuuji’s very core. He prayed that it was enough, that if he died he would at least die having served some sort of a purpose, that he would not be forced to live in a world without the boy who’d changed everything for him.
Cursed energy exploded from Sukuna in turn. It punched into Megumi’s pores like shrapnel from a bomb, every inch of exposed skin pricking up with blood at the sheer force of power. It sank its talons into Megumi’s skin, wormed its way into the torn-open edges of the hole in his chest and buried itself there, made itself at home in the same place his shadows lived, where the technique he’d been born with resided.
When the energy faded, Sukuna was smiling: a cross between pride and impossible fondness; he was flickering between Yuuji and himself, fighting to remain in control. “In another lifetime,” he said, and Megumi could feel the final dregs of his cursed energy attempting (and failing) to knit the broken pieces of him back together, “you would have had a good life with him.”
As if they’d lived it—as if this joke of a life would have ever given them the opportunity—visions of that daydream flashed before his vision. Yuuji and Megumi exorcising Sukuna, leaving the school, making a life together. Being happy, simple and free, an opportunity neither of them had ever been afforded. Loving each other, because if anyone could love Megumi without expecting anything in return, it would have been Yuuji.
It was Yuuji.
Sukuna’s grip softened until his fingers were merely touching the barely-beating thing inside Megumi’s chest. He left the hand there, half-afraid of what pulling the hand from around his heart would do. If he was lucky—and he knew he was not; even now he could feel Gojo’s Limitless shattering the layers of Sukuna’s domain piece by piece—he could lie here, next to Yuuji, and that would be the end of it all.
Megumi did not succumb to his injuries until he watched the last of the tattoos fade from the face he'd spent hours memorizing. Only then did he crawl forward, arms grasping for Yuuji’s body, and curl around it protectively, head pressed to his chest in the hope of hearing a heartbeat.
When the domain around him fractured, he slept.
after.
The school gives students a week off, after. Return home or stay, everyone has the option. Megumi has nowhere to call home but the school, so he stays.
Even if he had somewhere, he’s not released from the hospital for three days after the fight. His jaw is wired shut, his arm stuck in a sling, the crater-sized hole just above his heart packed with gauze that’s so unpleasant to change he has Inumaki order him to sleep while they do it those first few days. Pain medication is offered and refused. It dulls everything out, makes him angry and irritable; he doesn’t want that.
Megumi wants to feel this, all of it. Even if it feels like almost dying all over again.
He feels it when he first returns to the school. The grounds are empty, yet-to-bloom cherry blossom trees pregnant with low-hanging buds that seem to grieve the loss of the boy whose hair matched their petals. He feels it in the places he sees, the places he went with both of them: the training grounds, hours upon hours spent teaching and learning; the common area, where they’d spent countless nights curled up watching films; even the infirmary, where he goes for gauze changes those first few days.
He feels it when he lies on his bed and listens as one of the teachers places a shrine next to Yuuji’s bed for returning students to kneel and pray over.
He wears his grief like a suit of armor. It is a heavy, weighted thing; impractical to wear but safer than anything he’s ever known. When he thumbs over the photos in his phone of Yuuji and him, when he catches the scent of Yuuji’s body spray, when he lies awake at night and lets tears slip out the corners of his eyes: he feels nothing.
The grief cocoons him, shelters him from the partialities of life. He cannot feel anything because he feels only one thing, inevitable.
On the seventh day, when the other students return to school grounds, it is Panda who finds him on a bench beneath the cherry trees. Panda, who never left, who gave Megumi his space for a week.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.
It, as if the entire jujutsu world does not know that he killed Ryoumen Sukuna and the boy unfortunate enough to be his vessel—his best friend. As if there are not already whispers about Gojo Satoru’s cursed legacy, how he killed his friend and passed that same misfortune onto one of his prodigy students.
“No,” he says. He stares straight ahead, wind ruffling the unruly spikes of his hair. He clenches his fist in the sling and winces when it sends a shock of pain clear into his collarbone, closest to where Sukuna had punched into his chest.
He knows Panda means well. But the only person with whom Megumi wants to discuss the impact Yuuji’s death has on his life is Yuuji himself, and he is not here.
Yuuji is nowhere and everywhere, and Megumi is alone.
promises.
“Promise me.”
Sukuna had been bargaining with Yuuji for time together—training, he’d told him, and they did quite a bit of that and quite a bit of just sitting and talking. He was using their friends’ lives as poker chips in a game he was destined to lose, promising one after another in exchange for hours, blinks of time where he’d coach Megumi through moves, fighting and feinting and once they were done with that taking nothing more, sometimes answering Megumi’s questions and sometimes posing queries of his own.
Sukuna knew his time was coming to an end, same as Yuuji.
Through their time together, Megumi was being reshaped—refined. It was similar to the way a blacksmith might plunge a piece of iron into a forge, to pull it out and hammer it into a more suitable shape. Megumi imagined that was what Sukuna likened their training to: honing him into a weapon to be wielded, something deadly for him to take possession of.
The manipulation was not subtle. Megumi knew of it, noticed it; he could feel himself slowly becoming corrupted against the ideals of jujutsu society. He could feel himself agreeing with some of what Sukuna said, which was wrong, and he couldn’t bring himself to care about that. Because—being formed into something new to be used, was that different from anything anyone else had done to him? From Gojo sweeping him off the streets to the school pressuring him to now, where was the difference?
Megumi could not see any, save for the fact that this could be his choice.
He leaned back, planting his hands in the grass so he was propped up. He could feel Sukuna’s eyes on him; he did not look over. Instead he studied the training ground before them, wondered if Gojo’s eyes could see the fighting they’d done tonight.
Sukuna’s fingers reached over and tangled with his: a facsimile of how it would feel for Yuuji to touch him, a pointless wish and a cruel tease. This, ultimately, was how he did it. How he’d threaded that needle of discord through the eye of Megumi’s heart, how he’d sewn the first dregs of unhappiness and resentment deep within his chest. This is what you will miss, the curse seemed to sing, and Megumi knew Gojo had been right all those years ago. Love was the greatest curse of all. “Promise you what?”
“Don’t let him feel anything,” Megumi requested plainly. “When it—when the execution takes place. Don’t… feed off his pain.”
Sukuna sucked his teeth, made a considering noise. “Your pain will be enough to feed on,” he said in lieu of an answer. “What would you offer, in exchange?”
Anything.
“What do you want?
A huff of breath, more of a petulant sniff than anything. “What do you think.”
Megumi stretched his neck and rolled his head so his cheek rested on his shoulder. He eyed the curse sitting next to him, hair swept back so the tattoos on his face were on full display. He looked both eerily similar to and nothing at all like the boy he loved; sometimes, Megumi swore he could see Yuuji somewhere, deep in his eyes.
But he knew Yuuji was asleep right now. Giving them their privacy.
“I don’t know if I can make that promise,” he responded, finally. “Every time I summon him, he almost kills me.”
Tonight was no exception. Mahoraga was fierce, far more dangerous than any of the shikigami Megumi had exorcised before. They had summoned him dozens of times by that point, and Megumi had yet to come close to taming him.
“You need to be prepared for that.” Sukuna’s voice was somber, serious; he turned and faced forward. “I, too, will do my best to kill you when the time comes.”
shrine.
He keeps the small shrine hidden during the day, all too aware of how Gojo pries. But in the evenings when he returns to his bedroom, he pulls it out from its space beneath the bed, arranges the crumpled flowers he’s managed to slip into his pocket, and lights the incense and candle. He sits carefully so as not to disturb the barely-healed skin on his chest, and he stares.
It’s stupid, holding vigil for something—someone—like Ryoumen Sukuna. A disgrace to the memory of Yuuji, too close and bruise-painful when his mind circles near the subject of his best friend. But so many are mourning for Yuuji, Megumi included. A table sits by his bed beneath the poster of a bikini-clad Jennifer Lawrence; the door is closed but unlocked so as not to air out the room that still smells of him. Students come and go, slipping in at all hours to sit and pray over the small shrine built in memory of their fellow sorcerer. Gojo spends a lot of time there.
But nobody mourns for Sukuna; nobody prays for forgiveness over what is left of his soul.
Megumi, at least, has forgiven him. So he tries.
“May he know himself forgiven for all the harm he may have thought and done,” Megumi begins. The words are clumsy, inarticulate on his tongue; he considers stopping there. How stupid is it, praying like this? Romanticizing Sukuna’s final days, as if he’d protected Yuuji for any reason other than his own survival?
Praying when he isn’t sure who he’s praying for: Yuuji, or the curse that killed him?
“May he have accomplished the profound practice of phowa, and died a good and peaceful death. And through the triumph of his death, may he have benefited all other beings, living or dead.”
When the prayer is finished, Megumi sits in silence, watching the slow burn of the incense as it turns to ash. The smoke spirals and curls toward the ceiling, embers glowing orange before graying out; the candle casts shadows dancing across the dark dorm room. He sits until he can no longer feel his legs, feet dead beneath his weight, and only then does he move to get up.
Before he goes to bed, he leans forward and blows out the candle.
best friend.
“Y’know, when I first thought about all this, I didn’t think my best friend would be the one to—“ Yuuji finished his sentence by drawing a finger across his throat sharply and making a crrrt noise. He shoved his hands in his pockets and continued walking, face upturned to the sun so it highlighted the shots of silver at his temples. They’d started springing up late last fall somewhere around finger fifteen; the first time he noticed one Yuuji had burst into Megumi’s room to ask if that made him a silver fox. “I thought—well, I guess I figured one of the elders would do it, you know? Execution-style.”
Megumi wasn’t sure what part he was meant to focus on, but certainly wasn’t the part he was: that Yuuji had called him his best friend. “Oh,” he said, eloquent as always.
“Or maybe sensei,” Yuuji continued, “since he’s the strongest. But Sukuna says it has to be you.”
Megumi hadn’t given Sukuna’s ultimatum much thought since he’d first heard Gojo arguing over it with the curse himself. It was an intentional difficulty, a whim Sukuna was likely demanding to buy himself more time. Asking Sukuna had proved futile; when Megumi asked why it had to be him, he slammed enough cursed energy into Megumi to power an entire corpse and chastised him for becoming distracted.
The only surprising part of the whole thing was that Gojo had granted Sukuna a choice in his executioner. Gojo was afraid, Megumi thought. He wanted the job of killing Yuuji about as badly as he wanted Yuuji dead, which was to say not at all.
“—the blood of virgins,” Yuuji finished. Whatever Megumi had tuned out for, it was not a loss. “So anyways, I’ll see you tonight? Inumaki’s making everyone rice balls before we finish the last Hunger Games movie.”
Selfishness dictated that Megumi was unhappy with their Jennifer Lawrence marathon being interrupted by the third years, but he had no right. The entire school knew Yuuji’s time was coming to an end; interactions with him were fraught with tension, heavy with the fear of any words going unsaid. I love yous were exchanged freely, as were touches. Megumi could not blame anyone else for clinging to what little time they had left with Yuuji when he himself was doing the same thing.
“You’ll see me tonight,” he agreed. Unspoken was the agreement that they would continue their movie night after the third years had retired for the evening, tucked together in the safety of Yuuji’s room.
Neither of them addressed the implications of Megumi falling asleep there each night.
Yuuji’s face immediately brightened, eyes crinkling and a blush dusting the crests of his cheekbones. Megumi drank in the sight of him, committed every freckle splashed across his skin to memory. He was beautiful in the way all tragic things were: devastatingly, brokenly so.
“Cool, okay! I should—” he hooked a thumb over his shoulder and stumbled back over his own feet. “Gojo wanted to meet with me, so I’ll—”
“You’ll see me later.” Megumi tried (and failed) not to wonder how many more times he would be able to say that and mean it.
“Yuuji,” he called after the other boy had started to walk away. The line of Itadori’s back stiffened, tensed at the use of his first name. He turned to face Megumi, head cocked. The smile lines were deep around his mouth, but Megumi didn’t have to guess to know the one he’d worn during their walk had dropped the second Yuuji turned away from him.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks,” and Megumi stepped forward, pulled him in for a hug, breathing in the familiar scent of him: body soap and sweat and something herbal shivering just beneath his skin. He clung to Yuuji, allowed himself that single moment of weakness, and thought: I love you. I’m sorry.
“You’re my best friend, too.”
gojo.
Gojo passes Megumi in the student dorms one day, on his way to Yuuji’s room. He goes every day, sometimes more than once a day. His regret is a concrete thing, shading the halls a sickly pallor and leaving him looking windblown, weak: he has aged ten years in a matter of weeks, fire-bright laughter and smiles tamped to a weak flicker.
Instead of going to Yuuji’s room, he follows Megumi into his own. Megumi is silent; the table hidden in his closet feels taboo. Does Gojo see it? Does he sense Megumi’s grief in the scent-memories of incense and cherry blossoms, layered like shingles on a roof? Does he know Megumi mourns for both of them?
Most days, it feels as though Sukuna was the only one trying to save Yuuji, too.
For what seems to be the first in a long time, Gojo sighs. And then he sits, spine pressed to the side of Megumi’s bed. With the flick of a wrist, a bottle of Hyokunen no Kodoku and two glasses balance in his large hand.
Megumi busies himself with everything, anything but his teacher pouring the shochu, looking for all intents and purposes like he wants to have something akin to a heart-to-heart. He fiddles with the schoolwork he’s neglected for the past weeks, rearranges his pencils, considers the likelihood of Gojo following if he leaves.
When he runs out of things to touch on his desk, he is forced to face his sensei.
“Don’t tell anyone I’m letting you drink.” Gojo’s arm is outstretched, one of the glasses raised in offer to Megumi. The second glass is forgotten on the floor in favor of the bottle itself.
There’s nobody left alive to tell, some small cruel part of him considers saying, but reminding Gojo he’s all Megumi has left would accomplish nothing for either of them. They hurt enough without Megumi adding to it.
Wordlessly, he accepts the glass of shochu, takes it down in one gulp rather than sipping on it. He drops into the space next to Gojo, facing his bed, and he slumps forward to rest his forehead against the mattress.
The room is creaking-quiet, the only sounds of life the steady murmur of Yuuta’s speech in the next room, whimpering sobs muffled by the wall. The blood rushes to his head, swirls in his ears. He imagines his heart is beating overtime to flush his body the way it is, wonders if it’s worked this hard since Sukuna reached in and gripped it in his palm.
Megumi’s glass is refilled. He sips it this time.
“I miss him too,” Gojo says: an olive branch, an offering. He’s not talking about Sukuna, and it’s a kindness he pays Megumi to pretend, this way.
Yuuji was Gojo’s prodigy, his bright boy. He was the only student the Six Eyes would weep for, and Megumi had long since theorized that Gojo had been mourning his loss of Yuuji from the very moment they met.
The first words he’s spoken in weeks, jagged and rough as an uncut gem through his wired-shut jaw: “We should have tried harder.”
“I know,” Gojo agrees. He tips the bottle to his mouth, drinks down a long swallow and rubs at an eye through his blindfold. “I know.”
return.
The air tastes of acid and smoke on his tongue. Blood from a head wound drips over his brow and into his eyes; he drops to his knees and slouches forward, breaths heavy.
He says nothing but thinks I did it, Sukuna.
When he finds the strength to look up and watch Mahoraga dissipate back into the shadows as all shikigami do once released, his stomach gives a sickening lurch.
Mahoraga is not melting back into the shadows so much as he is bleeding, mouth open in a silent scream as black oozes from a gaping wound across his throat. Megumi feels that all-too familiar panic, the same one he’d felt the night he lost one of his demon dogs. Losing a shikigami is like losing a limb: equally as impactful and twice as painful, and this is gutting.
The gash across Mahoraga’s throat resonates in Megumi’s chest, his heart constricting and twisting into a pipe bomb set to explode.
“No,” he gasps. He pushes up with his arms, struggles to his feet. He doesn’t feel the lance of pain when he drops back to his knees; he ignores the burn in his arms as he begins to drag himself forward, desperate to try and save the shikigami. “No, no, no, I just—”
Megumi scrambles to his knees, arms trembling as he holds them out for the sign. “Mahoraga, go! ”
The shikigami drops to the ground, where the shadows are stirring and pooling at his feet.
The pain in his chest is white-hot and blinding now. His heart tightens, flips through a fumbled-out contraction and pauses; he makes it to Mahoraga and makes the sign again.
“Release,” he chokes out. Tears come unbidden to his eyes, but he does not swipe them away. They fall freely as he signs over and over again, desperate to keep his shikigami with the others. “I just got you, go, ” he commands, but it is a losing battle.
Mahoraga remains, body thrashing beneath his touch, until the very end. Then and only then does his body return to the shadows, that brief connection between Megumi and the shikigami—the bond brilliant, crackling with cursed energy and powerful as lighting—fading out. It aches, visceral enough that he feels it in his teeth, in the marrow of his bones. He keens, falls forward and tries to suffocate the cursed energy bleeding out of that gaping wound in his soul with something, anything.
There and gone: the screaming pulse of pain in his chest is replaced with a twisting sensation, one that knocks the breath from his lungs and slams him against the ground. The beating of his heart is no longer controlled by his body; it is controlled by an outside force, by the shackle-pressure of the weight he has been carrying since his last loss. Something grips his heart once more, shoves into that opening and spreads, tendrils like roots ricocheting off the very core of him.
It is more cursed energy than Megumi has ever felt, on par with perhaps only Gojo and—
Sukuna.
Sukuna.
The training, the questions, the slow manipulation. The promise he’d made to chain Mahoraga, even if it killed him, even if it took him years. Pieces of the plan snap into place, questions and inconsistencies clearing themselves as Megumi’s entire being is torn apart and stitched back together, skin itching with the sheer force of the power rippling through him.
A figure rises from the bubbling mass of shadows where Mahoraga had lain, and the damage on his soul from Mahoraga’s loss rewrites itself, scrawls a new history into the channels of his shadows. His heart slows; his breathing goes even with the knowledge of what he’s done, what this is.
This is a bond he will never escape from.
Brushing its robes away, the newly formed shikigami kneels, head bowed. The part of its mouth not covered with a wooden mask ticks up into a smirk. “Fushiguro Megumi,” it purrs, hungry eyes casting upwards to peer at his awestruck face. It swipes a thumb across Megumi’s cheek to catch the falling tears and pops it into its mouth. “What is your plan?”
All he sees is pink hair and that boyish smile, amber eyes soft and sweet like caramel. Love is the most dangerous curse of all, Gojo had said, and Megumi still agrees with that. He feels it, now. “I want to burn down every last inch of the world that took him from me,” he says.
Sukuna smiles.