Work Text:
He was out.
Free.
Air had never felt so good to breathe.
He stared down at the gravestone by his feet, tracing over its tiny ingrained letters with his scratchy, tired eyes.
His fingers trembled with some sort of emotion - a sensation welled up in his chest that made the fresh, earthly air hard to take in, made his lungs feel restricted and his throat close up.
His stomach ached with a familiar pain that he’d felt twice before, and now a third time, over the same cruel boy with inky hair and a broken spirit.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. He felt like crying at the feeling of contact after being deprived of the very human concept of interaction for however long he’d been trapped away, sealed like a prisoner.
It seemed that his mind had taken his place behind bars, and the thoughts that swirled through his head caused him to shudder.
The hand on his shoulder grew tighter. His breath grew quieter, fading into the gusty sounds of air, voices disappearing from behind him.
His vision faded and blurred as he lost his balance, hit with the full weight of realization.
He stumbled into the hand on his shoulder, feeling warm arms around his frame. His feet shuffled around as the hands led him away from the gray stone in the ground along with a love that once was.
He felt eyes on him, boring into his frame, staring at him.
He felt vaguely self-conscious as he could feel them slowly making their way down his frame - beaten and battered from his head to his toes by the men who now lied with the worms in the dirt.
For where love lied, so did a child, not yet old enough to drive.
The world spun around him as he was swept off his feet by his own human vulnerability.
Feet shuffled closer as the hands around him let go, allowing his knees to hit the dirt with a soft sound of defeat.
Sure, he’d won, but no victory worth claiming was ever worth the cost.
He stared at his hands, dirty with red, dripping with the love that he’d once felt.
Everything was a blur as he wrapped his arms around his tumbling stomach, leaning over as his insides gave up and were left splayed out in the grass.
There were hands on his shoulders again, pulling him to his feet.
He stumbled around as voices lit up behind him, speaking concerns and inquiries that he couldn’t bother to listen to.
Even empty, his middle still burned, his head spinning and pounding.
There were wounds on his body, and yet none of their stinging pains could add up to the pain he felt in his breast, clawing at his frame and begging to come out of its prison.
And so it did.
—
A scream broke through the air just as the sun was beginning to rise.
Students and sorcerers alike watched as the sorry, pathetic form before them, more than once regarded as the strongest, kicked and screamed and cried.
Gojo writhed on the ground, Shoko’s arms around him as tears flung from her eyes.
Yuji took a step closer, for once completely silent, his shoes crunching in the grass as he made his way over to the sobbing man and his friend.
He knelt down, regarding the two adults with a trembling lip and a somber expression.
After a moment of silence, Gojo’s quieted sobs filling the air, Yuji looked to Shoko, and she nodded, releasing her arms from her white-haired companion’s struggling form.
Once the older male was free from the doctor’s embrace, Yuji took advantage of his momentary stillness.
The boy inched closer to his eccentric teacher, placing his hands on the older’s shoulders. Icy blue eyes met light brown, and Gojo was slowly being pulled into a hug, his face hidden in Yuji’s shoulder.
No words were spoken as the once-imprisoned man broke down once more, screaming his voice against the younger boy’s now tear-covered shoulder.
Shoko was on her knees in the dirt next to Gojo, slowly rubbing circles into his heaving back with her palm.
She was perhaps the only one who truly understood just what the decomposing corpses in the dirt meant to him.
As the sun continued to slowly creep over the horizon, the crowd of people surrounding the sorry white-haired man began to disperse, leaving the grieving six-eyes user alone with his long-time friend and once-student.
Gojo’s hands clawed at the back of Yuji’s tattered uniform as his hoarse cries continued to crackle through the air.
The boy let it happen, simply whispering tiny words of reassurance into the older man’s ear.
It was years ago that Gojo had done this for the boy laid in the dirt, after his sweet, now-dead sister had gone to sleep.
It was years ago Gojo had been in Yuji’s place after his ex best friend couldn’t take the trauma of almost losing him.
It was years ago Gojo had been the boy, holding his now-dead blond-haired friend in his arms as the younger cried over his dead classmate.
Death was a curse, and it was beyond even a special grade.
Even after all of those days spent holding others, easing them through their traumas and grief as they recovered from the thought of losing someone, Gojo was now in their place - grieving over those same people who he’d once held.
It was ironic to him that those people who he’d promised to never leave had left him, alone in this sorry world.
It was then that it occurred to Gojo, as his sobs and cries quieted to a halt, his mind and body too exhausted to continue, that he had never been held like this before.
For somebody usually so strong, so powerful, and so sickeningly bouncy, he was now curled in a pathetic lump in the dirt, clinging to the last shreds of hope he had.
For even the strongest of men can be weak.
Even the strongest of men can be breakable.