Chapter Text
Yuuji couldn’t close his eyes without seeing faces. It had been this way ever since he was a child and the only person constant in his life was his grandfather who towered and intimidated. A man who’d simultaneously been the oldest person Yuuji had ever seen and the most alive. He would sometimes sweep him up into his arms, complain of a bad back, and toss him onto the threadbare couch where Yuuji would shriek and ask to do it again. The next minute he could stare him down for a failed test, making comments that sliced below the skin. He taught Yuuji that people could be many things. They could exist in multitudes and those multitudes were built up from the people they’d interacted with as a child stretching all the way back to times history books didn’t cover. They were all in an interconnected web and his grandfather sometimes made Yuuji feel like he was in the center of it. Like all of humanity's successes and failures had coalesced and distilled into him.
The faces were there even then. His grandfather hadn’t believed him, and he couldn’t really blame him for it. He’d had an overactive imagination for most of his life, the floating heads that surrounded him when he was alone were not the first weird story he’d brought up. Nothing was even particularly clear, there was no definite form. Just shapes, voices, sometimes a lock of hair, a wrinkle creasing beside an eye. They were just that – faces. Unnamed, unmarked, and disconnected. He could handle faces. Despite all the things he found very difficult to handle – sitting still, leaving his grandfather to go to school in the morning, remembering his homework – formless, unrecognizable faces that appeared in the darkness of his mind were the least of his concerns.
And then his grandfather died.
The events that followed were a bit all over the place. There was a lot of blood, a lot of near death scenarios, and his grandfather got pushed further and further behind. It was hard to find a moment to grieve when you were essentially sharing your brain with someone else and Sukuna didn’t give him a lot of breathing room. He was always there, right at the precipice, right where Yuuji didn’t need him to be. That was the point, probably: to annoy, to drive him out of his mind so that he could be a sole occupant. It wasn’t going to work. He promised himself that even more fiercely than he had promised Gojo. There was something intrinsic and deep-rooted in him that wouldn’t allow himself to be taken over, at least not without a fight, not without making his life worthwhile somehow.
The fact that it took less than twenty-four hours before he was able to have just two seconds where he could close his eyes and not be harassed by Sukuna’s voice or the flash of a cursed technique was testament to how badly he craved some version of normalcy. And in that moment, the faces flooded back in a way that was now comforting and familiar. It was a return to normal. Like always they flashed in temporary brilliance, like always he saw brief moments held in time. A smile, the faint whisper of his name, always just out of reach. Then they molded. They’d never done that before. The features took shape, hardened, crystalized into the hard set of a jaw, sunken eyes, a slight frown – an expression that almost toyed with the idea of disappointment.
Yuuji jerked awake, the air punched out of him. He stared at the unfamiliar ceiling, felt the press of soft sheets across his body, heard cicadas buzzing outside. Sukuna was saying something, but he’d quickly learned to tune that out. He was constantly saying something. Instead he focused on his heartbeat pounding relentlessly – a reminder that he was alive, that he had a goal. It was something to live for, something to die for. The meaning got muddled sometimes.
He wasn’t used to sleeping in a bed. It had always been that threadbare couch and then a thin futon when he got too tall. Even when his grandfather got sick and moved permanently from his twin-sized bed to the one at the hospital, Yuuji didn’t touch it. It sat unused in the middle of a dark, poorly lit bedroom. And what even was a bed that no longer served its purpose? Could it still be called one if its only role was to now remind and suffocate? What did it mean to no longer be worthy of your name?
Regardless –- nonetheless –- moreover, it couldn’t be slept on and Yuuji didn’t dare try.
The very presence of this bed –- his bed –- was alien. When he entered the room for the first time, Gojo over his shoulder grinning widely, he’d stopped in the doorway, remembered his grandfather, and took a step inside. Barely noticeable, just the space of an exhale. The mattress was thicker than the couple centimeters he was used to and threatened to swallow him if he shifted. The blankets were too tight, too warm, too clean. They smelled like unfamiliar laundry detergent and damp clothes given the luxury of being dried by the sun. It was a miracle that he fell asleep in the first place, but he doubted it would come to him as easily again.
The hallways of Jujutsu High were empty at 2 AM which shouldn’t have been as shocking as it was. Yuuji had naively thought someone would be awake, practicing or doing some curse-related activity he still didn’t fully comprehend. Instead, it was quiet. Just a yawning, dark cavern that continued on and was a more welcoming sight than his bed. How could he be in the heart of Tokyo and it be so quiet?
Yuuji had always seen faces whenever he closed his eyes, but he’d also always been around people. Actual, living people. People that didn’t sway and shimmer and change with every blink. He’d been raised by a sense of community – sense being the key term. His grandfather was famously alone, almost proudly so. He could do anything by himself: climb the three stories to their apartment with an armchair in one arm, walk the five miles back home after forgetting to bring money for public transport, drag himself across the floor when his back gave out to call the hospital. He could do anything by himself, but he didn’t have to. And that unspoken message was the part that echoed when the sun set and Yuuji was alone in an apartment with a bed that he refused to sleep in.
So when his grandfather had agreed to stay at the hospital permanently, there’d been his neighbors, the people at the convenience store, his teachers. People his grandfather had fastidiously ignored and Yuuji had connected with as revenge, a mechanism, a bandaid. He’d always been surrounded to the point of almost drowning, but not. And now he was here where people slept and hallways grew quiet and all he could see was the bed, pressed against the wall with neatly made sheets and a familiar face whenever he blinked.
“What are you doing?”
He jumped.
Fushiguro Megumi was the embodiment of a shadow, melting into the darkness, emerging when he pleased. Standing behind Yuuji, with his hands in his pockets, he looked unbothered, unaffected. Fushiguro had perfected it, not being interested in much. It made Yuuji want to work harder. It made him want to pull an emotion out of him, anything. It reminded him of being on a high school rooftop, of being spared, of rebirth. What made a person hide things even from his own eyes?
He was leaning against the wall of an alcove, the windows opening out to the training grounds. In the dark, the branches of the surrounding trees cast long shadows across the floor, grabbing at something in an effort to stay permanent. Yuuji slipped in, watched Fushiguro tense and then relax, muscle by muscle.
“I can’t sleep,” he said, but there was more under the surface, more he needed to say. Wanted to say. He didn’t know if there was a difference anymore. He swallowed. And then, because he was never good at restraint, worst of all when it had to do with himself, “This place is too quiet, you know, for being in the middle of Tokyo. It should be louder.” He forced himself to look back at him, just so that he could see if something changed.
It didn’t. Fushiguro just listened, or stared, or both. He mostly stared. Yuuji was unsure if he was listening. But then he hummed, and his eyes narrowed and Yuuji felt assessed.
It was like he was sitting at the mechanics while his grandfather was at home in one of his moods. He was back to the cool, metal table littered with tools to take apart and put back together, swinging his feet and watching as people dove underneath cars and emerged painted in oil. He was watching broken things wheel in and better, fixed things drive out. He had felt like one of those broken things, small and unsure of where the problem was. Just that there was a ticking noise somewhere where his heart was and most of the time he could ignore it, but sometimes it would drum endlessly. He had naively thought that by just sitting there amongst the adults who handled their tools so deftly and laid beneath two ton cars, that he too could get fixed.
Fushiguro could fix people with just his eyes. Unlike the mechanics, Fushiguro could. Yuuji had never seen it happen, but he also hadn’t seen a lot.
“We’re in the mountains,” he finally said, tone dripping with something Yuuji couldn’t define.
“We’re still in Tokyo.” He played with the strings of his hoodie, pulling at one side and then the other; they were never even.
“Do you like sleeping when it's noisy outside?” Fushiguro could envelope multitudes into a single sentence. He could ask a simple question, expect a simple answer, and at the same time reveal something in himself, purposeful or not. For Fushiguro, it had always been the mountains on the edge of Tokyo, or it had always been quiet. Yuuji wanted to know which one – needed to know.
He shrugged. “It’s white noise. Like those sleep apps. It helps.”
“I don’t think any loud sound can be considered white noise.”
“Okay, then it's brown noise, or blue noise, or whatever color the good one is that makes your brain quiet.” He gave too much away, but he had also wanted to give. He wanted to open up and then, in return, to pry his fingers into the inner depths of Fushiguro and pull something out.
“And traffic helps you sleep?” He didn’t hesitate, like Yuuji had said nothing at all.
Yuuji tilted his head to the side, leaning it against the cool glass. “Traffic, sure, but noise in general would probably do the trick.” He jolted up from his position. “Sorry, you were probably just trying to relax. I can go back to my room.” He’d never had a roommate, never had to live with anyone that wasn’t the man who raised him, and thus never had to be aware of how other people lived, what they preferred. The art of stepping around people and the homes they’d created, not just the ones they lived in. And Fushiguro had been here first, alone for years. Just like Yuuji craved noise, Fushiguro could crave the quiet tranquility of two nights ago.
“No, it’s fine.” When Yuuji looked back up at him, he was staring out the window, eyes still distant and uncaring, but lips pressed together. Holding something back or holding something together. A glimpse. “I couldn’t sleep anyway.” It was less something he did than something he didn’t do that gave him away. The tense line of his spine, the stubborn set of his eyes on some arbitrary point out the window, the fact that he hadn’t changed out of his uniform.
Last night he had looked exactly the same standing against the backdrop of Sendai. There was a little more blood where now there were bandages, but otherwise he had been the same staring down the face of a fifteen foot cursed spirit. His back was straight, his focus locked. There were things that happened afterwards, words that were spoken that Yuuji hadn’t been privy to. All he knew was that Fushiguro had played a part and now he wasn’t dying. In a sentence it seemed so simple — an event and its result. Maybe it had been more than an event, the spiraling of the event, and the result as an unintended consequence. Maybe he could convince himself to believe that.
“Why’re there so many empty rooms anyway?” he asked when he eventually couldn’t come up with anything else to say.
Fushiguro didn’t move, eyes still focused on something. “There just aren’t that many sorcerers.”
“Then why build them all?”
He was silent for long enough that Yuuji was convinced he wasn’t going to respond at all. Then he sighed. “I guess people need big things to fill up. It’s nice to know it’s there, that you can choose to put stuff in it and you might not, but it’s there when you need it.” Fushiguro had said something when he was unconscious in Sendai, something that resulted in one less empty room on the outskirts of Tokyo. Intentions were messy, Yuuji knew that. He knew that intentions were often only defined after the event. It was easy to recall why you did something after the fact and more difficult in the heat of the moment, when everything was pure instinct. Fushiguro had relied on instinct.
“Really?”
“No.” He snorted, a light puff of air. A hint. “I think the higher-ups had too much money and no idea what to spend it on. I think they want an army. I think people dream big and end up making stupid decisions that result in too many rooms and only two of them in use.”
“Three tomorrow.”
Fushiguro’s eyes snapped to his — a tool poised to disassemble. Yuuji thought something crazy, in the heat of the moment, no intention, just instinct: Maybe Fushiguro wasn’t looking at something outside, maybe he was trying not to look at something inside. The idea seemed ridiculous. He held onto it anyway.
Meeting Megumi under the cover of night became a routine. It wasn’t verbally agreed upon, but a lot of things weren’t said during their conversations. Yuuji tried to extract meaning from glances and breathing patterns. He assigned phrases to a lift of Fushiguro’s brow or the way he would pause in the middle of a sentence. Everything could have meaning.
Even when Kugisaki moved in and made the nights more lively, filling them with music and phone conversations, Yuuji still made his way to the alcove. And Fushiguro was always there, sometimes standing, poised to leave, other times sitting on the windowsill, but always there. Always willing to stick around for at least half an hour, usually more. What they talked about wasn’t more important than what they didn’t talk about.
On a night that Yuuji would define as the last good night, Fushiguro was late. Or he wasn’t arriving. It was always a sort of miracle that he came in the first place and Yuuji never forgot that. So he sat on the window sill, knee bobbing, and trying not to think about times when he had sat like this in a very different city, in a very different room.
His grandfather had bought him a cake for his birthday at the store on the other side of town. The remnants of winter were still all around, the roads icy from a late season storm, and still he had walked all the way out and back. He had hidden the box behind his back, kicking the door shut behind him. He had smiled when Yuuji came bursting out to the entrance. Nostalgia had a certain glow to it that colored every memory, but Yuuji liked to believe it was sunny, that the sun poured in through the window and across their small table where the cake sat with eight candles haphazardly shoved in. He liked to believe he had been grateful enough, thankful enough –- that he had imprinted his thanks into everything he did that day. When Yuuji closed his eyes, he saw his grandfather with the cake, the smile stretched across his face, but his eyes were dark. Yuuji had never been good at noticing people’s eyes enough to say anything about it.
“Itadori.”
He startled awake and he was back in the middle of the night. It was humid. It was summer.
Fushiguro just stood there and that itself was unbelievable. To not be leaning or pressed against something, to be separate from the building they were in, to be his own person. To just be a person, if that was possible. To just be a person standing in a building and looking at another person, another separate entity. To look at them with concern –- because Yuuji was looking at eyes now.
“Hi,” he managed after just a beat, smiling.
“What’s wrong?”
Yuuji smiled wider, like the previous smile was ineffective. This could work, even though he knew it wouldn’t. Fushiguro tried not to look, but he always ended up seeing too much, forcing Yuuji to show. If he had known that Fushiguro would wind up examining him before putting him back together again, he might have stayed in his room. He might have, but he wouldn’t.
“Nothing,” he managed, though it was useless at that point. Fushiguro had understood everything.
He didn’t move from where he was. Another step and he’d be out of the shadows, isolated in the moonlight. “You looked like this last week too. The first time.”
The fact that there was a first time was part of the problem. It implied a second, a third. It implied more. What did it mean to be defined by someone –- to see their definition of you unfurl? To be Itadori Yuuji: the boy who couldn’t sleep, the boy who couldn’t blink, just a boy, always a boy. But if Fushiguro had his own definition of Yuuji, then Yuuji had one of Fushiguro that was probably equally flawed. Fushiguro Megumi: always just out of reach.
“I see faces when I close my eyes.” He looked back outside and he understood Fushiguro a little more at that moment too. There was a point when you wanted to look at someone so badly that you had no other choice but to look away. “I think they’re all the people I’ve disappointed.”
The definition of Itadori Yuuji expanded.
Fushiguro shifted, but he still didn’t move.
“That’s pretty dumb.”
Yuuji snorted, shocked enough to loosen his arms, let his legs fall, toes grazing the floor. Fushiguro always seemed so hard to read, so brooding and dark and uncontainable, but he really was just simple. Yuuji liked simple. He liked not having to overthink things, at least not another thing. He liked emotions laid out plainly across a face, actions that screamed their meaning. He liked that Fushiguro thought that he was a lot more complicated than he was. He wanted to meet that Fushiguro too, the kind of person he thought he was. He wanted to expand his definition.
“It is, isn’t it?” Because saying it out loud made it seem a lot more stupid than it felt. It felt like a branding across his forehead, an announcement to the world.
“How many people have you disappointed?” he asked, voice level.
The last thing he should’ve expected from Fushiguro was a joint laugh over his own self-deprecation. Not when the flex of his hand was saying something else. The shift of his weight from one leg to another was a distinct tune Yuuji had parsed out days ago. Fushiguro, despite how he’d like to appear, was laughably easy to read.
Still, the question tripped him up. He had to avoid his eyes, look back out the window and then at the splinter of wood poking out from the window sill.
“I don’t know,” he murmured. “That’s the scary part.”
Fushiguro shifted, a slight tilt of his head. “You’re ridiculous,” he settled on after a prolonged pause.