Archive of Our Own

The whole world is fucking ending.

Fire slices the liminal space between Yuji’s skin and his muscles. His arms, his spine. Teeth crawl up the rows of his vertebrae. He clenches his hands around fistfuls of hair until his knuckles go white, and they dig into his temples in the process, but he has to do something to squeeze everything out of his head. His teeth clatter in his skull, and his feet sink into the mud of the earth. His body and mind scrape along through an icy river that fills his lungs with every breath.

He can’t breathe. Oh, gods, he can’t breathe.

Where did it start? His thoughts tumble backwards, then left, and he can’t even follow himself down the dark corridors he comes across. He doesn’t want to see this. Blood on the walls of the station. Blood boils in every corner of the room and beads up on his hands, his knuckles turning red—

Yuji jerks the wrong way, and his head strikes metal. A fresh wave of overwhelming ache threatens to consume him. He almost hopes it does. Easier. He grits his teeth against each other. Is he crying?

The bed. The bed is behind him, and he’s on the floor, and his legs are tangled in the sheets. His head hit the frame. Flames lap at his throat as the ice spreads through his skull. He presses his eyes closed, but it’s all there, too, on the backs of his eyelids.

He doesn’t want to see any of this. Not the past, not the present, not the future, not the oxygen searing through his lungs every time he sucks it through his teeth.

He woke up, and they were already there.

He bites down on his tongue and tastes blood.

They’re always there.

In a desperate attempt to drown the ache of the memories beneath the ache of something present and physical, he squeezes the sides of his head tighter. To try to keep himself from coming apart, too. If he lets go, who knows what his hands will do, how many shattered pieces he will fall into? He thinks of other people, and it just makes it worse, the broken glass and visions. It feels like someone else is clawing at the inside of his throat. The fire reaches his tongue.

Yuji is dying.

The room around him isn’t real. Shadows loom. The curtains are drawn, and there’s nothing behind them. Empty, hollow world, where he belongs, where he’s been the whole time, and it swallows him, hot teeth on his spine, acid eating away at his flesh, and he deserves it, but gods, please, it hurts. He doesn’t want this. He curls in on himself. His legs shake. He doesn’t want this.

A scream builds somewhere on the precipice of a complete loss of control. He slips at the edges, and he’s on the floor, his whole body, hardwood rubs against his cheek, and it’s wet, and he’s crying, and he opens his mouth, so wide his jaw hurts, but he can’t scream, no sound comes out, he can’t breathe, no sound comes out, he can’t breathe, he can’t scream, it builds, and it builds and it builds and it builds and it builds and it—

The light turns on and Yuji almost explodes.

A voice sprouts at the edge of his vision. So clear he can almost touch it. He’s blind, but he still sees the bodies in front of him, at his touch.

A sound most similar to a whimper wrenches itself free from his throat.

Footsteps move towards him.

Fuck, Yuji thinks, and his brain kicks into overdrive, as if it wasn’t already there. Like a heated computer engine, his thoughts boil, and it reaches his skin, and there’s a new bout of fire, and he can see it before he sees it. It gorges on the space behind his eyeballs. It tears out every strand of his hair. He writhes on the ground. He doesn’t want to be here.

They’re going to kill him. If he doesn’t burst into flames, whoever has just come in will kill him. They’ve already turned on the light. They’ll punish him, because that was the whole point, what they were supposed to do. A long time ago. Sword in his chest. Blood in his teeth. Blood on his—

“Hey.”

An ocean. Yuji gasps for breath.

The voice, new and old and familiar and terrifying, washes over him in cool tides. Not boiling hot, not icy, just cool. Not even lukewarm. He spends so much energy trying to pinpoint the temperature of the water, he forgets how to hurt, for a moment.

All at once, the footsteps come faster, closer, and a presence crouches beside him, bathed in darkness. “Are you okay?”

Yuji graps at that voice like it’s a life preserver, even though he’d rather drown. It’s intoxicating, the way he can’t decide if he wants to lean into it or run away, if it’s good or bad. It makes his head spin. They’re going to kill him. Right?

“Itadori.”

He can’t identify the tone of their voice. He can’t identify—

“Can I touch you?”

He must shake his head no, because the touch doesn’t come. Silence presses in and the fire gets hotter and he doesn’t want to be here.

The touch doesn’t come until it does. It finds him in fragments, fractions of a safe feeling lapping at him instead of the flames. Softer, more delicate, more hesitant than he’s felt in a while. He doesn’t lean into the hand—he can’t, he’s lying down and paralysed, but he doesn’t stop it, either, as it roams along his shoulder and partway down his arm. Like he’s being pet. He feels helpless. He might be shaking.

The voice murmurs something else, and there’s a shifting and a settling as the person sits down fully beside him. Yuji blinks back tears and listens through a haze. It sounds like the insides of his eardrums are burning. He feels fire nipping at his fingers. It did that once before, he remembers. Fuck. He remembers.

“It’s Fushiguro,” the voice says.

He knows that name. Knows the voice. Fushiguro’s gentle ministrations pause, and then he continues to rub Yuji’s shoulder, an ice pack to quell the heat. He’s still gasping through that frozen river in his lungs, though, and no one can help with that. He has to wait for it to leave him, or die like this. He should just die—

“Do you mind if I just talk to you for a minute?”

Yuji’s fingers stop tearing at his own hair. He presses the heel of his palm into the bone of his cheek, and he thinks he nods again, and hopes it means go ahead.

“I’m going to stay right here with you,” Fushiguro says, monotone and trembling at the same time. The timbre of his words is altered by the harsh waves eating away at Yuji’s brain and the kinder waves fighting against them. He has to speak through a cloud, through a sound barrier that can’t be broken.

He presses gently on Yuji’s shoulder, an anchor in the dark. “I don’t know what you’re going through right now. It looks like it’s really scary. Do you even know I’m here?”

Is he crying? His breath catches, and fear cycles through the quiet words.

He stops talking for a heartbeat too long and Yuji wants to scream. He can feel his own heart pounding and pounding and pounding, so hard it might break free of his ribs, and he doesn’t want it to. He doesn’t want to stop it beating, but it can’t leave him again. Not his body. Not his love. He lets out a strangled whimper and wraps his arms around himself. His fingers brush someone else’s at his shoulder.

“There’s a bird outside,” Fushiguro murmurs, thoughtful. A slow rush of water soothes the racing thoughts. A single seashell washes up on the burning beach. “It’s really sunny out. I can kind of only see its silhouette, but I think it’s a… warbler? It’s pretty small.”

Yuji’s heartbeat seems to recede seconds at a time. He takes in a breath, not as ragged as the ones before. He closes his eyes and tries to focus on what Fushiguro is describing. The bird is on fire. Everyone is gone, and—

“The trees are… getting to be really beautiful. All the leaves are coming in really green and bright.” He hums, and his hand runs smooth and comforting down Yuji’s back. “I didn’t used to like spring very much, but I feel like I’ve grown to appreciate it more now.”

Yuji blinks back the visions behind his eyes. He can see the trees. They were beautiful yesterday, too, out his bedroom window. Is that where they are, his bedroom? Is Fushiguro with him?

He exhales long and slow and remembers the bed. He’d woken up like this. Fatigue wraps its hands around his bones.

“Itadori, can you hear me?”

His voice gets even closer. His cool touch is palpable, not just in his hand where it rests on Yuji. He’s close. “Can you open your eyes?”

The ice seizes his lungs, and the image of the tree is ripped away by the roots, and Yuji’s eyes pop open more out of alarm than anything. His whole body shivers and quakes. He can’t stop it, he can’t stop it, he can’t stop it.

But though the fogginess, he sees Fushiguro, blurry and far away, but there. He’s leaning down to look at Yuji. Yuji can’t make out the look on his face.

“There you go.” Fushiguro’s voice drops an imperceptible degree in volume, temperature, size. His thumb alone works out a knot in Yuji’s shoulder. “Just focus on me,” he instructs. “Can you tell me five things you can see?”

Yuji chokes on a rotten taste in the back of his throat when the first five things that come to his mind are all horrid, gruesome images. He needs to push them out or they’re going to kill him. He glances around wildly, but all he can take in is the shape of Fushiguro in front of him, fuzzy at the edges and tilted sideways and refusing to stay still. He claws once at the ground and stammers a string of incomprehensible words.

“Take your time,” Fushiguro soothes.

With more effort than it’s ever taken to speak, Yuji’s mouth forms around the word “You.” He gasps like he’s taken a punch. He sees Fushiguro against a wall. Fushiguro with the reversed cursed energy. Fushiguro is bleeding. His features blend into one another, lips, the collar of his shirt. “Your throat,” he cries out, because it’s all he can think of, and the fire gets hotter around him. “Your head.”

“Take a break from me. If it’s difficult.” He scoots a little closer and settles himself down. “I know it’s scary right now, and I can’t imagine what you must be thinking. But it’s okay to let those thoughts go. What do you see here, in your bedroom?”

His mind feels numb, but he looks around again until he finds something. “Poster,” he says, staring past Fushiguro. “On the wall.”

He barely processes it when Fushiguro turns to confirm that. Yuji remembers putting that poster up, rolling out little balls of putty to stick it to the wall. Gojo had told him not to use tape.

His insides recoil and twist into knots. Gojo. Shit.

“Good,” Fushiguro murmurs. “What else?”

Eyes drift down and to the left. Yuji breathes heavily through his nose. His arms feel heavy, but not so hot anymore. “Wardrobe. There’s—my—I forgot to put my shirts away. I forgot…”

“That’s okay.” Fushiguro’s hand comes back to his shoulder and rubs back and forth. “Give me one more thing.”

He has to tilt his head a little now, to see more, and his vision blurs with the sort of vertigo he’d get stepping off of a spinning ride at a theme park. But he catches traces of green at the edges, rich and lovely, just like Fushiguro said. Like his voice promised on accident when he was trying to give Yuji something to hold onto. The sight of it is almost relieving. Yuji swallows thickly and then lets out a calmer shaky breath. “The trees,” he murmurs. The words come a little easier now.

“Good,” Fushiguro says again. “That’s really good, Itadori. Now, tell me four things you can touch.”

“Four?” Yuji whines. It seems like so many. He scrunches his eyes shut tight and tries to feel things that aren’t just on the inside. His fingers brush something smooth. “The floorboards.”

Fushiguro touches him a little more firmly, moving his hand in small circles now.

“Your hand,” Yuji notes in turn.

He pauses for a moment, trying to focus on that feeling. He would reach up and grab Fushiguro by the arm and never let go if he could.

“Open your eyes for me, Itadori,” he urges. How many times can he use Yuji’s family name? “Tell me what else you can touch.”

Yuji rattles off his sweatshirt and the sheets still beneath his legs that must have tumbled off of the bed with him. Fushiguro asks him what he can hear, and he says the sound of his own breathing and the wind outside.

“You,” he answers last, again, and this time it doesn’t feel so painful. It feels right. He clears his dry throat. “Your voice.”

“Two things you can smell?”

Yuji thinks carefully, focuses. “Laundry detergent. Your cologne.”

“Now, one thing you can taste. Last thing.”

The ocean washes over him as he considers the inside of his mouth and the air. His teeth are clean, brushed recently. His spit doesn’t really have a taste. But he inhales something that settles on his tongue, the promise of something that hasn’t come yet, but that will. He doesn’t even know if it’s real. He just says it. “Rain,” he breathes out with a heavy sigh.

He blinks his eyes open once more just enough to watch Fushiguro turn to peer out the window. The sun still reaches in to cast its rays across the quiet room. Quiet now that Yuji’s heartbeat is settled, now that the cruel voice in his head has fallen still.

Fushiguro looks back at him, and there’s tension in his shoulders, Yuji realises. His voice is calm, but edged with anxiety, and his mouth is pressed into a thin little line. Oh, gods, it must have been hard for him, to come in and have to deal with this when he’s been through so much of his own.

“How are you feeling now?” Fushiguro searches his face with worried eyes, leaning back where he sits. For the first time since he arrived, he takes his hand off of Yuji’s shoulder.

All Yuji can do is assess at first. He’s laying on the floor—it’s clear to him now. His cheek is pressed uncomfortably into the hardwood. He presses his hand against the floor and turns himself over, onto his back, staring up at the ceiling and glancing at his torn-apart bed out of the corner of his eye. He definitely dragged all the sheets with him when he stumbled up.

“Tired,” he answers at last. He lets out another sigh, and his body sinks into the floor. He’s not shaking anymore. Exhaustion stifles his thoughts now, not the memories.

Fushiguro moves to help him sit up, off of the uncomfortable floorboards, and lifts him until he can lean against the side of the bed. Yuji’s vision still swims, but it’s better now. He curls his hands into his fists and tries to focus on staying upright.

Fushiguro shuffles around to sit beside him. He stares straight ahead now, and his tone is a little flatter when he asks, “What happened?” But he’s still here. He doesn’t leave. He’s here, and alive, and unharmed as it stands.

Yuji studies the ceiling for a minute and sorts the pieces out one at a time in his head. He was already sweating when he got out of bed. He already couldn’t breathe. He woke up, and then… then he was on the floor, and then Fushiguro was there. He furrows his brow and swallows back the dryness in his throat. “I think I had a nightmare.”

A little flick of his eyes indicates Fushiguro is listening, and maybe even surprised. His tone is genuinely sympathetic when he says, “Must have been a bad one.”

“Yeah,” Yuji agrees, his voice breaking. He turns his head away slightly. “And then I just couldn’t stop thinking. Everything felt so—so overwhelming, and it freaked me out.”

“That’ll happen,” Fushiguro murmurs with a tiny sigh out of his nose. He leans his head back on the bedframe. Thinking about it, he probably knows how it feels. Maybe not exactly, but Itadori knows he has nightmares too, and surely it gets to be too much sometimes. There could be days Fushiguro doesn’t even make it out of the bed. His gaze is blank as he joins Yuji in staring at the ceiling, his expression has evened out now, and he seems tired, too, maybe just from trying to help, or from secondhand recollection. He knew exactly how to walk Yuji through it.

“Do you want me to get you some water?” Fushiguro asks.

Yuji hesitates for a moment. His throat really does feel dry, and he probably needs it. Every muscle hurts, and his body still trembles every few moments with aftershocks of the stress. He hasn’t had anything to drink since last night—he could be dehydrated. His vision is still blurry.

But he doesn’t want Fushiguro to leave. Some selfish, bonded portion of him wants to cling to him as long as possible, so that he doesn’t have to be alone, so that the thoughts can’t threaten to consume him again. It’s easier with Fushiguro by his side to quell the ache.

Still, he sighs anyway and nods. “Please,” he croaks out. “But come back right away?”

“Of course.” Fushiguro puts his hand on Yuji’s shoulder one more time as he stands and hurries out of the room. He comes back with a plastic bottle of water from the kitchen, and it’s ice cold when he hands it over.

Yuji pops the lid and guzzles almost half the bottle in one drink. “Thanks,” he mumbles around the rim.

“No problem.”

Silence spreads between them, a thick blanket that encases both of them at once. Yuji doesn’t know what to say, and he’s pretty sure he just needs a minute to get his bearings and calm down fully. To his surprise, Fushiguro is the one to break the silence.

Fushiguro starts his next sentence slowly, seemingly unsure if he wants to let the words out to hover in the peaceful air. He opens his mouth twice before he manages to form the words he wants to. “Is this… the first time you’ve had a panic attack? You seem oddly… well, over it already.”

A tight laugh builds in Yuji’s chest, and he barks it out quickly. “No,” he says, shaking his head. He takes another swig of water, letting the ice poor down his throat now, ten times better than what he was experiencing before. “Just the first time you’ve seen me have one.”

Fushiguro doesn’t respond, but he presses his eyes closed, and his mouth twists into a frown. He looks pained. Burdened. But he wipes the look off just as fast as it appeared. “How are you feeling now?”

“You already asked me that,” Yuji points out. He feels bad. He doesn’t need to cause any more problems for anyone, especially Fushiguro.

“Tell me again,” Fushiguro says anyway. “It’s been a few minutes.”

Yuji sighs and rolls his shoulders back. “Better,” he says, and means it. “It feels better to have you here with me. Thank you for—for coming.”

“Of course.” There’s something stronger and brighter in Fushiguro’s eyes when he turns his head to look at Yuji for the first time since the attack subsided. “I’m glad I found you when I did. You shouldn’t have to suffer through something like that alone.”

Yuji opens his mouth in surprise, then closes it and bites his tongue. It’s not like it’s rare, exactly, for Fushiguro to say such kind things to him, but it feels more intimate now. More special. He’s grateful, so grateful. Fushiguro sounds like he really means it.

“Thank you,” he utters again.

“It must be hard,” Fushiguro says, just like earlier. He reaches out to rest his hand near Yuji’s, so close their fingers brush. He moves it up to his arm a second later. To ground Yuji, or himself. To hold onto him. He glances at Yuji again and offers a sympathetic look.

“But we’re together,” Yuji says. Sure, he’s a little tired, and it sounds sappy, but he means every word he says, deeply. He looks back at Fushiguro and grins.

Fushiguro looks startled, confused, even a little sad. He doesn’t smile back, but he gives an affirmative nod and meets Yuji’s gaze. “We’re together,” he echoes after a moment.

Yuji remembers blood on the back of Fushiguro’s head. His body limp and lifeless, his soul slipping away. But he also remembers him like this, soft and kind and reassuring. When the time comes for him to stand, Fushiguro takes his hand to pull him to his feet, and Yuji commits every aspect of the touch to memory. Of Fushiguro’s kindness. Of him.