Chapter Text
Three Students of Sendai Highschool Injured in Sudden Attack
Megumi Fushiguro, Staff Writer
On April 15, the boys’ locker room at Sendai Highschool was attacked by a grade two curse user, leaving several students severely injured and one hospitalized.
A dislodged shower stall door came flying past Yuji, inches away from the left of his skull. Leaping to the side, he swiftly clung onto the crackling popcorn wall opposite the sinks and right over the lockers that he was pretty sure was 99% asbestos.
”Really? A high school boys’ locker room of all places? What is at all appealing about naked sweaty pubescent males, my guy. . .” Yuji groaned incredulously, limbs pressed up against the piss yellow paint as he actively defied gravity.
The masked figure remained silent, pausing to summon some sort of cursed technique as energy corroded across their back. Damn, tough crowd. With agonizingly revolting sounds of squelching and tearing, Yuji watched in awestruck horror as six massive arms began sprouting from the attacker’s spine. It wasn’t long before they reached full capacity, doubling both the size and degree of threat of Yuji’s opponent.
“Eugh. Where do you even find clothes with holes for that…” Yuji muttered under his breath as he ducked under a bench that was thrown directly at his face. He heard a clatter and looked over, only to see that it was his locker that had gotten crushed. Whipping his head back, he quickly took note of the many heavy objects occupying the figure’s several arms and began developing the start of a combating strategy. That was a step too far.
“Okay fine, no more Mr. Nice-Spider-Man.” Yuji shot a web towards the mysterious person’s hood, hoping to expose their face at least. Instead, as if the hood was stuck to their face, the attacker jerked forward with the momentum. Yuji could work with that. With a quick apology to his new lab partner Megumi, he grabbed the boy’s locker with his other arm and drew the attacker in closer using the tethering of the web tracing his skull. Just as he had calculated, the hood dragged the curse user instead of falling away, yet this flimsy attempt at a cool costume proved null at protecting their soft squishy head from the impact of metal lockers. A loud clang sounded as the two collided, and the curse user went down for the count.
“Finally. Do you know how long it took to renovate this place? The construction fellas were in here for months, enduring the stench of sweaty hairy growing boys on the daily. And then you walk in here and bust it all up, shame on you,” Yuji tsked, waggling a gloved finger at the unconscious body. A groan sounded from the corner, muffled by the mix of wall dust and bent lockers stacked in a pile on top of the voice. Yuji froze. Crap, was somebody here? Yuji had made sure to evacuate everyone before fighting directly with the man, but obviously he had missed someone.
Shit. What if this person had died? What if somebody had died as a result of his own futility yet again? As if right on cue, Yuji felt the strange parasite manifest a smirk on his cheek.
“Useless, aren’t you? Can’t save everyone even if you tri—” Yuji grit his teeth and shoved a finger down the mouth. Shit shit shit shit. He should’ve known better than to stop and ruminate on his past wrongdoings. The godforsaken parasite always threatened to take over during his sedentary moments.
With that, Yuji forced himself back into action, hurriedly sliding down from his position against the wall before rushing over to the rubble. Carefully, he began stripping away the ruined lockers and the slabs of dry wall until he caught sight of a figure. He recognized the face immediately. Junepi Yoshino.
Junpei. The kid from his film analysis elective. Who would share his chicken fingers with him every class just because he noticed Yuji glancing at them a little too frequently. Who was always quick to laugh at his jokes even if no one else in that miserably pretentious class found them at all entertaining. The kid who just yesterday had told Yuji about his aspirations of pursuing cinematography in the future.
The kid who was now laying in a pile on the ground, barely conscious. His ever present camera was smashed beyond recognition besides him. There was also a very worrying, in Yuji's opinion, amount of blood pooling from his chest.
“Crap crap crap crap,” Yuji muttered, cold sweat breaking at his temples. With practiced precision, he gently released a bit of his webs to wrap the wound up. A jagged metal bar stood erect, pierced through Junpei’s shoulder. The kid’s eyes were unfocused, his mouth slightly ajar. Yet to Yuji’s relief, his chest continued to rise and fall with stability despite the queasing breaths escaping his cracked lips.
“Shit shit okay Junpei bud buddy let’s stay awake okay? Don’t die, you can’t die okay? You’re okay, you’re okay.” Yuji wrapped his shoulder tightly and gently picked up the smaller boy, being especially mindful of the strip of metal. Yuji knew there were paramedics outside, he heard them arrive using his heightened hearing while fighting that strange curse identity. “Just hold on, I’ve got you,” he managed, barely over his breath. Whether he said it to Junpei or to himself was a mystery he didn’t plan on pondering any time soon.
Yuji could barely hear as the sirens blared in muffled flashes of red and blue over his own labored breaths. The sweat-slicked inner workings of his suit had been suddenly hit with a familiar crisp coolness of evening in Sendai, yet what would usually have been a comfort against bare skin did almost nothing to ease the violent inner strain of his trance. He smelled the metallic acidity of blood, the slippery fabric of his friend’s T-shirt in his hands swirling every corner of Yuji’s mind, blurring his senses
“I’m going to take him from you okay, sir? I need you to let go.”
Yuji blinked. The voice freed him momentarily from the suffocating fear of losing someone to his own incompetence for the second time. With a painfully familiar numbness, Yuji allowed himself to release Junpei from his grasp, watching with a distant buzz as the paramedics loaded his direly injured friend into the ambulance. He watched in silence as two of them abandoned their posts and hopped into the vehicle to drive him to the hospital.
A sudden tap made Yuji jump up a little in surprise. He turned around to find a paramedic with kind yet worried eyes staring back at him.
“Hey Spider-Man,” he said hesitantly, taking in Yuji’s disheveled appearance with a slightly subdued concern. “Are you hurt anywhere? I think the police are going to arrive soon. . .” The paramedic trailed off, glancing up at the busy street, signaling towards the police cars racing up the road.
Yuji shook his head. He knew what the paramedic was implying. While the medics might be fine with Yuji saving people, the cops definitely weren’t. They were convinced that Spider-Man was stealing their jobs, ‘wannabe savior’, they’d call him. But it was ironic, wasn’t it? Even though the root of their perspective was ridiculous, their morals restricted to written principles and stupid academy training that Yuji despised with every fiber of his being, in the end Yuji couldn’t help but acknowledge how they were the only ones who viewed Spider-Man as who he truly was—a pathetic attempt at masking himself as a hero. Deep down, Yuji knew that wearing a savior’s mask could never cover up his past sins. Saving the lives of hundreds of people could never atone for the loss of one innocent.
“You can’t quantify the lives of people, Yuji.” And here he is, trying to do just that to repent for the death of the same person who said that. His grandpa.
Yuji ducked back into the locker rooms, in part to escape the haunting memories but majorly to check if he had really finished off the mysterious intruder. He really should have checked before, but when you have a classmate bleeding out in your hands, it’s hard to keep a stable stream of thought.
Surveying the scene with a fresh lens, Yuji realized just how extreme the damage was. The overhead light was barely managing more than a flicker, several punctures squirting sewage from the sink pipes, and more than half of the lockers were ripped from their place against the wall and scattered across the floor. And there was Junpei’s blood, still wet in the spot he had been caught in. The sight made Yuji suddenly sick to the stomach, bile rising in his throat and a deep ichor pressing all throughout his corpus. It wasn’t his fault, he hadn’t started it, yet the blood was on his hands and the fractured mirrors reflected only his masked face back at him.
Snapping back into reality, Yuji forcefully pushed away his guilt and resumed his mission. He easily located the body of the attacker who hadn’t moved an inch from his fetal position against the sole remaining lockers in the locker room and began approaching with caution even though he knew from his senses that the man was no more of a threat than a grade four. Once Yuji was close enough, he shot a web at the body. It remained still, and a regretful relief washed over his tense being. Yuji got ever so much closer, reaching out his arm to check the body’s vitals when an arm—a normal one—gripped his wrist.
“Monkeys. Absolute monkeys. The whole lot of you. Stinking up the world with your disgusting rot, leaving other people, leaving sorcerers like us to clean them up. Well not anymore. Join us, Yuji Itadori. Use him for what he was made for. We are always waiting.” With that final word, the attacker leaned his head down, his teeth harshly biting into the capsule on his necklace. Yuji sucked in a sharp breath at the reminder of what he did. He would never use him again. Again. Because he was too weak to stop it the first time, his grandpa’s grave now a stark reminder of that fact.
No more than a minute longer of shortened breaths, the attacker slumped over, dead for real this time. Yuji reached out to check his pulse and, finding none, covered the body with a tarp nearby. As he swung up to the window to escape, he could hear the sounds of footsteps approaching. The police. Yuji had taken almost too long. Right before the first officer slipped into the locker room, Yuji was gone with the wind, leaving behind only a swinging window in his absence.
As he swung far from the scene, Yuji couldn’t help but linger on the dying man’s words. “Use him for what he was made for. We are always waiting.”
You can’t hide from what’s inside of you forever.
Though no casualties occurred, the incident left the students of the city’s most prestigious high school filled with fear and the newly renovated gym locker room in shambles.
Which begs the question, what, or who, caused the attack to come to an end?
Yuji hissed as his raw knuckles rubbed against the red and blue fabric, trying to locate and scrub away the blood stains. The former was proving to be much harder than the latter, which left him second guessing his decision on a red colored suit for the billionth time. But then again, just because he had a secret identity didn’t mean his obviously superior fashion sense had to be a secret too.
Well it still would’ve looked cool too if he increased the blue to red ratio, maybe he could’ve used purple instead or dark green, it is grandpa’s favorite after all—
Oh.
Right.
It was his favorite, after all.
You can’t hide from what’s inside of you forever.
As much as he tried to drown out that voice with the sound of the running tap water, he really, really couldn’t hide from the fact that maybe if he hadn’t been so damn upset over a stupid argument, maybe if he had learned to control the parasite inside of him instead of hopelessly letting it take over in the moment of anger, maybe then grandpa would still be alive. Maybe if he had just killed himself befo—
The sound of clothing tearing interrupted his thoughts. Yuji looked down to find the red fabric ripped, steam from the scalding water that’d been running for way too long half-obscuring his vision.
Crap. He was definitely going to have to borrow Choso’s sewing machine again. Why did that man even have a sewing machine anyway? He wore the same three robes on a daily basis. Yuji was at least sixty percent sure that his robes were just his old bedsheets repurposed.
He turned the sink faucet till the running hot water came to a stop. The heavy, soaked heap of fabric laid like the skin of a corpse in his hands, dripping red-tinted droplets through his fingers. He’d never get rid of the blood.
Yuji closed his eyes and took a deep inhale, allowing his throat to fill with the air of his small apartment. He let the tarnished suit fall against the porcelain bathroom sink, trying his best to ignore the wet noise it made as it hit the blood-stained silver drain. With his eyes still closed and breath still held, he switched on the right faucet, allowing cool water to run over his now sore hands.
Soap suds rose between slippery skin as the crimson left his palms and fingers. Yuji let his breath release slowly, and counted odd numbers backwards from one-hundred till his lungs had released their full capacity. Only when he was forced to inhale once more did he open his eyes, grateful to find his hands clean, the only blood being from the quickly healing gashes of his own knuckles.
Not once in this entire routine endeavor did Yuji dare to glance up at the mirror hanging right before him above the sink.
Turning off the sink with finality this time, Yuji released a heavy sigh and switched off the compact bathroom lights. It was the only harshly fluorescent-lit cranny in his entire one-bedroom apartment, as everywhere else was decorated with strategically scattered smaller warm lights. Though he wasn’t a particularly artistic person, Yuji had a deep respect for the technical arts, especially film composition and architecture. The vibe of warmer lights felt infinitely safer, reminding him of his early childhood at his grandpa’s townhouse…
Shit. Yuji squeezed his eyes shut with a jerk at the thought, quickly shoving down the memory. He hated this godforsaken bathroom, this stupid apartment that he tried to make a home.
Dipping into the flush of orange that illuminated the wide span of room that blended a bedroom into a kitchen across five-hundred square feet, Yuji allowed his nerves to ease, releasing a final shaky breath as he headed for his fire-escape window, stopping only to grab a half-eaten pizza box from earlier that evening.
Cold air whipped against him like a slap the moment Yuji shoved the glass open. Without any caution, as there was no need for such when one could easily stick to walls at will, Yuji stepped out and crossed the third threshold of his apartment into the late night city of Sendai.
The fire escape make-shift balcony wasn’t all that spacious, maybe spanning six feet across and four forward at most. It was Yuji’s sanctuary nonetheless. He sat with his gray sweats going four days strong of no washing against the cool green metal of the landing, allowing his head to lean back against the glass window behind him. The cooling sensation that came from the first few freezing inhales expanded from his lungs to his whole body. The warm light flooding across his apartment filled his peripheral vision, yet what Yuji was focused on was the clear, deep indigo night sky. He promptly ignored the loud city bustling below, the neon signs and blaring car horns, a long-tuned out melody in his brain. There weren’t any stars due to the city’s urban-typical light pollution, yet gazing into an expanse with no bounds and constant steady action was like meth for Yuji’s conscience. Not that he knew what meth was like or anything. He had his assumptions from the chemical composition, though. Which probably wasn’t actually anything like the solace that “stargazing” brought him, but whatever. Technicalities were appealing to him because they provided a solid understanding, a security in knowledge that Yuji was always eager to be a bearer of. Yet some things, many things, were better left free, or else life would suck.
The sky—or the universe—was a stable escape for him, one he developed since his early years in elementary science classes. It wasn’t fully figured out, yet that was part of its beauty. Humanity would continue to work for centuries on capturing its mechanics into numbers and calculations, to ease the rapid gas particles into a steady solidification of understanding, yet centuries was a long time that Yuji wouldn’t live to see. For now, it was free, blissfully escaping human understanding.
Yuji’s eyelids drooped, yet not fully closed, ensuring that the comforting vastness of blue didn’t escape his possession. Unguarded drowsiness swirled through his core, the exhaustion of the day finally catching up to his constantly maxed out body.
Yet of course, just when he felt his body relaxing, the mouth manifested itself on his left cheek, hissing all sorts of jabs at Yuji’s already wet heart.
“You heard them. Use me for what I was made for.”
Yuji jolted forwards, his eyes ripping open and heartbeat nearly punching against his chest. Mind racing, he quickly fought the rising hot choked sensation in his throat and shoved a piece of cold, half-eaten pizza into his mouth and swallowed hard.
Yet this practiced mechanism still failed to prevent the tears from prickling the rims of his eyes.
Despite his reverence for things inexplicable, the beauty he found in things untamed and left to be free from the grasp of human understanding, Yuji couldn’t help but want. It was in his blood, his adoration for calculations, for gaining knowledge, for solidifying explanations and holding a thorough understanding for everything he could.
He held so much, incomprehensible to even himself, within his mind, his heart, that he couldn’t help but yearn with every carbon atom in his body for someone, even if only a single person, to understand every part of him.
But the worst part is, he couldn’t help but fear the look of hatred, disgust, and disappointment that he’d find in their eyes when they finally do understand every part of him.