Chapter Text
She dies on New Year’s.
She dies in the snow, red poppies on fresh white sheets; she dies when it’s cold and wicked and empty outside. What Yuji means is, she dies alone.
This is the second curse that has gotten the jump on them since Shinjuku. This is the second collateral victim since Fushiguro knocked out, headfirst, since they tossed him into a hospital bed and started begging him to wake up. Yuji knows that it’s just a matter of time, but he’s scared. He thinks there are too many bad endings in this way of life to count on miracles, too many graveyards in everyone’s hearts. It’s simple: death and romance are two sides of the same coin.
You love someone, you let them go.
Saito Misaki dies because Yuji and Kugisaki can’t get there fast enough, before the grade one rips her head clean off her neck. Yuji didn’t know her well, and he’ll never get the chance to, and neither will anyone else. She hits the ground quietly and her long black hair spreads, snakes, around her like an inverted snow angel. And, she’s gone.
“Itadori,” Kugisaki is saying, her breath coming out in puffs with the cold, “hey, hey, focus, idiot.”
“What?” He snaps out of it. Yuji has been jumping lately, as if he’s scared to be in his own skin. “Right. Sorry. Right. Can you try Hairpin again? Then I’ll hit him.”
She nods sharply, gaze darting from Yuji to the curse in front of them, the curse hovering over Saito Misaki’s body like she’s not even there. The thing has got six arms—almost a spider—and large, beady black eyes rimmed red, dripping acid. Yuji doesn’t know if it can’t talk or simply won’t, because it’s been terrifyingly silent this whole time. Not even an exhale. He could blink and it’d have skittered away soundlessly, and then he’d turn, and boom, catch a mouthful of poison. So it’s really important he doesn’t get distracted else he ends up like that dead girl.
The problem is that all Yuji does these days is get distracted.
He can’t help it. Everything is so easy to lose yourself in. Like: how Fushiguro has been asleep for three weeks straight, no sign of life. Like: how it’s kind of hard to re-learn using your hands when you lose two fingers. Like: how he and Kugisaki are cleaning up the rubble, the rehabilitation missions in Tokyo, the way the whole world is turned inside out. But really: how much he misses all his dead friends.
Yuji doesn’t let himself dwell on it too much, because then he starts feeling sick to his stomach. Don’t think about all that grief. It needs to be forward motion, absolute momentum. Look, don’t even remember the good, because then the bad is so much fucking worse.
Kugisaki pushes him to the side just as the cursed spirit slings a batch of spiderwebs to the space where Yuji should’ve been standing.
“Hey, stupidface, get your head in the game!” she hisses over her shoulder, already hurling another nail at the curse. “What are you doing, Itadori?”
“Sorry,” he mumbles again, blankly. “I’m on it.” The next time Kugisaki triggers the explosion, Yuji’s there in a heartbeat. Wham, bam, a Divergent Fist to the gut, through the soft vertebrae. A sickening crunch as he pulls off the spirit’s exoskeleton. And it’s Kugisaki who goes for the kill, the hammer into the flesh. Two more hits and it’s done for. Just like that. If they’d moved quicker after they’d been alerted, the girl would still be alive.
It’s quiet as they stand there, panting, over the collapsing body of the silent curse. There are no spoils of war anymore, not after the past few months. Things die. It’s nothing special.
“Well,” swallows Kugisaki, “that’s that. Um, let’s report to Gakuganji about… the casualty, and he can handle it.” Yuji hates how normal it’s gotten. “We’re still visiting Fushiguro?”
“Obviously,” says Yuji. He means it to be lighthearted but it comes out more manufactured. “We’re not wasting these flowers.”
Kugisaki spins on him, a finger shoved into his face. “Yeah! Because someone keeps putting dandelions into the vase, I mean, seriously? Those are weeds!”
“Um, what? Dandelions aren’t weeds! Okay, well, maybe they are, but they’re pretty weeds! That’s what matters!”
“They’re weeds! They’re weeds! Fushiguro would totally care about that. You know he would too.”
“Yeah, well, he can tell us when he wakes up.”
A pause.
“Yup, and he’ll side with me.”
Another pause.
“Right.” Yuji stares at his shoes. There’s blood from both curse and girl puddling across the dark stone of the Tokyo rooftop. “Anyway. We should see him before Ieiri locks up for the night.”
“Please. It’s New Year's, that infirmary is running overtime,” says Kugisaki as she snaps a picture of Saito’s corpse and presumably texts it to Gakuganji, a picture of the spirit as well. “We’ll pop in real quick. God, I just know that if we don’t visit for one day, it’ll be exactly when that punk decides to wake up. I can’t stand him!”
“Then maybe we shouldn’t visit, ha.” It’s here that Yuji’s voice gets less funny, less confident. Kugisaki studies him. She’s gotten good at figuring out when he’s getting tangled up. He isn’t really one to wear his heart on his sleeve unless it’s on purpose, but somehow after coming back from the dead she can read him like an open book. It’s kind of unnerving. Or, Yuji guesses maybe he’s just that much worse now.
She reaches out and pinches his cheek, hard.
“Ow! What’s your problem?”
“Shut up. He’ll be fine, okay, and we’re going to be the first two faces he sees. So, come on, let’s hop on a train.” As the spider-curse starts to turn into ashes behind them, Kugisaki pulls Yuji by the sleeve, away from the carnage, the body, into the stairwell leading down, down, down. The office building, where Saito had worked, where she had phoned a sorcerer friend, is a broken yellow place. Yuji thinks maybe people spend their whole lives here. Climbing the corporate ladder until they eventually fall off and go splat.
The train is pretty much empty. No one’s going anywhere this time of night, or if they are, they’re already there. Yuji wishes he could be one of those carefree teenaged partygoers, someone’s apartment, sake, watching the sunrise. Badgering his grandpa for money envelopes.
Holidays are harder, now.
Kugisaki is warm against him, her navy puffer jacket half-zipped. “Any updates from Maki? On negotiations?” They’re on board a line that goes straight up to the mountains into the school. Outside the windows the snowflakes stick to the glass, melt away.
“No,” Yuji sighs. “We still have to wait for Fushiguro. The remaining few clan members are terrified of Maki, they won’t talk to anyone except the ‘real’ head. And we can’t exactly tell them he’s… you know… because of Sukuna. So they keep pestering us; it’s the worst.”
“Geez. Well, no way he’s letting them punish Maki. Can we at least tell ‘em that?”
“Ugh, they don’t care. Naobito did a real number on the Zen’ins. It’s all about authority figures.”
“That’s how it is everywhere though. Jujutsu society in Japan, even overseas. Authority this, authority that.” The world whizzes past them in muffled mechanical clanking and train humming.
“Yeah,” agrees Yuji, quietly. “It kind of is.”
The trip up to Jujutsu High is long and the white overheads send dull pains flashing through Yuji’s temples, the backs of his eyes. Kugisaki eventually goes silent, too, plugging in headphones to her cracked silver iPod. Yuji catches a glimpse of what she’s streaming: Anri’s Remember Summer Days.
Yuji wonders what the dead girl’s favorite song was.
He blinks and they’re back in the school, in the flickering hallways, the infirmary with overnight rooms where his best friend has been unconscious twenty two days. Yuji shrugs his small backpack off and rummages inside for the bouquet of daffodils he bought to switch out the old roses, which have been slowly rotting in their grey china vase. Every time they’d visit, there would be a few more shriveled petals fallen onto the wooden tabletop. Yuji tried not to keep count, but he did anyway.
Their footsteps echo in the corridor for a while. At room 43C, Kugisaki presses open the glossy door.
And there he is—lit in dim blue from the EKG machine, wrapped in covers, looking statuelike and battlescarred and gorgeous and doomed. And he’s looked like this for long enough that Yuji has started to forget the color of his eyes.
“Hey, Fushiguro,” Yuji says gently as they step in, shutting the door behind them. Visiting hours are technically over, but Ieiri always leaves 43C unlocked. “You planning on getting up today?”
Kugisaki takes the flowers from Yuji’s hands and yanks out the wilted roses from their place. She throws them in the trash. They’re smatters of red against the black garbage bag. “Maybe it’ll depend on the flowers,” she’s saying as she pours tapwater into the vase, “you know, maybe he’s a real stickler about that. I’m not that spiritual but Fushiguro maybe seems like he is and, like, he would never admit it to us. I know!—we should get him pink carnations.”
“Wow, that’s so mushy. I didn’t know you had it in you, Kugisaki.” Yuji sits down by the bedside, where he’s sat most of every day. Where he’s getting sick of sitting because can’t this boy just get better, damn it.
“As long as you don’t tell him it was my idea. Y’know, why don’t you get him the carnations, since you’re being such a prick!”
“What? No,” Yuji laughs, the suggestion leaving a strange bubbling feeling in his gut. “I’m okay.”
Kugisaki hums to her music as she tends to the daffodils. Her back faces Fushiguro. She doesn’t really focus on him when they stop by, instead sneaking glances through her peripheral. She’s always tidying up, folding something, saying something smart. Yuji thinks that probably, she can’t bear to look at him straight on. Because Fushiguro also looks a little bit dead.
The snow starts to blizzard; Yuji holds his breath.
It’s just not the same. Everything triangulated and broken, the dream distorted. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands anymore. The higher-ups try their best to send Yuji and Kugisaki on light missions, easy patrols, but he can’t quite figure out how to reset to normal. Every static space where someone alive should be haunts those school hallways. There’s only a few months of their first year left, but really it could be decades. Yuji feels like he’s swimming in endless tomorrows, a hope for summer breaks that will never come around. So much gushing loss.
The aftermath would’ve been easy to deal with if Fushiguro were there with him, but he’s not, so Yuji has to do it all himself. Maybe it’s a good lesson to learn, though. How to stitch yourself back together.
As Kugisaki is turned away, Yuji goes very still. If he doesn’t stay this still then the welling knot stuck in his throat would twist tighter and then he would cry. And he just can’t deal with that, not the embarrassment, not the honesty. So instead he thinks: Please, if there is a god, if there is a string of fate, or luck, or a reason to anything, then I’m asking you to wake him up. He has to wake up or else I could just drown. And maybe that’s selfish, but I don’t care. Please, please, please; please let something good happen because I’m about to stop believing.
And nothing changes for an awful two minutes. The snow swirls outside and Kugisaki fiddles with furniture trinkets. The daffodils sit stiff and bright in the corner, ultrayellow against bleak hospital decor. The second so mundane it could be a copy paste of a copy paste of a copy paste of a faraway day that both has and hasn’t happened. A film reel. A superposition.
When the moment stretches too long, Yuji knows he’s not getting what he wants. He thinks, oh, it’s one big joke. How stupid of him to expect anything else. He bows his head and the air conditioning hums and, look, it isn’t his best moment; he gets teary-eyed right then and there, sue him.
That’s why he figures he’s imagining things when he hears a bedsheet rustle. “Kugisaki,” says Yuji, voice watery, still looking down. “Could you find Ieiri and ask for an update on the girl that died? I want to know if Gakuganji sent someone to collect the body.”
“Mmhm,” is her distant reply.
The sheet rustles again. I’m going crazy, Yuji decides, I’m hallucinating things and when I look up he’ll be asleep and I’ll feel like a total moron. “Thanks. And, um, could you grab me something from the vending machine? I’m starving.”
“I guess.” She’s drifted closer, probably near the window now, her fingernails tapping on the frame. “Whaddya want? I don’t have too much money on me, so maybe just chips or—uh—oh my fucking god?”
Yuji’s head snaps right up. Again he thinks, oh, it’s a big joke.
Because—impossibly—Fushiguro is there, sitting up against the pillows and bracing an arm on the headrest. He looks tired and groggy and kind of annoyed, actually, but he’s there, he’s here. He’s opening his green eyes and squinting up at Yuji and Kugisaki. “What,” he tries to say, but it sounds more like a garbled cough.
“No way! No fucking way!” Kugisaki drops the leaf she’d been picking at, her eyes blown out wide. “Wait, I’ll chase down Ieiri! Doctor! Doctor!” And she’s running through the door with her brown hair flying behind her.
It’s just him and Yuji now in the muted blue light. Fushiguro’s wiped away most of the sleep, now licking his lips, cracking his neck. “Hey,” he attempts again, softer.
“Hey,” Yuji says back. He’s blinking fast—something warm unfurling in his chest. It spreads through his ribs and his stomach and his heart, all the way up to his throat. He’s choked up from relief, overwhelming fondness. “Welcome home.” I missed you.