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Megumi’s hands did not shake anymore. That was the thing he noticed last, when there was almost nothing left to notice with. The tremor that had lived in them for years, since Shibuya, since Shinjuku, since all the names of places that used to just be places and were now the sound a wound makes when you say it out loud, had gone quiet sometime in the night. He lay on his back in what had once been the entrance hall of a building he didn’t have the name for anymore and understood, in the distant clinical way he understood most things now, that this was probably not a good sign.
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He was thirty one years old. He had been the last one for six of those years, and some part of him had stopped being surprised by that math a long time ago, the way you stop being surprised by weather.
The building had no windows left in it, hadn’t for longer than he’d lived here, but there was a hole in the roof two floors up where the sky came through in a gray column, and if he turned his head just right he could watch dust move through it, lit up and drifting, the only thing in the world that still seemed to be going anywhere on purpose.
He thought, distantly, that he should get up. There was a phrase that used to mean something, get up, when there had still been reasons attached to it, people who needed him upright, a war that hadn’t finished losing yet. Now it was just two words with the insides scooped out. He stayed where he was and watched the dust and let his hands rest open on the concrete, palms up, the old scars catching what little light there was.
He had stopped counting the scars around the second year. Not out of grief. Out of something closer to boredom, the specific exhaustion of maintaining an inventory nobody was ever going to ask him about again.
Shibuya, six years ago, though the years didn’t feel like six anymore. They felt like something that had happened to someone standing very close to him.
He hadn’t been there when Nobara went down. That was the detail that had never stopped costing him something, small and precise, every single time it came back, which it still did, more than he would have liked to admit to anyone who might have still been around to admit things to. He’d been two stations over, cutting his way through something that didn’t have a proper name, and by the time he reached her the thing had already happened and finished happening and there was nothing left for him to arrive in time for except the after.
She’d been sitting up against a shattered storefront, half her face wrong in a way he made himself look at because looking away felt like a second kind of leaving. Her hammer was still in her hand. He remembered that specifically, the grip of her fingers not having loosened yet, like her body hadn’t gotten the message. He remembered thinking, with a kind of flat, useless clarity, that she would have hated dying somewhere with such ugly lighting. The kind of thought that arrives uninvited and never leaves once it’s moved in.
“Hey,” she’d said, or something close enough to a word that he’d chosen to hear it as hey, and he had knelt down and put his hand over hers on the hammer’s handle because he didn’t know what else a hand was for in that particular moment, and she had looked at him with the one eye that still worked and said something he’d spent six years failing to remember correctly. He knew it had been short. He knew it hadn’t been about him. He thought, some nights, that it might have been about the weather, an observation about the sky over Shibuya on the worst night of both their lives, because that would have been exactly like her, to spend her last clear sentence on something that had nothing to do with dying.
He didn’t get to keep the words. That was the part that felt unfair in a way he’d never bothered trying to argue with anyone, because there had stopped being anyone to argue with not long after.
Shinjuku came later, though not by much. The city had run out of room to keep its disasters spaced out politely.
He hadn’t seen Gojo die either. Nobody had, not really, not in any way that let a person describe it afterward with their voice staying steady. What Megumi had instead was the version that had traveled to him secondhand, worn smooth by however many mouths it passed through before it reached his, and a memory of standing several kilometers away when the sky over Shinjuku did something to itself that he still didn’t have language for, a color that didn’t belong in the part of the spectrum cities were supposed to use.
He remembered thinking, watching it, that the sky had never once in his life looked like an ending before, and now it knew how, and it would probably remember for the rest of its existence, the way a scar remembers a wound long after the wound’s stopped being interesting to anyone but the body carrying it.
There had been a version of Megumi, once, small and unfinished, who’d built an entire private architecture on the idea that Gojo Satoru simply could not be a thing that stopped. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t, structurally, the way certain buildings are load-bearing for a whole city’s understanding of itself and everyone privately assumes they’ll just always be there because the alternative is unthinkable enough to not think about. That Megumi hadn’t survived Shinjuku either, not really, even though his body had kept walking around afterward doing an impression of a person who had.
He tried, some nights in the years after, to remember specific things Gojo had said to him. Not the famous ones, the ones that got repeated by other people like scripture. The small ones. The ones only he would have been standing close enough to hear. He found, with the particular helplessness of someone reaching for something that used to be solid, that most of them had gone soft at the edges, the way anything does if you hold it too long in a hand that keeps shaking.
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Yuji lasted the longest. That was supposed to have meant something, Megumi used to think, in the years when he still let himself think in terms of things meaning something. Lasting longest was supposed to be an argument for continuing to last. It hadn’t worked out that way. It had only meant Megumi got more time to build something around him before the something got taken apart with the rest of it.
He didn’t like remembering the execution. He remembered it anyway, the way you remember anything you’ve told yourself for years you’re never going to look at directly, which is to say completely, all at once, with none of the mercy that a slower unfolding might have offered.
They hadn’t let him close enough. That was the center of it, the fact his mind kept walking back to no matter how many other directions he tried to send it in. He had been close enough to see and too far to reach, which was its own specific shape of punishment, the kind designed by people who understood exactly what they were doing to whoever was forced to watch it. Yuji hadn’t looked afraid. Megumi had spent years turning that fact over, trying to decide if it helped or made everything worse, and had never landed anywhere solid. Yuji had looked, in the last clear second Megumi got of his face before everything after happened, like someone doing math he’d already finished doing a long time ago and had simply been waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to.
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He’d found Megumi’s eyes in the crowd, in the noise, in whatever that entire day had been built out of. Just for a second. Long enough for Megumi to understand it was meant for him and not the general vicinity of the audience.
He didn’t know what the look had said. He’d built four or five different translations of it over the years, tried them all on like coats, kept none of them long, because none of them fit right and he suspected, in the honest part of himself he kept mostly closed off from daily use, that no translation ever would. Some things didn’t survive translation into afterward. They just existed, once, in the moment they happened, and then they were gone, the way a held breath is gone the second you let it out, no matter how carefully you’d tried to keep it.
He hadn’t been able to save him. That sentence had lived in his chest for six years now, unrotting, the one wound that never quite scarred over into something a person could stop noticing.
The vessel thing, people used to call it, back when there were still people around to call it anything.
He was the last one. Not the last sorcerer, not exactly, though close enough to it that the distinction had stopped mattering somewhere around year three. The last vessel. The thing Sukuna’s old shape had needed and never quite managed to keep, passed hand to hand to hand through a war that ran out of hands to pass it to, until it landed on Megumi and simply stayed there because there was nowhere left for it to go.
He carried it the way you carry anything too heavy to be carried properly, which is to say badly, in pieces, setting it down whenever no one was around to see him do it and picking it back up the second someone might be. Except there hadn’t been anyone around to see him do anything for a long time now. He’d kept picking it up anyway. He wasn’t sure when that had stopped being a choice and started being a reflex, muscle memory standing in for a will he suspected had quietly finished dying somewhere around the same time Yuji had.
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The techniques still worked, mostly. Not the way they used to. He summoned what he could summon, when there was still something worth summoning it for, and it came to him slower now, thinner, like calling an old friend who answers but sounds tired doing it, distracted, halfway somewhere else already. He didn’t push it. He’d learned, the hard way, more than once, what it cost to push a body that had already spent everything it had.
There was nobody left to protect. He kept doing it anyway, some nights, going through the forms in the dark of whatever building he was staying in, not because there was a threat in it but because his hands seemed to need the doing of it more than his mind needed a reason. A held technique, an old stance, the specific tilt of two fingers he’d learned at nineteen and never unlearned. Muscle memory outliving purpose. He understood, distantly, that this was probably its own kind of grief, the body performing a function long after the function had stopped mattering to anyone, the way a clock keeps ticking in an empty house.
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The silence was the part nobody warned him about. Not the deaths, not the losing, not even the vessel, all of which had come with at least some kind of built-in bracing, a shape he could see coming and try to get ready for. The silence had just arrived and stayed, total and unbroken and enormous, the kind that doesn’t have an edge to it because there’s nothing left to make a sound to contrast it against.
He’d talked to himself, in the first year.
Not out of any real hope of an answer. Just to hear a voice using the room. He’d stopped somewhere in the second year, not on purpose, just the way a habit falls away when the thing that used to hold it up gets quietly removed. His own voice had started to sound wrong to him after enough time without anyone else’s to measure it against. Too loud, or too small, he couldn’t decide which, only that it didn’t fit the space it was in anymore.
He thought, sometimes, about how strange a thing a voice was. How much of what made it yours wasn’t really the sound at all but the fact of somebody else hearing it and doing something back. Alone long enough, a voice stopped being a voice and became something closer to noise a body happened to be capable of making, no different, really, from the wind finding its way through a hole in a roof.
He missed being spoken to more than he missed speaking. He hadn’t expected that, back when he’d still had the luxury of expecting things about grief instead of just living inside whatever shape it turned out to actually take.
The dust in the column of light two floors up had shifted, or maybe he had, lying there on the concrete with his hands open and his breath doing something slow and effortful that didn’t quite deserve to be called breathing anymore. He was cold in a way that didn’t feel like weather. He noted it the way he noted most things now, at a small remove, like a man reading a report about somebody else’s condition.
He thought, this is probably it, without much feeling attached to the thought, the way you might notice rain starting outside a window you weren’t planning on going through anyway.
Then the smell came.
It arrived before anything else did, before the light, before the sound, autumn rain on old stone, specific enough that his chest did something involuntary around it, some reflex older than thought, the body remembering a season and a place faster than the mind could catch up and ask what any of it meant. He hadn’t smelled real rain in longer than he could measure. There hadn’t been a real autumn in a long time either, not one that came with the smell attached, the particular mineral sweetness of water hitting stone that had been warm an hour before.
And then he was somewhere else, or something that behaved exactly like somewhere else, which by that point didn’t feel worth arguing with.
The stairs at Jujutsu High. He knew them before he saw them properly, the specific angle of the stone, worn pale in the center from years of feet that had stopped existing everywhere except in a memory that apparently still had the authority to build a whole staircase out of nothing. The light was doing the thing it used to do in late afternoon, gold going soft at the edges, the kind of light that made everything look like it was already being remembered even while it was still happening.
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Yuji was sitting on the third step from the top. Exactly where he used to sit. Knees up, forearms resting on them, head tipped back just slightly like he was working out something in the sky that only he could see, the specific posture Megumi could have picked out of a thousand strangers without needing to see the face first.
He was younger than the version Megumi had last seen with his own eyes. Younger than the execution, younger than the last two years of the war, younger than most of the things that had happened to both of them. Whole in every way that mattered. Unmarked.
Megumi understood, somewhere in the part of his mind that still worked the way minds were supposed to, the part he’d normally have trusted with something this important, that this wasn’t real. He understood it clearly and completely and it didn’t slow him down at all.
“Hey,” Yuji said, in the exact voice, the actual weight and shape of it, not a flattened memory of a voice but the entire real thing, warm and a little rough at the edges the way it always got in the late afternoon. “You’re late.”
Megumi’s legs carried him up the stairs before the rest of him had agreed to it. He didn’t remember deciding to move. He only knew he was closer, two steps, then one, close enough now to see the small scar above Yuji’s eyebrow from some fight in their second year that Megumi had never once managed to forget the specific circumstances of, close enough to see the collar of his shirt sitting slightly crooked the way it always had, because Yuji had never once in his life managed to put a shirt on correctly the first time.
“I know,” Megumi said, and his voice came out smaller than he meant it to, younger, like something in him had reached back through six years and borrowed the shape it used to have before any of this.
Yuji smiled at him. The whole smile, the one that used to make Megumi’s chest do something he’d spent years being embarrassed about and had eventually just let happen without comment. “You’re here now,” Yuji said, and held out his hand, palm up, the way he used to when they’d sit on these exact stairs and Yuji would just want to hold Megumi’s hand for no announced reason, no occasion, simply because the hand was there and he liked it.
Megumi reached for it.
He could feel the temperature of the air change as his fingers closed the last distance, could feel, or thought he could feel, or wanted so completely to feel that the wanting had become indistinguishable from feeling, the exact warmth that a hand carries when it belongs to somebody who is still, impossibly, alive.
His fingers closed around nothing.
Not slowly. Not with any mercy built into the unraveling, the kind that gives a person even half a second to brace. All at once, the way the actual thing had gone too, the actual worst day, no warning generous enough to be called a warning. The stairs went first, then the gold light, then the specific worn pale stone under nothing, then Yuji’s face, dissolving not like smoke, which at least moves with a kind of intention, but like something simply switched off, complete in one frame and gone in the next with no travel between the two.
The smell of rain went last. It hung there a moment longer than everything else had, autumn rain on warm stone, and then it thinned out too, and there was nothing.
He was on the concrete floor again, if he had ever actually left it, which some clear cold part of him understood he hadn’t, not physically, not in any way that would have shown up if there’d been anyone left to check. His hand was still closed. He looked at it without immediately understanding what he was looking at, his own fingers curled around a fistful of gray air, the specific old scars standing out pale even in the bad light, the hand of someone who had spent a life holding weapons and, it turned out, in the end, holding nothing.
He didn’t open it right away. He lay there with his hand closed around nothing and let himself have the last few seconds of pretending there might be something in it after all, because pretending had become, somewhere in the last six years, one of the only forms of mercy still available to him, and he wasn’t in a position to turn any of them down.
The hole in the roof let its column of light through same as before. The dust still moved in it, unbothered, doing whatever dust does, going wherever it was going. He watched it because it was the only thing left in the room that still seemed to be in motion, and something in him, some very old and very stubborn part, wanted to watch something moving right up until the part where he stopped being able to watch anything at all.
He thought about Nobara’s hammer, the grip that hadn’t loosened. He thought about the sky over Shinjuku turning a color skies aren’t supposed to know. He thought about a look on a face in a crowd that he’d never managed to translate right and never would, now, not ever, because there wasn’t going to be a later to keep trying in.
He thought, with the last clear piece of himself, that it hadn’t been fair, none of it, the order things had happened in, the amount of time he’d been left to carry the ending after everyone else got to stop.
He opened his hand. There was nothing in it. There had never been anything in it. He had known that before he closed it and he knew it now and somehow both of those things had been true at once the entire time, the way the worst things usually are.
The smell of rain came back for one more second, faint, more memory than anything real, and then even that was gone, and the room was just a room, gray light through a broken roof, dust moving in a column with nobody left to watch it, and Megumi’s hand, open now, empty, resting on the cold concrete floor of a building that didn’t have a name anymore, in a silence that had finally, completely, nothing left in it to interrupt.