Chapter Text
The moment that Yuuji gained his teacher’s promise, he lost the ability to look the man in the eyes.
It’s not an intentional act, more like gravity. A force once compelling Yuuji to look towards Gojo-sensei’s covered gaze, now repelling him away from it. It came to be in the in-between moment after Yuuji asked and Gojo-sensei promised. A part of Yuuji already knew what the answer would be, just as he knew what he’d be looking at if he just lifted his eyes. Just a flat strip of dark fabric, a blindfold.
But for some reason, Yuuji couldn’t find the strength to lift his eyes completely there. Gaze caught on the curve of Gojo-sensei’s lips, the words forming on his mouth to eventually escape to occupy the air between them.
Of course, Yuuji saw Gojo-sensei promise and heard him say. I’ll make it quick, just for you, Yuuji-kun. You won’t feel a thing.
He should’ve been grateful. His wish, granted with only an ask and nothing more. Gojo-sensei even promised him to do it quick, painless. Yuuji should’ve brimmed with relief, should’ve smiled at his teacher and said his thanks until it became meaningless nothings.
And all Yuuji could think about was Gojo-sensei’s mouth, the shape it took, the sound that came from it. Yuuji wished it had taken him longer to search his mind for the reason of his unease, wish it’d taken him the whole night, or even just the evening. But it took only a second for Yuuji to remember, to find himself in a game of spot the difference with rising panic at the fact that there was nothing to spot out.
Something different, anything at all. Yuuji grasped at straws but couldn’t even feel air.
“What’s wrong?” Gojo-sensei asked.
You, Yuuji wanted to answer. But that wasn’t right, because Yuuji knows that if he were to view this from an outside view, peeking in through the sunsetting windows of the classroom the only thing different he could spot would be himself. Pale and shaken, muscles looking for an excuse to bolt.
And Gojo Satoru was the same as he always was. Down the playful curve of his lips, promising: Dinner’s on me. It was only yesterday.
And this will be only sometime in the future, Yuuji realized. Right down to the curve of his lips, the lightness of his tone, speaking from above as Yuuji lays his head down to be exorcised. Quick, right? Even in Yuuji’s imagination when he isn’t even looking at Gojo-sensei’s expression, he knew that he would not have to look to know what the man looks like. He’ll be reminded with every team dinner, every class period, every Yuuji-kun. He’ll be reminded of this moment where he realized Gojo Satoru will promise a quick and easy death to one of his students as casually as he’ll promise grabbing them something from the vending machine.
“Will you—” Cry? Sigh? Look sad? Show anything else at all?
In that moment, Yuuji thought that perhaps he was not even worth a single frown from Gojo Satoru’s perfect features. A thought came to Yuuji’s mind then, and in the same breath, he almost felt repulsed by it—by himself.
“Nothing,” he said quickly, almost afraid that if he didn’t say it fast enough, something else would sneak its way in. He wished again that he was a good liar, but he was not. But Gojo-sensei did not anything, only smiled just the same.
“Okay, Yuuji-kun,” Gojo-sensei said. “If you need anything else, just tell me.”
And god, did Yuuji want to. Fall to his knees and beg, and maybe, just maybe, Gojo-sensei would grant it. Kill me as your student, he wanted to plead. He imagined himself, just ink printed on a report—another mission to be fulfilled. He suddenly wanted, then, to weigh more than just ink and paper. Wanted for the hand that’ll come down to be weighed down with well worn memories. There’s not much, just a few months, maybe a few years if they stretch it. But surely, they’ll be heavy enough to pull down Gojo Satoru’s lips.
“No, nothing else,” Yuuji denied.
Ridiculous, Sukuna spat. What a pathetic farce this is.
At night, he laid awake, finally putting the words to his want. Imagined himself in that stifling room filled with emptiness and seals, candlelight flickering. Not the first to be put down in those halls, and not the last. He’d be seated, looking up at his killer, his teacher. Gojo Satoru would be wearing the same expression as always: when paying for dinner, grabbing an extra ice cream bar, exorcising a curse.
Gojo-sensei, he imagined himself saying, unable to stop the words from forming. Lowly and small, wanting a lick of comfort from a dimming flame. Can you care, even if just a bit?
Yuuji snapped open his eyes before he could imagine Gojo-sensei’s expression. His hands curled into fists, nails making indents in his palm.
You miserable wretch, Sukuna cursed, and unlike past fits, this did not sound like anger but venom.
“You’re mad because I just guaranteed your death.” Yuuji huffed, glad for a fight he can take.
I detest—no, I’m repulsed, Sukuna spat. That I’m stuck with someone like you.
“What’s new.”
Nothing’s new. You’re the same as when we first met: ignorant, harping on a proper death when you don’t even have a clue as to what death is, and all too eager to offload the coals you took upon your hands the moment it begins to burn.
Yuuji felt a familiar anger well up in him, an urge to fight, argue. Better than doing nothing and stewing in his thoughts. But recently Sukuna hasn’t even been granting him that. In the moment, Yuuji felt frustration, and glad for something other than misery.
He should’ve known that when Sukuna would never give him what he wanted without cost.
I want to save people, I want to die a proper death, I want to know more about people like me. Sukuna’s voice is a high, worming note. You want it all, but only the perfect, easily digestible bits.
There is nothing perfect or simple about this, Yuuji wanted to argue. Look around me.
Exactly, Sukuna said. You get what you want, and you hate every second of it.
Yuuji’s nose flared. “What did I get?”
Everything, Sukuna replied. Every last morsel of what you wished for, served on a platter. Yet now that you’re served, you hate it for not being easy to consume.
Yuuji didn’t know he could hate something until he met that stitched curse and his hatred bubbled from his depths, up to his throat, and escaped from his lips. Didn’t know how stark hatred could be—how natural it felt until it dug its way up and out into the world as a live, breathing thing.
He didn’t realize he never heard Sukuna truly hate something either, not until now—until Yuuji heard the word come from the bottom of Sukuna’s depths, up to the curse’s throat, and escape from the curse’s lips.
Let me teach you something you’d never had to learn. Sukuna doesn’t sound angry anymore, or disgusted—sounded like nothing Yuuji’s heard before. When you’re truly famished, even if it were a rock placed between your teeth, you’d bite down and chew until it becomes something you can swallow.
Yuuji tried to imagine it, the image stirring in his mind. Of wanting something so bad that you’d dig your hands into the dirt just to find rotten meat hanging off bones just for a bit of sustenance. He tried imagining it, dirt in his fingernails, gravel against his knees, a want so deep that it rotted hunger into famine.
He tried to place himself in that scene, and he could not.
He was hungry for it: a proper death, helping people, making memories. It sounded good in concept, perfect on recipe, but sat foul when he bit into the meal he was served.
The silence was rotten, space filled up with the echoed decay of Sukuna’s previous words: You get what you want, and you hate every second of it.
Wanting something enough to starve for it and wanting something enough to die for it. Just a difference in words, so similar and yet right now, these concepts feel so, so distant from one another.
“I want it enough to die for it,” Yuuji said, like arms raised to a knockout punch. Futile. Unable to think of any other argument he could make.
There is a moment of silence, almost familiar enough to make Yuuji think that Sukuna has cut the conversation short.
If only you wanted it enough to say it as strongly as you did when you threaten to kill. Sukuna sounded almost disappointed. Sukuna’s disappointment should mean nothing to Yuuji, but somehow in this moment, it felt searing. It scares you that Uchiha Obito regretted almost everything he’s done—but at least he’ll have died for something to regret it. You pity those other vessels, but at least they lived for something to fight for it.
Yuuji did not realize how much he rather Sukuna’s ire, Sukuna’s anything at all than this.
All you live and die for are the words of a dead man. A punch would hurt less, arms raised did nothing to stop the precise pierce of a blade into his sternum. The pain burning and bright, bursting in his ears the ringing of a flatline. But about yourself, Itadori Yuuji? There’s nothing. You will die for nothing, just as you have lived for nothing.
“Tell me if you hear anything interesting, Yuuji-kun.”
Yuuji nods, still unable to look up towards his teacher’s eyes. Surely, Gojo-sensei must’ve noticed by now, but he never brings it up. Never even mentions anything at all other than vague, concerned probing at the lessened energy in Yuuji’s body.
He was asked, once, if it was Sukuna bothering him. He wished. It would’ve been easier to explain away if it was truly Sukuna bugging him, keeping him awake than it is the echoes of the curse’s words leaving its spoiling flesh in Yuuji’s ears. The maggots and flies of its corpse buzzing in the canals of his ears during every moment of silence, a reminder of the sudden space Sukuna gouged out with the words that were spoken, the space that is left behind that only Yuuji occupied now.
“No, nothing,” Yuuji answered, and hated himself for wishing that there would’ve been something.
Gojo-sensei ambles out of the room, giving a wave without looking, and shuts the door behind them. There’s a small click as Uchiha Obito drops a piece of chalk back to where it belongs, a new name written on the board. Fuu.
“The seventh jinchuuriki,” Uchiha Obito begins. No meaning to the name is offered, so there is none. “She was raised partly by the village leader, Shibuki. Their village was not a particularly prestigious one for its time and rather kept to itself, but it was one of the few who got their hands on a tailed beast when they were first distributed.”
Right, that whole deal. Its fallout seemed numerous by now: all the destruction that the tailed beast brought unto each other, unto the world, and was brought unto themselves.
“They tried to keep Fuu’s status a secret and Fuu led a reclusive lifestyle as she grew up to best protect others as well as herself,” Uchiha Obito continues. “She was raised with more care than most jinchuuriki had. Shibuki cared to protect her as more than a weapon.”
A weight lessened off Yuuji’s chest. At least today he would not have had to learn of another child’s misery. “That’s good.”
“He did not raise her as only a weapon either,” Uchiha Obito notes. “From what I gathered, he tried instilling into her other lessons than just tactics and forms.”
“Like what?” Yuuji asks. Eager to throw himself into something else, take his mind off its own stagnant loop.
“Friendship, loyalty,” Uchiha Obito says, like it didn’t quite know the meaning of the words it just said. “Things of that nature.”
“Oh, she had friends?”
“No.” Uchiha Obito cut that thought short. “But she was allowed to dream of them.”
That’s more than most jinchuuriki got, Yuuji thinks. Most jinchuuriki grew up knowing that they would not be allowed the connections that other children their age were allowed to form freely. They grew up knowing that there would be few that could ever understand them, come to care for them, come to be their friend.
Fuu, at least, was allowed to dream. Yuuji didn’t know whether this was for the better or worse. Other jinchuuriki would already have foreseen the life they would grow into, Fuu’s dream would be shattered once it grew too big to fit the molds of reality.
“Sounds lonely,” Yuuji says. Though it seemed that none of them escaped that pervasive solitude growing up.
“She was,” Uchiha Obito responds. “Lonely, and bored. Making trouble for attention. Shibuki would scold her but forgave her easier than most other under his employ—I think he knew how she felt and could not bring himself to do anything more than scold and chide.”
Better than most jinchuuriki in that she had someone who cared for her since young. But in the same breath, never satisfied, always searching for something more than what her status tied her to. She was promised bonds, happiness, but was not given it in the same breath. He could imagine her like other children, wondering, then asking, Why not me, too? But unlike other children, this would not be a tale where her parents would come to hug her and reassure that she’ll come to grow into her dreams one day, but a tale where she slowly grew out of it as her caretaker—the one who built that dream for her—watched and only shook his head.
She got more than most jinchuuriki, but less than most other children her age.
“At least he cared.” Petty pittance.
Uchiha Obito didn’t say anything to that, instead, it says, “She got good with flight.”
Yuuji looks up.
“In her free time, she’d learn techniques and try to draw from her power,” Uchiha Obito explains. “It varies on the beast, but in her case, the appendages she could grow allowed her flight.”
“Like wings?” Yuuji imagines feathers.
Uchiha Obito shakes its head, as if reading Yuuji’s mind. “No, it was more akin to an insect’s.”
“Oh.” Yuuji visualizes it in his mind, the fragile wings of an insect, all too easily torn by a child’s hand. “It was hard, right? To do that stuff with your tailed beast.”
“Most tailed beast transformation happens regardless of the user’s will, manifesting only at heightened emotions,” Uchiha Obito explains. “To do it consciously is something that would take most jinchuuriki until their early adult years to begin, and some don’t risk it at all, especially those with more powerful tailed beasts. There’s a risk, most thought, of the tailed beast gaining control seeing as it already influenced the jinchuuriki’s mind a great deal to draw on their energy, let alone transform into their limbs.”
Sorcerers can control their own curse energy just fine. But there is your own curse energy, and the pure, unfiltered curse energy of a curse being pumped into your veins, directly into your mind. Foreign curse energy is a whole other ball game—Yuuji can hardly imagine the effects it’ll leave, rushing through the bloodstream like an infectious hot agent raring to go.
“And how old was she?”
“By her teenage years, she mastered it.”
Teenage years, around his own age.
“Did Shibuki tell her to do it?” he asks.
Uchiha Obito shakes its head. “Shibuki would’ve seen it as too risky.”
“So she learned by herself?”
“Alone, there were few teachers she could’ve sought for help on with this matter regardless.”
“That—” Yuuji struggles for words.
It could be talent, but Yuuji feels that the word doesn’t fit here. A hole too big to be filled by just genius. This was not something that was pointed at, told to be done, and was done. This was something gazed at, reached for, and achieved. Days spent staring at the open blue sky, yearning for the sights that awaited at the top of the world, imagining the flight of a bird and feeling what a bird felt.
This, Yuuji realizes. Was starvation.
Gazing at the sky, so hungry to catch the wind at the top of the world that she’d spent days, weeks, months, even years, doing what no other jinchuuriki was—that she shouldn’t be doing at all. It was dangerous, difficult, and draining. But he imagines her sitting crouched on the ground, looking up at the sky. Imagine her and what she must’ve been thinking, the determination pumping in her veins.
If I can’t be a bird, he imagines her thinking. Then I’ll fly as an insect.
He imagines her stumbling steps, failing lift-offs, and finally, the day when she finally flew and saw what no other before her had seen before. A sight that belonged to her and her alone, something that she could have and only could have because of what she was.
He could not imagine her as she flew. Could not imagine her expression nor how she felt. Could only imagine the back of her, a fuzzy, indistinct image of joy so palpable that the sun must’ve paled in comparison. Her wings flapping, the sunlight filtering through them in varied shades of colors that rendered all other shades in the world mute before it. A famine finally sated.
He could not imagine it.
“That sounds hard,” he settles with. Hard, a paltry understatement for what she scourged together, alone and a pre-teenager. No one told her to do so, but maybe that’s why she’d done it. Tore up the pieces of what she was meant to be and arranged it into a shape of her own liking.
“It must’ve been,” Uchiha Obito acknowledges. “But she could not get enough of flying.”
Starvation, wanting something so bad that you’d fly even with an insect’s wings, a cursed one at that. The very wings that stood as proof of the path that her life had taken before she even had a choice. But she probably didn’t think of them like that. She probably loved them, treated them like glass slippers that’d grant her invitation to a castle of her own making.
“Yeah.” That was all Yuuji could say.
“Eventually as a teenager—around your age—she signed up for an exam. A promotion exam of sorts,” Uchiha Obito says.
Promotions, Yuuji’s heard of those before. Gets sorcerers up a rank and needing a recommendation from a sorcerer of higher ranking. He mainly hears about it from the outside, a sort of ‘that’s cool’, because he doesn’t imagine himself anywhere on the scale. Couldn’t imagine himself on it rather than outside of it.
Yuuji’s never heard of an exam for a promotion before. Maybe it’s one of those things he has yet to learn, or a practice that died out. But it wasn’t until then that he realized that jinchuuriki were also given a rank and didn’t just exist outside of it. Just assigned a rank or given something unique based on their status. “You needed that back then?”
“Generally speaking, jinchuuriki would receive promotions for their fieldwork. Few are sent to exams given the enmeshed and public nature of it.”
“But Fuu was.”
“She signed herself up,” Uchiha Obito states. “Shibuki thought it too dangerous. But he eventually relented thinking of the reputation he could bring to his village—and all the missions and income that would allow, and assigned Fu bodyguards of higher ranks that’d pose as her teammate.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She wanted to see new sights,” Uchiha Obito answers. “But I think it was mainly to make new friends.”
A dream that she still held, not yet stifled by the world. She must’ve known by that point what she was, the extent that her status would limit her to. She must’ve known, but she pressed on. A stone polished with teenage rebellion and forged through years of childhood zeal. A precious, bright thing. Beyond the physical danger, Yuuji imagines Shibuki looking at her and thinking of all the ways the world could dampen her fire, crush her ideals, mold her into its shape.
“I think she said to her competitors that she came to make a hundred friends,” Uchiha Obito muses. “Though I’m not sure how accurate that report was, or how serious she was. I think she would’ve been happy with just one.”
A hundred friends. The kind of number you’d think was immeasurably large when you were a child, maybe large enough to make you never feel lonely again.
“Were there even a hundred people there?” Yuuji asks, recalling his own sorta tournament. It was between two schools and had less students combined than one regular class in an ordinary school.
“Plenty enough,” Uchiha Obito states. It reminds Yuuji of what Gojo-sensei said before about the past. In the Golden Age of jujutsu, just as there were immeasurable amounts of curses that roamed the world, there were an immeasurable number of sorcerers as well. It was the age when monsters like Sukuna were forged, when ghosts like Uchiha Obito went to scar the world, and when teenagers like Fuu came to make friends.
“There’s not many in the present day,” Yuuji responds. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen two dozen of us in a single room before, let alone a hundred.”
Uchiha Obito is silent for a moment. “Maybe that’s for the best.”
Yuuji studies Uchiha Obito, then remembers that Uchiha Obito, when he was alive, did not look at his own kind as ally—but as potential enemies. Back then, it was not just sorcerers against curses, not even sorcerers against curse users, but sorcerers against sorcerers as well. Factions, alignments, things that sorcerers in present day still have, but no longer to the same extent. Not enough to wage war over, because there’s simply just not enough bodies for a war.
“Fuu passed the first round easily,” Uchiha Obito pivots away from the somber topic. “An information gathering as well as ethics test, or something like that—whether you’d leave a teammate behind.”
“That was a thing?”
“Depends on the host of the exam,” Uchiha Obito responds. Though Yuuji wonders if it that really counts as ethics and a test for ‘stepping over the bar for being a semi-decent person for not leaving your teammate behind when you don’t need to.’ “There was a bit of a race to qualify for the second phase, Fuu and her team made it. In fact, they arrived first.”
“Did she fly?”
“No, I think she was told to limit the use of her flight unless necessary.” Keep private, right. “I heard that during the rest period in between, she saved another team from some kind of giant beast.”
“Was that also a test? Ethics?”
“No, it was just her.”
Just her, Fuu. A teenager out there taking a test just to make friends. Taking flight just to see how blue the sky is when you’re breathing it. Helping other teams just because she wanted to. Without even hearing of her personality, he could start to imagine her features, the expression she’d make: he imagines that she’d be someone who smiled often, who walked as though they were one with the breeze, someone who you could look at and think that if you come to them for help, they’d say, Sure, anything else?
She’d be free-spirited, if she could be free. But as it were, she was only spirited. An insect, not a bird. Unable to be rid of her earthly constraints.
“The objective of the second test was to survive for three days, each team was given one of two scrolls and told to retrieve the other from another team then make it to the main building before the three days were up.”
Much more complicated than a recommendation, Yuuji thinks. Meant to dwindle down prospects because they had had the numbers to dwindle down back then.
“She retrieved the second scroll before the first day was over.” A dominant contender. Yuuji’d suspected as much. She might not have been raised as just a weapon like her peers, but she was a weapon all the same. Propelled by her own desire to master her craft. “If she headed straight for the main building, her team would likely be the first ones there.”
“If,” Yuuji notes.
“On the way, she took the time to save another team from peril—going off track and away from her bodyguards.”
“They were her competitors,” Yuuji comments.
“I don’t think that meant much to her.”
“Yeah, I assumed as much.”
She was kind, Yuuji thinks. Wanted to help people, even those that might not have helped her back if they were in her place. But he didn’t think that mattered to her either. Didn’t matter what they’d do in her shoes, what mattered to her was what she’d do in her own shoes. The ideals that she grew up on: friendship, loyalty. The ideals that she still carried, even now.
She cared. The thought ended there, he didn’t know where to continue it, hasn’t heard the conclusion.
“She was delayed again shortly after.”
“Another team?” Yuuji’s lips quirk up despite himself.
“Another team, or specifically, another jinchuuriki.” Uchiha Obito’s lips mirror his own. “Gaara.”
Gaara, Yuuji hasn’t heard the name in what felt like a long, long time, and it rose him up from his seat. “Gaara? The first jinchuuriki?”
“That Gaara,” Uchiha Obito says. Yuuji doesn’t even know why he asked, not like there was more than one Gaara running around probably. But it feels like seeing Goku appear in One Piece, something you’d have to take a double look at.
“Wow, that’s—that’s cool.” Yuuji smiles. “So what was going with him?”
“His tailed beast was getting extracted at the time.”
Yuuji freezes, then he glances at Uchiha Obito. “You were there, too?”
“No, I was not.” As if reading Yuuji’s mind, Uchiha Obito continues, “And no, I didn’t send anyone to act in my stead.”
Yuuji’s face scrunches up. “So, there were other… others out there?” He’d thought Uchiha Obito was a special kind of fringe thing.
“More than I thought at first,” Uchiha Obito muses. “But less than you’d be concerned with.”
“You want to give a number for that?” Yuuji asks. “And you had people working for you?”
“It was an organization.”
“An organization?” Holy shit, Uchiha Obito was not just a fringe, friendless terrorist. He had coworkers and organizational structure and HR. “I’d be concerned with that. I’m concerned with that.”
“There were only ten people, twelve, at most,” Uchiha Obito says dryly.
“You got eleven other people on board?” Holy shit, how? Did Uchiha Obito somehow drop all his supervillain charisma in between getting reformed?
“They weren’t exactly on board, persay.”
“What do you mean by that.”
“One only wanted the money—”
“You made money from this?” He didn’t think there was a market for whatever Uchiha Obito was doing.
“We had a… side business.” As if not wanting to elaborate, perhaps sensing that the legality of it would collapse with a second of inspection, Uchiha Obito continues. “Two were there for their art, one exploded themselves, I think the other one died because he missed his parents and grandparents and decided to never address it until it stabbed him in the side.”
“First of all, art? And second of all, how does someone die from—”
“By letting their grandmother puppet their parents' puppets into stabbing them.” What the fuck. “One was there for his religion. One left after getting outmaneuvered by a teenager he was trying to control. The teenager died after he became an adult and thinking that it was time to die for his brother now.”
“You hired a teenager?”
“He joined willingly because he wanted to be a double agent.”
“You knew? And you still let him?”
“He was good,” Uchiha Obito says, as if that abolished child labor laws. They probably didn’t have child labor laws, Yuuji thought with maddening hysteria. If they did, Uchiha Obito wouldn’t have turned out like Uchiha Obito. “One was trying to be on board, but his heart wasn’t in it so he decided to revive a whole village after killing them.”
“He what—”
“One was a spy for me, but he was also spying on me.”
This is the worst Avengers line-up Yuuji’s ever seen. Just assembled of the people that all really, really don’t want to be there and was looking for the nearest opportunity to either fall onto a sharp object or leave.
“One who was embezzling funds to use it on her arsenal of paper bombs when she inevitably turned on me.” Uchiha Obito’s expression was kind of bitter, like embezzlement was the worst thing that she could’ve done. “Six hundred billion of them.”
“Holy shit, she hated you.” Yuuji’s starting to see the afterimages of Todo. “She could’ve used that money on other things like, I don’t know, a mansion or something—six hundred billion—a castle.” Yuuji’s mind latches onto something. “And the spy—he didn’t tell you anything either, or anyone else that even saw anything, oh man, they hated you.”
“One was loyal,” Uchiha Obito says stubbornly.
“One.” Yuuji does the math. “That’s like a ten percent conversion rate. They hated hated you.” Forget supervillain charisma, this was supervillain uncharisma. Good to know Uchiha Obito didn’t have a lick of charm in life or death.
“Our goals just didn’t align.”
“Sorry, but it really sounds like they hated you.” You just don’t not mention the six hundred billion paper bomb elephant in the room if you didn’t hate the guy that the bomb is aimed at. “I think I have to apologize to Gojo-sensei for saying that Maki-senpai hated him because I didn’t know what true hatred was.”
Uchiha Obito’s lips quirks up. “You said that to him?”
“A while ago, yeah,” Yuuji says. Suddenly remembering that he hasn’t spoken to Gojo-sensei one-on-one for a long, long time. He shifts in his seat. “Anyways, what was happening with Fuu?”
“She helped Gaara, even though she was also caught up in the extraction.”
“She was from a different faction.”
“Fuu didn’t see the world in those terms, I don’t think,” Uchiha Obito says. “Things were simpler for her, people she’d like to be friends with, her friends, and people who’d hurt that.”
Unlike her peers she was raised in seclusion, a hybrid between a weapon and a child. Complicated politics did not touch her from her view from above the world. From up there, she could only see the sky and the ground, and of it, she must’ve found both wonderful. Because she could’ve kept flying, higher and higher until she left everything behind, but she always landed back on earth. Back to the one that raised her, back to her dream, back to the earth with all the colors that the sky lacked and the people that the sky did not hold.
At the core of it all, Fuu was someone who loved everything about the world. From the biggest of things to the smallest, from the endless sky to small wings of flying insects.
She cared so much that it overflowed. A simple care that should’ve been molded away when she grew up, but it never did. It’s all so simple—was so simple for him, too. He wonders where they diverge, the difference between him and her.
“She managed to save him, right?”
Uchiha Obito nods.
“That’s good,” Yuuji says. “Then what happened?”
“The exam ended early, and on the way back Fuu encountered the ones that I did send.”
And here it was, the end of it all. Like an insect, born to die. Death before she even knew what adulthood was.
“She fought with all she had,” Uchiha Obito responds.
“She wanted to live,” Yuuji says.
Uchiha Obito meets his eyes. “They all did.”
That’s right, they all did. They fought for their lives. They fought with everything they had to live. Yuuji once thought he understood that—once was in the same place.
He traces her name now on the chalkboard. Fuu. No real meaning assigned. Unlike his own which had his parents’ hopes and expectations weighing on it. Fuu, a name with no weight assigned to it but now, it feels like it’d be unbearably heavy if you try to lift it. Because she instilled into it her own life, because now when Yuuji sees that name he thinks of the blue sky and the refractive light of the sun bouncing off thin paper like wings. He thinks of a warm smile and a warmer laugh and a heart that was a furnace, holding the entire world within its embrace. Just like everything else that she was given, she took it and made her own. Breathed life into it, made a mark so deep that it would be made hers alone.
Her way of leaving something behind in the world. They all did that. All fought for something—all tried to imbue their own essence into their names and Yuuji could hear it now and think of their visage, the soul that was held in that name once. Gaara, temperamental then steady. Yugito, a frigid, reliable force. Yagura, talented and in over his head. Roshi, mature and fiery. Han, still and solid. Utakata, reserved and distant. Fuu, flighty and light.
He thinks of his own name, infused with so much weight in birth and yet he imagines someone being told of his story. What would they see? He looks through their eyes, and he does not see himself. He sees something so weightless, it could’ve been written in sand.
“Would you have?” Yuuji asks at last. “Fought?”
“Of course,” Uchiha Obito answers naturally, as if there was never another answer possible. “And I did.”
“Do you regret it?”
Uchiha Obito doesn’t say anything for a moment. The answer seemed so clear to Yuuji, clear to them both: Yes.
Finally, Uchiha Obito says it. “I regret everything I’ve done, but I can’t regret that I lived.”
Yuuji glances up, meeting Uchiha Obito’s eyes. Suddenly, he can see the man that once existed there.
“I can’t regret that I lived, not when it was me living that allowed someone else to keep on living,” Uchiha Obito says. “It was me that caused him to be in peril to begin with, it was also me who placed him in a war, and it was also me that caused him so much misery to begin with—but I don’t regret living until the end.”
There was once a man who carved his name over the world with a jagged, sharp blade until it bled.
“Just so I can say that I’ve seen the future with him, and it looks bright.”
There was once a man who waged war on the world for world peace.
“Just so that if I go see him now, I can say that I’ve seen the future for him, and it’s brighter than we could’ve imagined.”
There was once a man—
“Your name, what does it mean?”
Uchiha Obito blinks.
“There’s no meaning to it,” Uchiha Obito says. “It’s just my name.”
There was once a man named Uchiha Obito, and he once wanted something so terribly that he’d starved for it. No, he wanted something so terribly that he’d live for it.
And Yuuji isn’t like him at all—because he’s only fighting to die.
Help people. Die a proper death. A steady beep, ringing into a flatline. Then: nothing. He smells the faint scent of the sea, a distant shore. He imagines them all glancing towards the approaching currents. He sees then that they would not be gazing towards the ocean, but towards the horizon.
Do you regret it? he asks now. And he can finally hear the answer. Spoken from different lips, in different voices, in their own unique ways, but all the same. It’d be the same a thousand times over. So many regrets they’d have inside them when they passed, so many things they’d think about in their last moments—clinging to life. They’d regret many things. How certain events played out, certain actions they’ve taken, things they’d wished they’d done differently, things they’d wish they had done, things they wished they would have the time to do.
But there would always be one thing they’d never regret having done, one thing that they'd always look at and smile for. Gaara becoming the leader of his village, Yugito becoming a fierce protector of hers, Yagura transcending past his caste, Roshi for the wrinkles on his hands and the gray in his hair, Han for becoming known as one of the greatest in the world during his time, Utakata saving Tsuchigumo, Fuu taking flight.
These were the things that the world could not take from them. The things that they made with their own two hands from what they were given. These were the things that after all the regrets, they could look at and smile. The setting sun beyond the shore, above the surface of the currents. Something so bright that it’d make them squint to look at when they laughed as they then took away from the shore and towards the sea, towards the sun. It would be written into every crinkle of their eyes, every line in their smile, every breath of their laughter: Look at that, I happened. I existed. I was here.
Even Uchiha Obito has taken towards the shore, wading into its currents, a grim line pressing down his lips. He’s not happy like the rest of them are, and making his way through the sea feels more like torture than a trip, but as he approaches the horizon and becomes swallowed by the sun, Yuuji can see that he, too, has finally smiled.
It was Yuuji who was stuck on the shore, looking out towards them.
I happened, he imagines himself saying to them, and the first sound would not even leave his lips—swallowed by the air. No weight to it, no meaning.
He had nothing to his name, other than his death. And he realizes for the first time how hollow it is to rely on death to give his life weight.
There’s no dust on the surfaces of Gojo Satoru’s living room table. No crumbs in the man’s kitchen and Obito has not looked, but he bets if he does, there would be no folds in the blanket on Gojo Satoru’s bed. The only thing that shows sign of life is Gojo Satoru and the wilting plant on the counter.
My place, Satoru’d said. But there is nothing here that’d make it Gojo Satoru’s.
“Make yourself at home,” Satoru says.
That’s something that even Gojo Satoru himself has not done, but Obito does not say that. “This is where you return to often?”
“Whenever I’m in Tokyo, sure,” Satoru responds, he steps into the place like he owes it—probably does—but it does not welcome him with the same ease. “Pretty nice, huh?”
Sterile, would be the word Obito would have chosen. “It’s clean.”
“It is,” Satoru acknowledges in the way someone acknowledges that the sky is blue. Evidence that there was never once a place Satoru called his that has not been cleaned down to the soil before he graced it of his own presence. “I have housekeepers.” Another fact of life. “Told you, enough money—”
“—to support a family of three, living in luxury,” Obito recites.
Satoru smiles. “That’s the idea.”
Obito has had an inkling of Satoru’s upbringing, the wealth embedded onto his fingertips, but he did not know the extent of it until he breathed in the empty wealth encapsulated in Satoru’s four walls. This was a man raised with the power to point at something and own it in the next breath. A man who’s never had to beg or plead for the world to give. And at some point, he lost the ability to truly want anything at all—a muscle that deteriorated from lack of use.
How devastating it must’ve been, Obito imagines. To one day learn that what you truly wanted, you could not keep.
Obito can understand it in an abstract sense, but he’s never had anything that was his that he didn’t fight for.
“More comfortable than the outside, right?” Satoru asks once he sat.
Comfort is for things like well-loved blankets and well-worn clothes. Obito’s found comfort in more uncomfortable places: the bony arms of his grandmother, the rough ground with crackling fire and his teammates whispering in the dark, the humid grounds of Madara’s cave. This is comfort only in the world of someone who lived in exhibits and the paintings of those exhibits. “It’s ambient.”
Satoru smiles, pleased. “You can come here more often, if you’d like.”
Another intimate invitation so easily proffered. This is not the inner caverns of Gojo Satoru’s heart, but it is something close to it. Empty as it were, this is where Satoru lays his head to rest, allowing his heart to even. Obito has trespassed many places in his life, but he can count on a single hand how many times he’s walked into another person’s heart. He’s not there yet, but he can see an invitation in the future, Satoru just waiting for the time to stuff it into his hands.
I can destroy this empty world of yours, he thinks, intrusively. I can make your shallowness become nothingness. And he could. It would be devastating. He could do it right now without a weapon, look around and spot the numerous ways in which Satoru has attempted humanity and failed—and the numerous ways in which he’s given up all together.
“At your invite.”
“Without my invite, too,” Satoru says. “It’s not like you have a place to stay.”
“Are you suggesting I break in?”
“Not like you have a problem doing that with Yuuji-kun.” Satoru laughs. “But if you want a key, I’ll give it to you. It’s nicer in here, right?”
Satoru’s eyes betray nothing but plain playfulness, but his finger twitches, leaving a tiny imprint in the fine fabric of the seat. Here, in Satoru’s inner world, the pulse of his heart is clear. This empty nest, this hollow world, these blank four walls. This is Gojo Satoru, broken down into brick and concrete. A man that has the power to have anything, and because of that, has nothing.
“Does no one take care of the plant?”
Satoru blinks, glancing towards the thing cupped in something that isn’t sterile white. “No, Yuta-kun got it for me as a souvenir, something from overseas. Told them not to touch it.” He laughs, not quite happy. “Though I guess I haven’t touched it much either, with all the missions.”
“You did try.”
“I guess.” Satoru shrugs. As if trying wasn’t enough. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just another thing in the long list of things Gojo Satoru tried to include in his world, but eventually found it stifled under his duties. There are many roles Gojo Satoru puts on: a sorcerer, the strongest, and a teacher. Obito wonders how many hours he gets to slip off those shoes and become just Satoru.
Within the day, three hours, maybe. And that’s when he’s asleep. Obito doubts that he’s even Satoru in his dreams.
“I’ll show you how to take care of it properly,” Obito declares. He stands, walking to the plant, analyzing its leaves. It calls to him—half of him—in a vague sense. “We can set up a schedule.”
“Wow, so that’s what gets you to come back of your own free will and not me?” Satoru says from behind him, still sitting. “I’m hurt.”
Obito can tell he’s not, just bemused. “It’s Yuta’s gift to you.”
“That’s true, we wouldn’t want his intentions to go to waste,” Satoru agrees.
“It’s also the only thing in these four walls that you personally placed.”
“Does it stand out that much?” Satoru asks. “I guess it doesn’t match the color scheme, or something like that.”
“It’s the most pleasing thing in this place.”
“Because it’s Yuta-kun’s?”
“Because it’s yours.” Gojo Satoru’s care is evident. He’s a man who loves and fear attachment in equal measures. He does not call anything his—not because he does not want to, but because he cannot stand the idea that he can have it, and how easily he can lose it. So he pretends he’s the strongest, just that. But even then, he still cares for his students, keeps around their dying plant just wanting to make space in his life for them but falling short because he does not know how to let himself breath.
Satoru is silent for a moment, Obito can’t see his expression, but he guesses that it’s finally something neutral—considering. The few times that Gojo Satoru does not smile, because he does not have anyone to smile against. “No one’s taught me how to take care of plants before.”
“No one’s taught you anything of note,” Obito comments.
“My tutors would be murderous to hear that,” Satoru says.
“They can try murdering me,” Obito replies.
“They’d have to get past me first,” Satoru says, almost playful—but couldn’t quite muster the airiness, voice too heavy for that. “Can’t have them killing you.” Spoken in a murmur, almost quiet, like something cradled and held close before it was let go into the world.
“Your plant would die without me,” Obito prompts, offering Satoru an out. Navigating them away from his depths and into lighter grounds. “And Yuta would be sad.” Another out. Another excuse to take.
“That, maybe,” Satoru agrees. “But it’s mainly because I like you too much to be able to see you die.”
Obito’s hand jolts, his heart does not beat—but if it did, it’d miss a beat. He truly feels it now: being in the sanctum of Gojo Satoru’s world. Each pulse of Satoru’s heart, he almost feels resonating in his own empty cavern. His world narrows down to the wilting plant in front of him, and Gojo Satoru behind him. He does not see Satoru’s expression. He does not turn to see it—could not. This is not something that he could see and walk away from the same as he was before, something in him knows it. Devastation, that is what that will be. Like a storm, it’ll tear down what Obito constructed for both their sakes.
Danger, his mind warns. He wants to run, flee. Forget Gojo Satoru, let the man recompose himself, and let this moment pass. He has a shovel in his hands; he could bury this moment.
He does not.
The silence stretches, its rhythm in the beat of someone’s heartbeat.
“What did you and Yuuji-kun talk about?”
Regaining steady grounds, he was all too eager to answer, “The seventh jinchuuriki. Fuu.”
“That’s all?”
“Also about my past organization,” Obito states. “He thought it was rather pathetic for one.” And it was, Obito admits.
Satoru laughs. Steady ground, back to what it was. “You’d have to tell me about that someday.”
“Maybe one day,” Obito promises.
“So, what else?”
“What makes you think there was more?”
He could hear the smile in Satoru’s words. “Because if there wasn’t, Yuuji-kun wouldn’t have gone from looking pale as a ghost to being more like himself again.”
“He asked me if I regretted it.” He hadn’t thought Itadori would ask. “Living.”
“Did you?”
“I did, once,” Obito admits. “Still do, most days.”
“What changed?”
Obito thinks for a moment. Saving Kakashi and being able to say his proper farewells, seeing the future and all that the world had accomplished, meeting Yuta and being able to finally draw the conclusion to the Uchiha clan and giving Yuta the pen to write its new first chapter. He hadn’t thought of it like that before, hadn’t thought himself capable of doing anything but creating misery and bringing destruction. Had forgotten that someone existed once, who cried when they killed, and just wanted a world with no tragedies. Had forgotten it until Gojo Satoru dug his hands into his chest—through all his defenses—and felt the pulse of a ghost, brought it to Obito’s ear and said, Listen to that, Uchiha Obito.
“You.”
Sound ceases to exist. Nothing but the unknown beat of someone’s heart. Then, there is the sound of footsteps. Steady and approaching.
“You once told me you’d die for the world.”
“I did.” He doesn’t recognize his voice or Satoru’s. The tone they’ve both taken on.
“When I met you, I could tell that all you wanted to do was die again.”
“That’s true.”
“This world couldn’t make you smile from the bottom of your heart, and all it left you with were regrets.”
Obito doesn’t answer.
“I just want to know, Obito. Even if it was just for a second, did I make you want to stay?”
This was not something that could be said—should be said. Unlike Gojo Satoru who was never taught, Obito knew all too well about playing with fire. He could lie now, and he knew it'd be the worst lie he's told ever since he got the truth trained out of him by Madara. And most importantly, he did not want to lie. Could think of nothing but the truth.
“It’s more than a second.”
The sound of a heartbeat, he doesn’t know whose it is. All he can hear is a pounding pulse, and footsteps finally stopping, just two steps, maybe even one, between them.
“I don’t know if what you’re saying is what I’m thinking it means,” Satoru says, voice speeding up in tandem, as if he couldn’t get it out fast enough. “I don’t know if you know—if you’re just choosing to ignore it.” Leave now, let this be in the past. Danger. This will be destructive for them both. “But I know that if it was me that made you want to stay, if it was me that made you feel that living isn’t so bad, if it was me that made you want to smile again—”
Stop now. They can both come back from this.
He feels Gojo Satoru at his back. Hands placed on both sides of the counter in front of him, resting on his own.
“If it was me that made you want to live as Uchiha Obito,” Satoru says, voice so close it feels like it came from beneath his skin. Lips next to his ear. He can’t turn. He knows he can’t—should not, should never. But he can feel the ghost of Satoru’s hair against the side of his face, the piercing gaze of his eyes. And he turns.
He shouldn’t have. Shouldn’t have started it, shouldn’t have done it.
But their eyes meet, red against blue. And even without it, Obito does not think he can ever forget Gojo Satoru’s expression as it is now for the rest of eternity. In that moment, Obito learns that Gojo Satoru never lost the ability to truly want.
“Just know,” Satoru says, Obito can feel Satoru’s words against his own lips. No longer so airy, it rests heavy between the two of them—a rasp that can be felt. His fingers curl around Obito’s, and it feels like hunger. “Me, too.”