Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Yuuji doesn’t know much about interior design, but Kugisaki has a vision. He’ll grant her that.

Her room is less like a dorm and more like a master suite spread in a home improvement magazine. The bed is neatly made—Yuuji doesn’t think he’s ever made a bed in his life—with a patterned pink duvet and a mountain of assorted pillows. A small Bluetooth speaker perched on the dresser plays an upbeat bubble pop song that immediately grates on Sukuna’s nerves. Kugisaki’s wardrobe must be too extensive for the storage space afforded to her, because she’s even managed to loft her bed and fit a squat set of sliding drawers under it.

(Yuuji can’t begin to understand why a person would need so much stuff. He and Kugisaki, more by nature than nurture, are very different in that way.)

Once the door closes behind him, Yuuji’s first order of business is to ask, “Do I get to pick the color? For my nails, I mean.”

“Duh," Kugisaki says. "What kind of monster do you think I am?”

“If I answer that, you’ll slap me,” Yuuji says—he’s lucky she doesn’t slap him just for that. Still working through his sensory overload, he lingers on the color-coded rack of shirts and dresses past the open closet door. “Are you a clothing hoarder or something? How does it not get messy in here?”

(With that, he’s already come close to asking one of his questions: Why do you buy so many clothes when we wear uniforms half the time anyway?. The folded-up paper is burning a hole in his pocket, the corners worn down where he keeps reaching in to fidget with it like he’s afraid it’ll disappear. He’s sure Kugisaki will pick up on that sooner or later.)

“It starts to, but there’s this crazy life hack where you pick up your shit and put it away,” Kugisaki informs him as she reclaims her seat at her plush desk chair. “It’s called cleaning.”

“Never heard of it. Sounds hard.” Yuuji gravitates toward the desk, eyeing a sturdy black shoebox of nail polish bottles. He can’t imagine how many nail colors exist in the world, but Kugisaki seems to own most of them. “...Can I pick more than one of these?”

“Sure. Ten max. Twenty if Sukuna wants in, I guess.” Kugisaki’s left hand is already done—immaculately—and Yuuji watches her begin her right. “Just let me finish mine first. I don’t trust you with the painting part.”

“Good call.” The little glass bottles clink as Yuuji sifts through his options. He hums a few bars of the song that’s playing; Kugisaki has pretty decent taste in music. “How long does it stay once you put it on?”

“It’ll start chipping within a couple days. Maybe less, since you’re always punching shit.” Kugisaki side-eyes him. “But I know you didn’t come for the free manicure. Talk.”

Oh, right. Talking.

It what he’s here for in the first place, but Yuuji hasn’t decided how to start. That’s a common thread of his. Barreling into a conversation unprepared, because preparing means thinking, and thinking means overthinking, and overthinking means talking himself out of doing something that desperately needs to be done.

“Uh, I did wanna say thanks again for the coffee this morning.” Yuuji drops a lilac-purple bottle back into the box after briefly considering it. He feels like he’s speaking in code. “It really helped.”

“I could tell,” Kugisaki says. She finishes her right hand and raises it to inspect her work in the light. “...Anything else?”

Yuuji points at her nails. “Those came out really ni—”

Kugisaki slaps her hand back down on the desk. “They’re not even done yet. If you keep dodging the subject like that, you’re getting the worst mani of all time.”

“Understood,” Yuuji says. He’s narrowed his color choices down to three—a medium sky-blue, deep emerald green, and dandelion yellow—and Kugisaki inspects them as he hands them over.

“These actually look cute together,” she tells him. “Maybe you’re not as aesthetically challenged as I thought.”

(Yuuji hadn’t considered the complementary-color factor at all. He just grabbed three that made him happy. Now that Kugisaki mentions it, though, the combination reminds him of a sunflower field or a summer camping trip in the woods or something. He’s starting to get why people do this whole nail-painting thing.)

“Thanks, I guess,” Yuuji says. Kugisaki could write backhanded compliments for a living. “Where do I sit?”

Kugisaki points at a spot next to her desk. “Just toss a few of my pillows on the floor right here. Take the pillowcases off first, though. They’re expensive.”

Yuuji strips the pillows as Kugisaki relays that a quality satin pillowcase is the key to sleek hair and a flawless complexion. He doesn’t risk bringing up her laundry list of hair products or her rigorous skincare regimen; he just follows directions until he’s kneeling on a heap of bare pillows with both hands flat on the desk, watching Kugisaki hunch over in her chair and inspect his fingers. 

“Ew, when did you start biting your nails? Or peeling them, or whatever?” she asks, grabbing his hand to scrutinize it more closely. “You should stop while you can. Your nail beds aren’t beyond repair yet.”

“I know,” Yuuji says, despite neither knowing nor caring what a nail bed is. “Painting them should help, right? Because I won’t want to ruin it.”

“Yeah, unless you like the taste of nail polish.” Kugisaki drops his hand back onto the desk. “I wonder if it’s worse than cursed fingers.”

“You think I like eating those?”

“Never said that.” Kugisaki shakes the blue nail polish before uncapping it. “Man, I get grossed out even thinking about it. Sucks you have to share your body with such a grody-ass freak.”

(That one hits harder than Kugisaki seems to realize. There’s still tension when people tell Yuuji not to blame himself for Sukuna’s incarnation, but when it’s framed like that—less of the can’t help that Sukuna’s here, and more of the can’t help that Sukuna’s a piece of shit— the guilt has less to cling to.)

Following a familiar sense of foreboding in Yuuji’s chest, Sukuna’s mouth opens on the back of his hand. “Hey, she’s a bold one. Modern-age women really are—”

“Okay, ick.” Kugisaki grimaces and slaps Yuuji’s hand like she’s killing a bug. “Major ick, Itadori. Don’t let him do that again.”

Yuuji doesn’t know if he should laugh. “Uh, I can try. No promises.”

Kugisaki eyes him with skepticism, like she’s deciding if that’s enough. It must be, because she moves on and plucks the brush out of the blue nail polish. “Next time I’m pouring that shit in his mouth,” she says, nodding at her nearby bottle of polish remover. “Now keep your hand flat.”

Yuuji presses his palm against the desk, fingers splayed. “Probably wouldn’t do anything. Poison tolerance.”

“Bet it’d be nasty, though.” Kugisaki takes a contemplative pause with the brush hovering over Yuuji’s thumbnail, then returns it to the bottle and picks up a short wooden dowel from the desk. “I’m pushing back your cuticles. They’re way overgrown,” she explains. Yuuji is indifferent. “And you still haven’t told me why you’re here. The coffee thing was bullshit.”

“Right,” Yuuji concedes. “I mean, it wasn’t a lie, but—”

“But the truth has an easy part and a hard part, and that was the first one. I know you,” Kugisaki declares in confidence, using her little stick to push back the tough skin at the base of Yuuji’s thumbnail. His cuticle, apparently. “Time for the rest of it now. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

“Yeah, got that.” Yuuji has a restless impulse to drum his fingers on the table to the beat of the k-pop song playing from Kugisaki’s speaker, but he keeps his hand still lest he face Kugisaki's wrath. The unoccupied one fidgets with the paper in his pocket. “It’s about—okay, it’s kind of about what happened. When you all thought I was dead.”

Yuuji winces when Kugisaki jabs the stick punitively into his finger. “You say that like it’s our fault for assuming. Funny.”

“Fine,” Yuuji huffs. “When Gojo-sensei and I faked my death together like a pair of scheming dickheads. Better?”

“Much.” Kugisaki finishes off the cuticle of Yuuji’s pinky. “Get the other one out of your pocket. What’s in there, your fidget spinner?”

“I don’t have a fidget spinner,” Yuuji protests, biting the bullet and pulling the paper from his pocket.

“You should,” Kugisaki says. “What’s with the paper?”

“I need it,” Yuuji explains. “And I figured I’d mess up the nail polish if I waited until—”

“Need it for what?”

“Can you let me finish a sentence?” Yuuji asks. Kugisaki rolls her eyes. “I need it because I kept thinking about you and Fushiguro while I was gone, and I realized I didn’t know anything about you guys even though you’re like, my only friends now.” He unfolds the paper and drops it in his lap, then holds out his hand as a peace offering. “So I thought of a bunch of questions for each of you.”

Kugisaki snorts. “What, like an interview? That’s your idea of getting to know someone? Okay.” She takes his hand and carries on with his cuticles. “Guess it’s better than nothing. Hit me.”

(It’s still early in the game, but this is going better than Yuuji had expected. He decides to save the pineapple on pizza question for last due to its destructive potential.)

“Alright.” He glances at the closet door again. “The first thing I wanna know is why you buy so many clothes. Especially since we have uniforms. Do you even wear them all?”

“Some are still waiting for the right outfit. I’ll wear them eventually,” Kugisaki pledges. She sounds highly certain of this. “But when I do have an occasion to dress cute, I don’t want to go to my closet and—wait, you’ve seen Clueless, right?”

Yuuji nods. “Along with most movies that exist, yeah.”

“So you know every film reference ever, then. That’ll be good for you socially.” Before Yuuji can parse whether that was an insult, Kugisaki continues, “Anyway, when I get dressed on my days off, I don’t want to look at a depressing loser closet. I want a Cher Horowitz closet. Even if I have to carry my uniform with me because cursed spirits don’t care that Sundays are for brunch and window-shopping.”

(In any other situation, Yuuji would point out that her window-shopping is just a preliminary stage of her real-shopping, but self-preservation wins out on this one. It's not the time.)

“Oh. I get it now.” Yuuji watches Kugisaki set aside her cuticle stick and pluck the blue nail polish brush out of the bottle. “Guess we all have stuff we do to feel more normal.”

“Yup. Like girls’ night,” Kugisaki says, painting a wide stripe down Yuuji’s stubby thumbnail. “Which is what we’re doing, by the way. Girls’ night is gender-inclusive.”

“It’s fun,” Yuuji says. He means it—Kugisaki had delivered his invitation like a threat, but Yuuji doesn’t feel like he’s here under duress. He can’t think of anywhere in particular that he’d rather be. His shiny blue thumbnail fascinates him (and Sukuna is really hating Kugisaki’s playlist, so maybe Yuuji will ask her for the link later). “We should do it again when Fushiguro’s here. And the second-years, too.”

“That’d be cute.” Kugisaki opens the green nail polish. “Speaking of Fushiguro. Are you two communicating like actual human beings yet?”

What a fantastic question. Communicating like humans, maybe. They’ve managed that much. But communicating like they used to before Yuuji went and fucked everything up? That’s another story, and it’s definitely what Kugisaki meant, because she’s staring Yuuji down like she can laser-eye a response out of him. Yuuji doesn’t look up from his hands on the table. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

“So that’s a no, then,” Kugisaki concludes. Satisfied, she returns to Yuuji’s nails. He’s pleased to report that his index fingernail is now green. “He’d kill me for telling you this, but your whole dying shtick really fucked him up. Like, bad.”

Yuuji winces. He’s terrified to ask, but: “What do you mean?”

“He was depressed as hell. Way worse than usual, I mean. Especially anytime it rained,” Kugisaki says. “It got so bad during this one long-ass thunderstorm that Gojo-sensei put Maki-san on ‘Megumi watch’. Fucking brutal. I couldn’t stop thinking about how pissed I’d be if both of you bastards went and died on me.”

Oh. So it was bad bad.

(And not only was it bad, but Gojo knew it was bad, and he still let it go on for two whole months. He does a lot of things for a lot of reasons beyond Yuuji’s comprehension, but something about this one… doesn’t quite add up.)

The rain detail takes a second to click, but when it does, Yuuji wonders how he was stupid enough to forget: a roll of thunder, the wet spikes of Fushiguro’s hair dripping water into his eyes. Heavy raindrops mixing with the blood that poured out of Yuuji’s chest and didn’t stop. Fushiguro seems like the type of person who would like rainy days, and now Yuuji wants to know if he used to, before all this.

Live a long life. Fushiguro must have hated him for that one.

When Yuuji’s silence stretches a bit too long, Kugisaki tacks on, “It’s not like you died on purpose, though, so don’t take that as some lame excuse to feel guilty.”

Yuuji frowns, unsure why else she would’ve brought it up. “What should I take it as, then?”

Kugisaki is still fully immersed in her work—she’s just about done with Yuuji’s left hand—but she doesn’t hesitate: “An answer.”

“...To what question?”

“Your stupid one from our first mission,” Kugisaki says. “When you asked him why he saved you.”

Yuuji watches her pick up the yellow nail polish again. The detention center mission feels like it happened a lifetime ago—granted, in Yuuji’s case, it did—and he’s surprised that Kugisaki remembers his argument with Fushiguro after so long. Or that she’d even cared enough to pay attention in the first place. “Oh. That.”

“Yeah. That,” Kugisaki says. “Do you really think the shit Sukuna does with your body is your fault?”

Sukuna stirs in the back of Yuuji’s mind. He doesn’t say anything, but he’s listening.

“It’s hard not to think so when that’s how everyone talks about it. Like when he killed me and the Kyoto people kept calling it suicide,” Yuuji says. “If I’m not responsible, then why do I have a death sentence?”

“I don’t care how the higher-ups or the Kyoto dweebs feel about it, and I know you don’t either, so stop pretending this is coming from anywhere but the worms in your brain.” Kugisaki leans down to peer at one of Yuuji’s nails before continuing, “Here’s how I see it. Say you have a car, then somebody hijacks it and runs over a bunch of people. Is that your fault?”

Yuuji tilts his head in consideration. “I… don’t know, maybe a little bit. Was it unlocked? What if I left the keys inside?”

“How does that even—you were supposed to just say no, you freak. What’s wrong with you?”

“A lot, according to you,” Yuuji points out. “Besides, I think Sukuna is more like… a hitchhiker I picked up on the side of the road. Who keeps trying to grab the steering wheel and go GTA on me. And I’m thinking, ‘damn, maybe I shouldn’t have let this psycho into my car’.”

“You know what? Forget it. Fuck the metaphors.” Kugisaki sets aside the nail polish and looks Yuuji straight in the eye, which is when he realizes he’s made a grave mistake. “Wanna know what drives me so insane about your whole guilty conscience thing?”

Yuuji grimaces. “I feel like that’s a rhetorical que—”

“It is,” Kugisaki cuts him off. “You act like your life means nothing just ‘cause you ate a finger, and everyone hates seeing it.” Yuuji wonders whether that last part is conjecture, or if she’s talked to people about this before. “But the world should be thanking you, honestly, because what if it was some unhinged curse user instead of you? Ever thought about that? They’d be off letting Sukuna hunt people for sport or something. You’re sitting in a dorm room getting your nails painted.”

Yuuji wants to push back that there’s no what if about it. Anyone but him—this hypothetical curse user, for instance—would’ve died the moment they swallowed that first finger, and in any case he did it on an ill-informed impulse, so it’s not like he made some noble decision to take one for the team. He’s a martyr for the cause of his own dumb choices. Nobody had to do anything. Kugisaki might kill him if he tests that argument, though, and the warning in her eyes says she hopes he knows it.

“Okay,” Yuuji concedes, more for the sake of getting back on topic than anything. “That’s fair.”

“You don’t believe me, but you’re done dying on the hill,” Kugisaki assesses, shifting out of attack mode. “We can table it for now.” She’s nearly done with Yuuji’s right hand. “Got more of those instant-friendship questions?”

“I’ve only asked you one, so. Yeah.” Yuuji glances down at his list. “Why do you dye your hair?”

“Because it looks cute,” Kugisaki answers, short and simple. Yuuji doesn’t know what he expected. “Why do you dye your hair?”

“I don’t. It’s always been like this.”

“Ugh, seriously? I hate you.” Finished with Yuuji’s first coat, Kugisaki returns to her own bottle of candy-apple red. It’s impressive; she manages to make unscrewing a nail polish cap feel like an act of violence. “I’d call you a liar, but it’s harder to believe you could keep up that dye job on your own. Next question.”

Yuuji would be offended if he didn’t agree with her. “Okay. Right after I met you, you said you only became a sorcerer so you could move to Tokyo. And I asked if you’d really be willing to risk your life just for that, and you said yes. Like it should’ve been obvious,” he says. “Was that really the reason?”

“Partly. If Jujutsu Tech were out in the boonies, I wouldn’t have bothered.” Kugisaki lines up the nail brush over her thumbnail and coats it in three quick, practiced strokes. “I’m not meant to have a dead-end life. Might as well have no life at all. If you saw where I’m from, you’d understand.” She squints at her nail like there’s a speck of dust stuck in it. Yuuji doesn’t see anything. “Would’ve been nice to be a model or an idol or something, but here I am. Guess it’s worked out fine so far.”

Yuuji watches Kugisaki tackle her next few nails as he takes a second to figure out how to respond. The current song on her playlist is definitely one Yuuji has heard before, but he can’t remember where. A loose strand of Kugisaki’s hair hangs in front of her face, too risky for her to tuck back behind her ear without smudging something.

“I guess that’s… rational,” Yuuji says, because he follows the logic even if he can’t remotely relate to it. “What’s the rest of the reason?”

“I’ve got unfinished business with someone,” Kugisaki discloses. She’s an impressive multitasker, polishing off a flawless left hand as she explains herself. “She’s the only reason my childhood wasn’t complete ass. She put up with a lot of people’s bullshit to make me happy, and I never thanked her properly before she left.” Kugisaki holds her hand to her desk lamp, tilting it at an angle to make sure the polish is smooth and uniform. “It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. People do stupid things for closure.”

Yuuji wonders about this mysterious she in Kugisaki’s past. If she’s family, or a friend, or a teacher, or some other thing—either way, he gets it. The regret of not telling a person something while you had the chance, the imagined satisfaction of seeing them again and putting the matter to rest. The creased sheet of notebook paper on his lap.

“I don't think it’s stupid. A lot of why I’m here is ‘cause of my grandpa’s dying wish, so…” Yuuji frowns as something occurs to him. “Is that the story you gave Yaga-sensei in your interview? I feel like he wouldn’t have liked it.”

Kugisaki smirks and proceeds to her other hand. “Hell no. I told him what a waste of potential it would be if he didn’t let me in, and then I kept slaughtering his weird little plushies until he agreed with me.”

“Okay, so you’re smarter than me, then.”

“Old news,” Kugisaki says breezily. “Enough on that. Next question.” She flicks her head to toss her hair over her shoulder. “I'm starting to like this lame friend-interview thing. I feel like a celebrity.”

Ah. So that explains it.

“Of course you do,” Yuuji says, which earns him a lukewarm glare. “This next one’s kind of a follow-up. Do you like Tokyo as much as you thought you would?”

“Yeah. It’s fucking awesome. I don’t regret anything,” Kugisaki says with complete conviction. “For reference, I grew up with two stores to shop at. Two, and one was a damn grocery store. Can you believe that?”

“That’s insane, actually,” Yuuji says, which flows into his next question: “Do you ever miss your hometown, though? Even a little bit.”

Kugisaki doesn’t hesitate. “Absolutely not. It can burn for all I care.”

Yuuji laughs. “Alright. Good talk.” He checks his paper again. They’re nearing the end. “So, next up. What’s your bench max nowadays?”

“Fifty kilos,” Kugisaki reports. Yuuji tries to keep his holy shit look toned down. “Trying to bench my body weight eventually. Which I’ll tell you is fifty-six, so I don’t have to slap you for asking.”

“Plus six on bench? You got that, easy,” Yuuji says. For her size, it’s ambitious, but so is she. “Squat?”

“Sixty-nine.”

“Nice,” Yuuji quips. “Deadlift?”

“Eighty, motherfucker. Hit that one the other day,” Kugisaki says, looking up from her completed second coat of polish. “Awhile back I told Maki-san I wanted to be strong enough to kill a man with my bare hands, which was the best mistake I’ve ever made, because she’s been running me into the damn ground. I’m getting calluses on my hands, Itadori. Calluses.” She flips her hands over to show Yuuji her palms. He’s no hand expert, but they look exceedingly normal.

“I don’t see any. But they make gloves for that, if you’re so worried about it.”

“Yeah, I know. I tried. But Maki-san said grip gloves are for pussy gym rats who don’t use their hands in the real world.”

Yuuji laughs. “Okay, so no gloves, then. That’s crazy progress, though. We gotta start sparring again.”

“Sure, now that you’re not too busy with your top-secret dead boy training camp,” Kugisaki says. “Hands.”

Yuuji lays his hands out flat, and Kugisaki opens his trio of nail polish bottles. He doesn’t know what to say so he doesn’t say anything, just watches her add a second coat of sky-blue to his thumbnail. The words top-secret dead boy training camp hang in the air, dangling heavy and silent through a green index finger and a yellow middle. Yuuji taps his foot on the floor to the beat of a song that's definitely going to get stuck in his head later.

“I really am sorry for that, you know,” he breaks the lull of quiet. It feels like the only thing to say. “Obviously I could apologize a billion times and it still wouldn’t fix everything, but it was fucked up.” His hands want to do something. To pick at his nails, to crack his knuckles. “I was so focused on getting stronger that I didn’t stop to think it might be hurting people. Especially you and Fushiguro.”

“Well, it wasn’t that you were being insensitive,” Kugisaki reasons. She picks up his finished hand by the wrist to move it and frowns at his sweaty handprint on the desk. “Dude, gross. Anyway, I think you were just completely ignorant—if you knew we cared, you would’ve felt bad.” Before she proceeds to his left hand, she looks up at him and says, “But you didn’t have a damn clue, did you? You didn’t even realize you mattered to us.”

Yuuji examines his double-coated nails as he considers her point. The polish is solid and opaque, shinier than before. He’s not sure Kugisaki is completely right, but he’s not sure she’s wrong, either.

“Maybe,” he says. “It was stupid of me either way, though. Even if it wasn’t on purpose.”

“Facts,” Kugisaki agrees, proceeding to Yuuji’s left thumbnail. “It’s hard when it’s just me and Fushiguro, you know? You’re like an interpreter. I don’t understand how his brain works.”

“And you think I do?” Yuuji asks, even though he sometimes likes to believe he does understand how Fushiguro’s brain works. “I only knew him a day longer than you did.”

“Okay, yeah. But I talked to him more in the first two weeks you were here than in the two whole-ass months you were gone. There’s some perspective for you.”

It’s a sad image, Kugisaki and Fushiguro training and fighting and learning from opposite sides of the insurmountable wall Yuuji’s death built between them. The whole time he was stuck in the basement, he imagined the two of them going about business as usual, but apparently business looked more like Fushiguro trying not to kill himself and Kugisaki trying not to think about it.

“Guess the company wasn’t too great on your end either, though,” Kugisaki continues. She’s a master at filling silences. “Just Gojo-sensei. And Sukuna, if he ever talks to you. Does he?”

Yuuji shrugs. “Sometimes. He thinks I’m pretty boring, but he comes out when something gets his attention.” He watches Kugisaki paint broad, clean lines of green down his index fingernail. She’s focused, but she’s listening. “He used to mess with me when I was sleeping. Bring me into his domain to torture me and all that.”

“Sheesh,” Kugisaki mutters under her breath.

“Yeah. I figured out how to make him stop, though,” Yuuji says. He feels Sukuna simmer in distaste at the memory of being outsmarted. “Now he just runs his mouth at night so I can’t fall asleep to begin with.”

Kugisaki pauses to glance up from the desk. Her eyes meet Yuuji’s, calculating but not cold. “So that’s why you were a zombie this morning? You could’ve said so.”

“I know I could’ve. I didn’t want to drag you into it.”

“Ugh. I hate the way you think sometimes,” Kugisaki says, returning to her task. “Dick move on his part, though. So he fucks with you, and you just… take it? There’s nothing you can do to get back at him?”

Sukuna emerges from Yuuji’s face: “Yes. That’s exactly right.”

Yuuji's free hand smacks his cheek before Kugisaki can do it for him. “No, it’s not. I make him listen to music sometimes, and it drives him insane because he’s a thousand years old and thinks everything sucks. He really hated all the movies that Gojo-sensei made me watch, too.”

Kugisaki sighs. “That’s great and all, Itadori. But you’re not making him hurt. I get that there’s not a malicious bone in your body, but you gotta adapt. All that stuff about being the bigger person and not stooping to his level? Bullshit. Revenge is fucking awesome.”

‘She gives half decent advice,’ Sukuna silently remarks. ‘See what happens if you follow it.’

Yuuji, personally, is getting very sick of these threats disguised as passive-aggressive suggestions. Maybe I will.

“What am I supposed to do, then?” he asks. “He’s just this thing inside my head. Most of the time I forget he’s even there.”

“Let me think.” Kugisaki paints the last stroke of polish down Yuuji’s final finger, then drops the brush into the bottle. “Clear coat on top in a bit, then you’re done.”

She looks deep in thought as she screws the caps onto Yuuji’s three nail colors. There’s something distant but vicious in her eyes, like she’s daydreaming about killing something. “You seem like you have an idea,” Yuuji says cautiously. “Like, a scary one.”

“Yeah. I don’t know if it’d work, though,” Kugisaki says. “I’m wondering if I could use my technique on Sukuna. I would have to hammer a nail into you, and I’m not sure if I can get my cursed energy to target him without hurting you too, but.” She shrugs. “Worth a shot, maybe.”

Sukuna doesn’t comment.

“Ieiri-sensei is smart about that kind of stuff. You could ask her,” Yuuji suggests.

“No, because she’d tell us not to do it. And she’d snitch to Gojo-sensei, who would also tell us not to do it, but he’d be way more annoying about it.” She grabs a bottle of clear nail polish. “No pressure, just let me know.”

“I’ll think about it,” Yuuji says, although he’s pretty sure he’ll take her up on the offer. “I have one more question on the list, by the way.”

Kugisaki starts to clear-coat her nails, ruthlessly efficient. “Do your worst.”

Yuuji takes a deep breath—it’s the moment of truth—and asks, “How do you feel about pineapple on pizza?”

“Positive,” Kugisaki answers. She glances up at him and narrows her eyes. “...What about you?”

Yuuji breathes a sigh of relief. “Same. It’s good. I’ll defend it with my life.”

“For real? So you do have a brain,” Kugisaki claims, victorious. “Maki-san’s gonna be pissed. Finally I have someone on my side.”

This, somehow, is the moment Yuuji feels the lingering ice thaw out. It’s so mundane, a blissfully useless thing to debate like the world depends on it. A slumber party conversation, an icebreaker question, a round-table debate in a public school cafeteria. Sorcerers die and kill and exorcise so the rest of the world can discourse about pineapple on pizza without the threat of death hovering over their heads, but—maybe sorcerers can grant themselves the same privilege to care about stupid shit. Life is short.

(Really short.)

“Maki-senpai is a hater? That's crazy," Yuuji comments. "We gotta see what the rest of the second-years think. Fushiguro, too.”

Kugisaki hums in assent. “Also Gojo-sensei. He’ll be on the right side of history, I bet.” She finishes off her topcoat and waves her hands in the air a few times, presumably to help it dry. “Alright, hands. Let’s see ‘em.”

Yuuji obliges. “Why do you need to put the clear stuff on top? It doesn’t look that different.”

“A few reasons.” Kugisaki starts the apparently essential process of clear-coating Yuuji’s nails. “It strengthens it, so it won’t chip as easily. Makes it a little harder to tell if it gets scratched. And it does look different, just not to the untrained eye. Wouldn’t expect you to notice.”

“Right,” Yuuji says with a slow nod. “Man, you’re like a pro at this. It would’ve come out really bad if I decided to do it myself.”

“No prob,” Kugisaki says, lofty and proud. Flattery truly does get you everywhere with her. “I never use those colors you picked, anyway. Glad they weren’t a waste of money.”

“Since when do you care about wasting money?” Yuuji jabs.

“Fuck off,” Kugisaki says. “Maybe I’ll do your makeup next time. I definitely wanna do Fushiguro’s, he’s got the face for it.” She looks up at Yuuji, squinting thoughtfully. “Hey, I just had an idea. You think I could get a set of lashes on Sukuna’s eyes?”

One lashless eye blinks open on the side of Yuuji’s face. The mouth on his cheek snaps, “Try it if you have a death wish, harlot.”

Kugisaki cackles. “Holy shit, did his dusty ass just call me a harlot? Go back to the Heian Era, geezer. We’re busy.”

“You repulse me,” Sukuna sneers. “At least in my era, females knew their place.”

“Oh no, I offended the cannibal-rapist-murderer.” Kugisaki rolls her eyes and brushes topcoat over Yuuji’s last few nails. “Grow up, incel. You’re just bitter ‘cause no woman with free will would ever go near you.”

“Women don’t need free will,” Sukuna states, then promptly retreats. 

“Fuckwad. Just for that, we’re bumping my girl power playlist next time,” Kugisaki says. “Anyway, Itadori, you’re all set. It’ll take a bit to dry, so try not to fuck it up.”

Yuuji holds up his hands to inspect the finished product. It’s a simple joy—just paint on his nails, at the end of the day—but it isn’t just paint, like how the coffee wasn’t just coffee. Kugisaki and Fushiguro are similar in that way; they hold their kindness close to their chest, taking the words that are hard to say and weaving them into acts instead.

(Yuuji needs that kind of person. He’s never been too good with words.)

“Thank you,” Yuuji says, awed. “It’s perfect.” He recalls that whole Ship of Theseus conversation with Gojo, the belief that his hands are his no matter how many times Sukuna has to regenerate them. Sukuna can do a lot of things, most of which are far beyond Yuuji’s capabilities, but he never could’ve thought up this color palette.

“Glad you like it. The world needs more straight men who aren’t afraid of looking fabulous.”

“Well, here I am,” Yuuji says with an easygoing grin, because if there’s a time to divulge to Kugisaki that he maybe isn’t a hundred percent sure that he’s a hundred percent straight, it isn’t now. “Must be getting kinda late, huh?” he guesses. When he checks his phone, it’s almost midnight. “Damn, yeah. Should probably let you get to bed.”

“Word,” Kugisaki says. As Yuuji stands up, she adds, “Hope you manage to knock out for a bit, too. Sukuna’s really got you behind on that beauty sleep.”

“Thanks,” Yuuji deadpans, dismissing the compulsory insult wedged into her well-wishes. “See you in the morning. For better or worse.”

He barely makes it to the door before Kugisaki calls out after him: “Hang on a sec.”

Yuuji stops with his hand on the doorknob. “Yeah?”

“Two things,” she prefaces. “First of all, I don’t completely forgive you for you-know-what, but I’m not actively mad about it anymore. An invitation to girls’ night is a privilege. Don’t take it for granted.”

“I won’t,” Yuuji solemnly pledges. “What’s the second thing?”

Kugisaki points at him with one immaculately manicured finger.

“If you fuck those nails up, I’ll fix them,” she says. Her eyes are warm steel, just on the soft side of threatening. “But only if you ask.”

That night, Sukuna permits him approximately three hours of sleep, on the basis that it gets unpleasant and turbulent in Yuuji’s head once his sleeplessness crosses the line into delirium. Yuuji is the last person on Earth who needs to be informed of this.

At any rate, it works. Yuuji is still tired, but he’s functioning. He's maintaining.

In brighter news, he only messes up two of his nails, and barely at that. Just a scuff on the right thumb and a nick in the left index finger, minor enough that they pass Kugisaki’s follow-up inspection at breakfast.

(After his nails, she turns her attention to his face and states that she bets he looked more alive when he was dead than he does right now. He tells her that if she got three cumulative hours of sleep over two consecutive nights, then she’d look like a corpse, too. His reflexes are so dulled that he almost doesn’t catch the can of Red Bull she throws at his head.)

“By the way,” Kugisaki says, pouring milk into two bowls of Lucky Charms, “do you actually wanna try my technique on Sukuna? ‘Cause I’m down if you are.”

On some level, Yuuji knows the exhaustion is impairing his judgment, but the part of him that’s currently awake will endure anything for a chance at making Sukuna suffer. Worst case, he shows up at Ieiri’s office with a nail stabbed into him. She’s seen worse.

“Sure, might as well.” Yuuji cracks open his energy drink. Caffeine hasn’t hit the same since he acquired Sukuna’s poison tolerance, but it’s better than nothing.

Sukuna’s mouth opens on Yuuji’s face. “You can’t be serious. Pitting me against a harmless little girl with a paltry hammer? Every day you continue to insult me.”

Kugisaki sets Yuuji’s cereal bowl on the table in front of him. He’s still getting used to her whole thoughtful gesture thing, because he can’t imagine anyone taking care of him for any reason but pity, and Kugisaki definitely isn’t the pity type. Then again, Yuuji would do the same for her or Fushiguro if they were victims of psychological-warfare-induced insomnia, so maybe this is just what it means to have a friend.

“So yesterday I was a wicked harlot, and today I’m a harmless little girl?” Kugisaki asks. She plucks a marshmallow out of Yuuji’s cereal and shoves it in Sukuna’s mouth. “Make up your mind or don’t talk about me at all.”

Sukuna spits out the marshmallow. “Disgusting.”

“Dis-gus-ting,” Kugisaki mocks him in a dumb voice. Yuuji snickers. “Fuck off, bro. Sorry we don’t gnaw on human bones for breakfast.”

“Crass, unpleasant thing. Waste of a pretty face,” Sukuna jeers, then exits before Kugisaki can harass him any further.

“Aw, did you hear that, Itadori? The pervy curse monster thinks I’m pretty,” Kugisaki mock-fawns, all spite and venom, as she sits down across from Yuuji with her own bowl of cereal. “At least he’s got an eye for beauty. He could start an agency.”

“Worst idea ever,” Yuuji says. He stirs his Lucky Charms. “Besides, who ever said you’re ugly? You’re just short and rude.”

Kugisaki flicks milk at him with her spoon. “Don’t remind me. And you’re welcome for the cereal.”

“Thanks,” Yuuji grants. “Man, life’s great when I don’t have to make my own breakfast. Maybe this insomnia thing isn’t so bad.”

“Please. You’re down to one functioning brain cell and it’s infected with Fushiguro separation anxiety.”

“I don’t have Fushiguro separation anxiety,” Yuuji—lies, maybe, a little bit. He does wonder how Fushiguro’s mission is going. Often.

Kugisaki doesn’t say anything, just smirks around a smug bite of cereal. Yuuji gives her a petty kick on the shin under the kitchen table, she stubbornly pretends not to notice, and the rest of breakfast is comfortably quiet. Kugisaki takes out her phone and Yuuji stares into space.

Once Kugisaki finishes eating, she pushes back her chair and stacks Yuuji’s empty bowl in her own. “So, I gotta grab my hammer if we’re trying this Sukuna thing, but meet me by the track in twenty? I wanna run some laps after.”

Yuuji nods. “Sounds good.”

Kugisaki drops the bowls in the sink, then points at Yuuji’s half-empty Red Bull can as she turns to leave. “Finish that in the meantime. Wake your lame ass up.”

(Yuuji does finish it. He chugs it as soon as she’s gone. He’s not sure if it makes him feel awake, per se, but his brain is buzzing in his head and he’s having a bit less trouble staying on his feet than before, so it has to count for something.)

When he reconvenes with Kugisaki, she’s wearing her tool belt over an expensive-looking purple tracksuit. It’s a beautiful day for vengeance, and the look on her face says she’s nearly as excited as Yuuji is. He wonders how much of it is righteous anger on his behalf and how much is just an outlet for her innate bloodthirst, but it doesn’t really make a difference. He’ll take all the firepower he can get.

“So, I won’t do Resonance or Hairpin or anything, but it’ll still hurt like a bitch if there’s enough cursed energy behind it,” Kugisaki says, lining a nail up over Yuuji’s outstretched arm. “I'll try to focus it on him, but no guarantees.”

Yuuji braces for impact as Kugisaki winds up her hammer, but nothing happens. It’s a flawless interception, executed in half a second at most: Gojo glitches into existence, snatches Kugisaki’s tools, and dangles the hammer over her head like a playground bully with a stolen toy.

“Oopsies," he taunts. "Were you using this?”

“How—ugh, whatever. Give it back, asshole,” Kugisaki snaps. “I’m trying to train.”

Gojo brazenly ignores her and holds a nail up to inspect through his blindfold. “Come to think of it, I’ve never actually touched one of these.” He levitates it in front of him, then swings the hammer and sends the nail straight through the trunk of a nearby tree. “Wow! That’s got some kick to it, huh?” he asks Kugisaki, tossing the hammer into the air and catching it by the handle. “And to think, you were about to do that to poor Yuuji. What did I teach you about friendly fire?”

Kugisaki rolls her eyes and recites, “That it’s bad, except when it’s not.”

“Correct! Ten points for Nobara! And—what were we training for, exactly?”

“If you must know, we were trying to use my technique on Sukuna,” Kugisaki informs him. “And Itadori gave me permission, so you can save all that friendly fire shit.”

Gojo pats Kugisaki’s head, as if he hasn't pissed her off enough already. “Your heart’s in the right place, but you’d be better off using your straw doll with one of his fingers, no? Let me decide if that’s a good idea, and I’ll get back to you.” He relinquishes her hammer, which she snatches out of his hand with violence.

“And the nail?” she demands.

“Oh, this?” Gojo asks, twirling Kugisaki’s nail in his hand. “You wanna see a magic trick?”

“Fuck no,” Kugisaki says.

Yuuji raises his hand. “I do.”

“Presto!” Gojo says, presenting his empty hands palm-out. “I’m keeping that, if you don’t mind. You’ve got plenty, right?”

Kugisaki scowls. “And what if I—”

“On a more immediate note,” Gojo steamrolls, “Ijichi called. He’s on his way back with Megumi.”

Two days, just as Gojo had predicted. Yuuji takes that as a good sign.

“Did he tell you how the mission went?” he asks.

“Ijichi? Not in detail, but he did agree to pick me up a double caramel brown sugar latte, so the situation can’t be that grim.” Already delighted at the thought of his ludicrous sugar bomb, Gojo’s smile widens as he says, “Yuuji-kun, don’t tell me you were worried about our dear Megumi. Were you?”

“Yeah, a little bit,” Yuuji answers, self-conscious. He’s not sure why worrying is such a big deal. It’d feel weirder not to worry. “Before he left, I made him promise he wouldn’t die.”

Gojo laughs. “Did you really? That’s so depressing!”

“Drama queens,” Kugisaki mutters. She may have had a point with the separation anxiety thing.

Yuuji pouts. “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

“I suppose it didn’t not work,” Gojo concedes. “Anyway, I’ll leave you to your training, but please kindly put off that master plan for now. Yuuji with stigmata is a little too on-the-nose.”

He’s gone before Yuuji has a chance to ask what stigmata means. A look at Kugisaki’s blank face tells him she doesn’t know, either.

“Dickhead,” she says, flipping a middle finger at the space Gojo leaves behind. She turns to Yuuji and says, “Guess that’s that, then. Wanna lap me on the track a few times? The feeling of inferiority motivates me.”

Yuuji would love to, but he’s lightheaded at the mere thought of exerting himself. This sleep deprivation shit sucks, and Kugisaki’s inferiority comment strikes deeper than she ever needs to know. There’s a sense of futility and weakness that reminds him of the end of his movie training, when he felt so persistently awful that any attempt at getting stronger felt useless, except this time around he can’t solve the problem by crying to Nanami.

“Running sounds kinda rough right now. I’d probably faceplant by lap two,” he says. “I think I’m just gonna chill in my room for a bit.”

“Have fun with that.” After sitting down to start her warm-up stretches, Kugisaki spares Yuuji a wry glance through her bangs. “Let me know when Fushiguro gets back, if you’re gonna be waiting up for him like a military wife.”

“I’m not,” Yuuji claims, without a clue who he’s trying to convince.

He ends up returning to the kitchen to stare blankly into the fridge as he contemplates another can of Red Bull. He wonders how bad it’d be to crack a second one before noon. He might give himself heart palpitations, but Ieiri doesn’t make him wear the pulse monitors anymore, so he figures he could get away with it.

He’s startled out of his deliberations by a loud thunk across the room, like something being thrown onto a table. When Yuuji shuts the fridge empty-handed and turns around, there’s Fushiguro—alive and well, unzipping the front pocket of a gray backpack. A massive, syrupy iced drink sweats condensation onto the countertop.

“Hi,” Yuuji greets him. It feels like it’s been more than two days. Granted, it’s been a long two days.

Fushiguro looks up. “Hi.”

“How was the mission?”

“Fine. Simple.” Fushiguro pulls out a phone charger, then drops his bag into the shadow at his feet. “Nice to have something go as planned for once.”

Yuuji exhales an anxious breath that he doesn’t remember inhaling. “That’s good. Is that Gojo-sensei’s weird coffee?”

Fushiguro plugs his dead phone in and sets it down on the counter. “Yeah, how could you tell?”

Yuuji half-laughs. “Lucky guess.”

Fushiguro steps toward him, as if he actually intends to look Yuuji in the eye and have a conversation. Yuuji seizes the opportunity to scan his face for evidence that something terrible happened—and how sad is it, that this surface-level trauma check is becoming a habit—but Fushiguro truly does look fine, like his solo mission was the easiest one of his life. Maybe Yuuji is just bad luck.

‘You’re worse than bad luck,’ Sukuna jabs. ‘You’re a curse.’

“You look tired,” Fushiguro remarks.

“I know. Kugisaki said that, too.”

(Two days in a row, which he opts not to mention.)

“Anyone with eyes would say that,” Fushiguro says. Inspection complete, he takes a half-step back. “Is it happening again?”

“It’s different.” Yuuji glances out the window. The sky is flat and overcast. “None of the domain stuff.”

“But it’s him, still,” Fushiguro infers.

Yuuji nods. “Yeah. Still him.”

Enough time passes in silence that Yuuji has to look away from the window to assess what’s going on in Fushiguro’s head. Cracking Yuuji’s aversion to eye contact must’ve been Fushiguro’s goal in itself, though, because that’s all it takes. Yuuji expects him to press for more details, but the past two days must’ve sufficed to make him forget that Fushiguro’s intuition works on very minimal information.

“Gojo-sensei has this dumb trick where he taps you on the head and you pass out,” he says. His phone wakes up, the dimmed screen silently lighting up with all his missed notifications. “He’ll do it if you ask. He thinks it’s hilarious.”

And there it is. Hit the nail—a figurative one this time—right on the head.

“Really? I’ll ask him about it later.”

Fushiguro picks up his phone. “He’s done it to you before. Like, ten minutes after he met you.”

“Oh.” Yuuji believes him despite having zero recollection of this event. “So it’ll probably work, then?”

“Worth a shot,” Fushiguro says.

Yuuji watches him unlock his phone and scroll through his notifications with his index finger like an old person. He wants to make a joke about it, but there’s still that insidious distance between them. Kugisaki telling him about Fushiguro’s reaction to his death didn’t help.

“Um,” Yuuji says, heralding the fact that he might make a massive fool of himself. “Question.”

Fushiguro looks up. It’s now or never.

(Well, not really. But that’s what Yuuji tells himself.)

“Can we talk at some point?” Yuuji asks. “I mean, once you’re settled in and everything. And it’s not bad or urgent, so don’t worry, it’s just—if I didn’t mention it now, I don’t know how much longer I would’ve kept waiting. For no good reason. So.”

He doesn’t expect Fushiguro to answer right away, and he’s right. A few seconds pass. The whipped cream on Gojo’s coffee is melting.

“That’s fine,” Fushiguro says, inscrutable. “I have to bring Gojo-sensei his stupid drink. I’ll be in my room later.”

Yuuji doesn’t ask what later means, even though he wants to. He just nods, equal parts relieved and terrified. He has no reason to believe that talking to Fushiguro will go badly, especially after things with Kugisaki went over so well, and yet. Anxiety turns his stomach and panic bells rattle through the cobwebs in his brain.

“Cool,” Yuuji says, managing a smile. “See you then.”

Fushiguro nods. When he leaves, Yuuji opens the fridge again. He’s decided a second can of Red Bull can’t be that bad.

If Yuuji thought knocking on Kugisaki’s door made him nervous, standing in front of Fushiguro’s is like looking down from a hundred-meter cliff.

It’s later, around seven in the evening, and Yuuji clocked Fushiguro returning to his room about an hour ago. Enough time has passed since he finished his energy drinks that he can hardly blame caffeine for his clammy, jittery hands. He’s also well aware that Fushiguro can sense his presence out here, so every second that passes is another second of making himself look like a huge dumbass, but—

The door swings out at him and he steps back, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision.

“That wasn’t nice,” he pouts. “You’re lucky I have Spider-Man reflexes.”

“You’re lucky I opened the door at all.” Fushiguro crosses his arms. The room behind him is pitch-dark. “Were you gonna knock, or stand out here like a vampire all night?”

There’s no dignified answer to that, but Yuuji has to say something.

“Knocking was the plan,” he says. “Just… didn’t quite get there yet. I would’ve eventually.”

“Means to an end, I guess,” Fushiguro remarks. “Come in if you want.”

He leaves the door half-open. Yuuji doesn’t follow him inside at first, hesitating until Fushiguro switches on a lamp and floods the room with dim light. His Divine Dog, taking up a solid half of the space on his bed, eyes Yuuji warily—not quite threateningly—as he steps inside and shuts the door.

“Sorry to bother you. Were you sleeping?”

Fushiguro sits cross-legged beside the shikigami. “No.”

“Oh. So, just chilling with the lights off?”

“I can see fine in the dark.” Fushiguro scratches his dog’s neck. Its tail thumps lazily against the bed. “Doesn’t make a huge difference to me, but my shikigami like it.”

“That’s sweet,” Yuuji remarks, before he has time to think better of it. At least he didn’t go with the less moderate option, which was ‘that’s the cutest shit I’ve ever heard in my life’. “Can I pet him?”

Fushiguro shrugs. “Go for it. Sukuna’s cursed energy might make him nervous, but he’ll warm up to you.”

Yuuji approaches the shikigami and holds out his hand to let it pick up his scent. Once it bows its head in permission, he looks at Fushiguro and asks, “What does stuff look like when you use your night vision?”

“Washed-out, kinda hazy. Barely any color. Otherwise it’s pretty normal.”

Yuuji forgoes Fushiguro's rolling desk chair to sit on the bed at the dog’s opposite side. “So like an edgy Instagram filter.”

“Sure.” Fushiguro nods at Yuuji’s hand as it runs through the thick fur on the shikigami’s neck. “Did Kugisaki do your nails?”

Yuuji lifts his hand to give Fushiguro a closer look. “She did the work, but I picked the colors. Did you know girls’ night isn’t just for girls?”

“I did, actually. Gojo-sensei’s been begging Nanami-san to have one with him for years.”

“Well, Nanamin should listen to him. It was fun,” Yuuji says. He resumes scratching the soft spot behind the dog’s ear. “And you better be ready, because you’re coming to the next one.”

“Resistance is futile, I assume,” Fushiguro says.

Yuuji nods. “Completely.”

“...I let Tsumiki paint my nails when we were kids,” Fushiguro tells him after a small pause. Yuuji holds his breath and clings to every word. It’s rare to hear about Tsumiki, especially unsolicited. “Just a few times, and I was pretty neutral about it, but it made her happy. I left it on until I had to go to school.”

“Didn’t wanna mess with your bad-boy image?” Yuuji prods with a smile.

“More or less,” Fushiguro admits. “She said I shouldn’t care what other people think of me.”

“Do you think she was right?”

“Pissed me off at the time, but yeah. She was right about a lot of things.”

Yuuji isn’t sure what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. He sits and pets Fushiguro’s dog. Fushiguro also sits and pets his dog. The silence isn’t outright uncomfortable, which is progress, but it’s not as comfortable as Yuuji would like it to be, either. It’s just silence.

Eventually Fushiguro reminds him, “What did you want to talk about?”

Yuuji takes a breath. His hands are getting sweaty again. He hopes Fushiguro’s shikigami doesn’t mind.

“I… just wanted to ask you some stuff, mostly,” he says. “Because I really missed you and Kugisaki when I was fake-dead, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I made a list of things I wanted to know about each of you,” Yuuji explains. “And I was hoping I could do yours now. If that's okay.”

There. It’s out, so there’s no going back.

“I have a couple things to ask you too, so go ahead,” Fushiguro says, and of course this is the outcome. Yuuji doesn’t know what else he should’ve expected. “You first.”

“Cool,” Yuuji says. “Here’s an easy one. What’s your favorite color?”

Fushiguro looks up like he doesn’t think he heard right. “What?”

“Your favorite color,” Yuuji repeats. “We’ve been through all this fucked-up stuff together, but I don’t even know something that basic about you. Don’t you think that’s sad?”

“Of course I do. Glad we’re on the same page.” It comes out a little bitter, but Fushiguro has every right to be bitter, and he tempers it by telling Yuuji: “It’s yellow. I don’t know yours, either.”

“Wait, really? No shot I would’ve guessed that. Yellow’s mine, too.” Yuuji holds up his hand to display the shade on his nails. Fushiguro’s dog tracks the movement with sharp eyes. “Like, this kind of yellow.”

“That’s a good one,” Fushiguro remarks.

“I figured you'd say, like… I don’t know. Dark green. Or navy blue, or something,” Yuuji admits. “You’re always surprising me, though. Maybe I should be used to it by now.”

Fushiguro semi-smiles, amused. “You’re not supposed to get used to surprises. That’s the point.”

“Yeah, true. Why yellow, though? I’m curious now.”

“So… picture an empty street in the middle of the night,” Fushiguro instructs him—without missing a beat, as if he’s had to explain this before. Yuuji wonders who’s asked him; rather, he wonders how many times Gojo asked before Fushiguro relented. “Then imagine a light coming on, like a porch light or a streetlamp.” Fushiguro pauses to let Yuuji craft his mental image, then prompts: “…If it’s not white, what color is it?”

(Warm and golden, like one of those incandescent lightbulbs that you know will be hot before you’ve even touched it.)

“Yellow, I guess. And I feel like flashlights and lanterns and stuff are usually yellow in cartoons. So, now that you mention it…”

“Yeah,” Fushiguro says. “I’m used to the dark. It’s comfortable. I could live in it all the time if I had to.” His hand rests on his shikigami’s back. “It’s just nice to see a light once in a while.”

Yuuji smiles and absently recalls that he was wearing a yellow hoodie the day he and Fushiguro met—he can’t memorize English conjugations or math formulas for his life, but his brain deems these trivial details of life important enough to hold onto. Maybe that hoodie did something for his first impression.

“Makes sense. I guess all the shadowy dark stuff would get old.” He pauses to mentally catalog everything Fushiguro has ever said to him, ever, then asks, “...Why do I feel like that’s the most personal thing you’ve ever told me?”

It may not have been the wisest thing to point out, because a brief fight-or-flight look flashes over Fushiguro’s face, but he doesn’t try to change the subject. He just shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe it was.” He nods at the paper in Yuuji’s hands. “It wasn’t your only question, though.”

(Thus continues the pattern started by Kugisaki, with her and Fushiguro both being far more amenable to the question thing than Yuuji anticipated. He should’ve given them a little more credit.)

“Nope. Here’s the next one.” Yuuji points at the photos of Fushiguro’s shikigami on the wall. “How’d you get those? Nanamin told me curses and stuff don’t show up in pictures.”

“They normally don’t,” Fushiguro says. His dog perks up like it knows he’s talking about it. “I just put Maki-senpai’s glasses in front of the camera lens.”

Yuuji laughs—he can’t think of a good reason why that wouldn’t work, but it still sounds fake. “Wait, for real? I feel like you’re messing with me.”

Fushiguro grants him a mild smile. “I’m not. Ask her next time you see her.”

“I’ll probably feel like she’s messing with me too, but okay.” Yuuji glances down at his paper. “Um, this next question might be kinda dumb—but do you think we still could’ve been friends if I never ate the finger?” he asks. “Like, if everything happened the same, except Gojo-sensei showed up in time to exorcise that cursed spirit at my old school before I did it?”

He expects Fushiguro to need some time, or to say it is in fact a sad and pointless thing to think about, but his response is almost immediate: “Yeah, I think so. Gojo-sensei still would’ve tried to recruit you. By that point you’d already figured out how to see curses, and your weird superhuman strength wasn’t a Sukuna thing either, so you easily could’ve trained in cursed tools and close combat like Maki-san.”

That… was far more in-depth than Yuuji expected, and now he has to remind himself to breathe. He focuses on petting the dog just to have something to do with his hands, since he’d usually default to picking at his nails and he does not want Kugisaki to kill him. “...Why do you sound like you’ve thought about this before?”

“Because I have,” Fushiguro says casually, like he has no idea the admission makes Yuuji want to break down in tears. “But I can tell you have too, so don’t start giving me shit about it.”

“Okay, that’s fair,” Yuuji says, even though Fushiguro ruminating on sentimental nonsense is not tantamount to Yuuji ruminating on sentimental nonsense. The next question is a little harder to ask: “...Then, what about a parallel universe where we’re both just normal people? Like, if you went to my old high school. And neither of us had ever heard of curses or jujutsu in our lives.”

(The thinly veiled real question, fraught with insecurity, sounds more like: How much of this is circumstance? Are we friends because we chose each other, or because people like us don’t have the luxury of choosing at all?)

“Possibly,” Fushiguro says—Yuuji is surprised he’s even entertaining the question, since it’s even more sad and pointless than the previous one, but he’ll take anything he can get. “Where would we have met, then? In class?”

“I doubt we’d have many classes together, since you’re way smarter than me, but maybe if you joined the occult club or something.” Unable to resist, Yuuji adds, “Or tried to kick my ass.”

“Even if you were the type of person I’d beat up, which you aren’t, I wouldn’t be dumb enough to try. You’d demolish me if I couldn’t use jujutsu,” Fushiguro says. Yuuji shrug-nods and glances down at Fushiguro’s gentle hand resting on his shikigami’s head. Imagining him without his technique feels almost blasphemous. “Occult club could work, though,” Fushiguro continues. “Do they make you pick an extracurricular? Like, it’s mandatory?”

“Yup,” Yuuji confirms.

“Alright. So, fuck sports. Student council would make me homicidal, but no one would vote for me anyway,” Fushiguro reasons, which is both true and hilarious. “Theater is a hard no. Not sure what my other options are.”

“Well, there was a film club. Literature club, too,” Yuuji suggests. “You like books, right?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t mean I want to sit and hear other people’s stupid opinions on them.”

Yuuji laughs. “Okay, right. So, occult club, then. Let’s say we met there at the beginning of the year.” He strokes the Divine Dog’s fur in contemplation, already considering his answer to the next question in case Fushiguro asks it back: “What would be your first impression of me?”

These questions are verging on self-indulgent—Yuuji is definitely going off script—so he should prepare for what he’s getting himself into, but he still isn’t ready for the look Fushiguro gives him; it’s appraising in the simplest way, as if he’s truly trying to see Yuuji for the first time. His signature incisive laser-stare dialed back to fifty percent intensity.

“Well, I think…” Fushiguro begins, pausing like he started talking before he fully knew what he wanted to say. Yuuji’s bad habits must be rubbing off on him. “I’d be curious about you,” is the eventual conclusion. “I’m sure a lot of people were. Here’s the most athletically gifted freak of nature anyone’s ever seen, and he decides to be a bootleg Ghostbuster instead.”

“It was mostly so I could have time to see my grandpa after school,” Yuuji explains, as he tries to pretend that Fushiguro calling him an athletically gifted freak of nature didn’t just give him the weirdest butterflies of all time. “Sports have really long practices every day. And whenever I had a game, he would’ve been sad that he had to stay in his hospital room instead of coming to see it. He’d never admit that, though.”

Fushiguro tilts his head and narrows his eyes like Yuuji is one of those math problems that takes up an entire chalkboard. This is more like the looks he’s used to, the Gojo-junior ones that make Yuuji feel like he’s being dissected. He’s never considered himself a complicated person, and Fushiguro is ridiculously smart, so Yuuji wonders what’s so hard to understand.

Then, Fushiguro asks, “Have you ever done anything selfish in your life?”

“Huh.” Yuuji thinks on that one. Fushiguro’s dog watches him like it’s waiting on the answer too. “I mean, the other day I bought the last two melon sodas from the vending machine when I could’ve left one for someone else, because I really didn’t need the second one, but—”

“For my purposes, that’s a no,” Fushiguro interrupts.

“What purposes?”

“I meant something actually selfish,” Fushiguro clarifies, whatever the hell the difference is. “Like, an active decision to put yourself first for once. It’s not bad to care about people, but you take on their burdens for no reason.”

“It’s not for no reason,” Yuuji protests. “When I care about people, I want to make them happy. It’s pretty simple.”

Fushiguro looks frustrated, but not judgmental. Like he’s turning Yuuji’s logic over in his head, trying his absolute best to see it from an angle that’ll make it make sense. Yuuji appreciates the effort.

“You’re a person too. Try caring about yourself. Figure out how to make Itadori Yuuji happy,” Fushiguro eventually says, with no clue what a low blow it was to casually drop Yuuji’s full name like that. “You sound like Tsumiki right now. She’s going to love you.”

“Really?” Yuuji asks. “I hope so.”

His attempt at a smile falls just short of convincing. This conversation is filling his heart with fondness and shattering it to guilty pieces at the same time. Yuuji wants to meet Tsumiki—he really, truly does—but it’s in no one’s best interest for him to be weaving himself into so many lives. An unacceptable number of people are caught in his orbit already, hovering close enough that his death will hurt them (as if the first time wasn't bad enough), and he thinks there are things that somebody with one foot in the grave has no business doing. Things like tying strings to the living world when it’d be much more prudent to clip as many as he can.

‘You’re finally catching on,’ Sukuna prods. ‘Better late than never.’

But—God, is it all so hard, because Yuuji loves people. He really fucking does.

“You’re thinking about something gainlessly depressing,” Fushiguro says. “I can tell.”

Yuuji blinks out of his (indeed gainlessly depressing) train of thought. “Shit. Was it that obvious?”

“You haven’t made much progress on the poker face front,” Fushiguro says. “Even the dog noticed.”

It’s true. The Divine Dog is now resting its head on Yuuji’s leg, nosing at his hand for attention, and he gives it a few appreciative scratches behind the ear—he thinks Fushiguro might be the luckiest sorcerer alive, even luckier than Gojo. There’s not a technique in the world that could measure up to this.

(In Yuuji’s defense, Fushiguro hasn’t made progress on the poker face front either. If anything, it’s the opposite. He’s only gotten easier and easier to read. Maybe that’s Yuuji’s own fault, though, because he has done a good bit of studying. He looks at Fushiguro’s face far more often than is strictly necessary.)

“He’s literally an emotional support animal,” Yuuji remarks. “I can’t believe he was made to exorcise things. He’s so sweet.”

“He just really likes you. He’s not even this nice to Gojo-sensei,” Fushiguro says—complete with a smug little smirk, if Yuuji isn’t imagining things.

“For real? That’s hilarious,” Yuuji says. “Oh, speaking of Gojo-sensei. My next question—don’t make that face, I haven’t even said it yet,” Yuuji protests, when he’s met with an anticipatory grimace. “But is Gojo-sensei, like… your family?” he asks. This does very little to dispel the grimace. “Because Nanamin and Ieiri-sensei kinda made it sound like he is, but they didn’t say a lot. And I was curious, but I felt weird asking anyone except you.”

“He adopted me and Tsumiki after our parents bailed,” Fushiguro explains. “My dad was a Zenin, so I would’ve ended up there with Maki and Mai, but the clan wouldn’t have accepted Tsumiki. I don’t know if I ever would’ve seen her again.”

“Oh. Okay,” Yuuji says. “So he saved you guys, basically.”

“...You could say that,” Fushiguro agrees. “Was that your last question?”

It wasn’t the last question, or at least it wasn’t supposed to be. There’s one final item on Yuuji’s list, the one that got Nanami socked in the face by the cursed doll. He’d planned on asking if Fushiguro really meant the last words he said before Yuuji died—I don’t regret saving you—but maybe that’s not the best idea. Knowing what he knows now, what Kugisaki confided in him, what Fushiguro has frankly been telling him this entire fucking time—it almost feels… disrespectful. Like a roundabout way of calling Fushiguro a liar when he’s never treated Yuuji with anything short of stubborn, painful honesty.

“Yeah, it was the last one,” Yuuji decides. He folds up the paper and manages to return it to his pocket without disturbing the Divine Dog’s head on his lap. “You said you had questions for me too, right?”

“Just a couple,” Fushiguro says, watching Yuuji’s hands as he tucks away his list. “Not enough to write them down, though.”

“That’s fine,” Yuuji says, although it does make him suspect that they’re going to be big questions. “Ready when you are.”

“Okay. It’s fine if you don’t want to answer this, because I probably shouldn’t even be asking,” Fushiguro prefaces.

It’s not a very promising start. Yuuji’s palms are already starting to sweat again.

Then, Fushiguro looks him straight in the eye and asks: “What happens when you die?”

And—oh, Yuuji does not like that question. He doesn’t like it at all. Or, more specifically, he doesn’t like the way Fushiguro asks it—what happens when you die, not what happened when you died. Ongoing, future-facing. It’s almost enough to make Yuuji laugh; not because he finds any part of this remotely funny, but because he’s the kind of person who laughs when he’s violently uncomfortable and doesn’t know what else to do. Which, yeah.

“Sorry, Fushiguro,” he says. “But I am never, ever telling you that. Not in a million years.”

Fushiguro’s brow furrows. “Is it that bad?”

“It’s not about good or bad, it’s just… wrong. It’s a shitty thing to know.” Yuuji is almost frustrated that he has to explain this, but he reminds himself that these things aren’t obvious facts of life to anyone but him. They have nothing to do with life at all. “If I could erase it from my memory, I would. Sometimes it makes me feel like I shouldn’t even be alive.”

For a second, Fushiguro looks… sad. Really, profoundly fucking sad. Maybe Yuuji should’ve kept that last bit to himself.

“That makes sense,” Fushiguro says. “Sorry. I knew it was a weird thing to ask.”

“No, it’s… fine. I’d be curious too if I didn’t know better.” Yuuji pauses, then asks, “...Any reason you were asking?”

(Should I be worried, is what he means, but there’s a good chance Fushiguro picked up on that. He’s far more perceptive than Yuuji is subtle.)

Fushiguro shrugs. “I have to die eventually, and I don’t like surprises. That’s it.”

“I get that,” Yuuji says, even if he doesn’t fully believe the 'that's it' part. “I guess I’ve always thought about death a lot.” He hurries to correct himself: “Not in a suicide-ish way or anything! Just as a part of life. Did you know 150,000 people die every day?”

“I did know that, actually,” Fushiguro says, which is… not too surprising, come to think of it. “Does it bother you?”

Yuuji tilts his head to the side, considering, one hand gently fidgeting with the Divine Dog’s fur. “...It bothers me that a bunch of them die before they’re ready, but not in general. It wouldn’t make sense for everyone to live forever.”

He almost divulges that he might have to do just that—to live, if not forever, then at least long past his natural expiration date—if Sukuna wasn’t bluffing about refusing to let him die until he hands over his body. He stops himself, though, because it’s definitely one of those things that’ll put that sad look on Fushiguro’s face again.

“Right. Your whole ‘proper death’ thing,” Fushiguro says. “I have a question about that, actually.”

Yuuji nods, hoping this question won’t be quite as soul-crushing as the first one. “Sure. Go ahead.”

“If you do end up eating all of Sukuna’s fingers and getting executed, would you call that a proper death?”

Okay. This one is… navigable.

“Before this all happened, if you’d explained the whole situation to me—like, hypothetically—I would’ve said no, that’s crazy. No one should have to die like that,” Yuuji reasons. “But now, I think… I might actually say yes.”

“Why?” Fushiguro asks.

“Because I’m the only person who can do it,” Yuuji says. “If I don’t mess this up, I know I’ll save a lot of people. It’s just, when I start thinking about what’ll happen if I do mess it up—“

“Of course you’ll mess it up,” Sukuna declares as he manifests on the side of Yuuji’s face. “But, you know the best part? Even if you weren’t all incompetent, delusional fools, even if you did everything right—”

Fushiguro’s shikigami lifts its head and snarls. Yuuji yanks his hand away as the fur on the dog’s back bristles and the shadows on the bed flicker erratically. Fushiguro gives it one last pat on the head, then Yuuji watches it melt into darkness as he dismisses it.

“He gets like that when Sukuna comes out,” Fushiguro explains. “He likes you, but he’s trained to hunt curses. I think it confuses him.”

“What a pathetic use of your technique,” Sukuna comments. “A creature capable of exorcising a special-grade cursed spirit, reduced to the role of a common mutt.”

“I don’t control my shikigami, I cooperate with them. If they don’t trust me or know my allies, they’re a liability in combat,” Fushiguro says. “You really should’ve picked that up by now. Must not be watching as closely as you think you are.”

(A part of Yuuji—the part that isn’t hopelessly smitten every time Fushiguro starts negging Sukuna—worries that Sukuna will take the last part as a challenge. It’s a field day for the voice in Yuuji’s head that insists he’s nothing but a danger to Fushiguro, that he’d stay far, far away if he truly cared.

Which sucks, because here Yuuji was, almost ready to believe that it wasn’t true.)

All Sukuna says before he disappears is: “I know everything I need to know about you, Fushiguro Megumi. I have all the pieces.”

Then, it's just Yuuji, Fushiguro, and the weight of that ominous final remark hanging in the air. Yuuji fights the urge to ask Fushiguro to summon his shikigami again, if he can promise to keep Sukuna under control this time, because now they’re sitting there on the bed with nothing but fragile silence and a dog-sized space between them.

(It’s not a small dog, either. It’s not even a big dog. It’s like, twice the size of the average dog. The dog-sized space is more of a timberwolf-sized space, to be precise.)

“...Did you have any more questions for me?” Yuuji offers. It’s the only thing he can think to ask.

Fushiguro looks at him from across the dog-sized space and says, “Nothing specific.”

“Okay,” Yuuji says. “Do you… want me to leave, then?”

“You can,” Fushiguro says, shrugging. “But if you’re asking me personally, no. I don’t.”

“Okay,” Yuuji says again. His shoulders release some tension. “Good.”

He’s not sure where to go from here. Yuuji doesn’t want to force any more deep conversation, because he gets the sense they’ve both reached their limit on that, but he can’t think of anything light to talk about either. He kind of just wants to sit here; he has very little energy or motivation to do anything else, and just-sitting-here with Fushiguro is infinitely better than just-sitting-here by himself.

There’s something about that dog-sized space, though.

Maybe it’s the fact that Yuuji would’ve been taking up that space this whole time if he could’ve been, and moreover the fact that there’s nothing stopping him from taking it up now. It’d be easy to scoot over, closer to Fushiguro but not too close—but then what? Yuuji still wouldn’t know what to talk about, how to proceed from there. Nobody ever told him having friends was this complicated.

On an impulse, Yuuji blurts out, “Can I hug you?”

Well, shit. That’s one way to go about it.

Fushiguro hesitates, brow slightly furrowed, lips parted like the answer is on the tip of his tongue. He looks… not quite uncomfortable, but surprised, as if Yuuji’s request was wildly out of character. It wasn’t, at all—Yuuji is affectionate, he’s physical, he’s definitely a hugger—but maybe Fushiguro never expected Yuuji to be like that with him, which is crazy, because Fushiguro tops the list of people that Yuuji would hug every day if he could.

Eventually Fushiguro says, “Yeah. Sure.”

If Yuuji thinks too hard about it then he’ll make this even more awkward than it already is, so he just shuffles across the dog-sized space and hugs Fushiguro like he would if this were a remotely organic situation. Arms snug around his torso (Fushiguro is smaller than Yuuji even realized, alarmingly crushable if he isn’t careful), head on his shoulder, knees clumsily bumping together because they are by no means in the optimal position for this.

Yuuji wasn’t sure he’d be so lucky as to have the hug returned, but Fushiguro’s arms settle around his shoulders and pull him the slightest bit closer. It’s almost enough to make Yuuji cry right then and there, because—when’s the last time anyone hugged him, anyway? That time he had his breakdown in front of Nanami, probably—but when’s the last time anyone hugged Fushiguro like this, either? He’s really letting this go on for a long time, far longer than Yuuji expected.

And then Fushiguro asks: “Do you want to lie down?”

“Huh?” Yuuji reacts instinctively, sitting up enough to look at Fushiguro and confirm that this is, in fact, Fushiguro Megumi that he’s talking to, since there’s no way he just asked what Yuuji thinks he asked.

Except he did, he absolutely did, because he looks supremely embarrassed when Yuuji meets his eyes. “I mean—not in a weird way,” he backpedals, and damn is it strange to see Fushiguro like this, all floundery and out of his element. “It’s just—”

“No, I know,” Yuuji quickly reassures him. “It’ll be way more comfy. C’mere.”

He lies back against the pillows and tries his best to be calm and normal about this, this being the fact that Fushiguro settles awkwardly with his head on Yuuji’s chest. The rigid, stilted intimacy of it confuses him at first, but then it catches up to him—of course. All over again, it’s like Fushiguro taking Yuuji’s hand to feel his pulse, a rare lapse in reason where his overall aliveness isn’t strong enough evidence of a beating heart.

“How’s it sound?” Yuuji asks, after a few seconds pass.

“Good,” Fushiguro says. “Just a little fast.”

“Happens,” Yuuji says casually.

Fushiguro has no comment. At first Yuuji expects him to shut this whole situation down, now that he’s gotten the reassurance he seems to have needed, but Fushiguro doesn’t move so Yuuji sure as hell doesn’t either. He dares to rest an arm on Fushiguro’s back, dares even further to lay his long-standing curiosity to rest and touch a wayward spike of his hair—it’s softer than it looks. Yuuji refrains from playing with it, partly because he doesn’t want to cross a line and partly because his hands are still sweaty as fuck.

Instead, Yuuji simply says, “I missed you.” He’s tired, comfortable, utterly disarmed. “Like, a lot.”

All at once, it’s for the two months Yuuji played dead, and the two days Fushiguro was away on his mission, and all the in-between time they spent watching each other from opposite sides of a rift that neither knew how to close.

“Don’t ever pull that dying shit again,” Fushiguro says, in lieu of I missed you too. “I mean it.”

Yuuji could say all sorts of things to that. He could say, I won’t. He could say, of course you mean it, you always mean it. He could even say something that starts with, so I know you’re not a tall woman with a thick ass, but I’ve been thinking about some things, and—

He doesn’t say anything of the sort. At the end of it all, Yuuji settles on, “I do have a death sentence, but I’ll try my best.” Fushiguro probably didn’t need the reminder. Yuuji shuts his eyes because he really doesn’t want to cry right now. “Please just… don’t go before I do, okay?”

“You know I can’t promise that,” Fushiguro says. “But I’ll try my best, too.”

It’s good enough.

Yuuji is tired. He’s so fucking tired, and it all catches up to him the moment he lets his eyes close. Maybe it's weird to knock out in Fushiguro’s room, especially in their current position, but Yuuji is already halfway there. The baseline exhaustion, the comfort of Fushiguro’s weight resting against him, the emotional comedown from weeks of tension finally breaking.

‘Don’t fall asleep,’ Sukuna commands inside Yuuji’s head. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

Yuuji opens his eyes.

He ends up telling Fushiguro everything, of course.

Not everything, that is, but when Yuuji betrays himself with a sniffle and Fushiguro asks why he’s crying, he doesn’t lie. Yuuji is frustrated. He’s tired. He’s really, really tired, if he hasn't mentioned, and he explains why, and Fushiguro says again what he said in the kitchen when he knew without yet knowing—ask Gojo. It always comes down to ask Gojo in the end, which is far from ideal given Gojo’s absent tendencies, and Fushiguro never says it without a touch of resigned annoyance.

Yuuji knows Gojo is on campus now; still, as he leaves Fushiguro’s room, he tries not to let himself get carried away with hope. There are some problems even Gojo can’t fix, even if Yuuji has yet to see proof of it.

In a stroke of luck—Yuuji’s actually been having quite a bit of that, relatively speaking, but he’d hate to jinx it—Gojo isn’t terribly hard to track down. Unfortunately for himself but very conveniently for Yuuji, he’s holed up in the faculty room doing paperwork from his last mission. Yuuji doesn’t even get lost walking there, nor does he dread approaching the door. He’s making progress.

Identifying him by presence alone, Gojo calls out, “Yuuji-kun! Come in.”

“Hey, Gojo-sensei,” he says, stepping through the door and shutting it behind him. 

Gojo seems to have been spinning lazy circles in his office chair rather than doing any substantial work, which Yuuji understands on a fundamental level. He watches Gojo finish off his final 360 before leaning forward and steepling his hands on his desk to give Yuuji his full attention.

“What’s up?” he asks. “A wellness check? You can tell Shoko I’m fine. Going insane, but only a little bit.”

“Uh, no. She didn’t send me. Are you okay?”

“As okay as I can be, considering.” Gojo picks up a pen and taps it on the stack of papers in front of him. “I usually pawn all this junk off on Ijichi, but Yaga said I have to start doing it myself. Something about a sense of responsibility?” He shrugs. “I don’t know. I stopped listening.”

“Oh. It’s really silent in here,” Yuuji observes. “You should put on music or something.”

“Nah, I work best on the brink of insanity,” Gojo explains. Yuuji nods, as if that makes the slightest bit of sense to him. “Anyway, what brings you to my pit of bureaucratic suffering? Want some homework?”

“No,” Yuuji says. “Please no. I just have, um—a weird request. Or a favor, I guess. To ask.”

“How weird can it be? Lay it on me.”

“Fushiguro said you can knock people out just by touching them. And that you did it to me before. Is that true?”

“True on both counts. And it worked beautifully!” Gojo snaps his fingers. “Boom. Out like a light.”

“Oh. That’s good. Any chance you could do it again?”

“I could be persuaded,” Gojo says. “But I’ll need details. Of the persuasive variety.”

“Okay. So, Sukuna’s mad that he can’t trap me in his domain when I’m sleeping anymore, and now instead he just harasses me before bed so I can’t fall asleep at all. And I’ve barely slept the last two days, and I feel like shit, and Kugisaki keeps calling me a zombie.” Yuuji wraps things up with a weak shrug. “That’s about it.”

“…That’s about it. Right,” Gojo muses. “Well, you look like you just got off a graveyard shift at the nightmare factory, so I’ll say yes to the hard-reset for tonight, but I’d be more comfortable with a long-term solution. I’ll work on that.”

And then, in Yuuji’s head, since Sukuna can’t just let things happen: ‘There is no long-term solution.’

Sniffing out the presence immediately, Gojo pulls down his blindfold. “Hi there, buddy! Long time no see.”

‘I won’t entertain this clown. I’m not in the mood.’

“He says he’s not in the mood to entertain you,” Yuuji reports.

“That’s fine. People usually aren’t.” Gojo taps out a contemplative rhythm on his desk with his finger. “Can he take a message?”

“Uh, he doesn’t really have a choice.”

“A captive audience! My favorite,” Gojo declares. “Sukuna, I’d say I’m not the type to invite myself places, but I totally am. Mind if we set up a demon-teacher conference at your place? Home-court advantage. Once in a lifetime offer.”

Sukuna emerges on Yuuji’s face. “Speak plainly. You want to enter my domain?”

“Yup. I hear it’s gorgeous this time of year,” Gojo says. “No rush, I’m a little swamped at the moment, but I bet we can figure something out. I’m flexible.”

“Interesting proposition,” Sukuna says. “I’ll consider it.”

That’s all he’s willing to give at the moment, apparently. He disappears. Yuuji expects Gojo to say something, but he doesn’t. Not right away.

“Why do you want to go into his domain?” Yuuji asks. The thought makes his skin crawl.

“Just to have a proper private word with him,” Gojo says. “Coming and going whenever he wants, using you as a telephone—that’s no way to carry a conversation.”

“Oh. So, just you? Like, you’d go in alone?”

“Completely and utterly,” Gojo reassures him. “He wouldn’t even have to expand it. Low-risk situation all around.”

“How?” Yuuji asks. “I thought it wasn’t a real place. Like, I can only go because it’s attached to my body.”

“Think of it as a miniature dimension. You’re more like a warp gate than a physical location, but fortunately dimensional travel is kind of my thing.”

Yuuji tries to wrap his mind around this multi-dimensional thing and promptly gives up. “I’ll pretend I understand that.”

“That’s pretty much what I do. It’s worked so far,” Gojo says. His smile is serene. “You should probably get to bed soon, huh? No rush, but I’m on standby whenever you’re ready.”

“Yeah, sounds good.” Yuuji can’t help smiling too, just a little one. “I’ll let you know.”

Yuuji brushes his teeth and changes into sweatpants and a big t-shirt. He doesn’t even know if this is going to work, but the mere possibility makes him feel like a kid on Christmas. Sukuna has been dead silent from the moment he stopped talking to Gojo.

Gojo materializes almost immediately after Yuuji sends a text to summon him. His first remark as he glances around is, “Wow! How can a room with so little stuff get this messy?”

“I said the exact opposite thing to Kugisaki the other day,” Yuuji tells him. “And it’s messy, but I know where everything is. So I don’t really care.”

“Yes, Nobara tells me you had a girls’ night! I’m wounded at the lack of invite, but I’ll cope,” Gojo says. “Anyway, bedtime—we’ll all let you sleep in, but if you’re out for more than eighteen hours or so, it’s best that I wake you up.”

“That’ll definitely be enough,” Yuuji says, settling into bed. Anything would be enough. The smudge on the ceiling stares down at him in anticipation. “Thanks for doing this. Even if it doesn’t work, I appreciate it.”

“Anytime,” Gojo tells him. “Sweet dreams, kiddo. Catch you on the flip.”

He taps Yuuji’s forehead with two fingers. There’s a second of blurry vision before Yuuji knocks out, and then there’s nothing but the deepest sleep of his entire life.

After a solid fourteen hours, Yuuji wakes up to a bright day and shakes off the vestiges of his dreams; he doesn’t really remember them, but he knows they weren’t bad ones. He’s pretty sure they were funny, even, the kind he often had before Sukuna—dreams dredged up from the dumbest parts of his subconscious, like riding an underwater rollercoaster with Jennifer Lawrence or showing up at school to find all of his classmates turned into frogs.

Yuuji sits up in bed and stretches his arms over his head. “Good morning, Sukuna,” he says, and it’s the most vindictive good morning of his life. “Did you sleep well? I did.”

Nothing. Sukuna’s pissed—Yuuji can sense that much, at least—but he doesn’t say a word. Yuuji tosses off his blankets and gets out of bed. His uniform is already laid out for him, draped neatly over his desk chair; that’s courtesy of Gojo, if the little chibi drawing left on a pink sticky note is anything to go by. Warm light floods the room through his glass sliding door. When Yuuji glances at his mirror, he smirks at Sukuna’s closed eye slits.

“Nothing, huh? That’s fine,” Yuuji says. It’s more than fine. “You’ve always been a sore loser.”

It’s true. There are very few things Sukuna hates more than losing.

Yuuji has never been the competitive type himself, and he knows he can’t win it all in the grand scheme of things—he’s accepted, or has been forced to accept, that his body is a means to a victory he won’t be alive to see.

Lately, though? Winning has started to feel pretty goddamn good.