Chapter Text
Everyone Yuji Itadori loves is dead.
His heart thumps away in his ribcage, hammering at its walls, trying to claw its way out. Clawing its way to what exactly, he is unsure. Sukuna’s destruction lingers around him like an itch that he can’t quite scratch, and he’s just about put a cheese grater to every inch of his body.
There is nothing left for him. Satoru Gojo is dead; his teacher, his mentor. Nobara Kugisaki, his friend, his best friend even. Kento Nanami. Choso. Yuki. If he had as many arms as Sukuna, he could rattle them off on his fingers.
And Fushiguro.
Yuji is certain that Fushiguro would rather be dead right now.
Yuji had promised to save him.
Yuji had failed.
Fushiguro’s eyes lost all of their faint softness, a kind of quiet reverence that had taken Yuji some time to learn how to see. He was a closed book, but Yuji had taken care to pry open his pages, to read the lines that had been scribbled out with haste. Yuji had learned many things about Fushiguro. He would run through the motions for his ten shadows (well, all but one) when he was bored. The crease of his eyebrows would disappear whenever he felt at peace, which was rare nowadays.
And his smile. Fushiguro rarely smiled, but when he did, Yuji wanted to bottle it, to keep it somewhere safe and warm where no one but him could touch it. No one else deserved to touch something so genuine.
His smile was too delicate, too gentle for the rest of the world, Yuji thought. Fushiguro was good. Fushiguro was grounding.
Fushiguro did not smile like this.
He didn’t grin with his face all twisted up and wrong. He didn’t cackle in a way that made Yuji’s stomach turn. His eyes were soft, not piercing like an arrow to Yuji’s already wounded heart. Those markings didn’t belong on Fushiguro. They were Yuji’s burden. Yuji’s burden that he had failed to carry.
And now it was Fushiguro’s.
“So start by saving me.”
Yuji tries his best to ignore the bodies piled behind him. Their blood was on his hands. He might as well have drawn the knife that killed them. It would make no difference. None at all.
“Itadori.”
He wonders if Fushiguro forgives him.
“Start by saving me.”
He doesn’t forgive himself.
“I’m so sorry,” Yuji manages, the words scraping through his dry throat. He tries, he does, to raise his fists one last time.
Sukuna laughs again, the sound reverberating even outside. Or maybe that’s just Yuji’s head. He was so used to Sukuna’s voice in there, always prancing around within his thoughts, when he ate, when he slept.
Black dots swirl in Yuji’s vision as even more pain pierces its way through his gut. His fist loosens unwillingly. He’s dying, he realizes. Alone, surrounded by nothing but the remnants of crushed Tokyo buildings and the remains of his loved ones. The only person seeing Yuji off is Sukuna. He was not strong. He didn’t help anybody. He died alone. His grandfather’s words meant absolutely nothing in the end. Yuji’s body hits the ground, and with the little vision he has left, he can see his blood pooling underneath him.
In his last efforts, Yuji hopes Fushiguro heard him.