Chapter Text
Yuuji digs through what was once a convenience store, trying to find something edible. It’s a half-hearted effort at best. He’s only doing it out of habit, because he knows he needs to eat even though he has no wish to do it, because he still has too much pride left to starve to death, even now. Because he imagines the worried twist in Choso’s face, the way he always searched for food more eagerly than him, never mind the fact that he himself didn’t need it.
He exhales sharply at the reminder, hands squeezing the pack of bread in his hand. There’s more green in it than anything else, the mold greedily swallowing most of it. If Yuuji were slightly more desperate, he’d probably eat it still. It’s nothing the other humans don’t do. When you’re pushed to your limits and you’re staring at death in the face with barely any energy left in your body, even finding a moldy loaf of bread feels like a gift, like you’re the luckiest person in the world.
Not to Yuuji, though.
He grunts as he drops the pack on the floor, pressing his hands to his eyes harshly. This store is a bust. It’s empty. Any non-perishable foods that might have been here have long been ransacked. There isn’t even any water left— he’ll have to drink from the dirty snow again.
He steps outside and lingers on what used to be a sidewalk. For a long moment, he just breathes, the cold air biting into his bare-skinned arms. He scratches the new scar running across his elbow as he takes in the white-colored landscape.
Tokyo is a graveyard.
The skyline has long since crumbled, reduced to skeletal remains of what once was one of the best cities in the world. Smoke curls in the air even now, the scent of charred earth and decay woven into every breath so that he can’t escape it. There’s no hum of traffic, no murmur of voices, only a silence that feels too loud and is occasionally broken by the howl of the wind threading through the ruins.
Yuuji hates it. He walks through the wreckage like a ghost, shoes shuffling against the cracked pavement, no direction, no purpose, and he hates.
Choso is gone.
His last thread to something real, ripped away from one second to the next. Yuuji hadn’t even been with him when it happened. He’d just felt it. And he should have been used to it by now, to the familiar weight of grief, but this was Choso.
So Yuuji walks through the streets of Tokyo and hates. He hates the soulless city, he hates the remnants of humanity lingering on it, he hates the curses that litter all of it, he hates the tiny hole where he sleeps that he can’t even call home anymore, not without Choso, he hates how much he misses him and how much he misses everyone, and he hates that he hates that. He hates how all of this is his fault. He hates how even after everything, he misses him, misses having that voice in the back of his head and that heavy presence in his soul. Most of all, he hates himself.
It's okay, though. He doesn’t have that much time left, he knows that. During the time spent with Choso, they dedicated their days to riding the city of curses. With his assistance, Yuuji made himself into the predator Gojo-sensei was so sure he’d become, until he had to be the one actively looking for curses instead of waiting for them. They eventually learned not to approach him, to avoid him.
Still. Eventually, a curse will be brave enough to take on the King of Curses’ former vessel, and Yuuji doesn’t know if he’ll have the energy or the will to fight back.
He doesn’t have to wait too long to find out.
How lucky.
He encounters the figure when he’s two streets away from his hideout. They stand opposite him shrouded in loose, tattered robes, their face hidden by an eerie mask covered in fine cracks. The air around them shimmers unnaturally, cursed energy flaring out in preparation for the fight that Yuuji will not give him.
“How disappointing,” The curse user muses in a raspy, almost amused voice, tilting his head. “I was hoping for a good fight. You look like a walking corpse.”
Yuuji doesn’t respond. He barely blinks as the curse user takes a step closer. He can see the shape of the man’s soul, pulsing with a kind of hunger that only people like him have. It looks all wrong— it’s spreading too far from his body, unraveling in places it shouldn’t, like the edges of a paper burning too slowly. If Yuuji were still fifteen and naïve, he’d almost feel sickened by it.
“Wow,” The man drawls, confidence in his arrogance. “You’re the King of Curses’ vessel? What a joke.”
But years have passed since Yuuji entered the world of sorcerers and curses, and now he knows that the state of the man’s soul just tells him everything he needs to know about him. Yuuji could touch it if he wanted to, has been able to do it for ages now. He could show the curse user how much of a joke he is.
He’s just so tired.
The first blow comes fast. Yuuji goes sprawling, his body skidding across the broken pavement and scratching his back. He could have dodged that easily, but he didn’t. Well. That’s his answer, isn’t it?
He lets the man in the mask hit him again and again and again, each hit embedded with too-weak cursed energy. What a joke, indeed. His body still throbs with a pain he barely feels above the numbness.
“This isn’t even fun,” The curse user says with disgust, gripping his jaw and forcing him to look at him. “Can’t you put up a bit of a fight?”
Yuuji just stares, empty-eyed.
“Ugh. Pathetic. You’re just waiting to die, aren’t you?” he sighs, releasing Yuuji. “I really was going to enjoy killing you, but why would I do what you want? Mmm, no. No, I won’t kill you.”
He takes off his mask, revealing a face marred with deep scars, one of them splitting his left eye in two. A gleeful grin overcomes his expression, making Yuuji frown as he continues speaking. “No, no, no, this will be much more fun. Let’s see how you fare, huh?”
The man starts moving his hands, cursed energy peaking in its intensity, and somehow, something in Yuuji just snaps. Why would he let some two-bit sorcerer take him out when not even Sukuna could? When he cheated death again and again? Why would he give this nobody the satisfaction of killing him or whatever it is he wanted to do to him?
A surge of something electric roars through his body, that familiar heat crawling in his veins. His fingers twitch before clenching into a fist. The curse user notices the shift too late, just how it’s meant to be. Yuuji moves without thinking, his body automatic after endless battles, and he lands a strike that sends the other flying to the ground. Yuuji steps closer to him smoothly, and whatever the man sees in his face sends him scrambling back to put distance between them, panic on his face as his hands weave together sloppily in one final sign.
The world lurches.
Reality cracks around him like an egg. Space twists and bends on itself, and Yuuji can’t see, the air shudders around him, and he’s falling. A loud sound echoes around him— it reminds him of the time Nobara dared him to pull a tree from the earth, the awful ripping sound it made.
Then, there’s light. Warmth on his skin.
Clean air.
Yuuji blinks harshly to clear the spots in his vision, breath coming too fast. His entire body trembles as it adjusts to his new reality, and there’s too much noise around him. It suffocates him. He clamps his hands on his ears to keep out the car horns blaring, shoes clacking against the pavement, the people laughing. People laughing. What the fuck is happening?
Instead of the decay he’s gotten so used to, he can smell food. The sweet aroma of pastries fills the air around him. He stares wide-eyed at the street filled with food stands in front of him, at all the people coming and going. His heart pounds erratically, stumbling back and bumping into someone behind him.
“Hey! Watch where you’re—” The businessman that was talking to him cuts himself off, face paling when Yuuji turns around and fixes his attention on him. The man swallows thickly and bites out another word before hurrying to the opposite direction. “Sorry.”
A little girl runs past Yuuji, laughing as her mother calls after her. A street vendor yells out his daily specials. A bus rumbles by and stops at a red light.
Where the fuck is he?
He drags himself into the nearest alley, back to the wall. He grips his pink hair tightly in his hands, like if he tugs hard enough his mind will be able to come up with an answer. Yuuji looks back out at the main street he appeared on, his eyes catching onto the billboard that looms in the building in front of the alley. It flashes with advertisements that make no sense at all, one after the other, until there’s a still with the basic information of the day on it— the weather prediction, the results of a baseball match. The date.
Yuuji’s heart drops out of his body.
Fuck.
It takes him more than it should to get his bearings. As he does so, he tries to get his facts straight.
One, he’s not dead. Two, he’s here because of whatever technique that curse user had. Three, he’s in 2006 because of it.
But Yuuji isn’t sure he truly is in the past. He isn’t sure it’s real. It feels real. It sounds real. But is it really? Could it all be a ploy to make Yuuji complacent and content in this world that isn’t torn into pieces, only to take it all away eventually? He doesn’t know the answer to that, and he’s too overwhelmed by everything to truly think about it.
He doesn’t recognize the streets around him. He asks for directions but try as he might to look and sound meek enough, people just skitter around him, avoiding his gaze. Yuuji gets it, he does. He hasn’t looked at himself in a mirror in a long time, didn’t see the point in it. It’s probably not a pretty sight.
Somehow, he stumbles into a more familiar area, one that wasn’t so destroyed in his time. From then on, it’s easier to find the path to the Jujutsu High— Yuuji used to visit it every once in a while, when he missed Megumi and Nobara and Nanami and Gojo and everyone else too much to function. And really, where else is there to go?
Yuuji stands at the entrance, breathless at the way everything he can see from campus stands pristine and clean and intact. In his eyes, it even looks shiny under the sun. He almost doesn’t want to come in and ruin it. He looks down at the pavement, at the invisible line that separates it from the rest of the world, wondering. Will it let him in? Sometimes, he feels more curse than human. A side effect of housing Sukuna in his soul, he supposes. Of spending so much time with only Choso for company.
“Okay,” Yuuji murmurs to himself. He tilts his face to the sun to catch its rays better and nods. “Okay.”
Then he steps in.
Breathing out a sigh of relief, he walks the familiar path to Yaga’s office and prays no one sees him.
For once in his life, the universe seems to be on his side because he reaches his destination with no distractions. He knocks on the door, and when no one answers, lets himself in with barely any hesitation. He sits down in one of the chairs gingerly, eyes roving over the room to catch any differences it may have from how it looked twelve years from now and waits. And waits.
And waits.
Eventually, he can see the familiar swell of Yaga’s cursed energy on his periphery. The principal stops outside the door for longer than necessary, and it gives Yuuji just the right amount of time to make himself look smaller. Or, well. He tries.
When Yaga opens the door slowly with a blank expression, Yuuji twists around to face him and attempts to smile. “Hi.”