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"Yuji," Megumi said, letting out a low breathy sound as he felt his nails sink harder into his flesh.
He didn't really pay attention to the sting, because what hurt more was how Yuji clung to him so fearfully.
His face was buried in his shoulder like it was a source of refuge, and his arms were wrapped tightly around him in more desperation than embrace. His pink hair matted to its limit and his eyes, once that warm brown and amber that melted Megumi's heart, were now blown wide like an animal.
They were wide out of horror.
Megumi remained inside Yuji, warm and grounding. They were both stripped bare, inside and out, Yuji's body pressed flush against his. His length inside him radiated warmth through the rest of his body and filled the places where cold, wet guilt seeped into his bones.
He stroked his hair softly, green eyes flickering with worry when Yuji sniffled into his neck. He shook faintly, even though it was barely noticable. But he felt his hands tremble against his skin and he sensed the way he tightened his grip.
Yuji plastered himself to him, as if he could memorize the scars on his body, as if he could keep him here by holding on tight enough to bruise.
He felt like vomiting, but not quite, which was the worst feeling. The only cure for it was to wrap his arms around his neck and press his forehead to the spot between his jaw and his pulse point. The steady rhythm of his heartbeat through his skin was the reminder he needed that he was truly alive, and he shuddered.
"Megumi, I..." he whimpered, tears stinging the corners of his eyes. "It's not enough..."
It would never be enough. The memories still reached him.
“Run, Kugisaki!” he screamed, voice raw with terror as Mahito ran towards her with a manic expression.
Yuji watched as his stitched hand cupped her face in passing. His hand slid off her face and she replaced it with her own. Mahito’s joyful, sadistic laugh rang in his ears long after.
He punched the stitched curse squarely in the jaw out of rage, sending him into the wall as he went limp for the time being, his blood splattered against the wall behind him.
The dread of her own demise wrapped around Yuji frightfully fast, cold and consuming. It pulled him under.
The worst part was how calm she looked.
Almost like she had already accepted her death. He knew what she was doing in the suffocating silence that followed. She was recalling all of her memories. Her eyes softened as she put down her hand and faced him, her soft smile feeling desperately out of place.
“Tell everyone… that it wasn’t so bad.”
She stayed still for a cruel moment.
Then the side of her face bubbled and exploded. She wobbled, expressionless, then crumpled to the floor silently, her body hitting the tile with a sickening thump.
Yuji stood there, and he saw the eerie dark hole where her eye should have been. His stomach almost rejected itself from his body.
And in the other, the fire in her eye had been snuffed out.
Permanently.
Everything he recalled felt like a wound being reopened inside his heart.
He let out a broken noise and fell apart once again, sobbing into his chest as each noise felt brutal, like something being ripped open. He sounded horrible.
But the memories didn't stop. They never did, even with Megumi's worrisome hands caressing his cheek and running through his hair. Even with Yuji's internal begging, to let him live for a little bit without the pain that came with his life.
He wanted to collapse and die right on the cold hard tile. To just rot there, let someone find him.
With the words of all the others he’s disappointed echoing in his mind, he turned the corner, every step heavier than the last.
His eyes shot open at the sight in front of him.
Ripped up curses and transfigured humans lay scattered across the subway. Their blood was smattered across the floor and pillars of the station. Flesh discarded everywhere he looked. But that’s not what terrified him.
Nanami looked barely alive. No, he just wasn’t. He was barely flesh, as the left side of his body had been stripped of its skin from fatal burns that should have killed anyone else, and was just blood and muscle underneath. It was utterly disgusting.
But he was a force. Clearly, he took out all of the dead curses on the floor by himself due to the way they’d been torn. By a blade, which must have been his.
And Mahito had a hand on his back.
The dread set in again. It was sharp and felt like swallowing rocks to Yuji.
Nanami turned his head around, spotting Yuji even though he’d made no noise from his spot behind the wall.
“Yuji… you take it from here.”
Silence.
And he popped.
The left side of his body swelled, veins protruding and then snapping in a second as the upper half of his body was obliterated at the hands of Mahito. His flesh fell like leaves off of a tree, swaying before gently hitting the ground.
His legs and the rest just fell along with it, joining the carnage that took place that night.
The cruel part was that his death almost seemed peaceful.
It’s what he would’ve wanted, he thought quickly to soothe himself to some extent. Nanami would've wanted it this way.
That didn’t stop Yuji from dragging his feet through the bloodshed, trampling the dead as he ran after Mahito with rage coursing through his veins for many more times that night.
Yuji's fingers curled into his back further, hard enough to bruise. He felt like the air in his lungs had escaped completely, and breathing felt dangerously difficult.
Megumi eased it. He brought his head out from underneath his jaw and shoulder, brushing the hair out of his forehead that stuck to his skin from the memories that bordered on nightmares.
He looked a mess. His eyes brimmed with tears that clumped in his lashes. His pupils rippled with fear and a mix of longing for the stability he'd been denied, the need for warmth that wasn't the raging fire spreading across Shibuya at his blood-stained hands.
Then the guilt came.
The feeling was the worst out of all of them. Cold guilt seeped into his body, it rivaled Megumi's warmth and tried to take over and hollow him out. The empty feeling.
The two girls bowed down before him, wordlessly, fear stricken and spread across their features and the way their expressions stayed locked in horror for many reasons.
They pleaded something about giving him more fingers in exchange for him killing Kenjaku, and freeing the man who raised them, Geto.
He wasn’t really listening. They were being annoying.
So he simply killed one of them.
He sliced her head clean off. It hit the floor disgustingly fast as thick wet pumps of crimson gushed out of her neck in a never ending stream.
The rest of her body stood still. Frozen in time.
The other girl broke down, shaking her body back and forth, screeching and screaming her name repeatedly until her voice felt horridly raw, as if that would bring her back in a twisted miracle.
She looked at him, pupils turned to pinpricks as she screeched at him instead, yelling something about revenge as she pulled her phone out, intending to use her cursed technique and hurt him.
What a delirious girl.
He killed her next.
She didn’t just die. She simply ceased to exist.
She was sliced into pieces, and those pieces bursted and shimmered into thin air, evaporating so only her blood remained. The sight was gruesome. The blood had sprayed onto the floor and the wall in a line behind her, the only trace that she was ever there.
Both girls died promptly that night, only adding to the bloodshed and mass destruction after dark.
He sniveled and wrapped an arm around Megumi's neck, whimpering and letting out small, meaningless protests that his brain didn't listen to.
First came the explosion that rattled the buildings around it and caused the power to stutter, lights flickering off and on.
Then came Sukuna’s deranged cackle, like thunder after lightning, striking fear into Yuji’s unconscious heart.
“As a token of appreciation for the fingers, If you manage to land even a single blow on me, I’ll work under you for now. And to begin, how about I slaughter every human in Shibuya?”
He almost achieved that goal.
The next few minutes were a blur of fire, regenerated limbs, and citywide destruction.
Sukuna tossed him through buildings, ripping through windows and walls in a fiery blur. He fired off molten bullets, shattering glass and putting holes in the roads and apartments.
He lit complexes on fire, and Sukuna walked through them to grab him, unaffected and hurl him through multiple floors in a flicker of unrivaled strength.
Cans and sewers popped and whistled as molten lava rose from the pipes of the sewerways and flooded the streets by Jogo’s hand. Buildings sunk in a sea of magma.
And yet he was still alive. In fact, the magma dipped into a hole around his body standing in the middle of the street. He was untouched.
Another blur, and he was slammed through yet another building and a few levels of street. He coughed up curse blood in the hole Sukuna created with his impact.
“The moonlight’s illumination. Makes it easier to see how pathetic you are.” He picked him up by the collar like a stray cat. “You mustn’t stop trying," he teased. "I’ll play with you again and again until I tire of this.”
Soon, Jogo leveled another building with fire and explosiveness, the pieces swirling and converging into a massive molten ball. “Maximum meteor!” he shouted. The ball tore through the streets at his command, demolishing roads with wind and heat in chase of the man.
And Sukuna skated on fire.
He glided across the road, dodging his path of destruction effortlessly, smiling like this was a game for a child.
He appeared in front of three Sorcerers and Panda, pausing in the middle of the group. He heard one of them shout to hurry up and run.
“No you don’t,” he cut in calmly. Like their souls didn’t dissipate out of fear in his presence.
“I forbid everyone in a 100-meter radius from moving until I say the word ‘now’. And I’ll kill anyone who violates that rule.”
While in front of the bridge, a large hot orange ball similar to Jogo’s attack had begun to form. It continued to grow larger as the time ticked by the second.
“Not yet…”
The ground rumbled intensely.
“Still not yet…”
The bomb illuminated the streets and expressions of terror in orange and yellow.
He clapped his hands together, satisfied. “Now.”
It dropped.
The next sob tore Yuji apart from the inside. He was most certainly leaving marks in Megumi's back. He shifted his hips, to try to relieve the pain with pleasure.
It almost worked, until the last memory came and ripped him in two.
His throat burned and tasted like acid as he vomited on the asphalt, nausea pounding at his head and thrumming through the rest of his body.
That dread from before. It consumed him whole, wrapping around his body like a second skin and seeping into his very soul.
He didn't want to look up from where he was hunched over on all fours, curled into himself so hard it was almost painful.
He didn’t want to see everything he’d done.
There was a gray, rubble-filled hole in front of where he laid. That hole used to be a city. That hole used to be a bustling home to people. Innocent people. Innocent people that he slaughtered.
The stench. Iron, death, and smoke filled his lungs and he coughed violently, the ash clinging to his red collar and the rest of his uniform, tattered at the arms. His hands scraped into the asphalt, no- dust.
It picked up the raw heat and sludge beneath and stung and scorched Yuji’s fingertips until they went numb.
He wished the rest of him could go numb. So all the guilt and pain and shame would stop. Or at least pause.
“Only me! Right now!”
He repeatedly screamed obscenities into the brittle ground, voice raw, strained underneath the crushing weight of guilt. At himself and at Sukuna.
“Die!”
His nails finally broke skin. Small beads of blood rose underneath his fingers as he clenched his teeth. He heard Megumi hiss softly and immediately felt horrible.
The green eyed boy noticed and held his face, swiping a thumb over his tears. He was careful not to touch those triangle slits underneath his eyes that Yuji despised and bring back pain.
"You've been remembering things, haven't you?" he whispered. He nodded in a weak response, his lip quivering uncontrollably as another wave of tears hit him.
He knew that Yuji's pain was different from his. His reasons were much more noble. Yuji had no choice, as he was being forced into execution and murder, and carrying guilt that he shouldn't have in the first place.
That didn't make it hurt any less for him.
To Megumi, Yuji was the strongest person he's ever known. When Megumi recalled his own memories, it felt like a dull ache in his chest that wore him down with time. But it ripped Yuji apart piece by piece.
It was happening right in front of him, in fact.
"Memories are supposed to hurt," he said softly against Yuji's hair. "That's what makes them worth remembering. The people who die are not truly gone until you forget them, so you have to keep them with you, even if it stings."
Yuji looked back up at him, amber eyes watering with Megumi's hope mixed with his despair.
He knew what he meant. If he forgot all of them, then how would he be able to remember Nobara's over the top laugh, the lessons Gojo and Nanami taught, all the memories that used to warm his chest?
"I know," he sobbed faintly against his chest. Megumi held him like he could memorize the scars on his body, until he was gone as well and only had this memory left to dwell on. "It won't always feel like this, right?"
"No."
"How do you know?"
Megumi paused, his own eyes shimmering with an unnamed emotion. "Tsumiki," he answered quietly. Yuji already knew.
"It's been long enough that I can remember her without as much of the pain that used to come." He sighed, not tired, but almost relieved, like a weight was just lifted off of his shoulders.
"It fades, Yuji." After he said that, hope washed over his features quickly.
The sorrow stayed, but it became background noise instead.
It just hasn't faded yet.
A beat passed. The silence didn't stretch, but instead it stilled as Yuji curled into Megumi for comfort instead of fright.
"Did she tell you that?" he whispered, as the quiet felt right. He hummed in response. "Yes," he smiled as the memory came back into sight. It was one of the good ones.
"Megumi, I need you to promise me something." He felt Yuji's thighs tighten around his waist.
"I need you to promise me that you're not going anywhere. You're not going to die and leave me before I do."
His voice wavered and a tear slipped out of his eye, but his face stayed the same. Utter devotion and honesty.
Megumi opted for a kiss as his answer. His fingers tangled into his hair, his lashes fluttered as his warm lips met his, and he felt complete. He would be remembering this, certainly. Even though it would be the memory that would sting later when his touch was gone.
"I promise."