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If sorcerer’s could create cursed spirits then the technical schools would be a lost cause, a battleground of writhing horrors. A thousand special-grades would swarm out of bedrooms, salacious and hungry and fattened by the stench of sweat and tears that clung to the sheets no matter how many times they were washed. There wasn’t a pillow in the school that hadn’t been sobbed into in the dark of night, when there was no defense against the curses that lurked in their minds, cunning and knowledgeable and knowing exactly when to strike.
Ten years before it had been different students, different nightmares. A girl dreaming of dead friends on her examination table, brought home just a little too late. A boy dreaming that the roiling in his stomach spilled out of his mouth like mud, that it didn’t stop until he was nothing but bones and taunt flesh. A boy dreaming of loneliness, of something he had only just managed to escape. When their dreams became realities they were hardly surprised: it had been an inevitability that if they couldn’t create curses, they could at least see them coming.
Now the bodies are smaller, the nightmares closer to memories than prophecies. They wake gasping night after night, reaching for something they had only just lost in the fog of sleep. But before the waking is the dreaming, the creation of vulnerability that they all pretend they don’t have when they’re awake.
Nobara lays on her side, her arm under her pillow and her feet dangling off the bed. She doesn’t fear any monster that can fit under her bed. An eyepatch — a gift from their teacher — lays on her bedside table, the delicate silken fabric opalescent in the moonlight. She twitches as the dream of the night plays out in her mind, dragging her through all those small amassed horrors. Knives burst from inside her arm and carve designs in their path, igniting a trail of ugly pain through her. The gaping maw of a curse looms beneath her, her nails scattered below her feet and her hammer broken. Spiders crawl from the void where her eye used to be, skittering across her lips and through her hair. The curse — Mahito, that ugly thing — brushes his hand across her face and she feels her body bubble and peel for hours as she dies. She watches them all die a hundred times: Saori, Yuuji, Megumi, Maki, Inumaki, Panda, Nanami, even Gojō. They die, and she is too weak to stop it. She wakes up gasping, her hand clutching at an eye that is no longer there, that has no phantom aches on its own but that burns with tears that can no longer be shed from it. Her remaining eye makes up for it, and tears fall uneventfully to her blanket.
Megumi curls around a pillow like a child in utero, his arms wrapped around it as if it might be stolen from him if he relinquishes his grip. Maybe it’s because his dreams always end with him clutching something stolen from him. When he was young it was the vague memory of his mother, whose hair and eyes he had stolen, who had been stolen from him when he was so young. He could only clutch her arm in his small hands, and his grip was never strong enough to keep her from leaving. Then it had been Tsumiki, whose hands he could still hold as she lay in her bed, so he tried to clutch her soul in his dreams even though it always flowed through his fingers like water. Then it was his dogs, the closest thing to a pet he had ever been allowed. Then — Yuuji. Those were the dreams that were closest to memories, that ended with him carrying the boy’s body in his arms, staggering under its weight with each dragging step. How could he weigh so much without his heart? It was the largest heart Megumi had ever known save his sister’s, yet it had lain in the grass like refuse. He wakes from those dreams with blood in his mouth and his own heart hammering in his chest like a mockery.
Yuuji hardly sleeps. Eventually, Gojō takes notice and looks at him with a sadness he only understands after Shibuya, after seeing what his teacher had lost. He has Shōko prescribe him a sleep aide, and that helps him at least fall asleep. Staying asleep is harder, he finds. In his dreams, he is the curse. He rips apart Nanami and tears out Nobara’s eye with his claws, he beats Megumi until blood clouds his vision and there is nothing left of his friend. He throws the meteor. He burns the city and crushes thousands of people under his heel. It is him, and there is no Sukuna to blame his atrocities on. When he wakes he doesn’t cry, doesn’t scream or thrash. He stares at his ceiling and waits for the sun to wipe away the dead friends who hang from the rafters. He knows that one day the dawn won’t come, and he'll be left with their bodies for the rest of his life.
Because he barely sleeps, it’s Yuuji who breaks the first barrier. He’s walking between the dorms one night when he hears the gasp of a nightmare losing its fight to keep someone submerged. Because he knows that struggle, and because he is slightly delusional from the fact that he's only gotten six hours of sleep across the last three nights, he pads over to the girls dorm and knocks briefly on Nobara’s window before sliding open the door and stepping into the darkness.
Her eye finds his in the dark, wide and cycling between pain and irritation at her unexpected visitor. Yuuji feels her vision catch on the scar across his face, the slight asymmetry of his mouth, and she settles on pain, dropping her head into her hands with a ragged breath. He just sits beside her and collects her into his arms, because it feels like the only right thing to do. Maybe it's because it's what he wishes someone could do for him, but he knows that he is too violent, too unpredictable to be given comfort.
Eventually, Nobara falls back asleep. Her breathing bottoms out and her hands release from where they've been fisted in Yuuji’s shirt. He's careful as he lays her back against her pillow and brushes the hair out of her face. They all have scars now. Nobara calls hers her beauty mark, and she doesn't try to hide it. She looks at models with prosthetic limbs and burn scars and sees that there's no way she could become less beautiful, that her beauty only shifts, never fades. He falls asleep sitting against her bed and wakes to her smacking him, complaining of his snoring loudly enough that he has to run to make sure Maki doesn't kill him for being in the girl’s dorm. It's the first real night’s sleep he's had in months.
The next day Gojō says he actually looks rested, and claps him on the back with an exaggerated grin. Yuuji doesn't know how to tell him that it just looks more fake the wider he smiles now, so he doesn't. He doesn't sleep at all the next night. Or the next. He lies awake, blinking up at the ghost of Nanami, whose only smile he could remember was clouded in blood and pain. His heart is hammering so loudly in his ears that he barely hears the muffled cry through the wall he shares with Megumi. But he does, and he stands up and pads out of his room and down the hall.
There's no answer to his soft knock, but that doesn't stop him from opening the door and padding inside, over to the bed where Megumi lays, face buried in a pillow and tension evident even through the cloth of his sleep clothes. Part of Yuuji thinks that if he were to touch him he might snap like an overwrought wire, so he just lays at the very edge of the bed and waits, knowing that he won't be turned away. Even though they likely should, Yuuji somehow knows that he and Megumi will never turn each other away.
After a few minutes Megumi finally turns his head, his skin looking overly pale on the moonlight, and gouging shadows pulling at his eyes. He looks as tired as Yuuji feels. He doesn't say a word, simply reaches out and wraps trembling arms around Yuuji, drawing them together in the center of the bed. The feather soft tips of Megumi’s unruly hair tickle his nose, but he simply pressed his face into the softness, breathing in the scent of whatever tea tree shampoo Megumi used.
It still takes the both of them a while to fall asleep, each clutching the other. Megumi’s heart hammers in his chest for a long while, whatever nightmare he'd awoken from still tearing at the frayed edges of his mind. Yuuji doesn't even consider sleep until the hands fisted in his nightshirt stop shaking and the breath against his collarbone is no longer ragged and pained. When he sleeps he doesn't dream, or doesn't remember it.
They wake up still clutched in each other's arms, neither rushing to pull away or explain away the contact. There is something dreamlike about walking up and seeing that the dark shadows under Megumi's eyes have diminished, and that the smile he manages to give is equal parts bashful and actually, authentically happy. It makes up for the nightmares of his him bloody, kept alive only by covenant, his body crushed with the force of his impact against a building.
From that night it becomes routine for one of them to pad into the others room an hour or so after they part ways for the night, slipping under the covers to lay beside each other and remind themselves that they are alive. Still sometimes waking in a cold sweat or with ugly tears staining the pillows, but undeniably alive.
Sometimes — only when the second years are away on missions, they notice — Nobara will quietly slide open the exterior door and sneak inside. Yuuji, as the lighter sleeper, will blink awake and slowly extricate his limbs from the tangle so that Nobara can wordlessly crawl between them and curl up, so much smaller in her fear than she usually is.
The nightmares are easier when they're together, but they still come. Yuuji may wake to Nobara clawing at where her eye should have been and have to hold her hands in his until she settles. Megumi may wake to Yuuji grasping his arms in a crushing grip, begging him not to leave, and will have to guide him back to wakefulness, then guide him out of the guilt for the bruises that will have already begun to bloom on his biceps. Nobara may wake to Megumi’s quiet crying, and will know to wake Yuuji so that the boy can trade places with her and the dull, resounding symphony of his intact heart can call Megumi away from whatever nightmare had set his mind on fire.
It makes the waking hours easier, knowing that they will actually be able to catch more than a few hours of fitful sleep makes it easier to pull through a day that might mean nothing but painful reminders of what they had lost.
It forges between them a curse, though none of them view it as one. When Yuuji wakes up and presses a kiss to Megumi’s temple he doesn't view it as a cursing act. When Nobara grabs them both for a too-tight hug after a mission that leaves them battered and bruised, she doesn't consider it damning. When Megumi tells his sleeping sister all about the people he loves most, he doesn't spit out the word.
As Gojō Satoru watches the shadows disappear from their eyes, the color return to their cheeks, he finds himself hoping he is fallible, and that all his personal theories will be disproven by a love that endures.