Work Text:
Beyond the windows the day was dull, soundless, the clouds hanging oppressively low in the sky, smothering the city in a shroud of melancholia. The feeble light peeking through the heavens dyed the school in sepia tones, deadening the shadows creeping across the abandoned hallway.
The empty halls of Jujutsu Tech seemed endless under Itadori Yuuji’s feet, corrosive, barren and dead. The ghosts clamped onto his legs, crawled under his skin as he walked, invading his soul, slowing him down. But he had made it this far, he couldn’t turn back or run away anymore. He could not return here.
As he walked, Itadori ran the tips of his fingers along the dappled plaster of the wall. Like too many, the school building was among the dead. The wooden floorboards creaked underfoot, the walls blanched grey and bleak, the windows shut closed like vacant eyes.
Every step clawed at Itadori’s ankles, something in his mind crying at him to stop, to run, but he persevered. He was allowing himself this one luxury, one that he knew he didn’t deserve.
For the state of the school, along with a growing list of casualties, was his fault. It was blood on his hands that he could not wash off, that he did not deserve to wash off. Like the scar that now gauged its path through Itadori’s countenance, he needed it, deserved it, as a permanent reminder of his sins.
So, no, he did not have the right to step foot in this school again, to dance on the graves of his dead friends, but he vowed to the ghosts that followed him that this was his final goodbye. He would not grace them with his presence ever again after he bid his final farewells.
Itadori’s footsteps slowed to a stop when he reached his intended destination – his locker. The locker, that was once so innocent, now lay as a monument to his failures. With shaking hands, Itadori slipped the key into the lock and let the thin metal door swing open.
As a monument indeed, the insides sat like a time capsule. A sharp reminder of what was lost and what will never return. His schoolbooks lay gathering dust, a sandwich – that Nanami had forced onto him one afternoon after complaining that children couldn’t be trusted to look after their health on their own - sat moulding and attracting flies, and finally, stuck right and centre on the back of his locker, what he had risked capture by sneaking back here to find in the first place, was a single photograph.
It was printed on glossy paper that was slowly losing its sheen with age, it was curling in on all edges and there were small prick holes in each of the corners from where it had once been pinned to the corkboard in his dorm room before being moved to his locker for safer keeping.
Carefully, Itadori reached into the belly of the locker and peeled the photograph off of the back. With hands that shook with a mix of shame and trepidation, Itadori held the photo up and let his eyes follow the familiar smiles that graced the photo.
It was a photo of the three of them – Nobara, Fushiguro and himself, painted in hues of yellow and gold, smiles as wide as the sun as they all lay in each other’s arms. Nobara was on the left, her big round sunglasses and wide-brimmed, floppy sunhat covered her eyes while her hand, throwing up a peace sign, covered her smile. Fushiguro was in the centre, hair pulled off of his forehead, to save from the summer heat, with a thin headband and an uncharacteristically toothy smile pulling at his lips. And, finally, on the right, arms outstretched to hold up the camera and take the photo, was Itadori himself. His cheeks had been dusted pink with a light sunburn and freckles that only appeared in the heights of summer peppered his skin. He remembered how that day he had smiled so much that his jaw had ached for days following.
Itadori’s fist tightened its grip on the photo as he blinked, tearing his gaze away from the photo as the world returned to shades of blue and grey. The photo was so bright that it stood out in garish contrast in the face of his reality.
What was worst of all, however, was that it was tainted. He had tainted it with his presence, by rubbing his grubby, blood-stained fingers all over their smiles, dying the memory a grisly red. But for it all - the pain, the guilt, the regret – Itadori found that he could not rid himself of the photograph. For as much as it was a reminder of who he had failed, it was also a reminder of what he was fighting for, who he was trying to avenge. It served as a reminder of why he did not yet let himself fall into the cold embrace of death like he so easily could and so many wanted him to.
In distant echoes Itadori heard footsteps, he was being pursued so he knew that he could not stay here any longer or it spelt his death. The fact that they had tracked him here was not the only reason that he could not stay. Every corner of the school was filled with memories that assaulted him, slipped down his throat and choked him, and Itadori felt he was going to be sick on it all if he stayed.
Itadori lowered his eyes to the photo once more and swallowed down the lump in his throat as he began tearing. He was gentle, more careful with it than he had been with anything else before, as he slowly traced his silhouette, erasing his existence from the photo entirely.
He let the scrap that was shaped like himself float gracelessly to the floor, not bothering to follow where it landed. He was left with just the glowing smiles of Nobara and Fushiguro and felt the photo much improved.
With a final, slow intake of air through his nose, Itadori slipped the photo into his pocket and bid farewell to the school, slipping soundlessly out of one of the eye-like windows.
----
Fushiguro stalked the halls of Jujutsu Tech with his hands in his pockets and a scowl weighing down his brow. He drowned himself in his anger, revelled in it, for he knew that if he didn’t, he would be crushed by the weight of his despair.
So many were dead, and so many more were, if not dead, as good as. In a matter of hours, the world around him had crumbled and he didn’t think anyone had the ability to pick up the pieces. His world had ended in Shibuya and now he just lived in the wreckage.
So, he got angry, at everyone and everything, at Itadori Yuuji. Especially Itadori Yuuji, who had all but disappeared before Fushiguro had even regained consciousness. All he wanted to do was to grab him by the shoulders and scream at him, hit him, punch him, ask him why he did what he did, but most of all he wanted him back, to see him alive, to give him a hug.
Everywhere he went he heard the whispers, hushed in the corners of every med bay and recovery sight, whispers that damned Itadori to death. And they weren’t just empty threats, it was an order of the highest kind – Itadori Yuuji was a wanted criminal and was to be killed on sight.
Fushiguro had lost Itadori once before and he knew that he could not survive going through that again.
So Fushiguro stalked the halls of Jujutsu Tech, ignoring the ghosts that clawed at his neck and wormed their way under the bandages that crossed his eye, on a damned hunch that Itadori would return here. The school was silent bar his heavy footfalls against the old wooden floorboards. It was all so familiar yet at the same time changed, the old corridor he used to cross everyday suddenly felt long, narrow and pointed, all too distant to access. It seemed to disappear into the dark oaken floor, swallowed by the gaping maw of the shadows, and yet Fushiguro persisted.
Itadori Yuuji, unconscious to himself, left traces of his presence wherever he went and Fushiguro could feel him in the air.
He stopped when he reached the end of the hall, faced with the imposing wall of lockers that once seemed so inviting, that now just looked like rows in a columbarium with his best friend’s names printed neatly underneath.
Something stuck in a gap in the floorboards caught Fushiguro’s wandering eye. Slowly, he crouched down and picked it up, turning, what seemed like a scrap of paper, over to examine it properly.
Fushiguro’s hunch had been right, Itadori always left traces.
Something in Fushiguro’s chest constricted painfully as he followed the carefully torn edges of the photograph. For the small portion that was left, Fushiguro had no trouble in recognising the photo immediately. He had seen it stuck in every room that Itadori had ever occupied, and then, later, in every locker that he had ever been assigned. He could just about see the remnants of his own arm lazily thrown over Itadori’s shoulders in the rough edges of the photograph and for a moment Fushiguro felt the ghost of Itadori’s warmth against his skin.
And, in that moment, Fushiguro wanted nothing more than to be able to feel that warmth again. The hallway had never felt colder.
Fushiguro tampered down the urge to crumple the photo in his palm, his anger once again roaring up through his chest. Instead, he slipped the scrap into his trouser pocket. He would keep it and then, when he finally met up with Itadori again, he would force him to glue the photo back together whether he wanted to or not.
The weight of the thin scrap of paper burnt a whole in Fushiguro’s back pocket. It was his first tangible piece of evidence that Itadori was still out there, still alive, and that he was on the right trail.
Fushiguro stared out of the vacant windows and swore to himself, wherever Itadori ran off to, he would follow him.
To the ends of the earth, he would follow him, so that he could drag him back home where he belonged.