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You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves
you, but he loves you.
Leather doesn't stain easily.
He rubs a thumb over the carefully stitched seams, and feels the thread running in between the coarse cloth - imagines it is him pulling the cloth through the carefully dotted holes. aIt’s easier than confronting himself with the tightness of his heart, blanking his face and memory as he stares outside at the lone streetlamp.
(He remembered asking gojo once, back when he was first learning how to sew, how long it takes to thread a needle, to run it through a piece of cloth without tearing it apart, without creating a too large, too big, too loud, too noticeable hole.
He remembers a silence, before a trembling voice telling him shoko would probably know better, after all that is what she at least meant to be doing in the infirmary though good knows what she doing in there other than smoking-)
And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself
a grave in the dirt, and you're tired.
The road is dark and long, with only the car's headlights providing illumination. Nonetheless, it's far too dark. Dark around the edges of his vision, dark when he tries to push through the matted hair covering the wound, dark glimmering in its absence of color in the crescent shadows that rest almost naturally (too naturally) beneath his carefully downstairs eyelashes, dark on the spot where he carefully thumbs his way over now dulled eyes, body trembling — with adrenaline or fear, he doesn't know, doesn't want to — from his toes to the tips of his fingers to the careful brush of the locks of his hair. He is trembling, and despite his efforts to hold him still even as the car jolts, he blinks, carefully stirring and shifting before smiling and breathing out his name. Megumi, he says, and he feels a hand on his arm, and his hand moves back almost subconsciously, reaching for him as he always has, though it shifts up to his nape when he sways.
You'll be alright. Just... stay awake.
With me, he wants to add, but the lie seals his mouth shut, the silence falling from his lips readily. The answer never matters after all, nor ever the reason.
You're in a car with a beautiful boy,
and you're trying not to tell him that you love him,
Itadori cannot see him - can barely hear him, the way he slumps against his chest. He wonders, almost treacherously, if he would still come back to him every time like this - so pliant, so perfect, so beautiful it hurts. Time is but a concept now, a mere suggestion instead of a fact. Has it been an hour since then? A minute? A second? It does not matter — would not. They have won, surely they have. The costs may have been one or two too many, but they have won. They always do - they know the price, no matter how steep, is always less heavy than the cost of losing.
He knows his worth - not necessarily his, but the looming scythe that hangs over the boy next to him (he doesn't believe in a religion, but with the way his heart aches whenever he smiles, he thinks what a picturesque tragedy) and so he doesn't slip up, doesn't riot, and simply accepts.
(Yet despite it all, He cannot help but dream. Dream of a world where they are free to run, a world he grabs Itadori's hand not of necessity but of an admission of fate - a world where they run until they no longer can, run until the sun sinks lower and lower until it is barely a crescent swaddled in bright hues of reds oranges and yellows, comforting in the same way that his touch feels, comforting in the way his words boom from his chest, strong and steady, comforting in the way it's always been him and no one else but him as they collapse into each other, all sharp ridges and melding bones designed to fit perfectly into one another, their warmths colliding. )
Yet the matter of the fact is this - he has existed before him and he will exist after him and this is how: by letting them take him away, by letting them blur and erase every memory that cuts him open, and the blunting of his grief is the dull blade that cuts into the fog of his life, seeping through him, forever as a reminder.
and you're trying to choke down the feeling,
and you're trembling,
Pain is not a foreign concept, nor is staring death itself in the eyes. He wishes he could go back in time, in one of those back to the future-esque moments from the black and white movies he dimly remembers through a haze of static (everything that isn't him is dull, he remembers distinctly thinking as the end credits rolled; when the slight weight of his head lolled over registered himself in his mind) where he goes back without meaning to and has no way of returning. Maybe he'd be a better friend, maybe he'd have looked out for him more, maybe he'd be able to do something - anything - without each of his touches filling him with cloying want; maybe Itadori wouldn't be staring at him with glassy eyes, lacking his usual warmth and instead shallowly gasping, breath erratic (so unlike the way he's used to) — so unlike the way his smile lit up as though someone had cleaved the sun.
The way his smile lights up, he corrects himself, his own heartbeat singing in tune to the ragged gasps of the boy beneath him. Itadori isn’t dead until it is of his own making.
It feels wrong to have him in his hands like this, he thinks, as his eyes flutter open wide, attempting to be reassuring even as he lies bleeding out next to him (in some semblance of a fucking joke). Itadori lies bleeding in the car, not next to the bodies of those who have done the most harm to their minds, and souls, but mere seats in front of a stash of cursed weapons. Itadori is bleeding on the passenger seat, and the road is still dark, and there aren't many stars in the sky, and despite the fact that he can barely see his face through the matted blood and hastily patched up wounds, he knows he's beautiful - even with blood running down his forehead, blood on his knuckles, blood on his threadbare shirt.
Itadori has always been beautiful.
Itadori, he wants to plead, holding the edges of the yellow sweatshirt that’s stained beyond repair. Itadori, he wants to say, twisting around, looking him in the eye, rubbing a finger beneath it. Itadori, he wants to scream until the name means nothing and everything to him, lying in the backseat of a car as it speeds down a nameless highway.
(it feels wrong to hold him like this, but he loves him - a tragedy in the making - and he thinks it’s enough anyway).
His lover (who is everything but it-) sways, and he looks away, face pinched, eyes shut in a solemn prayer of gods he’s never truly believed in. Itadori is beautiful, but the sight of him with pinched eyebrows and wet eyes and red-bitten lips that was caused because of something else makes his heart twist in his chest, and so he lets his eyes roam, unilaterally examining the backseat. There, an old bandage, hanging limp off hollowed cheekbones, there, an embroidered lamb smiling cheerily against stained yellow threads bunched together. Unable to focus on him, he looks at the head of the lamb - almost grotesque, he thinks, the way it seems to swim in the blood. Its black eyes stare lifelessly at him, as though pleading for him to leave before he ends up like it. It’s a perfect combination of beauty and horror, a macabre of sheer coincidence so painful that he looks away, back into his eyes that shine with unshed tears.
but he reaches over and
he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist,
“Good thing you didn’t forget about this place, huh.”
One of Itadori's hands are clasped weakly in between his own, pushed messily into the brackets of his fingers, and he opens up, cordial, pliant, always for him. Silently, he looks down at the faint discolourations and pockmarks in the hand that is not his own, and he finally believes him when he had said that he always is good with his hands. He thinks quietly about his own fists, how they left bruises that he is no longer proud of. He ponders how he could leave bruises he could be proud of, how Itadori's hands could leave crescent scars on him, trailing around his nape, scars he wouldn't mind - not from him.
Stay with me, he says out loud, breathless and genuine. He says, don't leave me now, not like this, because he needs this, he needs Itadori, because Itadori is now more of a jumbled coalescence of lifelines stringing them together as Itadori-and-Megumi. I need you to, he does not say, but he knows that Itadori hears it all the same.
Itadori slips his hand out of the loose teether, and reaches out a careful hand upwards, thumbing hesitantly at his face as he smiles back at him, breath gasping as Megumi moves, cradling Itadori’s face in hands, tight and grounding, for whom? he doesn’t really know. They both need it, he supposes. The hand that is pressing the gashes of the bandage is weakening. He’s never wanted it to be like this, and yet he knows - being with him is causing him to flay himself open with want.
He finds himself begging as he continues to hold him, and inside him, he knows that as he moves closer, that there is nothing he can do now, and there will be nothing he can do later to stop him, but it will hurt anyway.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
and you feel your
heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you
don't even have a name for.
Itadori doesn’t say anything, but he sways forward, lips and noses brushing but not pressing against each other, the drying blood on his brow smearing as he leans in closer.
“You love me, don’t you?” His words come out as a whisper against his ear as he moves closer, leaning on him completely for support, holding him like a lifeline. “Will you say it?”
He clenches his jaw, pulling back to look Itadori in his eyes - even as he splits his whole being in half and sets the butterflies inside his stomach free and ablaze. Itadori doesn’t gloat, doesn’t say it like a revelation because he knows, he knows Megumi always has.
“I love you,” he finally murmurs, looking away towards the lamb head stitched on once more. He thinks of this then; as the stitches morph until it’s his own head taking its place - a glimpse of the twisted underneath; this love is terrifying, yet what terrifies him the most is that he doesn’t want him to stop loving.
A tear of scarlet drips from the lamb’s eye, and that’s the last thing he sees before Itadori presses their lips together with a tilt of his head.
I do, too, he does not say, but Megumi hears it all the same.