Chapter Text
It’s a cold day, despite it being early summer.
The bread in his hand crumbles easily, being the stale end of a convenience store sandwich. A family of ducks make a lot of noise as he throws it out to them one piece at a time. He counts ten little ducklings, all scrambling to be the one to gobble up what he throws.
His eyes can’t help but look for the biggest one, and he wonders if it’s the oldest.
“That’s a lot of siblings,” he murmurs under his breath.
He tosses the biggest duckling a larger crumb of bread.
The duckling honks loudly. Opens its wings and shakes itself, and then swims to one of its brothers, letting it eat the bread.
Yuji can’t help the small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
He tries to remember his brother’s voice, but can’t.
He can’t remember his face, either.
He’s walking down a busy rainslicked street in Yokohama when his phone rings.
His steps falter, and he almost stumbles, but he doesn’t.
Yuji stands there for a moment, a still stone in the rushing crowd of foot traffic. There’s a weight in his throat that makes it hard to breathe or swallow that slowly travels down to his stomach.
He almost reaches into his pocket. Almost.
People weave around him, not looking at him, like he were an inanimate object. A lamp post, or a chair. It reminds him, strangely, of how he is separate from them. It reminds him of what he promised himself–a promise he’s kept for all these years, no matter how badly it hurts.
His fist balls at his side. He doesn’t answer it.
He doesn’t want to hear what he knows they’ll tell him.
Three days later, Yuji knocks on the door of an expensive apartment overlooking the Tokyo skyline.
Nobody answers.
It confirms his suspicions, and he turns to leave.
But then he hears it, just on the other side of the door. Quiet and small and faint.
The meow of a lonely cat.
Yuji sighs.
“Shit.”
Her kitchen table has only two chairs. One is well-worn, with a cushion on the seat.
The chair he sits in is much newer looking, minimally used. He remembers the last time he occupied it with her at this table years ago, just after the big skirmish with the Okkotsu kids and a reborn Mahito. Maki’s grandchildren were long-grown now, married with their own families, probably. He couldn’t imagine that either of them sat at tables this small.
The grey hoodie he wore that day is folded over the arm rest, unmoved from where he left it decades ago.
His bones feel heavy in his body as he eases into the chair. He picks up the jacket, unsure what to do with it. Unsure why Kugisaki would have kept it all this time.
The sound of greedy eating behind him is distracting, though, and he turns to watch in silence as Kitty inhales the bowl of food he’d given her. She’s acting like she’s starved.
“You couldn’t have called anyone else?” he mutters to his old friend, feeling tired. He reaches up a hand and scratches three fingers through his hair, knowing Nobora’s empty home wouldn’t be answering him any time soon.
His phone vibrates in his pocket. He reaches for it, swipes the screen open and reads the notification.
He sits there for a long time, looking at the screen, no longer reading the annual calendar reminder. The backlight on his phone fades, goes black.
And then he’s just staring at himself in the reflection of the screen.
It’s June 20th.
He tries to remember the words his grandfather spoke to him that day–this day–a lifetime ago. It’s understandably difficult to recall after so long, but he remembers the gist of it.
Yuji looks around Nobara’s empty apartment again. At the cat that had been left alone so long that its ribs could be clearly seen through its fur.
Something swells in his chest. Suddenly. Violently. He’s instantly nauseous with it. He pushes up and out of the chair so fast that the feet scrape against the polished wood flooring and scare the cat.
“Shit,” he hisses, pacing back and forth as he turns his phone on again. He goes to his contacts and dials the most recent missed number.
“Shit,” he hisses again, feeling burning tears begin to well in his eyes. The line rings once, twice, then–
“Kameda Medical Center, how may I direct your call?”
“I–I don’t know,” Yuji admits. “My friend called from there a few days ago, and I don’t know if she…”
“Can you tell me your friend’s name? Or why might they have been admitted?”
“Kugisaki Nobara,” Yuji recites quickly, “she’s very old, so she might have…”
“Is this Itadori Yuji?”
He stops pacing. Braces himself. “Yes.”
“You're in her chart as a family member,” he could hear the woman smiling through the phone, “she’s been moved to the hospice and palliative care floor. Room 1023.”
He pulls his phone away from his ear in disbelief, stares at it, and then brings it back. “She’s alive?”
“Yes, but…” the receptionist trails off. “If you want to visit, you should do it soon.”
He quickly thanks her and hangs up. He shoots Kitty an apologetic look as he gathers his hoodie and shoes and rushes out the door.
An hour later, Yuji is standing in front of a sterile door with a plaque on it reading her name. He took the time to stop at the restroom and freshen himself up, knowing she’d scold him if he arrived looking like a vagrant. There is a small bouquet in his hands of wild roses. He can feel the thorns on the stems pricking him through the neat white wrapping paper.
He wrestles with it for a moment. Wonders why he’s there, after he’d promised he’d stop doing this to himself.
He’s been to too many funerals.
Because she’s alone, he reminds himself viciously. Because she has him listed as family in her chart.
Yuji shakes his head and opts to just walk in.
Nobara’s room is small, but private, and has a large window on the far wall that offers a beautiful view of the Boso Peninsula and Pacific Ocean. There's only really room enough for one chair and a bedside drawer, and a bed in the center of the room.
Immediately, he sees her. She looks small, curled up on her side facing the window. She has a heavy comforter thrown over her, and what he can guess are pillows cushioning her body if the lumps are anything to go off of.
She’s not wearing her eye patch. Her hair has been cut shorter than he’s ever seen it.
She’s so thin.
Yuji closes the door to the room. It only takes eight steps before he’s standing in front of her and gently laying the roses on her bedside table.
The whole space is stark white and sterile, save for the rich red and gold of her duvet. There is a monitor built into the headboard of her bed that reads off numbers he couldn’t begin to understand–blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen. Nothing’s beeping or alarming, so he takes that as a good sign.
“I told you, I’m not…hungry…” she mutters tiredly. “Go away.”
“If you really want that,” he says quietly. He reaches out with his hand, the one missing two fingers, and gently pulls the blankets away from her face.
Nobara looks up at him, exhaustion evident. She looks pale. Her lips are chapped and dry, and when she reaches to touch his face, there are bruises all over her skin from needles.
“You came?” She asks, sounding like she can’t believe it. There is relief in it, too.
Her voice is raspy. Dry. He wonders if she’s refusing water as well as food.
He smiles down at her, settles to sit on the side of her bed. She doesn’t take up much space.
There are tears swimming in his eyes. It makes his vision blur. It doesn’t really matter, he supposes.
“You called, didn’t you?”
By the end of the week, he’s standing over a stainless steel table with a black lacquered urn and a pair of mismatched chopsticks.
Nobara’s bones are on the table, dusted with ash and still smelling of smoke.
He’s only done this once before, but he still remembers to start at the feet.
More people than usual stare at him.
He must make an unnerving sight. A young man, covered in scars, missing fingers, pink hair, dressed in clothes fraying at the edges, and holding the remains of someone else.
He’s not used to the attention any more. He’s not used to being perceived. It’s strange, locking eyes with someone across the aisle. Them looking at him with a mix of apprehension and pity.
It’s a two hour journey to Sendai on the train.
It feels longer than that.
In the end, he puts her ashes next to his grandfather’s in the Itadori family tomb.
He knows she’s from the North, somewhere in the Iwate prefecture. He knows she only went back there once to confront her mother and exorcise her grandmother.
He knows she chose to live in Tokyo.
But she listed him as family, so he’ll put her with his family.
There is a shrine at the top of a small cluster of hills at the edge of the city, with multiple small family vaults stretching over the landscape, connected by steep steps and bridges. He knows the Itadori family crypt is on the third hill.
The pillar marking what he’s looking for isn’t large or remarkable. Its stone is weathered, smoothed at the edges, stained from rainfall and the elements. He reads the names of everyone who's been set to rest underneath it, almost all of which he doesn’t recognize, with dates stretching back more than three centuries.
Something twists in his gut, seeing Wasuke’s name underneath Jin’s. Parents shouldn’t outlive their children.
There are nine more names carved below them, for his brothers. He hadn't had any remains to place there, but he felt the need to acknowledge the Death Paintings in some way, after Choso’s sacrifice. The six that he swallowed before the final battle against Sukuna and Kenjaku had never been fully sentient. Still, they had been his brothers, in a way, and were now gone. Fully absorbed into his soul, a permanent part of him.
They have been for a long time.
There is a new name carved at the very bottom, crisp and neat. It’s in the place where his name should have been.
Kugisaki Nobara.
He reaches out and runs calloused fingers over the kanji. Feels the rough grain of the stone. They tremble, slightly, from the weight of his grief.
“I hope you’ll be at peace here,” he says thickly, feeling the need to say something as he sets his last connection to the world into her final resting place.
When he’s done, he stands there, hands pressed together, head bowed, and utters a prayer for all of them.
By the time he’s done, the sun is sinking into the horizon.
The house is almost uninhabitable.
The foundation is crumbling, causing large cracks in the brick walls and floors. The tatami mats are all but decayed, and there is a potent smell of mold in the air. The appliances are all rusted and beyond function.
He’s owned it since his grandfather passed, and he returned to it after graduating from the Tokyo campus, and lived in it for a few years. He spent a lot of time going through the old man's things, transforming it from his childhood home into his own.
But that isn’t why it’s painful to return here.
Yuji heads to the bedroom in the back of the house, where he keeps most of his belongings. Clothes, old electronics, picture albums. He’s in desperate need of a shower and change of outfit.
Every time he walks the stretch of hallway, he keeps his eyes straight and trained on the door. He doesn't want to see the photos he’d hung in happier times, but also not yet having the nerve to take them down.
Today, though, he barely gets past the linen closet before his feet slow to a stop. He stands there for a while, unable to walk beyond the portrait of a woman smiling at him. He can’t bring himself to look, even now, a swell of shame and regret growing inside of him so fiercely that it threatens to swallow him whole.
Memories surface. Unbidden. Melancholic.
“Should we get married, Yuko?”
She’d cried happy tears. He did, too. He was so young then, barely twenty. In love and grateful to have something good of his own that was far removed from the horrors he’d been subjected to as a sorcerer. Being with Yuko had healed something in him, in the aftermath, in the way that only a good woman’s heart can. Her love had done that for him, and he, stupidly, loved her in return.
But Yuji had forgotten that the story of his life wasn’t one that was ever going to have a happy ending.
He’d been away when it happened, dealing with the rapidly forming problem of curses in Tokyo just after the global revelation went out. He hadn’t been here when he needed to be, and she’d lost her life to his negligence; a hungry curse sniffing after his energy residuals.
He still can’t step into the living room. The sliding doors are still boarded shut.
He doesn’t want to think of her blood still staining the floor.
In the end, he shoves his hand into his pocket and continues his walk down the hall.
He’ll find somewhere else to stay tonight.
He needs to sell this house once and for all.
It’s time.
He walks around aimlessly for hours. It’s a habit of his, in his old age.
The neighborhood has changed a lot. New buildings, new roads. It’s livelier at 2am than it ever would have been when he was a kid, that’s for sure.
The school is still there, though.
He stares at it from outside the gate, taking in the slightly changed appearance. He wonders if it’s the paint, or if they’ve added a few buildings. The national birthrate was still abysmal, so Yuji didn’t think many more classrooms were warranted, but who knows?
“I must be feeling nostalgic,” he mutters, and hops the gate in a single jump.
The weather box is still there.
There are charms put around it to deter non-sorcerers from noticing, which is good, considering what’s supposed to be inside.
He stands in front of it, not unlike he did at his family memorial hours before.
There’s a level of anxiety that washes over him every time he thinks about this box, and the finger in it. Sukuna is long gone, he knows that, but the trauma that the King of Curses inflicted on Yuji–on the world, really–lingers.
Shibuya has been rebuilt, of course. Not that Yuji has ever been there.
All he can see when he hears the city’s name is a crater.
The anxiety in his stomach roils, slightly, and Yuji’s mouth turns down into a scowl. He doesn’t like thinking about it, but he is. And an old, deep part of his mind is whispering loudly that he should just check–just make sure that the finger is still there.
His hand passes through the weak barrier easily enough.
The door to the little hutch is locked, which is a good sign. It should be enough to reassure him all together, really, but he won’t be able to leave until he sees for himself, so he breaks it.
The hinges squeak as he opens the door, and it’s dark out, but he can see it.
The tightly sealed claw of Ryomen Sukuna. It still stinks like wax and soap through the paper wraps.
Relief floods his body, making him feel heavy. He rakes trembling fingers through his hair and sighs.
“What the hell am I even doing?” he mutters to himself.
He slams the hutch shut and walks away.
Eventually, he finds the park that he used to frequent as a child. It doesn’t have a duck pond, but there are plenty of large blooming Wisteria trees that are nice to sit under.
It’s as good as any place to take a nap.