Archive of Our Own

“Good morning,” Satoru greets as Itadori starts to stir, lips parting and lashes fluttering. “So, which one are you right now?”

Itadori stills.

The stillness is as telling as the stirring, but there’s a quality to it that tempts Satoru to abandon his folded-up position on the chair in favor of something a little more battle ready. He doesn’t, this consideration one he assessed and dismissed before even sitting down, but it’s not a good sign that Itadori is triggering such instincts.

He hasn’t frozen like a boy who’s afraid or even confused. This is the animal stillness of a predator about to pounce.

Slowly, with a gravity that drags reality down into slow-motion severity, Itadori raises his head.

Dark brown eyes land on Satoru—and burn black with rage.

Cursed energy rises in a great, heaving wave.

It eats through the rope restraining Itadori in milliseconds, leaving behind ashes that fill the chamber with a foul smell. That rope was soaked in cursed energy and meant to corral monsters, and it was never going to hold Sukuna himself—that’s what Satoru is here for—but it should’ve contained a vessel bearing a single finger’s worth of power for at least a minute.

The snarling thing on the chair doesn’t look like he even registered the restraint. Then the chair shatters.

“Oh my,” Satoru says, leaping away from his own chair before it joins its sibling in a burst of wood and violence.

Itadori’s fist drives into the floor underneath, cratering it.

“They’ll make me pay for that, you know,” Satoru complains mildly, watching with keen interest as the seals papering the walls burn out one by one, their cursed-energy suppression brutally overwhelmed by the sheer power permeating this confined space.

Sukuna’s power didn’t feel like this back on that school rooftop.

Oh, it was similar. Certainly no less miasmic.

It was also significantly less.

But it’s not just that—the flavor of this power is distinctly different from what battered the edges of Infinity on that rooftop, much like how the violence now brimming in Itadori’s body is not the same gleeful viciousness that Sukuna threw at Satoru.

It is still a beastly thing.

Itadori hasn’t shifted from his crouch, his fist still resting in the middle of the crater. The room is dark now, the candles the first casualty of the oceanic surge of Itadori’s cursed energy, but Satoru can see perfectly clearly.

That’s why he knows Itadori can also see him perfectly clearly. His eyes aren’t brown anymore. They’re red and ringed, tiny black concentric circles expanding outward from narrow pupils.

Sorcerers have all sorts of freaky eyes. Satoru’s heard his own described in some very interesting ways. Sukuna’s eyes were red like this on the roof. He also had a good four of them. Currently, Itadori is only packing two, and his visible skin is free of those black markings.

It’s not definitive proof one way or the other. Sukuna has never incarnated, despite a few cults over the centuries trying their deranged best to bring him back. All of the chosen vessels just died horribly. The curses who eat his fingers evolve to have intelligence—and no small amount of malice—but none of them were Sukuna himself.

They have very little data.

Despite it all, Satoru can’t quite bring himself to believe it when he says, “Sukuna then.”

It’s as if his voice breaks whatever spell Itadori was under. One moment, there’s a boy crouched stock-still in the dark. The next, there’s movement so fast that the Six Eyes strain to track something for the first time since Satoru put Fushiguro Tōji in his well-deserved grave.

That, too, is beyond what Sukuna was capable of only a few hours earlier.

Interesting.

Satoru laughs as Itadori makes a spirited attempt at turning him into meaty paste. His body’s a whirlwind of curse-soaked fury, and everything he touches trembles and gives, often with explosive results.

He never touches Satoru, of course, but watching the main seal array on the ceiling wither into ash when Itadori uses it as a springboard does make him wonder what it’d be like to lower Infinity and allow such power to caress him for a moment.

He doesn’t; he isn’t, despite many assertions to the contrary, actually insane.

Itadori’s fist slams into space split into a septillion slivers, and for a single, scorching moment, the air sparks black with his power and his rage.

Satoru snags Itadori by his borrowed t-shirt and warps them both to a spot deep within the forest surrounding the school.

Infinity will protect Satoru but not whole buildings. He never takes long to subdue his targets, but something tells him that the damage Itadori could do in the meantime might leave the campus a smoking crater.

That won’t do. Satoru might sacrifice the higher-ups at the altar of a good fight, but his cute little students are also there.

When Limitless spits them out in a grassy clearing, Itadori doesn’t stumble or falter, tearing away from Satoru’s fist to put some space between them, and this whole time, his expression hadn’t changed from the angry snarl it’d settled into when he woke up and lay his eyes on Satoru, but now it fades, the corners of his mouth and eyes smoothing out to leave behind a terrible blankness.

Dawn broke a little while ago. The trip from Sendai to here and the subsequent negotiations with the higher-ups ate up the better part of the night.

In the natural light, Itadori looks—

Older, stranger.

Nothing like the cute teenager who sheepishly confessed that he’d eaten a mummified finger or the incarnated calamity who tried very enthusiastically to disembowel Satoru with his bare hands.

Satoru tilts his head to the side. “So, what are you? Don’t keep me in suspense now.”

That blank mask breaks, if only in the eyes. Rage floods them again.

No, more than rage. This is raw hatred, a hundred times more visceral than anything even the vilest of the higher-ups and old clan cronies have turned on Satoru. Infinity is no defense against that, but thankfully, Satoru’s sparkling personality is an even better shield.

“Did I offend you?” he chirps. “Well, that was rude, wasn’t it? You’re no cursed spirit, after all. Here, I’ll rephrase—who are you?”

He’s not really expecting an answer. Itadori hasn’t said a single thing in all this time. He hasn’t made a noise either, not even the huffs and grunts that usually come with a fight like this. Then again, he seems about as winded as Satoru—not at all.

That will change when Satoru decides to fight back for real, but it’s still very impressive that Itadori tore up the isolation chamber like a wild beast without breaking a sweat.

“Ah.” It’s a quiet, tired noise, radiating such acute exhaustion that Satoru feels a twinge somewhere deep and better left forgotten. “I knew it. You are new.”

Satoru blinks slowly, the gesture wasted on Itadori thanks to the blindfold.

“New,” Satoru echoes incredulously.

“Special grades are supposed to be special—that’s why they’re classified like that,” Itadori tells him, the blandness of his voice at odds with the way he’s staring at Satoru like he can bore through Infinity and human flesh with the force of his rage alone—not the first to try that with Satoru, again, but certainly the most notable so far. “My teacher, the man whose face you’re wearing—he’s the one who told me that. But you’re not special. You’re crawling everywhere like cockroaches, killing and eating and hurting. It’s never going to end, is it? This cycle of curses. It will never end.”

Something…is very wrong here.

One, this guy thinks Satoru’s a cursed spirit.

Two, he called Satoru his teacher.

That was, of course, the plan. It’d ultimately hinged on what Itadori himself would choose, but Satoru had already made mental space for three cute little first-years. He had a good feeling about it, and his gut is rarely wrong about these things.

He’s got a feeling or two about what’s happening right now too, but he can’t quite bring himself to look at those except at the most oblique angles.

Even jujutsu has known limits.

“Yuuji-kun,” Satoru says as delicately as he can manage, which historically hasn’t been much at all, “I think you’re a little confused.”

Yuuji calmly raises his right hand and scores his fingers down his entire left arm.

His nails tear into flesh. Blood streams down the gaping gouges—and then away from the skin, rising high into the air to form a cutting arc above Yuuji.

“That’s Blood Manipulation,” Satoru states, eyeing the flow of cursed energy in the live, lashing blood hovering over Yuuji. He doesn’t miss how the gouges on Yuuji’s arm close, not a drop of blood left on his skin or the sleeve of his t-shirt. Satoru whistles. “And reverse cursed technique. Are you aware that you’re supposed to be a hapless non-sorcerer, by the way?”

Yuuji’s answer is his entire body shooting at Satoru like a missile, the blood following half an inch behind like it can’t quite keep up with that demonic speed.

Satoru does fight back this time, Infinity fully engaged. Yuuji’s never fazed when his fists or feet slam into an endless expanse of condensed space, recovering in the blink of an eye to come at Satoru from new angles, and his blood moves with him like the perfect extension of his will, its gleaming lines coalescing into blades and bludgeons that try and fail to find nonexistent weak spots in Satoru’s cursed technique.

The whole time, Yuuji doesn’t let a single hit land on his own person, sliding and stepping around Satoru’s blows as fluidly as the blood dancing alongside him.

It’s quite beautiful.

It’s curiosity more than aggression that has Satoru adding a bit of red of his own to the fight, and the way Yuuji puts space between them the moment Red starts to manifest is another piece of this preposterous puzzle.

Satoru teleports to the space right in front of Yuuji, releasing Red.

The percussive force of the explosion washes harmlessly over him—and Yuuji, sheathed in a coffin of hardened blood.

“There’s no Kamo alive who could’ve pulled that off,” Satoru says thoughtfully, rocking back on his heels as a few pieces break off the coagulated blood, falling to the ground. The amount of cursed energy Yuuji has channeled into the blood would have drained most sorcerers, even grade-ones. Yuuji, Satoru can tell, isn’t even feeling the strain. The only living sorcerers who can expend so much power are Yuuta and Satoru himself. And going by certain records in the Gojou clan library that the Kamo really wouldn’t like finding there— “None from the past either. You grow into quite the monster, Itadori Yuuji.”

The blood reacquires its liquidity, cursed energy forcing it to circulate at speeds invisible to the human eye.

But Satoru’s eyes are designed to devour this world.

There’s something eerily fascinating about the way the blood peels off Yuuji’s skin like a reluctant lover to join the spinning crimson vortex in the middle of his palm. Convergence, executed with a perfection that the current Kamo heir would weep to behold.

Yuuji’s face is the last to be revealed, and the expression there could be carved from marble.

It would be very exquisite marble.

For a moment, they just stare at each other. If looks could kill, Satoru would be a smear on the ground. He’s not sure what his own eyes are radiating at Yuuji, but the blindfold renders it moot anyway. Probably for the best. Satoru would hate to scare him off.

Then again, Yuuji doesn’t look like he’ll end this fight without Satoru dead between his jaws.

Or he’ll die trying.

Satoru isn’t keen on either option.

His student from the future is still a precious student, isn’t he?

Yuuji snaps into the position for Piercing Blood—and a hundred tiny scissors bite through the air, through Infinity.

It doesn’t get through. It can’t. Infinity is made up of infinite infinities.

But the sensation of an alien cursed technique violating his own—it tugs at something deep inside Satoru, a visceral sense of wrongness that makes him gasp, half disgusted and half thrilled.

Yuuji takes advantage.

A blood-soaked fist slams into Infinity.

All cursed energy leaves the blood. Satoru’s cursed technique is sucked into an empty space.

Satoru warps away a second before a fist would have torn through his heart.

Yuuji follows, reaching Satoru almost before Limitless deposits him in his chosen spot. He flicks a weaker sphere of Red at Yuuji, not particularly concerned about it connecting. He’s even less concerned about the strip of trees it pulverizes instead.

Yuuji lands on the ground, the floating platforms of blood he used as footholds circulating back to the scarlet shroud over his head. He’s smart enough not to rush in again, but he watches Satoru with predatory intent. Given the chance, he’d probably aim for the head next.

Satoru sensed the power in that blow, devoid of any cursed technique but brimming with obscene amounts of cursed energy and raw physical strength. If that touches him, it’s going to cave bone. Mere reinforcement won’t be enough protection.

It won’t kill Satoru. There’s nothing left that can kill Satoru.

But this boy would have demolished Fushiguro Tōji.

And Satoru’s starting to think that he could fight back in earnest and still find Yuuji a real challenge.

Something sweet and slick slinks down his spine.

He tugs the blindfold down.

For the first time, Yuuji flinches. Then the rage redoubles, until it feels like Satoru’s staring into the eye of a storm.

What an interesting boy—if he’s a boy at all.

“Domain Amplification,” Satoru says softly, “is a highly advanced technique—the kind that can’t be taught, much like reverse cursed technique. Still, I like to think I must have been a very good teacher. What do you say, Yuuji?”

Yuuji only stares at Satoru like he’s picturing his imminent nonexistence.

Then—

“You can look like him. You can fight like him.” A corner of Yuuji’s mouth pulls up—a grotesque parody of a smile. “Even talk like him. But you can’t copy his soul.”

Unbloodied fingers press together, an unmistakable sign accompanied by a tsunami of power.

Satoru has a bad habit.

Well, he has several bad habits, and their number and nature vary depending on who you ask. He’s way choosier though, and there’s only one he’ll admit to, here in this moment.

He likes to watch.

Itadori Yuuji looks at him with still-water eyes and says, “Domain Expansion: Neverland.”

It’s never not fascinating, the way a domain settles into the world. There’s always a struggle—reality resisting the interloper. Even your run-of-the-mill sorcerer must be able to feel the way the very air changes, growing heavy and charged. Most of it is simply the deluge of cursed energy expended to bring forth the domain—but only most of it. The rest is even less tangible, something Satoru can only describe as ripples in the fabric of reality.

The Six Eyes let him perceive it more acutely than anyone else could, but even he can’t perceive what lies beyond cursed energy.

Imposing your will on the world is no small feat.

Satoru has seen very few sorcerers expand their domains. It seems to come naturally to sufficiently strong curses, but those don’t exactly grow on trees. Their domains are rarely interesting anyway. Limited intelligence, limited soul to work with. Sorcerers, meanwhile, aren’t lacking in soul-stuff, but the few who have the power needed to manifest a domain often don’t have the requisite control over themselves or their cursed energy.

Even if this domain expansion—and one with such an intriguing name—weren’t coming from Satoru’s future student, he’d be interested.

As things stand, he’s excited.

Hopefully, the sure-hit effect won’t be too pesky, but Satoru’s got counters at the ready.

Yuuji’s cursed energy slams down on the world. Reality yields, changing color and shape.

And Satoru finds himself standing in…a basement.

A very familiar basement.

Stone walls, wood-paneled floors, a lush red couch, a couple of tables, and a TV stand—a perfect replica of the secret room Satoru set up a few weeks after Yuuta’s enrollment, just in case he needed somewhere to stash the kid while the higher-ups made decisions that would be very bad for their health.

He didn’t end up needing it, but he’s kept the place up, now and then adding a few more titles to the movie collection he keeps there.

Even those are present, spread out on the coffee table instead of stacked under the TV like they should be. Satoru recognizes all of the titles. He also recognizes the wrinkles and scuff marks on some of the DVD cases.

In fact, the only element in this room he doesn’t recognize is the adult man standing beside him.

But that’s not quite true either.

Satoru turns to face what Itadori Yuuji has become.

The scars catch his eye first—a thin line cutting into Yuuji’s right eyebrow and a thicker mass of scar tissue kissing the left corner of his mouth. They’re smooth and dull with age, but they add an unmistakable edge to the rest of Yuuji’s features.

Features that are currently twisted into an expression even the Six Eyes struggle to parse.

The rage is all gone, as if this domain has doused every last one of its embers in icy water. But that no-less-vicious blankness hasn’t returned either. No, Yuuji’s face is anything but blank.

There’s horror there, in the trembling lips and widened eyes. The whites are prominent, and the delicate vessels inside seem on the verge of bursting. The irises are brown again—the same honeyed color Satoru saw on the rooftop.

But it’s not horror that’s flitting along every inch of Satoru’s exposed face and raking down the length of his body, a frenzy of motion that bears only one name—hunger.

There’s something else too, if Satoru isn’t misreading this new face made unfamiliar twice over. The most insidious of all human emotions.

Hope.

“Gojou…sensei?”

It’s a soft rasp, barely audible, as if Yuuji is afraid that saying it out loud will make it not so—but can’t help it anyway.

“The one and only.” Satoru bows with a flourish, hand over heart. His eyes stay on Yuuji, physically and otherwise, even as some buried part of him clamors for a reprieve from that expression.

He straightens up, his skin prickling under two layers of fabric as Yuuji’s eyes do their level best to devour him whole.

Satoru’s felt less exposed while naked.

“Not yours though,” Satoru chirps. “Or should I say not yet? We’ve just met, you know. But that’s only my experience, isn’t it? You know me.”

Yuuji’s expression shudders into something that’s too beastly to be awe and too gentle to be horror.

He has a very expressive face. Even when he tries to hide, the eyes give it away. That’s never done a sorcerer any favors.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Satoru says quietly.

Yuuji flinches back.

The TV crackles to life, the screen blooming bright with an explosion of telltale purple.

When the dust settles, Satoru’s own voice comes out of the speakers: “Let me just set things straight—you’re the challenger here.”

Yuuji makes a thin little noise, like an animal keening.

Satoru looks between Yuuji and the TV. The latter now displays Satoru’s own form in technicolor—exposed eyes and windswept hair and traditional clothes. It pans like a shot in a movie to…Megumi.

No. Megumi doesn’t have four ringed red eyes and markings that Satoru’s already familiar with.

“Huh,” Satoru says. “And here I thought you were Sukuna’s one-in-a-million viable vessel.”

Yuuji is quiet for a long moment. On the screen, there’s battle and banter. A lesser man would be distracted, even riveted, but Satoru has the eyes and the brains to spare for both the screen and the equally compelling man beside him.

“…No,” Yuuji says eventually. “I was just a cage. He was the vessel.”

Satoru hums. “It’s no small thing, caging the King of Curses.”

“No,” Yuuji agrees. His voice is different from what it was outside the domain, deeper and raspier in a way that better matches his appearance. “But I wasn’t very good at it.”

Satoru can’t exactly argue when the sneering specter on the screen is solid proof otherwise. He’s more curious why he wants to. Yuuji’s tone, maybe. Or the look in his eyes, which are fixed on Satoru rather than the screen. It brands itself into Satoru’s mind as hotly as the sight of Megumi reduced to a monster’s puppet and his own flesh bleeding from a hundred cuts.

It’s surreal to see his body be ravaged like this. As the fight goes on, the damage exceeds anything even Fushiguro Tōji managed.

Well, he did know it’d be no easy task to subdue Ryomen Sukuna. But not even in his wildest imagination would he have pictured contending with a Sukuna who can wield the Ten Shadows.

The Satoru on the screen is holding his own, naturally.

He is also stronger than Satoru currently is.

“When was this?” he asks Yuuji.

Again, the answer takes a while. Yuuji’s still staring at Satoru, and the horror has vanished entirely, leaving behind things no less terrible.

“December,” Yuuji says finally.

“The year, Yuuji.”

“It was…2018.”

Well then.

“It’s 2018 now,” Satoru says lightly. “June.”

“Yeah, I—” A shuddering exhale. “I know.”

“Quick study, aren’t you?”

Yuuji flinches again, but his eyes stay on Satoru, open wide and so greedy. It’d be hypocritical to judge when Satoru’s doing the same; he’s keeping his eyes on the screen physically, watching himself contend with two monstrous beasts formed of an admittedly brilliant application of the Ten Shadows technique, but an equal amount of his attention is fixed on Yuuji—and he has a feeling that the man knows it too.

Satoru whistles as his arm is cut off. He’s unsurprised when it doesn’t slow him down any, but watching it grow back is quite interesting. He’s experimented with minor regrowth—a finger, a couple of toes, the tip of an ear—but severing an arm just to test the limits of his reverse cursed technique was too much of a risk. Even Shouko wouldn’t be able to do anything if Satoru fucked that up.

But apparently, he can manage it even in a high-stress battle environment.

“Your teacher is very cool, huh, Yuuji?”

“Yeah.” The answer is immediate, but then Yuuji makes a broken noise—one Satoru takes precious seconds to recognize as an attempt at a laugh. “He was the coolest.”

Ah.

He has the strangest urge to reach over and ruffle Yuuji’s hair, as if he’s really a boy and not a grown man almost as tall as Satoru himself. He doesn’t, but he does shuffle a step closer to Yuuji in the guise of moving closer to the couch, gripping the back of it and leaning forward as if he’s only interested in the rather impressive fight on the screen.

Yuuji freezes like a woodland animal when Satoru first moves, and his reaction to the greater proximity is a poorly suppressed shiver—but he creeps closer too, still unabashedly watching Satoru while avoiding the screen.

Well, why would he watch when he probably knows this story by heart?

Satoru dies, of course.

He knew it was coming. Before the past tense, before that broken noise, maybe even before the fight started playing on the screen.

It’s still a very strange experience to watch death snatch him from the jaws of victory—Satoru has experienced the opposite, and it changed him forever. But death doesn’t offer change. It’s only an ending.

He can’t see cursed energy through the screen. Screens shouldn’t show cursed energy at all, in fact. But if he’s understood this correctly, he’s seeing what Yuuji once witnessed, which means that Red and Blue and Purple as well as every beast Sukuna calls forth from shadows are there on the screen but the invisible blade that bisected Satoru’s body is marked only by the carnage it leaves behind.

The Satoru on the screen has no such excuse, but he dies all the same.

The Satoru of now should be asking questions—hows and whys and everything a dead man can’t have asked—but it turns out the words wither when faced with this no-longer-boy who’s staring at Satoru like he’s the sweetest and cruelest dream he’s ever had.

The screen has frozen, fixed on the image of Satoru’s bisected body.

It’s still a strange sight. This is no movie, despite the medium. It’s no dream. But Satoru can’t muster much sympathy for the dead version of himself. A future that once was and never will be again.

If there are infinite universes for every choice, every possibility, there’s a world where Satoru never learned reverse cursed technique in that fateful moment, Fushiguro Tōji lived to sell his son, and the world was worse off for it. Satoru feels no sympathy for that boy.

And there’s a world where Suguru never left, and Satoru feels no jealousy for that boy either.

This is his reality, and the gruesome fate splattered across that screen will never be his.

As if to taunt him, the corpse’s face fills the screen—blank eyes and bloody lips framed by a halo of unstained hair.

“That idiot looks happy enough,” Satoru comments, not as confused as he’d like to be about why his corpse has the faintest smile on its face.

And for the first time since the screen crackled to life, Yuuji looks at it.

Satoru almost looks away from him.

“I hope so,” Yuuji croaks, the words at odds with the grief fracturing his expression into half a dozen graceful tragedies. “I’ve always hoped so.”

He means it, huh. He seems the type.

Satoru’s understanding more and more why Megumi wanted to save this boy—no, the boy this man used to be.

Yuuji’s still staring at the screen like he wants to crawl through and breathe that corpse to life.

It’s a mad impulse that has Satoru reaching over, and Yuuji’s hand bolts up, snapping harmlessly around the Infinity sheathing Satoru’s wrist, but he makes no attempt to move away or even stop Satoru from touching him.

Satoru grips him by the chin, tugging his face toward him.

“There’s a better view right here, you know,” he murmurs. “I’m much prettier alive.”

Nothing on Yuuji’s face disagrees, the hunger there as raw as his hatred was earlier.

The TV crackles, the telltale sound of static and then—

“Haven’t we had enough Gojou Satoru?”

“Huh?!”

“I want you to be more forward-thinking!”

The hand around Satoru’s wrist tightens, pressure that Satoru feels against his cursed energy rather than his skin.

On the screen, Yuuji—much younger than the one beside Satoru but markedly more scarred and sharper around the edges than the boy on the rooftop—is staring bewildered at a very alive, very whole version of Satoru.

Here, in the present, Yuuji says, “You shouldn’t be seeing—mmph.”

Satoru presses his palm more firmly against Yuuji’s mouth. The scar tissue at the corner is eerily smooth against his skin, and Yuuji’s lips are dry and warm. His breath is hot.

His entire body seems to have frozen under the touch.

On the screen, the soon-to-be-dead version of Satoru passes on his dream.

And his Yuuji says, “How could I ever forget you?”

The corpse-to-be doesn’t believe him. That’s clear enough, at least to Satoru. Maybe it’s clear to the Yuuji on the screen too, but he calls his Satoru timid and asks if he’s okay, eyes narrowed as the man laughs it off, and when he says, “I’m expecting great things from you,” the Yuuji beside Satoru tries to crush the infinite infinities around his wrist.

The boy on the screen has pink on his cheeks and fire in his eyes. The man in this domain bears the frozen wraiths of that fire.

“Besides,” the dead man continues, “there are easier ways to get inside me, you know.”

Satoru blinks at the non-sequitur, but the Yuuji on the screen only snorts; the pink on his cheeks stay, but the fire twists darker, sweeter.

“Sensei,” he sighs, all exasperation and no irritation, and stands up, padding over to where Satoru’s unfortunate future is sitting on a chunk of former wall with his legs spread whorishly wide.

The boy bends down—one hand on his teacher’s shoulder, the other on his cheek.

And there, in the split second before their lips meet, Satoru sees the way his counterpart looks at that boy.

Ah, he thinks, that’s how it was.

The Yuuji that survived Gojou Satoru once stares at the screen like a dead man and a starving man both, long after it fades to black.

Satoru watches what remains—their dull reflections on the black screens, the washed-out colors almost a mockery after those vibrant memories.

He lowers his hand, peeling it off Yuuji’s mouth. Yuuji doesn’t let him go, and Satoru doesn’t make him.

They stand there like silent sentinels. Satoru watches Yuuji and thinks of the boy on the screen and the man he watched die.

Love, he knows, is the worst curse of them all.

“That seems very questionable, morally,” Satoru ventures, breaking the silence Yuuji probably never will.

Yuuji starts. “What?”

Satoru turns to face him, carefully not looking at their linked hands. “Teacher–student relationships are frowned upon, even among sorcerers.”

“Oh. That.” Yuuji shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it. “Yeah, we got that a lot. Me, mostly.”

Yes, that sounds par for the course. Satoru can count on one hand the number of people who’d care about whether Sukuna’s teenaged vessel is being taken advantage of while also daring to question the strongest sorcerer on the matter. Yuuji must have been the target of most of the well-meaning interventions—and worse.

“Was it worth it?” Satoru asks, morbidly curious.

“Yes.”

It’s immediate, absolute. There’s little Satoru can say in the face of such faith.

One of them must have done something right for Satoru to entrust his dream to this man.

One of them must have done something very wrong for Yuuji to be so broken with grief even now.

He watches Yuuji, content to be watched in turn. He can’t tell Yuuji’s age for certain, but he must be closer to thirty than twenty. It could be a decade, maybe more, since he lost his teacher and lover. Let him look his fill.

Satoru knows a thing or two about such youthful love and its inevitable loss.

The Satoru who kissed that boy wasn’t youthful. He must have known better. It clearly didn’t stop him.

Satoru can’t say he understands it, but then, he’s known Itadori Yuuji for barely the span of a night, and the boy spent most of that unconscious. He seemed like a good kid, both from Satoru’s observations and Megumi’s account. That’s not enough to understand why he’d ever look at the boy like…that. Or trust him with his dream.

He doesn’t know how well Yuuji carried it, but he has clearly borne Satoru’s ghost for years and years.

Satoru knows a thing or two about that too.

Physical attraction, at least, is easier to wrap his head around. At fifteen, Yuuji was quite cute, with a shockingly well-built body to boot. As an adult, he’s strikingly handsome, and his body has gotten even broader and bulkier. His features have also sharpened and settled, accentuating the lines of his jaw and cheeks. The eyes are the same, except when they apparently mirror Sukuna’s, but the hair has grown a little, the undercut long gone and the fringe an artlessly charming mess. The scars add a rugged edge to his face without rendering it unfriendly.

When he smiles, he must be beautiful.

“You’re…” Yuuji says haltingly, “really real.”

“I’m really, really real,” Satoru confirms, keeping his voice light. “Unless, of course, this domain of yours always comes with a Gojou Satoru attached. I did set up this room—but you already know that, don’t you?”

Yuuji nods, more spasm than gesture. “You brought me here after I died.”

Satoru blinks. “After you died.”

“Didn’t stick,” Yuuji clarifies.

It doesn’t actually clarify anything, but after time travel, resurrection is easier to swallow. Satoru himself has come back from the brink of death, and he knows for a fact that his heart stopped for a beat or three while he lay there bleeding out, the entirety of his focus and his power trained on the secrets locked in his own brain.

And bringing a student in a delicate situation to this room is exactly what Satoru would have done.

The real question is—

“Well, you must have liked it very much if you went and made it your domain.”

Yuuji’s features shift with another complex interplay of emotions, and he drags his eyes away from Satoru with palpable reluctance, taking in the room. He doesn’t seem surprised by anything he sees—naturally, given that this is his innate domain—but his gaze lingers on the couch and the movies scattered on the coffee table.

He says, “It looks exactly like it used to. It’s been…” A flare of the nostrils, another hoarse attempt at laughter. Or maybe that’s just what Yuuji’s laugh sounds like these days. “God, it’s been years.”

Satoru hums, mentally sorting through puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit right.

“Still a strange choice,” Satoru says, “for a domain. They don’t usually look like real places.”

Yuuji sucks his cheeks in, his jaw moving like he’s chewing the inside of his mouth. His eyes flit back to Satoru, then away, and return again, staying this time like they just can’t help themselves.

“It doesn’t always look like this,” he tells Satoru, his voice hushed like it’s a confession. “It’s…never looked like this before. And it won’t again—not unless I bring you here.”

“A domain without a set shape,” Satoru murmurs, a familiar but long-unfelt blend of interest and excitement rearing its head. “You’re full of surprises. What determines the form?”

Yuuji’s lashes sweep low over his eyes, not quite hiding the liquid dark at their core. “Souls.”

“Souls,” Satoru repeats, a little incredulously.

“Yours. Mine.” Yuuji’s hand flexes around Satoru’s, groping around the trembling barrier of space like he wants to feel skin on his skin. “Whatever will let me touch your soul.”

Satoru sucks in a sharp breath.

You can’t copy his soul, Yuuji said before opening his domain.

And afterward, he knew it was Satoru. Not a curse, not a copy. The rage and hatred had yielded to hurt and wonder.

“You can’t just go around touching souls, Yuuji,” Satoru says, very mildly all things considered. “At least buy me dinner first.”

Yuuji makes a wheezing noise, a little too wet to be just amusement. “Yeah, I’ll—I’ll do that. Yeah.”

“Too late now. But I’m sure you can make it up to me.” Satoru takes in the basement again, noting its perfect mundanity. Whatever cursed technique has been imbued as the sure-hit, it never activated. “What were you expecting?”

“Huh?”

“You thought I was a cursed spirit, didn’t you? What form were you expecting? Curses are hardly known for their refined souls.”

“Aren’t they?” Yuuji mutters. He drags his free hand over his face. “No, I guess they wouldn’t be here. Where I’m from, there’s not much of a difference. I don’t know what form I was expecting. Something fucked up, probably. Always is, with curses. Sorcerers too, half the time. You and Sukuna were the only—” He shakes his head again, a sharp canine motion. Satoru makes a mental note of the fact that Yuuji once caught the King of Curses in his domain. “Doesn’t matter what my domain would’ve looked like. It’d have shown me the curse for what it really was. And I’d have killed it.”

There’s a hard edge to Yuuji’s voice—not mere anger but also grim determination.

“Scary,” Satoru says softly. “All for the crime of wearing my face? And here I thought you liked it.”

It’s in bad taste, and Satoru knows it well before he says it, but he still finds his breath freezing in his lungs when Yuuji raises blazing eyes to his own.

“Not you,” he says, simple and brutal. “They can’t have you.”

Satoru swallows, but his entire mouth remains dry.

He saw the expression his doomed counterpart wore when he looked at the boy about to kiss him. But he didn’t see Yuuji’s face in that moment.

He didn’t see what fifteen-year-old Yuuji looked like when his Satoru’s corpse lay in pieces on the ground.

And Satoru’s no coward, but just this once, ignorance might truly be bliss. The aged grief he saw on this Yuuji’s face is knowledge enough.

“Well, like I said, I’m quite real,” Satoru says—and drops Infinity.

Yuuji’s hand closes around his wrist like a warm brand.

Yuuji makes a gutted noise, his fingers flexing, but it’s surprisingly gentle, both the touch and the way he shifts to grip to hold Satoru’s hand properly, but instead of linking their fingers, he takes it in both of his hands, their combined girth enough to swallow even Satoru’s hand.

Calluses brush his skin, making it tingle pleasantly.

“Give me a tour,” Satoru tells him. “There’s more, isn’t there? I can feel your cursed energy well past these walls.”

“I…” Yuuji drags his eyes away from Satoru’s hand, blinking over at the wooden stairs leading out of the basement. “Yeah. There’s more.”

“Let’s go then. You can even keep holding my hand.”

Yuuji’s eyes widen delicately, dropping from Satoru’s face to his hand—still held firmly, warmly in both of Yuuji’s own.

He doesn’t let go. But he does lower one hand, while lacing their fingers together with the other, and he glances up at Satoru after, a bold look that challenges him to walk his talk.

Luckily for them both, Satoru is an expert in that.

He walks toward the stairs, tugging Yuuji with him by their joined hands, and Yuuji doesn’t immediately follow, staying rooted to that spot by the couch until Satoru’s arm is stretched all the way out behind him, but he moves before Satoru has to pull or coax him over.

Then they ascend the stairs, hand in hand but with Yuuji a couple of steps behind Satoru. His nape does prickle at having such a monster at his back, but it’s a rather useless instinct. Satoru has no blind spots.

And no one who looks—used to look, will look—at him the way this man does would put a knife in his back. At the very least, Yuuji would want Satoru to see it coming. A lover’s death.

It’s Satoru who steps out first—into a train station.

A familiar train station, in fact.

“Oh,” Yuuji breathes behind him, his tone and his expression a blend of surprise and resignation—as if he knew, deep inside, but was hoping otherwise anyway.

“Shibuya Station,” Satoru comments. “Curiouser and curiouser, as that little girl said.”

“…Huh?”

Satoru steps into the station proper, finding himself on a platform. Empty tracks lie in front of him, with another platform on the opposite side. Satoru’s been here before, out in the real world, and the only difference is the jarring lack of people. Everything else, from the pillars to the flooring, is a perfect replica of this part of the station.

Everything except the incongruous trap door from which they emerged. It remains even after Yuuji shuts it. If they head back down, that room will be waiting for them. If they linger long enough, maybe the TV will play something else.

There’s more, as far as the eye can see and well beyond.

“Do the trains run?” Satoru asks.

“The trains—” Yuuji repeats blankly, before cutting himself off with a sigh. “No, they don’t. The escalators and stuff work though.”

“Fascinating,” Satoru murmurs. “Your memory must be quite good for your brain to recreate places so perfectly.”

Yuuji huffs, taking a step forward so that he’s beside Satoru, their shoulders brushing. “It’s not that. Doesn’t matter if I remember. Or what I noticed. It existed. I was here. Or you, I guess, but this… I’m pretty sure this is on me.”

“So you didn’t take ungentlemanly liberties with my soul?”

“Sensei,” Yuuji sighs, his tone a remarkable match for the boy on the screen, despite the changes to his voice and heart. “I did feel your soul. Still can. But it’s not exactly fifty-fifty, what this place draws on. The first time I opened my domain, it was my old hometown, even though it was Sukuna in there with me. It still looks like that whenever I open it alone. Guess it left a mark. With others, it’s sometimes nothing I’ve ever seen—but I still know it the moment I see it.”

“Because you know your target’s soul,” Satoru concludes. “Creepy.”

“Thanks,” Yuuji says drily, unbothered—or maybe just aware.

Satoru’s still not sure what to feel about that, really. He’s not exactly feeling violated, but then, he’s not feeling anything at all. Whatever intangible essence this domain has exposed to Yuuji’s discerning gaze, it’s nothing Satoru can feel.

Is that the kinder devil?

Satoru drags his attention back to the matter at hand. “So if it’s not memory—”

“It’s knowledge,” Yuuji completes. “Places witnessed, known, felt. Even when we don’t remember, it’s still there, right? It’s stored in our brains, somewhere.” He turns his head toward Satoru, abandoning all subtlety in his staring. “Though I guess you don’t forget anything either. Not anymore.”

The other Satoru must have gotten real chatty for Yuuji to know that.

“I’m sure you know a lot about not forgetting,” Satoru says mildly.

Yuuji’s hand convulses around his. “Yeah. Guess I do.”

“Is it just the station?” Satoru asks. “Or all of Shibuya?”

Yuuji just lets out a slow breath. “Let’s find out.”

They walk through the station, and just like Yuuji said, the rest of it is fully functional—lights, escalators, sliding doors. Satoru even checks out a bathroom once, finding it in mint condition. Yuuji watches him with a vaguely pained expression.

Eventually, they emerge from the station.

“Well,” Satoru says, hardly surprised at this point, “this isn’t Shibuya.”

“Shinjuku,” Yuuji rasps.

A battle-torn Shinjuku. Satoru knows very well which battle tore it up. He’s vaguely surprised that his bisected corpse isn’t lying on that telltale patch of ground several feet in front of them. The blood is certainly there. He could, if he tried, find the exact spot his guts spilled out into.

“Whatever will let you touch my soul, huh,” Satoru muses, politely pretending to ignore how Yuuji freezes beside him. “Why these?”

Yuuji swallows audibly. “Gojou-sensei…”

“The basement, Shibuya Station, the place where that other me died,” Satoru lists. “The last one makes sense, I suppose. And you said I stashed you in that basement after you died—which raises more questions than it answers. Really, Yuuji, don’t leave me in suspense.”

“You haven’t changed at all,” Yuuji says, his voice almost a whisper.

“I’m your past,” Satoru tells him, not ungently. “The Gojou Satoru you know hasn’t been capable of change in a very long time.”

“I know.” The words bear a pale ghost of the fury Yuuji turned on Satoru earlier, but it’s gone in a blink, just like the flash of red in Yuuji’s eyes. “I know that. I know.”

Satoru says nothing, does nothing, only waits.

And if his hand has wound a little tighter around Yuuji’s, neither of them will tell, will they?

“The basement…is where I really got to know you. For a couple of months, it was just you and me. Mostly. There was Ijichi-san and Shouko-san and Nanamin, but—”

“Nanamin,” Satoru repeats, unable to help himself.

Yuuji snorts, like he also didn’t expect Satoru to help himself. “Nanamin. Exactly who you’re thinking of. But he only came in toward the end, and the other two had their own stuff to do. You did too, but you were there anyway. You trained me. And you spent time with me. We matched movies and sparred and ate together and…talked.”

It doesn’t sound like a euphemism. Satoru’s sure they really did talk. He’s just equally sure that they kissed and touched and did many other inadvisable things those days—and beyond.

“Sounds fun,” he says softly.

“It was.” Yuuji’s voice is tight, some unholy emotion barely leashed. “It really was.”

Satoru gives him a moment, then asks, “And the other two?”

Yuuji closes his eyes. “That’s where I failed to save you.”

There are stories there. Satoru saw what happened at Shinjuku, but Shibuya is a mystery.

He finds he’s in no real hurry for that answer.

He steps in front of Yuuji, so close that their chests almost brush. Yuuji opens his eyes, and his hand spasms around Satoru’s.

“I am the last person in the world,” Satoru tells him gravely, “who needs saving, Itadori Yuuji.”

Yuuji doesn’t flinch or falter, his eyes steady on Satoru. “That’s not true at all.”

Satoru holds his eyes for a very long moment. Yuuji doesn’t look away, doesn’t blink.

“Stubborn, aren’t you?” Satoru murmurs.

Yuuji’s lips twitch. “Hypocrite.”

“I am, that.” Satoru smirks, and Yuuji finally blinks, a corner of his mouth curling up cutely. Maybe he’s got more than doomed love in common with his teenage self. “Time travel isn’t supposed to be possible, you know. Not at this scale. You can slow it down, speed it up, dance around it—but you can’t reverse it. Unless that’s also changed in the future.”

“No. Not that I know of.” Yuuji frowns, looking thoughtful. “I think I died.”

There’s neither reason nor excuse for the sudden chill in Satoru’s blood or the way he thinks, for a moment, of the scarred boy on the screen, the unblemished one on the rooftop.

“It must have been quite the curse, to be able to kill you,” is all he says.

“Not a curse,” Yuuji says, something rueful in his voice, his eyes.

“Sukuna?” Satoru asks, though he’s skeptical. He can’t have moved on to Yuuji after killing Satoru; this man is at least a decade older. “What happened to him after that fight?”

“We killed him,” Yuuji says very blandly. “It was probably a nuke.”

“A…nuke.”

“What killed me,” he clarifies. “There were rumors. None of us really thought they’d do it. Can’t even tell you which country snapped in the end. They all hated us. Or feared us. Not much of a difference after a point, right?”

“No, there isn’t,” Satoru says faintly. “Yuuji, what happened?”

“My mother happened.” A brief snarl kisses Yuuji’s mouth, dripping disgust. It’s gone the next moment. “But that’s a very long story. It’s coming back to me, what happened at the end. I definitely died.”

“I’m sorry,” Satoru says; he finds that he means it.

He still doesn’t know Itadori Yuuji. But he knows he didn’t deserve to die—not the boy, not the man.

“It’s alright,” Yuuji says, his eyes crinkling as he smiles at Satoru. “We tried, y’know? To protect ourselves and everyone else. Not much we can do against weapons like that though—even if we’re weapons ourselves.” The smile fades, turning into something quieter. “You could have, huh? You could have saved yourself. No—you could have stopped it.”

“Probably,” Satoru says, mentally amending it to most definitely. “Do you resent him for dying?”

“Not at all,” Yuuji says like he’s reassuring Satoru, gentle from his eyes to his touch, and when a calloused hand rises to cup Satoru’s face, he strangles the instinctive urge to put Infinity between them. Human warmth covers him from jaw to temple. “I wanted to see you, that’s all. I remember that now. I expanded my domain. It was all I had time for. Knew it wouldn’t last long. I had a few minutes though. So I sat there in the snow, and I thought, I want to see him again.”

Words flee Satoru for a brief, burning moment. “Yuuji—”

“And I did.” Yuuji grins, wide and wild. Satoru was right, earlier—he really is beautiful. “Think I’m going to die for real now?”

Satoru blinks, keenly aware of how Yuuji’s eyes track the sweep of his lashes. “What makes you say that?”

“You said it yourself,” Yuuji says, oddly cheerful for a man who thinks he’s about to die, again. “Time travel isn’t a thing. And I got my wish! That’s way kinder than I’m used to the universe being, honestly. So it makes sense, right, that I’ll be gone after this.”

It’s…not bad logic.

But Satoru has a different—and better, quite literally—perspective here.

“You’re very alive, Yuuji,” Satoru tells him. “You’re in this reality. It’s accepted you. Your cursed energy flows in perfect harmony with the cursed energy of this time. Can’t you sense it?”

“But…” A deep furrow forms between Yuuji’s brows. It would probably be very inappropriate to poke it. “I was in that sealed chamber. It’s June, you said. That means—the other me, he—”

“You’ve taken your younger self’s place. Replaced him, in essence.”

“Oh,” Yuuji breathes, gently closing his eyes. “I killed him then.”

“That’s…one way to look at it,” Satoru says carefully. He doesn’t disagree. It’s Yuuji’s tone that’s bothering him—it didn’t sound guilty at all, only strangely relieved. And what little Satoru has seen of both this man and the boy he used to be says that it’s off, this reaction.

Before he can prod, Yuuji says, “That’s for the best. He wouldn’t have had a kind life.”

“Didn’t you just say it was worth it?” Satoru asks quietly.

Yuuji’s eyes flash open, black holes burning. “That’s not fair, sensei.”

“I am not a fair man,” Satoru admits, raising a hand and curling it around Yuuji’s nape; the fine hairs there kiss his palm. “That’s why I’m keeping you, Itadori Yuuji, even if you’re not mine to keep.”