Chapter Text
The first thing you saw when you opened your eyes was him. Itadori Yuji. Except it wasn’t really the Yuji you remembered.
The boy you’d left behind had been sixteen, all boundless energy and weaponized optimism, pink hair perpetually mussed like he’d just rolled out of bed (he usually had), with a grin that could have powered Tokyo during a blackout. The man holding you in his arms right now was someone else entirely. Someone who looked like he’d taken that boy apart piece by piece and reassembled him wrong, with parts missing and gaps that would never be filled
He still had that pink hair, though winter had arrived at his temples, threading silver through the rose. The hands cradling you were broader, knuckles more pronounced, callused in places that felt wrong because you didn’t remember them, wrong because you’d known his hands once, had memorized the shape and warmth of them, and these weren’t them.
“You’re awake,” he breathed. His voice was deeper than you remembered, rougher, like he’d spent years screaming or maybe years saying nothing at all. “You’re actually awake. I thought—Fuck, I thought I was hallucinating again.”
Again, he’d said. Again. How many times had he seen your face in crowds, in dreams, in the split second before sleep when the mind plays its cruelest tricks?
As your vision sharpened, his face came into cruel focus. The softness of youth had been carved away by time and whatever else he’d survived. His jaw was sharper, cheekbones prominent beneath skin that had seen too much sun, too little sleep, and probably not enough meals that didn’t come from a convenience store at three in the morning. The scars on his face were the same, perhaps lighter now, the way old ghosts learned to be quiet, faded to something almost decorative if you didn’t think too hard about how they’d gotten there.
He looked like he was in his late twenties maybe. Thirty at a push. But something in his eyes screamed ancient, as though he’d lived several lifetimes in sequence and none of them had been kind.
He looked older than you.
The thought landed oddly. Yuji—who’d been a first-year when you were in your third, who had tripped over himself and several pieces of furniture to carry your stuff, who had gazed at you with those earnest puppy eyes, who’d once called you “senpai”—that Yuji was now older than you.
Your hand lifted without conscious decision, fingers finding the line of his jaw. The bone structure was too defined, too angular. You traced it slowly, learning the new architecture of his face. His skin was warm beneath your touch, slightly rough with stubble that prickled against your fingertips. That was new. Yuji at sixteen hadn’t been able to grow facial hair to save his life. You’d watched him try once, the result resembling a depressed caterpillar that had given up on metamorphosis and was just clinging to his upper lip for dear life. You’d laughed so hard you’d cried.
You’d never see him at seventeen. At eighteen. At twenty, twenty-five, thirty. You’d missed all of it. Every birthday, every change, every incremental shift from boy to man. You’d skipped the entire book and arrived at the epilogue of his life.
“You grew up,” you murmured at last, because your brain had apparently decided that was the most intelligent observation it could produce under the circumstances.
His laugh shattered halfway through, transforming into something that lived in the same neighborhood as a sob but refused to commit.
“Yeah,” he managed, blinking rapidly. “Yeah, I did.”
You continued relearning him, mapping his face, caressing the hollow beneath his cheekbone where the baby fat had melted away sometime in his early twenties when you weren’t there to see it. The texture of his skin varied, smooth here, rough there. Your thumb brushed across the corner of his mouth, following the path of an old scar. You buried your fingers in his hair, feeling the shape of his skull beneath, the coarseness of silver mixed with rose-pink. He’d gone gray. Yuji had gone gray.
“How long?” you asked, even though part of you didn’t want to know.
“A hundred years,” he replied quietly, so quiet you almost didn’t hear it. “One hundred years, three months, and seventeen days.”
The number didn’t make sense. Your brain picked them up, turned them over, examined them from various angles. A hundred years. A century. The words had shape but no weight, sound but no meaning. You tried to fit them into some kind of logic and came up empty.
You were nineteen when you’d made your choice. You were still nineteen now. Nineteen and suddenly a hundred years out of step with the world. Time hadn’t passed for you the way it had passed for him, for everyone. You supposed that’s the sort of thing that happened when you got yourself sealed into the Prison Realm. Not exactly surprising, philosophically speaking. The Prison Realm operated outside normal temporal flow. You’d known that going in. Still had a hell of a kick when you came out the other side, though.
Seeing your expression—whatever it was doing—Yuji’s mouth twisted into something too sharp and brittle to be properly called a smile. More like a wound that hadn’t healed right.
“I do age,” he offered, and you could hear him trying to make it sound casual. “Just… really slowly. Slower than I thought. Slower than anyone thought. I’ve looked like this for about seventy years now, give or take. Turns out being half-curse has its perks. Immortality. Or close enough to not matter.”
His gaze darted away briefly, landing on something over your shoulder, before returning to your face. When he spoke again, his voice was trembling, each word threatening to collapse under its own weight.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I couldn’t get you out sooner. I tried—We all tried—I never stopped trying, but it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. I failed you.”
His entire body was shaking. You could feel it where his chest pressed against yours, could feel the vibration of it traveling through his bones.
“Stop,” you said, your hands framing his face properly now. “Yujin, stop.”
But he couldn’t just stop, could he? He’d been apologizing for a century. He’d been carrying this for a hundred years, three months, and seventeen days. One hundred years of guilt, of thinking he’d failed you when you were the one who’d failed him. When you were the one who’d chosen to leave.
You leaned in until your foreheads touched, until you could feel the heat of his skin and the quick, shallow rhythm of his breathing. You pressed closer, as though you could absorb his tremors into yourself through the point of contact, osmosis his century of grief into yourself and lighten the load he’d been carrying. It didn’t work like that, of course. Grief never did. But you tried anyway.
Before you even realized it, your hands were sliding down from his face to his neck, thicker than before, corded with muscle that hadn’t been there. His pulse jumped under your palm. His shoulders were much broader too, substantially so. That registered as your fingers mapped the width of him, the new span of his frame, and it felt like touching a stranger. A stranger who somehow still smelled like him—clean laundry and generic lavender soap.
You traced the lines of him through his shirt, the expanse of his chest rising and falling too quickly. The fabric was soft from too many washes. He probably didn’t buy new clothes often. Probably wore things until they fell apart because what was the point of anything?
His hands caught yours, stilling them against his chest, where you could feel his heart trying to escape his ribcage. His hands were so much bigger than they’d been. You’d noticed that first, but now you really felt it. Your hands had fit together perfectly before. Now yours disappeared into his, swallowed up. His hands had always been strong, but now they were old hands. Hands that had held too many things and lost most of them.
When you’d made your choice, you’d known what it would cost. You’d know your friends would grieve, known that Yuji would blame himself. You’d deemed it a necessary price, the kind of cold calculation you made when there were no good options left, only terrible ones and worse ones, and you had to pick the least terrible and live with it. Or not live with it, as the case may be.
You just hadn’t known Yuji would have to live with your choice for a hundred years.
You didn’t regret the choice. You’d make it again if you had to. Tomorrow, today, right now if the universe demanded it. The math still worked, the logic still held, the necessity was still necessary. But God, you regretted what it had done to him.
“It’s okay,” you breathed, the words ghosting across his lips. “You didn’t fail me. You waited for me. And I’m here now. Everything’s okay.”
He broke.
The sound that tore from his throat was inhuman. It was a century of grief and loneliness and desperate hope finally finding release, finally being given permission to exist outside his chest. He threw his arm around you, his fingers digging into your back hard enough to bruise. He crushed you to his chest, and then he sobbed. Great, heaving gasps wracked his entire frame, as though his body had forgotten how to do this and was remembering all at once.
“I missed you,” he gasped between ragged breaths. “Every day. Every single day, I missed you so much. Please, don’t leave again. Please. I can’t—I can’t do another hundred years. I can’t, I can’t—”
You held him back just as tightly, one hand cradling the back of his head, the other pressing flat against his spine. He was so much bigger now, so much broader and taller and more, but in this moment, he felt small. Smaller than he’d ever been.
“I promise,” you whispered, knowing it wasn’t that simple, knowing promises were just words and words were just air. But he needed to hear it, and you needed to say it. “I’m not going anywhere.”
When his lips met yours, it tasted exactly like the last time you’d kissed. Like goodbye and regret and longing for things that could never be, for futures that had died before they’d had a chance to be born. Salt-tinged with tears you couldn’t distinguish as his or yours or some combination thereof. Your face was wet. His face was wet. Everything was wet and terrible and you were kissing him anyway.
And yet the kiss was different, too, because this time you could feel the man he’d become in the new strength of his arms as they tightened around you. In the harsh catch of his breath between kisses, like he was drowning and you were air. You could taste a hundred years of stubborn hope, of pain weathered but never accepted, of a love that had refused to die even when everything else had.
***
The graveyard was quieter than you expected.
You’d half-prepared yourself for something grandiose. Towering monuments to fallen heroes, perhaps, with plaques detailing how they’d saved the world and probably also rescued several cats from trees, all rendered in prose so purple it verged on ultraviolet. Marble angels weeping decoratively over their designated dead. Maybe some eternal flames that required surprisingly mundane maintenance contracts with the local gas company.
But this was just... a graveyard. Unremarkable rows of headstones, some worn smooth by decades of rain and wind, the names barely legible, others still relatively crisp with sharp edges and fresh engravings. Flowers dotted the space, placed by those who hadn’t yet forgotten
So many stones. So many names. Dates of birth you remembered, had celebrated even, with cake and terrible singing. Dates of death you didn’t know. Entire lifetimes compressed into a dash between two numbers.
You lingered with each one, touching the carved letters and numbers like you could reach through granite and time to the people underneath. People you’d known. People you’d loved. People who’d lived their entire lives—fell in love, had children who had children who probably had children by now, grew old, died peacefully in their sleep or less peacefully not in their sleep—while you’d been elsewhere, elsewhen.
You didn’t speak. What was there to say? Sorry I missed your funeral and, well, everything else. My condolences on your death. I was unavoidably detained by cosmic imprisonment. Hope you had a good life after I abandoned you all. Some of them might just rise up to strangle you out of sheer spite.
Yuji understood. He always had that gift. He held your hand and let you grieve in silence. His warmth against your side was the only thing that felt real.
***
The city proper was unrecognizable, and that’s not hyperbole or dramatic exaggeration for effect. You meant it literally. You couldn’t recognize it.
Buildings clawed at the clouds, glass and steel behemoths that hadn’t existed in your time. The architecture looked less like buildings and more like arguments about the nature of gravity. People dressed differently, spoke with accents and slang that had evolved while you’d been gone, language drifting the way language did when you gave it a century to develop new patterns and forget old ones. Everything seemed to move too fast. The cars, the people, the world itself.
Yuji’s hand wrapped around yours, fingers laced tight, as you walked together. Sometimes he’d steer you gently when you stopped to stare at something too long.
“Took about ten years to rebuild everything,” Yuji explained as he led you through the streets that might have been the same streets you’d walked a century ago or might have been entirely new. “The battle destroyed about forty percent of the city. Maybe more. No one kept great records those first few years.”
You passed a school where children were playing in the yard. Some of them were clearly manipulating cursed energy, small flickers dancing between their fingertips as casually as children once played with marbles. One kid made a barrier shimmer into existence. Another dissolved it. They both laughed.
“Jujutsu education is public now,” Yuji went on, nodding toward the children. “Not everyone has enough cursed energy to do much with it. Most people cap out at basic detection and maybe a simple barrier if they work hard. But basic training is mandatory. Like... I don’t know, like swimming lessons used to be. How to sense curses, how to protect yourself, how to run away effectively if you can’t fight. Curse-related deaths are down by ninety percent these days. Almost unheard of. You’re more likely to die from, like, a vending machine falling on you than a curse attack.”
“That’s good,” you managed.
It was good. It was what you’d all fought for, once upon a time. A world where the monsters were kept at bay by education instead of by sorcerers throwing themselves into meat grinders, dying young and unmourned. Seeing it, though, walking through this future that happened without you, made you feel like a ghost haunting your own afterlife.
You turned a corner and stopped dead.
The building took up an entire city block. Gothic architecture that looked simultaneously ancient and brand new—soaring spires reaching toward heaven with the confidence of things that expected to be heard, flying buttresses that served no structural purpose and were clearly just showing off, stained glass windows depicting scenes you half-recognized. Battles. Monsters. Fire and light and dramatic poses. A woman wreathed in radiance, six gnarled wings spread wide behind her back and a twisted halo floating above her head, looking terribly noble and probably very cold in those skimpy robes, a trident held high in one hand, the other hand outstretched in either blessing or judgment, you couldn’t tell which, and you suspected that was intentional.
A massive sign in gold leaf, each letter the size of a person, professionally lit and probably visible from low orbit: THE FIRST CHURCH OF EVE.
Your eye twitched.
A crowd bustled outside, people chattering excitedly, setting up decorations. Tables were being arranged, destined for food and drink and possibly ritual sacrifice (you couldn’t rule anything out at this point). Banner after banner hung between the spires in dramatic, self-important fonts: “100th Anniversary Commemoration of the Last Battle of Shinjuku,” “One Century of Peace,” and most disturbingly, “Remember Eve—She Will Return.”
You could feel your soul attempting to leave your body. Again. This was becoming a concerning pattern.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” you muttered.
Yuji grimaced. “Wish I was.”
“That’s—” You gestured inarticulately at the building, the banners, the crowd, the entire situation. “Is that a church?”
“Your church, yeah. Well. Mei Mei’s church, technically. She founded it, ran it for fifty years, made an absolute fortune before she finally died. Choked on a grape, if you can believe it. But you’re the one they actually worship. Mei was long dead, but her franchise has been going strong ever since. She set up a very efficient organizational structure. There are branches in twelve countries now.”
You stared, your brain trying and failing to process what you were seeing. “They made a religion out of me? Seriously? People pray to me?”
“Seven religions, if we’re counting denominations,” he replied, tugging you gently away before anyone in the crowd could look too closely at your face and start having religious revelations. “This is just the biggest because Mei Mei got in early and had a hell of a marketing budget. The First Church of Eve believes you’ll return to lead humanity into a golden age. Very hopeful, lots of white robes, good coffee at their services. I’ve been to a few. Long story.”
You didn’t want to know… You definitely wanted to know. You said nothing.
“The Cult of the One True Dark God thinks you’re literally Satan and we’re all living in the end times because you’re gonna come back and destroy everything, usher in the apocalypse, reign over the ashes, et cetera. They’re less fun. No coffee, just doom and a lot of chanting. And then there’s the Eternalists who believe you achieved true immortality and exist outside time now, watching over humanity from a higher plane of existence. They’re into meditation and transcendence and finding your inner truth. Very peaceful. I don’t mind them. They leave offerings of fruit sometimes. The birds appreciate it.”
“This is stupid and I hate everything about it.”
“Yeah, I figured,” he said, smiling crookedly. “For what it’s worth, I punched a televangelist who tried to make money off your story on live TV. Back in, oh, 2040-something. Sold ‘blessed’ merchandise, claimed he had a direct spiritual connection to you, the whole thing. Broke his jaw. Totally worth the assault charge.”
Despite everything, you laughed. It came out slightly unhinged, but it was genuine. “You got arrested?”
“Three times,” Yuji admitted, looking almost proud, like these were achievements worth noting on a resume. “Once for the televangelist thing. Once for destroying a ‘sacred relic’ that was supposedly a lock of your hair that someone was auctioning for charity.” He made air quotes with his free hand, somehow managing to convey deep skepticism through punctuation. “It was a wig, by the way, not even a good one. Wrong color, wrong texture, obviously synthetic. Still went for two million yen before I set it on fire.”
“You set it on fire.”
“I was making a point.”
“And the third time?”
“Drunk and disorderly.” He had the grace to look sheepish. “I got into it at a bar with some asshole who was telling everyone he was your reincarnated husband and you’d chosen him specifically to carry on your divine bloodline.”
“Were you drunk?”
“Extremely. It was the seventy-fifth anniversary. I didn’t handle it well. Spent most of that week drunk, if I’m honest. Don’t really remember a lot of it. Woke up in a holding cell with a black eye and no shoes. Never did figure out what happened to the shoes.”
The image of Yuji drunk off his ass and picking fights in bars over your honor while somehow losing his shoes in the process was so absurd, so perfectly ridiculous, that you did laugh again, helpless giggles that shook your shoulders and made your ribs ache.
You leaned against him as you walked, and he immediately adjusted, taking more of your weight without comment. Passersby shot curious glances your way, probably because you were dressed wrong, moved wrong, stared at things like you’d never seen them before. But no one bothered you. They had no idea the Eve of Death they prayed to and commodified and built churches for was walking past them right now, holding hands with the last survivor of that battle, trying to figure out how to exist in a world that had moved on without them.
The First Church of Eve’s bells began to toll behind you, deep and resonant, calling the faithful to whatever service or ceremony was about to begin. You could hear singing starting up, voices raised in harmony, praising a version of you that had never existed.
You squeezed Yuji’s hand tighter and kept walking, leaving your past behind to its gold-leaf letters and commemorative banners and very good coffee. His shoulder bumped against yours and you bumped back. He smiled and led you forward into the world that had forgotten to wait for you but somehow, had left room for you anyway.