Chapter Text
Yuji’s barrier crumbled, and the whole battlefield was a wasteland.
The ground was black and smoking, the air filled with dust and ash. Yuji staggered to his feet. The ruined right side of his face throbbed in time with his heartbeat, but that was just pain. It didn’t matter.
“Is everyone…?” His voice was hoarse, and he faltered. “Is anyone…?” Alive, he wanted to say, because all he could see in every direction was charred and melted and Choso had just burned up into nothing protecting him, just gone, not even a body left, and how could anyone else have survived that?
Yuji was alone. He was alone. He was—
Something moved in the smoke, huge and heavy. It stalked towards him. Yuji stiffened, squinted with his good eye.
Sukuna. Of course.
Rage burned through Yuji. “Sukuna!” he roared.
Sukuna smiled at him, wide and mocking. “So persistent. But there’s no one to hide behind now.”
He really had killed them all. Yuji wanted to cry but there was no time and if he cried he wouldn’t be able to see out of his eye and then Sukuna would kill him too and then kill everyone else and it would all be Yuji’s fault because he was supposed to keep Sukuna contained and he’d failed at Shibuya and then he’d failed again and now Fushiguro was gone and Maki and Miwa and Ino and Choso and Higuruma and Okkotsu and Gojo—
He had to keep fighting. He had to. Yuji clenched his fists.
Wait. Inside his left gauntlet, his ring and pinky fingers were back, even though he hadn’t used RCT on them. And the eye that Sukuna had slashed through was feeling really strange and tingly, like it was healing, too, but Yuji wasn’t doing that. Was he?
He couldn’t let himself get distracted right now. Sukuna was settling back into a lazy fighting stance, with a stupid smirk on his face like Yuji was weak, like he was nothing, like he was a mildly interesting bug Sukuna would enjoy crushing. Even though he’d just opened his domain and couldn’t use his technique right now, just punch and kick, same as Yuji. Well, maybe Sukuna could gather up his cursed energy and use Malevolent Shrine again, but Yuji just wouldn’t let that happen. And if it did… He had some cursed energy left for RCT. He could bear it.
“Goodbye, brat,” Sukuna said, and rushed forward.
Yuji blocked the first punch Sukuna threw right at his face, crossing his gauntlets in front of himself, and lashed out with a kick of his own. The black flashes he’d hit Sukuna with before he’d opened his domain had been working. They’d hurt him. If Yuji could just land a few more…
The kick actually connected, but Sukuna took the hit and kept on coming, grabbing at Yuji with his remaining hands, trying to knock him off balance. Yuji managed to twist himself out of the way, just in time to run directly into the foot that swung out at his ribs. He felt something crack, but it probably wasn’t anything vital. He didn’t even cough up any blood, so he just pushed enough reverse cursed energy into his chest to keep on moving and ignored it.
Yuji ducked another swing from Sukuna’s upper arm and aimed a punch at his unprotected left side. But as cursed energy flowed into his fist, Sukuna’s lower hand shot out, viper fast, and closed around Yuji’s temple in a crushing vise, blocking his one good eye.
Blinded, Yuji tried to land the hit, but then he was being lifted, fingernails digging into his face, and Sukuna smashed him against the ground head-first, pinning him in place. Yuji flailed, kicking out and grabbing wildly behind him for Sukuna’s arm—if he could touch it he could cut it off, turn Sukuna’s technique on him again—but then the second hand wrapped around his neck and shoved down, and suddenly Yuji was using every drop of his cursed energy to keep Sukuna from completely crushing his windpipe against a melted lump of rubble. Strange shapes and bursts of color swam against the black of his vision. He tried to breathe and could only choke.
This was it. It was over. He could barely move and Sukuna had two hands on him. He was going to suffocate Yuji, nice and slow, or maybe just pop his head like a grape. Yuji had failed, again, and now, like always, innocent people were going to pay the price.
…Seriously, why hadn’t Sukuna killed him yet?
The moment he thought that, a wave of cursed energy exploded out of him. The weight of Sukuna’s hands vanished, and Yuji gasped for air against the ground.
What the hell? That hadn’t been him. Wait… was it…?
But there wasn’t any time to waste hoping about that, so Yuji pushed himself up and turned to face Sukuna. Who was standing and staring incredulously at him.
“Your eye,” Sukuna said, and then laughed, long and ugly.
What? Yuji’s eye? The left one was still intact, but the right one, the one Sukuna had destroyed—something was really wrong. He was starting to see out of it again, somehow, but it was too much, a complete overflow of information, and he was simultaneously looking at the individual drops of blood and sweat on Sukuna’s face and every tiny piece of ash drifting in the air and the dozen layers of cursed energy residuals splattered all across the battlefield and—Yuji slammed his palm over the eye, but the cursed energy was still there, on the covered right side of his vision, blazing from his own hand and radiating from Sukuna’s shape, blurring with the view from his left eye.
“So that’s how it is!” Sukuna crowed, his cursed energy bubbling with delight. “I didn’t think you were capable of going this far!”
“Okay, hey,” said a voice in his head, “you totally did the finger thing first.”
Holy shit. It’d worked.
“Hi, Yuji,” Gojo-sensei said brightly. “Mind if I borrow your body for a sec?”
—
Everyone was staring at him, and it felt wrong. Actually, everything about this felt wrong, but it wasn’t like Yuji had any better ideas. It wasn’t like anyone else cared enough to come up with an idea at all. And so he opened his mouth and announced to his rooftop audience: “I’m gonna ask Gojo-sensei to turn himself into a finger.”
Now everyone was confused and staring at him. Yuji hurried to clarify. “So that I can eat it.”
If Fushiguro was here, he’d probably frown and furrow his eyebrows and think Yuji was an idiot for basing all his plans on eating people’s fingers. And if Kugisaki was here—
Well they weren’t, but Gojo-sensei still was—not literally here, on the roof, but like alive and conscious and not sealed in an evil cube—and that was why Yuji was doing all of this.
“That way,” he told the crowd, “if he loses against Sukuna, he can come back and possess me. And then we can still use Limitless.”
For a second, all the people Yuji’d dragged up to the roof with him digested this. They didn’t seem super convinced.
“But we don’t know if you can handle being possessed by anyone other than Sukuna,” Hakari drawled.
“Yeah,” Kirara said, “what if he’s too strong and you just… pop?”
Okay, so that stung a little. They didn’t think he could do it? Yuji had included the third years just to be nice, and now he was kinda regretting it. “I have enough experience to handle it, okay? Besides, it’s Gojo. He wouldn’t hurt me.”
Ieiri-san, who’d been busy lighting a cigarette at the back of the pack, grimaced and made a doubtful sound. Jeez, weren’t her and Gojo-sensei supposed to be friends?
Finally, Okkotsu spoke up. “Itadori and I talked this through. We need a backup in case the rest of us have to fight Sukuna, and this is our best option.” At least someone had Yuji’s back here. Okkotsu was a good dude, even if he had stabbed Yuji through the ribs and killed him that one time. It was fine though. Yuji was over it. “I think I should be the one to be possessed though.” This was worse than the stabbing.
“Absolutely not,” Maki-senpai snapped.
“I have more cursed energy, so it’ll be safer for me,” Okkotsu argued, which was kind of total bullshit.
“Dude, we already decided this! It has to be me.” Yuji tried to make eye contact with him but Okkotsu was looking steadily at the ground.
Maki gave him a painful-looking punch in the arm, which got his attention pretty good. “Don’t be stupid. Yuji is right. He’s the only one here with any experience being possessed. Besides, we don’t know how your technique would react to it. You might just copy Limitless instead, and you couldn’t use it at all without the Six Eyes.”
Panda raised a hand. “Wait…” he said slowly, and started scratching at his fuzzy head. “Yuji, you wouldn’t be able to use Limitless either. How could we be sure you’d get the Six Eyes when Satoru manifests?”
Oh, yeah. That. It was the biggest weakness of the whole plan, but again, did anyone have a better idea?
“I think I would…” Yuji tried to give everyone a reassuring smile. “Because when Sukuna possessed me I got his extra eyes. And Kurusu got Angel’s wings! So it’s probably… thematic?”
Somehow this also didn’t seem to convince his audience much. Inumaki and Panda exchanged a loaded glance. Maki’s eyes were narrowed. Ieiri-san was blowing a big cloud of smoke into the sky. Hakari and Kirara had started cuddling and didn’t seem to have even heard him. And Okkotsu was looking at Yuji with his big sad eyes. He was like a cute depressed cow or something. And Yuji was getting very distracted and needed to say something before Kusakabe-sensei stepped in and shut the whole idea down—
“Even if you couldn’t use Limitless, the boost to your cursed energy would be significant,” Kusakabe said, thoughtful. Woah. He was in? “That could be a major benefit in the fight.”
“So… you think I should go through with it?” Yuji asked. He tried not to sound too desperate, but Kusakabe-sensei raised a single eyebrow at his tone. Dammit, he was being way too obvious.
But Kusakabe nodded grimly. “Seems like the best plan we’ve got. I say do it.”
There was some muttering around him. Yuji waited, but no one spoke up in protest, and the muttering died down, and then everyone was looking at him again.
“I won’t let you down,” he promised. “I won’t let him down.”
—
It was easier than Yuji expected to convince Gojo-sensei. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing.
“So you just have to transfer your energy and pull your finger off,” Yuji explained as they headed down the spooky stone hallway, passing by a bunch of candles in pillars. Who was even still lighting those? “It’s easy! I felt Sukuna do it when he jumped from me to Fushiguro, and I asked Angel about how the vow works.”
Gojo-sensei’s legs were long, and Yuji had to trot to catch up. His sensei was listening, right? “So, uh, this way, if you… die…”
At that, Gojo finally looked over at him and rolled his eyes. “Not gonna lose, but sure,” he said casually. But his hands were shoved deep in his jacket pockets and his shoulders were hunched, and his tone didn’t really sound as casual as he probably meant it to.
“Right, Sensei,” Yuji agreed. “You got this! But, like, just in case… if we do this finger thing we can at least catch Sukuna off guard.”
“Eh,” Gojo-sensei said, and shrugged without taking his hands out of his pockets. “Whatever. It’s not like I really need my left pinky anyway.” Without warning he stopped walking and swung around to face Yuji, a fake stern look on his face. “But I can’t just put all my cursed energy into a finger, Yuji. Kinda need that.”
“Angel said it only transfers if you die. And Ieiri-san said she can hold onto the finger until then. I mean, in case… then…” Yuji was quickly learning that it was somewhat extremely awkward to have a conversation about the logistics of someone’s possibly imminent death with that person. Of course he didn’t want Gojo-sensei to die. Of course he hoped this whole finger thing never needed to happen. None of this was right, or fair, and it was all Yuji’s fucking fault for eating that original finger in the first place. The least he could do was stop acting like his sensei was 100% definitely going to lose and die.
“Shit, sorry, Gojo-sensei, that totally came out wrong. I didn’t mean to—”
But Gojo waved him off. “Relax, Yuji. You’re fine. Just don’t let Shoko dissect my finger. She’s always way too eager about that sort of thing. Kinda creepy, right?”
Yeah, it was a little creepy, especially since Gojo-sensei had told him at one point that Ieiri-san had been “super sad” about Yuji coming back to life after Sukuna ripped his heart out that one time, because that meant she didn’t get to cut him open. Before Yuji could agree, though, Gojo sighed dramatically.
“All right, sure. I’ll do the vow. But not just yet. I still have a few things to take care of first.” His eyes darkened by the end of the sentence, which was a little scary. And also weird, to be able to see his eyes at all. Gojo-sensei hadn’t worn his blindfold or sunglasses ever since he got back from the Prison Realm. Yuji didn’t know what that meant, but he wasn’t sure if he should ask about it. And Gojo probably wouldn’t tell him why, even if he did. Gojo wasn’t really… talking very much these days.
Well, at least he agreed.
“Gojo-sensei…” Yuji said, hesitantly. “You’ll be careful out there, right? Promise you’ll be careful?”
Gojo stared at him, and that wrong feeling reared up inside of Yuji again. His eyes weren’t scary now—they were blank. Painted on, like a doll.
Then Gojo blinked, and eyes filled with life again. “Yeah,” he said, his voice light. “Pinky promise.”
He held his hand up, fingers spread out, and wiggled his pinky. Gojo-sensei was finally smiling, a big grin on his face, and Yuji hated it.
Yuji looked down at his own hand, at his own missing finger, the one that was torn off and sitting somewhere in Fushiguro’s stomach right now, and felt sick. When he looked back up, opening his mouth to ask if his teacher was really okay, if there was anything Yuji could do to help, anything he could say that would make all this the least bit better, Gojo-sensei had already turned away. He strode down the hallway, hands shoved back in his pockets, and Yuji just watched him go, words dying on his tongue.