Yuji Itadori

"But," Yuji stepped back. He pointed to himself. "I'm the Sukuna vessel."

Riku lowered her head.

"You… you still want me to die?"

"Any presence of Sukuna is too dangerous to leave unregulated," she answered, willing the emotion out of her answer. "The aftermath of Shibuya should serve proof of that."

"But–" Yuji stammered. "But then Sukuna just comes back, right? Seals don't work forever. Besides, if Gojo's around, he can totally take out Sukuna!"

"With due respect, were Gojo-sama alone capable of regulating your vessel, you would not stand here while he rests beyond." Riku curled forward, her posture moving into a mournful bow. "If saving lives is what you seek, then this is the clearest path."

The way Riku spoke was so sad, like even she didn't want this to be true. Despite the pain in his back, her presence and posture made Yuji go still.

"Is that really how I save the most people?" Yuji meant the question for himself, yet, he got an answer. Riku nodded solemnly.

"Would I get to say goodbye?" Yuji asked, his voice growing softer. "Fushiguro would be alone."

Riku said nothing.

"I–" Yuji clenched his fist again. A few shards of glass shone beneath the overhead lights. "Why can't you just open the box? Let Gojo-sensei out? He really can help! I swear!"

It was the girl's turn to step away. Her silvery stare went cold, sinking into Yuji. It was less like he was being watched by a person than by a porcelain doll.

"Gojo-sama has shown far too much favoritism," she said. "He will spare you despite the risk. Is that truly the existence you want, Itadori-san, for others to lose their lives in your name?"

"I–"

Yuji didn't know how to argue that. The most he could do was go silent.

That was the first problem. There were two.

In how intently Yuji had been watching Riku, something else had fallen to the wayside. For as long as Yuji had been watching the back of the prison gate in Riku's grasp, Yuji hadn't been watching Yun.

The reversed curse technique, mangled as it may have been when they'd first tried, had been just effective enough that it allowed Yun to stand. Their curse marked hands pulled together, their fingers twisting into shape as they started the mantra again. "Emerge from the darkness, blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure."

In seconds, a curtain covered the door. Yuji's shoulder bounced off the edge, shoved back into the bathroom. He barely had time to register what had happened when a strip of blue light the size of a needle shot towards his head.

Yuji ducked against the floor, covering his face. The glass of the broken mirror slid across the floor as his leg outstretched. He could register, however faintly, that the sliver of cursed energy had come from Yun.

The blue light of Yun's curse technique ricocheted. A ripple cast across the curtain, sending the light right back into Yun's palm. The curse mark at the back of Yun's hand seemed to glow from the impact.

Yuji followed his own momentum to land against the wall into a crouch. His cursed energy raised along his fist, bracing for the next onslaught. He had just found a stable spot when the light, and Yun's cursed energy, vanished.

It wasn't as if it was impossible to mask yourself. The fact it had happened so quickly, however, was strange. It made more sense if it was "Riku–"

Yuji had just managed to process that Riku must have intentionally suppressed Yun's energy when he heard the glass crunch. The hazy glow of Yun's cursed energy came flooding back. Yun had perched themselves on the top of a trash can, out of reach, with their curled hand braced to strike.

Though Yuji's eyes were now closed, that stable, stationary cursed energy let him know right where to turn to find Yun.

"What's wrong with you?" Yuji snapped. "I'm not trying to–"

While Yuji had tried to talk, something else had moving. Yuji felt the shift in the broken glass against his feet. He raised his arms just in time to block a strike.

The glow of Yuji's own energy extinguished with the impact of another arm smacking his own. Yuji's flow of cursed energy washed away as a hand pressed over his fist. This wasn't Yun attacking. It was Riku.

Riku's hand tightened around Yuji's, trying to push him back. Yuji twisted his wrist towards himself, planted a foot on top of Riku's and used his other arm to jab into her back. The impact forced them both to turn until Yuji trapped Riku between his body and the wall.

Yuji tried to reach towards Riku's sleeve. Not only did he want to hold her in place, but he was looking for something. She'd punched him, which meant her other hand had to be holding the prison realm.

Riku tried to slide a leg between Yuji's. He let her hit him. Though Riku tried to twist him off balance, Yuji jabbed an elbow into her side and just kept reaching. Sure enough, when he stretched down the length of her arm, he could feel the corner of a box. The back gate of the prison realm was clutched in her gloved hand.

"Help me!" Yuji screamed. "Riku, right?"

That shout seemed to make Riku pause. That split second of hesitation was enough. Yuji closed his hand around the other side of the gate, pulling it towards Riku. He didn't have the specifics, but it felt to him like all he had to do was shove the box against Riku's face or something.

Yuji had just changed angles for his own cursed energy to reactivate when Yun shot an attack. The thin strip of Yun's energy vanished, absorbed into the overwhelming current already around Yuji. Then, Riku turned. Her open hand brushed Yuji's neck, erasing both his and her energies at once.

Yuji jerked back from Riku's touch. He slid away to the right, clinging to the gate.

The fact Yuji had to pick a direction to move telegraphed where he was going. While Yuji was bracing himself for Yun, Riku turned herself, too. She raised to the ball of her foot and spun herself around Yuji. Had Riku's angle been different, the gesture may have been a spinning kick. Instead, the inside of her knee locked against Yuji's back, anchoring around him.

Against what should have been any kind of balance instinct, the second Riku's first leg had locked, she jumped off the floor to wrap her other leg around Yuji, too. The end result left both of them to crash against the tile, trapping Yuji on the floor.

"Agh–"

Most of the time, at this impact, Yuji's eyes would have snapped shut. Instead, instinct snapped them open just in time to see a flesh colored cube start sliding from his and Riku's hands.

In the time Yuji could have used to free himself, he didn't. Instead, he stretched his free arm as far as he could to snatch the gate. The cube tucked under his arm, secure.

Something–maybe a foot, maybe a knee–pressed into Yuji's back. Riku's bare hand pinned his arm at the wrist, forcing him down. What Riku may not have spotted was that in doing so, she'd pinned the gate down, too.

Yuji could have tried to move. He had a free arm, and his feet were still secure. All he had to do was tuck in his legs to force his way upright, then either grab Riku to gain leverage or roll himself over. It was all easy to save himself…

…but it wasn't about saving himself.

Maybe the deal had been a lie, but Yuji knew what he'd experienced. Whether or not the offer had been a bluff, there was potential for her to follow through.

The effort that Yuji should have put into escaping, he used to shout. "Riku! You've gotta do it, okay? Free Gojo!"

Something brushed at Yuji's back, tickling his neck. Maybe it was the bottom of Riku's hair. Whatever it was, he didn't get an answer... but he hadn't gotten a no.

"That was the deal, right? Me for him?" Yuji cried out. "Fine! If that's who I save, then I saved someone!"

A voice answered, though it wasn't Riku's.

"Thank you for your sacrifice," Yun spoke, their words oddly serene. "Both of you."

Yuji repeated "Both–?"

Yuji didn't know what Yun had fired until he'd already been hit.

An immense wave of pressure burned against Yuji's back. Though Yuji couldn't see it, he didn't need eyes to feel. The temperature in the bathroom had plummeted so far down that the air felt like it both froze and burned. Every pain receptor in his body was firing at once as a thousand tiny dots of cursed energy struck him.

A sequence of faces flashed before Yuji–things that no one could have told him to see and knew what they meant. The face of his grandfather mixed with Nanami's, and Nobara's, and Gojo's, too.

The image of that last face brought Yuji's hand to twitch. Despite the pain, he could still feel the gate. He could feel the pressure of someone limp across his back. That girl, Riku, must have fallen on him.

Yuji tried to move his arm, to throw the box away. It didn't work. His hand wouldn't budge. His eyes shut into the pain as he let out a retaliatory cry.

If there were any more pain left to feel, Yuji triggered it by forcing himself to move. He twisted his shoulder, bucking Riku from the blunt of the blast. At least, if she made it, maybe she'd consider his last wish.

Whatever hope that idea brought Yuji, it pulled away when Yuji felt something else slip. The cube slid from his arm. It skidded across the floor, just out of his reach.

"No–" Yuji let out a breath, straining himself. He writhed across the tile, trying, and failing, to move towards the cube he could barely see. A foot stomped into his back.

"May the afterlife show kindness I won't," Yun spoke. Though Yuji couldn't see clearly behind his back, Yun was holding a long shard of the broken mirror, brandishing it like a knife. They plunged the shard down, stabbing towards Yuji's neck.

The blade stopped short. Millimeters short. So short that the glass looked like it should have struck Yuji, except there was no wound.

Yun turned the glass in their palm. With a huff, they tried again. "May the–"

A vibration passed through the shard as it was repelled, this time a full foot from Yuji's face. The shard of glass shot out of their grip. It embedded into the ceiling, sticking out from the drywall. A few new odd dots of light reflected across the tile.

With the last bit of strength he had, Yuji turned towards the light. He opened his eyes.

Now that Yuji had turned to check, he could see what had changed. The light wasn't from the ceiling or the broken mirror. The light was coming from the stitches on the prison gate. Yuji was twisted up with Riku, and Riku's bare skin was touching the box. That meant this wasn't some random barrier around Yuji. This barrier was limitless.

A sudden wave of adrenaline let Yuji start to shout. "Gojo!"

Yun backed away. They folded their hands together, intersecting their fingers into a new attack stance. For how composed they'd looked before, their amber eyes were shaking. "Domain Expansion, Collision Kaleidoscope–" they tried to cast.

At the same time, Yuji climbed over Riku. He reached out to nudge the box directly against her hand.

"Gojo!" Yuji shouted so loudly he made himself cough. "Hey, Gojo! Over here!"

Riku's eyes snapped open. Yuji could barely register the lack of color in her stare when the attempted domain from Yun, the inverted energy from Riku, and the burst from the limitless from Gojo collided, all at once.

For a split second, the energy of Gojo's technique had been both impossible and possible. At the instant when Riku had touched the gate while Gojo passed through halfway, Gojo had been both capable and incapable of summoning the limitless. The result was a paradoxical state of quantum superposition-a mathematical impossibility of dual states, at once both imaginary and all too real.

Yuji didn't know a thing about what happened. All he knew was when it did, something was wrong.

Yuji heard an echo in his breath. It felt like his soul had just been ripped from his body. Every part of the room saturated in a different, impossible hue. An array of fragments, shapes in every color, danced around the circumference of the curtain. Within seconds, the purples turned to crimson, the browns maroon, and, right before the color could be clearly called red, the shapes burst forth into an overwhelming pitch of black.

Yuji couldn't see anything. There was both nothing and everything. The fabric of time itself gave way. One universe opened, and, in a blink of an eye, another spit them out.

A dull pain shot through Yuji's shoulder. His legs felt heavy against the ground. For all the fighting that had just happened, now, it was quiet.

That quiet was stopped by the loudest, most enthusiastic shout possible. "HAH! GOTCHA!"

Yuji's eyes snapped open in alarm to take in the sight of… a completely normal and not at all destroyed public bathroom.

"Back from the almost dead, it's the greatest sorcerer, Satoru Gojo!" Gojo waved in front of Yuji, flapping his arms for attention. His smile was as wide as could be. "And soon we'll fix global warming!"

For all the physical pain he was currently in, Yuji couldn't help but stare. His mouth stretched to the side.

"Wow…" Yuji marveled, a realization long suppressed sinking in. "Pretending to be dead really wasn't funny."

"What are you talking about, dead? I–" Gojo scrunched his shoulder to the side and stretched his neck. It popped. "That was just a zero star vacation! Note to everyone ever, Prison Realm? Worse than actual prison. I think."

Gojo tilted his head down to Yuji. "To be clear, I haven't been to prison." He paused. "Except yours. And Okkotsu's."

Gojo raised his fingers in front of himself to count, lowering a third. "Okay, to be clearer, I have not been arrested. I've been to prison a lot. Visiting. Man, why does everyone I know keep getting put in prison? What's the deal, there? Are you all really bad at crime?"

"Uh… Gojo-sensei…"

Yuji tried to look around from his spot sitting on the bathroom floor. The fluorescent lights swayed from side to side. An automatic faucet was running. There was no sign of a girl with pigtails, or a creepy sorcerer with bird shaped eyebrows. The only other living person here was some poor theater employee at a urinal trying to pee.

"Gojo. I really don't think that's the problem."

"It's not? Great!" Gojo bowed down at the waist, leaning into Yuji's face with a grin. He put a hand on Yuji's shoulder, helping him to stand by force. "Is it the weekend? If it's not, I could go for Taiyaki Wakaba."

It was, as far as Yuji knew, a Saturday, but that wasn't what Yuji brought himself to say. Yuji pointed towards his injured hand. "Gojo-sensei… I'm kind of bleeding. Can we see Shoko? Or a doctor?"

"Well…" Gojo drew out the word with consideration. In the end, he went right back to beaming. "You are a precious student! So. Sure! School it is! We can surprise the higher-ups, next. Oh, that'll be fun."

Gojo offered a hand out to Yuji. Yuji pulled himself up to his feet. He bent forward with a wince. Though it must not have hit anything vital, the stab wound still hurt.

"Gojo-sensei–"

Gojo sniffed the air. "Mmm. Hey, is that popcorn? I haven't eaten in months."

"It's a theater. So. Yeah." Yuji almost shrugged, only to stop himself from the pain. He blinked it off, then let himself just stare around in confusion. "Gojo-sensei, are there other sorcerers who disappear? Like, teleport and stuff. There were other people here before. They're not here."

"I can disappear, sure. Other people? Usually, not so much." Gojo looked around, or, at least, he turned his head. There wasn't all that much looking when his blindfold was on. "Oh, did you mean bird brows and pigtail girl? Cause I thought they were part of the whole prison realm thing."

"No…" Yuji's eyes went blank. "No, they were outside the prison."

Gojo tucked his hand under his chin, thinking it over. Though he looked concerned for a second, the next, he waved it off. "Well, it's probably fine. Don't worry! I don't sense anything here. There aren't even any residuals. Not even yours."

"Shouldn't there be, though? Residuals? I mean, Yun kept attacking–"

"Yun?" Gojo asked.

Yuji looked back. "You called them bird brows?"

"Ohhh. Gotcha." Gojo nodded. "Didn't birdy boy just attack with chunks of glass? There's no residuals from that."

"No. No, they had other attacks. They threatened Oza–" the name froze in Yuji's mouth, "wa…"

All of the other confusing parts about waking up in a bizarrely clean men's bathroom were washed out by an epiphany. Before any of this mess started, Yuji had been watching Into the Spider-Verse with Ozawa. And that meant… he'd just ditched her.

"Shit—"

"It's a good place for it, the bathroom," Gojo joked.

Without another thought to the state he was in, Yuji took off in a sprint. He shoved straight through the bathroom door in a mad rush for the theater.

"Ozawa!" Yuji shouted, every other thought out of mind. "Ozawa!"

Gojo, too, stepped out of the bathroom. His hands tucked into his pockets as he strolled after him.

In Yuji's dash through the hall, he didn't notice that the posters hanging on the theater walls were in different places. He also didn't see that the showtimes on each door had changed. In fact, if he had paid attention, Yuji would have seen that this was a completely different theater.

Yuji didn't consider the details. All Yuji had done was charge through the doors and burst in where he thought he was supposed to be, shouting. "Ozawa! Ozawa, I'm sorry! I–"

Yuji stopped mid-sentence. In all of his effort to get here, he realized he hadn't bothered to consider an excuse. His face went blank, his eyes turning to dots as he settled on the best he could come up with. "I got the runs… so... I ran. Sorry."

Only when he'd finished that did Yuji realize how dark the room was. The text of the credits was rolling across a black screen. The room was almost empty. As far as Yuji could tell, there was only one person left in the theater.

Hoping that the person in the back center seat was Ozawa, Yuji started to sprint up the steps. He raised a hand to try and catch their attention.

"Hey, Ozawa? I'm feeling better now. It's all good." Yuji raised a thumbs up their way. "Next time, we can do whatever you want, okay? But I kinda–"

Yuji stopped mid-step. Now that he was closer, he could see this person wasn't Ozawa. They had black hair. In fact, their hair was almost all Yuji could see. Their bangs cut diagonally, straight across the right side of their face. From this angle, Yuji could barely see their profile at all. There was so little to see, he shouldn't have recognized it.

But he did. Inherently. And the sight of this barely visible face made everything else wash away.

All of fifteen minutes ago, Yuji had been hallucinating. He knew that. That didn't stop Yuji from sprinting up the steps twice as quickly as before.

"Hey!"

Yuji's sudden run brought the other person to stand up. They turned their head away from the screen, their one visible eye narrowing, as if trying to decipher if this was a joke.

"Hey, wait!"

"Can you be quiet?" the guy asked, irritation sneaking into an otherwise hushed tone. "I want to watch the after credits. And I'm not Ozawa."

The words were hostile, in a subtle sort of way. It should have been a sign to back off.

Yuji felt his throat tighten. He squeaked out. "I know."

The screen turned colors one last time. The dialogue of the final scene started to run. Yuji couldn't see who was talking on screen… and frankly, even if he'd just seen the best movie of his life, he wouldn't care.

Every question Yuji should have asked faded. A warmth filled Yuji's chest that hadn't been there in a very long time. Hope.

"Junpei?"