Don't worry guys you only have to put up with me one more time because i'll be publishing Chapter 26, the epilogue and my afterword all at once. Our suffering is almost over let's gooooo. Also heads up, this chapter has 5.8k words.

SAY WHAT YOU MEAN

I WANT TO BE WITH YOU

i want to be with you,

Itadori felt like he was washed up on the shore of a cold beach as he twisted and turned in his bed, the warmth of the blanket becoming a brew threatening to boil over. Normally, he indulges in a few fantasies before falling into some unattainable dream, which was what had happened, but they were too short, slipping through his fingers before he could catch them. The anxiety in him was swelling like a balloon, fizzling and sweltering, almost devouring him whole the more he tried to bury it, but he simply couldn't.

It was overwhelming sometimes. To be him. To be stuck like this. To have hopes and dreams but worries and fears. And then to have Sukuna constantly in his head like a song on the radio you can't turn off.

Humans always seem tethered to something, whether it was endearing or parasitical for them. The universe is vast and endless but there is an end, and no one wants to be alone when it comes. That feeling of drunk wisdom when one finds something so utterly connective that they can't let it go until it's been squeezed of all emotion from their hands. A maniacal need to be fuelled by something, something to keep you in check. To keep you alive.

See, humans are fickle beings, swayed by the current of the stream, mindlessly launching off buildings and chasing false gods and imaginary shadows. They're manipulative and manipulated, as you once said, something your Mother drilled into you. Their desires are only so much until the jilting of reality kicks in. You learnt this slowly, letting the pain wash away each day until one day it was staring you straight in the face as you swallowed the belly of the beast, the blood — it dawned on you that your world was non-existent, a dreamland suited to the needs of the worst. Itadori knew; he was watching you as you slowly destroyed yourself, bit by bit, letting your heart of gold be the one to stretch your endurance thin and ruin everything.

Because everything was going downhill. It wasn't obvious at first but all it took was observance.

He misses the day he met you since he could only live it once. How looking at your smile was like blindly stumbling into heaven. The world seemed to bow down at your feet — boys, girls, nature. Even back then, you were still setting yourself on fire to keep others warm. You gave away bits of yourself to him and he wonders when he'll ever fully know you. That was just how it was back then.

Sure he knows you, but did he really like the person beneath the skin and bones? Itadori has seen the void that befalls your eyes; God doesn't like you. You're drowning in a pool of blood, limp like a fish on land. Even if you could get a butterfly to flutter on your finger, it would kill you eventually, eating away at the gooey canvases of your soul like moths to a flame. He finds that whatever happiness you experience is short-lived and it hurts.

At least he finds some peace when you laugh at his jokes, or when your heart skips a beat because your hand brushed with his. Or when he looks into your eyes and look at the sun gleaming on them.

Your eyes were a quiet kind of brown, like puddles left behind from the field rain, small and forgettable. They were the same eyes as your mother; what can't be undone cannot be cherished, so you were left with a relic to haunt you forever.

"Thinking about her, eh?"

Sukuna seems more confident today. Itadori wonders why.

Irked, he pushes the demon king out of his thoughts, but it's useless. "I don't need you spying on my thoughts."

"Tch, I'm not a perv like you, brat. Just thinking about the future," Itadori can see him now, the King of Curses atop his throne, smack-down in the middle of his mind.

He felt like he was wading through ice-cold waves. The static in the darkness was akin to an infection, almost boiling out his eyes. Still, Itadori was never one to give up. He knew his strength and welcomed it.

"Why the future?" His eyes narrow, "What are you planning to do with [F/n]?" His words curtail restrained thoughts, a trigger on his temper.

You return to his mind again like smoke he cannot wave away, nor catch. Each thought was like blood-slicked fingers reaching in and spooling the knotted mesh of anxiety saturated in black tar. With Sukuna, the two of you were fleshed out for him to see; all your flaws and humanity were exposed, like puppets being tweaked by their master.

"She'll come crawling back to me," Sukuna crows, spinning a skull around on his index finger. An idle expression hides the brutality within him. He turns, dark eyes sharp and cutting, almost killing Itadori instantly, "My vessel is much stronger than the others. Even if she thwarts my plan, her weakness was never her mother anyway."

Itadori is fixed in place, terror striking him when he tries to decipher Sukuna's words. He forces himself to take a step forward, "What plan? Are you going to kill her? I'll stop you! I won't let you hurt her anymore."

Sukuna leans forwards, laughing at Itadori's words, a litany of panicked thoughts quickly exiting a tongue. His expression darkens, "I can't kill her, you moron. She won't be able to carry my soul. But I can kill her soul — I only need her body. Besides... Yuuji. There is no stopping when it comes to God."

Itadori's lips move but everything falls away and the darkness of his dream returns again.

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You hate bugs.

They're annoying as hell and it doesn't matter about how many times your parents used to tell you the whole Look at their size and look at you! argument, you hate them.

Here, one would normally insert some sympathetic anecdote about how a bug traumatised you in your childhood but as far as you can remember, you hate bugs.

Which is why the intent to murder seemingly raged throughout your body when you noticed an insect the size of your fingerprint, on it's back helplessly as it wrestled on the window ledge, back in your home in Sendai.

Sendai hadn't changed much. It disturbed you how this environment remained the same, even if you were not present in it. You were so used to being a hurricane, absorbing in everything and being utterly self-destructive that you forgot about a sense of peace for a moment. This was most apparent because after the recurrent nightmares, you forfeited your right to solitude. Being alone would only make you realise just how empty it is to exist like this.

You may have gained your own strength but if you didn't curate it — keep it alive like a fire struggling to oxidise itself in the messy spool of a dark cave — then it would dry out, burn out n' be gone forever.

This realisation is what pushed you further into your training. You were falling into a river of power, floating and drowning at the same time. The waves drenched you as the days passed and then the days turned into weeks and two whole months later, you're sitting in the living room of your home, eyes staring and staring — the bug is still stuck on it's back and it's been ten minutes.

Gojo-sensei peeks from around the corner. He is too tall to fit through the doorframe so he leans in inelegantly, "Wassup, kid. That's what you guys say these days," He winks.

You roll your eyes, half-starting to regret bringing him along for a visit home but you're not a fan of going on public transport by yourself and Gojo knows how to buy train tickets. "Please never say that again!"

He slumps next to you on the couch and you can hear the springs beneath you weather and slouch. Your house is close to falling apart — it mirrors your family in a way.

It's bleak and uncharismatically empty, lacking the thrill and warmth most homes have. There was no sign of religion on the walls or shelves. Your dad dabbled in it in his youth — God, God and oh yeah! God — but he escaped it before the damage was done. You'd heard him muttering and murmuring and shaking his head when you asked those sorts of questions: 'Don't put your faith in a higher being to change who or where you are, [F/n.] Don't be your mother.' Mm, and look where your mother's antics landed her, eh?

"You know," You begin absentmindedly, "Bugs probably carry bacteria."

For a moment, Gojo is confused; the blindfold hides most of his expression though. And then, he looks at the tiny insect on the windowsill. Since his world is a mirage of patches, an ocean of energy he explores, he looks at the insect. The hairs on his skin prick and he turns. The explosion of cursed energy is outwardly projected from you. He's confronted head-on with so much emotion, so much power, undiscussed thoughts, repressed trauma, sadness — it's nothing he's not used to but it's just strange to know how powerful you could really be if you tapped into it. Just for a split second, he's glad you're oblivious/unawakened or whatever. And that you're gonna be on his side to crush the higher ups.

If those pesky old wizards got to you... Well, he'd be screwed.

"Scared of 'em?"

You shake your head silently; you are a garden of red and black agonies all seeping with the puncture of rotten fruit. This emotion was a bluntness on the edge of light. Tepid eyes sear and then sharpen.

"Watch," A simper of a smile somewhat tugs at your lips. "I've been practicing."

Gojo does.

But before you could pull off your new-found party trick, your father enters the room.

Two months was enough for him to somewhat get his act together. Before, he used to look at you with a hollowness in his eyes like he was staring at an unwavering reflection of himself. It made you tremble with guilt, lugging it around like an anchor set to drown you.

Your father's eyes are less grey, less lonely. He splutters, a heavy tongue carrying unresolved emotions, curled up from wordless thoughts that dampen the back of his mind. "[F/n], do you want to take these to Mom's grave?"

You breathe, low and silently, lost in the world you forget to live in. Did it matter, this world? Where children cried themselves to sleep on the street, where people's words soften in sympathy when the words 'dead mother' escapes your drowsy lips one afternoon. And then it doesn't feel the same, because hearing it elicits a train of thought that cannot be stopped. Her grave. Her grave. Her grave.

It was like screaming — jaw unhinged, eyes widened, mouth agape and voice shrill. Screaming to the world about death, because humans may have made up the word for death but would fear it for eternity. They rest: six feet beneath the ground, rotting as society moves on, uncaring because no one cares for the dead unless they want to.

There's a different world when it comes to death, a difficult outlook, but no one cares because if you are living, you're living, you're not dead. But in the end, everyone dies.

You haven't been to her grave in literal years. You imagine it now, stone covered in moss, sticky with grief and loneliness. The grass around is overgrown, sullen and wilting, a weak and meandering grey that teeters into yellow during strong summers. The air is dead, unforgiving and cold.

"Sure," The words seem almost empty on your lips. You eye the tray of assortments held in your father's hands and turn to Gojo, "You can come with me."

Gojo is patient and replies with something kind but your eyes are fixed on the carpet and everything is blurry, stirring an unwanted sickliness inside your stomach. The colours of the world smash into each other, dizzying you further.

He takes the tray and whistles, "Let's go, [F/n]-chan!" And he starts walking off towards your garden.

It's okay. It's okay. It's okay.

You find a tender smile makes it's way onto your face, "Wrong way!" You call after him once he's disappeared from view.

"It's just my blindfold!" He laughs in the distance, which prompts you to do the same, and he starts hurrying to follow you.

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There are two kinds of silence; the sweet serenity brought about from peace, and the destructive absence of sound that drives you to the brink of insanity. The silence after murder is utterly obliterative, like a piercing pain that seizes ears and yet you've felt it more often than not — death is no longer an insistence in this line of work, in the jujutsu world. Death, in person, cannot be a man but a beast. That is the truth that you seek in your eyes, the claws of a tiger that sits on the lap of Thanatos, awaiting the scent of bloody corpses and silent souls.

You're not sure which silence is enveloping you right now as you stand atop a small hill, blinking back almost every single emotion: hatred, anger, sadness, loneliness.

Your legs struggle to hold what feels like the weight of the world, knees buckling, you tremble in front of the headstone. The sun is searing your blistered skin as it climbs into the sky, marking the dawn of a new day, and leaving behind the darkness of the day before.

Now, your eyes bleed into greyish stone, where the name of your mother is etched forever, a remnant of her life, a relic of the lost, if you will. It's the closest you've been to her in six years.

She's rotting in the earth, rotting as she waits for you.

Did it feel good to do what you did? Don't you miss me? (BE THE MARTYR FROM YOUR BEDTIME STORIES. Come join me. Join. Me.)

Your mind tosses and turns and you slowly lose yourself in the corners of your thoughts. The crevices of anxiety seep into the pond of your memories and every time you reflect on the beauty of your mother, her dreamy smile is cut loose by the tongue of her dead corpse, rolling in the back of your mind like a ghost that cannot be set free. Everywhere you go, she will follow you, and into the end of the night, she cannot be set free.

Sighing, you force your eyes not to spill tears as you focus them on the brown dirt covering Mother's body. Your heart hurts to the point of no return, rib cage rattling as the strings of your organ are stretched to the brink of breaking, teetering between mortal heartbreak and the loss of self in oblivion. You find your body shriveling under the agony of breathing and living above the molten remains of a corpse, which in the end, everyone will become.

It dawns on you as the sun glimmers in a breathtaking way behind the gravestone, as if dipped in stirred melting honey that drips across hopeful blue skies, that everyone dies. That one day, being a jujutsu sorcerer meant it was going to be your body being burned atop a pile of the others, skin peeling back against the roaring flames of a man-made fire. And then, the vessel that housed the essence that made you... well, you... would be reduced to greyish ashes and left to watch humans topple each other on the ground that they walk on.

You can feel Gojo's sadness besides you. Did you want this fate?

No, and yet your mind sulks.

That unwanted pining is born from a sinkhole your heart is submerged in, choking you in the watery wisps of an unattainable dream, a longing that comes from within. It's now more than ever when her absence dwells on you like a heavy wish, pressing your heart against the endless pit of oblivion, to bear the weight of the void, and the weight of being by your lonesome.

Your heart is trapped; suspended by it's own strings in a cruel but beautiful manner, stretched out as it's flesh is peeled off layer by layer, is that swelling sadness. You hate it. You hate almost everything about what you are feeling right now.

Why do I miss someone I know was bad to me? Because all the good memories outweigh the bad ones? Because I sympathise with her? I want to do what she wants me to?

Too many questions. And not enough answers.

"How ya feeling, kid?" Gojo asks suddenly.

His words disrupt the angry flow that had whisked you away from where you were, in an abyss between somewhere and nowhere. Your eyes tremble slightly, wavering in perplexion.

"Huh?"

"Mm, I take that as overwhelmed. It's fine to be feeling what you're feeling right now, you know? I'm sure it was rough having to deal with all of this by yourself."

Contrary to the literal volanco of feelings exploding in your head, you don't like talking about your emotions so you laugh and push it away a tiny bit. "Pretty sure my mom's rolling in her grave right now when she looks at the shitshow I've become."

It was a hollow laugh, but the kind that filled the uncomfortable silence that was slowly choking you. Ringing in your ears, your laugh swallows you and spits you out a few minutes later.

Gojo stares. You find it hard to read him but frustration is etched onto his face; when will you recognise your greatness?

He purses his lips, "What were you going to do to the bug?"

You gently rest the tray in front of the grave, "I read something. In my mother's diary. A trick to use the shield as a weapon. It's only a layer that separates you from them. If I can control it accurately, I can suffocate my enemies or at least bind them and make them immobile."

Gojo listens patiently, awaiting more. He is curious. You are learning on your own, finding and tuning your power. He thinks back to his days and the ecstasy that rushed within when you could become powerful, when you felt your strength.

"At first I did it on big stuff... like that pole outside the training grounds," Ah, Gojo chuckles, remembering how he did a double-take upon seeing the contorted metal on his way to Masamichi. So that's how it ended up like that; he seriously thought he'd gone loopy from Calpol. "Then I tried it on small stuff. Beer cans and bottles, different materials and matter. Then I could do it on thumb tacks."

People normally think along the lines of the bigger, the better! but here, it was things like this that were true accomplishments of ability. Gojo knows how difficult getting the tiniest of details is and he has lived long enough to see jujutsu sorcerors unable to disperse every speck of Cursed Energy from their surroundings because small things are harder to pinpoint, harder to control, to gauge a depth perception of.

He smiles, swinging his arm around your shoulder, "I should get some custom stickers or something. Something like 'Well done! You survived Satoru's training!' or hmmm maybe, 'I am proof that Gojo is an awesome teacher!' Yeah, yeah I like that one —"

You laugh. It's a much better laugh, more lively now. "I'll be sure to wear them proudly. I thought you'd be a slacker but I guess I was wrong."

Gojo sighs, "I don't work at 100% on something I don't like, [F/n.]"

He wants to incite a revolution. He wants to crumble the hierachy and rebuild the world. Didn't he say when you first met him that he wanted to kill all the higher ups?

You don't reply, instead twisting your vision back to the grave since it is the only thing one could look at.

Gojo knows this is not only the grave but also the death site, the crime scene. The Cursed Energy that lived here was like an eternally-contorting explosion. A time loop stuck repeating itself, regenerating demons and curses. Gojo's eyes were blackened by it. There was too much. It was too heavy, too dark, too powerful.