modulo!itadori yuji keeps seeing your face.
no matter where he goes, no matter what he’s doing, for some unknown reason, he always sees you.
it’s not always literal; sometimes it’s figurative. like the way that person orders their morning coffee at that cafe the two of you went to, liked to visit, or the way that person leans down to the local stray cat in the way that you would insist on doing every time you saw it or even the way someone sneezes and how he would always playfully tease you about it, much to your lighthearted chagrin. he’s not doing it on purpose, he muses to himself, it just happens like the way a fish knows to swim with the current in a river – naturally and on instinct.
the worst ones are when he actually sees you, in all your glory, standing there. just the sight of you alone is enough to have him winded as his heart stutters in a frail attempt to keep him alive. he swears you’re just as beautiful as the day you left him (or more aptly, when he made you leave him in a poor attempt to protect you from what he would become) or even more gorgeous if that is even humanly possible.
sometimes, yuji wonders if the universe itself is conspiring against him every time he sees you in some sort of cosmic bid to draw out his sufferings. however, that thought is quickly extinguished when his gaze drifts back to you, some hidden magnetism bringing him back to you, and he can’t tear his eyes away from you.
when you suddenly turn towards his direction, he freezes for a second before pulling the hood of his jacket to better obscure his face. a part of him questions if you really did see him, but you don’t. instead you shake your head and walk away from the ghost of him.
a sigh escapes his lips. he thinks it’s good that you didn’t see him; it’s better for both of you – for him to stay in the shadows and far away from your sight. this way, you can move on more easily if he’s there like a waking reminder of everything that was lost and could have been (like how you are to him).
fuck, even if by some miracle you were near enough to him for the two of you to have a conversation, he wouldn’t even know what to say. just the thought alone of having you there close enough to hear him, to touch, has his hands sweating and his heart palpitating. he’s sure his throat would close up and that he would fumble all over his words so badly that it would just be another wasted opportunity as you slip further and further away from him. (it’s what he deserves after all).
the moment when he lost you plays back in his head on repeat like some cursed film highlight.
“i think we should break up.”
you scoff, brushing his words off as you go back to absent-mindedly playing with his hands. “yeah, right. don’t joke around about stuff like that, yu. jokes are supposed to be funny.”
“i’m serious.” his tone is sharp and unfeeling, a far cry from the boy, now man, that you know and love. “i think we should stop seeing each other.”
the room’s temperature drops to zero the second the words leave his lips, as the two of you sit in silence processing them. it all fades into a blur of hot tears and pained shouts that make him wince every time he has to relive it in his mind – he tries to skip over it as best as he can, pressing fast forward on the metaphorical remote. that is, until he gets to your last words, which, for some reason, is where his mind refuses to skim past.
“hope you’re happy with this, yuji.”
a small part of him, made brutally bitter by the cruel passage of time and all its consequences, doubts if this might have been a curse placed on him by you in some sort of backwards twisted way. though it leaves as fast as it comes when he realises that this is the one curse he wouldn’t mind because it meant that he was still tied to you in some sort of gnarled string of fate.
he’s not a paragon; he knows that. in all honesty, he slipped a few times during the first few years, where he ran back into your warm embrace, and he could forget the weight of the world that he’s been carrying without you as his north star to guide him home. for some reason, you accepted him each time, and he wants to ask why you would even spare him a glance after everything, but he learns very quickly to not question good things. and so he chooses to pretend for just a moment that everything is as it should be – with you in his arms.
however, yuji always makes sure to slip away before you wake up, a final kiss goodbye on your forehead before he disappears back into the dark corners of society. because after all, you don’t deserve to be with this undying monstrosity he’s doomed to be. you deserve the antithesis of everything that he’s now fated to become; someone who can grow old with you, who can be there for you completely without having to owe their life to some grander cause than loving you, and above all, someone who isn’t him.
he ‘s stopped having birthday celebrations. hell, he’s even stopped counting the years. what’s the point by now? there’s no difference between this year and the next and so forth, so no reason to look forward to them or even acknowledge them more than one might note the temporary shift in the breeze before turning your attention to something better. yuji wonders how you would feel about this, knowing he used to insist on cherishing every single moment he had with you, birthday included, as a marker of the time he had with you.
anyway, if he still believed in birthday wishes, all his wishes would go to you.
most recently, the last time he saw your face was at hana’s funeral.
he’s hidden at the back of the congregation, far away from all the other mourners, that is, until you walk in and decide to take a seat three rows in front of him. even with a veil over your face, he could pick you out of a line up blindfolded fifty times over and over again. it’s bad, he knows, but for some reason, his eyes always dart to your left ring finger, and a sick giddiness fills his chest momentarily when he realises that it’s empty before the familiar feeling of grief and self-loathing floods his veins again.
he thinks this will be the last funeral he’ll go to for a while.
occasionally, when he does sleep, he gets to dream of something good instead.
“so, do you think we’d be like them, yu?” your fingers are entwined with his as the two of you exit the cinema in high spirits after watching a movie you’ve been dying to see for ages. there’s a rogue kernel at the edge of your lips, and yuji reaches out to brush it away with the soft touch of his thumb, the gesture is like second nature to him, and you fight the blush that grows on your cheeks.
you giggle softly at his question, clearly amused by his slight confusion. “duh, like the characters in the movie that we just saw. do you think we’d find each other no matter what, even if time itself was against us?”
“of course, baby!” he nods his head so enthusiastically, absolutely resolute in his words, you’re a bit worried he might sprain his neck in his fervour. “i’d even fight time itself for you!”
“you mean you would fistfight the intangible concept of time for me?” you raise an eyebrow at him, an incredulous expression on your face at his words.
fortunately for you, your expression doesn’t deter him; in fact, it does the opposite – it spurs him on even more as he goes on to excitedly detail how he would defend you from the evil clutches of time and in the end, the two of you would ride off into the proverbial sunset in loving embrace. this earns him a kiss from you, one that he eagerly returns as you melt into each other.
the problem, he soon learns, is that life is not a movie, and worst of all, yuji is not the shining movie star who gets the girl in the end and saves the world.
if it’s not a trip back to the past, he sometimes dreams of the future. in there, he sees a quiet life – maybe even a kid or two running around that look like the perfect mix of the two of you, but the most important thing is that you’re there with him, and in this world, nothing bad happens to you two. he didn’t leave; you stayed despite everything, including him, and best of all, you two were happy.
perhaps that could have been another alternate timeline, where there are no curses, no sorcery, no greater calling – just you and him as normal people working your way through the growing pains of life together. a world where his dying moments are when he’s old and grey, surrounded by family and friends, with your last thoughts being of each other and the life you both got to fully share.
the cruellest of them is when he questions if he could have had all that in this world, this lifetime, if only he were a little bit more selfish. but that’s the problem – itadori yuji doesn’t have a selfish bone in his body. he’d rather stab himself a hundred times over and cough out his bloody insides with every haggard breath if it meant that you were safe.
he loved you – no, he still loves you, more than you will ever know, and the truth of it is the reason that he had to let you go. unfortunately for him, this will be just a cross that he has to bear for the rest of his damned existence.
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