Yuta feels like he’s drowning: a sensation he’s grown accustomed to as of late, accepting it with bleak neutrality. He’s never even come close to drowning. This is what he would imagine it would be like, though—his lungs feel cold and wet and heavy in his chest. They tell him kindly that he’ll bounce back soon because he’s healthy and strong, but weakness threatens to overtake him nonetheless. He’s stopped wondering aloud if he’s going to die because it made his mother cry, but death to him is a bird against the window. It’s brief and transitory. He’ll come back from it, he’s sure.
He’s only accustomed to the sensation when he’s awake, though, and so he wakes up gasping for air from some bad dream, and he knows that he’s drowning. He can’t even speak for the fear of it. All he can do is make a low, whining noise that isn’t nearly loud enough to wake the night nurse, clawing at his chest and throat. This must be what it’s like. He’s never going to be able to swim.
“Yuta,” a quiet voice says from the dark, and it’s only because his mouth is shut tight as to not let more water in that he doesn’t scream.
After a moment, though, he adjusts: the tone tethers him back to the world, the hospital, the scratchy blanket and uncomfortable wristband he’s worn for weeks. Rika. The name comes to him like he’s always known it. It does feel like they’ve always known one another, after all, like they almost don’t need to talk. Yuta hasn’t had a friend like that before. He hasn’t had a friend before, at least not compared to Rika.
“Yuta,” she repeats softly, standing tiptoed beside the bed so she can reach over and pat his head like she’s feeling for a fever, even though the uncomfortable monitor he wears would pick it up first. He can’t see her in the dark. “Are you okay?”
Is she even real?
“Are you even real?” he asks, a hoarse whisper. She giggles.
“Of course! Don’t be silly,” she answers, pulling her hand back. Yuta’s eyes adjust at least slightly, and he sees her small frame as a blot of substance in the shadows of his room. There’s a blanket on the chair behind her—two of them, two different colors tangled together to make one that’s thicker and more substantial. The imprint has Rika’s shape.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Checking on you!” She beams: he can hear the smile in her voice. “It’s your super nurse Rika-chan.”
“You’re gonna get in trouble,” Yuta whispers with urgency. She giggles again, and he shushes her.
“I haven’t yet,” she says dismissively. “Are you okay? I mean it.”
“I’m okay. I think I just…” He sniffles a little bit. The weight presses down that much more. “I had a nightmare.”
“Oh, Yuta…”
He hears some effort in the darkness, and then a heaviness by his side, worming underneath the standard-issue sheets with him. She’s feverishly hot when she brushes up against him. When he asked his parents why she was here, they said (with some delicate and hesitant wording) that she stayed too long outside and got too cold, but she feels warm for that. Her hand finds his at his side, and she runs her thumb against the IV injection site below his knuckles, that scabbed bit of skin and plastic. She holds him so hard that she shakes.
“It’s alright,” she says, now close and quiet, head tucked into the pillow beside him. “I’ll stay here and protect you.”
Yuta takes a deep breath, deeper than he thought he could. His parents stopped staying the night once he got stabilized, and the idea of someone being here again is a relief.
“You can’t,” he protests quietly, a thought occurring to him with clarity and alarm.
“Why not?”
“I’m sick. I’m not supposed to cough on anybody.” To demonstrate, he raises his other hand to his mouth, covering it. “What if I cough on you?”
“Huh?” He feels her tilt her head more than he sees it.
“We have to play outside,” he says urgently.
“What? It’s too late!”
“No, I mean…” Yuta makes a soft, frustrated noise, lowering his hand. “I’m only supposed to play with you outside.”
“It’s okay, Yuta.”
“I don’t want you to be sick.”
Rika laughs.
“I’m already sick,” she points out, and he has to suppose that she’s right, even if he doesn’t know why. He worries again.
“Are you cold?” he asks.
“No.”
“I don’t want you to be sick,” he repeats anxiously.
“I told you, I’m already sick.”
He feels her shift again, this time only minutely, and then he feels her hot breath at his cheek, comforting and gentle. She stays there for a long moment. He feels her tremble again, but then she presses her lips to his face. It’s awkward and a little too long before she moves back. He doesn’t mind. He squeezes her hand, and she squeezes his back as she snuggles into his shoulder.
“We’ll be sick together,” she says, voice heavy with sleep.
A spiral of infinite horror churns behind Okkotsu, and he turns his back to it.
He can still hear every grinding, moaning part of the damned whole, curses weak and strong alike being ripped apart and together: an ouroboros. Uzumaki eats itself alive. He doesn't have to see it, though, and he focuses on tuning the noise out, getting as close to himself as he can under the circumstances. His friends are safe, at least for now, and the thought brings him some comfort. That was a good reason to stay alive. They wouldn’t be okay without him. Still, it’s only temporary.
“Okkotsu,” Geto Suguru says, half-laughing through a mouthful of blood.
Yuta ignores him. He has to.
“It’s a good thing I came to kill you before you learned to use Rika properly,” Geto continues. It’s taking all of his strength just to raise his arm in the air, but he still smiles with a known victory at hand. This is what he wants, after all.
Rika raises her head when she hears her name, baring her already exposed teeth at the man she hates.
“Rika,” Yuta says quietly, encouragingly, and she has to look back at him.
His hand traces up her side. She’s as cold as a statue: thoroughly unlike any other curse he’s encountered. She is brutally inorganic. The traces of humanity are only vestigial, remaining in her hands, her voice, the mere idea of Rika somewhere in there.
“Yes?” she answers, voice trailing up in a question. He doesn’t touch her. She touches him—to carry him, protect him—but the reverse is rarely true. His hand guides her enormous head down to his level, and he obeys obligingly until his arms are around her neck. It’s the first time that Yuta has hugged his best friend in years. He only lets himself cry into her neck for a brief second before he knows he has to continue. Fortunately, Geto seems paralyzed behind him, as spellbound as any storybook audience.
“Thank you for protecting me all this time,” he says, and the coolness of her smooth skin soothes him. “Thank you for loving me.”
Rika gapes at him, a little unsure. She loves him: she loves him, and she knows that he loves her, because he promised that he would, but it’s been a long time since she’s heard it. The reactive bundle of nerves that is the special-grade curse Orimoto Rika dulls to the point where she can see it and feel it. It’s a clarity that she rarely experiences, and so she doesn’t interrupt him. She doesn’t move. Behind Yuta, she sees the curse user’s face contort in disgust.
“I just have one more thing to ask of you,” Yuta continues. His hands trail down her neck to her jaw, the thing that charitably could be called a face. “I want to stop this guy. I don’t need anything else.”
He looks her in the eye that he doesn’t know is there, smiling warmly and purely, which is needed for a sandbox promise.
“My future, my heart, my body…” He strokes his thumb against her face. “They’re all yours.”
He knows it’s going to happen, so he has to convince her of the same thing. He has to be sure that she’ll believe him: that she’ll end it all with him so that they can be together. His friends are alright, and it’ll stay that way. Nothing will ever hurt them again. Nothing will ever hurt him again. She has to believe that it’s worth it when all she’s done is try and prevent the inevitable: twisted knives in a dark bathroom.
“We’ll be together forever.” He closes his eyes, his smile so big that it hurts. “I love you, Rika.”
Yuta opens his eyes again, and there’s a calculated coldness in them that even she can see, as awake as she is, but she doesn’t care, because he loves her, he loves her, he loves her. Nothing else matters. She finally moves, opening her gaping mouth a little wider, expectant and obedient. It’s better than growing up and getting married, because it’s truly forever.
“Shall we die together?” Yuta asks, just for her, whispering the words so only she can hear. His breath is close enough to feel.
It’s a promise, after all.
“Why are you interfering?” the chittering mass in front of him says, in the sound of sibilant legs against carapaces, a flutter of wings on the soft syllables punctuated by clicks where the words turn hard. Maybe he’s imagining it. Maybe it’s another way of speaking altogether. Yuta doesn’t dignify it with an answer no matter what the case is. He wipes his blade clean of blood on his sleeve, soaking the fabric in red.
If he were to anthropomorphize the roach-thing in front of him—and he could fairly do so despite its appearance, given that it’s a powerful sorcerer—he could sense a degree of irritation.
“Why…are you killing us?” it asks in a compound voice. Yuta glances back up at it. He’d be amused if he was at all conscious of anything he felt.
“Why’re you killing people?” he asks. He eyes the monster for any weak point, letting his eyes unfocus to see the cursed energy, but nothing is immediately fruitful. He hopes that he’s not imagining this conversation, because that would be kind of embarrassing, especially when he knows that he’s being watched.
“I like…” Kurourushi’s mouth opens and closes, mechanical and unyielding, not corresponding to any words. “I like…the taste…of iron.”
Yuta scoffs, readying to attack again, but the insect has him beaten.
“Blinding!” it whines, folding hands that appear out of nowhere, and the buzzing around it reaches a fever pitch. “Blinding…blinding!”
Yuta narrows his eyes.
Two smaller curses emerge from the greater mass, and he starts moving before he can so much as think about what he even needs to do. The less he thinks the better. Instincts always serve him much more dutifully. Quicker than the summoned curses, however, is a tide of those reinforced cockroaches, and he pauses to shove his sword down into the water below him, channeling as much cursed energy as he can manage into the motion, sweeping the scuttling tide away with the disturbed water. It’s enough. It’s enough, but—
Shit, he can’t take his eye off of anything. A curse user with this many moving parts to keep track of…well, he knows what it reminds him of, but he cannot allow himself to think. All he can do is duck the larger insects as best as he can, but he’s too distracted, and one of them shoots a glob of foul-smelling liquid at his face, blinding him. He huffs, trying to force his eyes open again, but then he feels Kurourushi’s cursed energy rushing at him from his side, and he swings, unseeing, to defend himself.
When the blade connects with something solid, he almost feels relieved, but then his eyes crack open just enough to see something project itself from Kurourushi’s foul weapon into his shoulder, and he takes it like buckshot, staggering back. He suspected as much. Still, as much as he’d like to avoid using reverse cursed technique until he’s whittled the deadlock down to just one combatant, he knows that it’s fixable. Importantly, he’s close enough now to—
Yuta’s shoulder explodes in a sensation that almost makes him vomit, a reversal of being shot: something crawling out of the gaping wound in his body, a pulsating mass that claws and chews the injury wider as it grows. He does feel sick. It’s some kind of poison, he realizes, secreted from the things crawling out of him. Even when he stabs his katana back, quick as anything, he can still feel it work its way through his system. Damn it!
The festering parasites screech as they’re killed, and as soon as he looks back to Kurourushi, Yuta is hit from the front. A wide gash unfolds across his chest, just below his collarbones, and he can feel the muscle fibers tear open bit by grueling bit. If he moves wrong, he’s going to puncture a lung. He has to move, though. He wills himself to, but the wind’s been knocked out of him, and he can’t even breathe as the cockroach curse crawls on top of him, pushing him down with force.
He can only watch as the thing’s mandibles open again, a grotesque mix of chitin and curved teeth like a rodent, dripping with putrefaction. It salivates over the wound it opened in his chest: iron! Its hands emerge again to hold his neck down, just in case he could move after all of that, a third reaching to push his head down. Bifold eyes twitch down at him with anticipation. Hunger is taut across its body. The inside of its mouth is soft and mushy, stark against its segmented armor.
Yuta doesn’t even have time to blink before he moves.
His hands first—as heavy as they feel, especially his left where his shoulder was torn apart—just to secure Kurourushi’s head in place, thumbs digging into its eyes, though it's done a fair enough job of getting close to him already. He needs all the precision he can possibly manage as he brings his head up to bite down.
Even with his attempts to stabilize things (a little laughable, really), his teeth still land off their mark, if only slightly, his mouth crashing into the insect’s upper jaw to rip it apart. He feels something crunch as he sinks his teeth further in; a dry smoothness gives way to something altogether too wet and fluid. Like a hunting dog, he doesn’t let go. The noise of it all is awful, but he can barely hear it. He holds on as long as he possibly can manage, breathing hard into the hollow space between Kurourushi’s armor and innards, because he won’t have a second chance at this if he doesn’t do exactly what he has to.
It only takes a split second of focus to slow and then turn the tide of his cursed energy, and when he does, it’s torrential. It explodes from him, and the curse explodes in turn, its eyes bulging messily with the sheer pressure as it's cooked from within. He feels the pain of a million tiny creatures as their hive-mother is obliterated, and he’s satisfied: satiated. He rips the remainder of its corpse in half just because he can, though it takes him a few seconds to let his fingers release it.
The excess reverse cursed energy coalesces around his wounds, and his body pulls itself back together slowly and deliberately. He’s soaked in blood. Even so, even though he overplayed his hand, he knows he’s invincible.
He chokes on a chunk of crushed teeth and exoskeleton and spits it out, covering his mouth. He admires his work.
“Okkotsu Yuta has gained five points!” Kogane trills next to his ear.
Gojo Satoru can’t lose. Everyone knows it. Everyone says it like a prayer, like the saying makes it true. Despite it all, the uneasy month leading up to Christmas is packed with measures and countermeasures, backup plans for backup plans. Switch training. Flocks of birds. Convergence. Supernova. Cursed speech. Legalese. New Shadow Style. Comatose, even now. Yuta tells them his only idea, monster that he is, and nobody can stop him. It doesn’t matter, though, because Gojo can’t lose.
Itadori doesn’t know about the final final option, carefully excluded from that particular conversation, so Yuta feels a little bit lighter around him in spite of what they have to do.
“It’s a little like—uh, y’know, pschew. Like crushing a Coke can,” Itadori explains on their walk to a spot far enough away that nobody will have to hear him scream.
“Right,” Okkotsu says indulgently.
“And that’s just the basics, ‘cause it sounds like the other stuff is a lot harder. Not that I’ll have to use it,” he adds: a prayer. “But it’s pretty neat just to know!”
“I’m excited to see what you can do!”
“Hey, do you think that you’ll be able to do it after…” Itadori trails off. They both look at the ruined city around them so they don’t have to look at each other.
“I don’t know,” Yuta answers after a pause. He’s still smiling, but it’s hollower now. Itadori has learned to tell the difference after Okkotsu killed him. “It’s not your innate technique per se, so I doubt it. I guess we could try it with your big brother, but I’m sure he’d rather not chance it.”
“Right.” Yuji clears his throat, bouncing on his heels. “But this is going to work?”
“There’s no reason why it shouldn’t.”
“I mean, it only will matter if—if Kugisaki…”
The gray sky yawns down at them. Yuta smiles, meeting Itadori’s eye properly, trying to be genuine, now.
“She’s going to be fine. Even if she can’t help in time, it’ll still be useful. What you’re doing is good.”
“...Yeah.” Itadori exhales. There’s an emptiness behind his eyes that Yuta knows. “It’s for Fushiguro, and that’s what matters.”
Yuta feels his heart clench in a way that’s all too familiar. He’s tuned to the timbre of the red string. He knows it when he sees it. Every empty twitch of Itadori’s hands is telling, but he isn’t even sure if Itadori knows. That’s usually the way these things happen.
“...Hey,” Okkotsu starts, before he’s interrupted.
“How long does this take?” Yuji blurts out, stretching his arms over his head like he’s about to do a triathlon.
“Oh! Er, not long,” Yuta reassures him. “And it shouldn’t be too bad at all. If you just want to…”
“Yeah, I know how it works,” Itadori sighs morosely, before bringing his hands back in front of him to snap his ring finger off.
Yuta can’t stop himself from yelping, and Itadori himself makes an awful noise of pain, but he stays mostly level-headed. He’s thought this through, which is a good thing. He’s prepared. Maybe a little too prepared. Okkotsu watches the scarred stretch of skin by his mouth tighten as he uses all of his willpower not to cry out. His resolve is only second to his raw strength: the only other person Yuta knows who could do this purely physically would be Maki. She’s different, though. She has nothing to give Okkotsu Yuta.
“Itadori!” Yuta gasps, voice cracking in panic. “What—y-you can’t—”
“Nah, s’cool,” Yuji says through gritted teeth. He holds his maimed hand up in a thumbs up. Yuta could faint. Regardless, the blood creeps back up the side of his hand, clumsily collecting back at the new mass of splintered bone and ripped skin. “See? If I just keep it like this long enough, it’ll scab over. Kinda gross, but it works.”
“No, no, no,” Okkotsu says sternly, trying to collect himself again. He holds out his hand. “Here.”
Itadori glances up at him in surprise, before hesitantly reaching over to drop his severed finger into Yuta’s palm. Yuta yelps again.
“No!” He almost fumbles it from how shocked he is, but he recovers well. He hands it back to an unusually obliging Itadori. “Your hand. I’ll fix it.”
“Oh! Yeah, I forget you can do that,” Yuji says, perking up. He holds his injured hand out, the compressed blood slipping away and falling to the concrete below with the movement. Yuta charitably doesn’t ask how he could possibly forget given that it’s how Itadori wasn’t brutally murdered. Instead, he just takes Yuji’s hand between both of his, focusing his cursed energy down to the single point of his ring finger, or where it was.
“You can grow it back, right?” Itadori asks, watching the process with fascination.
“Not now.” Yuta is so focused that it takes him a second to correct himself. “I could, I guess, but Copy only works if it’s lost for good. I’m sorry,” he says softly, sincerely.
“Eh. I’m already missing the one,” Itadori says with a shrug. “Lots of people are missing a lot more. I mean, you wouldn’t even have to do all of this if I hadn’t…”
“Don’t think like that,” he interrupts, firm. “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s all my fault,” Yuji says, ostensibly reasonable, voice flat. His eyes are shallow and vacant again. “There’s nothing I can do about it, but it’s true.”
“No, it’s not,” Yuta says insistently, holding his hand a little tighter. The skin closes up, raw and pink. “You couldn’t help any of this. It all started years and years ago. You couldn’t help being born.”
“I…” Itadori’s eyes slide away with a guilt deeper than even he is willing to express. “If I…”
“No,” he repeats, firm. “It is what it is. You couldn’t have done anything differently.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“I guess not.” Yuta brings Itadori’s hand closer to his face to examine it for any missed injuries, focusing on this rather than the conversation. “It’s easier to live with, though.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not really.” He smiles beatifically.
Itadori seems less than content. He just sighs, glancing down at his own finger in his bloody palm.
“I just need to start with saving him,” he murmurs, lost in thought.
“You will. We will,” Yuta insists. He brings Itadori’s hand closer to him, still gentle and careful, and idly presses his lips to what remains of his junior’s knuckles. Blood coats Itadori’s hand, his hands, his ring, his mouth. “I promise.”
He doesn’t realize exactly what he’s done until he realizes Itadori is staring.
“Er—we’ll do everything we can,” Yuta says quickly, stumbling over the words, as if the words were ever a problem. He drops Yuji’s hand as fast as he can manage while still being cautious. “I really mean it!”
“Thanks, Okkotsu-senpai,” Yuji says. He’s polite and sweet, and the worst part is that Yuta knows he doesn’t care. Of course he doesn’t. He’s somewhere unreachable that Yuta knows intimately, and he’s going to need to be the one to claw himself out. It’s upsetting that even a promise is meaningless. Really, though—how many promises to Itadori Yuji haven’t been broken? He wants to pick Yuji’s hand back up and repeat it as much as it takes. Instead, he just smiles, holding his palm out again expectantly, hungrily.
As soon as Fushiguro has medical clearance, they throw him a birthday party.
Really, Kugisaki and Kurusu do—and Itadori tags along, of course, and Panda wants to be included at all costs but insists that he can’t possibly do work because of his condition (tugging pointedly at his stitches), so Maki ends up doing the heavy lifting, which would happen anyways, because it’s Kugisaki. Inumaki draws signs in his careful handwriting, spelling out each letter on construction paper. Even Ieiri offers to chip in and buy booze, but she gets chastised for it, and nobody can buy anything anymore, anyways. Life is slowly crawling back into Tokyo, but it is slow.
This being the case, there are no luxury bakeries to buy a cake from, so the process is an undertaking involving several hours, a dozen bowls, and far too many cooks for the scope of the kitchen they’re working from. It doesn’t help that none of them know what they’re doing. Yuta himself still can’t stand for too long at once, so he sits in the next room over and listens to Itadori and Hoshi argue about what flavor Divine Dog would be. Something is done eventually, and if the cake’s star shape (studded with shikigami) is a little lopsided, nobody has the energy to complain.
It’s small. It’s nice. It would be nice, but the void of Gojo Satoru sucks all the air out of the room until none of them can breathe, even as they smile and sing and watch Megumi begrudgingly blow out the sixteen candles on his cake, weeks belated. Everyone tastes him in the sugar and hears him in the music. It’s not all bad to feel like he’s there, but it’s raw enough that everyone instinctively wonders why he’s not, until they remember, and Yuta can feel them looking at him with either suspicion or pity. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t feel like he can, not with everyone watching him.
He volunteers quickly when Fushiguro taps out of his own party and Ieiri helpfully cites medical bedrest as the reason, even though Fushiguro really is capable of going back to the half-ruined dorms on his own and it’s Yuta who needs a hand going up and down the wooden stairs. His limbs don’t move like they should anymore, even though he knows that they should. Everyone expects him to get back to work sooner rather than later, and he’s going to have to assist in cleaning up the country, but putting one foot in front of the other is a challenge enough.
“Stop making that face,” Fushiguro sighs, his breath making clouds in the evening air.
“What?” Yuta looks over at him wide-eyed.
“Like you’re upset and want everyone to pity you.”
“That’s not what I’m doing…”
“Well, cut it out anyways.” Megumi’s usual mood is tempered by something like contentment, especially now that he’s out of the crowd of people all focused on him. He has a gentle expression that Yuta can’t recall really ever seeing before. It’s bittersweet. “—Hey, you’re doing it even worse now,” Fushiguro adds, squinting at him.
“Sorry! Sorry.” Okkotsu glances away, sheepish. “Just looking.”
“It’s rude to stare,” Megumi huffs, though he doesn’t sound too bothered.
“I was just wondering…” Shit, now he needs an actual reason. “What’d you wish for?” he asks brightly, smiling over at his junior again.
“What?”
“You’re supposed to wish whenever you have a birthday cake with candles, right?”
“You’re not supposed to tell anyone, though.”
“Ah, you’re so serious about birthday rules!” Yuta teases, bumping his shoulder into Fushiguro’s. “So you do have a wish?”
“It’s not my birthday, anyways, so it doesn’t matter.” Megumi frowns, at least more than he was frowning before. “I missed it.”
“You can’t really miss a birthday,” he says reassuringly. “I was in Kenya for mine last year, so I couldn’t celebrate with everyone, but it’s not like it just was gone.”
“There’s a difference between being in Kenya and being…” Fushiguro trails off, eyes trained on the trees. “Whatever.”
“Ah, but it’s good that everyone wanted to throw a party, right?” Yuta encourages.
“It was fine.”
“And you even laughed when Kugisaki got you that fancy shirt—”
“They shouldn’t have done any of it,” Megumi says quietly.
“What?” Okkotsu asks, even though he knows.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
Both of them come to a stop with faltering footsteps. As expected, Megumi is stubbornly looking away like he didn’t say anything at all, like it’s all one big hassle. Still: he said it, didn’t he? He knows that he did. He knows that Okkotsu wouldn’t just let it go.
“Don’t say something like that,” Yuta says, trying to play the respectable, authoritative senior and failing somewhere around crestfallen. “Everyone wants you here.”
“But I shouldn’t be.” Fushiguro looks back over to glower at him, though there’s something else there. “I know they all look at me, and it’s just—”
Sukuna. Yuta can see the extra eyes leering out of the scar tissue even now. He looks away politely, the way everyone looks away politely whenever Kenjaku is conjured from his features.
“That’s not true.”
“It is. And it’s fine, but I don’t know why anyone even bothers.”
“Because you’re our friend,” Okkotsu says, smiling weakly. “And we’re happy you’re here for another year, no matter if you missed time or not. That’s really it.”
Megumi looks at him, and for once seems his age: barely sixteen, overworked and afraid. Even when Yuta met him as a first year, when Megumi was still in middle school, he seemed older than he was. He had to be, Yuta reasons. He realizes that Fushiguro isn’t going to keep arguing with him, and so he has to give an ultimatum before they part here, in the pathway outside of the boys’ dorms.
“Here,” Yuta says, offering his hand out. “I promise you’ll get what you wished for by your next birthday party.”
Fushiguro snorts, which is at least an improvement. He’s been laughing more lately.
“I didn’t even tell you what it was.”
“That doesn’t matter! It’s a promise, so it’ll come true.”
“What are you even promising it on? I’m not giving you anything in return,” he says dismissively.
“It’s not a binding vow! You don’t need to give me anything. Although…” Yuta hums, and Megumi’s shoulders slump.
“What?”
“Promise to be here for your next birthday,” Yuta decides. “That’s the condition.”
“Where else would I be?” Fushiguro asks skeptically, even though he knows. They both do.
“Kenya?” He shrugs, holding his hand out a little more insistently. His ring glints in the low light of the lanterns.
Fushiguro looks at him like he’s crazy, and then like he’s a little less crazy, and then like he’s worried he might be crazy. All in all, he still shakes Yuta’s hand, and Yuta beams.
“I guess I’ll plan to be around,” Megumi sighs, rolling his eyes. “But I’m expecting something really good.”
“Oh! You do need to tell me, then!” Yuta pulls his hand back, putting it on his hip. “So I can make sure I can make it happen.” Fushiguro laughs under his breath at some joke only he knows.
“No. That’s against the rules, remember?”
“So serious still…”
“Someone has to be.”
“Fine, fine,” Okkotsu says, pouting. (It’s not a good look for someone nearing his own eighteenth birthday.) “I guess I’ll just guess, and you’ll have to deal with it. Can I at least get a hint? I won’t tell anyone!”
Megumi makes a brief, inscrutable expression, before tilting his head in thought. It must be a tricky one, but even so, he nods, gesturing Yuta closer with the same flat expression he always has.
“I really won’t tell anyone,” Yuta starts, amused as he leans in, “so you don’t need to be all secretive—”
Megumi puts one hand on Okkotsu’s face and the other on his collar, pulling him in to kiss him hard: inelegantly, inexpertly. He definitely hasn’t done this before. The more Okkotsu thinks about it, he isn’t sure if he’s done this before, either. At least they’re in the same boat. It catches Yuta so far off guard that there’s nothing much he can do about it—and by the time he decides he might very much like to do something about it, probably along the lines of putting his arms around Megumi, his junior slips away, opening his eyes, still as stern as ever. Yuta smiles blankly at him, hands halfway to his shoulders.
“Okay,” Fushiguro says decisively, stepping back. “I’m going to bed.”
“What?” Yuta asks, perfectly pleasant.
“I’m going to bed,” he repeats, syllable for syllable. He steps onto the creaking wood of the building’s walkway, holding onto the post as he looks at Yuta, nonplussed.
“What?”
“Thanks for the present, Okkotsu-senpai.” For the first time so far, Megumi’s expression creases into worry as he takes in Yuta’s general state. “Okkotsu-senpai?” he repeats.
“Yeah?” Yuta answers, touching his fingers to his lips.
“...You’ve kissed someone before, haven’t you?”