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Yuuki’s just about to grab the bandages when there’s a knock on her door, and even if she couldn’t sense the cursed energy outside it, she’d know who’s there. This late on a Saturday, Kugisaki’s either going through her self-imposed self-care regime or already asleep, and her cursed energy feels more like a bed of thorns than the spill of ink-black shadow hovering outside Yuuki’s dorm room door now.
Kugisaki would’ve barged her way in already, but Fushiguro waits for permission Yuuki doesn’t mind giving, calling out, “It’s open!”
The door opens then shuts till Fushiguro’s standing in the small genkan, wearing his own slippers instead of borrowing the pair Yuuki’s left sitting there. It’s not the first time he’s dropped by, and Kugisaki does too sometimes. It’s nice, being able to see them again, but it’s even nicer that they want to see her too without her inviting them first.
But Fushiguro throws a hand over his eyes the second he steps inside her dorm proper, his fingers pressed tight together, and like that still isn’t enough, he turns his face away to look at the wall too.
For a second, all Yuuki can do is stare at him. “What are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” he snaps right back, explaining nothing. “You’re the one who let me into your room naked.”
Yuuki’s never thought anything of being naked. She still doesn’t. But Fushiguro’s not looking at her, hand over his eyes, and past that, she can just barely see the tip of his visible ear tinting as pink as his cheeks.
She looks down at herself.
She is naked—mostly. Her pants are in her washing basket with her trousers and gakura, but she’s wearing socks and an undone shirt, a button-up of Gojo’s he told her to keep when her shirt got ruined during a mission and she had no more spares left to wear. It’s silky instead of soft, the fabric slipping like water along her collar and chest. She’s worn it to sleep a few times, and would’ve again now, if she didn’t need to change the gauze pad on her thigh.
It’d be a surprise Fushiguro’s so shy if she didn’t remember that night on her school roof so well. The second she had control of her body back, shirtless and startlingly cold from it, Fushiguro looked just long enough to register the fact she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath and shut his eyes. And then Gojo showed up, blindfolded but still clearly able to see through it, and Fushiguro refused to open his eyes again till Gojo let her borrow his jacket, just like Fushiguro’s refusing to open his eyes—well, pull his hand off of his face—now.
Yuuki pulls a blanket over her lap and buttons her shirt up enough to hide her tits before saying, “It’s safe to look.”
Fushiguro does, frowning and flushed, and his eyes drop immediately to the gauze pad peeking out from under her make-shift cover. The frown on his face deepens. “You didn’t go to Ieiri-san?”
“It was a small cut,” Yuuki assures him. “Seriously, I barely took any damage, and I know how to take care of this stuff. It’s fine.”
“It’s still bleeding.”
“Barely.” It’s not a lie, and it’ll be better once she goes to bed—she’ll prop her leg up with her blanket. She made it fifteen years without Ieiri’s help; there’s no need to bother her for something Yuuki can handle just fine herself. But Fushiguro frets a lot, way more than she thought he would. He’ll worry till it heals completely; that’s just the kind of guy he is. “If it gets worse, I’ll knock on the wall. Deal?”
“Deal,” Fushiguro says, shoulders relaxing. “You don’t need any help?”
Yuuki can feel her expression flatten even as her mouth twitches, fighting a grin. “You can look at me naked without passing out?”
“You don’t need to get naked for it,” Fushiguro says, but he’s blushing again, all the colour rushing back to his face. Yuuki doesn’t stop her grin this time, slipping teeth, and it’s a little mean to laugh when he’s so uncomfortable, but it’s funny. Kugisaki’s not shy, she just has no interest, and Gojo’s never bat an eye—not that Yuuki would know if he did when he’s always wearing a blindfold or those pitch-black glasses—no matter how little clothes she’s wearing. She woke up naked and he high fived her. Fushiguro’s the only one who’s ever covered his eyes and gotten embarrassed about it.
But he’s offering to help anyway.
“Sorry,” Yuuki says, swallowing her amusement and the urge to tease; by the look on Fushiguro’s face, she doesn’t do a great job. “You can’t really help with this. I just have to tie a bandage over the gauze, and that’s taped in place already, see?”
She tugs the blanket up a little, baring more of her thigh. The gauze pad is bloodier now, but barely, a dark red stain seeping through the thick cotton, the corners taped down. The bandages are a little overkill, but she moves in her sleep, and it’s better to make sure the gauze pad stays tight over the wound so she doesn’t get blood all over the bed.
Open wounds on her never stay open for long anyway. Bruises and cuts, the one time she caught a knife by the blade and it sunk into the muscle and meat of her palm before she learned how to stop it—they all took care of themselves quickly, closing up and fading long before she ever thought to worry.
Wasuke never said it was unnatural, but he never had to. Yuuki’s been a freak her whole life, and the idiots who picked a fight with her tried and failed to hide their bruises long enough for her to figure out theirs lingered much longer than her own ever have.
“I see,” Fushiguro says, looking like he doesn’t—or at least, like he doesn’t believe she does. “You’re that sure you’ll be fine?”
“I am.” He still doesn’t look like he believes her, so Yuuki adds, “I’ll go to Ieiri-san if it’s anything I can’t handle.”
That gets him to relax all the way. “Goodnight, then.”
“Night, Fushiguro.”
The door clicks closed behind him. Yuuki rolls her shoulders and sighs, tossing the blanket onto the bed to get it out of the way. It’s easier to wrap the roll of bandages around her leg instead of measuring a length, seeing as she’s gotten bigger and thicker than she was the last time she bothered to do this, but it’s almost meditative, wrapping the bandages around and around her thigh. There’s just enough slack to not cut off circulation if she flexes, but it’s still tight enough to do its job, holding the gauze pad snug and giving her another layer to bleed through if she has to.
She probably won’t. The bleeding is slowing, and she’ll have her leg propped up while she sleeps. By the time she wakes up, the cut will be gone with nothing more than some blood-stained gauze and bandages to prove it was ever real.
Her borrowed shirt isn’t completely buttoned up, three keeping it closed over her tits, but she can still look straight down her collar to the scarless skin beneath.
Ieiri never healed her when she came back to life. Checking for a mark wasn’t high on Yuuki’s priorities when she woke up with a cold ass on a colder metal table, but when she did—it’s not like she was hoping for anything. But she was expecting a mark, a reminder, some proof she’d taken so much damage she died, that just because she came back to life doesn’t mean it never happened.
Normal people don’t come back from the dead. Of course her skin didn’t scar.
Something more sensation than sound fills her dorm—Gojo, the only person she knows who can straight-up teleport even if he calls it something else.
Yuuki asks, “Do you think it would look cool if I had a scar on my chest?”
“From what?” From the sound of it, Gojo’s got something with him—a paper bag he sets on her desk, light enough that it’s probably food and not a souvenir, before she feels his legs press along her back as he leans over her, shadow swallowing her up.
“From Sukuna ripping my heart out. Do you think it’d be cool?”
Gojo hums. “Maybe. No one would ever see it.”
She would. But she does wear a lot of layers almost constantly. It’s not her fault she runs cold. Gojo runs so hot she can feel it through the fabric of his uniform trousers and her borrowed shirt, like a campfire against her back, and she’s curled up with him on his couch enough times to know he runs that hot no matter what he’s wearing, dressed down in casual clothes or wearing his high-collared uniform jacket.
It’s nice. Yuuki leans back into it, pressing herself harder against his legs. Gojo doesn’t so much as shift to better brace himself against her weight. He’s sturdy like that, solid and strong, and when Yuuki cranes her head back to look up at him so his upside-down face comes into view, he’s even smiling—but then, he usually is. His face just seems to relax like that, his edges sharp but his features soft.
He’s wearing his blindfold today too, clingy black fabric hiding his eyes, but even if he was wearing his sunglasses or nothing, he’d be hard to read. Yuuki’s learned how to, sort of, in the time she’s known him, but it’s not a sure thing. Gojo smiles with half his face or all his teeth, but even the close-lipped ones she’s seen have all been sharp, carving past muscle and meat to sink into whatever his real target is.
Whatever he’s looking for whenever he’s doing that, Yuuki hasn’t felt it scar. She hasn’t even felt it hurt. It’s heavy, but she’s strong too—strong enough to stay sitting straight even as she feels his focus shift, scanning her from scalp to socked feet before it returns to her face with something that feels like a slow blink even though Yuuki can’t see his eyes.
Yuuki just blinks slowly back.
“Did you want it to scar?” Gojo asks.
“Huh?”
“When Sukuna ripped your heart out,” he clarifies, reaching down to run his fingertips along her scalp; sensation spills down Yuuki’s spine, hot enough to make her melt back against Gojo’s long legs. “Did you want it to scar?”
“It wouldn’t have been hard to hide if it did. And it wouldn’t have limited my movement either, right? So I’d still have been fine to fight.”
“All good points,” Gojo agrees, “and not at all what I’m asking. Did you want it to scar?”
Yes.
No.
A strange mix of both, resignation and relief.
It should’ve scarred—on anyone else, it would’ve. No one else would’ve come back to life, or had Sukuna stuck in their soul to begin with, but an injury like that is supposed to leave marks. Yuuki learned control almost as soon as she learned first-hand how fragile humans bodies are in comparison to her, but she’s done damage before, not just leaving bruises but spilling blood too. She’s never fought with weapons, definitely nothing sharp—she’s never needed help doing damage before—but she’s still torn skin sometimes, and after it healed, it always left marks. Even the faint ones, even the ones that faded fast—there was still a scar there. Proof of what she’d done.
It was satisfying, sometimes, seeing those marks on people. Bruises under the bolts of jaws, red and raw skin on forearms and thighs, marks from her teeth. It felt good, catching flashes of those lingering marks, remembering what she did to cause them.
She doesn’t want to remember what it felt like when Sukuna ripped her heart out. It hurt—less than losing her hand did, but it still hurt. Probably from the lack of oxygen making its way to her brain. She definitely felt breathless, pushing out words she barely even remembers now. That conversation with Fushiguro hardly feels real. Sometimes, it feels like a dream, something foggy and faded, but everyone around her who knows has confirmed it happened.
Yuuki died. Her heart got ripped out. Sukuna did it. And there’s no proof of it on her skin she can look at.
“He’d probably like it if it did,” she says eventually. “Sukuna, I mean. He’d get off to it, wouldn’t he?”
The look on Gojo’s face is weirdly intent. His smiles don’t really soften his face, but without one, he’s all razor edges and sharp lines, like he could cut her open as neat and easy as a scalpel.
“Yuuki,” he says; it’s softer than the look on his face. “Do you wish it had scarred?”
If she had between yes or no, then—”Yeah. Kinda. It really would’ve been cool. And it’d have been nice to have, I dunno, proof.” That it happened. That she died. That she’s human enough for it to leave a mark.
It happens too fast for her to blink.
One second she’s sitting on the floor, using Gojo’s legs as a backrest and looking up at him, considering if she could fall asleep against him.
The next, she’s sprawled over her bed and Gojo’s kneeling between her legs, sitting up on his knees while she stares at him, trying to understand what the hell just happened, shoving herself upright.
“Sensei?”
“You know I can heal,” Gojo says, which isn’t true—Yuuki had no idea he could—but she’s too distracted watching him unzip his jacket to ask him what he’s talking about. “No matter what happens to me, I can heal it away like it never happened, good as new. Even if I couldn’t, I don’t get hit. I don’t get touched. But I have been given injuries that would’ve left scars if I let them.”
He tosses his jacket over one broad shoulder; Yuuki can just barely see it get caught on her desk chair in her periphery.
The rest of her is busy staring at what he was wearing underneath.
It’s as tight and black as his blindfold is, clinging to his skin, outlining every inch of muscle Yuuki’s sort of vaguely known exists since they met. Gojo’s not small—he’s big, tall and broad. His wrists and waist are the only delicate-looking things about him besides his razor-blade jaw, but at least that looks like it’d cut her if she touched it. His wrists are just pretty, veins faint and blue under the thin skin, and his waist is only small in comparison to his shoulders. She’d thought she understood that already, but before, he was always wearing that thick jacket, and even dressed down in the basement, his oversized shirts didn’t show off any of this.
But he said something—he was saying something. Now, he’s just waiting on her, implacable and patient, his smile resting on his face.
Yuuki makes her brain work, and her mouth follows suit. “If you let them? So, if you hadn’t…”
Injuries that leave scars don’t take much, just a sharp edge. Gojo’s made up of them; he’s the cutting thing. But he’s human too, made up of muscle and meat. She knows that. She’s never forgotten.
Someone cut him. Someone would’ve scarred him, if he couldn’t heal it away.
“Where would you have scars?”
Gojo reaches down, grabbing her wrist. His hand swallows it, pale and pretty against the sun-tanned skin of her arm. Yuuki doesn’t resist when he pulls, leading her hand up till her pointer finger is pressed to his left shoulder, right under the line of his collarbone. His body’s as hot as it always is whenever she touches him, a few degrees warmer than her own, campfire heat leeching through his shirt to drip down her hand and arm, and then he’s guiding her finger down and across his chest, carving a diagonal line over his shirt-covered stomach and hip till her fingernail is digging into the solid muscle of his right thigh.
It’s as sturdy as the rest of him, but the skin still dimples beneath the thick fabric of his uniform trousers. She can feel the sheer heat of him here too, that campfire a few degrees warmer.
It’s unthinking instinct to press into it, finger curling so she can dig her knuckles into the meat of his thigh. Yuuki only realises she’s done it when Gojo twitches, his thigh flexing under the touch, his fingers tightening around her wrist, but he doesn’t push her hand away or pull it closer, and the look on his face is that intent, intense thing again when Yuuki glances up, all angles and lines like the one he guided her hand along, left shoulder to right thigh.
When Gojo’s hand does move, it’s to guide hers till Yuuki’s knuckles are pressed to the meat of his right thigh, knocking on the muscle. He’s got to drop onto his haunches to do it, sitting on his heels instead of sitting up the same way she is, but Yuuki’s not paying any attention to the movement.
The diagonal down and across his chest was one unbroken line, her fingertip never leaving the fabric of his shirt, but the path he’s showing her down his thigh breaks—one, two, three, four times, till her hand’s almost touching the bed, her knuckles digging into the fabric and skin just above Gojo’s knee.
Yuuki swallows; it clicks dry in her throat. “What…”
“I was gutted first,” Gojo says, and it’s so light and casual the words don’t register before they do, jerking Yuuki’s focus back to his broad chest and the single unbroken line she drew across it like she’ll see a scar through his shirt.
Like she’ll see an open wound, a chasm carving through the skin. Like Gojo didn’t tell her himself he already healed it.
And his thigh—
“Stabbed here.” He taps his own fingers to it, the same four points Yuuki felt dimple under her own knuckles, the skin giving easily even with all the muscle beneath it.
Something soft and warm digs into the underside of her jaw—Gojo’s finger, curled into a hook to tip her face up and up to look at him.
He taps that same finger against the skin over his left brow. “And here, to finish me off.”
He’s not wearing his blindfold.
It’s not the first time Yuuki’s seen his eyes. She’s only seen them bared once before, but she already knew then that she’d never forget them, and she hasn’t, but distance must’ve dulled the memory, because she did forget just how vivid they are.
Fractals of blue—all blue, every blue—shimmering and shining and shifting into different shades, all of them bright and beautiful and blazing.
Even with his hair falling all around, it doesn’t soften his face. It didn’t the first time she saw his face bare, when he was interrogating that curse with a volcano for a head, but it made sense he didn’t look soft then. He still doesn’t, in the dim light of her dorm. He looks sharp, but Yuuki can see the curve of his cheeks now, the start of fine crinkles by the edges of his eyes, the flutter of his feathery lashes when he blinks, and he doesn’t look not-soft either.
He just looks like himself—more like himself, with his eyes bare and his hair down, silky looking strands falling over his brows. Pretty and stiletto, edges and lines sharp enough to cut, and Yuuki can still remember the heat of him dripping down her arm, that single unbroken line, those four knocks. The finger he tapped against his forehead.
He said he healed it. There was something to heal.
Yuuki reaches up without thinking, hand hovering over his face, and she realises what she’s doing with more than enough time to stop herself, to pull back and away, but Gojo only looks at her, something about his expression softening. Yuuki’s used to only having half a face to work with; having twice as much isn’t making him any easier to read. She didn’t think it would.
But he doesn’t stop her, so Yuuki brushes his hair aside, baring the skin above his left brow.
There’s no scar. Not even an old and faded one, something so pale and smooth it blends into his skin. There’s just pale, unmarked skin, and when Yuuki swipes her thumb across it, there’s no texture proving her eyes wrong, the skin here as smooth as the skin of her own chest.
Her hand’s almost pressed against his face, not quite cupping his cheek. She lets it drop into her lap. Her palm’s as scarless as the rest of her skin, unmarked, like nothing ever happened. Good as new.
Yuuki says, “I’ve never been stabbed, but I caught a knife with my hand once.”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. I didn’t know what I was doing. I mean, it’s better I caught it than get stabbed, but I wasn’t really thinking about what it could do to me.” She wasn’t thinking anything except for a small, muted flash of confused annoyance, wondering if she had to care about the knife cutting through the air before it was cutting into her. It ended the fight pretty quickly, anyway, if the scuffles she got into can even count as fights, catching a knife by the blade. “It didn’t do much. It definitely didn’t leave a mark.”
“Which hand?” Gojo asks.
Yuuki turns it over for him, offering it palm-up, and she can feel him focus on it even as the look in his eyes barely changes, his attention like a solid thing her fingers can dig into, like the muscle of his thighs and chest but without any give. His hair falls into face when he bows his head forward, but she can still see his eyes glowing through it, his lashes and hair tinted blue like his eyes emit light.
With her other hand, Yuuki traces the memory of the cut along her palm. It didn’t bite deep, caught in her fingers before it could do much damage, but she still felt it sink in, momentum and muscle pushing it into the meat of her palm hard enough to split skin and draw blood. It didn’t even really hurt, more surprising than painful, but for as long as it lasted, making a fist made it throb, pulling on the wound.
Gojo hums, running his fingertip feather-light across the same path she traced. It’s almost ticklish, her fingers twitching, but Gojo doesn’t do anything more than that, running his fingertip along her palm, slow side-to-side motions Yuuki tracks with half-lidded eyes.
It’s easy to remember how it hurt, even now, the first semi-serious injury she ever got. It wasn’t even all that painful or memorable—her surprise lasted longer than the fight did. But it lingers, the memory of how it felt.
Sharp surprise, a flash of pain that settles into a fainter sensation, like a burn beneath her skin.
Blood wells, collecting in her palm.
Gojo cut her hand.
Yuuki yelps, more out of surprise than hurt even as she jerks away from her own hand, but Gojo’s other hand is iron around her wrist. She’s still not used to having someone who can hold her in place even after all of their spars. It’s not a bad thing, or at least, it doesn’t feel bad that Gojo can do it so effortlessly, but even with her palm filling with blood, the smear of red shining on his fingernail, it’s as easy as it’s always been to relax in his hands, trapped and trusting he won’t hurt her more than she can take.
And he doesn’t—he lets the blood well, rubbing his thumb along her wrist, before he tugs just enough that Yuuki doesn’t resist at all when he pulls her hand up towards his face. Her blood drips off her palm, tiny droplets landing on Gojo’s thighs.
Yuuki watches, heart throbbing in her hand and throat, as Gojo presses a soft-mouthed, close-lipped kiss to her bloody palm.
He intertwines their fingers, palm-to-palm; the wetness is slippery between them, slick and hot, leaking out. Yuuki barely notices it over the red on Gojo’s mouth.
Gojo wears lip gloss. Every time she’s seen him, his mouth has shone with something even in the dim light of the basement, pink and glossy and soft like the rest of him has never been. Yuuki’s gotten used to it. But this shine is something else, red and wet and dripping, a slip of white teeth gleaming between the blood, and she can still see softness of his mouth, but for the first time, it looks as cutting as the rest of him always has. It looks like it has cut, like his close-lipped kiss is what slit her palm open, and it didn’t, she knows that, but he’s all sharp edges and lines, and she could believe it, that she could be cut open from just his kiss.
The shock of red looks good on him, on his pale skin and paler hair and every-blue eyes.
She can feel how wide her own eyes are, how flush her face is, like Gojo’s kissed her cheeks with that blood-stained mouth.
That’s probably not a thought she should be having. Yuuki doesn’t really care.
She doesn’t resist when Gojo’s hands come up to curve over her shoulders to push her down. It’s so gentle she could resist or fight it, probably, if she wanted to. She doesn’t.
Gojo lays her out till she’s lying down flat, sinking into the mattress from the press of his bodyweight, one big weighted blanket with a bloodstain and superhumanly bright eyes blazing down at her, and there’s something dark in them despite the glow, but nothing changes how safe she feels with this man even as her blood drips off his mouth.
Yuuki lifts her head just enough to watch it land on her borrowed shirt, and the flash of disappointment she feels is immediate.
“Yuuki-chan?”
“I liked this shirt.” It’s not ruined, and the red might wash out, but she’s not about to get up now to save it even if it is Gojo’s shirt. He probably knows how to wash it out. She’ll be able to give it back to him then, and it’s only fair, but she really did like this shirt. “I slept in it a few times.”
The silence stretches too long, and Yuuki’s gut drops. Is the shirt beyond saving? She’s never had to wash a material like it before. If the blood can’t wash out—
The intent look on Gojo’s face is a whole lot sharper when his mouth’s red with blood. His eyes are worse, a blue flame blaze burning on the spot of blood staining the pale blue of her borrowed shirt, and Yuuki’s ready for anger or, worse, disappointment that she was so careless with his clothes when she feels Gojo’s hands tighten around her shoulders so hard it’d bruise someone else, watching the manic glint grow in his eyes.
That...doesn’t look like disappointment.
“Sensei?”
“I’ll give you a new one,” he breathes, “I’ll give you as many as you want,” and his voice is rougher than she’s ever heard it, tight as the hands on her shoulders before he leans down, pushing her deeper into the mattress.
Soft, gentle pressure, dripping wet and right on her chest, right where Sukuna once tore her heart out, right where the skin closed over like it never happened.
There’s a blood smear there now, a stain from Gojo’s red mouth.
Yuuki makes a tight, trembling noise all in the throat.
It’s not a scar. The kiss to her palm didn’t cut it; no matter how hard Gojo kisses her chest, her ribcage won’t splinter the same way it did then. Yuuki knows her body, what it can give and take. Sukuna was wearing her skin, but it was her strength that punched through her chest. Gojo would need to use cursed energy to crack her open like that.
But that noise is still trembling in her throat, and Gojo’s still sharp, razor-edged and cutting and close, patient and implacable and so pretty it almost hurts.
“Please,” Yuuki says, watching the blood drip down her chest. “Do it again, sensei.”
The next kiss is harder and hotter, forceful enough to make her feel the hard press of Gojo’s teeth even with the softness of his lips to cushion it, and the noise Yuuki makes hitches in her throat, catching like she’s breathless, like there’s not enough air to even gasp with. She keens instead, wrists rolling so she can clutch at her pillow, a few strands of hair caught on her fist, and it’s so far away from the hot wet throb of her heart in her fist, the sense-memory of it filling her palm, something she can dig into, splitting under her nails, that she has to blink at the ceiling before it resolves itself back into recognisable shapes.
White hair, pale skin, bluer than blue eyes. The weight of Gojo’s attention cutting through her, into muscle and meat, and she can feel it like a fist around her heart—except it’s not cracking her open, isn’t splitting her ribs to rip her heart out. It’s a scalpel opening her up from collarbone to navel, neat and easy, like he didn’t even need the bloodstain to remember the hole in her chest, like it’s there no matter her layers, no matter the oversized hoodies and scarless skin closed over it.
It makes her heart throb, pulsing in the palm of her hand; when she digs her nails into the broken skin, blood welling, she can almost feel it give.