Yuji and immortal!Reader cus I will start crying
(happy birthday, itadori yuuji.)
on the nature of daylight — itadori yuuji.
even back then, when you were both quite young, sorcerers standing beside each other, you both had realized that the world never stops moving. people were born, they lived, and they died. people never seem to escape this cycle.
but for you and itadori yuuji, both of you have become the cycle’s prisoners. perhaps not in the way people fear. you were not frozen, nor were you both empty. side by side, living through the seasons of life, perpetually in the state of endlessness.
at first, it felt like a blessing. you and yuuji laughing in a cramped apartment, arguing over groceries with each other, pouting about burning dinner, going out to go and eat dinner at a ramen shop together.
all of that subsided to the slumber of being in each other’s warmth, tangled together after long days that felt like they mattered. your bodies didn’t tire the same way others did, but you still pretended. you pretended that it wasn’t. because it made everything feel normal. because he made everything feel normal.
“we’ve got time, okay?” yuuji would always say, grinning like the future was something soft and kind. “we can do everything.”
you will always trust him first.
even when you knew you shouldn’t.
your only child had his eyes. everything about them was soulful, so warm and so tender. bright as the dwelling sun. it made you feel alive in a way that made your chest ache. you had that feeling about your son all your life.
you watched him grow older, you watched him have friends, likes and dislikes. you watched him enjoy yuuji holding him when the nights were cold, watched him as he curled at your side, asking to hear stories of your life. it was so glorious to be his parents.
and the two of you were not.
that makes all the difference.
when he was at the end of his life, exhausted by his own old age, of a lifetime he had lived by your immortal side, you remember the first time you noticed. a fever that didn’t pass. a cough that lingered too long.
it was grievous. his wife had long passed, his children have their own lives. just like the moment of his birth, it was you and yuuji by his side. seventy years had passed, and yet you were still the same people that were there for him. the cycle has commenced its conclusion.
the dwelling sunlight in his eyes, shining against the same coloring of his father’s gaze. yuuji constantly holding cool basins of water and a towel, trying to rub it all across his body, trying to bring the fever down, every single night, with no fail.
every single night, you held your child through nights that stretched like forever. it was ironic, how you keep promising tomorrows that were never there to begin with. yet you were his mother, yuuji was his father. the two of you kept whispering promises you couldn’t keep, because that was all you could do.
“you’re going to be okay, my son.” you said, over and over.
“i….” your boy whispered to you, looking to his father and to you again. “i love you….”
“i love you too.” you whispered back to him, your hand glazing over his warm face. “i love you, my son.”
“please….please be my mother and father again in another lifetime.”
you felt choked up by the tears falling down your face. “I…we will. we always will.”
yuuji sat beside you, silent. his hand on his jaw, looking over your son’s glassy gaze. he knew. he always knows when something is beyond punching, beyond saving. yet his hand drifted to your shoulder, trying to soothe you even when he knew it did nothing. there was no comfort being parents who bury their children.
the day your child died, the world didn’t end. the sun still rose. the birds still sang. people still laughed outside your window. you screamed, so guttural out of your body, it had come to the womb and to any god that had cursed you with this suffering.
you hated them for it. you had hated their happiness. you had hated your misery. you hated everything for continuing. except him. except for yuuji. he knew you were living through the unimaginable. he understood. and he would always hold you through it.
you turned to yuuji, expecting him to break. to scream, to rage, to do something. instead, he just pulled you into him. in a way that was so tight that you felt your breath escape you. so tight it almost hurt you to exist in his touch. and his voice, when it came, was small.
“we’ll remember our boy, baby.” he said, his hand resting on the small of your back. “he’ll always be here.”
like memory could replace a heartbeat.
as tears fell, you took in his warmth.
yuuji will always be warm with you.
even when everything else isn’t.
years turned into decades, decades turned into hundreds of lifetimes. life still moved on. faces blurred as much as names faded. you watched the remainder of your kin grow as the roots of a massive tree would. endlessly graves multiplied and flowers continued to overgrow in its headstones.
your friends, your comrades, strangers who kept becoming family in the milliseconds of your life, to their entire lifetimes. only the two of you were left to remember it all, to tell those stories, to sing about those songs under the same daylight that you have seen thousands upon thousands of times.
all of them slipping through your fingers like water. you stopped counting after a while, as much as yuuji has. it was easier that way. but the nature of daylight meant that you both would still feel it in your face, and yuuji would be beside you. he would be there to feel the sun too.
he was not going to be the same man you loved, even when you both no longer age. he still had the same face, the same laughter, somehow a different mannerism, a different mind. you held tighter to him. you keep him closer. your heart continued to grow with love for him. yet all the same, he was still him, he was still your yuuji.
you watch him change in the quiet moments. the way his smile lingers a second too long, like he’s holding it in place. the way he memorizes everything a little bit quicker, a little bit faster. but such knowledge didn’t matter when he could indulge himself in the sound of your laughter, the way your hand fits in his, the joys you found in the smallest of things.
almost like he’s afraid even you might disappear someday.
almost like he wouldn’t have any more lifetimes with you.
(which you won’t. but that’s the cruelest, most generous part.)
one night, long after the last of your grandchildren is gone and the distance between you and the blood of your blood, the bounty of your love becomes ever so distant, you find him sitting outside. he was staring at nothing. or maybe everything. it’s hard to tell.
you take a deep breath and you found yourself sitting beside him. quietly you put your hand onto his own. you see him turn to you slowly. he looked devastated. broken beyond measure. your heart breaks more than it already has. for a while, neither of you speaks.
“do you regret it?” you finally ask. your voice feels too loud in the quiet. “living this long.”
you don’t say with me, you think to yourself. don’t say you regret a life with me.
but it’s there. it’s always there, that feeling. that thought could always be there one way or another. he turns away from you for a moment. yuuji leans back on his hands, looking up at the sky. the same sky. the same daylight. always the same.
even in the pain, the two of you were always together under it. on the nature of daylight, itadori yuuji thinks that it was bearable. a thousand times more moments under the daylight and it would always be bearable with you beside him.
“no.” he says to you almost immediately, letting out a small pained smile. he takes a soft breath. squeezing your hand tightly. “you make the daylight feel so beautiful, even after all this time.”
“do i really?” you smile to yourself, almost so grievously.
“you do.” he replies to you, lifting your entangled hands together. he kisses it. and smiles back. “but it hurts.”
you laugh a little at that. not because it’s funny. because it’s true. because of course it hurts. everything meaningful does. everything that hurts means there was some joy that had been within its fragments. you had learnt that too well. you took in another breath and nodded back at him.
he turns to you then, really looks at you. almost like it had been that first time he met you when you were still fifteen, in the world you knew nothing about. yet he looked at you so beautifully. almost like he sees something new, something worth loving, something worth having in this world, even after all this time.
“hey, [name]....” he says, nudging your shoulder. “if we’ve got forever…”
you raise an eyebrow. “what is it?”
“we should keep living properly, right?”
this boy, no…..this man who refuses to let eternity turn into emptiness. who keeps choosing to care. to love. to try. again and again and again. under the same endless boundless sky, under the daunting daylight that you both live under. you intertwine your fingers with his.
“okay, my love.” you say to him softly. “let’s do that.”
even knowing what it costs.
even knowing how it ends.
(even though it never really ends.)
somewhere, far in the future, you’ll forget the exact sound of your first child’s laugh. the shape of their face will blur. their voice will fade. but the feeling of it all, that tenderness of the sunlight in the same eyes he shared with his father, the same soft whispered i love you your grandchild said, it was still there.
the love truly stays. the feeling is eternal. it never leaves. it just settles deeper into your bones. and yuuji is still there. he is always the memory that bridges those worlds with you. he was always your constant in this world. you were content with that.
but it isn’t empty, either.
as long as its you and him.
together under the daylight.
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