#gravare

He looks like he’s in his early twenties. The same broad shoulders, the same easy stride his body remembers even when his mind drags behind it some days.

His face hasn’t learned how to look eighty-nine.

It still carries youth in the line of his jaw, in the fullness of his cheeks, in the stubborn health of his skin.

Only his eyes contradict it.

They don’t have the weight of someone who is tired from a late night.

They have the weight of someone who has attended too many funerals and kept showing up anyway. They’ve watched seasons turn without permission. They’ve learned how to smile for people who would not understand the truth, because the truth makes them uneasy, because the truth invites questions he no longer has the patience to answer.

He walks past the small building near the entrance where a caretaker keeps track of things.

The man inside is new, most of them are new, now.

There’s a brief moment where the caretaker looks up, ready to greet him like a stranger, then hesitates like he’s deciding whether it would be rude not to recognize the person who comes here so regularly.

Yuuji nods first, making it easier.

“Morning,” he says, voice low. “Sorry if I’m early.”

“You’re… not bothering anyone,” the caretaker answers, still uncertain.

Yuuji offers a small smile, the kind he uses now that doesn’t ask for anything back.

“Thanks.”

Then he’s moving again, following the paths between graves as if he could do it with his eyes closed. In a way, he can. He knows where the stones lean a little, where the ground dips after rain, where one particular pine tree drops needles onto the pathway and makes it slick. He knows which corner of the cemetery catches the wind hardest. He knows the sound of the place, the muted crunch underfoot, the way distant traffic turns into a steady hush, the occasional call of a bird that sounds like it doesn’t belong in a city at all.

A long time ago, he used to hate cemeteries.

Not because he was afraid, but because they made death feel organized.

They made it look neat, as if something could be arranged and handled and then set aside.

Now he understands why people need it to look that way — if it looked like it truly feels, nobody would be able to walk through the gate.

He passes familiar names.

Some are sorcerers. Some are civilians. Some are people who died in the wrong place at the wrong time, the names carved into stone because there was a family who loved them enough to insist they be remembered properly. Some stones have offerings placed at their bases, some have wilted flowers, some have polished surfaces that show they’re cared for often.

He doesn’t stop at every one.

He can’t.

He keeps going until the rows angle left, until the ground slopes a little, until he reaches the grave he always comes to last — because it’s the one that makes him linger, and he has learned to give himself time for that.

The headstone stands with quiet stubbornness, not tall, not ornate. It’s a simple slab, dark stone, the name engraved in clean lines. The dates beneath it sit like facts that refuse to soften with age.

Fushiguro Megumi. Birth. Departure.

There are years between those two lines that should have been longer.

Yuuji knows the numbers by heart.

He still catches himself counting the gap sometimes, as if math could argue with reality.

He stops in front of the stone, and for a moment he just stands there.

The cemetery is quiet, but it isn’t empty. Someone is sweeping along a path two rows over. A couple stands near a grave with matching vases, their heads bowed. A child’s voice travels faintly from somewhere, scolded quickly into silence.

Life goes on, even here.

Especially here.

Yuuji shifts the bouquet from one hand to the other. The paper crinkles. He takes a slow breath through his nose, letting the cold air settle his chest.

“Hey,” he says.

It comes out like he’s greeting someone at a café, like he expects Megumi to lift his head from a book and grunt something back. Like he expects that familiar, unimpressed look that always made Yuuji want to do something louder just to break it.

He crouches, careful with his knees. His body doesn’t complain the way it should at his age — it never has, not anymore. Sometimes he forgets how strange that is until he sees someone else move slowly, until he watches an elderly person steady themselves with a cane and realizes he looks nothing like them even though he should.

He sets the bouquet down in front of the stone and peels the paper away gently.

The flowers are Japanese gentians — rindō — deep indigo petals, narrow and delicate, with a color so concentrated it almost looks unreal against the winter-dulled grass. Yuuji chose them on purpose. He chooses them every year, when he can find them, even though they’re not the easiest flower to get on the fourteenth of February when everyone else is buying roses and carnations.

Megumi liked them.

Not in a loud way. Not in a way that would have made him admit it easily. But once, years ago, they had passed a patch of them growing stubbornly near a shrine’s steps, and Megumi had paused. He’d looked down like he was considering something serious, and when Yuuji had asked what was up, Megumi had said, flat as always, “They bloom even when it’s cold.”

As if that was enough of a reason.

It was, apparently. It still is.

Rindō carries meanings that feel too sharp to say out loud. Justice, some people call it. Sincerity. Sometimes, I love you in the language of flowers, though Yuuji doesn’t know who decided that and he suspects Megumi would have rolled his eyes. It also means grace and elegance, imbued in a feeling of sadness and love.

Yuuji doesn’t bring them because he needs the symbolism to do the speaking for him — he brings them because he remembers Megumi’s face when he saw them, that tiny pause where his guard slipped for a second, where he looked like he wanted to keep something small for himself.

Yuuji adjusts the stems so they rest neatly against the base of the stone. He brushes away a few fallen pine needles that gathered since the last time he came. The cold bites his fingertips, and he doesn’t pull away.

He lets it sting. It makes him feel present.

Then he looks up at the headstone and lets his shoulders relax the way they do when he’s finally alone.

“I’ll start with the boring stuff,” he tells it, as if Megumi is there and would complain if Yuuji got too emotional too fast. “Because it’s you.”

His voice is soft. It doesn’t carry far.

Yuuji doesn’t need anyone overhearing the way he talks here. He doesn’t need anyone deciding what kind of person he is based on what grief looks like when it’s been alive for decades.

“I had that meeting with the committee again,” he continues. “The one I told you about. The new people. New rules. They’ve got those screens now that show cursed energy readouts like it’s weather. They can predict a surge before it happens, most of the time.”

He huffs a quiet laugh that doesn’t have much humor in it.

“They keep talking about ‘optimization.’ Like you can optimize this.” His gaze drops to the stone again, and his mouth tightens. “Anyway, they wanted me to sign off on some kind of partnership thing. They want to share data with the public safety side, and the tech side, and some corporate group that says they can make cursed energy ‘transparent.’”

He pauses, listening to the wind scrape along the graves like fingertips across paper.

“I said no,” he adds, after a beat. “For now. I know you’d say it depends. I know you’d ask what the contract actually says. I read it. I read all of it.” He lifts his eyebrows at the stone like he expects Megumi to be surprised. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Yuuji’s throat tightens briefly, not because of the paperwork, but because of how easy it is to imagine Megumi’s expression. He can picture it so clearly that his body reacts like the person is right in front of him.

He breathes out.

“They’re not wrong that things are different now,” he says. “Curses changed. People changed. The way they form, the way they move. It’s… messy.” His fingers shift on his knee, restless. “There are fewer of the old kinds, I think. Fewer random tragedies in alleyways. But then you get these new ones that attach to networks, to broadcasts, to whole crowds at once. You don’t fight them one person at a time. You fight them like you’re trying to untangle something.”

He shakes his head slightly.

“I don’t like it. I’m doing it anyway.”

That’s been his truth for a long time.

He doesn’t like most of what he has to do.

He does it because someone has to.

He does it because he promised people he would.

He does it because quitting would feel like letting the dead down, and he has already survived too much to allow himself that kind of betrayal.

He reaches into the pocket of his coat and pulls out a small charm — paper folded neatly, inked with a simple seal. It’s not a grand thing, just a protective ward he made himself, the kind he used to learn in school when he still had classmates to copy from and complain with.

He sets it beside the flowers.

“I know it’s stupid,” he tells the stone. “I know you’re not… here.” He swallows, the muscle in his throat working. “But it makes me feel better. So.”

He tilts his head, looking at the engraved name, and for a moment his face softens in a way he rarely allows anymore.

“I saw a kid today,” he says quietly. “Well. Not a kid. He’s nineteen, I think. Big mouth. Acts like he’s invincible. Keeps trying to pick fights he can’t win.” Yuuji’s lips twitch. “He reminded me of someone.”

He lets that sit.

“I told him to stop doing the hero thing,” he adds, voice turning rough around the edges. “He didn’t listen. Of course he didn’t.”

Yuuji shifts his weight slightly, still crouched. His knees don’t ache, but the position pulls at something in his back that makes him aware of time anyway. He’s so used to being physically capable that he forgets what it means until he remembers his age again like an unwanted fact.

“It’s weird,” he says, glancing away for a moment at the rest of the cemetery. “To be the person people look at like I’m… experienced? Like I’m wise. I’m not. I’m just still here.”

The words come out plain, but they carry something heavier under them. Yuuji doesn’t dress up his feelings. He never learned how. He just learned how to keep going with them sitting in his chest.

He looks back at Megumi’s stone.

“And it’s Valentine’s Day,” he says, like he’s making a report. “Everyone’s acting ridiculous. There were chocolate displays everywhere. Pink everywhere. Even the guys at headquarters were being weird about it.” He snorts, then shakes his head again. “I bought a box of those bitter ones you like— well, liked.”

He reaches into the paper bag and pulls out a small box, the kind sold at a convenience store with too much care put into the packaging. It’s not fancy. It’s not even particularly special. But it’s there, and that matters to Yuuji more than the quality of the chocolate.

He sets it down beside the charm.

“I know,” he says, anticipating criticism that will never come. “It’s cheap. But I thought—” His voice catches. He pauses, then tries again. “I thought you’d complain if I didn’t bring anything. And then I’d tell you you’re dead, so you can’t complain. And then you’d still find a way to look annoyed.”

His breath shakes once. He forces it steady.

“Anyway,” he says softly. “That’s my day so far.”

He sits with that, with the cold air and the stone and the small offerings at his feet. He lets himself be quiet for a minute because he has learned that silence here doesn’t swallow him the way it used to. It just holds him.

His eyes drift to the carved dates again.

He can’t help it. He never can.

When Megumi died, Yuuji was… young, in every sense that matters. Not just because his body was young, but because he still believed grief might be something you do once and then it ends. He still believed the sharpest pain would dull into something manageable with enough time.

He knows better now.

Grief doesn’t end.

It changes shape.

It learns where to sit.

It becomes part of the daily routine the way breathing does.

Some days it’s quiet.

Some days it surprises him so hard he has to stop walking.

He leans forward and lifts his hand toward the stone.

The engraved letters are worn slightly at the edges from weather, from time, from fingers that keep coming back to trace them. Yuuji’s fingertips find the divots and follow them carefully, as if reading in Braille, as if he could pull Megumi out of the stone by remembering hard enough.

The rock is cold. It doesn’t give.

Yuuji’s fingers move over the name, slow, reverent without being dramatic. He’s done this so many times that the motion feels automatic, like it’s a necessary step in making sure Megumi is still real.

“Megumi,” he says, using his name like an anchor.

The sound of it on his tongue still hits him in a way his body recognizes immediately. There are names you say without thinking, and names that stop your heart for half a second no matter how many years have passed.

He keeps tracing the carved lines.

“I’m doing okay,” he murmurs. “I know you’d call bullshit on that. But I’m… still doing it. Still going.”

He presses his thumb gently into one of the grooves, then drags it along the curve of a character.

The stone doesn’t respond.

It just stays there, patient and indifferent in the way only objects can be.

“I get tired,” he admits, the words leaving him like a confession. “Not in the normal way. I mean— sometimes I do get tired like that too. But mostly it’s… inside.”

He lifts his eyes to the space above the stone, not looking at anything in particular.

“It’s been hard,” he says. “It’s been hard for a long time. And I know you’d tell me it’s obvious. I know you’d tell me to stop stating the obvious. But I—” He swallows. “I just want you to know I’m still here. I’m still trying.”

It feels strange, sometimes, to talk to a grave like it’s a person. It felt strange the first few years, when his throat would close up and he would stumble over words and feel embarrassed about it even though there was nobody to judge him.

Now it feels like the most normal thing in the world.

Megumi is the person he talks to when he can’t say things to anyone else. Megumi is the one he doesn’t have to explain himself to. Megumi is the one who knew him before the years piled up, before the curse of slow aging became a shadow following him through every doorway.

There are people still alive who know the truth about Yuuji. People who have met him in different decades and realized, slowly, that he doesn’t change. There are new sorcerers who have heard his name like it’s a story, like it’s something distant and exaggerated. There are others who avoid asking questions because they can sense there’s pain behind the answers.

But Megumi knew him when he was just Yuuji.

When his world was small enough to fit inside a classroom.

When his greatest fear was dying without meaning.

Yuuji keeps his fingers on the stone and lets his voice lower even more, like he’s telling a secret just for the person in front of him.

“I miss you.” he says.

It’s simple. It doesn’t need decoration. It doesn’t get easier to say. It just becomes necessary.

“I miss you so much,” he adds, the words rougher. “And it’s stupid because I’ve said it every time and it doesn’t change anything, but I keep hoping maybe… maybe it matters that I say it.”

He inhales carefully.

“I think about you every day,” he continues. “Not in a dramatic way— not like I’m sitting around crying all the time.” He snorts softly again, wiping at the corner of his mouth with his knuckles out of habit. “But you’re there. In everything. When I pick up my shoes. When I see someone with dark hair that falls in their eyes. When someone gets angry quietly instead of yelling. When it rains.”

His breath catches on the last word. He steadies it with a small exhale.

“I don’t go a day without you crossing my mind,” he says. “Not one. I don’t think I ever will.”

The cold makes his eyes water slightly. He blinks and doesn’t bother hiding it, because the stone doesn’t care and because he doesn’t have to pretend here.

He shifts his hand, tracing the dates now.

Birth.

Departure.

His fingertip follows the numbers, and he hates how final they feel. He hates how clean they look, like they’re enough to summarize a person.

Megumi was more than a name and a pair of dates.

He was the quiet stubbornness that kept them alive when things got ugly. He was the steady presence that didn’t need to be loud to be strong. He was the person who would stand in front of someone else without thinking about what it would cost him, then act like it was nothing afterward.

Yuuji remembers a hundred little moments.

Megumi scowling at him for eating too fast. Megumi handing him a bottle of water without comment. Megumi standing beside him in the middle of a ruined street, eyes narrowed, blood on his face, still calculating the next move. Megumi sitting on a step with his head tilted back, eyes closed for a second, letting himself breathe like he was allowed to be young.

Yuuji misses all of it. The big moments. The small ones. The ordinary ones that felt like nothing back then and now feel like treasures he can’t hold.

He keeps talking because stopping would mean sitting in the silence with everything unsaid.

“I went by the old school last week,” he tells the stone. “It’s different. They rebuilt it twice. There’s a whole wing now for… I don’t even know what to call it. ‘Cursed systems integration,’ they say.” His lip curls with faint annoyance. “It’s like they’re trying to make jujutsu into a machine. Like if you get it organized enough, nobody has to suffer.”

He pauses, then adds more quietly,

“I wanted it to work.”

He stares at the ground for a moment, at the winter grass, at the small pebbles embedded in the soil.

“I still want it to work,” he admits. “I want the kids now to have something we didn’t. I want them to have normal days. I want them to have stupid holidays where their biggest problem is whether their chocolate is too cheesy.”

His throat tightens again.

“I want them to have time.”

That’s the thing he’s been robbed of in the strangest way. Yuuji has time. Too much of it. But it isn’t the kind of time that feels like a gift. It’s time that keeps going after everyone else’s stops. It’s time that turns him into a witness, again and again, to endings he can’t change.

The curse that slowed his aging wasn’t some blessing meant to keep him safe. It was a consequence. A leftover knot in his existence from the way his life was twisted around curses and vessels and impossible survival.

He lived.

He keeps living.

And the world keeps asking him to watch.

He looks back at Megumi’s name.

“I’m not alone,” he says, as if answering a question Megumi would have asked. “There are people. There are always people.” He hesitates. “It’s just… they don’t stay the same.”

He thinks of faces that belonged to his friends when they were young, now aged into wrinkles and gray hair before they died. He thinks of people he met later who looked at him with suspicion, then with fear, then with pity. He thinks of funerals he attended where the person in the casket looked older than him even when they were younger on paper. He thinks of the way some people eventually stopped inviting him to things because it made them uncomfortable, because they didn’t want to be reminded that he wasn’t changing.

He doesn’t blame them. He just carries it.

“I had tea with Nobara’s niece last month,” he says, voice turning softer with the memory. “She’s… she’s a lot like her. Same attitude. Same way of looking at you like you’re the one being weird even when you’re not.” His mouth tugs upward for a second, a brief flash of real warmth. “She asked me about you.”

His smile fades as quickly as it came.

“I didn’t know what to say,” he admits. “I told her you were… you were strong. That you were annoying. That you cared more than you ever admitted.” He swallows again. “I didn’t tell her how you died. I didn’t want to put that in her head.”

He rubs his thumb along the stone again, slower now, as if the motion itself keeps him from falling apart.

“And I still miss Gojo-sensei,” he says abruptly, like he’s trying to change the subject even though the grave doesn’t mind where the conversation goes. “Sometimes. Not all the time. I get mad at him too. I still do.” His jaw tightens. “But I miss him.”

He glances to the side, toward the section of the cemetery where another stone stands, another name that used to fill rooms like sunlight and arrogance.

He hasn’t gone there yet today.

He will, probably. He usually does.

But Megumi always comes first.

“If he knew I said that out loud, he’d never let it go,” Yuuji mutters. He can almost hear it — Gojo’s voice, bright and teasing, leaning in too close, acting like everything is a joke just to see if Yuuji will laugh. “He’d be like, ‘Aww, Yuuji, you finally appreciate me? Took you long enough.’”

The imitation makes his chest ache.

He laughs once, quiet and breathy, and it breaks into something that hurts.

“I think he’d tease you too,” he adds, looking at Megumi’s stone like it’s a partner in crime. “Like, ‘Megumi, you’re missing the best era. People are putting cursed energy in apps now. Isn’t that hilarious?’ And you’d glare at him and he’d laugh harder.”

He falls quiet again.

The wind lifts, pushing through the trees. The gentians tremble slightly, petals tight against the cold. Yuuji watches them for a moment, then reaches out and adjusts the bouquet again, making sure it sits properly.

He doesn’t want the flowers to fall over. He doesn’t want anything here to look neglected. It feels like a small way of respecting the person whose name is carved into the stone.

It feels like something he can still control in a world that taught him control is usually an illusion.

He looks at the chocolate box he left and makes a face.

“You’d tell me it’s too bitter,” he says. “But you’d eat it anyway. Or you’d give it to someone else and pretend you didn’t.”

Yuuji’s voice softens again, dropping into something almost tender.

“I’m sorry.” he says, suddenly.

He doesn’t always say that part out loud. Some visits, he can talk about the day and leave it at that. Some visits, he can talk about work, about the state of the world, about ridiculous committee meetings.

Sometimes he can pretend grief is just a companion sitting quietly beside him.

But today is Valentine’s Day, and the world outside is loud with a kind of love Yuuji will never have with the people he wants it from. Today the contrast feels heavier.

“I’m sorry I didn’t save you,” he whispers.

His fingers dig into the stone’s grooves slightly, not enough to hurt, but enough to make his knuckles pale.

“I know,” he says quickly, as if he can already hear Megumi’s response. “I know you’d hate me saying that. I know you’d tell me it wasn’t like that. I know you’d tell me it wasn’t my job to save everyone.”

His breath shakes. He steadies it again.

“But I wanted to,” he says. “I wanted to save you anyway.”

He leans his forehead forward until it’s just above his hand, not touching the stone, but close enough that the cold rises into his skin.

“I wanted you to grow up.” he says, voice barely audible. “I wanted you to have a stupid life. A boring life. I wanted you to get old and complain about your back and have to wear reading glasses.” His mouth twists with pain. “I wanted you to keep scowling at me when I did dumb stuff.”

He closes his eyes.

The memory of Megumi’s face is so clear it feels cruel. Yuuji can still see him in motion, can still hear the way he said Yuuji’s name when he was angry, can still picture the rare moments where he looked almost relaxed.

Yuuji opens his eyes again and stares at the carved letters, grounding himself in what is real now.

Stone. Cold. Names. Dates.

“I miss you.” he repeats, quieter.

Then, like he’s making a vow he has already made too many times, he adds,

“I’m going to keep living.”

The words land heavy because he hates how they sound like a threat. He doesn’t mean them that way. He means them like a promise, even though the promise hurts.

“I’m going to keep doing the work,” he says. “I’m going to keep trying to make things better. I don’t know if it’s working. Sometimes it feels like I’m just… putting out fires in a forest that keeps burning.”

He swallows again, the taste of metal in his mouth from holding emotion back for so long.

“But I’m still here,” he says. “So I’m going to keep going. For you. For everyone.”

He sits there for a while after that. He doesn’t rush himself. He doesn’t check the time. He doesn’t look at his phone.

A couple passes behind him at a respectful distance. Their voices are low, their steps careful. Yuuji doesn’t turn. He lets them have their grief in their own space the way he wants his.

The cold creeps into his bones eventually, even if his body is stubborn. His hands go numb at the fingertips. He flexes them slowly, then places his palm flat against Megumi’s name one more time.

It’s a strange thing, to touch a grave and expect comfort.

The stone is hard. It doesn’t hold warmth. It doesn’t respond.

But Yuuji’s body still reacts like the act matters, and maybe that’s enough.

“Okay,” he says, voice slightly hoarse. “That’s… that’s it for now.”

He tries for something lighter, because he always does at the end. It’s his habit, his way of not leaving on a note that feels like goodbye.

“I’ll come back,” he tells the stone. “You don’t get to complain. I’m not leaving you alone.”

His lips twitch as if he’s forcing the expression.

“And if the committee tries to pull something stupid again, I’ll tell you all about it,” he adds. “So you can glare at me in my head.”

He inhales slowly, then pushes himself up from his crouch. He stands, brushing dirt from his pants with a quick swipe of his palm.

From above, the grave looks smaller. The offerings look more fragile. The gentians stand out like a quiet refusal against the winter.

Yuuji stares down at Megumi’s name for a long moment.

There are things he never says out loud because saying them would break whatever careful balance he’s built inside himself.

There are truths that are too raw to handle directly.

But today, he lets one of them slip through anyway, soft as breath.

“I’m going to miss you every day.” he whispers.

He doesn’t wait for an answer. There won’t be one.

That’s the point, and it’s the part he still can’t accept no matter how many years he survives.

He turns and begins to walk back along the path.

His footsteps crunch softly. The cold wind follows him. The cemetery remains behind, holding its silence with steady patience.

Outside the walls, the world keeps celebrating love in bright colors and sweet flavors and silly rituals.

Yuuji carries his grief through it like he always does — quietly, stubbornly, with the weight of eighty-nine years behind eyes that still belong to a young man.

And even as he walks away, even as he leaves the grave out of sight, Megumi stays with him.

Not as a ghost. Not as a miracle. Just as what love becomes when you don’t get to keep the person — a constant presence in the ordinary hours, a thought that never fully leaves, a name that still hurts and still matters.

Yuuji’s hand closes around the empty paper bag, crumpling it slightly.

He walks through the gate, nods once at the caretaker without stopping, and steps back into a city dressed up for Valentine’s Day.

He keeps moving.

Because he promised.

Because he survives.

Because tomorrow will come whether he wants it to or not, and he will carry Megumi into it the way he has carried him into every day since that engraved date — every single day, without exception.