Chapter Text
The ritual failed again, as they all had before. failed
Yuuji watched the glowing symbol beneath his feet dim as he withdrew his cursed energy. The paper talismans plastered on the walls drifted to the floor, as if they had lost their will to remain in place.
It was one in the morning at the Jujutsu High vault archives. The silence of the hour settled in the room, undisturbed, and Yuuji let himself listen to it for a moment, as though the answer to what he was doing wrong might be hidden somewhere inside it.
Ancient scrolls lined the room in endless rows, stretching far beyond the reach of candlelight. Each one held fragments of preserved knowledge passed down from the Golden Age of Jujutsu, records too dangerous or too valuable to be lost. Yuuji had spent the better part of a year buried in this room. Reading. Testing. Adjusting. Searching through every page for even a scrap of surviving text about the method of Kenjaku’s ritual. The same ritual that had once split the King of Curses himself into 20 cursed objects. That allowed him to exist even after death.
Yuuji crouched and picked the nearest scroll up from the floor. He had read the ritual enough times to recite most of it from memory, yet he still read it again. There had to be something he was missing. His eyes moved slowly over the faded ink until they caught on a smudged rune half cut off at the edge of the page. The symbol was incomplete, nothing more than a fragment, but it was enough to be worth a try.
After studying it one last time, Yuuji dipped his brush into the ink and added the missing rune to the edge of the ritual circle. When he was finished, he set the brush aside and rose to his feet with a quiet groan.
Even with his slowed aging, decades of fighting curses had taken their toll on his body.
He drew in a steady breath and gathered his cursed energy around himself. The seals responded at once, igniting one by one across the room until a ring of light blazed to life. For one brief moment, it felt stable. Like if he only held on a little longer, the ritual might finally settle into place.
Before he could even begin to speak the incantation, his control slipped.
The circle around him burned brighter. Yuuji’s breath caught as the cursed energy around him lurched violently out of his grasp. He tried to force it back under control, but his body no longer responded. The room began dissolving at its edges as the archive shelves twisted and blurred into light.
Something was wrong…
The space around him folded inward. His vision darkened at the edges, the world narrowed around the dizzying sensation of being pulled apart. Yuuji stopped resisting. After so many failed rituals, he had finally found one that worked.
He let himself feel the brief, quiet satisfaction of success as his mind and body began to separate. This was the ending he had been searching for.
And for the first time in decades, Yuuji’s mind went quiet.
Yuuji’s peace was short-lived. The pounding in his head dragged him back to consciousness before he was ready. He didn't want to open his eyes yet. Even through his eyelids, the light already hurt. He stayed still, waiting for the dizziness and nausea to pass.
When Yuuji finally forced his eyes open, the first thing he saw was the ceiling above him. Something about it felt faintly familiar, and the uneasy recognition made his stomach curl. He stared at it for a moment longer before turning his head to take in the rest of the room.
Sunlight slipped through thin curtains and spilled across a small dresser beneath the window. A plastic tub lay overturned near the wall, toys scattered across the floor. Nothing about the room made sense, and yet every detail tugged at something buried deep in his memory. His gaze drifted across the walls until it caught on a drawing taped crookedly beside the window, its edges curling with age. Two stick figures stood side by side in uneven crayon lines, one tall and one small.
His breath caught.
He knew that drawing.
He had drawn it while waiting for his Grandpa to come home.
Recognition settled over him all at once. He knew this room. He had slept in it, played in it, waited in it. This was his childhood bedroom.
Yuuji drew in a slow breath and looked around the room again, more carefully this time. Decades of jujutsu had long since taught him that panic only made room for mistakes. Whatever this was (domain, cursed technique, or dream), he needed to gather information before he reacted.
He had dealt with illusory domains before. If this was an illusion, then there had to be a way to break it.
He pushed himself upright, intending to inspect the room more closely, but the motion felt wrong almost immediately. Frowning, Yuuji swung his legs over the edge of the bed and froze.
My feet don't touch the floor.
Unease crawled up his spine. Did he shrink? He hopped down, landing on unsteady legs. He felt like a small breeze could push him over. His balance sat too high, his limbs were too short, and his head felt slightly too big for his body. The room had not changed, but now he understood why it felt so different. He could no longer see the top of the small dresser. The doorknob sat too high. Everything in the room felt bigger and taller than it should.
He looked down at his hands. Soft, unscarred, and free of callouses from decades of training and fighting. As he took in the rest of his body, Yuuji’s heart started pounding. Faded dinosaur pajamas, one sleeve stained near the cuff.
This can't be happening.
Starting to panic, Yuuji looked frantically across the room. His eyes caught on to the calendar hanging above the dresser. It was cheap, bright, and ordinary, decorated with sunflowers and marked through in his Grandpa's messy handwriting. He stared at the month printed neatly across the top. Yuuji’s stomach dropped.
September 2006.
He just stared at the calendar. Everything he felt was wrong with him suddenly made sense. This was not a dream. He was not trapped in a domain. This was not some kind of illusory technique. The room was real. The body was real. The date hanging above the dresser was real.
Yuuji had gone back in time.
For a long moment, Yuuji could do nothing but stand there, staring at the proof of it while his mind tried to think of how this could have happened. Before he could panic, He slowed his breathing and tried to summon his cursed energy. He felt it wrap around him, thin and weak compared to what he remembered, but unmistakably his. The energy stirred quietly beneath his skin. It moved sluggishly toward his hands. He focused, guiding his energy towards his fingertips, and watched as a small dotted link wrapped around his pinky finger.
Using Shrine, Yuuji carved a shallow cut across his finger. He squeezed his finger until a drop of blood welled to the surface. As it fell, he caught it and began trying to move it. He managed to shape it into a thin, unstable line before the shape collapsed on itself. Drops of blood scattered on the floor, and the effort caused him to become exhausted.
His techniques were still there, engraved in his soul, but his body could barely handle them. He lowered his hand and exhaled slowly, already feeling the strain settling into his limbs. His cursed energy was thin, his output crippled by a body too young to carry what he had brought back with him. Whatever else had changed, he had not returned empty-handed.
That was enough.
He reminisced about his short time with Choso, how he wanted to teach him everything about Blood Manipulation. Yuuji shook his head before he could bury himself in grief.
The calendar drew his eyes again, then to the room around him, as he tried to get his thoughts into order.
2006.
Before Shibuya. Before Sukuna. Before everything fell apart.
Geto.
The name surfaced suddenly, dragging old conversations behind it. Gojo’s former best friend. The sorcerer who defected. The man whose body Kenjaku would one day steal for his own plans.
Yuuji’s stomach tightened.
If Geto never defected, then Kenjaku never would have gained access to his body. Gojo would never have been sealed. Shibuya might never happen at all.
The shape of the future rose in his mind all at once, no longer memories but a sequence of disasters waiting to happen. He knew where the fractures began. He knew how far the damage would spread if no one stopped it. This time, he would not need to stumble blindly toward the aftermath. This time, he had a second chance.
The thought settled into him with cold, immediate certainty. He did not need to understand why this had happened. He had been given another chance, and that alone made its purpose obvious.
He was here to make sure the future went differently.
His fingers curled at his sides as his thoughts sharpened into something familiar, something old and dangerous in how easily it returned. Whatever this body could endure, he would use it. Whatever pain waited for him, he would bear it. If being dragged back through time meant he had one chance to force the future onto a better path, then he would use himself for it without hesitation.
That was all he had ever been good for.
A tool. A weapon. A cog placed back at the start of the machine.
This time, he would make sure to save everyone.
A knock at the door broke Yuuji from his thoughts. It was soft, almost absentminded, followed by the quiet creak of wood shifting open and the sound of familiar footsteps approaching across the hall.
“Yuuji?”
His Grandpa’s voice was rough with sleep, warm and worn at the edges in a way that struck Yuuji harder than anything else had that morning.
“What are you doing up?”
Yuuji froze. For one brief second, his mind was completely empty.
He had spent the last several minutes forcing the impossible into something he could use, reducing shock into strategy and grief into purpose, and all at once it fell apart at the sound of a single voice.
Grandpa.
Yuuji’s mouth opened, and the answer was already there. He was fine. He was going back to bed. It was nothing. He only needed a little more time to think, a little more time to plan, and by morning, he would know where to begin. But the words would not come.
His Grandpa stepped into view in house slippers and a wrinkled shirt, his hair messy from sleep and his expression still heavy with concern. He looked exactly as Yuuji remembered him. Ordinary. Tired. Alive.
Something in Yuuji cracked.
His Grandpa was dead. His Grandpa had died years ago. Yuuji had carried that grief for so long he thought it had finally dulled into something manageable. Now his Grandpa was here, alive, standing in the doorway, asking if Yuuji was alright.
Yuuji’s mouth kept opening and closing. His throat tightened painfully around his words. He could feel what he wanted to say pressing against the back of his teeth, but the only thing that came out was a broken sob.
“I… I missed you.” The words came out so quietly, he wasn’t sure he’d said them out loud.
Yuuji was moving before he realized it, stumbling forward on unsteady legs and crashing into him hard enough that his Grandpa nearly lost his footing. His arms barely made it around him, small and shaking where they clutched at the fabric of his shirt, and then Yuuji was crying in earnest, years of grief breaking loose all at once in harsh, helpless sobs.
His Grandpa made a startled noise, then picked Yuuji up without hesitation.
“Hey, hey,” he murmured, one hand settling warm and steady against Yuuji’s back. “I’m right here. I’m right here.” Yuuji could only cling tighter. A rough hand moved gently through his hair, then cupped his face to wipe at tears as they came.
“What’s wrong, huh?” his Grandpa asked softly, voice gentling even further when Yuuji only shook his head and cried harder. “Nightmare?” Yuuji could not answer. Maybe it had been. Maybe all of it had been. His Grandpa only sighed as he laid Yuuji down in bed. Yuuji was too exhausted to protest.
After tucking Yuuji back in, his Grandpa got up to leave, but was stopped when Yuuji’s hand tugged weakly at his sleeve.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, easing down beside him with a tired sort of patience that made something in Yuuji ache all over again. He pulled Yuuji close, one arm settling around him as he tucked the blanket back into place.
“I’m just in the other room, alright? You can go back to sleep.”
He should’ve let Grandpa go. He needed to finish planning and figuring out what he needed to do. Instead, warm beneath the blanket, his head tucked against the steady rise and fall of his Grandpa’s chest, Yuuji felt all the tension drain out of him all at once.
Held in his Grandpa’s arms, Yuuji fell asleep to the sound of a heartbeat he thought he had lost forever.