Yuta collapses into the puddle of your blood like the world's most sorry, trembling animal, and for a long, shameful minute, he lets himself be swallowed by your blood and his own guilt. He presses his face into the wet grass because the smell of you — iron and antiseptic and something wildly, impossibly dear — is the only thing that keeps him anchored to the moment and not the thousand ways he has managed to fail you before this one.
"I should have told you," He breathes, not to anyone, not even to Shoko, to the empty, ragged air between your bodies. "I should have told you about Africa. I shouldn't have—" His voice cracks, breaks apart, and the sentence dies in a halo of snot and bleeding lips and useless apologies.
Shoko slaps him. It's not loud enough to cut through the ringing in his ears, but it's real and sharp, and it yanks him back into the present. He startles, looks up. Her face is bone-white, hair plastered to her forehead with blood — not his.
Yours.
And that makes everything worse.
She isn't gentle.
Never is.
And especially not now.
"You're not auditioning for a tragedy," she snarls. Her hands are a mess of light and motion as she clamps around your skull and your chest in turn, gauging, probing, fighting to weave what she can back into place. "You're not moaning for sympathy. Get your head out of your fucking —" She swallows, and the soft, professional part of her takes over for a second, the one that has seen a thousand impossible things and refused to be melodramatic about any of them. "If you keep thinking about leaving, we're going to lose her. You're wallowing, and she's bleeding out, Yuta. Fix it. Now."
Guilt claws at him, a living, aching thing that tastes like bile. The thought of Africa — the words he'd almost said, the words he hadn't said, the plan he'd almost kept to himself — pressed at his chest like a fist. He can see your face again in the gutters of his mind, not as that warm, fragile girl in her hospital bed, but as a body, broken, soft, dying, and the image makes something inside him snap. He hates himself enough to get up.
"How do we... How do I help? I don't —" Yuta's hands are empty words; his cursed energy pools like spilt ink, messy and unfocused. He has never been graceful with technique. He can't do the small, patient things — not like Shoko.
Shoko blinks like he's asked her to recite a spell in Latin. Then, as if someone's switched the world down to a level of absurdity it cannot recover from, she tries to teach him.
"Okay. This is how I explained the Reverse Cursed Technique to Satoru back at school," she asks. There's a flash of memory in her eyes that is so disgustingly fond it makes his throat hurt. "I told him to 'FWOOSH' the bad shit out and then 'HYOOHH' it away. He still had no idea." She pinches her nose.
"You explained that to Gojo?" Yuta asks, half-laugh, half-cry, because the scene of Shoko trying to teach Gojo is a ridiculous hallucination. It pulls something from him that isn't entirely despair.
Shoko snorts. "Yeah. Taught him the old FWOOSH HYOOHH. He didn't get it either. He's the strongest, not the smartest — " She bites the edge of her lip and for one tiny, obscene second the world lightens because she's laughing.
(Somewhere in Switzerland, Gojo sneezes.)
"So, here's the improved version: imagine her blood is dirty water. You. . . You shove clean water through it. You don't ladle it out. You force it through until the bad stuff can't hang on anymore. Make sense?"
It doesn't. It makes less sense than any metaphor should. Yuta looks at her like she's speaking a foreign language. "Fwoosh and, and —what?"
"Fwoosh and Hyoo — God, Yuta, you're as clueless as Satoru." Shoko crouches lower so their faces are almost level. "You channel Reverse-Cursed energy into her. Purge, don't pull. Rika will help with containment. I can't —" Her hands glow green as she taps, coaxing, the fragile, surgical precision of her craft folding the edges of mangled tissue like someone smoothing crepe paper. "I'm trying to reassemble brain matter that's been—" She doesn't finish. There's no clean way to say that bits of your brain are missing, and she's trying to re-sew a mind out of the grey fragments now scattered across the grass and pavement.
