[ Yuta would never call himself an optimist nor is it likely that anyone else would given that his reputation for being gloomy is well-earned, but there's such a bleak defeat to what Geto says that even he finds hard to swallow. It's what giving up on oneself looks like. Yuta knows that feeling intimately well. It's sitting in a chair, feeling small and utterly broken beyond repair, and deciding never to go outside again. He also knows, from the very same experience, how untrue the feeling had turned out to be and what the solution had been to make him see it — to listen to reason put plainly in the words 'but living by yourself gets lonely', to accept a hand offered, to rely on others and learn to put himself back together again in doing so. He's made himself a patchwork of all the traits he admires in his friends — their examples of unyielding strength and kindness the golden urushi lacquer filling in the missing gaps in the cracks — and he's come out so much stronger for it even if he never did recover the capacity to care about himself.

Yet sitting in that chair he thought it had been too late as well. He'd been wrong. Geto is wrong too, he thinks, giving the boy who gave Gojo the framework to build his principles upon too little credit. But where the past is concerned, Yuta can yield a little. ]

Maybe the past can't be changed, but you can still change now. It's never too late. You've been given a second chance, it would be a shame to waste that and not do things differently.

[ Learning from past mistakes, finding new reasons to live (and not just reluctantly survive). The power of a fresh new start cannot be underestimated.

But more than anything, after forcing Gojo's hand like Geto did... ]

You owe him that much, don't you think?